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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=650  Newsvine took the password protection off of its site yesterday and officially launched (my pre-launch post on Newsvine is here).
Newsvine combines the best features of a number of companies and products like Digg and Google News with great features like chat and blogging-style comments. The result is a perfect news site (note that new competitors, like spotback (mentioned here) are aiming to overthrow Newsvine already, however).
 The result is a really wonderful social news experience. They are also planning on a revenue sharing arrangement with news contributors (we’ll see how that goes).
Congratulations to Mike Davidson and the team at Newsvine. It’s now a site that I visit at least daily.
FYI, Newsvine was mentioned quite a bit in today’s Gillmor Gang.
Tags: news, digg, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=651  Valleywag, if you don’t know, is the new Gawker network blog written by Nick Douglas. It focuses on tech gossip (loosely defined) and it has been a source of fascination and outright fear for me since its launch in January. It’s already hugely popular and the talk of the town.
Any kind of gossip is ok with Nick, and the juicier the better. I’ve seen posts on Craig “craigslist” Newmark’s dating situatiion, Tom Foremski’s less than brilliant strategies, stories of VC wife beating, and endless “who’s hotter” posts.
Generally speaking, it’s best to avoid being written about on Valleywag if at all possible.
My initial strategy was to ignore it (and Nick) entirely and pray for the best. Dave Winer hoped that being in Berkeley, outside of Silicon Valley, would be enough to keep him safe. Others simply tried to stay quiet.
Well, it didn’t work. I’ve been written about a few times, and sometimes ridiculed, on Valleywag (posts are here). So now I have a new policy. I’m going to suck up to Nick Douglas in a big way. This post is my first effort. Nick, can I take you to dinner sometime? 
Tags: gawker, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=652  I almost got a personal demo of Reg Cheramy’s Zigtag tonight…Reg stopped by my house and talked a big game, but ultimately said he wanted to wait a bit before demo’ing his product to me.
Zigtag promises a lot - saying “Zigtag will transform how people search, save and share knowledge & information important to them” on the landing page that also asks for your email. I’m not completely sure what this means, but it sounds like it might be useful.
 Consolidating your stuff to an online service is an exploding area right now - lots of the storage services are differentiating themselves by offering this type of thing. I’m looking forward to trying out zigtag when Reg is finally ready. Until then I have to settle for his flip card demo (seen in picture), and hope that some good software is on the way. Sign up to be notified of the launch here.
On a completely unrelated note, this is my first post from my new MacBook Pro. Wow, what a computer!
Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=653  Brian Oberkirch from Weblogswork gave me a demo of PodServe today. If you are a podcaster, or want to be, there are some features that you are going to be really interested in trying out.
As I see it there are three important features of note.
First, PodServe is a place where podcasters can host their podcasts for free. You simply create a channel and all of your podcasts are included. Brian interviewed me today (he’s an up an coming podcaster himself) - you can see the podcast interviews of me and others on his page here. As a podcaster, you can use this page as your main site, or you can simply point to the individual files in your own blog and they will be included as enclosures. Not only is this service free, but PodServe is also providing a RSS feed for the page (which you can use or not), and PodServe will also provide statistics and other tools to assist the publisher. Comments/reviews are also enabled on each site.
If you are a podcaster looking for a free place to host your files, PodServe is an excellent choice.
Second, PodServe also allows “social podcasts”. A channel can be created that allows a number of podcasters to submit files, and all will be included in the feed.
 The third notable feature is really interesting. Users can create full public podcast channels that anyone can add their content to. Two great examples are Brian’s Naked Conversations Discussion (podcasts discussing Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s new book) and Alexander Muse’s Elevator Pitch Podcast, which is a podcast that any company can use to submit an elevator pitch. I’m considering using the service to create something similar to the Elevator Pitch Podcast for use by TechCrunch readers.
PodServe is just one product in a large new project called Big in Japan. Brian has been working on Big in Japan, along with Alexander Muse, for a long time now, and they are preparing to launch a number of the new products, including PodServe, at the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin next week. If the other products are as interesting as PodServe, Big in Japan is going to be, well, big.
Note: This is the second post I’ve done with my new MacBook Pro, and it just keeps getting better. I’m seriously impressed with this machine. Macs are really, really cool.
Tags: podcasting, brianoberkirch, alexmuse, alexander, muse, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=654  ZoomClouds is from the same (Spanish) guys that brought us Zoomtags. It’s pretty straightforward. Sign up, give it a feed, set some paramaters, and get a tag cloud that you can include on the site. Mine’s below. Clicking on a tag leads to a results page hosted by ZoomClouds - example is here.
ZoomCloud is similar to TagCloud, one of my very early profiles.
Tags: techcrunch, tags, tagging, web2.0, web 2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=655  I was introduced to Bill Baxter, one of the founders of new startup SnapTune, today. The company will be launching this week. With a little user configuration, Snaptune will automatically downloads songs and other content directly from an FM radio to your computer, and add meta data from Amazon and other sources.
Setup requires a download (PC only right now, so I had to break out my old laptop), and connecting a FM receiver to the PC (including just about any FM radio via line in). The service also shows song information, including information obtained from Amazon.com’s web service.
Snaptune One works with most FM tuner cards and USB FM devices, or you can simply connect an FM radio up to line-in on your PC to get started. For less than $2 for a simple cable you can get started with Snaptune today and start discovering an endless supply of new music. With a USB FM tuner you get the added benefit that Snaptune can tune to different stations for you according to a schedule you define.
Snaptune One works with almost any radio station anywhere in the world. FM radio goes in, individual songs come out, it’s that simple!
Snaptune One also shows you information about each song, the albums that contain it, other albums by the same band, how popular it is on the radio, how new it is, whether it’s going up or down in popularity, and detailed reviews for the albums from Amazon.com. With a couple of clicks of the mouse you can add any album you like into your Amazon.com shopping cart.
According to Bill, Snaptune is able to find complete songs and other content in audio streams by using “advanced signal processing and search techniques”. When I pressed him for more details, he wouldn’t budge, citing IP protection concerns (fair enough), but added “it just works, try it!”
 Well, I wasn’t able to try it because I couldn’t find a USB FM receiver for my computer today (Fry’s for some crazy reason doesn’t carry them). I’ll be doing more “research” tomorrow though. Bill tells me CompUSA carries a bunch of different brands.
Based on one of the screen shots, though, one thing is certain - Snaptune will do a good job pulling in meta data about the songs from Amazon and other sources (including user created data).
Once the hardware is setup and the client installed, you simply set your favorite radio stations (and if you like, specific times of broadcasts), and Snaptune will automatically download the music and metadata for you. This is a music discovery service - like Pandora, you tell it something about what you like (in this case, certain stations and times), and Snaptune selects music for you based on that information. While you can use existing software to record FM on your computer, Snaptune does all of the hard work for you and guarantees full audio of the songs, etc.
For free accounts, you can move up to 20 songs to your hard drive in MP3 or WMA format. You can, of course, then move these to a portable device, burn to cd, etc. There will also be an option for a premium account, which will have no limits on downloading to hard drive/devices.
For premium accounts, it would be really great if they set up a RSS feed and included each song as an enclosure.
Snaptune’s other founders include Mark Atherton, Warren Burch and Ian Mercer. The company, which is self funded (that’ll change soon) is based in Bellvue, Washington.
As I mentioned above, Snaptune should be launching this week. To be notified when it goes live, enter your email here.
Existing competitors in this space include Replay Radio and RadioTime.
NOTE: I’m trying to figure out if I like this service better than Pandora. They are both excellent ways of discovering new music. With Pandora, you get instant gratification but no way to keep the music you like without buying it separately. I think I’ll use both.
Tags: pandora, music, radio, ipod, mp3, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=656  Seattle-based Wetpaint opened its doors today to show off a few sample sites that use its new, super-slick wiki platform.
You can get a good overview of how users interact with wiki’s built on the platform by going through the rather tedious tour. Basically, its a highly user-friendly wysiwyg-type wiki platform. To see an example wiki, check out the xbox 360 site they’ve created.
This is a hosted wiki solution, and Wetpaint’s business model is to add contextual advertising to each page of the wiki.
The company was founded last year and is backed by Trinity Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures. See Silicon Beat, John Cook and Zoli Erdos for more.
Tags: wiki, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=657  The Mercury News points out a fairly basic flaw in Google’s Desktop Search application: it cannot track files if you move them around on your hard drive (changing folders, moving folders, etc.). The application will index new files added to the computer, but it doesn’t notice when an already-indexed file is moved to a different folder.
The solution? Uninstall and then reinstall the program, and endure the hours it will take for it to re-index your hard drive. Then, repeat the process when you move files into new folders again in the future.
Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0, google
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=658  We have all the ingredients for a great story: dramatic predictions of Google taking over the world, secret disclosures of a new stealth product at a Google analyst meeting, outing of the story by bloggers, and subsequent purging of the public data by Google to keep things hidden from the public and competitors.
Here’s what we know so far:
Epic 2015 - Prediction of Google Control Over Our Lives
In the spring of 2004 Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson presented the ominous Epic 2014 (now renamed Epic 2015) that ultimately predicts that Google will force the New York Times to shut down. In the movie, they also predict that Google will launch something called “Google Grid”: “…a universal platform offering an unlimited amount of space and bandwidth that can be used to store anything. It allows users to manage their information two ways: store it privately or publish it to the entire grid.” See the movie here.
Google Drive Discussion with Analysts
Robin and Matt’s Google Grid prediction seems to be well on its way to becoming reality. On March 2, 2006 (a few days ago), Google hosted an analyst day and presented a wide range of information on new products and strategies. Among the information was a description of the upcoming “Google Drive”, a place for users to store 100% of their data online.
On page 19 of the presentation, Google stated the following:
Store 100% of User Data
With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).
We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user.
As we move toward the “Store 100%” reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine.
Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user’s data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be access across applications. For example: a user’s Orkut profile has more value when it’s accessible from Gmail (as addressbook), Lighthouse (as access list), etc.
These slides were also made publicly available.
Greg Linden Discovers Google Drive; Google Purges Information
However, the slides discussing Google Drive were quickly taken down by Google and replaced with a sterilized version after entrepreneur and blogger Greg Linden noted the Google Drive information and blogged about it.
Greg did not retain a copy of the original, but readers of his blog did and posted the original content in the comments to Greg’s post.
What we Know
At this point, all we know is that Google is already developing Google Drive, an online storage service that will be designed to store all of our data and make it accessible from various devices. No word on pricing. As to timing, Google is concerned with storage and bandwidth constraints that exist today, and so this may still be far into the future.
Even so, the thought of Google entereing the market must give the online storage startup gang a shudder.
A final thought on Google Drive: Information was clearly purged from analyst materials (unless this is an elaborate hoax by Greg and his readers), meaning we have selective disclosure of this information. Some people received it but it is not generally available to the public. I don’t like this. In fact, I think it’s Gevil. Now that some people know about it, Google should put it (back) up on the web.
Tags: gdrive, google, googledrive, onlinestorage, techcrunch, gevil, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=659 
I have had the privilege of getting an exclusive look at the new developer community and toolkits that Salesforce will be launching at the eTech conference tomorrow. Salesforce have been on the cutting edge of what we now call Web 2.0 in the business space for years. They were trying to swing mindset towards software as a service and the web as a platform long before we had the terms that we use today to describe these technologies and ideas. Salesforce has grown to become much more than just a CRM application and is now a platform for business collaboration and communication on the web – allowing developers to build applications on their platform and giving their 399,000-strong customer base access to these applications.
The best indication of the growth of Salesforce as a platform has been that now over 40% of requests to Salesforce web servers are SOAP requests to their API. AppExchange is the application platform at Salesforce and today its library of applications has over 160 applications listed within it, all of which are available to Salesforce customers. At eTech Salesforce plan to announce the launch of their new developer community – the AppExchange Developer Network, which provides developers with the community, tools and resources to let them build applications for AppExchange. Salesforce will also be announcing the availability of toolkits for both PHP (supporting the native SOAP libraries in PHP5 – developed in collaboration with Zend) and something that is very exciting, a RubyOnRails toolkit called ActiveSalesforce.
Salesforce refers to what we know as Web 2.0 in the consumer space as ‘The Business Web’ in the business space. The technologies and ideas behind Web 2.0 such as Ajax, SOAP, Software as a service etc. all started out in the business space and their breakout into the consumer space resulted in the Web 2.0 we know today. While businesses and products such as the early Salesforce were the instigators and drivers popularizing the technology the growth of the consumer Web 2.0 resulted in the business space being forgotten. The purpose of the AppExchange Developer Network is to make it much easier for developers of mashups and other applications to apply their skills in the business space and to have their solutions showcased to the large user base that Salesforce has.
I have previously developed applications as well as client libraries that integrated with Salesforce, back with the first release of their API in 2002, and was amazed at how far both the technology and the community had developed since then. Today as a developer you can go to the developer network to signup for a free developer edition account, download all the development tools you will need and learn everything there is to know about building apps for Salesforce using the plethora of resources and the community they have on hand. The methodology behind AppExchange for a developer is:
- Imagine – think of an application or mashup that could be built to server business customers (such as a expense reports application)
- Create – using the toolkits available (Ajax, PHP, RubyOnRails, Java, Perl, etc.) and the resources (sample code, online presentations, podcasts, the forum etc.) create your application using your free developer edition account.
- Share – Submit the application you have created to AppExchange and have it available and a click away from 399,000 Salesforce customers,
- Succeed – most importantly, you have a business opportunity with the applications you build. Here you can work together with Salesforce in promoting your solution and succeeding.
There are a number of possibilities, for instance a expense report application could integrate with PayPal to settle payments with employees and send them back notifications (just one idea). Salesforce offers all this to developers and asks for nothing in the form of a payment, or even a revenue share. There are a number of successful applications in AppExchange right now, and a number of businesses who have products exclusively on AppExchange and do very well from it. An example is a company called DreamFactory which was founded by Bill Appleton. DreamFactory has released a number of products for AppExchange such as DreamTeam, a project management application. At Techcrunch each week we see so many new products each week that are jumping into very crowded spaces (such as online calendaring, and our favorite, Ajax desktops) that have no clear revenue model. More of these companies should consider the business space and what Salesforce has to offer developers with AppExchange. The cost of getting your product onto the platform is zero, and the huge amount of resources makes it very simple to do.
I also got an exclusive look at some of the new applications in AppExchange that will be released shortly. These are all mashups of services that we know now with Salesforce. The first example was the Google Maps mashup, which displays on a map the location of your leads or contacts. This mashup was developed using the awesome Ajax toolkit which allows the application to be hosted in the client – meaning the developer of the mashup doesn’t need a host server. The other exciting mashup was Salesforce integration into Skype. What the user does is selects who they would like to call or invite into a conference then press a ‘call’ button and it will dial out over Skype to these people and setup a conference. You can mix-up Skye usernames that you have stored against a contact with ordinary phone numbers and it will take care of it.
Another mashup that I saw was the integration of Salesforce with the online word processor Writely. When this is launched Salesforce customers who store their documents on Salesforce will be able to open them with Writely and save them straight back to Salesforce again. Yet another mashup which again was very simple and effective was integration with the Adobe online PDF generator, allowing you to create PDF’s from sources within Salesforce and having them save back to your account.
These mashups all had one thing in common – they are an elegant combination of two great services that combined prove to be a very effective solution to common problems for business users. I could spend a lot of time talking about AppExchange and Salesforce and I don’t feel that a single post can do them justice. What I do hope is that with the announcement of the new AppExchange Developer Network and new toolkits that make it very simple to write apps, that more and more developers will consider joining the community at Salesforce and developing not only products but businesses on top of Salesforce. I know I look forward to reviewing more applications in the future that are built in Salesforce.
Tags: appexchange, conference, etech, mashup, oreilly, salesforce, techcrunch, Web2.0, web20, Web_2.0, writely, skype
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=660  London based social-network-service Streakr is just a twinkle in its founder’s eye and could be months from launch, but they’ve got a fancy logo and they promise to deliver a product with attitude. I like that. Give them your email if you want to hear when they launch, or watch for a full profile here.
Tags: socialnetworking, techcrunch, london, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=661  Uk/Czech Republic based AllPeers, a yet to be launched firefox extension for the peer to peer sharing of files that I am absolutely in love with, is announcing a Series A round of venture capital tomorrow. Investors include Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures. No word on the size of the investment.
My previous posts on AllPeers, including screen shots of the product, are at this link (just scroll down).
Ok guys, you have the funding and the hot eastern European dev team. Will you please launch? And I really hope you build an extension for Flock as well, because that will be my default browser as soon as it launches.
Tags: flock, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0, firefox,
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=662 
SixApart, the creators of popular blogging platforms TypePad and MovableType will be releasing a set of new features and services for their products directly aimed at the growing business market for blog software. Currently there are a large number of corporations already publishing blogs using SixApart software and the latest releases are part of a broader strategy to better support and to grow this enterprise customer base.
The first software release to spin out of the new strategy will be Typepad Business Class, a new TypePad edition that will be suited for companies with high-traffic sites who wish to setup a blog or multiple blogs to communicate with their audience. TypePad Business Class will be launching today and will contain a number of technical enhancements over classic TypePad that are tailored for enterprise requirements. For starters there will be an improved permissions structure with up to 4 levels of administrator access which can be used to control access to all aspects of the blog (such as ability to post, comment management, design editing). They have also made it easy to setup additional blogs and to control all aspects of the corporations blog design so that it can be tailored to match their corporate identity. The storage allocation with the Business Class service will be 4GB while bandwidth allocation will be 40GB per month with the price coming in at $89.95 per month. Other plans with more storage and bandwidth allocation will also be available at higher prices.
SixApart will also accompany the technical improvements with service level agreements that will guarantee a certain level of uptime, an essential requirement if they wish to attract the big corporations onto their platform. The SLA being offered only guarantees 99% uptime (which is still 4 days a year of downtime, that isn’t guaranteed) but it is the first such guarantee from a blogging provider. SixApart will also be holding seminars to help companies start blogging, the first of these is the Blog Business Summit on March 16, 2006 in Los Angeles.
Also as part of the new business strategy MovableType will be getting a makeover with some enterprise features such as integration with LDAP directories and other authentication services, better anti-spam protection, Oracle database support (amongst others) and customizable email support. The business-grade MovableType doesn’t have a launch date or a price yet but it is currently in beta in Japan and should be out soon.
It seems that every day you hear about or see news of yet another company that has started a blog (or blogs) so capturing this interest and growth with targeted products is a very smart strategy from SixApart. At the moment these businesses who wish to blog are either setting it up themselves or engaging outside consultants, so now they have a company to go to which has a solid market share in the consumer space and a good reputation. I believe it is only a matter of time before Wordpress and others catch onto this market and release their own services targeted at businesses.
Tags: techcrunch,, web2.0,, web20,, web_2.0,, sixapart,, typepad,, blogging,, blogs,, movabletype,, business,, blog
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=663  Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s CTO, had a thought for a new service about a month ago. Today, he launched it at eTech and through Dave Winer’s Scripting News.
The core idea is a new open standard, called Live Clipboard, which allows the copy and pasting of data, including dynamic, updating data, across and between web applications and desktop applications. Microformats for things like calendar entries, contact information, etc. will use common clipboard data formats. Ray wrote on his blog today:
Simply stated, I’d like to extend the clipboard user model to the web.
A few weeks ago, I approached my brother Jack – who leads a Concept Development team in my group at Microsoft – and visually sketched out and storyboarded some end-to-end user scenarios that I wanted to try to accomplish. The scenarios were all centered on this new clipboard user model.
The team took me up on the challenge, and in a few short weeks had accomplished all of the scenarios, and more. And they did it using techniques that are incredibly simple, and which work securely and are browser independent.
Today at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference, I’m sharing this new concept – through a brief demo and through hallway discussion.
I call this new concept Live Clipboard, because we view “live†efforts as those providing users with seamless end-to-end scenarios that “just work†by weaving together the best of software and the best of services.
The Concept Development team has created a screencast of a Live Clipboard demo, and a simple web page-based demo that you can play with. Hopefully this will convey more vividly some of what I’ve attempted to explain above.
 Go through the demos and sample live page above to get a feel for how it will work. The last couple of demos which show piping of dynamic information across applications are mind bending. This can change the way we use the web, by associating XML feeds with chunks of content instead of entire pages or sites.
Tags: microsoft, live.com, liveclipboard, xml, rss, rayozzie, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=664  Palo Alto based lala made a splash by announcing their landing page on USA Today (wow, you sure don’t see USA Today announcing new companies very often - I wonder how they got this scoop). Lala is a new service, set to launch this summer, that allows people to swap physical CDs.
It looks to be exactly like Peerflix but for CDs. You will tell lala what music you have. Other members can request it from you, and you send it directly to them using a postage-prepaid envelope supplied by lala. They charge $1 for the swap, and $.20 goes directly to artists.
You aren’t supposed to send copies of CDs (originals only), and lala asks that you do the “right thing” and remove songs from your iPod or PC once you’ve sent a CD to another member. While I’m all for the revenue sharing with artists, pleeeease, lala, get over yourself and drop the condescending, do-the-right-thing-as-defined-by-the-RIAA messaging.
I have never written about Peerflix - I am a former member and was deluged in spam from the service and never found anything good on the site to request (people keep the good stuff and put little known movies into the service). My hope for lala is that they get much better inventory from users and don’t try to enforce the “no copies” rule too strongly. These will be very difficult things to do.
Tags: lala, peerflix, music, riaa, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=665  After a reported long-term power struggle with co-founder Bob Wyman, PubSub CEO Salim Ismail has been replaced by Constantine “Gus” Spathis today. More details in the PubSub blog. There are also serious acquisition rumors floating around about the company, so expect more news soon. My previous posts on PubSub are at this link.
Tags: salimishmail, bobwyman, search, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=666 Two startups have launched recently to assist web 1.0 content and commerce sites add much needed web 2.0 features - Aggregate Knowledge and BazaarVoice. The companies, both backed by Josh Kopelman’s First Round Capital, help companies add customer feedback features at a fraction of the price of developing them in-house.
 Menlo Park-based Aggregate Knowledge, led by CEO Paul Martino and VP Products Chris Law, launched officially today at the eTech conference. The company creates automated “behavior recommendations” for websites - things like “people who look at this also looked at” and “people who bought this also bought” features. See screen shot here for a visual. Integration is extremely simple.
Aggregate Knowledge also creates white label “ajax homepages” for clients that help to promote this information. See this screenshot for an example.
 Texas-based BazaarVoice, which is a little further along than Aggregate Knowledge, provides Amazon-like editorial recommendations for products - things like customer reviews, etc. This is big business - BazaarVoice is able to provide their service at a fraction of the cost of in-house development, and even very large sites like CompUSA are starting to adopt their solution. Pricing starts at about $2,000 per month for smaller customers. In addition to Josh Kopelman, BazaarVoice has received funding from Tom Ball at Austin Ventures.
Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=667  I am now in possession of screenshots from Google’s long delayed new Ajax calendar application, which will be called “CL2″ (the CL2 login screen is here). It was only a matter of time before someone broke down and leaked these - as far as I know these screen shots are the first on the public web. Previous ones were almost certainly photoshopped fakes. These are real.
Om Malik also recently posted with some additional details and has been trying to track down more information. Now we have it.
Here is the default view of Google’s new CL2 Calendar:
There have been leaks before today, however. Rumor has it that one of the beta testers provided credentials to Yahoo…although Yahoo notified Google (after a thorough review of the product I suppose).
The closed beta is ongoing with about 200 participants - people involved are not allowed to invite outsiders to see the calendar and are under strict rules not to share any details with outsiders. Based on feedback I am getting, CL2 is a long way away from launch.
About CL2
CL2 makes it easy — even effortless — to keep track of all the events in your life and compare them to what your friends and family have going on in theirs. We’ve designed a calendar that works for you — helping you add events from email, friends, and other public calendars — so you don’t have to spend all your time maintaining your schedule. CL2 even helps you discover new events you might be interested in. We think it’s a great tool for managing your daily schedule, keeping track of what everyone in your family is doing, organizing events for a club or team, or creating public events that you can promote to the world.
CL2 is closely, very closely, integrated with Gmail. It includes now-standard web 2.0 features - Ajax, subscription feeds for integration with iCal and other desktop calendars, event creation, search, sharing, notifications (including SMS) and more.
It’s also clear from the event creation functionality that Google is is going to attempt to aggregate events like eventful and zvents do now. If they combine their event creation feature with a web crawl and parsing of event data (exactly what zvents does), they will be able to create a very large events database. From the CL2 Trusted Tester Guidelines:
Creating Events
You can create events on your calendar in a number of ways.
Click ‘Create Event.‘ This brings you to the create event page, where you can enter information about your event.
Click on Quick Add (or type the letter Q). Quick Add gives you a text box where you can type all the information about your event in normal English, and we’ll fill out the form for you. We’re pretty excited about this feature, so please let us know how it works for you.
Drag-to-create. If you’re looking at the day where you want to create an event on your calendar, just click and drag your mouse from the desired start time to the end time. Once you’ve selected your time range, you can just choose a title for your new event.
Event Pages
Whenever you create an event, we create a web page which you’ll see when you click on the “more details” link on any event. This web page is only visible to you, unless you’ve invited other people to your event or made the event public, in which case you can use the page to share information about the event with people who are attending or the public at large. Note: you don’t have to be a CL2 user to be able to see event pages, so you can use these pages to share information with anyone involved with the event, regardless of what online tools (if any) they use. (Ever wish your favorite local band would learn how to use HTML and publish their calendar? Once we get your feedback and open CL2 to the world you can help them do just that.)
I am not going to publish the full guidelines because there is information included around becoming a tester that I feel is inappropriate for public disclosure.
Overall, CL2 is a very impressive product. The tight integration with Gmail will make that an even more compelling product. Other online calendar applications are going to have a very hard time competing.
Additional Screen Shots:
Tags: CL2, google, googlecalendar, calendar, ajax, zvents, eventful, techcrunch, web2.0, Web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=668  Sharpcast, which I wrote about briefly after seeing their product at a recent conference, announced a big round of financing today - $13.5 million from Signma Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Selby Venture Partners. The company is based in Palo Alto.
The product is a suite of consumer services that acts as a “uber-interpreter” across platforms (PC, mobile, etc.). Sign up to beta test their first product, Sharpcast Photos, on their website. If you have the time and are interested, read CEO Gibu Thomas’ post on Web 2.0 and why he created Sharpcast.
This round of funding signals that Sharpcast is in it for the long haul - no $30 million acquisition for them at this point. From what I’ve seen so far, they have real technology that can help bridge the gap between mobile and desktop applications.
Tags: mobile, techcrunch, photos, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=669  Live.com rolled out a new toolbar and website feature today, and the site has a somewhat better look and feel. New features include the ability to have multiple pages (a good thing), enhanced search, new themes to choose from and more. Richard MacManus has more details.
 Search has also been significantly enhanced. Live.com clearly has the best image search on the web now (both results and UI). Standard web search is also good - note the “infinite” scroll bar on the right. The only problem is that search is massively slow, and Microsoft needs to fix this problem immediately.
Note to Live.com Team: Hey! How many posts do I have to do on Live.com to get TechCrunch into the default technology feed?
Tags: microsoft, live, search, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0, ajax
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