The Secret Diary of Michael Arrington

Security

2008-02-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

Tech Media Network

This post has been contributed by O'Flaherty via CBN

About 4 years ago I wrote a post called “Security, Microsoft and You…” and I am amazed that very little has changed in that time.

Who’s running anti-virus software and thinks they’re up to date? Are you sure? Have you checked manually.. A lot of anti-virus software is configured to update once a week, but updates can and are released more frequently than that. Downloading manually, regularly, along with the automatic update keeps you safe all the time.. Also, it can reduce the size of your downloads, instead of downloading a big file once a week, little ones once a day.. you’ll hardly notice it..

Who’s got a firewall running? No, get one.. Don’t feel you need one? Do you suffer from the “Who’d want to hack me?” syndrome.. get over it.. Nobody might want to hack you, but that won’t protect you from worms that search for open ports to infect your machine…

We may be using Vista (or XP SP2) but many people are still not using automatic update properly and are still continuing to run to run their computers without anti-virus software, anti-spyware software or a decent firewall solution.

Here’s 3 quick and free solutions you can use to help protect your PC:

Anti-virus: AVG from Grisoft.
Anti-spyware: Spybot and Adaware. (These should be run periodically and concurrently):
Firewall: Commodo Firewall

The Latest from TechCrunch

2008-02-18T10:25:00.000-08:00

The Latest from TechCrunch

First Look: Kluster’s Market Approach to Crowdsourcing

Posted: 18 Feb 2008 11:15 AM CST

Crowdsourcing may work for Wikipedia, but few commercial companies have figured out how to make it work for them. The basic concept is to get outsiders, preferably customers, to swarm together to design a product or complete some other project. Crowdsourcing is quickly becoming a crowded field—there’s Innocentive, Cambrian House, the soon-to-launch CrowdSpirit, and Ideablob, to name a few sites. But Ben Kaufman, the CEO of a startup from Burlington, Vermont called Kluster, thinks that what is missing are market-like incentives to motivate contributors and push the best ideas forward.

Kluster, which is supposed to launch later today in a public beta and will be used by attendees at next week’s TED conference, is designed so that companies can offer cash rewards for each phase of a project. Participants who back the winning idea get to share the reward. Projects can range from creating logos and marketing campaigns to designing a product.

Participants start off with points, or “Watts,” that they can invest in different projects. Explains Kaufman:

Our Watt system is like a currency. You get a certain amount of Watts. As you do more things you get more Watts. Instead of voting on ideas, you invest your Watts in concepts you like.

So if a company decided to offer $5,000 for the best new logo to come out of Kluster, some graphically-inclined members might upload a few sketches. Other members could then invest Watts in the design they think is best suited for the company’s product, make suggestions for improvements, or upload their own variation of the logo. Whichever logo gets picked by the company at the end wins the $5,000, which is distributed to all the members who backed that particular logo based on how much they contributed to the idea, how early they got behind it, and what percentage of their total Watts they put at risk. Kluster computes what your stake is in any given project.

Watts are never directly convertible into dollars, but they do influence how much of a cash reward each member is entitled to. At the end of each phase, all the Watts invested in the losing ideas are redistributed proportionately to the investors in the winning idea. As people collect more Watts, they gain standing in the community and have more to invest in subsequent projects.

Kaufman came up with the idea for Kluster at his last startup, Mophie, which makes iPod accessories and was recently sold to mStation for an undisclosed sum. One of Mophie’s hit products is the Bevy, an all-in-one iPod Shuffle case, bottle opener, cord-wrap, and keychain. The company designed it at last year’s MacWorld conference in 72 hours with input from 30,000 customers using software that was a precursor to Kluster. According to Kaufman, Mophie sold hundreds of thousands of the $15 cases.

He took the proceeds from the sale of Mophie, plus $1 million from Village Ventures, to capitalize Kluster. The business model is to collect fees from the participating companies. For each cash award that is distributed to members, Kluster collects 15 percent on top of the award. If a company wants to run a crowdsourcing session for a private group, Kluster charges for that separately based on the number of participants (public projects are hosted free). Kaufman is also exploring other ways to make money: recruiting users with particular skills to a project ($5 a head for each experienced graphic designer, for example); selling sponsored “feature” spots on the homepage to promote a project; user surveys, analytics, and targeted advertising.

Kluster’s success or failure will depend on the quality of talent it can attract to its site, and how active members become in contributing to projects. Members can debate different ideas, upload photos, videos, and even CAD files. Everyone has their own profile page, and can keep track of how many Watts they have. Unfortunately, the site doesn’t offer any Web-based product-design software, which is what a crowdsourcing site really needs.

But Kluster seems to get the economic incentives right which is half the battle. The other half is convincing companies that this is worth their while. For now, admits Kaufman, most companies see this primarily as a marketing exercise to engage their most avid customers and maybe generate some viral buzz. It will take a hit product to come out of this process for them to look at it as an actual source of innovation.

Rather than offer a cash reward up front, Kaufman initially wanted to structure the economics so that winning products get a $1 royalty per unit that is eventually sold. That turned out to be too hard to sell, but it is the direction where all of this is going. For crowdsourcing to really take off, the market needs to decide which are the best products. Not some brand manager.

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Chinese Government May Be Concerned About Microsoft’s Takeover of Yahoo

Posted: 18 Feb 2008 09:04 AM CST

An interesting report from Reuters/ eWeek suggests the Chinese Government may be concerned about Microsoft, a firm that uses “monopolistic tactics” buying Yahoo, which will mean Microsoft will become the biggest shareholder in Alibaba, one of China’s biggest internet firms.

According to the report Alibaba “will seek a stronger voice for its management team in Microsoft’s talks to acquire Yahoo.”

Although Alibaba has Yahoo as its biggest shareholder, the firm is run locally by founder Jack Ma, who maintains effective control over the business, although Jerry Yang sits on the board.

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YouNoodle Thinks AI Can Predict Startup Success

Posted: 18 Feb 2008 05:33 AM CST

We cover a lot of startups here at TechCrunch, but I don’t recall ever having covered a startup that thinks it can use artificial intelligence to predict whether other startups will be successful. YouNoodle promises to do just that.

The site opens to the public today, and they chose the NY Times to pitch their product:

Kirill Makharinsky, 21, and Bob Goodson, 27, call their software a "start-up predictor," and they say their company, YouNoodle.com, might give an edge to venture capitalists and other investors trying to decide whether to sink money into an early-stage company.

"We don't want to replace investors," Mr. Goodson said. "We simply believe that industries of comparable size have utilized artificial intelligence to inform decision-making."

"Give us some information, and we'll give you some idea of what the company will be worth in five years," he said.

Call me a little skeptical, but I’ve been pitched AI that will predict the results of horse races for years, and ASIC warns against them.

Having said that, this quote is not inaccurate:

Paul S. Kedrosky, a venture capitalist and the author of the Infectious Greed blog, said that his industry was indeed inefficient at picking winners; typically, 90 percent of venture investments are not home runs.

It sounds interesting, but what do you think?

Who would you trust to pick the chances of a startups success?

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Who Bought Rupture?

Posted: 18 Feb 2008 01:45 AM CST

We knew something was up when Shawn Fanning’s startup Rupture, an unlaunched social network around gaming, delayed and delayed their launch. Well, it turns out, say multiple sources, that Rupture was able to do what Parakey pulled off in 2007. Get acquired before launching, that is.

We’re shaking trees to find out the buyer and size of the transaction. But Fanning, who founded Napster, is having a good month. Just a few days ago we reported that his other startup, SnoCap, was acquired by Sequoia-backed Imeem.

Rupture has been tight lipped about releasing any information at all about the company, but as far as we can tell they raised just a single round of angel financing, in 2006. More as this develops.

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Digital Downloads Are Not About To Kill Blu-Ray

Posted: 18 Feb 2008 12:54 AM CST

With Toshiba’s announcement that it is to cease manufacture of HD DVD players, the High-Definition format wars are now over. With Blu-Ray left standing, some, such as Rob Beschizza at Wired are now saying that digital downloads will now kill Blu-Ray.

It’s an argument I want to support and many of you reading this will feel is a sound one, but it’s not going to happen anytime shortly. Here’s a few reasons why

Old Habits/ Age Dies Hard
I’m probably in the last generation who will ever remember a world without widespread computer use and internet everywhere. Younger generations (often called the “digital generation”) only know a world where anything can be accessed or downloaded at the click of a mouse button. To paraphrase many a politician, the young people are the future, and the next generation has nearly already abandoned CD’s, and physical media like DVDs and Blu-ray are next. But that doesn’t account for the many others who, as Rob Beschizza points out, already buy DVDs by the millions and will likely buy Blu-Ray now that HD wars are over (and as they did before DVD’s with VHS). Substantial generations have grown up with physical media, and this isn’t about to change tomorrow. Like music downloads though it will start to change, but like music that is going to take at least 5-10 years.

Access (or I want to watch movies on my TV)
I asked my mother the other day why she hadn’t downloaded something (legally of course) after she had purchased the physical media instead. Her response was simply that she didn’t want to watch it on her computer. Although many reading this will never give a second thought to watching video on their computer, there are still people who prefer consuming video on their TV sets. To be fair, HD on a 1080p 40″ TV set provides a better experience that on my 17″ Macbook Pro, although the TV set doesn’t easily come to bed with me.

There are ways of brining digital downloads to TV sets, but none have anywhere near the penetration yet to offer a serious alternative to DVD and Blu-Ray. Apple is now offering HD movie downloads via their Apple TV box, but try and find more than a handful of people who own an Apple TV. Others offer a similar service such as Vudu, and there’s even Microsoft Media Center, and yet none are mainstream. Until such time net or network enabled devices become mainstream, TV and physical media will retain the upper hand.

Broadband limitations
The US internet community cried long and hard when Time Warner announced it was considering capping downloads on its internet plans in January, and yet I’m sure most non-Americans reading about it would have simply said welcome to our reality. The problem going forward is the days of cheap unlimited internet access in the United States may well be coming to an end as more and more download video and use P2P services. The low cost of bandwidth itself was a historical quirk that came about due to the first dot com bubble. That extra remnant capacity is being used now, and the costs of increasing capacity will likely be passed on to consumers. If this means more capped internet plans that immediately puts a constraint on the amount of video that can be downloaded. Outside of the United States this is already the case with capped plans in many countries, restraining potential growth in downloads (simply users will only be able to download so much content.)

Combine this with the need for high speed internet access that isn’t universally available. Digital video will not become dominant where it takes hours, sometimes days to download, when users can simply rent or buy the title on physical media.

Conclusion
As I said in the introduction, I’m all for the supremacy of digital downloads. I own two net enabled TV devices, a Zensonic network DVD player that allows me to stream content from any computer in the house or my NAS drive to my main TV set, and I’ve recently added an Apple TV to my line up. I wouldn’t swap this setup, and yet I’m still in the vast minority. Blu-Ray will likely be the last big/ mainstream physical media technology ever and it will have a strong future. The various factors needed for mainstream digital downloading and viewing will eventually combine to finally kill Blu-Ray (and the domination of all physical media) sometime between 2010 and 2020.

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Fred Wilson - Hypocritical, Wrong and Conflicted

Posted: 17 Feb 2008 11:12 PM CST

Fred Wilson lit a fire today suggesting that certain bloggers need to step it up a notch to improve quality and be more like mainstream journalists.

A fair point if spoken generally, although I’d argue that the quality of reporting done by many bloggers today, at least in the tech space, is equal to or better than most mainstream journalism. I think this is particularly true when we’re talking about breaking, non-embargoed news, where contacts and inside sources matter more than having all the time in the world to think about, research, write and edit an article. His point, therefore, should have been that all news writers need to step it up a notch and aim for better quality, which is sort of like saying nothing at all.

Normally I wouldn’t take issue with the statement, except that it was partially aimed at us. Wilson specifically called out our Erick Schonfeld for his post on social gaming platforms, as well as Matt Marshall at VentureBeat for a post he wrote about Like.

Wilson’s first gripe is that Matt, in his post about Like, didn’t give enough credit to competitor ThisNext. His second - that Erick, in his post on Zynga and SGN, suggested that the “two companies are neck and neck like Hillary and Obama,” when “Zynga is almost an order of magnitude bigger.”

Wilson fully discloses his conflicts of interest in the post - that he is a friend to the founder of ThisNext and an investor in Zynga. At that point, of course, a lot of the credibility behind his opinions comes into question. The two bloggers he is attacking have no conflicts with these startups.

He fails to realize that both Matt (San Jose Mercury News) and Erick (Fortune, Business 2.0) are seasoned mainstream journalists who’ve made the crossover to blogging. So his whole argument about blogging v. mainstream media loses yet more steam.

In reading the articles, it seems to me that Matt did an excellent job of highlighting a recent surge by Like while still noting relevant competitors. Erick’s post, which I am more familiar with, is in my opinion above reproach. Erick notes the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms and suggests that developers will ultimately make a decision as to which, or both, they will join. Erick also interviewed Wilson for the post and quoted him in it.

So what this really comes down to is this. Wilson didn’t like the coverage. But instead of simply disagreeing with and rebutting the points made in the posts, he went after the reputation of the writers themselves. That would be inappropriate even if he was right. But the fact that he was both conflicted and wrong makes it inexcusable.

Wilson failed to uphold the very standards of integrity that he demands from others. He failed to contact Erick or Matt before writing, and didn’t seem to have the facts to back up his argument. In a twitter exchange between us on this issue, he defended his sloppiness on the fact that he’s a blogger, saying “if you are a blogger you can say what you think, once you become a journalist, you have a different standard.”

Now, frankly, I’m confused. Bloggers can say what they think, but journalists can’t? I think what he’s trying to say is that Erick and Matt are no longer bloggers and now need to hold themselves to a higher standard - one that Wilson explicitly doesn’t hold himself to. That sounds like hypocrisy 101 to me.

Also, in a comment to his original post, he says “Erick didn’t get it wrong…but i think he missed the opportunity to get it right.”

How can you be both wrong and right at the same time?

Wilson partially retracted his post in a follow up, saying that he was sorry for singling out Erick and Matt, and saying that he “didn’t mean to take a shot at either of them.” But he then goes on to say that the whole exercise was a good one, since it started this great conversation on the issue.

That’s no apology, Fred. An apology would include you admitting that both posts were well researched and well written pieces. And that it was wrong to attack the reputation of these writers just because the conclusions reached by them were different than your own.

One last note. In the comments Fred says it isn’t even debatable that SGN is not a real company. From what we hear on the street, some very high profile venture capitalists are willing to bet some serious money that he’s wrong.

Update: Mathew Ingram says I went a little too hard at Fred here. I don’t necessarily disagree. Fred tends to come at people pretty hard, so I went hard back. But some readers won’t know that, so it’s worth pointing out.

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Twitxr - Like Twitter, With Pictures. Yeah, It’s Photoblogging.

Posted: 17 Feb 2008 02:46 PM CST

FON (better known for building a WiFi community) launched Twitxr today through their FON Labs group. Basically, it’s Twitter but allows picture uploads when sending a message (which makes it particularly useful for camera phones). FON founder Martin Varsavsky announced the product on his blog.

So, yeah, basically it’s a photoblog. You can easily set it up to automatically send your messages to Twitter and Facebook too, though, which is useful. My Twitxr account is here. Here’s an example of a message that was copied over to Twitter. Another feature I like is the fact that you tell it where you are, so location information is included.

Varsavsky says it’s specially designed for the iPhone, and they’ve created software that makes uploading text and a photo from the iPhone very easy. As a third party application, though, it isn’t officially available for the iPhone. You have to “jailbreak” the phone before you can install their application. It looks like you can’t simply grab a photo that you’ve taken normally from the iPhone, either. You have to initiate the photo through the Twitxr application. The application automatically adds location information to your photos and updates.

Twitxr is the upteenth variation of Twitter to appear (see Jaiku (acquired by Google), Pownce, etc. One clone has even gone to the deadpool. This isn’t even the first Twitter-variation to include photos - see Zannel . This is something Dave Winer has been working on with his FlickrtoTwitter project as well - which sends links of your new Flickr photos to your Twitter account. And photoblogging is nothing new. So as pretty as Twitxr is, perhaps FON should stick to wifi.

Update: I’m actually going to re-jailbreak my iphone to test the software - the fact that uploading is so easy and it adds location information is worth noting. If it works really well, this could actually be a reason for me to stop posting directly to Twitter.

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The Latest from TechCrunch

2008-02-17T10:19:00.001-08:00

The Latest from TechCrunch

Cookthink: Like Pandora For Recipes

Posted: 17 Feb 2008 04:53 AM CST

Washington DC based Cookthink bills itself as being like Pandora for recipes with a tested cooking database that returns results based on user desires.

The key pitch of Cookthink is the “cookthink it” search tool. Users enter what they are craving and Cookthink suggest a good recipe to match those cravings. Ingredients can be combined, for example if you had cravings for a pasta dish that included bacon and mushrooms, you could add all three to the search and the service will return a recipe.

Recipes can be searched using four categories of tags: mood (eg, hangover-friendly), ingredient (eg, chicken), cuisine (eg, Tex-Mex) and dish type (eg, quesadilla). For each recipe, Cookthink suggests complimentary recipes for the dish, and links are provided to relevant cooking tips and techniques.

Cookthink also offers a meal builder, with which users can create and save meals using recipes on the site.

There is absolutely no shortage of recipe sites on the web with often very little between them. Along with the rich search and feature set, Cookthink promises that every recipe on the site has either been tested in-house or by one of the members of the “Cookthinktank,” a confederation of food bloggers and cookbook authors whose recipes are searchable at Cookthink. Basically they aren’t suggesting recipes that haven’t been tested by someone related to the site.

The site is currently privately funded and will look to raise venture capital in the northern Spring.

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Sonico: The Biggest Social Networking Site You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

Posted: 16 Feb 2008 11:42 PM CST

Spanish language social networking site Sonico is the biggest social networking site you’ve probably never heard of before today. If you haven’t you wouldn’t be alone, it has zero hits in Google News as I write this post.

Buenos Aires based Sonico from FNBox launched in August 2007 with the usual social networking mix of message boards, profiles and networks based on school or workplace. Nothing remarkable, until you look at the numbers.

Sonico now has over 8 million registered users, and has recently launched a Portuguese version as well (so as to cover the rest of South America). According to Alexa the site now ranks at 167, and is in the top 50 sites in Colombia, El Salvador, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Honduras, Panama, Chile, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Argentina, Cuba and Mexico. We can only get the worldwide figures from comScore and although it’s still below the leading second tier social networking sites, it’s still placed extremely well for a site that is just 6 months old.

Targeting the South American market is in vogue at the moment with players such as MySpace and Facebook now offering Spanish language versions, and smaller players such as Wamba trying to get a foot hold in a continent that has a growing online user base. Google’s Orkut is already big in Brazil and Hi5 is also popular locally. If their current growth continues Sonico will be a site to watch.

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David Lawee New Head Of Google Corporate Development

Posted: 16 Feb 2008 03:57 PM CST

If you are looking to sell your company to Google, David Lawee is the guy to be stalking. Lawee, a source says, is the new Vice President of Corporate Development at Google, a spot that has been vacant since Salman Ullah, the previous VP, left (along with Sean Dempsey, also from Google corp dev) to form new venture fund Merus Capital.

Lawee, who started off in corporate development at Google but was most recently their VP Marketing, was a bit of a surprise choice, we hear. Many insiders expected Megan Smith, Googles VP New Business Development, to get the job. Both Smith and (now) Lawee report to SVP David Drummond.

Google’s corporate development group has been a bit of a revolving door over the last couple of years. In addition to Ullah and Dempsey’s departures, Chi-Hua Chien (now at Kleiner Perkins), David Friedberg (Weatherbill), Stephen Chau (now at Google Maps/Local), Jeff Donovan (retired) and Jeremy Wenokur have all left the group and or the company. There are just three people left in Google’s U.S. corp dev team (four now with Lawee), and another four or so abroad.

Part of the problem: Google’s corp dev team is, according to our source, hesitant to step on toes or pursue deals that won’t have internal corporate sponsors for integration. Only deals brought to them by others in the company can be pursued, and the corp dev team chafed at these restrictions. No word on whether things will change under Lawee.

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Use RosterBot To Manage Your Kids’ Little League Team

Posted: 16 Feb 2008 12:14 PM CST

Nothing mind blowing here, but RosterBot will be a welcome application for coaches of kids or adults informal sports teams. It’s simple, it’s free and it works, unlike existing applications (let me know if you know of an alternative that you like).

Like most of the good applications we see, it was created not from a spreadsheet but from the need to solve a problem. In this case, Canadian Ian Bell (founder of the new and improved PubSub) came up with the idea when he got tired of reading through email strings about upcoming games for his hockey teams.

In an email, Ian wrote “Lots of companies vying for domination in this space. My approach is to focus on the core value and really get good at solving the pain most people have around organizing their teams, and not worry about all the other big-ticket aspects such as photo sharing, scorekeeping, etc. Other companies are good at that but they’re mired in the process of making big sales to leagues, etc. I’m hoping I can make the appeal directly to teams, which is far less costly and more viral.”

RosterBot works for any sport, and it takes about a minute to get the team set up and invitations sent out. If you are on or coach a team that can use this, you’ll love it. Otherwise, move on, nothing to see here.

So Ian, when’s the new PubSub launching, anyway?

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The Latest from TechCrunch

2008-02-16T10:21:00.001-08:00

The Latest from TechCrunch

Poor People Use Yahoo, Those Better Off Use Google

Posted: 16 Feb 2008 05:31 AM CST

New data released by Hitwise yesterday shows that the difference between those using Yahoo and Google can be shown by the wealth of each user.

The graph right demonstrates “Online Representation” based on demographic types. The Y axis represents Yahoo, the X axis Google, with the higher the number, the more that particular group of users uses each service. Yahoo is strong in “struggling societies,” “blue collar backbone,” and “remote America,” where as Google obtains higher use in “small town contentment,” “affluent suburbia,” and “upscale America.” The size of each circle represents how many in each group have spent $500+ online.

The differences between the groups aren’t great, but the results do go some way in explaining the Yahoo conundrum. Although a distance second in search, Yahoo has remained the number one traffic destination online ahead of Google, so you’d think with more traffic Yahoo would convert that traffic into similar returns to Google. But alas we know that not to be the case, and that would appear in part to be related to people using Yahoo not spending as much online and being in poorer demographic categories than Google users, providing a lower return per user.

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Make Your Own Comics With Comiqs

Posted: 16 Feb 2008 03:14 AM CST

Singapore based Comiqs gives users the ability to create their own comics with a rich web based editing suite.

Sites and services that provide comic generation aren’t new. Comic Life from Plasq (makers of Skitch) would be the best known in the field, and comes installed on new Macs. There’s also no shortage of “add speech bubble” style web editors available as well. Comiqs offers a similar feature set to Comic Life, but online and totally free.

Users can use Comiqs with photos uploaded from their computer or from a photo-sharing website like Flickr to create a comic. Tools include speech bubbles of different kinds and shapes, frames and fonts. The interface is drag and drop so the learning curve is next to zero. Comics can also be embedded on other sites in a custom viewer for multi-page productions.

Comiqs is currently securing investors to take the service to the next level, where they intend to “work closely with cartoon artists in a revenue sharing arrangement that open up new revenue streams for talented artists and position our site as a place to find talented cartoon artists.”

Comiqs completes with StripGenerator, PikiStrips and Toondoo.

The demo video below shows one frame editing, but it should be noted that the tool can be used for traditional style (frame by frame) comics. You can also play with the service directly without the need to set up an account.

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stickK Allows You To Put A Contract On Yourself

Posted: 15 Feb 2008 07:48 PM CST

stickK is designed to promote a healthier lifestyle by allowing users to create "Commitment Contracts" that oblige them to follow through with commitments such as exercise and quitting smoking.

stickK was developed by Yale University economists Dean Karlan and Ian Ayres who tested the effectiveness of Commitment Contracts through extensive field research. Economic and behavioral research before Karlan and Ayres considered the effectiveness of the model, and their own testing found that people who put stakes (money or reputation) on the table are far more likely to achieve any goal they set for themselves.

Taking out a commitment contract though doesn’t mean a thing unless there is a penalty for breaking the contract, and stickK covers that as well. Users can set up a contract to include payments to charities if they fail to meet their contracts, and friends can be used to make the final call on the result as well, reducing the chance that users will lie about the result of a contract.

Steven D Levitt of Freakonomics fame wrote about stickK in January (Ayres is an occasional Freakonomics Blog guest blogger) and approved of the concept, a strong endorsement for the site.

stickK has raised $1.2 million in angel funding and had over 1,000 commitment contracts as of early February.

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Web-Based Translation Service Lingtastic Launches in Closed Beta (Invites)

Posted: 15 Feb 2008 06:30 PM CST

A new startup called Lingtastic is coming out of stealth today that wants to lower the cost of professional translation services. Using a distributed team of freelance translators around the world, customers will be able to call in, and the translator with the lowest bid will take the call. Instead of $100 an hour or more, CEO Chas Watkins expects the hourly rate to be as low as $18. (Lingtastic will take 20 percent as its cut).

The service launched in closed beta today for Spanish-English translations. Other languages will be available when the site launches publicly in March. If you want to try it out, send an e-mail to TC [at] Lingtastic [dot] com saying why you want to use the service. TC readers will get preference in being accepted to the beta.

Lingtastic will provide both live interpreters and translate text messages from one language to another. Watkins imagines many scenarios for his services. Any hotel or car rental agency across the world can have a live interpreter by simply calling. Sales people trying to reach potential customers in foreign countries could use the service. Or simply someone trying to flirt with someone they meet on a social network who lives in another country. Text translations can be sent via e-mail, SMS, or posted to Websites. There is a developer API as well. Here is how Watkins describes the service:

In the live release next month a customer with an account will be able to request a live interpreter from our website and they will receive a call from that person in seconds. They can specify language, specialty, max price and skill level and the interpreters compete for their business. That call can come on a normal phone, cell phone, skype, Yahoo, Google talk, or MSN. We can even conference in a third party on any of those applications too!

The most important aspect of our service though is the interface we have built to this system. That allows developers to quickly add our service (or resell it) from their own software or social site. This will allow people to quickly develop applications that can translate text, or have live interpreters call them to chat with friends from within any website or service.

Watch this slide show for more info.

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Facebook Group Wants to Draft Lessig For Congress

Posted: 15 Feb 2008 04:45 PM CST

With the death of California Representative Tom Lantos on Monday, a special election will be held in April to fill his seat in Congress. Will Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig run? Already on Facebook, a “Draft Lessig for Congress” group has formed (with 554 members as of this posting). Lessig, who has long been a champion of Free Culture as a lecturer, intellectual property lawyer, and CEO of Creative Commons, has recently turned his attention to corruption. (He has a wiki about corruption here). In fact, his last lecture on Free Culture, which he has been giving for ten years, was on January 31.

What Lessig means by corruption is corruption of the political process:

That our government can’t understand basic facts when strong interests have an interest in its misunderstanding.

I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money . . .. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

Lessig recently just registered Change-Congress.com. If he does decide to run, it should be interesting to see how he goes about raising his campaign funds. Tip jar, anyone?

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Another Vice President Parachutes From Yahoo, Lands as CEO of Xobni

Posted: 15 Feb 2008 02:04 PM CST

At Yahoo, they don’t have golden parachutes, they have purple ones. Yahoo’s vice president of social search, Jeff Bonforte, is among the thousand or so employees being laid off. (The picture at left is of him skydiving with the parachute Yahoo gave him as a signing bonus when he joined the company a few years ago). His last day is today. But Yahoo’s loss is startup Xobni’s gain. On Monday, he plans on accepting an offer to become CEO of Xobni, a startup that makes Outlook e-mail smarter. (Disclosure: I’ve known Bonforte for a long time. We once lived in the same house).

As head of social search, Bonforte oversaw Yahoo Answers and Delicious before those businesses were recently absorbed by other groups. His real accomplishment at Yahoo, though, was prior to that, as the VP in charge of Yahoo Messenger!, working for Brad Garlinghouse. Under Bonforte, Yahoo Messenger! surpassed AIM in number of users for the first time, revenues went up sixfold, and he also introduced all those funky avatars to the product. Before Yahoo, he did a stint as president of Michael Robertson’s SipPhone, where he developed the Skype-like Gizmo Project on the sly. And during the go-go 1990s, he founded i-drive, one of the first online storage services (it went belly up—a good idea that was too early). At Xobni, his experience with both Yahoo! Messenger and search should serve him well.

Xobni launched at TechCrunch40 (read our review). It is a 14-person YCombinator startup that raised a $4.2 million Series A last year from Atomico Investments, First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures. The VP of engineering, Gabor Cselle, worked on Gmail and did his Masters thesis on inbox organization (I’m not joking). Xobni offers a plug-in for Outlook that helps you sort through your inbox. Click on a person, and you can see all your threaded conversations with them, as well as any attachments they may have sent in the past. “It makes email, in general, work the way your brain does,” says Bonforte. Bill Gates is also a fan.

When Bonforte first met the Xobni founders a few months ago, he brought them into Yahoo to talk to other executives there. They made a lasting impression on him at least. “We weren't looking for a CEO,” says co-founder Matt Brezina, “but any time we find good people we ask, How can we get them?” Co-founder Adam Smith will relinquish the CEO title, but both he and Brezina will remain very much involved in running the company.

Although Bonforte has only good things to say about Yahoo, I haven’t heard him sound so excited in years. “Just fixing Outlook is a huge opportunity,” he says. “The inbox is still fatally flawed. It is hard to find stuff, hard to find people, hard to understand the network of relationships in your inbox.” Xobni addresses all of those issues.

And what about Xobni’s business model? It is still up in the air, but there are many avenues to explore: selling premium services on top of Outlook such as file transfers, adding people search, adding voice, integration with enterprise apps like Salesforce, Oracle, and PeopleSoft. Bonforte is a creative guy. He’ll figure something out.

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The Latest from TechCrunch

2008-02-15T10:28:00.000-08:00

The Latest from TechCrunch

Social Network for Gamers, UGAME, Enters Private Beta

Posted: 15 Feb 2008 11:40 AM CST

The prospect of founding a successful generic social network these days might be bleak given the dominance of players like MySpace and Facebook. However, there’s still plenty of room for niche social networks to rise and generate lots of participation.

UGAME, which enters closed private beta this week, wants eventually to be the leading social network for gamers. The site will start off as a place where competitive PC gamers in particular can socialize, share their gaming feats, and organize themselves into teams and other associations. While UGAME will initially cater to the World of Warcraft, Counterstrike, and Quake obsessive, its motto points to a more ambitious future with “All Games. All Platforms. All People.”

A key to starting a successful niche social network probably lies in the creators’ ability to balance familiar features with ones that capitalize on the niche’s unique qualities. If this is true then the team behind UGAME is off to a good start. They’ve built in lots of functionality that will be immediately familiar: news feeds, profiles, friends, blogs, photo galleries, status updates, etc.

But they’ve also added gaming twists to these features and built out new features that don’t exist elsewhere. To name a few: members can post their gaming achievements from both tournament and non-tournament events; they can list their favorite games and computer hardware specs; and they can join teams that are allotted their own public-facing profiles.

UGAME grants users an unusual amount of control over privacy settings. While all sections of the site are accessible to non-registered users, only elements designated as “public” will show up to everyone. Privately designated elements such as photo galleries and profiles will remain accessible only to friends and other permitted users. Founder Sam Mathews describes UGAME in regards to privacy settings as a cross between Facebook and MySpace.

If the premise behind UGAME sounds familiar, you’ve probably heard of Shawn Fanning’s social networking project Rupture, which has been in closed beta for over a year. Or it may remind you of WeGame, a YouTube for gaming videos that we wrote about last month (and which shares a startlingly similar name and color scheme).

UGAME will open its private beta in a few weeks; you can email this address with a mention of your favorite game to put yourself down on a preferred TC readers list for when that happens.

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Amazon Web Services Goes Down, Takes Many Startup Sites With It

Posted: 15 Feb 2008 10:55 AM CST

Amazon Web Services suffered a major outage this morning, affecting the thousands of Websites that rely on its storage (S3) and cloud computing (EC2) services. Startups including Twitter, SmugMug, 37Signals, and AdaptiveBlue, for instance, use Amazon’s S3 storage service to store all the data for their Websites. Reports started coming in across the Web, email, and Twitter about the outage (Twitter only uses S3 for file hosting, not its main messaging application). The major difficulties seem to have been fixed, but some issues persist. The outage started at around 6:30 AM PT, possibly sooner.

This could just be growing pains for Amazon Web Services, as more startups and other companies come to rely on it for their Web-scale computing infrastructure. But even if the outage only lasted a couple hours, it is unacceptable. Nobody is going to trust their business to cloud computing unless it is more reliable than the data-center computing that is the current norm. So many Websites now rely on Amazon’s S3 storage service and, increasingly, on its EC2 compute cloud as well, that an outage takes down a lot of sites, or at least takes down some of their functionality. Cloud computing needs to be 99.999 percent reliable if Amazon and others want it to become more widely adopted.

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An Outsider’s Flawed View Of Silicon Valley

Posted: 15 Feb 2008 03:56 AM CST

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman wrote a blog post a couple of days ago comparing Silicon Valley unfavorably to the Seattle tech scene.

I spend a lot of time in both places, and I think some of his observations are correct (people here compete to the death, people there go hiking). But even though I occasionally criticize Silicon Valley myself, I think there are some things that are dead wrong in his analysis. If you want a well balanced life, Silicon Valley is not for you. But if you want to change the world and are willing to do absolutely anything to achieve your dreams, there is no better place to be than here.

Apart from a few arguable points, such as his opinion that it is easier to retain employees in Seattle because they aren’t always looking to start their own company, most of the post seems come down to Kelman convincing himself that Seattle’s shortcomings are well worth it because it’s a nice place to live. Sure, he admits, not being immersed in tech means you tend to be out of it a little, and it’s harder to come up with cutting edge ideas: “When you and everyone you know spend 18 hours a day downloading, hacking, breaking, sharing, gossiping, criticizing and arguing about the Web, it's easier to tell when an idea is truly new. And if you don't, it's almost impossible to catch up.”

He explains all that away, though, by suggesting startups in Seattle are more about building a great business than simply being cutting edge, or “cool”. “But being apart from Silicon Valley can give entrepreneurs the latitude to think about what works, not what's fashionable,” he says.

The problem, though, is Kelman doesn’t provide any supporting evidence for this thesis, and I can’t think of any for him. The truth is people come up with good ideas when they have the motivation and intelligence to do so, not when they’re surrounded by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Having literally tens of thousands of bright tech minds around you to listen to and challenge those ideas, as you do in Silicon Valley, gives entrepreneurs a critical competitive advantage.

The truth about Silicon Valley is that ideas matter more than anything. A Stanford (or even the occasional Berkeley) student with an idea can turn it into a Yahoo. Or a Google. Or countless other success stories. They are surrounded by people who want them to succeed, who are willing to give them money to support their ideas, and then help them grow it. There is no where else in the world quite like this place.

Sure Seattle is beautiful (Kelman talks about lakes and outdoor stuff a lot in his post). And if you want to have a balanced, healthy lifestyle, that’s a great place to do it. If you don’t think you have what it takes to make it in Silicon Valley, maybe Seattle or other mini-tech hubs is the place for you. But the best of the best come to Silicon Valley to see if they’re as good as the legends that came before them. It’s a competitive advantage to be here. And if you aren’t willing to take advantage of every possible advantage to make your crazy startup idea work, perhaps you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur.

Sure, Silicon Valley is “a heartless amnesiac.” There is no nostalgia for the old days, because we are always looking to rip the old stuff up and throw it away for something better.

The fact is that all those great things about Seattle, or wherever, don’t have a damned thing to do with offsetting the business and cultural advantages of Silicon Valley. Making lifestyle choices is fine, but don’t delude yourself into thinking those choices are anything but a tradeoff. If staring at lakes and skiing after work are important to you, don’t pretend to be surprised when your startup doesn’t cut it.

You spent 16 years in Silicon Valley before fleeing to Seattle, Glenn. Come back, if you dare. I think you have what it takes to succeed. Even here.

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Consumating To Join The Deadpool

Posted: 15 Feb 2008 03:30 AM CST

Tag based dating site for geeks Consumating is to shut March 15, according to a notice posted to the Consumating forums.

Consumating was acquired by CNet in December 2005 and was later relaunched in June 2006. The sites traffic remained strong in 2006 then fell away in 2007 according to Alexa (the site was too small to register on comScore). The site currently ranks at 149,238.

The code for Consumating went open source in March 2007 and is available as “clonesumating” on Google Code here for those who think they might be able to make a better go of the concept.

Consumating joins the TechCrunch Deadpool.

(via Paid Content)

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Major Newspaper Groups Form Joint Local Online Advertising Group

Posted: 15 Feb 2008 03:16 AM CST

Four leading US newspaper companies are to announce a new joint company today to sell targeted local online advertising on their respective sites.

The Tribune Company, the Gannett Company, the Hearst Corporation and The New York Times Company will jointly own quadrantONE, with a base in Chicago that will employ 17 people.

According to the NY Times, advertising space will be sold in papers including The Los Angeles Times, The Des Moines Register, The Houston Chronicle and The Boston Globe. However titles considered to be not local will not be included in the deal, including USA Today, The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune.

The new company is said to be focused on offering advertisers scale in ad buys, with the newspaper companies themselves maintaining control. The move comes as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all target online mainstream media news sites, and it would appear that in part the move is also a reaction to that, with Lincoln Millstein from Hearst Newspapers saying simply "We want to control our own destiny."

The combined reach of quadrantONE’s partner sites will be 50 million unique visitors a month.

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Yahoo Relaunches Yahoo Video

Posted: 15 Feb 2008 02:55 AM CST

Amid the turmoil of staff layoffs, takeover offers and merger discussions, Yahoo has relaunched Yahoo Video.

The biggest change to the service is the addition of a 16:9 viewer, along with support for files up to 150mb, embedable playlists and improved user profiles. The content focus has changed from simply offering content uploaded by users, to including video material from other Yahoo properties, including music, movies, TV, news and sports.

Yahoo Video has struggled to make an impression against Google’s domination of the market and according to comScore is about to be surpassed in traffic by Dailymotion. The service was not helped by Yahoo’s decision to offer its live video streaming service under the Yahoo Live banner instead off Yahoo Video, when there are rumors that Google may offer live streaming from YouTube later this year. Yahoo acquired video advertising service Malvern Networks for $150 million January 31.

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8aweek To Help You Kick That Internet Time Wasting Addiction

Posted: 15 Feb 2008 02:16 AM CST

New Y Combinator startup 8aweek aims to help you stop wasting all that time on random Internet sites. They offer a Firefox plugin that monitors the web sites you visit and how long you spend on each site. If you are on a user-defined “restricted site,” the plugin will tell you when you’ve spent too much time there. Or alternatively, it will block sites if you tell it to be a little more aggressive about time management.

Some users may not be all that Interested in having the plugin try to change their surfing habits. But the service also provides an interesting chart showing all the sites you visited the previous 24 hours and how much total time was spent there. Some users may be surprised to see, for example, just how much of their life is spent on Facebook. The product includes a privacy option that allows users to turn off monitoring, or have the data stored only on their PC, not the Internet.

The company is offering the plugin for free; they want to make money by selling the service to businesses who want to limit the amount of time their employees waste on the Internet. Today businesses can buy a web filter to block access to known time wasting sites. But filters don’t catch everything, and some companies may want to take a softer stance by simply monitoring time on these sites rather than blocking them outright.

8aweek is very similar to RescueTime, another Y Combinator startup that launched last November. RescueTime montiors usage of both websites as well as desktop applications, so the products are not identical. But the products seem too close for comfort - I’m surprised Y Combinator is backing both of them.

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What’s Microsoft Offering Open Source On February 27?

Posted: 15 Feb 2008 12:50 AM CST

First Scoble writes about something so amazing from Microsoft it makes him cry and will be world changing. Then Long Zheng spots the above page via an email pitch linking to opensourcehero that redirects here.

What open source something will Microsoft forge on February 27 that will be world changing and make Scoble cry? I read Scoble’s post again (either I didn’t read it all the first time, or he has since added to it) and pulled out some more clues:

Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay both work on the Next Media team at Microsoft. The team does the following:

Microsoft Next Media Research group focuses on exploring what new consumer media experiences are possible with the growth in computing power, connectivity and storage in a compelling, elegant and transparent way in the 3 to 10 year timeframe. The group envisions consumer information and entertainment experiences not available today and builds or combines technologies from other Microsoft Research groups and crafts intuitive user interfaces and compelling scenarios to deliver that experience. Rather than focus on old media or new media, the group attempts to develop working prototypes of the Next forms of media possible from new convergent technologies, hence the name.
Scoble said there isn’t a business model with what ever this is, supporting the tie in with the open source announcement the same day
Scoble again: “Could they have done this at a Silicon Valley startup? I doubt it. Venture Capitalists won't see enough business value in what they are doing.” Which means it’s not a product that will sell, more likely an interface or way of doing something, and again, likely to be released open source
Scoble: “If I told you today what they were doing, without showing you the video we'll have up on March 3, you'd tell me "that's lame Scoble." It’s 100% involved visually, and likely interface related.
Scoble: “Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords, was the first to tell me about,” ActiveWords knows about it, and is an interface improvement provider.
Scoble: “In Wong and Fey's work you'll see techniques that lots of startups are using and, even, that the Google Map team is using,” got to be visual, possibly 3D.
commenter on Scoble’s blog:

I don't know if this has anything to do with what Robert is talking about, but its interesting to note Wong and Fay worked on this:

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) project is designed to be an extensible learning and exploration environment which integrates hyperlinked rich media narrative with a seamless multiple survey virtual sky to enable guided and unguided exploration of the universe.

In my earlier post on Scoble crying I guessed Silverlight or online Office. It might be something powered by Silverlight, but I’m now changing my predictions. It’s either an amazing online astronomy program, or it’s heavily interface related to I don’t know what. Guesses given where Fey and Curtis work: media management in images, audio and video.

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Women’s Online Video Preferences Are Tamer Than Men’s

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 11:36 PM CST

New figures from Nielsen’s new VideoCensus product reveal that women prefer mainstream media video content online, where as men prefer user generated content.

According to Ars Technica, the figures show women aged 18 to 34 were twice as likely as men of the same age group to watch network TV shows streamed from sites such as CBS.com or Hulu, where as men aged 18 to 34 were over twice as likely to check out user-generated video sites as women (YouTube and others.) The figures relate only to streamed content, and therefore excludes iTunes and downloaded content from P2P services such as BitTorrent.

Even if we discount the figures fully (Ars suggests men are more comfortable with BitTorrent therefore MSM content is not counted correctly) its a strange anomaly. Why would women prefer professional content and men preferred user content? and is it possible to obtain an answer without being completely sexist in a conclusion?

No doubt Nielsen and competing services will test the theory in the coming months. If it’s proven to be true, it may well affect the focus of sites in both spaces, and will most definitely affect the types of advertisers these sites attract.

(image credit: icanhascheezburger)

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Microsoft Will Launch Something That Made Scoble Cry. I Want (To See Scoble Cry)

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 07:57 PM CST

Proving perhaps you can break an embargo without breaking an embargo, uberblogger Robert Scoble writes about an amazing Microsoft product that makes him cry.

Scoble gives no hints as to what it is, but writes this about the product:

It's even rarer that I see software that I know will change the world my sons live in…While watching the demo I realized the way I look at the world was about to change. While listening to Wong I noticed a tear running down my face. It's been a long while since Microsoft did something that had an emotional impact on me like that.

The only possible hint is the launch date: February 27. I don’t believe in coincidences and this date just happens to be very close to the official Adobe AIR launch (I’m heading to Sydney for the Asia-Pacific launch event Feb 26). So I’m guessing that maybe Microsoft has picked the date as a spoiler to come after the Adobe event. It could be anything, but I’m thinking that it may be Silverlight related, and it might be related to online/ offline applications. Possibly a kick-ass web office package, or new tools to bring online apps offline. Either way it will be something that made Scoble cry, and I want to see the product, and Scoble cry some more.

What product will Microsoft launch February 27

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Game On: Zynga and SGN Battle For Social Gaming Developers

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 06:13 PM CST

The social networking game is all about scale. There are so many apps now on Facebook alone, nearly 16,000, that it is nearly impossible to get noticed unless you are already part of one of the bigger app companies. Cross promotion between apps is the key. Some of the largest app companies like Slide or RockYou, for instance, typically charge 50 cents per install to distribute apps from smaller developers across their users. But now we are beginning to see networks starting to form across specific application genres.

In the social gaming category alone, a battle is brewing between the Social Gaming Network (SGN) and Zynga. Tomorrow, both will launch separate developer platforms for other gaming applications. (Info here for SGN developers, here for Zynga developers). The appeal to smaller social game developers is similar: join one of the gaming networks and see your game promoted on the toolbar or gaming page when people are playing other games in the network. Fred Wilson, the partner at Union Square Ventures, who invested in Zynga, explains to me:

It is the exact same value proposition why you would want to build your app on Facebook as opposed to the Web. You can rapidly develop an audience. It is access to audience and monetization.

Both companies have varying claims as to how large their audiences actually are. SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar says, “We are able to promote the developers’ games across millions of users and 700 million pageviews a month.” SGN’s most popular games on Facebook and its own site are Warbook, Street Race, and Fight Club. Zynga, for its part claims 1.3 million daily active users across Facebook, Bebo, Meebo, and Friendster. It’s most popular game is Texas Hold’Em poker (with 609,000 daily active users in Facebook alone), followed by Blackjack, Attack!, Scramble, and Sea Wars. At least on Facebook, it appears that Zynga has more daily active users. (See Zynga Facebook stats here and SGN Facebook stats here).

Zynga, I have learned, has also recently acquired two smaller gaming developers: one is behind the CLZ group of apps, which have 365,000 daily active users, and the developers behind the Superheros app (34,000 daily active users). The company is also trying to avoid the as-yet-unresolved fate of Scrabulous, a Facebook game that is being threatened to be shut down because it is a copy of Scrabble. Zynga recently renamed one of its games Sea Wars from Battleship. (Guess what game it is based on?). Attack! is similar to Risk, and Scramble is a digital version of Boggle. So there still might be some issues there.

Later tonight, SGN will launch a set of APIs for developers and its Gaming Hub application on Facebook, which will attempt to create a “gaming graph” that connects you to other games in the hub, particularly the ones your friends are playing. Joining the hub will let Facebook members keep track of what their friends are playing, their high scores, and will move all game-related feeds from their profile pages to the hub. Explains Pishevar:

What is annoying is there is a lot of noise on people’s profiles. That gaming graph belongs inside the gaming hub. It is a portal to all your games.

The gaming hub will also eventually become a mini ad network for games, although not at launch. Zynga, on the other hand, will have advertising baked into its hub, splitting any ad revenues with game developers. But the ads will be secondary to the cross-promotion.

So game developers will have to decide whether to go it alone, join one of the gaming hubs, or join both. May the best hub win.

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No Date For Valentine’s Day? Get Some “Adult Content” At Zivity

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 04:35 PM CST

Zivity, the venture-backed adult content site, which we first covered in August 2007, is starting to get mainstream press attention - co-founder Scott Banister appeared on the Fox Business Channel late last year, and Forbes wrote a long piece on them last week.

The service, which distributes payments to models and photographers based on user voting, is still in private beta. Today, though, they are giving away a bunch of accounts to TechCrunch readers - just be one of the first 1,000 people to email techcrunch@zivity.com and you’re in.

Zivity will also be giving invitations to users to give to friends shortly, so we’ve added them to InviteShare. If you don’t get an account via the email above, add yourself there and someone will invite you as soon as the feature is turned on.

Zivity launched at TechCrunch40 last Fall, and co-founder Cyan Banister is becoming somewhat famous since she isn’t just an employee - she also models for the site.

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Indiana Jones High Def Trailer

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 04:11 PM CST

From CrunchGear: Check out the high definition trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie on Yahoo Movies. You can’t embed the trailer, of course (that would make too much sense), but they have some ridiculous countdown widget thing that shows the exact number of seconds until the movie is released. In case you are curious:

Watch the Trailer on Yahoo! Movies

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Watch out Craigslist, Sister Site Kijiji Is Taking Off.

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 01:11 PM CST

It’s not yet a Craigslist killer, but eBay’s free classifieds site Kijiji is taking off in the U.S. eBay, of course, is also an investor in Craigslist, but its 25 percent stake doesn’t give it a controlling interest and the other 75 percent is not for sale. So in March, 2005, eBay launched Kijiji as its own competing free classifieds site overseas. Then last summer, it launched a U.S. version of the site.

Since then, the U.S. site alone has grown from 362,000 visitors in July, 2007 to 1.8 million in January, according to comScore. (If you count U.S. visits to Kijiji’s international sites as well, the number is 2.3 million). In comparison, Microsoft’s classified site, Windows Live Expo, attracted only 176,000 visitors in January, Yahoo Classifieds attracted 97,000, and neither Google’s classifieds site nor Google Base even registers on comScore.

Kijiji’s visitor stats are still less than 10 percent of the 26.7 million people in the U.S. who went to Craigslist in January, but comScore puts Kijiji as the sixth most visited classifieds site in the U.S. (after Craigslist, sites owned by Dominion Enterprises like Homes.com, AutoTrader, Cars.com, and Apartments.com). Kijiji is ahead of classifieds sites like Oodle (No. 9, with 1.3 million U.S. visitors in January) and Vast (No. 20, with 444,000).

eBay is obviously doing something right with Kijiji. But can it ever catch up to Craigslist?

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The Latest from TechCrunch

2008-02-14T10:29:00.001-08:00

The Latest from TechCrunch

What’s Next for YouTube (Video Editing, Recommendations, Advertiser Analytics)

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 10:21 AM CST

Last night at an event in NYC dubbed “Videocracy,” YouTube gave marketers a sneak peak at some upcoming initiatives. Silicon Alley Insider’s Michael Learmonth tried to get in, but was thrown out. Luckily, Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer took notes. Here is what he learned:

—YouTube is excited about its active sharing feature that lets YouTube watchers signal to other viewers when they are watching a particular video (if you turn the setting on, anyone watching the video at the same time as you will see your username on the right side of the screen).

—Better video-editing tools are on the way. (What took you so long?).

—Video recommendations will soon be launched based on what you have already watched (similar to Amazon’s collaborative filtering, people who liked this book also liked that one).

—YouTube wants to be everywhere. It will continue to distribute its videos beyond the Web browser to mobile devices and large, flat-screen TVs in the living room.

—For marketers, the “real news was YouTube's announcement of an impending launch of advanced analytics tools. You'll be able to see where video views are coming from (geographically and site-wise), as well as many other data points. This will be a huge help to advertisers trying to extract more success metrics and data from their YouTube efforts.”

YouTube is also planning some more “Tentpole Content Initiatives” to draw a mass audience, much like its presidential debate partnership with CNN. These will include:

—The YouTube Games. A takeoff on the Olympics featuring homemade videos of the “wacky wide world of weird sports.”
—Living Legends. Videos of living legends like the Rolling Stones.
—The YouTube Global Gathering. A worldwide event that will be broadcast from multiple locations on YouTube.

Thanks for sharing, Ian!

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Topper Makes Search Complicated In The Name Of Progress

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 06:24 AM CST

Topper search offers a search service which….um…machine learning….um something…..results.

Here’s the pitch anyway.

Here is a quick description of how to use it. Enter a search query. Topper Search will go out and get the top 100 results and display the top 10. Select at lease one ‘+’ and one ‘-’ result. Topper will use machine learning to build a model and classify all 100 results. Use the buttons in the top bar to redorder these results to your taste . Topper will then display the a different top 10 based on your model.

It is great for building ad hoc models for a single search. Try it for disambiguating a query. The stock example I use is ‘lions’ (for the football team or the animal). It can also be used for multiple searches and has a simple persistence mechanism for later use. For example once you have a model built for ‘lions’ try a search for ‘bears’ or ‘eagles’.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. We are building out tools for blogs and news etc using similar machine learning tools.

There’s a PDF on Topper here for those interested.

It sounds cool, but I’m not a coder and this sounds rather complicated. Using it is worse again, after the slow delivery of search results you’re asked to + or - results in an attempt to create better search results (sort of a poor mans Reddit, but more complicated and without the kooks.) Developers and coders may find this interesting so ultimately those of you reading this who are that way inclined can take a look. For the vast majority of the rest of the planet, it comes in on the usability scale at between ZOMG and FAIL. Still, it might take off, maybe the world is looking for a complicated version of Google

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Couchville Joins The Deadpool

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 05:04 AM CST

TV listings site Couchville has joined the deadpool.

The service, provided by PVR software maker Snapstream, offered US TV listings via zip code and cable or satellite provider. According to Michael’s March 2007 review:

… and it shows you a simple, easy to navigate TV guide. A vertical red line shows you what's currently on, and via an Ajax interface you can grab and drag the listings vertically (for channel) or horizontally (for time) to see more (this works much like the Google Maps interface)….It's very simple and it's very useful.

Michael said Couchville did one thing right, just a shame that one thing wasn’t sustainability.

(thanks to 1to10 Reviews for the tip)

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Serious Drama As KnockaTV Shuts Down

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 03:40 AM CST

I haven’t seen this much public drama between founders and their investors since the FilmLoop forced merger in early 2007. Earlier today I wrote that Israeli startup KnockaTV was heading to the DeadPool. Employees, who are apparently going unpaid, are pushing the company into liquidation to try to get at least some of what is owed to them.

We dug a little more into the story, because it just didn’t make sense: the startup was well funded with $3.5 million in capital from mid 2007 and the founders, who were among the creators of ICQ, had a $407 million payday in 1998. That doesn’t guarantee the startup would be successful, but it suggests that employees wouldn’t have to worry about their paychecks this early on.

Based on rumors going around Tel Aviv, there was some sort of major fallout between Evergreen Venture Partners (the venture firm behind the financing) and company founders, particularly Sefi Visiger. Product development may have been seriously delayed. Burn rate was so high that an additional funding round was needed, and Evergreen may have demanded the founding team put up more cash instead. Tempers flared, the founders elected to shut the company down, and are reportedly supporting the employees in their efforts to liquidate it. According to one source, the liquidation will ensure that employees are paid before other creditors become too numerous.

A liquidation would knock out existing stockholders, leaving the company assets to be sold off. Quite possibly they would then be acquired by the original founding team, leaving Evergreen without any stock, or their original investment.

How much of this is true? Sefi and Evergreen won’t comment directly to us. But there is little our contacts in Israel want to discuss today other than KnockaTV and what they heard happened. Companies that closed substantial funding just a couple of months prior don’t generally fall apart immediately before launch. Evergreen’s reputation in Israel is considered excellent, whereas some members of the KnockaTV founding team are said to be major league partyers first and serious business people second. More will likely be said on this story, from both sides, before it is finally put to bed.

The sad part of all this (other than employees going unpaid) is that the product actually held promise. Our early reviews were generally positive.

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CNN iReport: iLame Or iGood?

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 02:40 AM CST

CNN launched iReport.com yesterday, a “citizen journalism” site dedicated to user news submissions.

Andy Warhol said in 1968 that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” and iReport.com is offering users at least part of their 15 minutes as submissions may be used on CNN itself. But unfortunately that’s where it ends, because there is no payment for submissions. CNN claims this is a site is “where the community — not CNN — became the most trusted name in news,” but trust doesn’t equal money at a time where more and more sites and startups explore ways of compensating users for their time and effort.

There is some good content on the site, and CNN has selected star reporters in a social networking style popularity contest that encourages decent content, that and users can vote on stories as well. The weakness in the idea is that submissions are not pre-vetted or pre-read (or seemingly post-read), and you get stories like this one that is currently sitting as the fourth most viewed story on the site. I’m sure the weather in New York might be disgusting, but does a story that consists of one line and a picture of snow really make for great reporting? Then there’s stories like this one; Testing testing…… I can see people having proper fun with this in the coming days, until CNN ultimately decides that not moderating the site is a dumb idea.

Bored TechCrunch readers should feel free to add their own stories to CNN iReport and post the links. There’s no prize for the best one, other than your 0.25 seconds of Warhol fame in the TechCrunch comment thread

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Seesmic Announces $6 Million Series A Round

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 02:25 AM CST

Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur wrote a long blog post about his $6 million Series A round of funding today (I am an investor in this company). Most of the round was taken by Atomico (founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis), and rounded out with a long list of angel investors. Much of this was reported late last year.

This is Loic’s fourth or fifth startup, but his first in the U.S. (he’s French). Seesmic, a video-focused startup that is very twitter-like in its ability to facilitate random discussions, is doing well in its closed beta period. We aren’t covering it much given the conflict of interest, but this is a company I expect great things from, which is why I invested. See Dave Winer, VentureBeat, Mark Evans, Ryan Stewart, TheNextWeb and others for their thoughts.

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MySpacers Will Love This AddHer Widget Thingy

Posted: 14 Feb 2008 12:45 AM CST

Anyone who’s ever visited HotOrNot and clicked on pictures for hours will be a perfect user for AddHer. Users (women only at this point, look for AddHim soon, say the founders) upload a photo of themselves and create a widget that can be embedded on MySpace or another website. The widget shows the user plus another randomly selected woman and asks readers to select who they like better based on a variety of questions. If this doesn’t make sense, just see the embedded widget above and keep clicking on my face (the founders decided to allow me to join even though I’m not a woman - I didn’t pick that picture though).

Readers can visit the MySpace page of the person they clicked on, and users who’ve created a widget can see their ratings and the total number of times people have seen their image. See their tour and the AddHer blog for for more details.

This is the first product of Addmired, Inc., which is a Y Combinator startup. More on the Addmired CrunchBase page.

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“Post to MySpace” Button Released for Easier Sharing

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 11:35 PM CST

MySpace is now providing an easier way for publishers to help users spread their content virally.

They’ve set up a “Post to MySpace” button that essentially just runs a snippet of JavaScript that sends some content to a user’s MySpace profile page. The snippet takes four parameters: a title, some content, a URL, and the location in the user’s profile page to post the content (in their “about me” section or on their bulletin board, for example).

We’ve set up a button below with which you can send a TechCrunch link to your MySpace profile page.

This button is similar to the Flux fshare button that we previously wrote about.

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Plaxo’s Buyer - Not Facebook, Not Google. Likely Comcast

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 11:31 PM CST

Plaxo finally got bought, say valley whispers, and blog after blog have speculated incorrectly about who the buyer might be (first Facebook, then Google). Finally, someone may have gotten it right - Valleywag is saying that Comcast is the buyer, for $175m. That makes sense based on what we heard earlier today, too: that one of the cable players bought them, for something just under the $200 million previously rumored. Comcast is the most active buyer in the bunch. In fact, they’re getting a bit of a reputation as the guys who’ll look at any deal, and don’t quibble much on price. If no one else will take you, there’s always Comcast.

To be fair, some of my disdain for Comcast exists solely because they supply my cable and Internet at home, and really really suck at it. I believe I’ve spoken to every customer service rep they employ.

Plaxo did around $5 million in 2006 revenue, doubling that to $10-$12 million in 2007. 2008 projections are $20-$25 million. The company has 1.8 million worldwide visitors per month (Comscore).

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Yahoo Makes Its Case in Letter to Shareholders

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 09:50 PM CST

Yahoo has just released the following letter to shareholders outlining its reasoning for rejecting Microsoft’s offer to buy the company. In it, CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang emphasizes Yahoo’s strengths as both an online destination and an advertising network, and argues that Yahoo is better off going it alone than combining with Microsoft. He states: “The global online advertising market is projected to grow from $45 billion in 2007 to $75 billion in 2010. And we are moving quickly to take advantage of what we see as a unique window of time in the growth - and evolution - of this market to build market share and to create value for stockholders.”

He says that even though Yahoo is the No. 1 Web destination, his goal is to increase visits by 15 percent annually. Re-emphasizing his strategy of being the key starting point on the Web, he adds, “we are particularly excited about our growth prospects in mobile, the biggest emerging starting point in the world.” (We could have told you that). All in all, the letter is pretty much a formality without any major new arguments, but it does put Yahoo’s best face forward to its shareholders. We’re No. 1, Yang is saying, and we don’t need Microsoft. What he doesn’t explain is how Yahoo got into this pickle in the first place.

Here is the full text of the letter:

Dear Stockholders,

On February 1, 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited proposal to acquire your company. As much has been reported in the press recently, I wanted to reach out to you personally to let you know why your Board of Directors, after a careful review by Yahoo!’s management along with our financial and legal advisors, believes that Microsoft’s proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo! and is not in the best interests of our stockholders.

Most importantly, I want you to know that your Board is continuously evaluating all of Yahoo!’s strategic options in the context of the rapidly evolving industry environment, and we remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all our stockholders.

We have a unique combination of strengths

– Yahoo! is one of the most recognizable and admired brands in the world. We have over 500 million users (nearly 1 out of every 2 internet users worldwide). In the U.S., we are # 1 in many of the most used online services including personalized home pages, mail, news, music, shopping and travel. Because we have leadership positions in so many indispensable online services, users spend more time on Yahoo! sites than anywhere else online.

– Yahoo! is an attractive partner for marketers. Yahoo! is #1 in online display advertising, which represents 90% of the advertising inventory on the web, and we are also a leader in search marketing and a pioneer in the growing fields of mobile advertising and online video advertising. Through Yahoo!, advertisers can now connect with consumers on our owned sites as well as those of our growing network of partners including eBay, Comcast, AT&T, a consortium of over 600 newspapers, Forbes.com, Cars.com, WebMD and more.

– Yahoo! has the financial flexibility to execute our plans, thanks to our healthy cash balance, which exceeded $2 billion as of December 31, 2007, and our substantial operating cash flow, which we expect to grow double digits in 2009.

– Yahoo! has made important investments in our core computing infrastructure enabling us to dramatically increase the speed of our search engine updates even while handling vast and growing quantities of data.

– In addition, we have the added value of our substantial, unconsolidated investments in Japan and China. We have substantial positions in Yahoo! Japan, the leader in its market, and Alibaba, which is strongly positioned in China, a market with enormous growth potential.

(more…)

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PageOnce to Put All Your Online Accounts in One Place

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 07:54 PM CST

Personal content aggregators are nothing new. We recently covered the latest of many services that consolidate your social networking activity into one place. But PageOnce, a company that was on this year’s Israel Web Tour, wants to become the one stop shop for all your web-accessible accounts.

The site is still in private beta and working to expand the number of account types that it supports (TC readers can sign up here). However, you can already use the service to retrieve information from many banking, social networking, airline, email, and shopping accounts such as Citibank, Facebook, American Airlines, Gmail, and Amazon. PageOnce takes the information appropriate to each account (once you give it your username and password, of course) and displays it in a Netvibes/PageFlakes-like layout. If you have lots of accounts to manage, you can choose to view them according to type (finance, shopping, utilities, etc.).

Despite the fact that PageOnce needs to build relationships with many of the account providers in order to retrieve information from them (not everyone has an API like Facebook after all), the company has done a good job digesting information for at-a-glance presentations from a fairly wide range of providers. The “fetch once” technology behind the site, however, only pulls information from elsewhere; it doesn’t push information back, so you can’t actually make changes to your bank account while on PageOnce; you’ll need to follow links to the bank’s website itself.

PageOnce is definitely onto a good idea here, and I particularly like being able to check all my accounts without having to reenter usernames and passwords for each. However, I wonder whether a more established personalized homepage provider like Netvibes won’t swoop in and steal PageOnce’s thunder. Netvibes is already a great place to retrieve information from various web services and RSS feeds. It wouldn’t be a huge leap for them to provide widgets that could display information from a much wider range of personal accounts as well. And in fact, when I asked Netvibe’s founder Tariq Krim whether they planned to provide this functionality, he said that Netvibes is already discussing the possibility with several account providers supported by PageOnce.

PageOnce seems to have the leg up since they’ve already proven that they can aggregate this sort of information. But since they rely on their own efforts to expand support for an inexhaustible number of accounts, a more decentralized approach with Netvibes as the focal point and account providers as the widget developers themselves could win out in the long run.

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Chinese Stealth Startup Qifang Wants to Bring P2P Lending to the Mainland

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 07:20 PM CST

Peer-to-peer lending is coming to China. This morning I interviewed a Chinese-American entrepreneur living in Shanghai named Calvin Chin working on a stealth P2P lending site for Chinese student loans called Qifang. (The name, which translates to “bloom,” comes from the Chairman Mao quote, “Bai Hua Qi Fang”—”Let a hundred flowers bloom.”) Consumer lending is just getting off the ground in China. Most college education is financed by group borrowing associations rather than bank loans. Chin wants to bring that group lending dynamic online with Qifang. In fact, P2P lending might have a greater impact in China and other developing countries than the U.S. because of the absence of other consumer banking alternatives.

Chin was born in Michigan, went to Yale, and worked in banking and a few tech startups before moving to China. He founded Qifang in August, 2007. He is aiming to a launch the site in China in the spring. So far it is a real bootstrap operation. He has raised $200,000 in angel money from investors in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, and is in the process of raising a series A financing. Qifang was inspired by existing P2P lending startups like Prosper and Zopa, but Chin is developing it with a Chinese twist. He says:

We feel strongly about China’s Internet being pretty embarrassingly all about copies. And while we were inspired by other models, we feel like we need to challenge ourselves to be different and better and fit the market. We think of it as innovation leveraging—take a good idea and make it work for China by making it different.

Simply porting over Prosper’s business model won’t work, given the lack of credit history, the lack of a large student loan market, the still-young Internet culture, and the severe regulatory environment. As with Prosper, individuals with money to invest can come on the site and register as lenders. They can browse through the profiles of the different borrowers to decide who to loan their money out to. Unlike Prosper, Qifang is starting out only with student loans.

And it is not the fist P2P lending site in China. A broader one called PPDai offers P2P loans across many categories (see this write-up in English). But Chin thinks that starting with student loans is the better strategy in China because of the need to stay in the good graces of the government. Anything that helps promote education is popular with government bureaucrats.

It is also a big market. Chin estimates there are 25 million students in China, who pay an average tuition of $700 a year. That is $17.5 billion in potential loans.

Chin expects the interest rate on most loans on Qifang to be between 8 to 12 percent, a decent return. The interest rate will be based on how many lenders bid on each loan. The site will recommend that lenders invest in a portfolio of loans to reduce their risk, but if they choose, each one can put all their money in a single loan. Since there is very little credit history on individuals in China, the site will use other proxies to calculate risk. Each borrower must scan in their national ID cards to verify who they are, and list their school, major, grades, hometown, parents ID cards and income. Chin is creating partnerships with the schools directly, so that the information students supply can be verified and so that loan payments can be made directly to educational institutions. “We don’t want students running off to Macao,” he jokes.

There will also be an interesting social calculus that takes place on the site. Since each borrower’s parents will be named on the loan, failure to pay it back would result in a shameful losing of face for the parents. “Social pressure is very powerful here,” notes Chin. Default and delinquency rates will also be visible by hometowns, school, and even major. Banks don’t benefit from that sort of social pressure. Whether it will have any effect on default rates will be worth watching.

As growing economies like China develop their banking infrastructure, P2P lending has a shot of growing up with it rather than fighting against an already-entrenched way of doing things. In that sense, P2P lending might have a better shot in China than it does here.

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GumGum Launches New Image Licensing Platform

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 05:10 PM CST

GumGum launches an ambitious new project today - a new platform and business model for licensing content on the Internet, beginning with images.

Image piracy runs rampant on the Internet, of course. Blogger Perez Hilton was sued for stealing images of celebrities, and we’ve had (ridiculous) charges leveled at us as well. And don’t forget the recent Lane Hartwell debacle.

Attributor, a Silicon Valley startup, helps content owners track their intellectual property to find examples of infringement. But until now, no one has really thought about a better way to license content on the Internet, so that both large and tiny publishers have an incentive to avoid simply stealing stuff.

That’s where GumGum comes in. Images today are generally licensed for a flat fee, exclusively or non-exclusively. GumGum founders Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir think a better way is to charge for impressions, or on an advertising-supported basis. But tracking image impressions isn’t trivial, so they first had to build a platform to do that.

GumGum allows any publisher to search for images (there are thousands available now via a number of photography agencies) - here’s an example search for “Britney.” Images can be licensed on a CPM basis (generally $0.20 or so, but determined by content owner), or for free with an advertisement.

GumGum requires images be published via a Flash object so that impressions can be tracked and billed properly. Flash also allows them to serve interactive advertisements, served via VideoEgg (we wrote about their Flash ad product here).

Here are two images, one based on CPM licensing, one based on advertising:

Any photographer can now upload images and sell them. And any publisher can create an account to license images. Down the road, GumGum says, they’ll be adding video, audio and text content for licensing as well.

Will This Work?

It’s certainly a pain for publishers to have to embed a Flash object to publish an image, but it is the only reasonable way that GumGum can track impressions and serve ads. Many small publishers will of course simply continue to steal images, or look for freely usable stuff on Flickr. But if there is a killer image that a lot of people will want to publish, GumGum is a great way to easily license it to an unlimited number of people. At the very least, it’s an interesting experiment.

GumGum raised $125k in a December seed round from friends and family. The founders, who sold a previous startup Mojungle to Shozu in 2007, also put $125k of their own capital into GumGum.

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KnockaTV May Be Heading To The DeadPool

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 04:40 PM CST

Israeli startup KnockaTV looks to be in serious trouble. If this article in the Globes is correct, 21 employees went without salaries in January and the company is ₪1.2 million in debt (about $300,000).

We first wrote about KnockaTV, which was founded by the same team who founded Mirabilis (ICQ), in August 2007 (Mirabilis was sold to AOL in 1998 for $407 million). They went into private beta in December 2007. The company raised at least $1 million in seed funding (the Globes article says they’ve raised $3.6 million in total). Update: the company is telling us they raised a total of $3.5 million, half from Evergreen, half from the rest. CrunchBase updated.

The founders have a lot of personal capital at their disposal, and it seems unlikely they’d let employees go unpaid. Still, the unpaid employees have supposedly petitioned the Tel Aviv District Court to appoint a provisional liquidator to the company.

I’ve emailed the company for a comment. For now, KnockaTV goes into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

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Here Come the Shareholder Lawsuits Against Yahoo

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 03:04 PM CST

The inevitable shareholder lawsuits have started to be filed against Yahoo for not accepting Microsoft’s bid. Yesterday, the Wayne County Employee’s Retirement System of Michigan, was the first to file suit. The retirement fund owns 13,600 shares. You can expect more shareholders to pile on board, especially if this thing drags out.

In fact, that is not the only shareholder suit Yahoo is facing. On February 1, the day Microsoft made its recent offer, another shareholder lawsuit was filed against Yahoo in California for failing to accept Microsoft’s bid from the year before. They might want to amend that lawsuit to include Yahoo’s most recent rejection as well.

The more that Yahoo fights the merger, the more shareholder lawsuits will pop up. The reports in the media typically note how this is increasing the pressure on Yahoo. Nothing against Wayne County, but 13,600 shares is a tiny stake for an institutional investor. If bigger investors started suing, then the pressure would be noticeable. But big investors don’t sue, they vote their shares.

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YouCastr: Live Podcasting For Sports Fans

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 03:00 PM CST

If you ever considered yourself a Marv Albert or John Madden in training, YouCastr is the place for you. The site just launched out of a quiet beta. It’s kind of like Ustream or Justin.tv for sports commentary. The site lets anyone stream live broadcasts of game commentary or cut random rants in archived podcasts. Listeners can tune into commentary covering the latest sports games and chat live or leave comments. Here’s an example of a good podcast.

While I’m not quite ready to turn down the volume on my TV to hear Joe Schmo’s coverage of the Superbowl, a place for sports fans to post sports rants for later listening has promise. There’s already a vibrant community of sports bloggers covering news and even live blogging games. These same bloggers would probably love to easily make audio broadcasts like the best of them. YouCastr makes that easy.

With the entry of Yahoo into the live video category and Ustream acquisition rumors, there’s a lot of interest in the live format. YouCastr’s focus on sports strikes me as a good way to inject a sense of purpose and consistency missing from some lifecasting sites. When you go on Justin.tv, you don’t always know what you’re going to get, but YouCastr will always give you something sports related.

YouCastr was built over the past year by a team of four and is funded in the mid six figures by a team of angels.

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Imeem Acquires Snocap

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 01:15 PM CST

Digital music wholesaler Snocap, long searching for a buyer, is being acquired by music streaming site Imeem. The price will likely not be disclosed.

Snocap was founded in 2002 by Napster creator Shawn Fanning, Jordan Mendelson and Ron Conway. The company raised $10 million from Conway, Morgenthaler Ventures and WaldenVC and did high profile distibution deals with MySpace and others, but the business failed to scale (since people don’t really pay for music any more). Last year they also partnered with Imeem, who may see an acquisition as a better end result than Snocap simply shutting down. Imeem uses Snocap’s digital fingerprinting technology to track how many times any particular song is streamed on its site so that it can allocate a portion of its advertising dollars to the major music labels. Without Snocap’s technology, Imeem would have to find a replacement quickly, or find a new business model.

The deal is just being closed this week, we hear from a source. It’s a good outcome for Snocap, which has gone through significant layoffs and was on deadpool watch.

This is the second acquisition for Imeem in as many months - in January they acquired Anywhere.FM. Imeem has raised two rounds of capital, although the size of the second round was not disclosed.

Fanning, meanwhile, has largely moved on to his new startup, Rupture.

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Half Of All Clicks On Display Ads Are Worthless

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 12:43 PM CST

More and more online advertisers are paying on a per-click basis, but who is clicking on those ads and how much are they worth? A study put out yesterday by comScore, Starcom Media, and Tacoda suggests that half of all clicks on display ads (as opposed to clicks on paid search links) are generated by only 6 percent of Web surfers.

And these are not a particularly desirable bunch. The average heavy clicker is 25 to 44 years old, earns less than $40,000 a year, spends a lot of time online but not a lot of money online, and likes to frequent auctions, gambling sites and job boards. Sounds like a lot of these heavy clickers are out of work and have nothing to do. But who did you think clicked on those ads anyway?

Additionally, the study found that there was no correlation between how many times a brand’s ads were clicked on and brand awareness or positive attitudes towards that brand.

Advertisers probably know this already, and are focusing on the other 50 percent of clicks. But what they should really be doing is stop counting clicks and start measuring things that actually matter to their business, like sales or brand awareness. Counting clicks is easy. Measuring meaningful economic returns is not.

(Photo by Checlap).

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TwoFish Announces Micro-Transaction Engine for Games

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 12:27 PM CST

A new gaming startup called TwoFish has announced a product called TwoFish Elements that it claims is the “first turnkey solution for powering a dynamic and realistic in-game economy.”

CEO Lee Crawford, who has worked on gaming infrastructure for the likes of Yahoo, Sega, Heat.net, and Shockwave.com, says that TwoFish is addressing the biggest opportunity the gaming industry has ever seen: the rapid emergence of casual, mass-market games. While casual games are becoming increasingly popular, they also draw people who don’t want to pay for games upfront. Publishers are therefore faced with the task of charging them for in-game virtual goods like swords, shields, cars and pets, as well as new levels and functionality.

TwoFish intends to step in and relieve publishers of the burden of developing the requisite micro-transaction systems in-house. TwoFish Elements is a server-side~~, open source~~ platform based on Java, MySQL, and Linux that provides three layers of service. The first is an accounting and currency management system that takes care of a game’s virtual currency and its relation to real currency. The second is a catalog of virtual items that can be bought within a particular game. And the third is an analytics tool that lets publishers track the goods being bought within their games.

Crawford says that TwoFish Elements can be integrated into a wide range of internet-accessible game types, from lightweight HTML or Flash games to 500mb downloadable titles. While TwoFish itself is not a game publisher, it has been working with one for the past year to produce a proof of concept game called Edge Racers, an MMO for car customization and racing. The company is now soliciting other publishing partners who want to use its engine.

For more coverage, see VentureBeat and GigaOm.

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The Latest from TechCrunch

2008-02-13T10:34:00.000-08:00

The Latest from TechCrunch

Your Phone is Your Mic: SpinVox Lets Users Talk to Twitter, Facebook, and Jaiku (Europe Only)

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 11:37 AM CST

I am convinced that we are going to see a big growth in voice apps that use a mobile phone as a microphone. Today, at the Mobile World Congress in Spain, London-based startup SpinVox announced a new feature of its speech-to-text service that lets users call in their Twitters or send in messages to Facebook or Jaiku.

Is making a phone call easier than thumbing an SMS? Depends what kind of phone you have and what kind of person you are. But the Dictaphone is now social. This will appeal at least to all those people who like to record their notes into a mini tape recorder. They can share those thoughts with the world, and computers will transcribe them.

As far as I can see from a quick perusal of SpinVox’s Website, its service is only available in Europe, and it is not free. But it is an obvious solution to the mobile user-interface problem. The best input technology for a mobile phone is speaking into it. Maybe competitors SimulScribe, Jott, or Yap will step up to the plate in the U.S.

Wait, there is already a way to turn a phone into a microphone for any Web application. It is called the MyVox API from VoodoVox. It is ad-supported so it is free. And the best app built on the API can win $25,000.

Hat tip to our man in Spain, Crunchgear’s John Biggs, who alerted me to the SpinVox announcement, and discovered these weird blockhead dolls at its booth at MWS:

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Boomer Social Network Eons Gets a Facelift; Spins Off Obits Section as Tributes

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 07:24 AM CST

Can Jeff Taylor revive Eons, his dying social network for aging Boomers? A few weeks ago, he dropped the minimum age requirement of 50. And, today, he is giving his old lady of a site a facelift. The redesigned site now has new navigation, new organization centered around groups, and new search that helps members more easily find others with the same interests—whether that’s perennial gardening, books, or plus-50 hookups. “Now,” says Taylor, “if you say I want to go to Italy, you can meet all the other people that want to go to Italy. If your first car was a ‘67 Ford Mustang, you can meet other people who had that same car.”

Taylor, who founded Monster.com, finally realized that what his dwindling members wanted was a social network, not a portal for Sunsetters. Most of the intense activity was around the groups on the site, and so that is where he is focusing his efforts now. He also realized that nobody wants to go to a social network to be reminded about death. So he is spinning off the obituary section as a new site (and company) called Tributes. Eons is the majority shareholder, but Dow Jones is also a strategic investor. The Financial Post puts the investment in Tributes at $4.2 million. (Legacy.com is the leader in online obits).

Taylor also threw out a custom search engine called Cranky that returned results with a preference for the top-5000 sites that people over 50 visit, as measured by Compete.com. Search, it turns out, is very rarely age-specific. People just want to find what they are looking for. And they don’t like being called cranky.

These are all sound moves, and the site is better for it. But despite the redesign, and the $32 million that Sequoia and other investors have put into the company, its basic premise is still flawed—that people over 50, like children, need their own safe place on the Web to congregate. Some old people just aren’t interested in the Internet other than to check their e-mail, check their stock portfolio, and see pictures of their grandkids. Eons won’t draw them either. Then there is a whole other set who are completely at ease with the Web, and don’t need a walled-off area especially for geriatrics. They want to find people who share their interests, no matter how old they are. Finally, there is the subset of Boomers who only feel comfortable with people their own age. Those are the only people who Eons might appeal to.

Currently, that amounts to only 283,000 people a month—the number of unique visitors going to Eons, according to comScore. The best way to get that number up is to create vibrant communities of interest, regardless of age. The nature of many of the activities in these groups naturally skews towards an older demographic. But that should be a byproduct of the site, not the organizing principle.

One of the distinguishing features of Eons is the “Lifepath” on each profile page—a timeline that marks important memories in each member’s life and aspirations for the future. Members who share similar points in their Lifepath can easily find each other. But in other areas, Eons is lacking even the most basic social networking features like third-party applications. Taylor is a marketer, not a technologist. OpenSocial? “Our audience doesn't want to take a widget because they think it is stealing,” he claims. When I ask him during a recent visit to my office if profile pages would now have activity streams (like the news feeds that have helped make Facebok so popular), he looks at me blankly and asks back, “What?” Old people, they just don’t get it (and Taylor is not even 50).

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Intel puts $3.5 million into ‘bragging rights’ startup

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 07:07 AM CST

Bragster, a London-based social network for dares (think Jackass meets Facebok), has closed a $3.5 million Series A round of venture capital funding led by Intel Capital, the global investment arm of Intel Corp, reports TechCrunch UK. They were joined by angel investor David Frankel who previously invested in companies including GetMeIn and SiteAdvisor (sold to Ticketmaster and McAfee, respectively). Bragster is the re-launched Gottabet which won a seed round in 2006 but dumped its cash betting model. In Bragster you don’t place cash bets, you simply ‘brag’ to your friends that you will do something, like turn up at work in your pyjamas. Revenues will eventually come from ’sponsored brags’ created by brands and a white label version. Bragster is biggest in English speaking countries like the UK, US and Canada, with about 800,000 users globally after a year of operations. Bragster was foundered by Belgium-born Wim Vernaeve and Bertrand Bodson who run the company in London, with a 10 person team. The site is built on Ruby on Rails. Bragster joins a new wave of sites where you place non-cash bets on things such as news events (e.g. HubDub) and might make an acquisition target for a larger social network or a media company if it can build out its reach.

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Google Officially Hijacks 404 Pages, What Do You Think?

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 06:53 AM CST

Following our story yesterday on reports that the new beta version of Google’s Toolbar hijacks 404 pages, Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed the story.

Unsurprisingly Cutts suggested that the hijacking was a helpful measure and that it only takes place where the 404 page is under 512 bytes. I have to admit that it does sound warm and fuzzy, Google being helpful and all, but still, when Verisign started hijacking similar non page results, there was a mighty uproar.

I get Google’s argument, and the vast majority of web pages will not be affected by this, but it seems to be the thin edge of the wedge to me. Google hijacking any pages, no matter what the argument, is not a positive step forward. What do you think?

Do you support Google's stance in hijacking pages?

(image credit: TechRepublic)

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Bebo extends its mobile reach as sale talks buzz

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 06:49 AM CST

Even as Bebo is rumoured to be in sale talks, it has today signed a deal to to allow its 40 million plus members to produce and share content on their mobile phones, reports TechCrunch UK. Bebo’s new client application for handsets is provided by Intercasting, which has the Anthem product for social sites. Yesterday Bebo said it had signed a distribution deal with T-mobile in the UK ,where it also has an existing partnership with operator Orange. In Ireland, Bebo is currently partnered with O2.

Client applications for handsets make for greater integration with the phone camera and the contacts in the SIM card, which is fast turning into the new battleground for mobile social networks. Yesterday Yahoo! said it’s oneConnect software automatically merges your social network contacts with your mobile phone address book. And Danish start-up ZYB (see Mobile Crunch) yesterday launched its Social Phonebook, which uses the SyncML to sync contacts in a Plaxo-like manner with other ZYB users.

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Dell Acquires Adam Dell’s MessageOne For $155 Million

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 05:53 AM CST

Dell has acquired enterprise email management service MessageOne for $155 million.

MessageOne offers on-demand services for business continuity, archiving and disaster recovery, with a particular focus on email. MessageOne’s Email Management Services (EMS) promises to “eliminate all of the risks of managing email by solving archiving, continuity, and security needs” with a “fully integrated suite of on-demand services” that eliminates email downtime and prevents data loss.

As Alarm Clock points out, the interesting thing about the acquisition is the possible nepotism; MessageOne is owned by Michael Dell’s brother Adam Dell. Although it does seem like a somewhat strange acquisition for Dell, the company has been slowly moving into Internet/ online fields, having acquired EqaulLogic in November 2007.

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Yahoo And News Corp. Continue Marathon Discussions; Possible Bid To Counter Microsoft

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 01:32 AM CST

At the start of the Microsoft/Yahoo saga we reported that News Corp. was scrambling to put together a bid to compete with Microsoft, but backed down because they were unable to find outside funding to make the deal lucrative enough (the sorry state of the debt markets contributed to the problem).

Yesterday Silicon Alley Insider reported that talks between the two were continuing. We’ve confirmed the rumor - Yahoo and News Corp. are in the middle of marathon discussions, and have more details.

According to our source, the deal structure would spin off Fox Interactive Media (the primary asset is MySpace, but IGN, Scout Media, Photobucket, Fox Sports, AmericanIdol.com, Flektor, Ksolo; plus investments in Hulu, Simply Hired and Snocap are also assets of FIM) into Yahoo, along with a big cash injection from News Corp. and an unnamed private equity fund. The total investment would be valued at around $15 billion.

Yahoo would be valued at somewhere around $50 billion before the transaction, north of Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid. That would leave News Corp., plus the private equity group, with more than 20% of the combined entity. They’d be the largest single stockholder and effectively in control of the combined Yahoo/FIM entity and their nearly 150 billion monthly page views (which would be second only to Google).

The negotiating team is said to be trying to iron out the details in the next 48 hours, in time for Yahoo’s upcoming board meeting to review its options.

Microsoft is largely expected to increase their bid to the $35 range in the next couple of days based on Yahoo’s formal rejection of their first offer (effectively raising their bid to $50 billion). Any competing offer needs to be in that range or higher.

One major snag - it is widely believed that, even with a News Corp. deal, Yahoo would need to outsource search marketing to Google to make the numbers work. While Google is likely happy to do that deal, it’s unlikely U.S. regulatory agencies would approve it (we discuss this in detail here). Without the revenue boost and cost savings from outsourcing, the News Corp. bid may not pencil out.

Yahoo, of course, isn’t too worried about that right now. All they want is any kind of bona fide competing bid to at least get Microsoft to increase their offer. Yahoo execs are saying privately that they think a Microsoft acquisition is now fait accompli. Still, if News Corp. can somehow make a compelling offer (and getting a private equity group on board was a huge first step), Yahoo’s board may recommend the deal to stockholders.

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Bebo: $1 billion Acquisition “Definitely Happened” Says Source

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 12:19 AM CST

Following up to our post last week talking about a possible acquisition of social network site Bebo: A high level source has told us that Bebo has been in discussions via their investment bank, Allen & Co., with a number of potential buyers, and says that the company signed a deal on Monday to be acquired. The rumored price is $1 billion.

What’s clear is that Bebo, which is the second largest social network in the UK behind Facebook, either signed a deal, or is sending out false messages that they’ve been or are about to be acquired (which is unlikely given Allen & Co.’s involvement). If misinformation is the goal, we’ve bought it hook, line and sinker.

The buyer is unclear, although we are still betting on Google given that Bebo fits well with Orkut (very, very small user overlap). Microsoft has been mentioned as another possible candidate, although they seem to have their hands full right now with Yahoo. Other potential buyers, including News Corp. (mentioned in our previous post), Yahoo and others, have backed out due to price, from what we’ve heard. There are other potential buyers as well (CBS, Viacom, Comcast, others).

This is far from confirmed at this point, particularly the price, but this is about as strong a rumor as they come.

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Techmeme Adds Firehose Feeds

Posted: 13 Feb 2008 12:17 AM CST

The last time I was in the Valley I spent a decent 90 minutes catching up with Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera on Michael’s lounge (sorry, couch). As I do every time I catch up with Gabe, I endeavored to get him to spill the secrets of Techmeme’s algorithm, then shortly there after I offered him money to license the script (having failed on three previous attempts to get someone on Scriptlance to design me a clone). As usual I failed on both accounts, but there was a third request and Gabe was listening.

Like many I’m addicted to Techmeme and more recently Twitter, and to date Techmeme + Twitter hasn’t met my expectations. Techmeme’s feed, which is then fed into Twitter, only offers “important” stories, and hence the only way to see breaking stories on Techmeme has been to visit the page itself and constantly refresh it. As of today, Gabe is now offering “Firehose” feeds that provide any story attaining headline status on Techmeme (which excludes “Discussion” links) within 5 minutes, either by RSS and/ or Twitter. RSS feed here and Twitter account here.

The down side is that the page view number for Techmeme is about to take a hit, but conversely Techmeme fans will welcome this additional functionality. Thanks Gabe.

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Yahoo Exec Bails: Bradley Horowitz Leaves For Google

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 11:30 PM CST

Bradley Horowitz, head of Yahoo's Advanced Technology Division (and mentioned in a post earlier today), has accepted a position with Google, we’ve confirmed via a source at Yahoo. We have a message into Bradley for a comment, but have not yet heard back.

He will be working with Joe Kraus, director of product management and head of Google’s OpenSocial initiative, although we do not yet know his exact role.

This is a blow for Yahoo. Most new products (at least the fun stuff) goes through his group, and he is often the face of Yahoo at industry events. He is universally liked and respected, certainly outside of Yahoo and, as far as I can tell, within.

Bradley joined Yahoo in May 2004 as Director of Multimedia Search, and later worked on Yahoo Desktop Search and the Yahoo Toolbar. He was also key in getting the Flickr acquisition done. See the about page of his blog for his full bio.

He’s pictured on the right above, with Delicious founder Joshua Schachter.

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Firefox 3 Beta 3 Released - Try It If You Dare

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 08:40 PM CST

The current production release of Firefox is version 2, but developer releases of version 3 have been available since November 2007. Today Firefox released the beta 3 version of Firefox 3. You can download it here.

I love version 3 of Firefox since most of the memory leak issues on Macs seem to have been fixed (I added it to my list of top applications in December based on that). But a lot of key plugins don’t work yet on Firefox 3, and a lot of sites break when viewed through it as well. Because of that, I’ve switched back to version 2 for now. A list of known issues is here.

Firefox currently has around 17% market share among browsers, second only to Internet Explorer.

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Blue Organizer’s Latest Indigo Release Lets You Surf Things Instead of Web Pages

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 08:04 PM CST

Semantic search applications are finally starting to gel this year. Tonight, Adaptive Blue is releasing the latest version (dubbed Indigo) of its FireFox add-on, Blue Organizer. Put simply, Blue Organizer lets you surf things instead of Web pages. It recognizes when a Webpage that you are browsing is about certain classes of things: books, movies, music, stocks, recipes, restaurants, blogs, wine, clothing, electronics, celebrities, musicians, hotels. And it creates shortcuts to other Webpges about that same “thing” (or object). If you are reading a book review on a blog, for instance, Blue Organizer will let you jump directly to the page on Amazon about that book, or AbeBooks, Alibris, Barnes & Noble, eBay, and more. You can also go to a custom Google page that only searches book reviews for that book. For each different class of things it recognizes, you get a different set of contextually-relevant options.

Blue Organizer was developed by Alex Iskold, a frequent contributor to ReadWriteWeb. He raised $1.5 million from Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures back in February 2007, and is going to try to raise a B round soon.

Baked into Indigo is semantic search technology that acts more like a discovery engine than a traditional search engine. It is limited in what it can recognize, but it does recognize certain things and concepts and matches those with other Webpages about the exact same thing. You never have to go to a search engine, you just have to surf the Web and hop from concept to concept. The software can make inferences about entire Web pages, text inside those pages, and links inside those pages.

When it recognizes that a Web page is about a book, a movie, a recipe, or some other thing, the Blue Organizer icon at the top of your browser changes to an appropriate image (book, movie reel, chef’s hat) to indicate that it has identified an “object” on the page. And it offers a series of appropriate links, such as the Amazon page for a book or a list of reviews, as well as other links based on the way you use the Web, such as “Save to Delicious,” “Share on Facebook,” or “Digg This,” options. The software studies your Web history to surface links to Websites you already frequent. And Adaptive Blue has created a customized Google search engine for each class of objects it recognizes for more relevant search results.

Within a page, if you highlight the name of an author or a movie, for instance, a little SmartMenu box will pop up with links about that person or thing. If it recognizes the name of a book or restaurant that is already hyperlinked, a little blue folder icon will be embedded right next to the word. Click on that, and you get a bunch of associated “SmartLinks.” The SmartLinks also appear in search results pages, much like the Stumbleupon icon does when a you have the StumbleUpon Firefox add-on and you come across search results which have been rated by that community.

As with the previous releases of Blue Organizer, you can also save objects in the slide-out sidebar. This is a bit different than just saving links because you define what kind of “object” you are saving (blog, book, image, stock, toy, etc.), and you get the associated SmartLinks, custom search pages, and other categorization that goes with it.

Thinking of the Web in terms of things instead of Web pages does not come naturally. I installed the old Blue Organizer add-on more than a year ago, and have maybe used it twice. It was too advanced and didn’t fit into the flow of how I use my browser. (It is not just me—the add-on has been downloaded 1.3 million times, but only a couple hundred thousand people use it actively). The new features in Indigo, however, surface the utility of the application implicitly as you surf the Web. You don’t have to remember to save anything. You see a little blue folder, click on it, and get helpful links about that concept. You see the toolbar icon change, and you click on the pull-down menu to do something useful.

Complex apps need easy entry points, and Indigo has plenty of those. There is a lot more to this app than I can go through here. It makes it easy to create smart widgets, supports microformats, recognizes common names and addresses, and lets you highlight any text and send it as a message on Twitter, Tumblr, or Lijit. You can find more details on the Indiigo release here and here. Check it out and tell us what you think.

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Brickhouse Head Leaves Yahoo

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 07:28 PM CST

Salim Ismail, who has led Yahoo Brickhouse since since March 2007, left the company today as part of broader layoffs at Yahoo. Layoff packages were being offered, he said, and he left voluntarily.

Brickhouse is based in San Francisco and shares office space with Chad Dickerson’s Advanced Products Group, which creates new products based on market research (the distinction between the two groups has always been a little hazy to me). Both groups fall under Bradley Horowitz, who runs Yahoo’s Advanced Technology Division. Ismail says Dickerson will be taking over Brickhouse.

Examples of Brickhouse products include: Pipes, Bravo Nation and the unlaunched FireEagle. Advanced Products Group Products include KickStart and Yahoo Live, which launched last week.

Ismail, who previously cofounded PubSub, says he is considering a number of startup opportunities. He also says he reviewed over 3,000 ideas at Yahoo, and has some thoughts on his own startup as well.

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Stream Your Music Collection to Anywhere with JukeFly

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 06:03 PM CST

If you like the idea of listening to your music collection on whichever computer you choose but aren’t satisfied with the plethora of music lockers out there (including the very nicely designed Anywhere.fm which was acquired by Imeem recently), check out the streaming music service JukeFly as an alternative.

JukeFly looks a lot like Anywhere.fm but there’s a crucial difference: instead of uploading all of your songs to JukeFly, as you would with Anywhere.fm, you download a 1.5mb client (currently only available for Windows) that will turn your computer into a streaming music server. If you leave your computer on and connected to the internet, you can go over to your friends house or a local internet cafe and play all your songs through the JukeFly website for free.

Because JukeFly has opted to leave the heavy lifting to users’ own broadband connections, the company doesn’t have to deal with the costs associated with serving up audio files. But it also doesn’t assist in distributing your files to others, resulting in a limit to how many people you can share your music with at a given time (currently only one friend). To remedy this restriction, the company is working on the ability of users to upload their JukeFly playlists up to a server so they can at least share songs in them with multiple others.

JukeFly supports MP3s, iTunes unencrypted formats (AAC and Apple Lossless/m4a), and Ogg Vorbis. The service should appeal to users with very large music collections since they won’t have to deal with uploading all of their songs. The two entrepreneurs behind JukeFly previously founded Tukaroo, a desktop search product that competed with Google and Yahoo’s desktop search offerings and was acquired by Ask in June 2004 (support for it has since been dropped). Development on JukeFly started in early 2007; the founders post regular updates to their blog.

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Yahoo’s oneConnect: One Mobile App to Rule Them All

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 03:44 PM CST

Today at the Mobile World Congress in Spain, Yahoo announced a mobile app called oneConnect that will be available in the second quarter as part of the upcoming release of Yahoo Go 3.0. I have not seen a demo of this myself, but it sounds like a much-needed integration of messaging and social apps. OneConnect will pull together contacts from your mobile phone, Yahoo address book, and social networks, including:

Bebo
Dopplr
Facebook
Flickr
Friendster
Hi5
Last.fm
LinkedIn
Myspace
Twitter

You will be able to see whether your contacts are online, recent messages, status updates, uploaded photos, and other activity streams for each one. Of course, you will also be able to send them messages via e-mail, IM, and SMS. The mobile app will save SMS and IM conversations as a single thread, even if you are texting and the other person is using Yahoo Messenger. The app also supports AIM, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk.

A feature called “Pulse” will give you the most recent updates of all your contacts across all the social networks it monitors. You’d see, for instance, that your girlfriend just added a photo to Flickr, your business partner just updated his Facebook page to say he landed in London, and your brother just sent out a Twitter. It is like Friendfeed or Spokeo on your mobile phone, tied to your address book so that you can message your friends based on what they are doing.

Yahoo didn’t invent anything here, but simply integrating all of these services is powerful stuff. If you think about it, oneConnect is a mobile portal for the social Web. It connects you to your friends online and then gets out of the way.

One app that can pull together all your friends’ activities from social sites across the Web and present it in a consistent way should strengthen Yahoo’s position on mobile phones. Except on a few advanced handsets like the iPhone, the browser is not yet the ideal user interface for interacting with the Web on your mobile phone. A dedicated mobile app like oneConnect, which itself will be part of Yahoo Go, makes much more sense. But there are only so many apps you can launch on your phone before feeling overwhelmed. This fits in nicely with Yang’s “starting point” strategy. There can only be a few starting points on the mobile Web, and Yahoo is well on its way to being one of them.

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Mobile Data Now: Google SMS for Businesses

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 02:56 PM CST

New Zealand startup Mobile Data Now is placing its bets on SMS, email, and IM as the preferred methods of retrieving information while on the go, at least until tolerable mobile web browsers become more ubiquitous.

The company is using the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week to announce a product being described as Google SMS for businesses. With Google SMS, you can send Google a search query via text message and Google will send you search results back. This is particularly handy if you don’t have a smartphone, can’t make your way to a computer, and want to find out the number of a local pizza joint.

Mobile Data Now is an attempt to make it just as easy to retrieve information from corporate databases. The employees of businesses that install Mobile Data Now’s software could, for example, use SMS to retrieve information about a customer just before heading into a meeting with them. If their corporate databases also kept track of supply chain information, they could query that information when out of the office as well.

Businesses can also use Mobile Data Now to give consumers an easier way to retrieve information about their offerings. The company suggests that real estate agents could list phone numbers and text codes on signs placed in the front yards of houses for sale. People passing by could then instantly find out more information about these houses by texting in their respective codes.

The general idea here is to take technologies ordinarily intended for person-to-person communication and rework them for person-to-machine communication. This makes sense as long as more effective person-to-machine communication methods, such as HTTP, are not available. Since many phones don’t yet support adequate web browsing, I can see Mobile Data Now satisfying a need in the short term. But as handheld devices evolve - and they appear to be doing so quite rapidly these days - software like Mobile Data Now (and Google SMS for that matter) will simply be rendered obsolete in time.

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Thank You TechCrunch Sponsors

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 02:50 PM CST

Thank you to our wonderful partners who make reading TechCrunch possible. Without them, our expanding editorial team and coverage would not be possible.

Brightcove, Internet TV and video platform

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WildApricot, membership and community management services

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PantherCDN, content delivery network

OneSite, social networking software

PartnerUp, online community that networks entrepreneurs and small businesses

Ads-Click, text-based ads marketplace

oDesk, outsourced programmers, web designers and other talent

eBuddy, web-services meta instant messenger

MediaTemple, TechCrunch’s own hosting provider

Here’s a list of upcoming conferences hosted by TechCrunch sponsors:

Future of Web Apps Miami, February 28 - March 1: TechCrunch readers get a 15% discount with “TCMIAMI08″

O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns, March 3-4, San Diego

OReilly ETech, March 3-6, San Diego

Plugg, March 19, Belgium: TechCrunch readers get a 25% discount with “TECHCRUNCH”

MySQL Conference and Expo, April 14-17, Santa Clara

Thanks again to our wonderful sponsors who keep the lights on at TechCrunch. We now offer multiple sponsorship packages, including participation on CrunchBase, CrunchGear and MobileCrunch as well as TechCrunch UK and TechCrunch France. Learn more here or contact us.

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Spottt Reincarnates LinkExchange

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 12:00 PM CST

Spottt, which went into private beta at TechCrunch40, launches to the public today. The product is part of the Adbrite advertising network, but is being run as a separate brand.

It is a reincarnation of sorts of LinkExchange, an advertising network that launched in the mid nineties and was later acquired by Microsoft in 1998 for $265 million. LinkExchange co-founder Tony Hsieh (also the CEO of Zappos) is advising Adbrite on Spottt.

The basic idea is that you place the Spottt 125×125 ad unit on your site, above the fold (no adult content). They provide a simple embed code, or you can use your own ad serving software (we use OpenAds). For every two ad impressions that you serve, you’ll get one free ad somewhere on the network (you can see the ad unit here on TechCrunch, we’ve added it into the sponsor’s area to the right to test it), and it is also on CrunchBase.

That leaves Spottt with 50% of the ad inventory for itself. For the first year they’ll just place their own ads on sites. After a year they’ll add the extra inventory to Adbrite and let advertisers purchase it.

This isn’t for everyone, of course. Sites that can sell ads will want to do so to make the money. But Adbrite founder Philip Kaplan notes that there are millions of websites that cannot afford to advertise, and this gives them a way of doing so without paying. And even sites that have advertising units on their site may want to add this to get some inventory on other sites. “I think this is the coolest thing we’ve ever built,” he said.

Spottt is also providing real time statistics for users, including the number of ads you’ve shown, the number you’ve received (half of that) and the number of clicks on both ads you are showing and those you are receiving. Click on the image for a larger view of sample stats.

Spottt is run from Amazon’s EC2 web service, and advertising images are hosted on Akamai (Kaplan says he wants to be able to scale quickly in the event it grows anything like LinkExchange did back in the day). They are also working with Gigya to enable the placement of the ad unit on MySpace and other social networks. If ads aren’t accepted on any particular social network, he says, they’ll just run their house ads on that site.

If you’d like to sign up for the service, use the code “techcrunch” and get 1,000 free impressions to start. The first 1,000 registrations qualify.

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The Latest from TechCrunch

2008-02-12T10:43:00.001-08:00

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Point Organizes a $4.8 Million Series A For Itself

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 11:04 AM CST

After raising $2.5 million from angel investors last year, social activism and campaign-organizing site The Point has closed a $4.8 million series A financing from New Enterprise Associates. The idea behind the site is to create campaigns around social action—it could be donating to a political candidate, boycotting a company’s products, or simply organizing a meetup—but nobody is required to actually do anything until the cause reaches a pre-determined tipping point, or critical mass, of supporters. It is designed to focus activism or community involvement in campaigns that actually have a chance of succeeding. Although, there are some crazy causes, like this one to raise $10 billion to build a winter dome over Chicago.

The startup is based in Chicago. It plans to make money from ads targeted to each cause/topic. I first wrote about The Point when it launched last November.

Here is a video of founder and CEO Andrew Mason explaining why he started the site:

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Yahoo Confirms Maven Networks Acquisition

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 10:11 AM CST

Yahoo has acquired video publishing platform Maven Networks for $160 million. We were the first to report the deal the day the papers were signed, on January 31. The next day, Microsoft announced its bombshell offer for Yahoo, which probably delayed the announcement of this smaller acquisition. Everyone at Yahoo has been a little bit preoccupied.

Yahoo will use Maven’s technology to host video for media partners and incorporate Maven’s video-ad insertion technology into its overall advertising platform.

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Building a Killer Web App In 45 Minutes

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 09:50 AM CST

If you could gather together some of the smartest Web developers and ask them to brainstorm a killer app for you, what would you ask them to build? Oh, and they will only have 45 minutes to do it. That is the task set for me at the upcoming Future of Web Apps conference in Miami (Feb. 28 to March 1). I will be moderating a panel that will include Kevin Rose of Digg, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress, and several other Web app superstars (the conference organizers are trying to rope in Blaine Cook of Twitter and Cal Henderson of Flickr into the panel as well, schedules permitting). The goal of the panel: Come up with a killer Web app in 45 minutes.

So what should I have them build? Please vote for the choices below or, better yet, suggest an app yourself in comments. Who knows, some crack developer in the audience might just go ahead and build it.

What General Area is In Most Need of a Killer Web App Right Now?

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Nokia Plays Nice With Google In Mobile Search

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 08:34 AM CST

Nokia is partially embracing Google by agreeing to put Google’s mobile search on some of its phones. It already ships phones with mobile search from Yahoo and Microsoft, so this isn’t that big a deal. But it does show that as Nokia prepares to compete with Google-based Android phones, the cell phone leader will incorporate some basic Google functionality into its own phones as a preemptive move.

It is also a matter of choice. Google has so much loyalty among searchers that not including its mobile search on Nokia phones might be seen by some customers as a disservice. In any case, Nokia’s strategy is to provide search from multiple sources based on location and application (local search, map search, Web search, community search, news search).

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TechCrunch/CrunchGear/MobileCrunch Barcelona Meet-up - UPDATE

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 08:29 AM CST

We will hold tomorrow’s TC/CG/MC meet-up at the Cafe del Sol, Av Paral.lel 182, right down the street from the Fira. I’ve received quite a few emails already but RSVP with the subject line “BCN MEET-UP” to john @ crunchgear.com so I can put together a head count. Apparently a bunch of strangers in a law office wasn’t quite a good idea so I moved it to a hole-in-the-wall paella place with an upstairs. See you there at 6pm tomorrow, February 13.

[Map]

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New Google Toolbar Beta Hijacks 404 Pages?

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 05:06 AM CST

According to reports at DigitalPoint forums, the latest beta release of Google Toolbar hijacks 404 pages as shown in the image above.

It’s not clear from the reports as to whether this occurs only when no customized 404 page is available on a specific site, or with every 404 page. I also can’t test the theory, least the only beta version of Google Toolbar I could find was for Internet Explorer.

The Google 404 page offers some hints as to what a user could do next, and also provides a Google search box.

If true (and there’s pages of people saying that it is), Google being helpful (which I’m guessing will be their justification) really goes against their do no evil mantra once again. For 404 pages to be hijacked in this way, be it in all cases or only some, removes the rights of the webmaster to decide what a user sees when visiting all parts of their website, and that’s something many will find wrong.

(via Chris Garrett, image credit SEOker)

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UK Proposes Three Strikes And You’re Out Illegal Downloading Law

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 04:30 AM CST

A “draft consultation Green Paper” to be released by the UK Government proposes a three strikes and you’re out law to combat illegal downloads.

Under the proposal, UK internet users will be monitored by their ISP’s for illegal downloads, and those caught will receive an e-mail warning in the first instance, internet suspension the second time, and then termination of their contract on the third strike. A similar law was proposed in France back in November 2007.

According to the BBC quoting The Times, broadband firms which failed to enforce the rules could be prosecuted, and the details of customers suspected of making illegal downloads would be made available to the courts.

The proposal faces several serious hurdles, such as attributing blame where internet access is shared, and then determining what is illegal content. Although BitTorrent traffic is primarily pirated material, there is also increasing amounts of legal material as well. Even this week a German record company offered its entire music catalog via Pirate Bay, so even using and accessing material from the most famed pirate site of them all may not actually constitute downloading illegal material.

The proposal unsurprisingly comes from the Music and Record industry, and although not yet law is being promoted by the UK Government as part of a “comprehensive plan to bolster the UK’s creative industries,” so looks like it will be implemented at some time in the future. [Techcrunch UK has more].

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Bootstrapping Event In San Francisco - Get The Last Five Tickets Here

Posted: 12 Feb 2008 01:53 AM CST

On the evening of March 6, 2008 I’ll be moderating a Churchill Club panel discussion in San Francisco on “Bootstrapping As A Start-Up.” Participants include Sean Byrnes (CEO Flurry), Craig Newmark (Founder Craigslist), Gabe Rivera (Founder TechMeme), and Stephen Weir (CEO MadeIt). The discussion will be around starting and growing a startup without outside funding.

This is a very small event - just 30 attendees total (hopefully they’ll video so that more people can watch it afterwards). The tickets are now gone - but the last five have been reserved for TechCrunch readers (and are free). If you want to go, please leave a comment below telling us why you think you would benefit from the event or have something interesting to contribute. Also, given that there are so few seats available, please don’t ask for a ticket unless you are sure you can attend. I’ll choose five in 24 hours.

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RocketOn Gets $5 M For Embeddable Virtual Kids World

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 11:37 PM CST

RocketOn is a San Francisco based startup is making a 2D virtual world you can access across any site through an embeddable widget. They also just raised $5 million from the D. E. Shaw group's venture capital unit, bringing total investment up to $5.8 million.

In its alpha state, this virtual world is simply a chat widget with some avatars you can walk around the screen with the click of a mouse. You can chat in real time with other people on the network and walk into a variety of themed worlds (chat rooms) with different features. It’s also obviously targeted toward kids, with its fuzzy-looking avatars and chat profanity blocker.

The more complex functionality includes friending, profiles, fame, and items. Each world has an object or character you can interact with (dancing stones, little monster, arcade games). Although, you can unlock more worlds and features by inviting more users.

However, their widget strategy strikes me as odd because it flies in the face of the safety centered walled gardens other kid oriented sites have built to keep kids safe (Club Penguin, Webkinz, and others).

Avatar Chat (Virtual Worlds) in full screen mode

Add Avatar Chat to your profile, blog or web page!
Chat withYour Friends!

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MySpace Quietly Launches Games Site

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 09:56 PM CST

Still number one social networking destination MySpace has entered the casual flash games market with games.myspace.com.

The new site won’t win any awards for innovation, indeed it looks like a < $100 template buy from Digitalpoint, but ultimately that doesn't make a difference. Casual flash gaming combined with a youngish user base in the millions makes this a no-brainer in terms of going to be a success for MySpace. The only question is whether it will cut into similar sites that also offer flash gaming. It's certainly not in Kongregate territory yet, but there are plenty of smaller players with very similar looking sites and games. (Having said that, the first game offered on the site is Desktop Tower Defense, so maybe it is slightly higher up the tree).

Games.myspace.com offers a variety of multiplayer and single player games. A link can be found to the service from the front page of MySpace.

(thanks to Daniel for the tip.)

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HotOrNot Apparently Very Hot: Acquired For $20 Million

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 06:11 PM CST

San Francisco based HotOrNot, founded by James Hong and Jim Young in October 2000, has been acquired, we’ve heard from multiple sources.

The buyers are investors connected with Avid Life Media, and paid somewhere around $20 million for the site. Hong and and Young have been taking money out of the very profitable business all along the way - which we reported was another $20 million or in May 2007. HotOrNot never raised outside funding.

The investors are creating a new company, called HotOrNot Media (new site coming soon), and they may be acquiring more properties as well.

I spoke with Hong a few moments ago, who confirmed the acquisition, which closed on Friday, but not the price. He says he and Jim will not be affiliated with the business on a day to day basis going forward. “We’ve been working on HotOrNot for seven years now,” said Hong, adding “It’s time to break up with this girlfriend.”

HotOrNot makes money from advertising, virtual flowers and a premium fee when users want to connect. They experimented briefly with a free model, but abandoned it last September in the face of overwhelming spam. Their annual revenue is estimated to be around $5 million, with $2 million in profit. According to Comscore, the site has around 5 million monthly unique visitors and 200 million page views.

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VentureBeat Takes $320,000 First Round

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 06:10 PM CST

Venture focused blog VentureBeat has taken a seed round of $320,000. Investors include Georges Harik and Aydin Senkut (both ex-Google); Mike Brown, Philippe Cases, MHS Capital, Amidzad and White Sand Group among others. VentureBeat joins GigaOm, who’ve raised two rounds, in the “funded blog network” category.

VentureBeat was founded in 2006 by ex-San Jose Mercury News writer Matt Marshall and has as its goal “to provide insider news and data about the entrepreneurial and venture community that is useful to decision makers.”

Marshall said that the money would be used to take the site to the next stage, and will also presumably be used to pay Dean Takahashi’s salary, a new high profile signing for VentureBeat announced last week.

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IDC: Google’s Ad Market Share Slipped In Fourth Quarter

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 05:30 PM CST

A forthcoming report by IDC estimates that online advertising in the U.S. reached $25.5 billion in 2007, and $7.3 billion in the fourth quarter.

It also puts Google’s market share of Internet advertising in the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2007 at 23.7 percent, down half a percentage point from the third quarter. That is Google’s first slip in market share in two years. While Google’s overall U.S. sales (net of traffic acquisition costs that goes to pay partner sites) still went up 40 percent last quarter, it was not enough to keep its market share position compared to the overall industry. Damn those non-performing MySpace ads!

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Microsoft Responds

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 04:47 PM CST

There are two very different battles going on between Microsoft and Yahoo. The more interesting side is the behind the scenes attempts to influence press and key shareholders. But this is also playing out publicly. Yahoo leaked this weekend that they were going to turn down the Microsoft offer, and today they came through with the formal rejection.

Microsoft responded quickly via a press release:

MICROSOFT RESPONDS TO YAHOO! ANNOUNCEMENT

Reiterates Full and Fair Proposal for Microsoft-Yahoo! Combination

REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 11, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) today issued the following statement in response to the announcement by Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) that its Board of Directors has rejected Microsoft's previously announced proposal to acquire Yahoo!:

It is unfortunate that Yahoo! has not embraced our full and fair proposal to combine our companies. Based on conversations with stakeholders of both companies, we are confident that moving forward promptly to consummate a transaction is in the best interests of all parties.

We are offering shareholders superior value and the opportunity to participate in the upside of the combined company. The combination also offers an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market.

A Microsoft-Yahoo! combination will create a more effective company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. Furthermore, the combination will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising.

The Yahoo! response does not change our belief in the strategic and financial merits of our proposal. As we have said previously, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!'s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.

On February 1, 2008, Microsoft announced a proposal to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion and a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock based on the closing prices of the stocks of both companies on Jan. 31, 2008, the last day of trading prior to Microsoft's announcement. Microsoft's proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Yahoo says the offer is “massively undervalued.” Microsoft counters that it is a “full and fair proposal” and makes it clear that they won’t back down. Who wins? I still think Microsoft. But I love that Yahoo’s putting up a fight. And I love the ping-pong back and forth public statements, too.

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Clean Energy Startup Infinia Raises $50 Million To Crank up Manufacturing

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 03:02 PM CST

If you thought clean energy financings were hot last year, 2008 promises to be scorching. Case in point: Infinia today raised a $50 million series B, led by British hedge fund GLG partners. Existing investors Equus, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gross’ Idealab, and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital also participated in the round (after putting in $9.5 million just last June).

Infinia has developed utility-scale renewable energy technology that combines a Stirling engine with a large solar collector. The Stirling engine, a technology that’s been around since the 19th century, converts the heat into electricity. Infinia used to be called Stirling Cycles, and has been around for more than two decades. It has designed Stirling engines as power sources for NASA missions, implantable artificial hearts, and cooling devices that the army uses in Iraq. Now, it is focussed exclusively on using the technology to create 14-foot diameter solar collectors that can generate 3.5 kilowatts of energy apiece. Gang together 50 or 100 (at about $20,000 a pop) and you have the energy producing capacity of a small power plant.

Infinia’s Stirling engine is powered by a free-moving piston that requires no lubricants, and thus no maintenance. “What makes this unique is the no-maintenance profile,” says chief financial officer, Gregg Clevenger, “the ability to deploy a Stirling engine out in the desert and it is engineered to run for 20 years without you having to do anything.” It is also designed to be assembled with common mass-produced parts that an auto-parts supplier could manufacture. Getting the cost down is the key to creating a technology that is competitive with other forms of energy.

Using its Stirling engine technology, Inifnia thinks it can eventually produce electricity 20 to 30 percent cheaper than today’s existing solar panels. And in times of peak energy demand—on a hot summer day, for instance—it could even be competitive with electricity from gas-powered or coal-fired plants. Renewable energy isn’t going to replace fossil-fuel technologies off the bat, but if they make economic sense for utilities to deploy in a hybrid grid, they will become more cost-competitive over time. With this round, there is $50 million on the table that says Infinia will be one of the companies that makes renewable energy more affordable.

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Version 2 Of CrunchBase Released

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 02:47 PM CST

Over the weekend we relaunched Crunchbase, our online database of startup, investor and entrepreneur information. We first launched the site last year as a simple place to dump all the structured data about startups that we get our hands on. Our interns work to add all the data that flows into our inboxes every day to keep it updated, and the site now tracks 1,515 companies, 4,499 people and 762 financial investors.

The new version of Crunchbase has a new design, but that is the least of the changes. The old PHP code has been thrown out, version 2 is a Ruby on Rails application. And while there are a ton of new features, the main change is that any reader can now edit any part of the site, or add new companies, people or investors entirely. We’ve also added RSS feeds for all new stuff, like recently funded, recently launched, etc. Those feeds can be found on the home page (we’ve switching them to Feedburner shortly, so you’ll be able to get these by email as well.

It’s not a wiki yet (that will be added next March), but it shares some wiki-like features like public editing. Our goal is to create a fully wiki based on structured data - something PoliticalBase has done in the political space (The PoliticalBase Crunchbase entry is here). For now, all changes are moderated, but we’ll be adding features that build authority to allow for real time, unmoderated editing of Crunchbase.

This is a work in progress, and we’ll be defining more about it in the near future. For example, there is currently no copyright policy, although we’ll be making this freely usable by others (like Wikipedia) when the Wiki launches. We’ll also be working to get our data into Freebase and other appropriate web services.

We’ve created a simple widget to pull key data about the companies, people and investors in Crunchbase into any other website (example below). If you add the widget to your site a link is automatically created back to your site on the relevant Crunchbase pages.

As we’ve said in the past, there are a number of for-pay services out there that track this exact data and try to charge thousands of dollars per month for access. We can’t see any reason why this data should not be free. So we’re helping to make it that way.

The new site was created by Henry Work and Mark McGranaghan, who’ve been working with us full time for a couple of months to build this. The overall project is being led by our Mark Hendrickson.

If we’ve missed your startup, or something in Crunchbase is wrong, please correct it by clicking “edit” on the appropriate page.

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VisualCV Thinks It’s Time to Update That Resume

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 02:23 PM CST

Phillip Merrick thinks it is time to update your resume. The co-founder of webMethods has a new startup that just launched today, VisualCV, that wants to replace the paper or e-mailed resume with a profile page that lives on the Web. He’s raised $5 million from headunting firm Heidrick & Struggles and Valhalla Partners.

You can think of VisualCV as the serious profile page you want to present to potential employers. (Don’t think they won’t look up your Facebook page as well, though). The VisualCV is very much like a regular resume in that it is one page with a summary of your achievements, work history, education, and interests.

You can literally highlight parts of the text, add links, upload a video to express your personality, as well as career charts showing how you’ve progressed in the workplace. You can keep the VisualCV private, share it with a select group, or make it public on the Internet. Here is Merrick’s VisualCV. Companies can also create their own interactive page to communicate to potential employees why they might want to apply for a job. Through partnerships with CapitalIQ/Standard & Poor’s and VentureSource, hovering over a company name in someone’s VisualCV will trigger a pop-up revealing revenues, number of employees, investors, and a short description.

The service is free for individuals and the basic functionality is free for corporations. Merrick plans to sell premium services to corporations and white-label the site as well to consultants, recruiters, and the like. He explains:

After our commercial launch in the spring, we will begin charging employers for enhanced capabilities. These will include the ability to create “binders” of VisualCVs who are shortlisted for open positions, then route them around their company to the hiring managers who can make their own annotations on the VisualCVs. We will also charge for premium placement of company VisualCVs (e.g. above the fold positioning when a candidate searches for, say, software companies). Additionally, we will also make a “white label” private version of the service available to large companies for talent management.

There is a social networking aspect as well in that both job-seekers and companies can see who has checked out their VisualCV pages. VisualCV isn’t alone in trying to reinvent the resume, or the job site in general. Recently we’ve written about NotchUp’s pay-per-interview approach and StandoutJobs, which also tries to humanize corporate HR pages with videos and social elements. I have a feeling we are going to see a lot more efforts along these lines.

The single-spaced, typed resume is already an artifact of another age. I don’t think I’ve updated mine since 1993. But I am not sure that what will replace it is a sanitized profile page. Any smart manager will at least Google an applicant before calling him or her in for an interview. Increasingly, our professional and personal lives are becoming transparent for all to see online. Whether or not you decide to link to your blog or Flickr photos or Facebook page, the person you present on your VisualCV better not be too different from the person you really are on the easily searchable Web.

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The Latest from TechCrunch

2008-02-11T10:26:00.001-08:00

The Latest from TechCrunch

Meanwhile, Microsoft Buys Danger

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 09:43 AM CST

While everyone has been preoccupied with the Microsoft-Yahoo saga, the Microsoft acquisition machine keeps on chugging along. Microsoft announced today that it has acquired Danger, makers of the popular Sidekick cell phone. I guess that Danger IPO isn’t happening after all. Terms were not disclosed, but its was in the process of trying to raise $100 million in an IPO. Now, the mobile platform company will be rolled into the Windows mobile team and be part of the overall Entertainment and Devices division that includes the XBox, and the Zune.

Here is the prospectus Danger filed with the SEC last December. In fiscal year 2007 (ended September 30), Danger had revenues of $56.4 million (up 14 percent), and a net loss of $12.4 million (double from the year before). It’s cumulative net loss since it started operations is $188 million. About one million subscribers (923,000) use a Danger mobile device—nearly all from T-Mobile. Investors include Mobius Technology Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, T-Mobile Venture Fund, Softbank Capital, Motorola, Meritech Capital Partners, and Venture Strategy Partners. The company has raised about $142 million in five rounds over the past eight years.

So Microsoft just bought a hip, but money-losing business. Is this Microsoft’s answer to the iPhone? Or is it an answer to Google’s Android? Hopefully, it is the latter.

Danger phones run ~~Windows Mobile~~ Danger’s OS, and they are among the most consumer-friendly Internet-capable phones, with a full slide-out keyboard. Microsoft could use the Danger ~~handsets~~ beloved OS and form factor as a platform to create a complete Windows Mobile experience with a much better IM experience than WinMo offers. That way, it could control both the hardware and the software, just like Apple does with the iPhone. But the mobile handset business is brutal. Look at Motorola. Microsoft would be better off taking all the software innovations Danger has created, and baking them into Windows Mobile, which will soon be facing competition from mobile phones running on Google’s open-source Android mobile operating system. If this acquisition was made to keep Windows Mobile one step ahead of Android, it was a smart move. (Of course, the irony here is that one of Danger’s founders, Andy Rubin, is now working at Google and is the man behind Android). If Microsoft is going to use Danger as its entry into the mobile device business, the chances that it will keep losing money in its hardware division are dangerously high.

(via CrunchGear)

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First GPhone Hands-On

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 09:42 AM CST

We’re trying to grab some better quality video for you all, but here is CG’s first hands-on with the GPhone. It’s actually the emulator running on Texas Instruments hardware and is very speedy and quick. The downside? No real compelling reason right now to say this is better than any other mobile Linux platform, let alone WinMo and Symbian. It’s basically a proof of concept in the wild.

Full MWC at CrunchGear

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Yahoo Confirms Rejection Letter to Microsoft

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 08:45 AM CST

Filed this morning with the SEC (as expected):

YAHOO! BOARD OF DIRECTORS SAYS MICROSOFT'S PROPOSAL SUBSTANTIALLY UNDERVALUES YAHOO!

Sunnyvale, Calif., February 11, 2008 — Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today said the Yahoo! Board of Directors has carefully reviewed Microsoft's unsolicited proposal with Yahoo!'s management team and financial and legal advisors and has unanimously concluded that the proposal is not in the best interests of Yahoo! and our stockholders.

After careful evaluation, the Board believes that Microsoft's proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo! including our global brand, large worldwide audience, significant recent investments in advertising platforms and future growth prospects, free cash flow and earnings potential, as well as our substantial unconsolidated investments. The Board of Directors is continually evaluating all of its strategic options in the context of the rapidly evolving industry environment and we remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all stockholders.

Goldman, Sachs & Co., Lehman Brothers and Moelis & Company are acting as financial advisors to Yahoo!. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP is acting as legal advisor to Yahoo!, and Munger Tolles & Olson LLP is acting as counsel to the outside directors of Yahoo!.

Now it’s Microsoft’s move. Let the shareholder lobbying begin.

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Self-Help Site First30Days.com Launches With $5 Million from Hearst and Dick Parsons

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 07:36 AM CST

Self-help is big business—just look at all the Tony Robbins and Dummies books at your local Barnes & Noble. As with all media businesses, the self-help industry is moving online in a massive way. The latest Website to organize itself around self-help is First 30 Days, which took the covers off its private beta this weekend. The new site is designed to take people through the first 30 days (and beyond) of major life changes, such as the first 30 days of finding your dream job, starting a new business, buying a home, being pregnant, or getting a divorce. Founder and CEO Ariane de Bonvoisin tells me, “We will help you through any change that life throws you and will help you get going on anything you want to get started.” The site is launching with 45 different life changes and will soon get up to 100.

Before founding First 30 Days, de Bonvoisin worked as a corporate strategist/VC at Bertelsmann, Sony, and Time Warner. At Time Warner, she worked directly for former CEO Dick Parsons, who personally put up the seed money for the business. The company recently closed a $5 million series A financing, led by Hearst Corporation (other investors included Parsons and the New York City Investment Fund). The site plans to make money with ads and sponsorships targeted at each life change—stroller ads for people looking at how to deal with pregnancy or being a new parent pages, banking ads for people contemplating starting a new business.

I suspect that First 30 Days will appeal more to the Oprah crowd than to readers of TechCrunch, but I also suspect it will have no problem finding its audience. The site will likely skew two-thirds towards women, predicts De Bonvoisin, (indeed, it’s the type of concept you’d expect to see on the cover of a woman’s magazine). But she hopes men who wouldn’t be caught dead reading a self-help book in public will flock to the site as well in search of answers.

After all, people going through major changes in their work or personal lives need a place to turn to when they cannot figure out what to do. Visitors are encouraged to sign up to get a daily e-mail with a different tip about the particular change they are going through. Each life change has its own section on the site, with Top 5 Things to Do, expert interviews, daily news and blog posts from across the Web on that topic, a daily tip, community Q&A, shared wisdom from readers, and links to relevant books, websites, magazines, movies, music, and more experts. There is also a weekly podcast called Change Nation that features interviews with celebrities about how they deal with change.

The site takes a positive approach to dealing with the changes in your life. Its overriding message is: change is inevitable, change is good, make the most from it. The whole approach reminds me of corporate change management techniques applied to people’s personal lives. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner. Each change section on the site follows a familiar template, which provides easy entry points, but sometimes can make every life change sound the same. For instance, look at the two lists of Top 5 Things to Do below. One is for improving your sex life and the other is for switching to a Mac. You can tell which is which, but barely:

Dig deeper and you’ll find some actual advice,and maybe others going through the same change. That is potentially the most powerful aspect of the site, as a place to find other people who are going through the same twists in their lives as you are. Once you go through all the expert advice and check out the resources, that would be the biggest reason to go back.

The site is built on Ruby on Rails. And there are two viral widgets in the works. One is an Everyday Change tip that can bring some inspirational candy to people’s personal sites and pages. The other is a Facebook app due out in March where you can select which types of changes you are going through, get tips sent to your Facebook feed, and post a bar chart that shows how many people on Facebook (who have loaded the app) are going through breakups, starting a job, or going through some other change.

First 30 Days is starting on the Web, but it could easily expand into other media such as books and TV. In May, HarperOne will be publishing The First 30 Days by de Bonvoisin. And she plans many more books. “The idea in my head,” she says, “was to start it as a book series. Dick Parsons said start it online. With books, I have no relationship with you.” If she can make First 30 Days the first place people go to when they need help with life’s transition points, it could easily become more than a 30-day habit.

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Interview with Dov Moran, founder of Modu

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 07:31 AM CST

We just got out of an interview with Dov Moran, founder of Modu. As we suspected, the device is a module-based GSM system that includes a small, fully-functional phone and a set of “mates” or “jackets.” You can pop the phone in and out of different devices and add GSM functionality to almost anything, from GPS units to cameras. You’ll pay about 200 euro for a phone and two jackets and then a little extra for different devices.

The product will be very interesting to CE manufacturers in that it reduces to the time-to-market considerably and ensures they don’t have to go through FCC testing with every new mobile product. John at CrunchGear has a more detailed take on things but the idea is very compelling.

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GPhone Prototype Debuts At Mobile World Congress

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 07:14 AM CST

The first official prototype of a phone running Google’s Android platform has debuted at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today. Upstaging the usually quick blog media, AP captured the first shot (above), left of picture we’ve blown up the phone for a closer look.

Samsung said yesterday that it won’t debut an Android powered phone until 2009, and AP reports that the first Android powered phones are due for a second quarter release, so despite earlier rumors of a February launch date, the world will have to wait for its GPhones.

Tune into CrunchGear for all the latest news from the Mobile World Congress.

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Ticket Scalpers Seatwave Take $25 Million Series C

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 06:11 AM CST

European ticket resellers Seatwave have taken $25 million Series C in a round led by Fidelity Ventures that included Atlas Venture, Mangrove Capital Partners and Adinvest. Total funding for Seatwave to date is $36 million.

London based Seatwave, like StubHub (acquired by eBay for $310 million) and TicketsNow (acquired by Ticketmaster for $265 million) resells tickets to major events. The company was founded in 2006 by Joe Cohen, formerly with Ticketmaster and Match.com.

According to PEHub, the European market hasn’t had a strong online reselling presence, particularly compared to the United States.

Scalping tickets (reselling tickets) is not the easiest market to be in, with the practice frowned upon by many, and often illegal as well. The resale of football (soccer) tickets is illegal in the United Kingdom unless the resale is authorized by the organizer of the match, such as an under an agreement Seatwave competitor Viagogo has.

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Nuconomy Emerges To Provide Next Generation Site Analytics

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 03:41 AM CST

Tel Aviv/San Francisco based Nuconomy (part of the recent Israeli Web Tour in California) is aiming to give publishers a lot more information about what’s happening on their sites than Google Analytics currently offers. CEO Shahar Nechmad says he wants to give people insights that are usually only available to sites that can pay thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars per month, from service providers like Omniture, WebTrends and Coremetrics.

But Nuconomy is also approaching analytics in a new way to try and put more meaning into the data that is thrown back at users, meaning that in many ways it will be more useful than even those hugely expensive alternatives. Dan Farber took an early look at them last year and wrote a little bit about the approach. In general, though, they’re moving beyond the simple page view model to measure different types of activities. And they are digging a lot deeper on both the user side and contributor side.

Beyond The Page View: Correlation and Contribution

For example, Nuconomy is designed to consider the impact of widgets, Ajax, Flash, mobile, etc., which don’t generally show up in page view metrics. And they are also measuring everything on both a contributor level (think analytics by author in a blog) and user level (people on the site).

Correlation is a big party of Nuconomy, which shows how things on the site affect other things. Do more posts/articles mean more page views? Does one author get more comments but less page views? How do photo uploads affect the number of comments? And so on. See image above for how it is presented.

Another feature that helps sites measure contributors is a ranking formula, set by the publisher. Page hits, ratings, comments and other metrics can be weighted differently to come up with an overall algorithm to compare authors.

Two Way API

Nechmad says that existing analytics services don’t do anything to help sites make changes, or provide direct input into decisions. Possibly Nuconomy’s most important feature is a two way API, allowing your site to make changes automatically depending on input from the service. Today humans have to view the data, analyze it and then make changes based on that. With Nuconomy, changes can be made without humans slowing things down.

New Funding

Nuconomy raised a $300k seed round in April 2007 from Yossi Vardi, Shlomo Nehama and Uzi Tzuker. Today they announced another round, estimated at $3 million, from WPP.

Nuconomy is currently in private beta, although it is being tested by some of the largest portals and publishers in Israel. They are opening up another 400 slots for beta testers today. Integration is through the API or via a simple java embed. They are also planning to release a Wordpress plugin in the next month or so. During the beta period Nuconomy is free. Eventually they will charge a small fee for sites with more than a couple of million unique visitors per month.

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Wikimedia’s 2007 Financials Posted

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 01:19 AM CST

Wikimedia Foundation posted their audited 2007 financial statements (I’ve embedded the document below) last week. Their fiscal year actually ends June 30, so these are already almost eight months old, but they reveal some interesting information about the entity that controls Wikipedia nonetheless.

Generally Wikimedia publishes these five months or so after the end of the year; this year they took eight months. Total donations and other income increased from $1.5 million in 2006 to $2.7 million (the period covered is prior to their recent fundraising effort). Donations of Google stock actually made up a material portion of contributions - 681 shares were donated in fiscal 2007 (worth about $315,000 based on the current stock price).

Travel expenses jumped significantly from $140k to $264k. Given that this period included time when Jimmy Wales was pitching Wikia Search around the world, some conspiracy theorists are speculating that travel expenses related to the for-profit Wikia (which Wales founded) were being reimbursed by Wikimedia Foundation. Wales, however, told me via email that the foundation does not reimburse him for any travel expenses at all, even for pure Wikipedia events, in order to remove any doubt about mixing funds between the entities. “I fund all that myself, out of my own pocket personally,” he said.

The financial statements also note, though, that Wikia and Wikipedia do share some infrastructure costs, assets, employees and expenses:

The Organization shares hosting and bandwidth costs with Wikia, Inc., a for-profit company founded by the same founder as Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Included in accounts receivable at June 30, 2007 is $6,000 due from Wikia, Inc. for these costs. The Organization received some donated office space from Wikia Inc. during the year ended June 30, 2006 valued at $6,000. No donation of the office space occurred in 2007.

Through June 30, 2007, two members of the Organization's board of directors also serve as employees, officers, or directors of Wikia, Inc.

Financial statements for 2006 are here.

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc 2007 Financial Statement

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Microsoft Upgrades Office Live Small Business

Posted: 11 Feb 2008 12:06 AM CST

Microsoft has announced a range of upgrades for its oddly named Office Live Small Business service (odd because it doesn’t offer an online office suite).

The original Office Live was launched in February 2006 as a easy to use business focused hosting package that competes directly with Yahoo’s small business hosting service.

The new features include:

“Store Manager,” a hosted e-commerce service that enables users to sell products from their websites or on eBay ($39.95 per month)
Custom domain name and business e-mail is available to all customers for free for one year, with up to 100 email account each with 5 GB.
“Advanced Web design capabilities,” allows users to edit more of their sites inline
Support for Firefox 2.0 ed note: Microsoft calls this a feature
Synchronization with Microsoft Office Outlook
E-mail Marketing module with up to 200 e-mails per month free during beta testing
Business applications are now included free to all customers (but still no office suite)

Other features include gadgets and improved adCenter integration.

When Michael first covered the service he wrote the following:

For a small company needing an informational website, it will be great. Given that the domain name, website building, hosting and email will all be free, this will be very attractive to small business.

It still holds true today, it’s a solid hosting package, and the free options are appealing. Although there is no shortage of hosting options in the market, these sorts of packages appeal to the less computer literate and the main competition here is Yahoo. Yahoo’s small business offering recently announced unlimited hosting, but packages start at $11.95, which is precisely $11.95 more expensive than Microsoft’s base level package. Couple that with the strong cross branding/ marketing with Microsoft Office and this is one space Microsoft will grow marketshare in, and likely at Yahoo’s expense.

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Wait. Yahoo and AOL? I Was Looking Forward To Something More…Fierce.

Posted: 10 Feb 2008 09:57 PM CST

I was so damned excited yesterday to see Yahoo preparing to put up a Mel Gibson style Braveheart fight against Microsoft, Google and anyone else that tried to screw with their freedom. But if the reports of Yahoo exploring a merger with AOL are true, this battle could sizzle out quickly and pathetically.

AOL’s great, and I appreciate the effort they are putting into creating quality, cutting edge web services. But AOL plugs none of Yahoo’s holes - no search marketing platform (Google handles that for them). No algorithmic search technology (ditto). And very few actual searches (they have 5% market share, or less).

Now I certainly don’t have the answers Yahoo needs to stay independent and relevant (that’s why I still think the Microsoft deal is going to happen), but making one more big mistake is not going to suddenly turn everything around. If Yahoo wants to take control of AOL’s various properties and users, fine. But they still need to figure out a way to compete with Google.

By the way, the Times is using “A source close to Yahoo!'s thinking” in reporting these rumors. I’m not even sure what that means.

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MySpace Reportedly Had A Traffic Surge In January

Posted: 10 Feb 2008 09:39 PM CST

January U.S. Comscore stats for MySpace are released on Monday, but we’re hearing they’ll show a big surge in a number of key areas. Average time spent on the site increased to 204 minutes (up 14%), the highest it has been since August 2007. Unique visitors are supposedly up 13%, with Facebook showing a decline of 800,000 or so unique visitors in the same period.

We’ll try to get our hands on the actual stats tomorrow to verify. But it should be noted that these will be U.S. numbers only; worldwide numbers for January, where Facebook is showing most of its growth, won’t be released until later.

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TipJoy - A Better Tip Jar For Content

Posted: 10 Feb 2008 04:58 PM CST

The idea of a “tip jar” on blogs and other content sites to help bring in a few extra dollars has been around for years. Donations and payouts are generally made through PayPal, and there are a number of plugins for various blogging platforms to make the process easier.

New Y Combinator startup TipJoy is designed to make it even easier to get people to click that tip button. Readers are not required to create an account or have a PayPal account to leave a tip, so there is little friction to them getting started. If they want to leave a tip they just click the button and type in their email address. I’ve added a tip button below to show how it works - any money we receive we’ll be distributing back to other bloggers who add the button, and/or donating to charity.

If you leave a tip as a new user, you start to build up an account debit. You can eventually pay that off via PayPal (TipJoy keeps 2%), although no one comes after you if you choose to skip out on the bill. You can also start to ask for tips on your own site, and anything people leave for you offsets what you’ve given to others.

The TipJoy site shows popular sites that have received a lot of tips, and you can also send any URL or email a tip directly as well. As a tipper, you can choose the amount you’d like to tip by default (starting at ten cents). Then, every time you click the tip button on a participating site, that amount is added to your bill.

If you want to cash out of your tips you can choose to either receive an Amazon gift card or donate the amount to charity. For now, you can’t receive cash since the company wants to avoid becoming a regulated money transfer service. In the FAQs they suggest they’ll be adding this functionality eventually.

I like the service because it creates a network around the idea of tipping for content. Users are both tippers and tippees, keeping a balance that they pay off eventually. I also like the fact that people don’t have to pay off that bill. It creates an interesting psychology where people find it very, very easy to leave the tip, and then may feel guilted into paying off the bill. At the very least, TipJoy is an interesting human psychology experiment.

The service has a number of options for integrating buttons and graphics on to the site. I imagine they’ll be adding plug-ins and other tools as well over time.

TipJoy was founded by Abigail Kirigin and Ivan Kirigin. The company blog is here.

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Ex-CNETer Launches Iminta

Posted: 10 Feb 2008 12:10 PM CST

San Francisco Iminta launches into private beta on Tuesday. Like a number of other startups, you tell the service the various social networks where you have accounts (delicious, flickr, YouTube, Lastfm, etc.) and the service creates a master list of everything you are up to on those sites. Your friends can then subscribe to your master feed, and/or you to theirs.

There are other services that are very similar - FriendFeed (still in private beta) and Plaxo Pulse are the most well known, but others include Mugshot, Readr, 30boxes and Spokeo.

For the most part, Iminta has features that are similar to those services, particularly FriendFeed. There are some differences worth noting, however. Whereas FriendFeed has only a single setting to make your feed public or private, Iminta allows you to create groups of friends and determine which groups see what content. On the flip side, they allow people viewing your feed to strip out some of your feeds. So if you Twitter too much, for example, your friends can choose not to see that, but leave everything else. Iminta also allows you to filter data by type when you are viewing a number of friends, or all of your friends, at once.

It makes for a less simplified interface than FriendFeed, which has its pros and cons. But as you add a lot of friends, the ability to manage the data is, in my opinion, a good thing.

Another thing I like about Iminta, and the reason I’m writing about it, is that the company has been bootstrapped to date by founder Aaron Newton (an ex CNET product manager) - I always like the non-funded startups. Newton says he began working on the site a year ago just because he wanted the product for himself and his friends. He got more serious about it, and left his job at CNET, when he first heard about FriendFeed in October.

You can request an invitation on Iminta now, and Newton says they’ll bring in as many people as they can starting on Tuesday. Once you are in you can also invite your friends - we’ve added Iminta to InviteShare to help you get a quick invite (FriendFeed is here).

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