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Europe Is Searching For Its Silicon Valley

2008-04-07T14:26:00.000-07:00

Over the past few days at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to hang out with about 700 Internet entrepreneurs from all over Europe. The startup scene in Europe reminds me of Silicon Valley four or five years agoâ"hungry startups building Web companies on the cheap and products that scratch a personal itch.

Swedish startup Twingly, for instance, wants to come up with spam-free blog search by starting with the best 450,000 blogs and letting users share blog posts with each other. ~~Paris~~Brussels-based Zilok is creating an eBay for renting things such as drills and digital projectors. London’s Fav.or.it makes a feed reader with extra powersâ"you can leave comments on blogs within the reader, it ranks posts based on how much they are actually read, and it lets you filter posts by tag, rank, or category. In Munich, andUnite has created a service that allows you to collect your search terms and share them with others.

And a handful of companies are even gaining substantial traction. I was surprised to learn that the social network Netlog claims 30 million unique visitors and four billion page views per month (comScore counts 11 million visitors, but five billion page views). Netlog operates in 15 different languages, and 20 countries. Then there is eBuddy, the Meebo of Europe, which boasts 12 million Web users and 1.6 million mobile users of its Web-based instant-messaging service.

Most of the startups I encountered, however, are still operating under the radarâ"in Romania, Sweden, Holland, Ireland, France. But a cross-border Web 2.0 culture is definitely gaining steam across Europe. Technology itself is helping to break down borders. A VC showed me the landing page on his mobile phone. It wasnât his e-mail. It was Twitter. Another startup founder told me that Twitter helps him keep a dialogue going with other entrepreneurs and VCs across Europe, and even with contacts in the U.S.

Europe is still a mosaic of employment law, tax regulations, and cultural habits that can influence where it makes the most sense to locate different parts of a business. One Dutch CEO, for instance, told me that ~~it costs~~ you need a minimum of 18,000 Euros in starting capital just to incorporate in the Netherlands. ~~And that is just the government’s fee~~.

When I asked which region was most likely to emerge as Europeâs Silicon Valley, the answers were all over the map: London, Munich, Berlin, Zurich, Geneva, even Barcelona. The money is in London, cheap office space is in Berlin, the mobile expertise is in Helsinki, the weather’s nice in Barcelona, and the inexpensive engineers are in Estonia (which may not even consider itself part of Europe, but is close enough to manage from Berlin or Amsterdam).

As Europe searches for its Silicon Valley, it may turn up as a state of mind rather than a specific place. The truth is that Europe may not need a single Silicon Valley because business is becoming so distributed. While some Silicon-Valley chauvinists may disagree, the idea of concentrating all the talent and capital in one region seems so last century to many Euro 2.0 entrepreneurs.

(Photo Â© Pieter Baert).

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Microsoft (Pretends To) Force Yahooâs Hand

2008-04-07T08:24:00.000-07:00

April 5, 2008
Board of Directors
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Members of the Board:

It has now been more than two months since we made our proposal to acquire Yahoo! at a 62% premium to its closing price on January 31, 2008, the day prior to our announcement. Our goal in making such a generous offer was to create the basis for a speedy and ultimately friendly transaction. Despite this, the pace of the last two months has been anything but speedy.

While there has been some limited interaction between management of our two companies, there has been no meaningful negotiation to conclude an agreement. We understand that you have been meeting to consider and assess your alternatives, including alternative transactions with others in the industry, but weâve seen no indication that you have authorized Yahoo! management to negotiate with Microsoft. This is despite the fact that our proposal is the only alternative put forward that offers your shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.

During these two months of inactivity, the Internet has continued to march on, while the public equity markets and overall economic conditions have weakened considerably, both in general and for other Internet-focused companies in particular. At the same time, public indicators suggest that Yahoo!âs search and page view shares have declined. Finally, you have adopted new plans at the company that have made any change of control more costly.

By any fair measure, the large premium we offered in January is even more significant today. We believe that the majority of your shareholders share this assessment, even after reviewing your public disclosures relating to your future prospects.

Given these developments, we believe now is the time for our respective companies to authorize teams to sit down and negotiate a definitive agreement on a combination of our companies that will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders, creating a more efficient and competitive company that will provide greater value and service to our customers. If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo! board. The substantial premium reflected in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal.

It is unfortunate that by choosing not to enter into substantive negotiations with us, you have failed to give due consideration to a transaction that has tremendous benefits for Yahoo!âs shareholders and employees. We think it is critically important not to let this window of opportunity pass.

Sincerely,

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Office
Microsoft Corp.

Enough with subtle messages delivered through the press: Microsoft goes on the record with their threat to bail on Yahoo.

This is really just a sign by Microsoft that they really, really still want this deal. The fact is they still haven’t announced their proposed Yahoo board slate, are still radio silent with those board members, and, most notably, haven’t pulled their offer.

This is saber rattling, and a signal that they aren’t ready to increase their offer yet. Nothing more. I stand by my prediction of a negotiated deal in the next twelve days, before Yahoo announces their Q1 earnings. Yahoo has no real alternatives, and Microsoft clearly still wants this deal.

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Last Ticket Release for April 10 TechCrunch MeetUp LA: Geek Goes Chic

2008-04-07T02:22:00.000-07:00

The TechCrunch MeetUp LA co-hosted with PopSugar is next Thursday, April 10 and we’re making the last 250 tickets available now.

MySpace will be spinning MySpace Music for us all night with an awesome DJ. Come join the eclectic celebration of new technology, media and fashion that fits the LA scene.

There’s still time to help sponsor the MeetUp. This is our biggest event yet, with over 1,500 attendees, so the business networking will be great. Please contact Jeanne Logozzo to learn more about how to participate.

Event Details:

Date: Thursday, April 10, 2008
Time: 6:30 pm - midnight
Venue: Vanguard, 6021 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood (maps: Google / Microsoft / Yahoo)
Photo/Flickr Tag: techcrunchmeetup12
For additional details, see our dedicated event page.
Got your tickets? Join the MySpace or Facebook event pages as well.

Get tickets here, based on availability. As usual, tickets are $10 to manage the guest list, and proceeds will be donated to charity. All ticket purchases are non-transferable and non-refundable. If you purchase multiple tickets under your own name, your guests will need to arrive together with you at the event. Photo IDs are required for event check-in (attendees must be at least 21 years of age); no paper tickets necessary. Hope to see you there!

Thank you MeetUp 12 Sponsors

Co-Host

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Fox Interactive Media To Miss Revenue Targets; Chief Revenue Officer Out Amid Reorganization

2008-04-06T20:20:00.000-07:00

Amidst all the excitement over the MySpace Music announcement today is another story about the fate of parent company Fox Interactive Media. FIM, the division of News Corp. that controls MySpace, IGN, Scout Media, Photobucket, Fox Sports, AmericanIdol.com and other properties, is in trouble.

The company, under President Peter Levinsohn, will miss their revenue target of $1 billion for the current fiscal year ending June 30, multiple sources say. Rupert Murdoch, Chairman of News Corp., first gave revenue guidance for their subsidiary FIM in June 2007 (further information here):

“…we are forecasting that MySpace alone will generate in excess of $800 million in revenue in fiscal ‘08. Overall, FIM in fiscal ‘07 generated revenues of $550 million and a profit of $10 million, even after absorbing $80 million in retention and amortization costs. We would be surprised if FIM revenues this fiscal year do not exceed $1 billion with margins well above 20%.”

Actual revenue is estimated to come in at around $900 million (2007 revenues were $550 million). And the $200 + million in expected operating margins is also likely an illusion. The division as a whole, with more than 2,500 employees, will be much closer to break even.

The impact could be far reaching for the organization. All employee stock options are tied to profits. This includes MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and Co-founder Tom Anderson, whose compensation is heavily weighted towards the plan. If there are no profits, there are no payouts.

Some insiders say the projections were impossible to meet. Nevertheless, News Corp. has a fall guy: Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett, who was hired from Time Warner in 2006, has been either terminated or was offered an inferior position and resigned. Barrett was rumored to have had a very strained relationship with DeWolfe. Jeff Berman, currently MySpace EVP of Marketing and Content and a former public affairs executive, was named head of MySpace sales and marketing.

Barrett is at least the seventh senior executive to leave FIM in recent history. Former COO Mark Jung (now CEO of Vudu), Chief Strategy Officer Jim Heckman (now CSO at Zazzle), CEO Ross Levinsohn (now a Managing Partner at Velocity Interactive), SVP Heather Harde (now CEO of TechCrunch), EVP Sales John Trimble (now EVP, Sales at Glam), and EVP Corporate Development Mitchell Chun (now at Zazzle with Heckman).

In addition, FIM is moving some assets from MySpace and other properties into two new groups:

Platform: The group will control software and services to be sold internally and to third parties.

Monetization: To be led by Adam Bain (EVP of Technology and Production). The 250 person group has already moved out of FIM headquarters in Beverly Hills to a former Yahoo building in Santa Monica. The group, which is largely built on the 2007 SDC acquisition, will sell ads into FIM properties (after Google and each entity’s direct sales group) and will also sell advertising for third parties, including MySpace platform widget providers and other web services. The entity is reportedly also close to making another acquisition in the advertising space and may take the acquired company’s name as their brand. Revenue from this group is rumored to be about $150 million in the current fiscal year.

The main FIM properties, MySpace, IGN, Scout Media and Photobucket, will remain under their current heads, and will all have direct sales groups to sell primary advertising space. Also, AmericanIdol.com, currently under FIM, may move to Fox.

FIM declined to comment on this story.

Update: This email was sent to all FIM employees at around 9 pm PST:

All,

Since its inception nearly three years ago, FIM and its properties have experienced phenomenal growth and success as a result of your collective efforts. You have worked diligently to create the largest, most innovative content communities in the world, and, as a company, we are now prepared to take the next step in our evolution.

That next step involves two things: 1) leveraging our industry-leading advertising technologies to create an entirely new business for the company and 2) more closely aligning our products and revenue. We will achieve this alignment through a restructure of our sales and advertising groups that will begin to take effect in the coming weeks.

FIM Audience Network
First, we have created a new business unit called the FIM Audience Network. Despite the press in our industry about the challenges of monetizing social media, we have built amazing Hyper Targeting and Optimization technologies that dramatically improve our ability to provide better advertising solutions to our clients. Given these strengths, Adam Bain â" who has been so instrumental in developing this capability â" has been promoted to President of the new unit.

Adamâs team will be comprised of FIMâs ad technology, ad operations and performance sales groups. Their charter will be to optimize monetization across FIMâs content network and those of other third-party publishers. The merging of these groups into a single business unit will provide our family of brands and new third-party clients with the ability to extend their reach and enhance their advertising effectiveness across a vast online audience.

Integrated Sales
In addition to the creation of the FIM Audience Network, we will be integrating our branded sales teams (including client solutions, sales development, and traffic generation) into the operating businesses that they support.

This change recognizes that our individual business units have evolved to a point where it is clear they are best served by dedicated professionals who live and breathe those products alone.

For example, at MySpace we have launched our developer platform, unveiled incredible new features and functionality and, just today, announced our landmark joint venture with leaders in the music industry to form MySpace Music. In order to maximize the benefits of these events it is essential for our product and sales team to work hand in hand.

By integrating the sales teams in this way, each operating unit will be empowered to assume responsibility for its revenue, growth and profitability. Further, each operating group will be afforded greater flexibility to implement processes and programs that meet the unique needs of their respective markets.

Since the sales teams will now be integrated with their respective brands, we will no longer have a separate FIM Revenue Group. In the two years that heâs been here, Michael Barrett has built a phenomenal sales team and driven tremendous results â" helping to exceed our News Corp estimates and achieve profitability as a division. His efforts have primed FIM to take this important step in the next phase of our growth, and I want to thank him for his contributions. Michael will remain with the company for the next two months to guide the transition before moving on to pursue new endeavors.

Members of affected groups will be transitioning in the next few weeks and will hear more details from their respective leaders.

Closing

This reorganization is a milestone for FIM that will create many exciting changes and opportunities for each of you, as well as for our company going forward.

I am confident that we are moving in the right direction to secure our long-term success, and I am certain that we have the right leadership team in place to take us there.

Iâm very proud of all of you, and I thank you for your ongoing commitment to the organization.

Thank you.

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Rumor: Federated Media Takes $50 Million On A $200 Million Valuation

2008-04-06T14:18:00.000-07:00

Federated Media (FM) has rumored to have raised $50 million from Oak Hill Capital Partners on a $200 million valuation, according to VentureBeat. Total funding for Federated Media to-date would be $57.4 million.

So what would Federated Media do with $50 million: Invest in sites. From a March interview:

Battelle: Well, I canât say specifically what we might do with any money that we might raise, should we do a fund-raising round. But I think there are an awful lot of opportunities in this emerging field and itâs just good to have access to capital to execute any reasonable ideas that we might have. Itâs a very quickly changing market and it needs financing. I mean individual sites need financing and we want to be a good partner for all of our sites.

Here’s what Michael said at the time:

Hereâs what I think he really means: Theyâll either buy sites outright, or guarantee revenue, or guarantee revenue in exchange for equity. A publisher wouldnât consider Federated Media an attractive investor versus venture capitalists simply because it would mean tying their revenue to them over the long term.

VentureBeat talks about expanding the business and Facebook apps, but does FM really need more money to build out its core business? There’s every chance FM will be going down the Glam path in owning or part owning some sites and acting as the ad broker for others.

disclosure: FM sells ads for TechCrunch

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WeColumn Launches A Blogging Widget

2008-04-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

During the taping of Diggnation at the Next Web conference today in Amsterdam, Tobias van Telligen, an enterprising CEO of a Dutch startup bum rushed the stage and got in a plug for the Website he just launched today: WeColumn. He also bought 75 beers for the audience. That 150 Euros ($235) was marketing dollars well spent. Afterwards, also came and told me about his new Website.

WeColumn falls in between a regular blog and a micro-blog. You write a paragraph or two about a specific topic that you think others may be interested in and then other blogs or sites can embed the text as a widget on their own sites. For instance, Telligen’s own WeColumn (in Dutch) is about surf conditions in the North Sea. Other Dutch surf sites, such as the Holland Surfing Association re-skins the text and puts it up on their site.

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A Widget That Tracks Political Sentiment

2008-04-05T20:12:00.000-07:00

As campaign season heats up, creating a political widget is a good way for startups to highlight their technology. Today, Jodange released two more Top of Mind widgets for iGoogle that tracks the sentiment about the political candidates as well as the sentiment of the candidates themselves on a series of topics. The first one, Candidate Pundit, analyzes news stories, political blogs, and other sources and does a semantic analysis of the text to determine whether the story is positive, neutral, or negative about a particular candidate. (The company’s first Top of Mind widget tracks sentiment on publicly traded stocks).

The second one, Topic Pundit, tracks the candidates own sentiments about issues such as taxes, the armed forces, domestic politics, and immigration. You can click through to see how the sentiments break down by candidate, and then click through again to see the excerpt that was analyzed. To see the actual source (mostly newspapers, it seems), you have to click through all the way back to Jodange’s site. It would be nice to see the source in the widget itself, but otherwise it is a very promising app because it helps you cut through the clutter of political reporting and speeches out there.

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Live From The Next Web (2008)

2008-04-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

If you couldn’t make it to Amsterdam, Mike Butcher is live blogging the Next Web conference on TechCrunch UK. Read his individual posts on How to Deal With VCs (Adeo Ressi), the first batch of startup demos (CoComment, eBuddy, Fav.or.it, Wuaw, Introniche, Empressr), Open Widgets (Khris Loux), and Lookery’s play for European social networking ads. Or you can watch a live stream of the entire conference here (in Silverlight) or here (Windows only).

Update: Click on more below and see the live stream here in Silverlight. Right now Scott Rafer (founder of MyBlogLog and Lookery) is interviewing Kevin Rose of Digg. He says he is working on a recommendation system for Digg that will show you Diggs from other people who Digg items similar to what you Digg that should be out this summer. That could be huge. Also, on the difference between Twitter and Pownce: “Pownce is an amazing platform for sharing media with your friends and having a conversation around that media.” (TechCrunch UK has a complete write-up of the Rafer-Rose Q&A).

Update 2: Now up: Leah Culver, Nova Spivack, and demos from Netlog, Webnode, Lookery, Zilok, Radionomy, and Wakoopa.

Update 3: An episode of Diggnation will be streamed live here, starting at 11:50 AM ET. Make that 12:30 PM ET. This thing is starting now.

Update 3: Show’s over. We’ll be streaming the rest of the conference tomorrow.

(more…)

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Wuawee Launches: Connects Your Mobile Phone to Your Social Networks

2008-04-05T08:08:00.000-07:00

One startup that presented at the Next Web in Amsterdam is Wuaw, which just launched a mobile app called WuawWee. The app lets you upload photos from your phone to a widget on various social networks (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, iGoogle) and chat with friends. You can see the chat on your phone, and they can grab the widget and put it on their MySpace or Facebook pages. The mobile service costs 5 Euros per month, or 1 Euro per use.

Ads will be embedded in the desktop widget, and radio streaming will come soon (Wuaw has streaming deals with European radio stations for its MyRadio product).

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Slide Caught Posting Fake Positive Reviews For Their Own App

2008-04-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

Multiple fake reviews for the Funwall App on Facebook have been deleted after it was discovered that the reviews came from employees of Slide, the apps owner.

Fake reviews seem to be part of the norm these days, however most companies are smart enough to cover their tracks; Slide employees on the other hand post from accounts that are part of the Slide Inc Facebook network.

A couple of samples (via this thread on Facebook)

FIVE STAR RATING
I can’t live without it!
by Sohyen Claire Kim at 2:12pm on January 30th, 2008
http://www.facebook.com/s.php?k=1000000 â¦ ref=fbprvw

You can enjoy this super amazing FunWall apps!!!!
Very Strongly Recommended!!!! big_smile

FIVE STAR RATING
Fantastic Application!!
by Mayumi Yoshida at 1:44pm on February 1st, 2008
http://www.facebook.com/s.php?k=1000000 â¦ ref=fbprvw

I totally love FunWall!! I can put Youtube videos, greeting cards, neat pix and fun postings…it’s super convenient and addictive!!
And I love how I can forward my friends’ fun stuff that they sent me!!

Hooray for FunWall!! Seriously, a Wall cannot get any better than this.

FIVE STAR RATING
w00t!
by Adora SlideEleven at 6:41pm on February 16th, 2008
http://www.facebook.com/s.php?k=1000000 â¦ ref=fbprvw

love it.

FIVE STAR RATING
luv it!
by Adora SlideEight at 1:15am on February 17th, 2008
http://www.facebook.com/s.php?k=1000000 â¦ ref=fbprvw

The Adora Slidexxx names are a particularly classy touch: not only is Slide spamming Facebook with fake reviews, they’re also using fake accounts with fake names and more staggeringly adding the fake accounts to the company only Facebook group (The name Adora comes from Slides Sr. Product Manager Adora Cheung). A full list of the fake accounts on Slide Inc here; there are pages upon pages of fake accounts, which also breach Facebook’s TOS.

MikeP on the same thread sums it up beautifully: “Slide writing fake reviews on their own reviews board is hilarious! is that really the behavior of a company worth $500M?”

Here’s a new theme song for the bright sparks at Slide who thought this was wise:

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Confirmed: MySpace To Launch New Music Joint Venture With Big Labels

2008-04-04T14:02:00.000-07:00

We’ve confirmed through sources that MySpace has settled the pending litigation Universal Music, albeit in a very unique way. They’ll create a new MySpace Music joint venture, with equity stakes from all the major labels (except EMI, which is still negotiating).

Expect the announcement today, and a launch of the new music property in July or August 2008. The news was first reported by Reuters, with additional information from SAI.

The new company will own the MySpace music property, get a cash infusion of $120 million or so from parent company News Corp, and distribute that $120 million to Sony BMG, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. In return, the litigation will be dropped and the labels will give streaming and downloading rights to their catalog to the new entity. Approximately $100 million of the News Corp. capital will go to Universal; the rest will go to Sony BMG and Warner.

Users will be able to stream music on demand, create playlists, and add widget music players to their profiles. The streaming will be advertising supported - at first via display ads (like Imeem), and later via in-stream audio ads. DRM-free downloads will also be available, either advertising supported or on a pay basis like Amazon’s Music Store.

Advertising revenue will be split among the joint venture partners according to their equity stakes, not based on play counts.

CEO Search

MySpace is currently conducting a CEO search for the new entity, which is being led by MySpace COO Amit Kapur on an interim basis. Sources say that Kapur and MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe heavily recruited Ian Rogers, who just left Yahoo for stealth startup Topspin Media.

In case it isn’t abundantly clear - the big labels are all but giving up on charging for recorded music. Instead they’re trying to grab equity stakes in the distribution channels that directly touch consumers.

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Motley Fool Co-Brands With Mint

2008-04-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

TechCrunch40-winner and Benchmark-funded startup Mint is having a good year. Their user base has grown 25% in the last month to 200,000. And today they’re getting access to 4 million more via a co-branded partnership with The Motley Fool, a popular finance portal.

The deal includes a co-branded version of Mint and promotion of the site on Motley Fool. Mint CEO Aaron Patzer says the deal is not exclusive, but wouldn’t give other details.

More than anything this is a sign of credibility for Mint, which continues to win ground v. competitors. Expect more partnerships soon.

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Zillow Disrupts Lending Market With Mortgage Marketplace

2008-04-04T01:59:00.000-07:00

Zillow, the site where you can find pricing estimates and other info about houses around the United States, aims to disrupt the online lending market with the launch of its Mortgage Marketplace.

The marketplace is a free service that hooks lenders up with borrowers. It works very much as Zicasso does for travelers (see our review of that service here). Borrowers submit just the essentials - what type of loan they need, where they’re located, their estimated property value, their credit history, etc - without divulging any of their contact info. Then certified lenders make offers that can be compared side-by-side. It’s up to the borrower to reach out and contact those lenders, not the other way around as it is with services like Lending Tree.

Zillow cites a Harris Interactive study showing that it’s more important for borrowers to keep their contact info private than to find the best rates. Apparently lenders are a bit too eager to sell you on a deal after they know how to find you. So the main advantage of this marketplace lies in protecting borrowers’ identities and tipping the balance of power into their favor.

There are other advantages to the system as well. Borrowers can rate lenders and leave comments about them so that others can make better decisions. The extra transparency also lets lenders know what types of offers they are competing with, which could lead to more competitive deals. That’s okay with lenders, though, since they’re gaining access to a larger market for which to make their offers.

According to the company, Zillow attracts about 5M unique visitors monthly, 1/5 of which are looking for a loan and 2/3 of which are looking to buy or sell a home. We’ve also been told that 1 in 3 professional lenders visit Zillow every month. This traffic is therefore a natural fit for a service like this, which shouldn’t have a problem gaining traction.

Some other fun facts about Zillow: of the 90m homes in the US, 80M are listed in Zillow and 70M have estimated prices (”zestimates”). A full 45% of the 90M total homes have been looked up on the site; in San Francisco that percentage is around 90%.

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Koreaâs Pandora.TV Looks To International Markets

2008-04-03T19:56:00.000-07:00

Pandora.TV, South Korea’s largest user generated video site, is expanding into new markets with additional language support and features.

Pandora.TV launched in 2004 and has grown to become the “YouTube of Korea,” ranking as the countries 24th most popular site according to Alexa (comScore data is not available) with 20 million monthly unique visitors, 2.5 billion monthly page views with 2.5 million hosted videos. Notably the company has taken $16 million over two rounds from Altos Ventures and DCM, said to be the largest foreign investment made in a Korean internet startup.

Pandora.TV offers a mix of YouTube style videos and Live streaming. Like YouTube, videos can be embedded, voted upon and comments left on each page. A key selling point is unlimited video storage.

As of today Pandora.TV is now available in English, Chinese, Japanese as well as its native Korean. New features rolled out with the international expansion include HD quality video playback (H.264 codec support), multiple video upload (up to 5 files simultaneously), unlimited category creation and site widgets. Pandora.TV has also claimed cross-browser support as a new feature, however the Live Streaming service requires a download to view and stream that is only available to Windows users.

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Announcing The TechCrunch50 Conference: September 8-10, San Francisco

2008-04-03T13:54:00.000-07:00

Mark your calendars for the second annual TechCrunch launch conference, co-produced between TechCrunch and Jason Calacanis: TechCrunch50 at the San Francisco Design Center on September 8-10, 2008.

Like last year at TechCrunch40 (except there will be ten more startup launches), fifty new startups and products will launch over three days. All finalists will be chosen solely on merit; they are not charged to attend or present at the event. The top startup to launch at TechCrunch50, as chosen by the judges and organizers, will receive a $50,000 cash prize (last year’s winner was Mint).

The 40 startups that launched at last year’s event have now raised at over $143 million in venture capital (not all has been disclosed publicly). That’s mostly because they were all excellent startups. But the press and blogger coverage from the event certainly didn’t hurt, either.

We will also be bringing back expert panelists to speak at the event and judge startup demos. Last year’s experts are here. Many of these people will be returning, along with a number of new judges as well. Announcements of attending experts will be made over the next few months.

New Venue, New Format

TechCrunch50 is a three day conference to accommodate the ten additional startup launches, as well as more panels and workshops. We’re changing locations this year. The event will be held at the San Francisco Design Center, a huge and beautiful venue that can accommodate over 1,000 attendees with ease.

We’re incredibly lucky to have the support and backing of a great and growing group of corporate partners. Sequoia Capital, Mayfield Fund, Clearstone Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures and Fenwick & West all returned quickly to support us for the second year in a row. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo reached out as well, and we’re very grateful for their new commitment to our merit-based conference format.

Is Your New Product Right For TechCrunch50?

If your startup or product is launching in the late summer or Fall, TechCrunch50 may be the perfect launchpad for you. The important factor is that the startup has no previous public exposure before the event - the 50 slots are reserved for new products that the audience hasn’t seen before. If launching on the actual date of the event is too soon, we will make a limited number of exceptions to allow you to show a demo of the product at the event instead.

Things To Know:

Official Site: TechCrunch50
Dates: September 8 - 10, 2008
Tickets To Attend: TechCrunch50 Tickets
Application to Launch Startup/Product: Company Application Form
Applications Deadline: Friday, June 27, 2008 (early consideration deadline June 13)

Conference ticketing courtesy of EventBrite

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Europe-Focused Blog Search Engine Twingly Goes Into Private Beta

2008-04-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

Twingly, the Europe-focused blog search engine that I wrote about in January, has just entered private beta. You can sign up for an invitation on the home page, or go here for an instant invitation (the first 2,000 get in).

Twingly has a number of features that make it an attractive engine. First, they have a “no spam” search that only queries blogs that are known to Twingly to be actual, real, blogs. This is a white list approach that returns fewer results since most blogs are not included, but spam is virtually wiped out. Twingly currently has 450,000 approved blogs on the white list and is adding another 1,000 per day.

Instead of trying to index every blog in existence and then removing spam via black lists and other methods, they are limiting the blogs they monitor to those that are proven to be legitimate. They started with a small list of known blogs, and then spidered out from there based on links to other blogs. The assumption, which is fairly sound, is that good/real blogs will not link to spam blogs. The end result is a white list of real blogs that are indexed - everything else is ignored.

Searches can be ranked by date (which is standard for blog search), by number of inbound links (the equivalent of Technorati authority) or by TwinglyRank, which is “a combination of keyword relevancy, number of inlinks, number of user recommendations, publishing date and time and some secret sauce.” Users can also perform language specific searches in any of 29 supported languages (they track another 31, but not accurately enough to deploy yet).

Twingly already has a product - a nifty screen saver that shows blog posts on a world map as they are written. The new search engine will use some of the back end technology they’ve developed for the screen saver - mainly their ping server (see here for our overview of what ping servers are) and existing index of blogs.

Founder Martin KÃ¤llstrÃ¶m says that, in addition to the consumer-facing search engine, they’ll partner with large content news sites to show blog posts related to news content. This is something both Sphere and Technorati have had success with in the past, and the company can do revenue-sharing deals on additional page views. Content providers like it because it incentivizes blogs to link to their content (to get a link back). Twingly may not be able to compete with Sphere and Technorati in getting U.S. based partners, but he says he already has 44 live with large European publishers, generating 100 m widget views per month.

The company has raised â¬1 million in a July 2007 round of financing from Servisen. They have seven employees. Look for a launch of their search engine in the next month or two.

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Book Authors Association Joins Sky Is Falling Brigade

2008-04-03T01:50:00.000-07:00

The Society of Authors, the UK Association representing professional book authors, has called chicken little on the book industry by suggesting that internet piracy will cause authors to stop writing.

Tracy Chevalier, Chair of the Society of Authors and the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring told The Times that the current payment model for authors was dead and even suggested that content should be made available for free:

âIt is a dam thatâs cracking…We are trying to plug the holes with legislation and litigation but we need to think radically. We have to evolve and create a very different pay system, possibly by making the content available free to all and finding a way to get paid separately….

Itâs hitting hardest the writers who write books that you dip in and out of: poetry, cookbooks, travel guides, short stories â" books where you donât have to read the whole thing….Cookbook authors are really struggling. I do it myself â" if I want a recipe I go online and get it for free….For a while it will be great for readers because they will pay less and less but in the long run itâs going to ruin the information. People will stop writing. Thereâs a lot of âwait and see what the technology bringsâ but the trouble is if you wait and see too long then itâs gone. Thatâs what happened to the music industry.â

That music industry where musicians have stopped publishing music and are begging in the streets….

On a positive note they are at least talking about alternative models and recognize that there is a need for change, but does anyone really believe that books are doomed? that writers will stop writing because pirated copies of their works may appear on the internet? While online content and E-Book readers are changing the book game, there will always be a market for books; literature is not modern music, it can’t be created on a whim by 9 year olds using Garage Band.

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Google/Skype Acquisition or Partnership Imminent?

2008-04-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

Something big is brewing between Google and Ebay’s Skype, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Actually, for weeks now there have been low level rumors of the two companies talking, but nailing down any details was difficult. New information, however, suggests that they are in current talks and that a partnership or outright acquisition may be announced in the near future.

Skype, acquired in late 2005 for $3.1 billion, has been a financial albatross around Ebay’s neck. eBay removed Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstrom in October 2007, reportedly due to frustration at the financial performance of Skype. Ebay also negotiated down the huge earnout due to Skype stockholders and took a $936 million one-time loss around the transaction.

It’s clear that eBay wants to either unload Skype, or significantly drive performance.

Google, by contrast, is just beginning to think about how to dominate the voice space. They have a VOIP service through GTalk, a free 411 service and GrandCentral, a telephone management service they acquired last year for $50 million.

All of these products reside under VP Product Management Salar Kamangar and his new right hand guy, Bradley Horowitz. Other key players in the group are Wesley Chen, the product manager who championed the GrandCentral acquisition, and GrandCentral founders Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet.

That core team should be at the CTIA Wireless Conference in Las Vegas, but we’ve heard that they either aren’t there or at the very least aren’t showing up for scheduled meetings (if anyone at the event sees them, let me know). That doesn’t mean the team is busy working on a partnership or acquisition of Skype instead of attending the conference. But given that we’ve heard from sources close to the deal that something is happening between the companies, it’s not a stretch, either.

What does Skype bring to the table? Scalable technology and a proven platform in the VOIP, VOIP2POTS and P2P Video, to start - 100 billion VOIP minutes have been logged on Skype to date. At any given time there are 10 million simultaneous users on Skype. Skype is the glue that can pull all the nascent Google products together.

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On Eve of Facebook Chat, Babuki Takes a Chance

2008-04-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

When Facebook rolls out its chat application (”Facebook Chat”) sometime this week, users are going to see an instant messaging bar at the bottom of their screen wherever they go on the site. And they won’t even have to install that bar; it will be put there automatically for everyone. That’s the power of complete and instantaneous distribution possessed by Facebook alone, and it’s what made us declare all 3rd party IM apps on Facebook as “basically dead”.

So you’d expect no more Social.IM or Friendvox’s to crop up, but a newly launched service called Babuki IM still thinks it has a chance to become the preferred IM client on Facebook.

Co-founder Aly Chesney points out two main advantages to his product: it can be used both through the Facebook website itself and through an AIR-based desktop client. And it works with other IM services such as AIM, Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, MySpace, Livejournal, and even Social.IM.

Babuki also provides other useful features such as the ability to make yourself invisible to certain Facebook friends and to set a wider range of status messages (Away, Extended Away, Busy, etc.)

The interoperability Babuki provides with other IM services is certainly the main advantage it has over Facebook Chat, which will eschew the Jabber (XMPP) protocol in favor of a proprietary one. The Mac and PC compatible desktop client also gets a big thumbs up from me.

But the question will be whether Facebook users care enough about these features to choose Babuki over Facebook Chat, especially with the expectation that Facebook will add features and interoperability over time. I don’t predict many of them will, although we can hope that Babuki amasses enough users to pressure Facebook into adopting its superior functionality.

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Jana Consortium: CNET leadership has âpresided over massive value destructionâ

2008-04-02T07:44:00.000-07:00

The battle over the future of CNET continues. This morning the Jana consortium, which announced an attempt to take control of the CNET board of directors in January, published a website and white paper (embedded below) to support their effort.

Jana and its co-investors now own 14.9% of CNET, plus another 8% in non-voting derivatives. Their primary goal is to get voting control of the board to push through a broad agenda to reform the ailing company. But that hasn’t gotten them much face time with CEO Neil Ashe and the rest of the executive team. From reports, CNET has treated Jana as an outsider, despite the fact that they are the largest or second largest shareholder in the company. CNET sued to throw out Jana’s claims for board seats based on a technicality. That suit was dismissed quickly, but an appeal was filed last week.

At this point, the CNET team is trying to firm up the financial status of the company in advance of their annual shareholder meeting in June to have any chance of staying in control (and keeping their jobs). Jana, meanwhile, will be attempting to win points with the other stockholders to get their votes for the board slate they are proposing at that meeting.

The CNET board currently consists of eight directors. Two are up for election at the upcoming meeting (Peter Currie, Elizabeth Nelson). Jana wants to replace those two directors, and add five new seats, giving they 7 of 14 directors and voting control of the board.

The message Jana is sending to the CNET stockholders is straightforward and blunt:

Despite premiere brands and content, CNET Networks Inc. (”CNET”) has consistently underperformed peers and destroyed enormous shareholder value. We believe there is still time to reverse course and unlock value, but in order to do so CNET must undertake transformative change to strengthen its core assets and move from its “Web 1.0″ roots to the modern Internet industry. We believe CNET’s current leadership has failed to offer shareholders any evidence that it possesses either the necessary sense of urgency or the experience and expertise needed to lead this change successfully.

and

Despite owning leading web properties, over the past few years CNET has consistently underperformed its peers due to a failed strategy and an inability to proactively seize upon new opportunities and challenges in an effective manner. The majority of the current Board has overseen a 45% decline in shareholder value since 2005.

The white paper is an even broader condemnation of the management team. It begins with “The leadership of CNET…has presided over massive value destruction…CNETâs current leadership now claims it can reverse course and begin creating shareholder value, but we believe they have offered no evidence that they can do so.” They also point to data showing a three year, 25% decline in CNET stock v. a 40% gain in the Morgan Stanley Internet Index.

Jana’s plan: Bring in “new leadership” to CNET to execute on a new strategy focused on “strengthening core assets.” The plan is centered on improving advertising technology and organization, improving navigation and SEO strategies, and leveraging social media to boost growth. They also call for an improved content management system and significant cost reductions. Revenue per employee in 2007, they say, was dead last compared to CNET’s peers.

Starting on page 31 of the document below Jana also provides a timeline of events showing an increasingly hostile relationship between the parties.

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Google Wake Up Kit

2008-04-01T19:40:00.000-07:00

I’m lumping Google Wake Up Kit in with the Gmail Custom Time - not super funny.

More Google April Fools Craziness:

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Whisher: Metered Wi-Fi made easy

2008-04-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

I’ve been meaning to post about Whisher for a while but they just launched some nice beta software so it seems like the right time. The company is based in Barcelona and they showed me their alpha code back in February. Now, however, they’re ready to go live.

Whisher is essentially a metered hotspot system. You use their plug-in and see various hotspots on the screen. Instead of seeing an encrypted hotspot called “FARGLEBOXR” you will see a useful name and a price per minute or hour. As a consumer, you know exactly what you’re paying and as a Wi-Fi provider you’ve got an easy-to-use system for allowing folks to hop on without buying secret code numbers at the counter. They’re offering white-box services to providers who can rebrand a Whisher hotspot or simple pay-as-you-go accounts for cybercafes, etc.

You can also share your Wi-Fi for free and then pick up other hotspots anywhere in the world, similar to FON. This, combined with micropayments model, makes for an interesting product. The product is available now for OS X and Windows. You can download it here. Coverage is fairly sparse in the U.S. but it’s considerably more robust overseas.

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Another Fun Tool From Aviary: A Photo Time Machine

2008-04-01T07:36:00.000-07:00

When we hear from Aviary it’s bound to be something entertaining and fun. The New York based company remains in private beta but adds to its suite of image manipulation products regularly. The newest tool is called Dodo, a web-based time machine.

A video demo is below. You upload an image to the service and it will “age” it based on user input. An example: upload a picture of yourself, tell it how many years out you want it to age you, tell it how much you drink and smoke, and not any planned plastic surgery. It will then show you what it thinks you’ll look like down the road.

Aviary says the tool isn’t just for fun - that it may also be useful for “tracking down long missing children,” and “determining if a girlfriend will end up looking like her mother.” Demo video below.

What’s the technology behind it? Well, it’s pretty close to magic. Anything is possible in early April, it seems.

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Reality Digital Raises $6.3 Million Series B

2008-04-01T01:34:00.000-07:00

Everybody wants to get in on social networking and user-generated video. Reality Digital, a white-label YouTube that lets media sites add video-uploading and social-networking features, raised $6.3 million in a series B financing. OpenView Venture Partners was the sole investor in the round. The company previously raised $2 million in a series A from private individuals in November, 2005.

In addition to video-uploading, Reality Digital’s platform can also handle audio, blogging, mashups, mobile uploads, profiles, forumsâ"pretty much any feature that you’d see on MySpace or Youtube. It also includes a full management suite that lets companies monitor usage and manage advertising campaigns. Customers include MTV Networks, the Travel Channel, Lonely Planet, and the Daily Reel Reality Digital also powers the back-end of Adobe Premier Express, which is Flash-based software for creating video mashups. Reality Digital competes with KickApps, VSocial, and VMix.

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Yahoo Shines A Light On Women 25 To 54

2008-03-31T19:32:00.000-07:00

Yahoo has launched Shine, a new content portal aimed at women aged 25 to 54.

At its core, Shine is a large blog with magazine style layout. Content is broken up into various subcategories with the front page highlighting the newest content from across the site. Topic areas include parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career and money, entertainment, fashion, beauty, home life, and astrology.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Amy Iorio, vice president for Yahoo Lifestyles saying internal research shows women are looking for a site to aggregate various content and communications tools:

“These women were sort of caretakers for everybody in their lives,” she said. “They didn’t feel like there was a place that was looking at the whole them — as a parent, as a spouse, as a daughter. They were looking for one place that gave them everything.”

With Shine, Yahoo will find itself competing with offerings from Glam Media, Sugar and iVillage. Screenshots as follows.

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Six Months In, And 600 Posts Later . . . The Worlds Of Blogging and Journalism Collide (In My Brain)

2008-03-31T13:30:00.000-07:00

Blink, and six months go by. Ever since I made the move from Time Inc. to TechCrunch, my life has become a whirlwind of nonstop blog posting, little sleep, and a growing addiction to news feeds, Techmeme, and my Blackberry. Last week, I wrote my 600th post (this one is No. 617). The boxes I brought over from my previous career are still stacked, unopened, in my TechCrunch office. A lone painting from my three-year-old son adorns the wall. I have not had time to unpack or even buy a bookshelf to put things on. Fourteen years worth of stuff, and it still amazes me I donât need any of it.

The journalist in me has been avoiding this post (too navel-gazing, too self-absorbed), but the blogger in me canât help it. Media is changingâ"how it is produced and how it is consumed. The worlds of blogging and journalism are colliding and I want to get some thoughts down on this transition before I forget what the old world was like or feel too comfortable in the new one. (Fair warning: If you don’t like long posts, skip this one).

Just as more and more blogs are building up professional writing staffs, more and more newspapers and magazines are requiring that their writers start blogging. A quick glance at the Techmeme Leaderboard, for instance, shows that its top spots are almost evenly split between blogs and traditional news organizations. Note that the blogs are all of the professional variety, complete with writing staffs (TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Ars Technica, Silicon Alley Insider, GigaOm, VentureBeat, etc.) and that the highest ranking news sites (CNET and the New York Times) also have the most active journalist bloggers.

But remember that all the big blogs that have turned professional and are now out there trying to build small media businesses started out as personal. Also, remember that these blogs (TechCrunch included) represent a tiny, tiny sliver of the millions of blogs out there. Unlike others, I don’t draw as sharp a dividing line between professional and personal blogs. Any blogger can rise to the level of contributing to the public discourse. Those that do so on a consistent basisâ"such as Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Nick Carr, Mark Cuban, Fred Wilson, and othersâ"gain wide followings, and with that a responsibility to their readers that is equal to any journalist’s.

A more useful distinction is that there are sources of information that readers trust and sources of information that they don’t. Once someone reaches that level of trust, their responsibility is to tell the truth as best they can.

For me, blogging and journalism began to blur long ago. I took over the Business 2.0 blog (which became the Next Net) from Damon Darlin, now technology editor at the New York Times. That was back in May, 2005, one month before Michael Arrington started TechCrunchâ"which just goes to show that Michael and I have been on the same wavelength from the start. Of course, back then, he took blogging much more seriously than I did.

At Business 2.0, my blog was always a side projectâ"although it grew to 50,000 feed subscribers. I was paid to write, package, and orchestrate articles for the print magazineâ"in addition to other sidelines, which included organizing mini-conferences and dabbling in Web video. Eventually, blogging became more important to the magazineâ"all writers and editors had to start one. But it could never quite shake that extracurricular tinge.

Working at TechCrunch is a completely different experience. For one thing, I no longer write long-form, narrative journalism. There is not much time for story-telling (except for weekend posts like this one). It is mostly breaking news, reporting facts and providing analysis. At TechCrunch, I am completely focused on blogging, 24/7. With a few exceptions, no single post is very difficult to write (unlike an in-depth magazine article that can require 50 interviews and weeks of travel, for instance). But taken as a whole, blogging is actually harder. That is because the blogging never stops. Just ask my wife and kids, who now mock me by repeating back my new mantra: âIâm almost done, just one more post.â

Putting out TechCrunch is like riding a bullet train. When I jumped aboard, it was already going 150 miles per hour. Six months ago, the main TechCrunch site was attracting about two million visitors a month and it was ranked No. 4 on the Technorati 100 list of the most linked-to blogs. Today, six months later, we are within spitting distance of three million visitors a month (2.9 million, to be exact), and last week we overtook Engadget for the first time to reach the No. 1 spot on the Technorati 100. (We’ll see how long that lasts, the Hufifngton Post is right on our tail).

So what is the TechCrunch formula? It is hard to say other than obsession. The main TechCrunch blog is written by four of usâ"Michael, Duncan, Mark, and me. (When I began, there were five, but Nick Gonzalez decided to opt for the comparatively saner hours of a startup). Despite our small size, we are a global organization. When not traveling, Michael and Mark write from California, Duncan writes from Australia, and I write from New York. Somebody is always onlineâ"often all of us. Michael literally never sleeps. It is really unhealthy.

What we do at TechCrunch is actually pretty simple. We write about Web startups and the larger tech companies that try to either copy or acquire them. Depending on the day, I could be liveblogging the launch of the Amazon Kindle, arguing about free speech in the Internet age, uncovering secret projects at Google, giving Yahoo unsolicited acquisition advice, or writing about a hot new startup.

There is always something else to write about, and not enough time to cover it. But we live or die by how fast we can post after a story breaks, if we can’t break it ourselves. We hardly have time to proofread our posts, as anyone who’s come across one of the frequent typos in TechCrunch knows. Luckily, our readers love to point out our mistakes in comments. They are our copy editors and fact checkers. (We love you guys). Our philosophy is that it is better to get 70 percent of a story up fast and get the basic facts right than to wait another hour (or a day) to get the remaining 30 percent. We can always update the post or do another one as new information comes in. More often than not, putting up partial information is what leads us to the truthâ"a source contacts us with more details or adds them directly into comments.

Some people question whether TechCrunch is even a blog anymore rather than a professional media site. But that distinction is becoming increasingly meaningless. The truth is that we are both. We compete with traditional news organizations, but with a small fraction of their staff. That is our competitive advantage. We certainly cover the news and do original reporting, but we also discuss news reported by others and are not shy about voicing our personal opinions. We are as much a filter as a source.

There is something about bloggingâ"the immediacy, the give and take, the point of viewâ"that helps it compete with traditional media for attention. And we don’t want to lose that. We like to speculate, argue, and debateâ"sometimes in ways that traditional journalists may think is unseemly. That’s okay, as long as our readers keep coming back for more.

Because what is a blog? It is a conversation with readers. And you don’t have to start a conversation knowing all the facts. But it helps if you end up with more than you start out with, and if you turn out to be right more often than wrong. Otherwise, people will stop listening to youâ"the same as they would with any media source.

(Hubble Telescope photo of colliding galaxies via Oswaldo).

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WordPress Gets Major Overhaul

2008-03-31T07:28:00.000-07:00

WordPress 2.5 has been released with a major overhaul to the interface and a range of new features.

The biggest change is in the appearance of the administration backend, which is described as being a “Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard.” The WordPress dashboard is now widget friendly, and users can include items such as stats, offering similar functionality to MovableType.

Other new features include multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, code friendly WYSIWYG, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and improved search.

A demo video from Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg above, and further details on the WordPress blog here.

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European news roundup

2008-03-31T01:26:00.000-07:00

As European startups prepare to march en masse to The Next Web conference in Amsterdam next week, the European tech scene is still feeling buoyant, whatever the global economic outlook. Certainly that was the feeling at Plugg in Brussels last week, a conference I chaired, and where the startups presenting were all now showing an increasing quality, in contrast with perhaps a few years ago. According to new data, 2007 was a bumper year for tech company exits - but reality has bitten in 2008, and there remains a debate amongst VCs about whether we are in a slump or a market correction.

TechCrunch people are starting to make a habit of chairing conferences in fact, as our own Eric Schonfeld will be doing just that at Next Web. To give him and you a heads-up, I’ve prepped a short outline about the companies presenting. And if you’re going, be sure to say hi to Eric and I. In the meantime, here’s a roundup of news from this side of the pond:

â¢Â Last.fm expanded in Germany and plans to “scrobble” video/TV as well as music… more

â¢Â XING, the European business social network competing with LinkedIn hit revenues of $30.98 million and the member base increased to nearly 5 million … more

â¢Â 100 Euro Tech startups were picked out for the Red Herring’s annual European competition… more

â¢Â The Guardian newspaper hired Matt McAlister, currently the director of Yahooâs developer network to begin building a development platform… more

â¢Â Zemanta launched its alpha for blogging on acid… more

â¢Â Facebook’s UK figures bounced back after the holiday period… more

â¢Â 3i re-terated that it was exiting from early stage in Europe… more

â¢Â IBM started a Cloud Computing Centre in Dublin… more

â¢Â We reviewed Intruders.TV, Europe’s answer to FastCompany.tv… more

â¢Â Video startup BlinkBox inked a deal with FreemantleMedia… more

â¢Â France’s Wikio RSS news aggregator launched in the UK… more

â¢Â EU startups competed at the Plugg conference… more

â¢Â Myrl launched a Web-based virtual world… more

â¢Â Spinvox raised $100m (as story we broke) … more

â¢Â Isango raised $8 million for its âtravel experiencesâ… more

â¢Â WAYN.com looked like it was on the block again… more

â¢Â CloudMade raised â¬2.4m to supercharge open source maps… more

â¢Â WeLoveLocal sold a majority stake to a local radio group… more

â¢Â Pointlessly, EU taxpayers were forced to fund a $306m Google rival… more

â¢Â We reviewed Forkd - a social network for recipes… more

â¢Â 20 UK startups are to visit Silicon Valley in April - come meet them… more

â¢Â The Russian government to buy YouTube clone for $15m… more

â¢Â Scott Rafer joined Polldaddy… more

â¢Â Google had strong European growth… more

Elsewhere:

â¢Â Online video viewing stats tripled in the UK… more

â¢Â UK real estate startup Zoopla! got off to a cracking start… more

â¢Â European mobile Internet users will triple, reaching 125 million by 2013… more

â¢Â Russiona search player Yandex questioned Google’s claim to dominance in Russia… more

â¢Â UK startup Reevoo received funding from a French VC firm… more

â¢Â The EU officially endorsed DVB-H for handset TV video… more

â¢Â Apple appears to be waiting for 3G iPhones before launching in Spain and Italy… more

â¢Â Behavioural targeting firm Phorm has been branded ‘illegal’ by a policy group amid further criticism of the company’s plans to track users via their ISP… more

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Could China Throw a Wrench in Microsoftâs Yahoo Deal?

2008-03-30T19:24:00.000-07:00

If Yahoo agrees to Microsoft’s buyout offer, the deal would still have to be pass muster with antitrust regulators here in the U.S, in Europe, and in China. As John Markoff points out in the NYT, a new Chinese law that will go into effect in August gives the Chinese government regulatory oversight over any merger that “involve acquisitions of Chinese companies or foreign businesses investing in Chinese companiesâ operations.” Yahoo owns a big stake in Chinese Web marketplace Alibaba, which also runs Taobao, Alipay and Yahoo China. It is unclear what China’s position would be on a Microsoft-Yahoo merger, but it could be the first big test of how it is going to exert its new regulatory muscles. Speeding up the deal before the Chinese law goes into effect probably wouldn’t help avoid a Chinese regulatory review, since it is unlikely that any deal would be approved by both the U.S. and Europe before August. (DoubleClick took a year, XM/Sirius took longer).

If China tries to use this opportunity to extract unreasonable concessions from Microsoft, there is always the option to sell Yahoo’s Alibaba stake, which is worth at least $3 billion. But that would mean abandoning a strong foothold in China, a market no Web company can ignore. On the other hand, China could go the other way and show its pro-market stance by being the first to approve the deal. That would be a great goodwill gesture to put out there during the Beijing Olympics.

Does Microsoft Need to Worry About China Blocking A Yahoo Deal?

(Photo by HVargas).

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Craigslist, Coming Soon In A Language Near You

2008-03-30T13:22:00.000-07:00

The Craigslist phenomenon continues, and it isn’t just in English any more.

The site dominates the U.S. market for classified advertisements, with nearly 27 million unique monthly visitors (Ebay’s Kijiji, by contrast, has just 2.3 million U.S. visitors/month). But the fact that the service was available only in English hurt it internationally, where Kijiji is a close second.

Craigslist is now available in Italian, French, Portuguese and German. “Basque, maybe Klingon” are coming soon.

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Amazon Muscles Print-On-Demand Services

2008-03-30T07:20:00.000-07:00

Amazon has announced that it will only sell print-on-demand books printed by its own print-on-demand service BookSurge.

The print-on-demand book business has thrived in the last few years as players such as Lulu, Blurb and others have catered to publishers looking to reduce overhead on inventory. It will be very difficult for anyone to compete with Amazon in the print-on-demand space.

The decision may also cause book prices to rise with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Amazon BookSurge prices are higher than other print-on-demand providers.

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The Zoho Business Machine Rolls Forward: Invoices Next

2008-03-30T01:18:00.000-07:00

Zoho continues to launch a new product every month or two. Next up is a way for businesses to send electronic invoices. It joins a suite of sixteen other business-focused applications, including a full “Office” suite (online clones for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.). Most of their applications are free or significantly less expensive than competitors.

Other applications include web conferencing, and most recently a portal to manage human resourcesâ"recruiting, org charts, HR forms, etc.

This is certainly not the first online invoicing tool. But the value in Zoho is, increasingly, the fact that they have so many services under the same brand/sign on. The invoices product will be free for users who send up to five invoices per month. Paid packages range up to $35/month.

A quick way to understand which Zoho applications are free and which have a fee - the productivity applications listed on the left hand column are free, the business applications on the right will have a fee.

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TechCrunch DeadPooled My Company And All I Got Was This Lousy iPod Shuffle

2008-03-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

Who says nothing good comes from getting deadpooled?

Blake Machado was the winner of a YouTube announcement contest we held a couple weeks back. He was the first to guess correctly that YouTube would come out with some new APIs to spread its influence over the web. The prize was an iPod shuffle.

Turns out YouTube’s announcement was particularly poignant for Blake given his connection to the previous deadpooled Stage6. As he revealed to us after winning:

Ironically guessing/winning this is bitter-sweet. I was the PM of
Stage6 and this is an area where we had planned to beat YouTube to the
punch and gain some, hopefully, extremely positive results. We would
have as it was scheduled for Feb. release — oh well.

So how’d we comfort him in his time of need? Etched a reminder of that deadpooling into his “consolation” prize, of course. You’re welcome, Blake.

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Stealth Startup Glassdoor.com Takes $3 Million Series B

2008-03-29T14:14:00.000-07:00

Glassdoor.com has taken $3 million Series B in a round led by Benchmark Capital.

Not a lot is known about the Sausalito, CA based company. CEO and Founder Robert Hohman was previously the President of Hotwire.com, and the team includes Richard Barton, CEO of Zillow and Tim Besse, previously in senior management at Expedia. PEHub suggests the company is a “social networking company focused on employment conditions in the workplace,” where as Rent Bits suggests that it may be Real Estate related.

The company is still very much in stealth mode and gives no hints on their site aside from saying that “except that we think it’s pretty unique and going to be a lot of fun to build.” The company may already be struggling with bringing the mystery product to market, with their site saying that they “expect to have something live in early 2008,” yet are still displaying a holding page.

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The New York Post Got It WrongâMicrosoftâs Alternate Board Slate For Yahoo Is All Sewn Up

2008-03-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

This morning, the New York Post ran a story with this headline:

M’SOFT NOT YET ON BOARD
NO NAMES LINED UP YET FOR YAHOO!

The article goes on to suggest that nobody in Silicon Valley wants to be on Microsoft’s alternate board for Yahoo for fear of “alienating both Yahoo! insiders and others who are aligned with the search giant.” This was news to us since we started gathering names of people who might be on that alternate board two weeks ago.

The sad truth is that nobody is afraid of Jerry Yang or any other Yahoo insiders (what’s left of them). While the Post may have uncovered some individuals who may have been considered for the alternate board and declined, that is not the same as evidence “that the software giant actually doesn’t have anyone lined up.” Because, in fact, Microsoft does have an alternate board lined up and the people chosen for it have agreed to serve if called upon to do so. We have confirmed this with a member of the alternate board.

So why hasn’t Microsoft released its proposed slate? It is not because it cannot find anyone to serve on it. More likely, the reason that Microsoft has gone dark is because it is deep in negotiations with Yahoo to close the deal. The expectation for a revised bid of $34 a share or more is well-founded. If a deal is imminent, there is no point in doing something hostile like propose a new slate of directors. The absence of a slate actually means the chances of the deal going through are high. If Microsoft does decide to reveal the slate in the next few days, then you’ll know the negotiations aren’t going well.

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An Interview with Virgin Americaâs head of In-Flight Entertainment

2008-03-29T02:10:00.000-07:00

In honor of Linux week at CrunchGear we sat down with Charles Ogilvie, Director of In-Flight Entertainment, to talk about how this start-up airline made Tux fly.

CG: Why did you pick linux for RED?

CO: Linux is very stable and agile. We were able to pare down the embedded seat-back side to only the libraries we need, license a container app and then write the code needed to tie everything together

Which distribution are you using?
Flavors of Red Hat & Fedora (we have embedded seat-back units, seat & distribution boxes and a head-end that consists of some file servers)

How long was it in testing?
Weâve been developing it for 4 years and it has gone through numerous iterations. Before a new version is released, it is tested on a simulation rack

Did Microsoft approach you about running Windows on the back end?
Weâve talked with a lot of software vendors.

What was the hardest part about creating the system? Was it the software? The hardware?
The hardest part is maintaining agility. The beauty of the architecture is that we can continue to move forward, innovate and constantly look for additional areas to add new, unprecedented functionality like our inflight food ordering system or seat-to-seat chat.

Why don’t more people use Linux in high traffic situations like this?
I don’t know. They should.

How often does it crash? The Linux machines, not the planes…
Resets or reboots occur in different areas. Because we are trying different open source games, we do notice issues with porting them for example. Over time, we work through those issues. Our inflight team members (flight attendants) have the ability to reboot seats. The seat units also monitor themselves and can reset themselves if they freeze or lose connectivity (a heart-beat) with the head-end.

What’s the deal with the in-flight chat? Why was that included? Have people connected through that?
Seat-to-seat chat and TV-Chat are some of the most fun features we have. Weâve had everything from people striking up great conversations with other guests in chats to groups using it laugh and have fun while watching the same program. The whole idea behind it is to allow a sense of community to take place in a typically confined, airborne environment. I cannot wait for broadband and the chance for our passengers to chat with the ground

What’s in store for the future besides in-flight Wi-Fi?
The ability to compose a music-video playlist is pretty cool and on the horizon. The READ section is also awesome in that it takes what is typically a bunch of wasted trees (excess newspapers, periodicals) and allows us to be more environmentally friendly and timely with things like news/event info/sports/entertainment etc.

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More DoGooders On The Internet: Intent To Focus On Wellness

2008-03-28T14:06:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I had the chance to check out an upcoming Los Angeles-based startup called Intent, which should launch publicly this summer. And while Intent is a for profit startup, the founders say their goal, like Causes, is to help people along the road to making money.

The intent founders, which include Deepak Chopra’s daughter Mallika Chopra as well as Sarah Ross and Sal Taylor Kydd, will aim to fill a niche between lifestyle sites and medical properties - a destination for wellness content, a syndication platform, and a branded hub for people seeking to share their intentions (personal, social, spiritual and environmental). The site will include original content from wellness category luminaries, medical professionals, media personalities, and pop culture icons. They aren’t willing to disclose much more for now.

The company has raised under “less than $1 million” in an angel round of financing that included Richard Wolpert and other unnamed investors. The Intent blog is here.

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A content suggestion engine for blogging? That could workâ¦

2008-03-28T08:04:00.000-07:00

Launching in Alpha today is Zemanta, the European startup which has developed a facility for Wordpress blogs to suggest contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags using an internally developed semantic analysis engine. Eventually they will also integrate tabs for third parties who provide vertical-specific suggestions (tech or SEO, for instance). The upshot? Start writing a blog post and Zemanta looks at it and then starts to add the most likely links to the text, which you can then edit (something a lot of bloggers would kill for no doubt). It also builds links to related stories. This kind of application exists a lot in academic and enterprise content management systems but hasnât appeared on the Web very much to date as these tend to be very CPU/resource intense technologies. So Zemanta is a web service API not unlike Akismet in its ability to look intelligently at content and decide what to do with it.

You can now download a demo which works with Firefox and TypePad, Wordpress and Blogger. It’s in alpha material, so don’t expect it to be full-formed.

The Zemanta team emerged out of Slovenia and took part in Seedcamp (a London-based Y-combinator-style incubator) last year and was one of the six selected for funding. They recently announced a $1.5 million seed round, led by Eden Ventures with additional investment from Saul and Robin Klein through The Accelerator Group. The co-founders are AndraÅ¾ Tori and BoÅ¡tjan Å petiÄ, both hyperactive, smart young guys who I met at Seedcamp last year. They have since brought in an experienced CEO in the shape of AleÅ¡ Å petiÄ, a former O’Reilly author and CEO of an IT integrator in Slovenia. As it happens, the Zemanta story is quite typical of the European startup scene right now - very “London meets New Europe”.

Zemanta Wordpress Plugin Teaser from zemanta on Vimeo.

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Riding Up the Hudson With a Dash GPS On My Dash

2008-03-28T02:02:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I went for a drive with my wife up the Hudson River. Well, she was driving. I was playing with the new Dash Express GPS navigation system. The Dash is not perfect, but it holds a lot of promise. (See CrunchGear’s review). It was able to pinpoint a hard-to-find home on a country road. And it let me toggle between a 2-D and 3-D view, bleating out in a computerized female voice when the next turn was coming up. I had to mute that because the voice was driving my wife crazy. In fact, she found the whole screen pretty distracting, so I had to turn it away from her. But my three-year-old son in the back seat couldn’t get enough of it. He kept yelling at me to move my hand whenever I was blocking his view of the blue car on the screen that somehow went exactly wherever we did. Although, he did point out that our real car is green. (Can’t those Dash folks get anything r! ight?)

The Dash is a GPS unit that can communicate back to the Internet using cellular data networks or WiFi (it contains three chips: GPS,WiFi, and GPRS). You can’t browse the Web, but you can use the touch screen to search Yahoo Local for nearby gas stations, restaurants, airports, and any other place that might be listed. One of my favorite features: it can tell you the price of gas at each station nearby so you can price shop without wasting gas driving around. The Dash even found a chocolate shop for us when the one that had been recommended to us was closed. Once you find a place you want to go to, you just hit “route” and it gets you there. It picks what it thinks are the two or three most direct routes. And it even shows you the traffic on those routes based on historic! al patterns, sensors, and, if available, traffic data from other Dash drivers.

You also can program the Dash from the Web and create GPS mashups. For instance, you can mark your own addresses on a map, find places on Yahoo local, or tap into any GeoRSS feed (or make your own) and send it to the GPS unit in your car. I’d love to be able to access the Web with a browser as well, or at least get regular RSS feeds, but the temptation to check those things while driving might be too great (which is why that is not a feature).

The best thing about the Dash is that it connects you to other Dash drivers to give you traffic intelligence. Because each Dash unit is sending back data about its speed and location, once a critical mass of a few hundred or a thousand drivers get a Dash in the city where you live, you will arguably have the best live traffic information available. At last that is the theory. Early adopters will have to wait for that critical mass to build up before they can test it out.

One request: For people living in big cities with street parking, knowing when a nearby Dash driver just vacated a spot would be a killer feature for future versions of the software.

Okay, I actually have some more requests. An opt-in messaging system with other Dash drivers would be awesome. If handled correctly, could be very helpful and create a strong sense of community among Dash drivers. (No plans for that either, but I think it is a good idea).

Here is where the Dash needs some help. If it picks the correct route, you are fine. But if you know a better one, you cannot tell it which way you want to go. You can only pick a destination and hope that it doesn’t lead you astray. I noticed that it tends to favor major highways, even if they are 20 miles out of your way. All you can do is keep driving, and eventually it will pick a new route based on your GPS coordinates. Something as simple as being able to move the line of the suggested route with your finger, like you can on Google Maps with a cursor, would fix that problem.

Another gripe: you cannot do multi-point routing from the GPS unit itself. You must enter a new destination each time you get into the car. (Although, you can create a map of destinations on the Web and send them to your unit as saved destinations).

A final major flaw with the digital map in the Dash is that as you are driving along a strange highway, it doesn’t show you what cities you are passing. That is how I mentally keep track of where I am when I am driving long distances. On that ride along the Hudson, I found myself repeatedly referring to our old, beat-up, road atlas to get my bearings. The thing that kills me is that the Dash knew exactly what cities we were passing, it just wouldn’t show me.

These are all minor quibbles. I am particularly excited about the the fact that the device’s capabilities will grow over time, especially the ability to see live traffic information and to download customized lists of destinations and geographically-relevant feeds. The Dash goes on sale starting now at Amazon for $399, plus a monthly fee of $10 (the first three months are free).

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Phishing Scam Targeting Facebook Users

2008-03-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

We’ve had two separate reader reports of a Phishing Scam targeting Facebook users.

The scam involves a notice appearing on the wall of user profiles as a message from a friend, saying “Hey, I got a new facebook account. Im going to delete this one, so add my new profile” then with a link that appears to be a link to the new profile. The actual link goes to a URL on view-facebookprofiles.com, a domain registered (and whois protected) on Namecheap and hosted at Softlayer that looks identical to the Facebook login page:

Users fooled into resubmitting their Facebook details on this page then have their Facebook accounts hijacked and all of their contacts receive a similar message, propagating the phishing scam.

It’s not clear yet exactly what the phishing scammers are planning on using the compromised accounts for, or how far it has spread. One tipper claimed that many of his friends had been caught as well.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen phishing on Facebook, but certainly it could be the most well co-ordinated and widespread attack so far.

Obviously if you see a message in Facebook similar to this, it’s a trap! If you’ve been caught or have shots of this thing in action, send us an email or leave a comment.

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AT&T Is Working on Its Own 3D Browser (Pogo). What Are They Thinking?

2008-03-27T13:58:00.000-07:00

It takes either a very brave or very foolish company to enter the browser wars. But that is exactly what AT&T is doingâ"in a small way. I was just shown a demo for Pogo, a 3D browser based on Mozilla that is in private beta (we should be getting invites in a couple weeks). It is a project that comes out AT&T’s business development group and Vizible, a Toronto-based company whose 3-D rendering engine gives Pogo a very different look than other browsers. (AT&T is an investor in Vizible). “The concept is not to rebuild the browser,” says Vizible founder and CTO Anthony Gallo, “it is to extend it.” For the foreseeable future, Pogo will only be available for Windows machines.

Pogo works like a regular browser, but it manages pages more visually (see screenshots below). Instead of tabs, it has a scrollable strip on the bottom that shows a thumbnail image of each site you’ve visited during your session. A “Springboard” button on the top left takes you to a grid view of your favorite sitesâ"akin to what you might put on your bookmark toolbar. You can also view the rectangular cells in various Coverflow-like animations. You can do the same with regular bookmarks, which are treated as “collections.” You can drag Website images into each collection or associate a collection with a tag. Then any page you tag going forward gets automatically placed within that collection. Your browsing history is also represented visually, as is your search history. For any particular search, every page you click through to gets saved as part of yet another collectionâ"although you can only see one search set at a time.

A big turnoff, though, is that there are also banner ads in the Springboard and other visual modes. And the search bar is limited to Google and some AT&T-owned product-, image-, and Yellow-Pages-search engines. You can’t swap in another search engine, at least through the beta. Oh, and it only works on Windows.

The visual tricks are neat, but at this early stage I am not sure how many people would ditch their existing browsers for better visualizations. Does it let you browse faster or more efficiently than you could before? I am not sure it does. In any case, AT&T would have been better off releasing this as a plug-in for Firefox. But presenting the Web in a richer, more visual way is definitely part of a bigger user-interface trend we’ve been seeing, especially in search (SearchMe, Snap, and ManagedQ come to mind).

Where Pogo is going is more interesting than where it is at this early stage. Imagine being able to manage all your mediaâ"video, audio, photosâ"through the same visual interface. If Pogo allowed me to “collect” Web videos, photos, and music, and manage them in a unified way like I can with media on my desktop, that would be a big step in the right direction. Check out the video below of Pogo in action, which was taken by my colleague John Biggs of CrunchGear. Towards the end you will see some shots of the underlying Vizible technology, which I personally find more exciting.

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CG News: Motorola splits

2008-03-27T07:56:00.000-07:00

In a clear move to keep Motorolaâs flagging mobile phone sales from pulling down its lucrative broadband and switching enterprise services the company is splitting into two publicly-traded organizations. The Mobile Devices company will focus on mobile handsets while the Broadband and Mobility solutions sector will work on secure voice and data communication along with broadband for enterprises and government.

Motorola shareholders will receive shares in each of the companies once the process is completed.

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Peerflix Procrastinating On Customer Refunds

2008-03-27T01:54:00.000-07:00

As we reported yesterday, Peerflix is to close its core DVD sharing/ swapping business April 23. Since then we’ve heard reports from users who are having problems cashing out their Peeflix accounts. Here’s what one reader received:

The Peersafe Protection Program will also be terminating effective April 23, 2008 meaning that you will no longer be able to make any Peersafe claims starting April 23, 2008. So, if you have DVDs that you have been holding on to but were planning to send at some point, now?s the time! If your Trade Cash account balance is greater than $10 and you would like to cash out your remaining Trade Cash balance, you must do so before April 30, 2008. To request a cash out of your Trade Cash, please log in to Peerflix.com and click My Account in the upper right corner, then click the My Cash tab and then click on the Request Cashout button and follow the indicated steps. As of April 30, 2008 you will no longer be able to request any Trade Cash payments from Peerflix and your Trade Cash will immediately expire and be forfeited. All cash out requests remain subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Peerflix Service Policies and will be charged a $! 10 processing fee.

Closing a service and charging users $10 to cash out is a little rough, but not only that they’ll have to wait as well. After following the process, they received this message:

Please note that requested amount is not removed from your cash account until the request processed. Cashout requests are processed and paid approximately 45 days after the end of the month in which you made the request. You will receive a confirmation notice when your request is processed and your payment is on the way. If you do not have the necessary funds in your account at the time payment is made, you will receive the remaining balance, but under no circumstances will we issue disbursement for less than $10.

45 days from the end of the month would place the transaction due date as mid May, 3-4 weeks after Peerflix is due to cease trading. As the reader commented, it “doesn’t sound good.”

For a company wishing to continue (in another form) as an ad network, leaving your existing customers empty handed isn’t going to create a lot of goodwill going forward. Peerflix burnt through $10 million in funding received over two rounds from 3i Group, Battery Ventures and BV Capital.

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Google Recommends No Vote On Human Rights, Anti-Censorship Proposals

2008-03-26T19:52:00.000-07:00

Google has recommended a no vote against two shareholder proposals to be put to their annual general meeting May 8 that relate to free speech and human rights.

Proposal 4 comes from the The Office of the Comptroller of New York City and St. Scholastica Monastery. The Office of the Comptroller of New York City is the custodian and trustee of the Retirement System of NYC Teachers, Police, Fire Deparment and Education System. It reads:

Internet Censorship

Whereas, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are fundamental human rights, and free use of the Internet is protected in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees freedom to âreceive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiersâ, and

Whereas, the rapid provision of full and uncensored information through the Internet has become a major industry in the United States, and one of its major exports, and

Whereas, political censorship of the Internet degrades the quality of that service and ultimately threatens the integrity and viability of the industry itself, both in the United States and abroad, and

Whereas, some authoritarian foreign governments such as the Governments of Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam block, restrict, and monitor the information their citizens attempt to obtain, and

Whereas, technology companies in the United States such as Google, that operate in countries controlled by authoritarian governments have an obligation to comply with the principles of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and

Whereas, technology companies in the United States have failed to develop adequate standards by which they can conduct business with authoritarian governments while protecting human rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression,

Therefore, be it resolved, that shareholders request that management institute policies to help protect freedom of access to the Internet which would include the following minimum standards:

1) Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.

2) The company will not engage in pro-active censorship.

3) The company will use all legal means to resist demands for censorship. The company will only comply with such demands if required to do so through legally binding procedures.

4) Users will be clearly informed when the company has acceded to legally binding government requests to filter or otherwise censor content that the user is trying to access.

5) Users should be informed about the companyâs data retention practices, and the ways in which their data is shared with third parties.

6) The company will document all cases where legally-binding censorship requests have been complied with, and that information will be publicly available.

Resolution 5 comes from Harrington Investments and calls for a Google Board Committee on Human Rights:

4.7 COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RIGHTS

RESOLVED: To amend the Bylaws, by inserting the following after section 4.6:

Section 4.7. Board Committee on Human Rights. There is established a Board Committee on Human Rights, which is created and authorized to review the implications of company policies, above and beyond matters of legal compliance, for the human rights of individuals in the US and worldwide.

The Board of Directors is authorized in its discretion consistent with these Bylaws, the Articles of Incorporation and applicable law to (1) select the members of the Board Committee on Human Rights, (2) provide said committee with funds for operating expenses, (3) adopt regulations or guidelines to govern said Committeeâs operations, (4) empower said Committee to solicit public input and to issue periodic reports to shareholders and the public, at reasonable expense and excluding confidential information, including but not limited to an annual report on the implications of company policies, above and beyond matters of legal compliance, for the human rights of individuals in the US and worldwide, and (5) any other measures within the Boardâs discretion consistent with these Bylaws and applicable law.

Nothing herein shall restrict the power of the Board of Directors to manage the business and affairs of the company. The Board Committee on Human Rights shall not incur any costs to the company except as authorized by the Board of Directors.

SUPPORTING STATEMENT

The proposed Bylaw would establish a Board Committee on Human Rights which would review and make policy recommendations regarding human rights issues raised by the companyâs activities and policies. We believe the proposed Board Committee on Human Rights could be an effective mechanism for addressing the human rights implications of the companyâs activities and policies as they emerge anywhere in the world. In defining âhuman rights,â proponents suggest that the committee could use the US Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as nonbinding benchmark or reference documents.

Google, Yahoo and other US companies operating in China have come under heavy attack over the last 12 months for operating within the boundaries of local law where those laws are not aligned with Western ideals. Google’s stance against proposals such as these will not win the Mountain View search giant many fans in the human rights movement.

(in part via Barrons)

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Liveblogging the OpenSocial.org Conference Call

2008-03-26T13:50:00.000-07:00

The conference call is about to start. Let’s see what they have to say beyond the original announcement earlier today of Opensocial.org. Here are my notes:

Wade Chambers from Yahoo kicks things off. Yahoo has been impressed by OpenSocial so far. Feels OpenSocial is rapidly developing and has a lot of potential [obviously not there yet, though].

Joe Kraus, director of product development at Google: Explains what OpenSocial isâ"write once, deploy anywhere. Two major container partners have launched (orkut and MySpace), with Hi5 coming online soon. Today OpenSocial reaches 200 million users. “If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far, go together.” OpenSocial is about going far.

Our collective goal was to make sure that OpenSocial is on a strong footing for years to come. Announcing today intent to creating a non-profit organization. It will provide a safe harbor for intellectual property. Expect the foundation to be set up in next 90 days. Yahoo, MySpace, Google have agreed to patent non-assertion covenant. Once the foundation is created, it will get similar non-assertion clauses from all OpenSocial contributors. Google will contribute OpenSocial trademark and other documentation, specifications, etc.

Steve Pearman, SVP of product strategy, MySpace: Quite a lot has happened since launch with MySpace as a container. What does OpenSocial mean to containers? [”containers is OS-lingo for hosting sites like MySpace, Bebo, etc]. It means specialization. Real winners will be the users when everyone can specialize on what they do best.

Q&A:

Miguel Helft, NYT: To what extent is creation of foundation a response to concerns that Google would own the IP created by OpenSocial?

Wade: From the Yahoo perspective, while Google has been doing a great job shepherding the community, it is a community effort. This is the next step.

Joe Kraus: this is just the next step in where OpenSocial needs to be heading because it is a community-driven process. More a natural evolution than a particular response.

Me (TechCrunch): Why weren’t other OS partners involved in this announcement and if there is ever any revenue associated with the foundation, how will that be split up?

Joe: the idea was to invite the whole community to form this foundation. In the meantime, until that is set up you have seen MySpace, Google and Yahoo enter into an agreement give [protection to the community], the intent is involve the whole community

The Opensocial specification doesn’t say anything about monetization. Each of the different social networks implementing OpenSocial can spit up revenues in any way it sees fit. The foundation will not be taking in any revenue because that is not in the specifications.

Steve, MySpace: In the event there would be some revenue lines to the foundation, I don’t know what they would be, maybe T-shirts, they would go towards furthering the purpose of the foundation, not something that would b split among constituents.

Eric Eldon (VentureBeat): Some stats on who OS is doing?

Joe: Since specification 0.5, we made two major revisions, with 0.7 everyone felt it was launch ready. two major containers have launched with OS , MySpace and Orkut, Hi5 coming next Tuesday.

Steve: thousands of developers, hundreds of application in last two weeks.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb: Are there concerns about OpenSocial splintering? [Uh, yeah].

Steve: Early feedback from app developers is that once they got OpenSocial running on one OS social network it took only hours to make it work on another. We think we are off to a great start. [Non-response, see above]

Wade: We are supporting OS because we feel it will benefit the Internet, users, and developers. [Double non-response]

[I agree with Marshall that splintering is the big issue here. Everyone pays lip service to OpenSocial, but if they are big enough they go ahead and try to create their own platform or team up with Facebook. See imeem and Bebo. Anyone else think this is a problem?]

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Save the Developers! Stop Using Internet Explorer 6

2008-03-26T07:48:00.000-07:00

There is a scourge on the Web. It is called Internet Explorer 6. Even though the more recent version of Microsoft’s browser, IE7, has been around for more than two years, IE6 still represents 31 percent of all browsers out there (versus only 22 percent for IE7 and 36.5 percent for Firefox). This upgrade lag is simply unacceptableâ"to programmers, that is, who find it a real pain to make sure their Web apps work on five different browsers. Not only that, but IE6 supports some non-standard features and functions that are not compatible with other browsers. The security vulnerabilities aren’t too much fun either.

It’s too much work and, quite frankly, it is driving some programmers batty. Which is why a group of them have created SaveTheDevelopers.org, an organization dedicated to making the Web a better place for developers (and thus for users as well). Web developers can grab a piece of code to put on their Websites which will detect if a visitor is using an outmoded browser (IE6, cough). When the offending browser is detected, a pop-down window will appear (assuming those aren’t blocked) which will direct the user to a page where they can upgrade to IE7, or the latest version of Firefox or Safari.

More campaigns are planned for the future to whip those laggard Web surfers into shape, and once again make the Web safe for developers.

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Peerflix To Close DVD Business, Continue As Ad Seller Only

2008-03-26T01:46:00.000-07:00

Peerflix has announced it will close its previous core DVD trading platform April 23.

In an email to members (via Stowe Boyd)

Dear Peerflix Member,

Effective April 23, 2008 Peerflix is discontinuing the Marketplace and DVD buy/sell/trade portions of Peerflix.com. While the Peerflix.com web site will be available beyond April 23, 2008, you will no longer be able to buy, sell, send or receive DVDs on Peerflix as of that date. While we have made considerable investments in our marketplace platform over the past four years, unfortunately the escalating costs of operating the marketplace do not make that business viable at this juncture. As we move out of the DVD marketplace business, we are focusing our energy and resources on building the Peerflix Media Network which is now the web’s fastest growing vertical movie network.

Erick wrote in November that Peerflix didn’t know what it wanted to be; after four months it would appear that it wants to be a BlogAds or niche FM for movie sites and nothing more.

Peerflix has taken $10 million over two rounds that included 3i Group, Battery Ventures and BV Capital.

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Yeah, But He Didnât Predict The iPhone, Did He?

2008-03-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

“A typical vacation in 2008 is to spend a week at an undersea resort,” wrote James R. Berry in 1968. His article, 40 Years In The Future, had a few things almost right, and a ton of things that probably won’t be reality even a hundred years from now.

Berry guessed right on flat panel displays and computers that do a lot of work for you. But he also thought we’d have robots to do our housework, cars that go 250 mph in heavy traffic, and domed, climate controlled cities.

Sadly, he also guessed that medical care was universal and competent, his biggest mistake: “Medical research has guaranteed that most babies born in the 21st century will live long and healthy lives. Heart disease has virtually been eliminated by drugs and diet. If hearts or other major organs do give trouble, they can be replaced with artificial organs.”

He almost touched on the Internet, too, when he said “The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer,” and “TV-telephone shopping is common.” And he came eerily close here:

Suddenly your TV phone buzzes. A business associate wants a sketch of a new kind of impeller your firm is putting out for sports boats. You reach for your attache case and draw the diagram with a pencil-thin infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen lining the back of the case. The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associateâs office, 200 mi. away. He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device. He wishes you good luck at the coming meeting and signs off.

Overall, not a bad job and, frankly, better than most of us could probably do at predicting the future 40 years from today. The entire article is below.

(more…)

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Google Throws Another Wireless Ball in The Air: WiFi 2.0

2008-03-25T13:42:00.000-07:00

No sooner does Google exit the FCC’s 700Mhz spectrum auction with its $4.6 billion still in its pocket and its rules imposed on its competitors than it throws up yet another ball in the broadband wireless game. Earlier today, it proposed to the FCC that the unused “white spaces” in television broadcast signals which will be freed up as a result of the transition to digital TV should be converted into unlicensed spectrum for long-distance wireless broadband applications. This spectrum could become a “Wifi 2.0″â"free! , unlicensed, and able to reach much farther than WiFi can today.

The white spaces Google is talking about are parts of the television spectrum that offered extra headroom for channels 2 to 51. Since digital TV signals are more efficient than analog signals, that buffer will no longer be necessary after February, 2009 (when the conversion to digital sets is mandated in the U.S.). So what to do with the extra spectrum? Google is saying give it away and see what happens.

That is not a bad idea. Look at what happened with WiFi. It became so popular and useful precisely because nobody had to bid billions of dollars just for the right to build out a network. Also, it is not clear how much the government would be able to raise even if it did try to auction off the white space. The spectrum is not as clean as the (separate) 700 MHz spectrum that was just auctioned off for $19.6 billion. There are more interference issues. But Google and other tech companies, including Dell and Microsoft, argue that those issues can be solved more or less.

Why can’t Google make up its mind on which wireless technology it wants to go with? Diversity, actually, is the point. It wants to do everything it can to usher in an era of wireless broadband Internet servicesâ"on existing mobile networks, on next-generation mobile networks built on the 700 MHz spectrum, on unlicensed WiFi 2.0 networks, on WiMax networks, on everything. (In fact, with recent rumors surfacing again that Sprint and ClearWire are in talks to merge their WiMax networks but are looking for investorsâ"Intel is supposedly not interestedâ"maybe Google will take some of the $4.6 billion it didn’t have to spend on the 700MHz spectrum to prop up that dealâ"although WiMax has its own technical issues).

Google also wants as many companies as possible to build Android phones and wireless devices for as many of those networks as possible so that even more people can search the Web and use Google applications when they are not sitting in front of their computers.

Keep your eye on the bouncing balls.

(Photo by SideLong).

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South Park Studios - Itâs Like AllSP, But Legal

2008-03-25T07:40:00.000-07:00

It hasn’t been hard for people to watch the cult favorite show South Park (possibly the best show on television) online. Sites like Allsp (All South Park) have had the entire catalog available for some time. And episodes are always available on BitTorrent immediately after broadcast.

Instead of fighting BitTorrent and sites like Allsp, South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker are simply going to try to make them irrelevant by offering something better. Along with Comedy Central, they’ve expanded South Park Studios, where viewers can stream any episode of South Park from the show’s twelve seasons. The joint venture was announced last year, but added whole episode viewing today.

The main benefits: quality is significantly better than the clips on Allsp, and are searchable. Of course, there’s also no question about copyright infringement when you watch shows on the sanctioned site. The downside is that the episodes are not embeddable (although clips like the one above are), and there are ads includes in the streams.

Revenues from the joint venture are being split 50/50 between Comedy Central and Stone/Parker.

The viewing experience is very similar to Hulu. But the fact that the entire catalog of episodes is available makes the site much more attractive. Hulu only shows the last few episodes of any particular show, so new viewers are unable to start from the beginning. If Hulu wants to be the long term default library for online television, they need to work out licensing deals that allow them to upload all historical shows, too.

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LongJump Wants You to Stop Pushing Paper Around the Office

2008-03-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

LongJump, a hosted applications environment that competes with the likes of Salesforce and Coghead, is introducing a new visual workflow system meant to streamline business processes.

Companies will be able to set up this workflow system in conjunction with existing LongJump applications, such as those that track businesses’ assets or contracts. Before the introduction of this workflow system, these applications could be used to manage databases of relevant objects. Now they can also be used to program and execute on procedures that regularly occur around them.

Do expense requests usually go through your company’s hierarchy before getting approved? You can now chart this process in LongJump with “states” and “actions”, respectively represented as circles and vectors in the visual workflow creation tool. Each circle represents a type of person within the company (supervisor, manager, CEO, etc) that must make a decision on the expense request (approve, deny, issue check, etc). These decisions cause the request to travel along the vectors until a final conclusion to the process (request fulfilled).

This process would ordinarily be accomplished over email or even physical slips of paper that make their way through various “in” and “out” boxes around the office. Now it can all be handle in one central online location with variously designated user accounts for employees.

LongJump says that its visual workflow solution is the first to come integrated with a full-featured database application suite. Competitors include Appian (a hosted solution) and Tibco Business Studio (non-hosted), but these must be used with something like Oracle or SAP. Since many large corporations are happy with their existing database solutions, this new workflow product will appeal mostly to small and medium-sized businesses.

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These Crazy Musicians Still Think They Should Get Paid For Recorded Music

2008-03-24T19:36:00.000-07:00

Why is it the Brits have all the crazy-stupid ideas about how to screw up the music industry even more than it is already?

British musician Billy Bragg argues in the New York Times today that some portion of Bebo’s $850 million sale price should go to the musicians who uploaded their music to the site.

Note that Bragg neatly sidesteps the fact that music was uploaded to the site by artists (or their labels) themselves, with full knowledge that they would not receive payments of any kind (except free marketing, of course, and access to Bebo’s tens of millions of music loving users).

His argument is based on the notion that Bebo’s success was based on the availability of streaming music on the site: “The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise…Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.”

Bragg also tries to take direct credit for Bebo’s success:

Mr. Birch has cited me as an influence in Beboâs attitude toward artists. He got in touch two years ago after I took MySpace to task over its proprietary rights clause. I was concerned that the site was harvesting residual rights from original songs posted there by unsigned musicians. As a result of my complaints, MySpace changed its terms and conditions to state clearly that all rights to material appearing on the site remain with the originator.

A few weeks later, Mr. Birch came to see me at my home. He was hoping to expand his business by hosting music and wanted my advice on how to construct an artist-centered environment where musicians could post original songs without fear of losing control over their work. Following our talks, Mr. Birch told the press that he wanted Bebo to be a site that worked for artists and held their interests first and foremost.

Bragg does attempt to argue his case, primarily by (1) saying that social networks are as much to blame for declining music sales as the people who are downloading songs in violation of copyrights, and (2) saying that arguments that social networks are doing musicians a favor by marketing their music are “disingenuous.”

Both arguments have holes in them so large you could drive a BitTorrent stream through them.

Social networks have absolutely nothing to do with the decline in music sales. The fact that recorded music can be reproduced at a zero marginal cost is why music sales are declining. You can hate that or love that, but it’s simple economics that drives it.

And in fact the argument that social networks actually provide free marketing to artists is not disingenuous. In fact, it’s quite correct. Bragg notes that radio stations pay royalties for playing songs, even though they also obviously provide free marketing for artists.

His argument isn’t quite factually correct - In the U.S. royalties are paid by radio stations to song writers but not artists (it comes to about $450 million per year). In most of the rest of the world, though, artists are paid royalties. But a much more interesting analysis of the radio industry is the very strong desire for labels and musicians to pay them to play songs. Payola is now illegal, but the practice almost certainly continues. As recently as 2005, former New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer prosecuted payola-related crimes in his jurisdiction.

Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist. Websites that bring that music to listeners are doing artists a favor. In fact, they’re doing them a favor that they should (and will) be paid for. Young artists and songwriters in particular benefit from these services - Until a few years ago they had almost no way to break into the mainstream without getting a label to promote them. Now those walls are being torn down, and Bragg has the audacity to complain about it.

I think the main reason Bragg wrote this article is jealousy over the massive success of someone he once met - Bebo cofounder Michael Birch. The paragraphs quoted above where he takes credit for their business model reveal his angst in that regard. Bragg had absolutely nothing to do with Bebo’s $850 million payday. And everything else he wrote in that article is dead wrong, too.

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Startups Battle Over Who Invented Risk-Like War Game First

2008-03-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

Many college students (but few others) will recognize the Risk-like game known as Turf that pits thousands of students against each other in a weeks-long online wargame that is similar to the board game Risk, but uses the college campus as the map.

What started off as a for-fun experiment by Yale student Gabe Smedresman in January 2007 resulted in a game that went on for over a month and involved over 3,300 Yale students (more than 25% of the student body).

But now that original game of Turf has spawned two separate and funded startups to push the game as a business. Smedresman joined with Harvard students Andrew Fong, Matt O’Brien, and Hugo Van Vuuren to found Kirkland North, a Y Combinator backed startup (screen shot of their game is above). Meanwhile, a rival company has launched that was founded by some of the players of Smedresman’s original game, called GoCrossCampus.

A New York Times article today written by Brad Stone profiles GoCrossCampus and suggested the founders invented the game and said “The game, a riff on classic territorial-conquest board games like Risk, may be the next Internet phenomenon to emerge from the computers of college students.” There was no mention of Kirkland North or Smedresman’s original work in that article.

Kirland North contacted the NYT, they say, to set the record straight. Stone then wrote a new article on the NYT’s Bits blog with the additional information supplied by Kirkland North.

The Kirkland North guys are obviously irate over what they see as a blatant rip-off of their idea. In a phone conversation, Van Vuuren said that the GoCrossCampus guys are not engineers and had to outsource the development of the game, using Turf as a guide. The code base is inferior, he said, and of the 20 games that have been run on the GoCrossCampus platform, half have had technical failures (GoCrossCampus has not yet responded to my request for comment) (Update: see below). Van Vuuren says their platform is stable and has had no problems in the six games they’ve run since last year. A recent Stanford game, he says, had 2,500 players, with more than 1/3 of undergraduates playing.

And there is yet more drama - the original NYT’s article on GoCrossCampus had a prominent quote from Google product manager Jonathan Rochelle, who “views it as similar to software like Google Calendar and Google Docs â" tools that enhance real-world collaboration,” and “Next month, Google will bring GoCrossCampus to its New York office, pitting sales departments against engineering groups over a map of the companyâs Manhattan campus.”

But it turns out that Gabe Smedresman is actually a full time Google employee. The fact that Google is planning to run his rivals’ game at their New York office must not sit well with him at all.

Of course, Hasbro, the owners of the original Risk game, will have something to say about the real inventor of the game, so neither company may have much moral ground beneath their feet.

See also our coverage of Kdice, a simple synchronous multiplayer version of Risk.

Update: I spoke to a somewhat bewildered GoCrossCampus co-founder Brad Hargreaves (who’s currently on spring break). He says that the GoCrossCampus code base was developed completely separately from the original Turf game, and that they made repeated offers to Smedresman to join their founding team, which he declined. He also says that at the time they spoke to the New York Times, which was last month, they had no idea Smedresman intended to start his own rival startup. Hargreaves also disputes KirklandNorth’s assertion that the GoCrossCampus founders aren’t engineers - two of the founders are engineers, he says. Finally, Hargreaves says that their technical hiccups were all in the first two games that they ran; all subsequent games, he says, have run smoothly.

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God 2.0 Online This Easter

2008-03-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

Its Good Friday and while millions will be enjoying the day off, others will be attending church and praying for salvation. According to a Pew survey in 2004, 64% of American Internet users perform spiritual and religious activities online, so here’s a few sites appropriate for the day.

GodTube

We covered GodTube in April 2007 and the site is still spreading the word. GodTube is a YouTube like Flash video sharing site focusing on using âtechnology to connect Christians for the purpose of encouraging and advancing the Gospel worldwide.â

People2Pray

According to ChurchMarketingSucks.com, “If you’ve ever complained about the smut and garbage that can happen on community-driven sites like MySpace, then People2Pray is the answer to what good is all this online community.”

CrossConnector

Billed as a 37signals for Jesus followers, CrossConnector helps users plan and manage mission trips and church activities.

Faith2

Faith2 is a Popurls/ Alltop style site for “the Christian Web 2.0.”

eBible

Search the bible through a search box or navigate via tag cloud, eBible is “your personal online Bible that is easy to search and fun to use.” See our May 2006 review here.

Lolcat Bible

For those looking for something lighter, the lolcat Bible offers a different interpretation of the Easter Story. Matthew 27, 1:5.

1 So liek iz teh mornins and all teh ppl sez tehy duznt liek Jesus and wantz to kills him;2 So tehy ties him upp and maed him goes to Pilate.

3 Judas feels teh stoopid and bringes teh moniez back,4 becuz he iz liek, “I iz stoopid, made invisibul err0r. Jesus iz innucent, k?”

And teh big catz sez “whtevr.”

5 So Judas sez “Do not want!” and he trows teh moniez and then killz hisself wiht sum yarn.

If God isn’t your thing, check out YouTube Awards finalist AngryLittleGirl on YouTube; her nominated video on religion here.

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Ning: All Our Charts Point Up And To The Right

2008-03-24T01:30:00.000-07:00

Ning certainly continues to rock and roll, at least according to data released by the company and reported by Comscore. The company, which allows users to easily create social networks, now has over 200,000 social networks on the platform and is adding another 1,000 or so per day. And Comscore-reported traffic is spiking up nicely: 3.1 million unique visitors/month, generating 71 million page views (February 2008). Ning, in short, looks like it might be a real business. Meanwhile, Ning competitor Flux, which is backed by Viacom, seems to have fallen off a cliff (we’re checking with Comscore on that data - see our earlier post on Flux growth here, including the update).

More Bells, More Whistles

Tonight at 10 pm California time Ning will launch a redesign (screencast here) that includes a updates to the photos, videos, groups, members, profile, forum and blog features (see here and here)

Ning is certainly feature rich, and users are flocking to it (a little porn never hurts, either). What I’d really like to know is how revenue growth is coming along. The company generates fees from advertising and users who want premium features. They’ve raised more than $44 million to date.

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CrunchGear this Week

2008-03-23T19:28:00.000-07:00

The best post of the week? Watch some of CG’s staff get zapped by a ridiculous shocking iPod. Warning: Some NSFW language.

The week started out with a “square iPod,” the iRiver E100, and some controversy over Wal-Mart pulling Linux PCs from shelves. We weighed in on the terrifying BigDog quadrupedal robot and its diminutive brother, LittleDog. The EyeFi card got dissected, as were Verizon’s plans to allow some open access. Sony Ericsson made excuses for falling revenues (lower demand? Really?). Our “hot or not” contest is over but now you have a chance to win a truly awful iPod Touch ripoff. Lastly there’s this sassy Lenovo ad taking a shot at the MacBook Air. Sexy and full-featured? Not possible!

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SpinVox Translates Voice-to-Text Service Into A $100 Million Round

2008-03-23T13:26:00.000-07:00

Voice-to-text technology is finally getting some respect. As first reported by TechCrunch UK, Goldman Sachs is investing in a $100 million private financing round for SpinVox, a London-based technology startup that transcribes voicemails to text so that they can be more easily digitized, searched, and manipulated. Other investors in the round included GLG Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management and Toscafund Asset Management. This brings the total invested so far to $200 million, reports Reuters. The 31-year-old CEO, Christina Domecq (a member of the liquor f! amily of the same name) says this latest round values the company at $500 million. There were rumors previously that SpinVox was pursuing an IPO, but with the markets in a tizzy the company found more private money instead.

SpinVox has some interesting Web apps, including Spin-My-Blog and Facebook and Twitter integration, but it is really a mobile play. People actually pay extra for this type of service on mobile phones. SpinVox has partnerships with twelve mobile carriers, mostly in Europe, including O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, 3, and Virgin Mobile. They still have limited availability in the U.S. for any of their services. But if people like visual voicemail on the iPhoneâ"which simply lists voicemails like e-mails but still makes you listen to themâ"imagine if they could translate all of those voicemails to e-mail and simply read them.

When it comes to mobile, voice is still the best way to input information but it is not the best way to extract it. SpinVox lets you have the best of both worlds. This voice thing is gonna be big.

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Smelling Trouble Behind AOLâs $850 Million Bebo Deal

2008-03-22T13:18:00.000-07:00

When AOL bought Bebo for $850 million last week, CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant believed the social network would help save AOL from its downward spiral. Social networks are where pageviews are generated these days, and AOL’s own attempt to turn AOL Instant Messenger into one (via Aim Pages) was a dud on arrival. Bebo, with 22.9 million unique visitors in February and 10.3 billion pageviews (per comScore), was growing and it was for sale. Even though AOL is trying to transform itself ! into an advertising network, it makes much higher margins on the ads it places on its own pages. The formula for its business is pretty simple: Unique visitors X page views = advertising inventory. If social networks are the future of the Web, AOL needed to own one.

But was Bebo the right one, and did AOL pay too much for it? Those are questions that other AOL executives below Falco and Grant are asking themselves, reports Silicon Alley Insider. The concerns of the senior executives who actually run AOL (and reportedly were not consulted on the top-secret acquisition) include: the general difficulty of making money placing ads on social networks (see Google’s missed quarter), “flattening traffic growth at Bebo” (see chart below), overly-rosy revenue projections for Bebo that might have been three times too high, and the likelihood of losing Bebo’s most talented employees (the founders are already out of there).

From my own sanity-checks with sources, there is definitely the sense that AOL was not Bebo’s first choice. Initially, it was aiming for a valuation above $1 billion. But then the ground started falling out beneath it, and AOL’s $850 million offer started to look real good. AOL was a desperate buyer. Even if it bargained Bebo down on price, it may still have paid too much. Bebo’s growth is indeed flattening relative to other global social networks like Hi5 or Friendster. And while social networks generate a lot of pages, they are not yet particularly valuable pages.

There is a silver lining here, though. If AOL can use its targeted advertising assets (Advertising.com, Quigo, Platform A) to make that Bebo inventory pay out, it will surprise everybody. And that will be good for Platform A because it then will be able to grab more advertising business from other social networks. (That is, if New York State does not outlaw targeted advertising before then). The likelihood of that happening is not great, but AOL employees need at least a glimmer of hope to keep showing up to work every morning. (I do what I can).

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Pulver Launches An Online TV Guide In The Form of a Cube (PrimeTimeRewindTV)

2008-03-22T07:16:00.000-07:00

Now that all the major TV networks are streaming prime time shows on the Web we are starting to see sites and applications that bring all of that video to one place. Instead of going ABC.com, NBC.com Fox.com, CBS.com or Hulu, why not create a uniform interface that organizes and streams the videos from all of those TV network sites? That’s the idea behind Fancast, desktop app Veoh TV, NewsClipper for network news (which I wrote about earlier), and Blinkx is finally about to launch its own BBTV. Today! , Vonage founder Jeff Pulver throws his hat into the ring with PrimeTimeRewind.tv.

Like the others, PrimeTimeRewind.tv attempts to put a consistent skin on what is fast becoming a disjointed experience. Pulver’s contribution to this user-interface challenge is to turn the TV Guide into an interactive video cube. When you go to PrimeTimeRewind.tv, you are presented with a cube filled with video thumbnails on each face. Spin the cube horizontally and each face shows the Web video offerings of a different TV network ((ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, TNT and USA). Rotate it vertically and each face shows a different category (action, comedy, reality, drama). Click on any one thumbnail and you are taken to another page in which the full player opens up. Really, it just frames the original site (each with their own player) with a PrimeTimeRewind.tv sidebar that lets you rate, comment, and share videos. It is still a compromise, but a step in the right direction.

Pulver has more details here on his blog. (This should not be confused with his other Web video projects, pulver.TV for aggregating original Web video and Network2.tv, his original effort at creating a guide for video on the Web, which seems to be down right now).

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Diigo Revamps Social Bookmarking Service with v3.0

2008-03-21T13:10:00.000-07:00

We got word last night that Diigo will be releasing version 3.0 of its social bookmarking and webpage annotation service today. The company is calling it its biggest upgrade since 2006, when former TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick gushed extravagantly over it.

I’m personally not a daily user of Diigo, even though going back and reading Marshall’s review makes me think I should be. I’ll just have to try v3.0 in full later today. A demonstration video, embedded below, shows an entirely new user interface. We’re also told that the code has been rebuilt and over 100 new features have been added. Social networking has been further developed, too, so you can share your bookmarks with friends and groups more effectively.

Diigo is explicitly pitting itself against Delicious by stating: “in the battle field of social bookmarking 2.0, we believe only delicious and Diigo are still strong players, with Diigo clearly the leader in terms of features and innovations…People who have seen both Diigo 3.0 and delicious 2.0 also think that we are far ahead of delicious 2.0.” Sounds like Diigo’s trying to play David to Yahoo’s Goliath.

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Sequoiaâs Gospel of Startups More True Than Ever

2008-03-21T07:08:00.000-07:00

If you are an entrepreneur seeking a moment of clarity, there is no better place to start than Sequoia Capital’s Elements of Sustainable Companies.

It’s not new - these are the principles that have driven Sequoia’s investment strategies for decades. But today, with troubled financial markets beginning to spread cancer-like into Silicon Valley and venture capitalists starting to pull back from two plus years of carefree spending, startups have little wiggle room for error. This list is a beacon to help guide startups through their most common early mistakes.

We were reminded of the list recently when one of our interns, Bryan Scott, wrote an article talking about how important those ideas are to him. I informally polled some of my entrepreneur friends yesterday and today and was surprised at how few of them had read the list.

These principles are not for every new business, but they are certainly the key drivers of success for any startup looking for venture capital to drive growth. I’ve talked about some of these ideas in past posts, but nothing hits home quite as powerfully as a simple list, written by the venture firm that funded startups like Apple, Google, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Oracle, PayPal and YouTube. Being able to put a check mark next to each item below certainly doesn’t ensure success. But ignoring them is a sure way to fail.

I consider this essential reading for any aspiring entrepreneur, along with The Man In The Arena.

Elements of Sustainable Companies
Start-ups with these characteristics often foretells the success of a business and the likelihood of it becoming a sustainable, enduring company. We like to partner with companies that have:

Clarity of Purpose
Summarize the company’s business on the back of a business card.

Large Markets
Address existing markets poised for rapid growth or change. A market on the path to a $1B potential allows for error and time for real margins to develop.

Rich Customers
Target customers who will move fast and pay a premium for a unique offering.

Focus
Customers will only buy a simple product with a singular value proposition.

Pain Killers
Pick the one thing that is of burning importance to the customer then delight them with a compelling solution.

Think Differently
Constantly challenge conventional wisdom. Take the contrarian route. Create novel solutions. Outwit the competition.

Team DNA
A companyâs DNA is set in the first 90 days. All team members are the smartest or most clever in their domain. “A” level founders attract an “A” level team.

Agility
Stealth and speed will usually help beat-out large companies.

Frugality
Focus spending on what’s critical. Spend only on the priorities and maximize profitability.

Inferno
Start with only a little money. It forces discipline and focus. A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great engineers requires very little firepower.

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Is Facebook Playing Favorites With App Developers?

2008-03-21T01:06:00.000-07:00

Facebook has taken steps to limit application spam numerous times in the past. One of the recent steps they took was to specifically limit the number of daily invitations that users could send out to others - going from a hard cap of 20/day to a variable rate that takes into account the rate of declines by recipients. All of these steps are designed to limit the barrage of messages that the average Facebook user gets asking them to add applications.

The details of the rules seem fairly trivial, but they have a big impact on the third party developers trying to build a business on Facebook. And remember that Facebook isn’t simply doing them a favor by letting them on the platform - OpenSocial gives these developers other options to get access to users. And remember that Facebook invited these devlopers with open arms, even setting up a fund to provide investment capital.

So when developers noticed that CBS seems to be playing by different rules than everyone else they were understandably irate. CBS’ March Madness facebook application, which is being promoted as “The Official Tournament Brackets On Facebook,” allows users to invite up to 100 friends per day. Competitors must play under the existing rules - three that I checked out had a limit of just 18 invites/day. Facebook and CBS announced a partnership around March Madness earlier this month.

The pools all close Thursday at noon, so application developers are scrambling to try and add users. Facebook seems to be playing favorites with CBS based on a revenue relationship. This isn’t the first or even the second time Facebook has shown a willingness to prioritize their own interests over those of their developers. Now, it seems, they may be open to trading revenue for special treatment, too.

I have an email in to Facebook for comment, and will update this post with any response.

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CNET Soap Opera Continues; CEO Neil Ashe May Be Fighting For His Job

2008-03-20T19:04:00.000-07:00

Despite CNET’s unexpected legal setback last week in their fight against what is now their largest stockholder (a consortium of investors led by Jana Partners), the board and management team continue to fight on. Previous meetings between Jana and the CNET board were already “tense and uncomfortable.” I can only imagine they’re getting more so.

So far, the Jana consortium has not demanded an ouster of CNET CEO Neil Ashe as part of their proposed reforms of the ailing company. But that may be changing, says a source close to the drama. “Jana’s patience with Neil has run out, they’re now looking to get rid of him,” said the source. When a company’s biggest stockholder (holding nearly 25% of the outstanding stock) wants you to resign as CEO, it becomes difficult to both fight for your job and simultaneously “maximize shareholder value.”

If Ashe is forced out, who might step in as CNET’s CEO?

There are no shortages of rumors here, either. One insider says former CEO Shelby Bonnie may be right for the job. Bonnie resigned as CEO in October 2006 following an options backdating scandal. Later, though, the SEC completely exonerated Bonnie and CNET and dismissed the charges. He is still a major shareholder in CNET and owns about 7% of the outstanding stock. And so far Bonnie hasn’t taken a side in the fight - most other major shareholders are backing current management.

Bonnie, however, has moved on to his new venture, PoliticalBase, and hasn’t shown any outward desire to return to CNET.

Another name that has come up as a possible CEO candidate is Dan Rosensweig, the former COO of Yahoo and who’s currently a partner at private equity firm Quadrangle Group. Rosensweig was formerly the President of CNET, a position he took on following the merger of ZDNet and CNET in 2000. Rosensweig would likely be interested in the job, said someone who’s familiar with the situation, but only if the board of directors invited him to come on board. From what we hear, the Jana consortium might also be interested in pushing him as an alternative to Ashe.

Rosensweig would find himself in a familiar situation. Not only did he previously work at CNET, his right hand Editor-In-Chief at ZDNet, Dan Farber, recently took the top spot at CNET News as well. They remain friends - when Rosensweig left Yahoo, he only gave one personal interview - to Farber. Perhaps they’ll get the old band back together for an encore.

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Heâs Baaack! Quattrone Starts Qatalyst Partners.

2008-03-20T13:02:00.000-07:00

After spending years in the wilderness fighting obstruction of justice charges stemming from the investment banking excesses of the late 1990s, Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone is back. Yesterday, he launched Qatalyst Group, a boutique investment bank that will focus on technology M&A and advisory services.

As the head technology banker for Credit Suisse, and Morgan Stanley before that, Quattrone had a hand in practically every major Internet IPO during the 1990s, from Amazon to Netscape. He has one of the deepest Rolodexes the Valley. In the press release announcing his return, he squeezes a couple of supportive quotes out of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, venture capitalist Jim Breyer, and Facebook CFO Gideon Yu.

I suppose a general economic downturn is as good a time as any to start a boutique M&A investment bank. Perhaps he can hire some folks from Bear Stearns.

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Fynanz: How Students Spell Peer-to-Peer Loans

2008-03-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

There is a new way to spell peer-to-peer lending: Fynanz. While you or I might not entrust the financing of our college education to a company that cannot spell, the txt-happy generation might go for it. And if they can find college loans at lower rates than at a bank, who cares?

Fynanz launched quietly on Monday. It wants to apply the peer-to-peer lending model (see Prosper, Zopa, Lending Club, and Qifang in China) to student loans. Right now, only students who are residents of Florida or New York can apply for a loan, but that will expand to the entire country later this year. Anyone can become a lender.

Unlike Prosper or other P2P lending sites, Fynanze guarantees each loan. And since they are qualified educational loans, the students can deduct the interest from their taxes once they start paying back. To reduce its risk, the startup looks at other factors in addition to credit scores when evaluating each student borrower, including grade point averages and what school the student is attending. Says CEO Chirag Chaman, a former banker who put up $500,000 in seed money to get the startup off the ground:

We looked at 15 years worth of data to create an underwriting model specific to student loans. We now what are the factors that reduce default rates. I was doing structured loans at Citibank.

You can think of it as securitization for the masses, but I am removing investment banks from the process.

The loans are co-payable to the school, and Fynanz takes into account tuition and other expenses to make sure students don’t take out more than they actually need. “It is not for your spring break,” says Chaman. By cutting out the banks, he thinks he will be able to find individual lenders willing to offer loans that are 0.60% to 1.0% lower than what a student would get from a bank. (And that is after Fynanze takes a 1% fee for its guarantee fund).

With interest rates coming down, though, in response to the Fed’s recent interest-rate cuts, it is going to be tough to compete with the big banks. But the focus on student loans should reduce the shelter Fynanz in comparison to other P2P startups with a broader loan portfolio (Student loans tend to have lower default rates than most consumer loans).

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Odeo Acquires BlogDigger

2008-03-20T00:58:00.000-07:00

Odeo has acquired blog search engine BlogDigger for an undisclosed sum.

BlogDigger launched in 2003 as a competitor to the then dominant Technorati, and launched a locally focused search facility in 2005. The site offers standard blog search, and unlike Technorati has constantly focused on its core product.

For the new Odeo (formerly SonicMountain) this is their second acquisition in just over 6 months, having acquired FireAnt in September.

According to a post from Greg Gershman on the BlogDigger blog, Blogdigger’s aggregation and search technology has been integrated into Odeo’s new beta site. Gershman has joined the Odeo team as Vice President of Search and Engineering.

(via ReadWriteWeb)

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Forget the Movie, Go To A Concert

2008-03-19T18:56:00.000-07:00

As music CD sales plummet and the long term price of recorded music trends towards free, live music will evolve from being a way to market new album releases to quite possibly the primary income stream for most artists - even the big ones.

That’s why services like iLike, which determine your favorite music based on your iTunes listening habits and then tell you about upcoming concerts for those artists, are on the rise. Relative newcomer Songkick goes even further - it makes educated guesses about what music you’ll like that you may not have heard before, and then suggests local live shows for you to attend.

Songkick founder Ian Hogarth says that 70% of U.S. adults attend a live music show every year, but we collectively spend 35 times as much on going to movies as we do on concerts. There is a big opportunity to increase the size of the market, he says. but people need more information on who’s performing, where, and when.

We first covered them at launch last year, and we also mentioned their “Alexa For Bands” project recently. Today though they’re releasing new functionality and also announcing a round of financing.

Songkick focuses on artists that are still alive (dead artists tend not to go on tour) - they’re tracking about 1 million of them in their database. Users can get recommendations on the Songkick site or via an iTunes plugin (Windows and Mac). And now Songkick is making their database available to partners. Larger partners can access the data via their API (music search engine SeeqPod does this). And smaller sites (music blogs, for example), can add upcoming concerts about artists they’re discussing to their blog posts and other content via a new “BandSense” product that auto-determines band names and inserts links to upcoming concerts.

API partners split revenue with Songkick 50/50. Blogs and smaller sites get 100% of the revenue for now.

Songkick was originally a Y Combinator startup and took a small amount of financing. Today they are announcing a second round, from The Accelerator Group and SoftTech VC. The company was founded by Ian Hogarth, Pete Smith and Michelle You.

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BracketBrains Giving Sports Bettors An Edge

2008-03-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

It may not be sexy but BracketBrains could improve your chances of winning that office pool for this year’s NCAA basketball tournament.

The site, developed by three Stanford grads (one math, one computer science, and one industrial engineering), analyzes data collected from over 10 years of game results to predict who might win the possible face-offs during March Madness. It’s intended for both casual and professional bettors who want assistance in making their picks, but who don’t have the time or expertise to cull and analyze all the data themselves.

It works by looking at 15 factors in particular, including teams’ average margins of victory, distances from home, and winning percentages. Users can tweak the weight placed on each factor to account for personal intuitions, observations, and theories. This personalization in turn will adjust the system’s predictions, making the site more interactive than a simple prediction sheet.

The current version of BracketBrains is basically version 1.1. Testers of the beta product reportedly did well for themselves over this past year: 22% won prizes in their bracket pools, and 70% of the most serious users thought it had improved their performance.

BracketBrains can be described as a “fremium” product; users can model one region for free, but they’ll have to go for one of three paid packages to access more functionality. 3,000 paying subscribers have signed up so far.

While BracketBrains uses algorithms and historical data to determine its predictions, another site we’ve reviewed called PicksPal uses crowd sourcing to make its picks. Visitors to that site must pay to access its predictions, which are determined by the service’s most prescient users.

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Fixya Raises $6 Million B Round for Crowdsourced Tech-Support

2008-03-19T06:52:00.000-07:00

Companies hate providing good tech support for their products because it is expensive. And consumers hate calling up tech support when they can’t get a gadget to work properly because they usually get the run-around. The idea for Fixya is quite simple: Let consumers help fix each other’s gadgets.

The startup, which was in the DemoPit at TechCrunch40, announced a $6 million B round from existing investors Mayfield and Pitango. (It had previously raised $2 million in January, 2007). Fixya already has information on 800,000 consumer products, ranging from electronics to appliances. It also stores a lot of owners manuals in digital form. The site has been growing at a respectable clip. In the U.S., comScore measured 1.5 million unique visitors in February, up 107 percent from the year before (see chart below). Worldwide, comScore estimates 3.7 million unique visitors in January (the company claims 6 million uniques).

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Taaz Gives Me A Reasonable Excuse To Post Pictures Of Angelina Jolie

2008-03-19T00:50:00.000-07:00

On the left is a picture of plain old Angelina Jolie. But on the right…well we’ve got Angelina after she’s been through the Taaz virtual makeover service.

The service, which launches today, uses some of the same tricks as many of the Flash-based photo editing tools we’ve covered in the past. Taaz has added proprietary facial recognition software so that it can, for example, figure out where your lips are when you want to put on lipstick. Taaz also differs from normal photo editing tools in that it is specifically set up to help users (mostly women) see how they might look with different hair, eyes, makeup, etc. Finished makeovers can then be shared with other users, rated, commented, etc.

The tools are dead simple to use (thanks, Adobe) and I had a lot of fun testing the service. See the image below for me with cool hair and a lot of red stuff on my cheeks. They’ve also included a number of original articles on beauty and style, and helpful hints like this one: “Contrary to popular belief, matching your eye shadow to your eye color enhances your eyes, making them pop.” Good to know.

The company is based in San Diego, California. They’ve taken two rounds of financing - a seed round from UCSD vonLiebig Center and a Series A round from iSherpa Capital and Crawley Hatfield Capital. Taaz was founded by David Kriegman, Satya P. Mallick, and Kevin Barnes.

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FriendFeed Adds Search, And Suddenly Feels Like A Destination Site

2008-03-18T18:48:00.000-07:00

FriendFeed, a service that aggregates social network information, just launched quite a nice little search feature. Users can search by individual, friends, or all users, and specify the search only to specific services like Twitter or Delicious. A basic search box is on every page. Advanced search is here.

FriendFeed is clearly more than a simple service to aggregate lots of data from other websites and then access it via RSS. Users can comment directly on posted items (and do so frequently). Now they can search, too. More and more FriendFeed is looking like a destination site built on the back of all that third party data.

That’s smart of them, and it’s something we’ve seen in the past. The most recent example is Meebo, which began as a way for users to access instant messaging services like Yahoo, AIM, GTalk and MSN on the web. But eventually they started allowing users to create their own accounts, and then launched their own proprietary chat service as well. Meebo has always said that isn’t a big part of their overall strategy, but I notice that most of my chats on Meebo are now done via their service, not one of the big IM players.

The company has had a huge surge in users the last week or so (and remember, the service only officially launched on February 25). They won’t disclose exact user numbers, but they say that the FriendFeed user base grew 10% over the weekend and 25% in the last week. They’re clearly having their Twitter Moment, and have avoided, so far, all the uptime issues that plagued Twitter for two years. Whether you think it’s beautiful or ridiculous, FriendFeed is on the rise.

And back to those Twitter comparisons for just a moment - FriendFeed now has a robust search feature just weeks after launch. Twitter still hasn’t launched meaningful search, even after promising it months ago. Twitter needs to be careful - failure to execute has brought many popular startups to their knees. It’s time for Twitter to step it up.

FriendFeed is based in Silicon Valley and has raised $5 million in venture capital.

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Photoshop Dreams of an iFlipPhone

2008-03-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

When is Apple coming out with a flip version of the iPhone? Unwired View created some nice Photoshop images of what an iFlipPhone might look like based on what it claims is a recent Apple patent application for a “dual-sided trackpad.” It would help if Unwired View linked to the actual patent application, which I was unable to find on the US Patent Office Website (although, I gave up after about 15 minutes. If someone finds it please share the link or patent number in comments below). The patent supposedly describes a semi-transparent panel that can flip open, allowing either si! de to be used as a multitouch trackpad. Polarized keypad numbers might appear on the inside when you open up the clamshell, but when you close it, you would see through to the inside screen.

As with all Apple patents, just because somebody dreamed this up in Cupertino does not mean it will ever make it into a product. There is also the possibility that this is a hoax. (Is it even possible to make a touchpad that is transparent? I don’t know). But even if it is, doesn’t it make you want a clamshell iPhone?

Update: The patent is not a hoax. Unwired View coughed up the link in comments (thanks). It was filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization, not the USPTO, which is why I was unable to find it. Bring on those translucent touchpads!

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The Censors Take Down YouTube and Google News in China. How Will Google Respond?

2008-03-18T06:44:00.000-07:00

Amid the recent protests and violent crackdown in Tibet, the Chinese government is closing off all media access to the region and censoring reports about Tibet inside China. That includes not just CNN, but YouTube and Google News. Both Google sites have been blocked from the Internet in China. News reports about the protests and images that appear to come from inside Tibet are available on YouTube (see the slide show embedded belowâ"warning it shows graphic images of bodies in the streetsâ"and a CNN report). To prevent its citizens from seeing these videos or reading about them, the Chinese government has taken down all of YouTube and Google News inside China.

This isn’t the first time YouTube has been censored. Last month, Pakistan ended up taking down YouTube worldwide for a couple hours because of some supposedly “blasphemous” videos on the site. And in September, Myanmar blocked the entire Internet during a period of political unrest.

The question is: What will Google do to restore access to YouTube and Google News inside China? China is a big market that Google needs to be a player in. Will it voluntarily strip out all videos or news items about Tibet? Or will the Chinese government just figure out how to strip them out itself? There is a precedent here: in China you cannot find a lot of information about the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising on the Web, including the famous image of the lone man standing in front of the line of tanks. Most young Chinese have never seen that image.

I am speculating hereâ"there is no indication that Google has been asked to remove information about Tibet or that it would do so. But if it were to do so, then it would become complicit in China’s censorship. That might have to be the price it has to pay to give the Chinese access to all the other information on YouTube and Google News. The alternative might be a permanent ban.

Which option is the lesser evil for a company that has pledged itself to do none whatsoever?

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Yahoo Buzz: Yahoo Reveals Stats From The First Two Weeks

2008-03-18T00:42:00.000-07:00

Yahoo Buzz, a Digg-like service that launched on February 25, is now nearly three weeks old. We asked Yahoo to share some of the data from those first two weeks.

The big benefit for publishers is that top Buzz stories are linked from the Yahoo home page, which turns a firehose of traffic onto a story. When those stories hit the home page there’s a good chance that the linked site will have a record day in traffic. Yahoo says they’ve sent 16 million visitors to outside sites in those first two weeks, and they’ve gathered data from some of the linked partners:

Salon got so excited about a February 28 link from the Yahoo home page to this story that they issued a press release - they had 1 million unique visitors that day, the most ever to the 12 year old site.
US Magazine was linked from Yahoo on February 27, and had the second highest traffic day ever. 32% of visits that day came from the Yahoo home page.
Huffington Post reported 800,000 unique visitors from a Yahoo-linked story
Smoking Gun, Portfolio.com, Dallas Morning News and Imaginova all reported significant traffic increases after links from the Yahoo home page.
Sugar, Inc. sites have had nearly 1.8 million unique visitors sent from five different Buzz stories on the Yahoo home page

Yesterday we were linked from the Yahoo home page as well, for this story by Duncan Riley on Japanese ISPs blocking file sharers (see image above, click for larger view of how the links look). The link went live at 5:45 PM PST as one of the bottom four links in the news box (these send less traffic) and was up through the day. Despite the fact that yesterday was a Saturday (slowest traffic day of the week) and that it was up only 1/4 of the day, we had our highest traffic day ever and over 1,000 comments were left on the post. The traffic almost brought our site down, but the guys at Media Temple kept it alive.

Yahoo is still ramping up the number of links it puts on the home page from Buzz, and is being careful about the potential to flat out nuke websites with all the traffic they can send. But it’s clear that a link from Yahoo.com blows away anything Digg or any other competitor can offer. That will keep the Buzz publishers, who must be invited into the service, paying attention.

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A Funny Moment At The Flickr Party Tonight

2008-03-17T18:40:00.000-07:00

I was at Flickr’s fourth birthday party tonight in San Francisco with a few hundred Flickr fans, tech geeks, press and Yahoo/Flickr employees.

At some time around 8 pm Dan Farber, the new Editor in Chief of CNET, says, “huh, I just got an email that says, according to [blogger] Robert Scoble, we bought Revision3 for $58 million.” Uh-oh, I thought. I’m in San Francisco, an hour away from my computer. We’re going to be very late to this story.

I asked Farber if it was true. He said if it was this was the first he’d heard of it. A few moments later, after a couple of phone messages back and forth with his team, he said CNET had posted on the rumor (he was joking with me, but I couldn’t read him and thought he was serious). I emailed our team to look into it and cover the story, pulling Mark Hendrickson away from dinner and back to his computer.

I then called someone at Digg, who said something along the lines of “it’s complete bullshit.” After that call I did two things. I told our team to back off the story, and then promptly lied to Farber and said that Digg confirmed the rumor - Revision3 had definitely sold to CNET. Farber (damn him) didn’t bite - he typed a message or two on his phone, then looked at me and said “no, we didn’t.” At that point I laughed and told him what Kevin really said.

Scoble, meanwhile, sheepishly retracted his original Twitter message and the whole ordeal came to a end.

My guess is that 7 or 8 people between CNET and TechCrunch had their evenings at least partially throw into chaos over this. But my only disappointment was that I couldn’t trick Farber into writing a post on CNET that they had acquired Revision3, when it was nothing more than a figment of Robert Scoble’s imagination.

Update: Loic Le Meur gets Farber on video:

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So Thatâs What The EU Does With All That Microsoft Money

2008-03-17T12:38:00.000-07:00

Now I get it - The EU takes money from the Microsoft ATM with one hand, and then invests it in a sure-to-fail “Google Killer” with the other.

â¬99 million to Thomson and 22 other European companies to create Quaero, a multimedia search engine (Danny Sullivan notes Thomson was already in this business and then sold it off). This is on top of â¬120 million approved last year for Germany’s Theseus research project, which will develop and test new search technologies for the Internet.

Quaero and Theseus were originally the same project, but split in 2006 to focus on their respective markets.

The projects will need lots more funding down the road, so look for more withdrawls from Microsoft. And if that well runs dry, they can always figure out something to charge Google with and get a little of that action, too.

Of course, I’m stretching the facts here to make a point. The EU is simply allowing the French and German governments to make these investments with their own taxpayer’s money. There is no direct link between Microsoft fines and these subsidies. But the point is the same - the EU is not willing to let free markets determine winners and losers. The winners must be home grown, at any cost. And U.S. companies that have too much success in Europe seem to face a bleak choice - massive fines or government-backed competitors. It’s absurd. And it’s no wonder that many of the best European entrepreneurs keep coming to the U.S. to start companies.

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An Alexaholic Moment: Visual Search Engine ManagedQ Gets Snapped

2008-03-17T06:36:00.000-07:00

This morning brings another cautionary tale for anyone trying to build a Website or a business using data from another site. Visual search engine ManagedQ is broken right now because it took images of Websites from another visual search engine, Snap, without permission. (See screenshot above). Sound familiar? Alexaholic (now Statsaholic) ran into similar trouble with Amazon a year ago for taking graphs from Alexa before they were officially available through its API (read more about that dispute here).

It is unfortunate that Snap effectively disabled ManagedQ, which is run by a few programmers out of a basement in Palo Alto. But it goes to show that just because data is becoming more freely available on the Web, you still have to be careful about building a business on another company’s data. It appears that ManagedQ based its visual previews entirely on Snap’s images. As I wrote in a review last month:

Every time you do a search on ManagedQ, a grid appears on the right of the first six results so you can visually see what is on the other side of what is normally a blue link. If you click on one of the images, it opens up a larger, browsable window still within ManagedQ. The idea is that you can surf the Web without leaving the search application.

The way ManagedQ was using the images violated Snap’s terms of service (TOS), according to Snap CEO Tom McGovern. Snap does distribute these images through its Snap Shots widgets. (We use them on TechCrunch. If you mouse over any external link in this post, an image of the Web page on the other end will pop up). After coming across the site, his engineers figured out that ManagedQ was taking the images from Snap without any attribution or link, and cloaking the fact that it had done so. After contacting ManagedQ and not getting a response, McGovern ordered his engineers to block the site’s access to Snap’s images. Warns McGovern:

Folks really need to use services per the TOS. Otherwise they will go the way of ManagedQ or Alexaholic.

Ouch. At least his engineers didn’t replace the Website snap shots with goatse images. But the reaction does seem a bit harsh, especially for a tiny site like ManagedQ. Was McGovern justified in his response? Here’s what ManagedQ looked like before:

Update: ManagedQ founder David Stat has provided the following comment on their shutdown at the hands of Snap:

As we’ve been developing ManagedQ, we looked at several different
thumbnail services and decided on Snap due to their speed and high image
quality. ManagedQ is an experiment with visual Search, not a high volume
Search site. As such, we believed that Snap would not mind our use of
their service and may even encourage its novel and interesting
application. Before using Snap for our site, however, we performed a
traffic analysis and found that ManagedQ would consist of only about
0.01% of Snap’s traffic at most - hardly a share that would affect them
in any meaningful way.

It is most unfortunate that Snap has decided to block us, but I
understand that they are perfectly within their rights to do so. We did
not, however, receive a notice beforehand. We would certainly be
interested in pursuing an agreement with Snap that is outside the bounds
of their normal TOS, but we haven’t yet done so because we thought
ourselves too small for them to consider such a partnership.

Our focus is on continuing to create a new Search Experience with broad
appeal. We believe data should be open by default. We are at a loss
as to why a relatively big startup like Snap would feel threatened by a
small Search experiment like ManagedQ.

Update 2: Snap CEO Tom McGovern has also added these remarks to the situation:

We want sites to use the service in an unadulterated manner where the
actual Snap Shot is shown. There are lots reasons (server load,
business model, end user confusion) that this is important to us. For
developers that are working on a project or offering a commercial
service there are many other companies that offer a developer API
(Girafa, thumbshots, Alexa).

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