House Minority Leader N...

While SOPA supporters have tried to present the copyright bill as a bipartisan effort to stop the “theft” of copyrighted material, the bipartisan opposition has been building fast this week. Today, House minority speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has come out against it, too, saying on Twitter that “[we] need to find a better solution.” Follow @DarrellIssa @DarrellIssa Darrell Issa If even we agree… RT @ NancyPelosi : Need to find a better solution than #SOPA #DontBreakTheInternet Cc @ jeffreyrodman about 2 hours ago via Twitterrific Reply Retweet Favorite To learn more about the bill, check out our teardown from a few weeks ago, and our roundup of the latest events from yesterday and this week: Kill Switch Now a Soap Opera, Heavily-Backed SOPA Copyright Bill Gets New Bipartisan and Popular Opposition

Browser Plug-In And Sha...

Shareaholic , a plugin that makes it easy to share content across a variety of social and bookmarking sites, has raised $1.9 million in funding from 500 Startups, Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot), David Cancel, Brian Shin, Roy Rodenstein, Nicole Stata, Nextview Ventures and General Catalyst Partners. Shareaholic allows you to find a site you like, click on the plugin’s button nestled in your browser toolbar, and choose which service you’d like to share it to. And Shareaholic is compatible with every major browser, including support for IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. The company also launched publisher sharing tools for WordPress last year. The company has also announced that Shareholic has reached 250 million unique monthly visitors after 12 months of working with publishers. Shareaholic has also seen more than 2 million browser downloads (up from 1 million in 2009) and 1.4 million WordPress plugin installs. Shareaholic is also releasing a widget for Tumblr.

I Believe In Google Plu...

Is this a contrarian view? I can’t even tell any more. On one hand, Google Plus now has 40 million users , it’s the fastest-growing social-networking site in history, and its users have uploaded 3.4 billion photos . On the other, Google is mum about how many of those users are actually active; some say that its traffic has declined significantly from its peak; Google’s own management didn’t much use it, until recently ; and many agreed with Google engineer Steve Yegge’s lengthy and viral rant about how they have screwed up Plus. Not me. I think Google+ is a hit in the making. I hardly use it myself any more — indeed, my last post there, more than a month ago, was “Sadly, it seems G+ has degenerated in my mind into little more than the place I go to complain that Twitter seems to be down” — but I’m no representative sample. Heck, I don’t really use Facebook either, except to mindlessly echo my Twitter stream . (We pause here briefly so that bloggers everywhere can recover from their exposure to the mindblowing notion that perhaps one should not treat one’s own anecdotal experiences as universal truths.) When Sean Parker pointed out that all your friends are already on Facebook, Vic Gundotra retorted, “Your mom and friends, guess what, they are already on Google.” As MG said some time ago, that little black bar on top of their home page and search results is their secret weapon. It gives Google an unparalleled ability to lead horses to their water. But can they make them drink? I think they can. Think long term. Google does. When Google initiatives flop, they’re usually pretty much dead within a month of arrival, a la Buzz or Wave. But when they get any traction, Google is excellent at pushing them uphill, bit by bit, year by year, with a relentless tide of data-driven iterations , all the way to the top of the mountain. When Chrome launched, a lot of people (including me) were bemused: why a new browser? Weren’t Firefox, Opera, and Safari more than good enough? Now it’s on track to overtake Firefox, and maybe one day even IE. When you consider the commitment Google has made to Plus, you have to figure that G+ today is a mere crude and clumsy approximation of what it will be a year from now. And what it is today is pretty damn good. (Especially now that they’ve ( more or less ) stopped machine-gunning themselves in the foot, by publicly backing down from their stupid and ham-handed real-name policy.) There are already a bunch of things G+ does better than Facebook. Photo sharing. Group video chat. Allocating people to Circles. Sharing Circles with others. …Wait, there’s sort of a theme, isn’t there? Groups. Circles. Handcrafted subsets of your friends, your acquaintances, and the people you follow. Videoconferencing with a group of your co-workers; literary discussions with the members of your book club; debates about the price of a new roof with the other members of your local community center; ongoing scheduling of your World of Warcraft guild; news from the leading lights of the political party of your choice; any of the hundreds of kinds of little or large groups of people that form and dissolve all the time. That’s what Google Plus is good at, and Facebook isn’t. Mark Zuckerberg famously said, “ Guess What? Nobody Wants To Make Lists ” — but everyone lists and subdivides the people they know all the time: in their head, or on paper, or in the To:   and CC: fields of their emails, for innumerable social reasons. They’ll do so online, too, if it’s easier and a more core part of the experience than it is at Facebook. I believe people want to connect to both broad-brush swathes of people — everyone they know, everyone they work with, everyone they went to school with, friends of friends — and more carefully defined groups, with finer control over identity and membership. Can Facebook seamlessly do both, and be all things to all people? Maybe, but that’s not the direction they’re going. Ironically, they’re doing things “the Google way,” betting on sweeping algorithmic solutions with their Smart Lists and Top Stories , while Google seems to be building G+ “the Facebook way,” around personal curation and social selection. The key difference is that, as moot aka Christopher Poole said the other day, our identities — and our relationships — are prisms rather than mirrors, multi-faceted rather than black & white. Google Plus acknowledges this in a way Facebook doesn’t, and that’s a big part of why I believe it will ultimately succeed.

Samsung Asks Apple For ...

Good morning, and welcome to today’s edition of: “Apple and Samsung love to hate each other.” Though it’s only been a short weekend since the latest update, the dueling electronics makers have again waged war in the Netherlands. Samsung countersued Apple in the Hague court last week , claiming that the iPad and iPhone violate certain 3G technology patents held by the South Korea-based company. The issue is that those Samsung-held patents fall under FRAND licensing terms, as they cover technology necessary for the industry as a whole, and must be licensed out to competitors under reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms. Because of this, Samsung has asked that Apple pay 2.4 percent for every chipset per patent within its 3G-capable iPhones and iPads, reports Webwereld journalist Andreas Udo de Haes on Twitter . Obviously, negotiations like this negate the need for an injunction. However, Apple claimed in court that it was already paying its licensing fees to Intel, which Apple is arguing as the sole supplier of its GSM iPhone chipset. Samsung, on the other hand, is saying that Apple has other component suppliers that it is purposefully obscuring to circumvent such claims. Samsung has also argued that Apple knew about Samsung’s patents back in 2007, around the time of the first iPhone, and that Apple declined to license the technology. Apple said those terms weren’t in conjunction with FRAND’s guarantee of “fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory” terms. Whether Samsung then asked for 2.4 percent per patent on chipsets is unclear, but Apple has certainly called that figure “excessive” this time around. Meanwhile, the Australian court is fielding further requests to delay the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Both companies met today in front of Judge Annabelle Bennett to talk about the revised version of the GalTab that Samsung has said no longer violates the original 10 allegedly infringed Apple patents. In court, Apple said that three of its patents are still being infringed by the Samsung tab, all in reference to touchscreen technology, reports Australia’s IT News . Apple has taken an “eyes wide open” strategy in its argument. “It must have been plain as the Opera House to Samsung that Apple’s patents were right in front of its eyes and that they were wide open,” said Apple’s lead counsel Stephen Burley. “If they intend to launch a product that infringes a patent, they ought to clear the way in advance, not to crash through.” Though it’s unclear how the Dutch case will pan out, Apple’s made big strides in Australia even without securing a permanent injunction. Samsung had been advertising an “imminent launch” for the Galaxy Tab 10.1 since July 20, but the tab has yet to grace Australian shelves . Again, there are no signs of this fiasco slowing down anytime soon. Buckle up. Crunchbase APPLE Company: Apple Website: apple.com Launch Date: January 4, 1976 IPO: September 26, 1980, NASDAQ:AAPL Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007. Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod (offered with... Learn more

Sequoia Leads $10 Milli...

The desktop browser wars are fiercer than ever, with Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and *cough* Internet Explorer all in a heated race for users (and new features). But there’s a relatively new market that’s still ripe for a surge in browser innovation: mobile. All of the aforementioned browsers already have mobile incarnations, but there are some new mobile-only browsers popping up as well. And today MoboTap, the company behind the Dolphin Browser , is getting a big boost: it’s announcing that it’s closed a $10 million Series A funding round let by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Matrix Partners. Sequoia partner Kui Zhou will be joining MoboTap’s board. The company first launched the Dolphin browser 15 months ago — it’s since been downloaded 8 million times, and has 4 million monthly active users (1 million of whom are using the app daily). And it’s growing quickly, with 30,000 new downloads every day, which works out to around a million per month. Usage is concentrated in the US, which has 80% of the total downloads, and the remaining user base is mostly in Asia. The biggest selling point for Dolphin is that it lets you customize your mobile browser, in much the same way you would customize the desktop version of Firefox or Chrome using extensions. At this point there are over 50 Dolphin add-ons available, including Last.fm and LastPass. Dolphin also supports gestures — you could set it up to take you to TechCrunch every time you drew a big ‘T’ on your screen, for example. And there’s a nifty ‘Webzine’ format that cleans up the pages you’re viewing. Dolphin uses the ‘Chrome Lite’ browser that’s baked into Android as its rendering engine — it focuses exclusively on the UI and user experience. The new 6.0 edition of the browser, which launches today, also brings with it an important new feature: it’s free. Up until now Dolphin has been available as a freemium product, with an ad-supported free version and a premium version available for $4.99 that removed the ads. Now the company is focusing on getting as much distribution as it can, so it’s getting rid of the ads entirely and making the premium version free. The company says that it will be using the new funding for three things: it’ll be growing the team, which already numbers nearly 100 between offices in San Francisco and Beijing. It’s going to focus on building out new partnerships, which means we can probably expect it to come pre-installed on some handsets in the future (at this point all of its growth as been through downloads on Android Market). And, finally, it’s going to launch on other platforms — an iPhone app is in the works. Dolphin will obviously see competition, both from other startups and from the big browser vendors themselves (I’ll be surprised if the mobile browser that ships with Android doesn’t support extensions in the next year). But competition is only a good thing here, and there will be hundreds of millions (billions, even) of users to go around.