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Blogging the Liveblogging of the iPad Launch —

Discontented with the notion of merely reading about the iPad launch and perusing reviews thereof? Time to stop worrying and learn to love the liveblog. Marvel at our semi-comprehensive list of people in line bruising their thumbs in the service of moment-by-moment documentation of line speeds.

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• New York Times Bits blog: a plethora of Times functionaries have spread out across the nation
• CNET: covering San Francisco, Palo Alto and NYC
• Gizmodo: the kids at Gizmodo are doing a marathon live-app review
• Intomobile: at the Palo Alto store
• PaidContent: at the Best Buy in Manhattan
• Reuters: even Reuters is getting in on the action!
Tech Crunch: in service of our evil twin, Jason Kincaid in San Fransisco
• TUAW: representing the Mountain States

If you know of any other liveblogging of the iPad launch taking place around the globe, please drop a link in the comments, why don't you?

Top photo by Jon Marshall
Bottom photo via Alan Light

Discuss

While there are many people still using Google Buzz, an article on Tech Crunch shows that the millions of users on Gmail simply have not caught on. Of course, we cannot blame the users' for this. Who needs yet another distraction when you have Facebook, Twitter, and FourSquare all doing pretty much the same thing. Even Google Reader has shown to be more useful for some people than Buzz. Now you might say: well, Buzz and Reader are meant for two completely different things, why compare them? The answer to that is simple: the reason Buzz is doing so badly is because you can compare them. And, quite frankly, Google better shape up its social networking services or they will have no chance at taking on Facebook.


The first mistake Google made with Buzz is actually one of their most well-known features: Gmail integration. While I applaud the fact that Gmail users can now use another one of Google's services with just one click, and while I definitely appreciate the integration, a social networking service does not go over well unless it has its own portal. Integration is good, and helpful, but not without a separate landing page. Because users are not going to go through the trouble of signing up for a Google account just so they can access something similar to FriendFeed, but worse. Buzz should have its own page, end of story.

The next problem Google made with Buzz is not getting rid of the noise. This is a problem everybody has seemed to have been dealing with lately, on all platforms. Steve Hodson had an OMG moment when Louis Gray realized his blog posts being in twelve places at once can get annoying for users.  As I said in the first paragraph, the primary reason Buzz is failing is that it can be compared with Google Reader. People route their Google Reader shared items directly to Buzz, at which point the entire post shows up in my feed. After that, a hundred people comment on it, and then the comments are practically larger than the post itself! Google does, in fact, hide comments when it gets too large, but that's only if you have marked the comments as read. Enter the Buzz stream for the first time in a few hours, and every single comment will be iterated over your screen.

The final mistake Google made with Buzz was not making anything worthwhile. What I mean by this is that all Buzz is right now is a copy of FriendFeed (did I say that already?). People have been blogging with claims that Buzz is Google's competition against Facebook and Twitter. Not a chance. Primarily because Facebook and Twitter have something Buzz does not: features. Facebook is an entire social networking platform, with walls (not the walled garden kind of walls, but actual profile walls), groups, fan pages, games, and more. Twitter catches users with its mobile capabilities; you do not need to be tied to a computer to use Twitter. Buzz has neither of these: it cannot be used anywhere other than in Gmail, and the only thing you can do is comment on other people's activity. In fact, the reason there is noise on Buzz in the first place is because all it is useful for is to act as a conversation board for shared items in somebody's Google Reader feed.

Just to sum up everything up here: there are few things Google needs to do fast if they want to rescue Buzz from ultimate failure. Give Buzz its own page, but keep the Gmail integration as well. Give more features to Buzz, and make it more like Orkut, without copying. Do not allow people to stream their Google Reader shared items into the service. And finally, make it easier for people to opt-in, because having Gmail as your only Buzz interface will not get you any new users.

Bang Up Your Lexus, Goof Off With a Samurai Sword [Hoon Of The Day] — A very expensive crunch emanating from the front of your Lexus can only mean one thing: it’s time to bring out the duct tape, the spray paint, and a katana blade. More »

NileGuide, one-stop travel planning site, has launched an new iPhone app, called What’s Next for geared towards travel recommendations. The startup, which lets you create customized trip itineraries is integrating location-based technology with What’s Next to offer personalized, and interactive content and recommendations in the app, which costs $2.99 on the App Store.

What’s Next aggregates content from over 30 different sources, including Citysearch and the NileGuide website, for 200 destinations. The app is designed for travel spontaneity. Travelers can arrive at a destination, turn on their device, touch the “Near Me” button, and find recommendations for nearby activities, restaurants, nightlife, hotels and more.

Users can refine these recommendations by filtering with preferences such as “romantic,” “business” or “off the beaten path,” or by searching based on activity type such as museums, spas or golf courses. There is also a filter for hotels and restaurants for “good for business travelers”. Users can also plan trips in advance by touching “Where To” button from the Home screen, choose any destination, and start building an itinerary before they arrive. And the app features much of the guidebook-like content that NileGuide includes on its web site.

NileGuide also has a free iPhone app that integrates more of the travel itinerary-creation functionality that is included on the startup’s website. While the travel app industry is a competitive space, this new app from NileGuide could be an incredibly useful tool for on-the-go recommendations with a location-based twists. And its reasonably priced given the vast amount of information included in the app. Founded in 2006 and based in San Francisco, NileGuide has received $9.5 million in funding from investors including Draper Richards, KPG Ventures, Austin Ventures, and Tenaya Capital.

In the video above, Doug Cutting, the creator of the Apache Hadoop project, discusses how the technology was first developed for large web companies (like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, which all use the open-source technology). Essentially, Cutting says Hadoop was born out of need: the data landscape was changing, and fast. Data volumes, especially complex data (video logs, visuals, etc.), were growing everywhere and there was a need for a cost-effective place to collect this data and mine it.

Cutting now works at Cloudera, the startup that commercially distributes and services Hadoop. Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data.

Via Cloudera, Hadoop is currently used by most of the giants in the space including Google, Yahoo, Facebook (we wrote about Facebook’s use of Cloudera here), Amazon, AOL, Baidu and more. To date, Cloudera has raised $11 million in funding from Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.

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TechCrunch Friday GiveAway: An Apple iPad #CRUNCH —

It’s Apple iPad day, and every early adopter worth their salt is pre-ordering one of the soon to be ubiquitous little devices and counting the days until they get their hands on it on April 3. You’ve been waiting on this thing since December 2008, after all.

We know you’ve already bought two for yourselves, the limit, because that’s how TechCrunch readers roll. We know this because we’ve told our advertisers that every single one of our 9.2 million monthly readers is a high disposable income influencer in technology and media that just loves to try out new things that they see advertised on TechCrunch. And since those advertisers believe us, we have the means to buy an extra iPad and give it to you. Even though you’ll then have three of them. Because you, dear reader, are a high disposable income influencer.

Anyhow back to the iPad. This isn’ the 3G version, which comes later in April. This is the 16GB Wifi iPad, a $499 retail device, that we’ll give away to one lucky reader chosen at random who comments below or retweets this post. Just do one of two things: either retweet this post, and make sure to include the #crunch hashtag, or leave a comment below telling us why this device must be yours. The contest ends at noon California time on Saturday. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. We’ll pick a winner tomorrow afternoon and contact you for more details. Anyone in the world is eligible, as long as you can receive delivered packages (our Nexus One winner lives in Romania). And we’ll throw in a TechCrunch tshirt.

TechCrunch Friday GiveAway: An Apple iPad #CRUNCH — It's Apple iPad day, and every early adopter worth their salt is pre-ordering one of the soon to be ubiquitous little devices and counting the days until they get their hands on it on April 3. You've been waiting on this thing since December 2008, after all. We know you've already bought two for yourselves, the limit, because that's how TechCrunch readers roll. We know this because we've told our advertisers that every single one of our 9.2 million monthly readers is a high disposable income influencer in technology and media that just loves to try out new things that they see advertised on TechCrunch. And since those advertisers believe us, we have the means to buy an extra iPad and give it to you. Even though you'll then have three of them. Because you, dear reader, are a high disposable income influencer. Read on for details...

Apple Rejects App For Containing "Minimal User Functionality" [Apple] —

A million fart app developers must've just started sobbing in hysterical fear as Apple decided to reject an app because it "contains minimal user functionality and will not be appropriate for the App Store."

The app in question, DuckPhone, was developed by Nick Bonatsakis of Atlantia Software and had one simple purpose: To make your phone quack like a duck. For whatever reason, Apple didn't think that was useful enough to an average user and wrote Nick this love letter:

"Dear Atlantia Software LLC,

We've reviewed your application DuckPhone and we have determined that this application contains minimal user functionality and will not be appropriate for the App Store.

If you would like to share it with friends and family, we recommend you review the Ad Hoc method on the Distribution tab of the iPhone Developer Portal for details on distributing this application among a small group of people of your choosing or if you believe that you can add additional user functionality to DuckPhone we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

Sincerely,

iPhone App Review Team"

My guess is that whoever was stuck reviewing DuckPhone really hates Jersey Shore, but the bigger issue remains: Apple's now got yet another completely arbitrary reason to reject an app. [Crunch Gear]

Capacity crunch, isn't that a breakfast cereal? RIM's Mike Lazaridis seems to have been a real grouch at MWC this week as apparently he hasn't stopped talking about the doom and gloom awaiting mobile carriers over the next few years. Focusing on the bandwidth-hungry North American market, Lazaridis has criticized the apparently irresponsible network saturation growth, which he sees as being primarily driven by app-centric operating systems. If you're wondering who he could possibly be referring to, let Mike clarify it -- according to him, you could carry five BlackBerry devices for each iPhone on a network. As evidence of his firm's focus on efficiency, he points us to that freshly demoed WebKit browser, which he claims uses a third of the bandwidth required by the competition from Apple and Google. If only he wasn't implying that owning a BlackBerry would save the internet, Mike's sales pitch would be rather compelling -- those are mighty impressive numbers he is citing.

RIM CEO claims we are staring 'down the barrel of a capacity crunch,' should all get BlackBerrys to prevent it originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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