TechBloggin.com

It’s not easy being a wrestler. Inside the ring your pounding an opponent’s head against the corner post, but outside the ring it’s hard to meet people. Nobody really wants to be your friend. Not even on MySpace. They say their your friends, but they are not really your friends.

Wrestlers aren’t stupid. They know everybody thinks they are just a bunch of clowns. That’s why the company that employs all the wrestlers you see on TV, World Wrestling Entertainment, created WWE Universe, a social network just for them and their fans. Okay, it’s not really a social network. It’s just a craptastic promotional vehicle. And some of those wrestlers aren’t so bright. But they are lonely.

Just because Mark Henry is the “world’s strongest man” doesn’t mean he doesn’t cry at night when all he has to keep him company is his pit bull, Theodore, and a can of beans. Or Zack Ryder. The poor guy might be a tag team champion, but when he goes home all he has to look forward to are watering his plants and watching reruns of Smackdown with his cat, Fluffy. Be friends with them. Don’t block them out of your life. They need you.

The only person who needs to be scared of these guys is Mark Zuckerberg. I sent Mark and Zack a message explaining that nobody is going to sign up to be their friends on the WWE Universe because everybody is over at Facebook. They didn’t respond so well to that news. Be scared Zuckerberg. Be very, very scared.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: Erick Schonfeld

written by

Every year at the Web 2.0 Summit, Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker gives her view of the world, the Web, and the technology industry by quickly going through about 50 slides that illustrate the major trends she is tracking. Last year, she zeroed in on the China Bubble. This year, she talks about the root causes of the current economic downturn, the outlook for Web businesses, and where she still sees major growth (mobile and emerging markets).

She singles out the mobile industry as the one where both the most opportunity will be found and disruption will occur over the next five years. Moreover, she suggests that the U.S. is poised to lead the transition in mobile to a Web-centric model. (I totally agree). Interestingly, she points to the introduction of the first Android phone by T-Mobile, not the launch of the iPhone, as the key inflection point for the coming era of the mobile web.

Meeker’s full presentation, which she gave yesterday, is in the video embedded above and her full slide deck is below (thank you, Henry Blodget, for uploading them). The slides are also available here.

A few slides in particular stuck out for me. First, the growth rates for both e-commerce sales and Internet advertising are normalizing much faster than anyone expected they would compared to offline growth rates for retail sales and advertising. No doubt, this steep slowdown in growth is being compounded by the overall economic situation. In the first slide below, the red line is U.S. retail sales growth and the yellow line is e-commerce sales growth. See where the yellow line is headed?

In the second slide, the top green line is Internet advertising growth. At least it is still above all the other kinds of advertising and not yet in negative territory, but the trend does not look good.

In fact, as ad budgets decline and Web pages keep growing, the bigger problem is that the supply of ad slots on the Web is becoming greater than the demand to fill them. The only way to fill those slots is to lower the price of each spot. As the slide below illustrates, ad impressions keep growing, but the cost per thousand (CPM) keeps dropping (on average, to about $1.50 for banner ads and to just above $20 for rich media ads):

On the bright side, compared to the overall spending on other forms of advertising such as TV, print, and direct mail, Internet advertising still has a lot of share to gain, and will likely continue to do so.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Source: Erick Schonfeld

written by

Hitwise has released a ranking of some of the top news sites, measured by traffic on Election Day. CNN.com came out on top, seeing a 146 percent spike over the day before. But MSNBC.com, Fox News, and the Drudge report all saw nice bumps as well. ABCNews.com had a record day, with a 113 percent jump in traffic over the day before. And CNN’s Political Ticker blog by itself saw a 122 percent jump. (Twitter traffic rose 43 percent and traffic to Twitter Election 2008 rose 1,100 percent).

Some sites, amazingly saw declines from the day before, such as Time.com (-21%), Current TV(-53%), and Slate (-33%).

Here is a list of the top election news sites (you can see all the stats in the table below):

1. CNN
2. MSNBC
3. FOXNews
4. Drudge Report
5. The New York Times
6. FOXNews.com Elections
7. USA Today
8. ABCnews.com
9. The Huffington Post
10. Real Clear Politics
11. The Washington Post
12. CNN Political Ticker
13. CBSNews.com
14. Time
15. Electoral Vote Predictor
16. The Politico
17. MSN Election 09
18. Townhall.com
19. Free Republic
20. Daily Kos
21. Current TV
22. Slate
23. FiveThirtyEight
24. Michelle Malkin

Conspicuously missing from this list are the news sites provided by search engines Yahoo, Google and AOL. If these were included, Yahoo News would take the top spot above CNN with a 55% increase in traffic and 0.72% market share. Google News would take 4th place behind MSNBC with a 58% increase, and AOL News would come in at 12th place behind The Huffington Post with a mere 19% increase.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Source: Erick Schonfeld

written by

As blogs grow and try to cram more and more stuff on their homepage, load times are becoming a bigger problem. According to Royal Pingdom, 74 of the top 100 blogs have home pages crammed with so much stuff (more than 500 kilobytes) that anyone without broadband might be frustrated by the load times. TechCrunch falls into this category, as does the Huffington Post, Engadget, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, Lifehacker, and even the Official Google Blog. The homepage of the New York Times, for comparison purposes, weighs in at 750 kilobits.

And 35 of the top 100 blogs have home pages of more than one megabyte. Even with a 1 megabit/second broadband connection, it still takes 8.4 seconds to load a 1MB page. (And 22 seconds with a 384 kilobit/ second connection). That is way too long.

Sadly, our home page weighs in at 1.2 megabytes. But you should have seen it before the redesign. It is about five times faster now. We are still not satisfied and are working hard to get the load times down.

Across all 100 blogs, the biggest factors contributing to load times is too many images (61.5%) and scripts (17.3%). Those are the big culprits on our home page as well. But we are not going to get rid of all the images, we are working on better ways to automatically resize them. And for scripts, we’d like to get it so that we load only the ones we need at any given time instead of loading all the scripts on the page at once.

Below are the 26 blogs with home pages smaller than 500 kilobytes:

alistapart

WebStandards

Daily Blog Tips

MacRumors

Political Radar

ReadWriteWeb

43 Folders

Microsiervos

Kotteke

Roytanck

Pharyngula

Search Engine Land

Travel Pod

Copy Blogger

Scobleizer

Blogoscoped

Pro Blogger

Talking Points Memo

Matt Cutts

DoshDosh

Swampland

Coding Horror

Tech Dirt

Seth Godin

Zen Habits

Gothamist
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: Erick Schonfeld

written by

On Election night everyone was glued to their screens. Not just their TV screens, but also their computer screens. Going to the major news sites, hitting refresh on the interactive electoral maps millions of times, and watching Obama and McCain give their final speeches of the campaign streamed live over the Web. According to Akamai, which is the content delivery network for most major news sites including CNN (which had a record day on its own), NBC, Reuters, and the BBC, global visitors to news sites peaked last night at 11 PM with 8,572,042 visitors per minute.

That is double the normal traffic level, and 18 percent above the previous peak of 7.3 million visitors per minute achieved during the World Cup back in June, 2006. (The third biggest peak to news sites was last March during the first day of the U.S. college basketball playoffs when it hit 7 million visitors per minute).

How long will this record last and what will be the next event to topple it?

(Hat tip to Beet.TV).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: Erick Schonfeld

written by

Google and other tech companies won a big battle in Washington today. In an Election Day meeting, the FCC approved the unlicensed use of “white spaces” spectrum newly freed up as a result of TV broadcasters going from analog to digital broadcasts. Google has long been leading the lobbying effort to turn this spectrum into a sort of WiFi 2.0. Telecom companies and sports leagues opposed opening up the spectrum, claiming that it would interfere with wireless headsets and other devices that use nearby licensed airwaves.

Google argued that the interference argument was bunk, and the FCC agreed. Although the FCC is requiring more testing before “white spaces” devices will be approved.

This is a big win not just for Google, but for the entire tech industry. Just as WiFi changed the way we connect to the Internet in our homes and offices, the “white spaces” spectrum could be used for longer-range wireless broadband connections. The wireless carriers are right to feel threatened.

As far as Google is concerned, it wants as many wireless networks as possible to connect to the Internet. The “white spaces” is part of a bigger thrust. For instance, consider a recent Google patent to tie disparate wireless networks together through a marketplace that would let people switch networks on the fly as they moved around based on price and quality of coverage. As we noted in a post about that patent:

The patent is part of Google’s broader agenda to get as many people online as possible with as many devices as possible. Hence the gPhone, its pressure on the FCC, and Larry Page’s bristling in support of open white spaces. The opening of white spaces in particular could lead to more connection points for mobile devices, ones that form an attractive alternative to those provided by wireless carriers. And Android-powered phones could be among the first to take advantage of a flexible connections system.

The FCC just gave Google the go-ahead to start its end-run around the carriers. But it also just approved Verizon’s acquisition of AllTell, so it is spreading its love around.

Update: In a blog post today, Google co-founder Larry Page writes:

I’ve always thought that there are a lot of really incredible things that engineers and entrepreneurs can do with this spectrum. We will soon have “Wi-Fi on steroids,” since these spectrum signals have much longer range than today’s Wi-Fi technology and broadband access can be spread using fewer base stations resulting in better coverage at lower cost. And it is wonderful that the FCC has adopted the same successful unlicensed model used for Wi-Fi, which has resulted in a projected 1 billion Wi-Fi chips being produced this year. Now that the FCC has set the rules, I’m sure that we’ll see similar growth in products to take advantage of this spectrum.

As an engineer, I was also really gratified to see that the FCC decided to put science over politics. For years the broadcasting lobby and others have tried to spread fear and confusion about this technology, rather than allow the FCC’s engineers to simply do their work.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: Erick Schonfeld

written by

The U.S. Election isn’t until tomorrow, but doesn’t it already seems like Obama has won? That is certainly the impression you get if you look at any of the polls, state-by-state electoral maps, or prediction markets out there. Even the latest Fox News poll has Obama leading McCain by 50 percent to 43 percent.

My favorite prediction tool, and the one with the best record of getting elections right, is the Iowa Electronic Markets. In its winner-take-all market for the U.S. Presidential election, it is predicting that Obama has an 89 percent chance of winning the majority of votes (see graph above). NewsFutures, similarly puts Obama’s chances of winning at 90 percent, and Intrade has his stock trading at 90.6.

All the traditional telephone polls similarly show Obama in the lead, especially those that bother to call people on their cell phones. But you cannot really trust those polls. They are notoriously wrong. It is better to look at state-by-state breakdowns projected onto an electoral map. The New York Times, for instance, has Obama clearing at least 291 electoral votes to McCain’s 163 (he needs 270 to win):

The NYT also has a nice interactive graph that shows all the major poll results and how they’ve changed over time. Again, I trust markets over polls any day, and it is interesting to note that in another Iowa Electronic market predicting the share of the vote each candidate will get, it is predicting a closer race than even Fox. Right now, it has Obama winning 53 percent of the vote compared to 47 percent for McCain.

Remember, those numbers can literally change overnight. And the only poll that counts is the one taken in the election booth.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Source: Erick Schonfeld

written by

Since our last update a week ago, we’ve added 18,885 job eliminations at tech and media companies to our Layoff Tracker. That brings the total to 38,538 layoffs across 108 companies over the past two months.

Some of the bigger reductions this week came from Motorola (3,000), Qwest (1,200), and Electronic Arts (600).  Among startups, there were job cuts at Revision3 (10), Emusic (10), Sugar Publishing (9), Aliph/Jawbone (25), matchmine (42, deadpool), and Gizmos (10).  We’ve also started adding media companies facing disruption from the Internet, including Gannett (3,000), Time Inc. (600), and Conde Nast (32), whose Portfolio magazine laid off nearly all of its Website staff.

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article.

Here is the full list of layoffs from the past week:

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: Erick Schonfeld

written by