re-nightmares.com

Blecher said Hasbro waited, “in deference to the fans,” until it launched its official Scrabble Facebook app earlier this month. That was created by Electronic Arts and is used by a mere 8,900 daily users.

Hasbro combined the lawsuit with a notice to Facebook invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s takedown provision. As of 11:30 p.m. PT on Thursday, the Scrabulous application was still listed on Facebook.

Hasbro on Thursday filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit in New York against the creators of the ad-supported Scrabulous application, which boasts an astonishing half-million daily users.

It’s unclear how the lawsuit will proceed; the defendants could simply ignore it if they have no U.S. assets to seize, and aren’t worried about Indian courts enforcing a default judgment. RJ Softwares did not respond to queries on Thursday.

This is the lawsuit we all knew was coming: Hasbro, which sells the Scrabble board game, has sued to shut down the wildly popular knockoff on Facebook called Scrabulous.

The lawsuit names as defendants Kolkata, India-based RJ Softwares, its CEO Rajat Agarwalla, and Jayant Agarwalla, who launched Scrabulous two years ago. It asks the court to yank the Scrabulous game from Facebook, disable the Scrabulous.com domain name, and grant Hasbro damages and attorneys fees.

Facebook representative Brandee Barker replied with this statement, which is succinct enough to include here verbatim:

Mark Blecher, general manager for Hasbro Digital Media, said in a telephone interview that his employer’s goal is to promote its authentic, legitimate Facebook application. “This is theft of intellectual property,” Blecher said of Scrabulous. “It’s really no different from when the recording industry faced the issue of folks posting music on sites like Napster and letting them copy it for free.”

We believe that games are an important part of the social experience on
Facebook and have been impressed by the creativity and innovation of the
games that developers–both large and small–have built on Facebook
Platform. In the case of disputes such as the one involving Scrabulous, our
hope and expectation is that the parties can resolve their disagreements in
a manner that satisfies the parties, that continues to offer a great
experience to gamers and that doesn’t discourage other developers from using
Platform to share their creativity and test new ideas. Over the past year,
Facebook has tried to use its status as neutral platform provider to help
the parties come to an amicable agreement. We’re disappointed that Hasbro
has sought to draw us into their dispute; nevertheless, we have forwarded
their concerns to Scrabulous and requested their appropriate response.

“I didn’t believe in Bigfoot at the time,” Whitton said.

And if Twitter is to be believed, the Internet still doesn’t.

That didn’t do too much to appease the skeptical audience of the press conference, who were on the verge of heckling.

But most of the Twitter observers tuned into the press conference seemed to take the whole thing as entertainment. “I’m actually fearful to enter these Bigfoot infested woods in Georgia!” one exclaimed. “He’s a Bigfoot dressed up as a Bigfoot, playing another Bigfoot,” one wrote in a nod to a line spoken by Robert Downey Jr. in the just-released satire flick Tropic Thunder.

Plus, the Associated Press reported that Whitton and Dyer’s story had changed, and in the press conference Whitton claimed that he and Dyer hadn’t actually been veteran Bigfoot hunters as reported earlier. When they found the creature, they considered the idea of doing guided tours of Bigfoot country, but that was as far as they said they went.

“R.I.P. Harry. The Hendersons will miss you,” one Twitter user said jokingly in reference to the ’80s comedy Harry and the Hendersons, about a family that adopts a Bigfoot. Others were more skeptical, given the dubious nature of the photos. “That Bigfoot in the box looks so totally fakey, like a bad Halloween costume,” another Twitter user said.

“Starting Monday I should have assembled some fine scientists that will do the autopsy to find the origin and death of this creature, and at that point in time we will make it known and hopefully we’ll get somebody to come in and film it,” Biscardi said to listeners, “to show it to the world as it’s being done. I want to get to the bottom of it.”

It’s the ultimate summer Friday news story: CNN Webcasting a press conference hosted by the men who claim they nabbed a dead body of the legendary creature known as Bigfoot.

“I want to protect the species,” Whitton continued. “Everyone would be up there hunting for Bigfoot and disturbing the habitat.”

Bigfoot hunter Tom Biscardi held the press conference in Palo Alto, Calif., in conjunction with Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, the two men from Georgia who claim that they found the corpse while hiking. Biscardi wouldn’t actually show the body, saying that he had invited Fox News reporter Megan Kelly to show it on-air and that a number of scientists would be performing an autopsy on Monday.

Most Twitterers didn’t seem to believe the contents of the conference, probably because there were enough gray areas in the press conference to paint the walls of my office a nice foggy hue. Biscardi denied that he’d participated in a money-scheming Bigfoot hoax in 2005, saying that he’d been duped by a deranged woman who claimed she had two “Bigfeet” in captivity; he claimed he refunded those who’d charged to see a Webcast of the creatures when he realized it was fake. And Whitton shrugged off a series of goofy YouTube videos, most of them now pulled from the video-sharing site, in which he and Dyer reportedly claimed the Bigfoot was a fake and featured Whitton’s brother dressed up as a scientist analyzing it.

“We just decided to have a little fun with it,” Whitton said. When asked why he didn’t call authorities when they claimed to have found the body in early June, he answered, “I didn’t see any need to at the time. It seemed like it would create a frenzy.”

People have been Googling it, too. The search query “Bigfoot press conference” hit the top three on Google Trends.

On the Web it was equally chaotic. Twitter users went nuts, with Twitter Search (formerly Summize) bringing up dozens of posts per minute from users who were watching the press conference online or expressing their opinions within the site’s 140-character limit. Third-party analytics site Twitscoop showed a barrage of Twitters that included the word “Bigfoot,” and determined the word to be the hottest term on the microblogging site at the time.

Mac OS X 10.5.3 is now available for downloading from Apple’s site or through the Software Update process. Dozens of bugs are fixed with the new release for products like iCal, Mail, Time Machine, and others.

Apple has released the latest version of Mac OS X Leopard, just weeks before its annual developers’ conference.

(Credit:
Apple)

The newest version of Mac OS X Leopard, 10.5.3, is ready for Mac owners.

Apple is getting set to host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco the week of June 9, where we might learn more about the yet-unnamed Mac OS X 10.6, assuming they aren’t skipping ahead to Mac OS XI, or Mac OS 11, or whatever naming convention gets chosen.

The sites use a combination of human input and an automated semantic engine in an attempt to suss out not only the most relevant but also the most interesting or most important pieces of information within the category of focus. To start, a human editor identifies quality sources of content for the subject area and builds a glossary of terms; the humans add metadata to search terms so results can be more nuanced than a strict keyword search. The engine then analyzes new pieces of content and surfaces those that are determined to be more relevant to the topic or interesting to users.

Readers can take part in refining the sites’ content by suggesting news sources; those who create a profile can also share stories they like or broadcast a feed of the stories they’ve read. This last feature, aside from letting you develop your own mini-feed of content, also feeds back into the Loud3r algorithm. Eventually, the system learns your preferences and surfaces stories that you might be interested in.

Loud3r, a start-up content aggregator that we saw present at the Under the Radar conference earlier this month, officially launched its network of content sites Tuesday morning. The launch includes 25 focused sites, all of which share the “3r” branding. In addition to more mainstream-sounding New3r (which covers gadgets and tech) and Glitt3r (fashion), the company’s portfolio includes sites focused on enthusiast niches, such as sneakers (Sneak3r), skateboarding (Grind3r), and martial arts (Fight3r).

Nitpicking aside, the sites themselves are attractively designed, with a single left-hand column of stories that makes for easy skimming. I will probably be adding some Loud3r feeds in areas of interest to my RSS reader. Whether I spend much time on the site itself, however, will depend on how many other people become part of the community.

That said, the partnership isn’t always perfect. For example, when I clicked on the “Barrel” topic in the beta version of wine-enthusiast site Decant3r, I pulled up results that included stories about record-high oil prices and pork-barrel government spending, as well as one image of a gun barrel. (I suspect those results will disappear as the site acquires more users who flag irrelevant content.) And while humans set up the initial content parameters, the pages themselves lack the coherence you’d find at a human-operated site. The Decant3r front page, for example, features traditional headlines such as “Grape growers bubbly over expansion” alongside blog post titles, such as “91 Points in Wine Spectator,” that, when pulled out of context, provide little information about the article that follows.

Decant3r, a site for wine lovers, is one of 25 sites in the Loud3r network.

I really like Loud3r’s combination of machine and human inputs. It strikes a mostly comfortable balance between the exhaustive list of stories generated by a simple search term and the handful of relevant stories you’re likely to get from a single human filter, such as a blogger.

Worth using? I don’t find the service very appealing and have no plans to go back.

Redzee: too slow and screenshots are too small.

One of the weird things about using Google’s 2001 index is that the experience of using the current version of the search engine is much the same as it was back then.

Worth using? Absolutely.

Searchme is a genuinely useful visual search engine. It shows giant site pictures with readable text, and it has very strong categorization and bookmarking features. It is graphically intensive and requires a modern computer, a big screen, and a broadband connection, but it is a very good alternative to the Google less-is-more approach to searching.

Viewzi: several search experiments in one place.

Piclens, now known as Cooliris: puts your PC's graphics horsepower to good use.

Worth using? Definitely worth a try.

Nexplore: it’s on to something, but still too busy.

Worth using? Not really.

See also: Yahoo India’s Glue.

Worth using? It feels more like a science project than a tool you’ll want to use every day, but some of the views are really clever.

Nexplore uses Yahoo as its search engine for Web pages, Blinkx for video, and its own servers for Wikipedia. Like Ask.com, it categorizes search results in the left-hand navigation bar, which is very useful. Its special trick is its “gallery” view of search results, in which it displays thumbnails of the results in an easy-to-grok grid view. Its standard “summary” displays text results like Google, but with screenshots that pop up when you hover over search results. I found most of the displays busy and distracting.

Cuil displays a very attractive and useful search result page but still gets things wrong by occasionally attaching images to results that come from places other than the results themselves. The search results themselves are much improved from the initial embarrassing launch, but the occasional mixed-up images could leave you scratching your head. (Story)

Viewzi is a collection of visual search experiments. With about 20 different views of search results including a clever multi-engine view that overlays identical results from different engines, and a straightforward Coverflow-like screenshot view, it showcases different ways to see search. (Review)

Yes, Google has steadily and carefully evolved the search results page since its launch in 1998. There are now more graphics on the page (for image results, YouTube videos, stock charts, and the like), and there are links to specialized search indexes (News, Images, Books, etc.). But the basics of the search results page are the same: a string of text links with excerpts underneath them. (The major competitive engines from Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask.com are much the same.)

Searchme: big images and clever features make this visual search work.

Piclens, which changed its name last month to Cooliris, isn’t a general search engine like the other products in this roundup. It’s a plug-in for
Firefox and Internet Explorer that lets you search for and display photos and videos from specific sources like Flickr, Google Images, YouTube, and Amazon.com. I’m including it here because it offers such a smooth and gorgeous experience for searching for visual data. Of the products in this review, it’s the only one I use all the time. (Review)

Making a graphical Google isn’t easy, though. You can’t just slap a bunch of page images onto a search results and walk away. But to see what a contemporary search result page could look like, check out these newer search engines, listed in order of bad to good.

Cuil: a more modern look to traditional search results.

Worth using? Worth a shot, if you ignore the pictures.

Redzee offers a single Coverflow-like view of search result pages. The concept has grown on me since I first panned the service in January, but the site’s utility is still lacking. It’s slow to display results, and the images it shows are too small to include readable text, so you have to judge the results based on the overall design of the site thumbnails you’re looking at. That just doesn’t work. (Review)

Sure, the lightweight page design is one of the things that makes Google blindingly fast. But once you have the search index working well, maybe there’s more you can do with the interface than make it fast. Maybe it’s time for change. Maybe the Web’s users can handle it now.

Surely there's more to search than this.

Turning to Yahoo, Liddell said the company made the decision to shift gears during the quarter as a deal with Yahoo seemed less likely and after Yahoo made its deal with Google. Of the increased spending plans, Liddell said two-thirds are related to driving increased search business.

He noted the market is projected to be $80 billion by 2012, making it one of largest growth areas for the company.

2:45 p.m. PDT: Healy noted that the PC industry saw 12 percent to 14 percent in the quarter, ahead of Microsoft’s forecast, with Microsoft seeing its client revenue growing even faster as it returned to making piracy gains after a dip last quarter.

On to Q and A:

It’s plans include more toolbar programs with computer makers, deals with other software makers and Internet service providers as well as a faster roll-out of its Live Search Cashback program. The company will also look at more vertical acquisitions, he said.

I’ll update this blog once there’s more to report. For now, Microsoft is just going through the formalities. (And the sound quality, at least here at CNET, is terrible, with investor relations chief Colleen Healy barely audible).

“We do not make these investments lightly,” Liddell said, noting that the loss will be “a drag” on the rest of the company. However, he said Microsoft views a further several hundreds of millions of dollars is worth the cost given the size of the online advertising market is measured in tens of billions of dollars.

Microsoft said it won’t be deterred by either the current weakness or its failure to strike a deal with Yahoo. “Regardless of what happens with Yahoo, it’s a space we are committed to.”

Update: 2:40 p.m. PDT: CFO Chris Liddell speaking, noting that, since its last conference call, Microsoft has decided to invest more in both acquisitions and in in its own online services business.

Pressed by analyst Heather Bellini on when Microsoft might see the business shift away from being a drag on overall margins, Liddell said, “I can’t promise you you are going to see a massive turnaround in the short term.”

2:47 p.m. PDT: As for the online business, Healy said that page views and search queries came in as expected, but noted that “monetization lagged.”

2:49 p.m. PDT: The company sold 1.3 million
Xbox consoles in the quarter.

2:54 p.m. PDT: Liddell is back. The company expects 12 percent to 14 percent growth in the PC market, but Windows client unit revenue to only climb 9 percent to 10 percent for the year. Slower growth for Microsoft is because of the continuation of a few key trends, he said. Emerging markets growth will continue to outpace mature markets, while consumer segment growth is seen exceeding business growth. Also, more PCs are being sold by large computer makers as opposed to smaller “system builders.”

Asked about the macroeconomic economy, Liddell said. “We are clearly cautious like everyone is,” but added that for Microsoft’s products, the company is feeling good overall. He did note that the company was seeing slowness in online advertising. “It was weak in the fourth quarter,” he said. “There is a direct impact and we are not immune to that in the online space.” That weakness is expected to continue, at least in the current quarter, he said.

Microsoft has kicked off its earnings conference call, after posting quarterly results and outlook that were below what some analysts were projecting.

The company sees some of the challenges it saw in the online services business continuing, although Liddell said the company hopes that some of its investments will start to pay off later in the fiscal year.

He again pointed to the company’s planned investments in areas like distribution deals as well as new business models, like Live Search Cashback. “In the short term that is not going to make the division profitable,” he said.

3:10 p.m. PDT: Liddell said he won’t be taking questions on Yahoo, but he did go over the elements of its latest proposal and added, “We continue to believe our proposal is a compelling one.”

He noted disappointment in Microsoft’s share price given its results, saying it reflected both general uncertainty and Microsoft-specific issues, such as the uncertain Yahoo issue.

Hiring improved, with Microsoft closing more open positions, Healy said.

“We remain focused on the factors in our control,” Liddell said.

2:52 p.m. PDT: Expenses came in $500 million higher than expected, on higher sales of Xboxes and Microsoft consulting services, both of which have a higher cost of sale, Healy said.

3:00 p.m. PDT: Microsoft plans to continue to invest (read: lose money) in online services.

“Demo needs to die,” Arrington said in the interview. “It’s just an old-school model…It clearly involves pay to play, and what we’re offering is better.”

But Arrington insisted that his event is better for early-stage entrepreneurs because presenting companies pay nothing to demo at TechCrunch 50.

And while TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and CEO Heather Harde insisted in interviews late Wednesday that their selection of September 8-10, 2008, as the dates for TechCrunch 50 was about the availability of an affordable San Francisco venue, Arrington also made his feelings about Demo clear.

“Venues are really hard,” Arrington said of the location for TechCrunch 50, San Francisco’s Design Center Concourse. “We really like this venue (and) this was the only dates we could get it.”

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, in discussing the decision to place TechCrunch 50 at the same time as DemoFall said, ‘Demo needs to die.’

Demo Executive Producer Chris Shipley expressed disappointment on hearing the news that TechCrunch 50 had been scheduled for the same dates as DemoFall.

In fact, she said the fees may well establish those that pay it as serious about their products in the minds of the press and venture capitalists that attend.

TechCrunch 50, by comparison, will not charge the companies that present.

That’s because both TechCrunch and Demo effectively require participating companies to be launching themselves or their products for the first time.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

One problem with that argument, however, is that since TechCrunch 40–the slightly smaller 2007 precursor to TechCrunch 50–companies have had to choose one show or the other.

“I think that certainly…TechCrunch 50 is a great venue for young companies,” Shipley said by phone from Madrid, Spain. “But to put it up against Demo means those companies are now going to be competing for attention, and I just don’t see how that’s good for entrepreneurs.”

By “pay to play,” Arrington was referring to the five-figure fee that all companies that present at either Demo or DemoFall must pay for their spots.

“I’m not certain why it must die,” Shipley said. “I think that there is a lot of room in the market for products and services that support entrepreneurs. And I don’t see how it’s a benefit to (the entrepreneurial ecosystem) to kill off a platform that’s all about supporting entrepreneurs.”

For her part, Shipley said she appreciates that TechCrunch 50 doesn’t charge its participating companies, but added that many companies that exhibit at Demo are established firms for whom the fees are not onerous.

“There aren’t many venues (in San Francisco) where you can get 1,000 to 2,000 people sitting down,” Arrington said.

Shipley wouldn’t say what DemoFall 2007 earned, but did say that the majority of the 650 to 700 attendees had paid. With tickets for that event costing $3,000, that means DemoFall likely earned well into seven figures as well, just from tickets. Presenting companies likely paid well more than $1 million more to demo.

He said that of some 1,100 attendees at the 2007 event, approximately 800 paid full price of $2,500, while about 100 students paid $490. That means the event brought in around $2.5 million in ticket sales alone, not counting what sponsors gave.

He elaborated, saying that he and his fellow organizers needed to find a venue in San Francisco that was affordable and that could hold between 1,000 and 2,000 attendees.

Still, she suggested Arrington’s assertion that Demo needs to die is unfortunate.

Still, any controversy over the timing of the two events is going to focus on the fact that TechCrunch 50 will take place on the same dates as DemoFall–Arrington told me he wasn’t aware of the dates and that Harde had been in charge of scheduling–even though DemoFall’s dates had long been announced.

The scheduling of the TechCrunch 50 conference, which was announced Wednesday, has pit it directly against DemoFall, a long-standing event geared toward entrepreneurs and their products.

While Arrington would not say how much money TechCrunch 40 made in 2007, he did say it was profitable.

Mobile app developer mSpot has launched a new tool that will allow users to make ringtones directly in their browser. Dubbed Make-UR-Tones, the service provides a click-and-drag ringtone creation tool from a catalog of over 400,000 songs. Each ringtone will be 30 seconds in length and cost $2.99. So far, the service is limited to Sprint and AT&T customers, but the company says its ringtones will support other carriers “soon.” Worse, it doesn’t support every phone from the carriers and the
iPhone, for example, is currently not supported. Weird.

Zuora is bringing its billing subscription service to Facebook, Tien Tzuo, the company’s CEO, announced Monday. Tzuo contends that subscriptions are the missing element that will allow developers to make money on Facebook apps and his company will let developers charge as little as 25 cents weekly, monthly, or annually. The company currently takes 2 percent as a commission on all sales.

ToysRUs announced that it has won an auction for the Toys.com domain name, paying $5.1 million in a bidding war with domain holding company National A-1. There is currently no word on how ToysRUs plans to use the domain, but the URL is currently down.

SocialToo, a company that makes it easier to get more out of social networks, announced that it will no longer allow its users to automatically send direct messages to users who follow them on Twitter. According to the company’s CEO, Jesse Stay, he wants to “take a stand against automated direct messages” and aims at restoring their usefulness in Twitter. In addition, he announced that anyone who wants to block automated messages from any service can do so by providing SocialToo with their Twitter username and password.