Is the Google Toolbar a Trojan Horse for Ad Targetting? (Ballmer Plays The Privacy Card).
Erick Schonfeld
31 comments »
Is Google getting ready to serve up display ads to people based on their Web surfing habits (as opposed to their Web searching habits)? Ever since the DoubelClick acquisition closed, industry watchers have been waiting to see how Google would dip its toes into behavioral ad targeting. One rumor going around is that Google is going to target ads to people who use the Google Toolbar,
which is now bundled with Dell PCs.
The rumor came to us via an online measurement startup that expects Google to make an announcement about a new service leveraging the Google Toolbar at the upcoming Audience Measurement 3.0 conference later this month, which Google is sponsoring.
The rumor could be an attempt to spread FUD, but it is not just startups that are playing the privacy card. In a discussion with Washington Post editors and reporters on June 4th, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer raised a similar privacy issue in relation to the Dell deal (see video below):
Why is that toolbar there? Do you think it is there to help you? No. It is there to report data about everything you do on your PC.
Now that Google’s age of innocence is over, competitors will be bringing up privacy concerns every chance they can. Google already collects so much data on what people do on the Web. With the increasingly widespread toolbar, though, Google gathers data well beyond the search bar.
Since the Google Toolbar can track every site you visit, that data could theoretically be used to target ads served by Google (including DoubelClick display ads anywhere on the Web, or to further refine search ads). For instance, you could browse a Lumix digital camera on Amazon, and then see ads for digital cameras when you land on an unrelated travel site that happens to serve up DoubelClick ads. Or perhaps the next time you do a search on Google, it will push a Lumix ad out to you. Google could also use the data to create a Web measurement service that competes with comScore, Quantcast, Hitwise, or Compete.
These are all hypothetical at this point. But there is nothing stopping Google from doing so. Per Google’s general privacy policy, it reserves the right to process “personal information” for the purpose of:
Providing our products and services to users, including the display of customized content and advertising;
And the separate Google Toolbar privacy policy doesn’t say anything specifically about not using the data it collects for advertising purposes. In fact, it notes that:
Certain optional Toolbar features operate by sending Google the addresses or other information about sites when you visit them.
But it also notes that users can disable the toolbar’s ability to collect personal data if they choose (presuming they can figure out how to do that). At the very least, Google has certainly thought about doing something like this. One patent issued last March describes a way of:
tracking user behavior, determining a user topic interest (e.g., from a plurality of different candidate topics) based on the monitored behavior, and serving ads relevant to the determined user topic interest.
Google did not respond to an email I sent asking whether it intends to use the Google Toolbar to target ads at users.
If Google does start targeting ads based on Web surfing habits, you can be sure that Microsoft and others will add that to its list of concerns it brings to Washington. Ballmer, in that same discussion quoted above, believe it or not, relishes the prospect of competing against Google on privacy. Here is a fuller excerpt from the video above:
One of the things you can reward users on is their privacy. You can literally say, “Hey look, you will seed this data to us if you use our search engine, but we are going to pay you.” And it’s a trade. If your don’t like the trade, it’s ok. Don’t use our search engine or don’t use it in a certain way. And there will be competition between us and Google and whoever else along that line.
. . .the number of people who have any clue what data is being collected or not being collected by them—Any of you own a Dell PC at home, personally? There is not much about you it does not know . . . to Google, because it is their toolbar. We just won the HP deal, but anyway.
Why is that toolbar there? Do you think it is there to help you? No. It is there to report data about everything you do on your PC. I am not trying to say this is nefarious or bad, I am just saying being clear is probably the most important thing. And any user can say, “This is clear and this is OK with me.”
I actually think we are going to have to compete on privacy policy.
When he says he is willing to pay users to give up their privacy, he is being literal. Who would you trust more with your privacy, Google or Microsoft? I’m not sure I trust either one.
Footbo.com: (Real) Football Social Network Kicks-Off
Roi Carthy
35 comments »
For the benefit of TechCrunch’s American readers, let’s first set a basic ground rule for this post: Football = Soccer. You know, the game played 90 minutes that can end in a 0-0 draw but can still be regarded as an excellent match. With that out of the way…
Second to the iPhone 2.0 announcement (and maybe the Yahoo-Google deal), what was the most important event of last week? The start of Euro 2008 tournament of course! So if you’re going to soft-launch a football oriented social network like Footbo.com, this is the month to do it (the tournament runs throughout June).
Footbo is the type of niche-oriented social network we have grown accustomed to. From a feature perspective there’s no attempt to reinvent the social network experience—in fact, the current interface doesn’t offer any Ajax/DHTML/CSS pizzazz. The idea of “less is more” rings true in Footbo’s case, which focuses on offering an information and interaction hub for everyday football fans, as opposed to cutting-edge functionality and interface design. Even so, the design is at times rough around the edges with tables running amuck and such.
Footbo provides football-related content in the form of live feeds, line-ups, game schedules and tables from about 70 leagues around the world. A Predictions section allows users to predict the final scores of games. These can be submitted/edited until the kick-off of each match. Users can also grade player performance, thereby electing the “Top 11″ of each league or round. Integrated wiki functionality lets users add and edit content about teams and players. There are already tens of thousands of existing profiles with basic info on teams and players. Game pages feature fan boards and live discussions. The Euro 2008 section leverages these features on a single page for a “one-stop” experience.
Footbo is predominantly a European play targeting individual fans, fan clubs, and amateur teams. For the sake of context, Footbo estimates there are 170,000 amateur football teams in Germany alone. Properly executed, there could be plenty of business servicing this niche alone. However, Footbo’s scope is wider as is evident by the fact that the site is available in English, German and Spanish.
Footbo will launch its official Beta in August with a host of new features. It’s up against some serious competition from ESPN’s Soccernet and less serious competition from Joga.com (a soccer social network that was created as a joint venture between Nike and Google’s Orkut which is now seemingly defunct—all that is on the site is a splash page promising that something called JogaTV will be “coming soon”).
North American readers: You can now revert back to the term “Football” referring to a game with far too many rules played with an egg-shaped ball.
| Website: | footbo.com |
| Location: | London, United Kingdom |
| Founded: | November, 2007 |
| Funding: | $1M |
Footbo.com is an online social community for football lovers all over the world.
Fans and amateur players can receive customized information, share content and media and express their knowledge and emotions.
Footbo.com is created by people who… Learn More
Amnesty Hypercube Puts Web Widgets On Your Desktop
Erick Schonfeld
14 comments »
The widgetsphere is roughly divided into two camps. There are desktop widgets like Apple Dashboard Widgets, Windows Gadgets, and Yahoo Widgets that act as standalone mini-apps that pull in data from the Web. And there are Web widgets like Google Gadgets or countless others that act as standalone mini-apps that you can add to Web pages such as iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace, blogs, etc. Amnesty Hypercube, an application from Mesa Dynamics that launched today in beta, is trying to bridge those two camps.
For those who prefer the clutter of desktop widgets, Hypercube converts Web widgets into desktop widgets. It also converts desktop widgets back into Web widgets so that you can put your favorite widget into Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, or Orkut. This lets you mix and match widgets from different sources through a single management console. I tried it and launched a Google News gadget, a widget that shows top Diggs, and some games.
If you are widget crazy, and your current desktop widget platform does not support the widgets you want, this could be helpful. You can take your favorite Web widget and turn it into a desktop widget. Although, most of the major widget platforms already have a wide and overlapping choice of widgets. And some, like Google Gadgets, support both desktop and Web widgets.
The free software download works only fro Mac OS X now, but a Windows version is coming in August.
TheFunded Goes From Criticizing VCs to Helping Members Court Them
Erick Schonfeld
33 comments »
If startup CEOs want to anonymously rate, review, and criticize venture capitalists, they can still do that on TheFunded. But the site added a feature today called TheFunded Connect that lets members help each other with what they really want: introductions to those same VCs.
CEOs looking for funding can put up brief pitches, solicit comments from other members to refine those pitches, and ultimately get personalized e-mail referrals to VCs on their list from other CEO members.
Adeo Ressi, the founder of TheFunded, cringes when I ask him if he is trying to turn his site into a social network for entrepreneurs. “God no!” he replies. But when entrepreneurs network, it is to make business connections, which is exactly the purpose of TheFunded Connect. (Perhaps it is more a business networking feature than a social one, but you get the idea).
As part of the pitch, CEOs identify how much they are hoping to raise. For instance, Erik Weaver, the CEO of Digital Ribbon (described as an “eBay for CPU Cycles”) wants to raise $1.5 million on a pre-money valuation of $5 million. Widgeteer Khris Loux, CEO of JS-Kit, wants to raise a $5 million series A. Suzanne Xie, CEO of online closet site Weardrobe, is looking for $500,000 to $1 million in angel money.
If another CEO wants to refer one of these funding seekers to a VC he knows, an email can be generated through the site (but the referrer puts in his or her own email address to make it look genuine). To help fuel these connections, whenever members look at the profile page of a venture firm that another member wants to be introduced to, they will be prompted to look at the relevant pitch.
The theory is that a personal introduction can be the breakthrough an entrepreneur needs to get a VC’s attention. Automating this process fits in with Ressi’s belief that most startups need to do 30 pitches to get three serious offers.
Whether or not this will generate any referrals, at the very least CEOs can get some feedback from their peers on their pitches. The problem is that the pitches, at least the ones up right now, are a bit spare in their details. There is little background information on the companies other than what is in the one-paragraph pitch, no bio information on the CEOs, no slide decks, and no video presentations (cough, Elevator Pitches). That makes it difficult to recommend any startup based solely on the pitches. But those elements can certainly be added, and Ressi is exploring his options there.
If Ressi can create a community where CEOs can actually help each other get funded either through helpful advice or introductions (or, in the future—why not?—pooled capital), then CEOs will keep coming back to TheFunded. If the introductions and advice go nowhere, then they’ll stick to working their Rolodexes.
The Funded, a controversial site focused on revealing the inside of the Venture Capital world, is out to find the truth about how Venture Capital firms treat entrepreneurs. Like Avvo, a service that allows users… Learn More
Will 2008 Be Google’s End Of Innocence?
Michael Arrington
79 comments »
2008 may be the year that Google’s innocence ends, as media and governments start to cast a less forgiving eye at the behavior of the company that controls 60% of the search market and perhaps as much as half of all online advertising revenue.
In 2007 the Federal Trade Commission opened an antitrust investigation into Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick. The deal was eventually approved, although the EU took a lot longer to give their stamp of approval (The EU in general isn’t a fan of Google).
This year, though, things might not go so well. Politicians are lining up to question Google’s recent search marketing deal with Yahoo. The deal was clearly structured to try to slide past regulators, but it isn’t clear that this time Google will get a pass.
Other questions are being raised as well - such as why Firefox continues to default search to Google on clean installs, instead of offering users a choice right up front. Microsoft is forced to offer users a choice when they install Internet Explorer. Given the longstanding financial ties between Google and Firefox, perhaps the same choice should be presented there as well.
There’s no getting past the fact that Google has out-competed everyone in the search game, and is justly collecting the economic rewards of that effort. But society loves to tear down their heroes just as quickly as they supported them as underdogs.
This may be the year that things change for the ten-year-old Google. Their days of innocence may be over - perhaps Yahoo, or Firefox, are the apples that they should not have bitten into.
Here’s What’s Going To Happen To Apple’s Rivals
Michael Arrington
97 comments »
Business Week investigates what the iPhone’s impact is going to be on rival high-end phone makers like RIM, Palm, Nokia, etc. I’ll save you the read - the answer is summed up in the image to the right.
It’s true, Apple only sold 6 million iPhones in its first year, out of a billion or so handsets sold worldwide. But remember that they are currently available in only a couple of countries. And in the U.S., they’ve grabbed a 25+% share of the smart phone market. And that was with a slow, no-GPS, expensive device (here’s our side-by-side comparison of the iPhone v. the RIM Blackberry 8820 from a year ago).
Imagine the havoc they will wreak with the twice-as-fast, half-as-expensive, GPS-enabled, Exchange-supported 3G iPhone that they’ll unleash on 22 countries this year.
In short, it must be really unpleasant to be in this business and not be Apple right now.
| Company: | Apple |
| Website: | apple.com/iphone |
| Launch Date: | July 11, 2008 |
Announced at the 2008 World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), the iPhone 3G is the… Learn More
Dead Simple Flash Based WebChat For MySpace
Michael Arrington
20 comments »
MySpace IM is popular - as many as twenty percent of users on the site at any time are also logged in to their IM client. But it’s only available via a download for Windows machines, locking out everyone else. There is no official MySpace support for webchat or non-Windows clients.
Pidgin, Trillian and eBuddy have announced support for MySpace IM via a reverse engineering of their proprietary text-based protocol. The version of Trillian that supports MySpace, however, is in private beta, and I have never been able to get eBuddy to work properly with MySpace IM.
So if you really, really want MySpace webchat, you can now use unofficialmyspaceim, a new flash based site build by Prasad Mahendra. I tested it, it works. I even had a somewhat unsatisfying chat with MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson.
Beware - you have to enter your MySpace credentials to use the service, and there’s no guarantee this service won’t use them for, well, anything they want.
Also, you may not have to wait too long for official Mac and webchat versions of MySpace IM. Rumor is they’re already working on it.
| Website: | myspace.com |
| Location: | Beverly Hills, California, United States |
| Founded: | August 1, 2003 |
| Acquired: | July 1, 2005 by Fox Interactive Media for $580M in Cash |
MySpace is a popular social networking site that lets friends share, message and stay connected. The site lets you browse profiles, blog, email and join groups. MySpace also has videos, music and classifieds. Music artists can add friends, stream… Learn More
Here’s Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They’re Banned
Michael Arrington
131 comments »
The stories over the weekend were bad enough - the Associated Press, with a long history of suing over quotations from their articles, went after Drudge Retort for having the audacity to link to their stories along with short quotations via reader submissions. Drudge Retort is doing nothing different than what Digg, TechMeme, Mixx and dozens of other sites do, and frankly the fact that they are being linked to should be considered a favor.
After heavy criticism over the last few days, the A.P. is in damage control mode, says the NYTimes, and retreating from their earlier position. But from what I read, they’re just pushing their case further.
They do not want people quoting their stories, despite the fact that such activity very clearly falls within the fair use exception to copyright law. They claim that the activity is an infringement.
A.P. vice president Jim Kennedy says they will issue guidelines telling bloggers what is acceptable and what isn’t, over and above what the law says is acceptable. They will “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.”
Those that disregard the guidelines risk being sued by the A.P., despite the fact that such use may fall under the concept of fair use.
The A.P. doesn’t get to make it’s own rules around how its content is used, if those rules are stricter than the law allows. So even thought they say they are making these new guidelines in the spirit of cooperation, it’s clear that, like the RIAA and MPAA, they are trying to claw their way to a set of property rights that don’t exist today and that they are not legally entitled to. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model - paid content.
So here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist. We don’t see them, we don’t quote them, we don’t link to them. They’re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.
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