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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=812  From the well-sourced rumor file: Facebook, which began allowing employees from a handful of companies to become members last week, may be adding another 1,000 companies on Tuesday.
Facebook determines if a person is a member of a college, high school or corporate network based on their email address. As they add companies, anyone with an email address from that company can become a member of that company’s network on Facebook.
Here’s something I’d love to have: a TechCrunch Facebook network. I would issue email addresses to TechCrunch readers and we could have a private network of people who want to discuss new startups and share information about themselves. I don’t think this is in Facebook’s plans, but I’d enjoy doing it.
Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=814  In March, Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive, said he’d acquire five or so new companies in the near future. On Monday morning they’ll announce two of them.
The first announcement is a confirmation of the previously rumored NewRoo acquisition. The second announcement is the acquisition of New York based kSolo, a service that enables its users to create, share and rate their own recorded music (web karaoke).
Both of these acquisitions are excellent “plug-in deals” for Fox’s massive MySpace property, with nearly 70 million users.
Terms are not going to be disclosed, although rumors put the deals at less than $10 million each. Look for a press release Monday AM. Here’s the full text of the press release:
FOX INTERACTIVE MEDIA COMPLETES
ACQUISITION OF NEWROO INC. AND KSOLO.COM
Los Angeles, CA - May 1, 2006 - Fox Interactive Media (FIM) today announced it has completed two acquisitions of innovative early stage companies, Newroo Inc. and kSolo.com (www.kSolo.com). Newroo has developed an intelligent tool that scans the web and finds the most relevant information for users from thousands of websites, enabling them to easily create their own web sites by aggregating and remixing content from third-party websites and blogs. kSolo.com is a powerful user-generated music service that enables its community to easily create, share and rate their own recorded music and connect around shared tastes in music genre and style.
“Fox Interactive Media’s acquisitions of Newroo and kSolo demonstrate our commitment to empowering users with interesting tools that they can use to further enhance their online experience and online identity,” said Ross Levinsohn, President of Fox Interactive Media. “The acquisitions further validate FIM’s ability to unearth early stage, technically savvy web 2.0 companies led by entrepreneurial, forward-thinking management teams.”
“We are excited to bring both our technology and music community to the Fox Interactive Media family of web companies. We look forward to working with them to build the next generation of online music experiences for consumers,” said Nimrod Lev, Founder and CEO of kSolo.com.
“We were attracted to Fox Interactive Media because they quickly grasped our vision to provide web users with a powerful tool set to create decentralized vertical content websites around people’s passions and interests,” added Dan Gould and Brian Norgard, Co-founders of Newroo.
Financial terms of the deals were not disclosed. Both technologies will be deployed across relevant sites in the growing FIM Network.
About Fox Interactive Media
With the third largest reach of any Internet company, Fox Interactive Media (FIM) is building an integrated network of sites that offer its more than 70 million worldwide users socially rich media experiences centered on entertainment, news, information and self-expression. The company’s network includes Internet assets from News Corp. divisions, including the highly trafficked Foxsports.com, Americanidol.com and Fox.com. FIM also owns and operates such category leaders as MySpace, the number one social networking site on the Web; IGN, a leading gaming and entertainment site; Scout.com, a dynamic collegiate and pro sports network; AskMen, a leading men’s lifestyle site, and Rotten Tomatoes, the premier destination for movie-goers, among others.
About kSolo.com
kSolo.com is the world’s first Web based karaoke service, providing users with the opportunity to sing their favorite songs, record their personal performances and send their personalized renditions to their friends. Utilizing proprietary technology and requiring nothing more than a microphone and an Internet connection, the service is available to users anywhere with a connected PC. Members can also send their recordings via email (as a singing eCard) and to webcast their performances for the world to judge. The company recently received first prize at the prestigious Popkomm IMEA awards, held in Berlin, Germany.
About Newroo Inc.
Newroo was founded in 2002 by Daniel Gould and Brian Norgard who attended Brown University together and who wanted to provide users with a powerful tool set to create vertical news-driven websites that found the most important things on the web about their personal passions and interests. The company has developed an intelligent tool that scans the web and finds the most relevant information for users from thousands of websites, enabling them to easily create their own web sites by aggregating and remixing content from third-party websites and blogs.
Media Contact:
Fox Interactive Media
Julie Henderson
(310) 969-7141
Tags: rosslevinsohn, myspace, merger, acquisition, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=815  Genius, Inc. launched their first product tonight: SalesGenius. It’s targeted to sales and marketing teams and allows these professionals to track the activities of sales leads on their corporate websites. CEO David Thompson, a former WebEx executive, gave me a walkthrough last week.
A lot of analytics packages already offer the ability to track user behaviors on websites. The difference with SalesGenius is that it requires absolutely no IT integration on the company side, and ties actions to specific leads. The method that they use to do this is actually quite clever.
If you are a sales professional, you use the SalesGenius Outlook plugin or web based email product to send an email to a lead. Any URLs back to your corporate website are automatically converted to Genius URLs, which are served through a proxy and allow Genius to track their clicks and subsequent actions on the site. The sales professional can then contact leads with the additional information that Genius provided to them.
This isn’t a consumer facing application, but a lot of sales people read this site and I think this may be very relevant to them. The basic product is $49/month per user and includes a 30 day free trial.
There are aspects of the service that trigger questions of privacy. For more, see Dan Farber, who says it’s “Not exactly a stroke of genius, but useful” and Rafe Needleman, who calls aspects of the service “disturbing”.
Tags: salesgenius, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=813  I’ve heard from three independent sources that YouTube may have very quietly raised another $25 million in venture capital after raising two rounds totalling $11.5 million from Sequoia Capital. YouTube’s last round ($8 million) was announced just a month ago, on April 5, 2006.
There are two reasons why I think this rumor may be accurate. First of all, YouTube is on a roll: 35 million videos are watched daily and they have 13 million unique monthly visitors. Bandwidth costs for all of these videos adds up: Forbes reports that YouTube’s bandwidth fees are approaching $1 million per month. Since YouTube is revenue-free (they just started placing ads on the site in March), they need more than $11.5 million in capital to keep up with growth.
Second, it is also understandable that they would raise a lot of cash over two rounds given that Sequoia Capital is involved and almost certainly has veto rights over new rounds of financing. Sequoia will want to maintain their equity share of the company (probably in the 25-30% range), but won’t want to pay current prices for those shares by participating in a new market valued venture round. The solution? Do a round at a lower valuation where only Sequoia participates, and then follow up with a subsequent round (possibly only days later) with new venture capitalists at a significantly higher valuation. This is the VC game, and funds like Sequoia can pull this off with their hotter startups.
Like I said, this is only a rumor (and I’ve been dead wrong with YouTube rumors in the past), but this one makes a lot of sense.
Tags: sequoia, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=816  Yahoo Tech launched tonight, taking clear aim at the massively popular CNET Reviews property.
The best way to get a quick understanding of the site is to take the tour, also linked from the home page. Yahoo Tech is providing content about technology products from Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Answers, in house experts, and third party sources like Consumer Reports.
Product reviews can be accessed via a tag cloud or the search bar. Yahoo Tech includes product reviews, how to guides and other content. Yahoo Tech also has four resident bloggers to give product advice to different customer segments.
They are making a big effort to dumb things down for non-techies and differentiate themselves from CNET and other review sites. Is it better than CNET? No, not even close, yet. The depth and quality of reviews just isn’t there. Is the site slow as hell? Yes, probably from the massive traffic hitting it and the fairly heavy use of Flash. We’ll keep an eye on this as it evolves.
Tags: CNET, reviews, yahoo, flash, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=817  This news was embargoed until today at 5 AM PST, but Om managed to dig up the facts anyway. Recently reformed Plaxo is announcing the acquisition of online calendaring startup HipCal, which was built by five college students while attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York
Plaxo says they will integrate HipCal’s calendaring product directly into Plaxo’s free product, and expand premium calendar services as well. Plaxo, now with 11 million or so members and adding 20,000 per day, is in an excellent position to leverage its address book features into new product lines. Calendaring is an obvious next step.
The size of the aquisition was not announced but is almost certainly single digit millions. Here’s the full text of the press release:
PLAXO TO ACQUIRE WEB 2.0 CALENDAR START-UP HIPCAL
New York Fraternity Brothers Create Upstate UpStart
and Land Silicon Valley Jobs
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—May 1, 2006— Plaxo®, Inc., creator of the smart address book, has agreed to acquire innovative start-up HipCal, developer of an award-winning online calendar service. The acquisition will strengthen Plaxo’s calendar platform, and extend the company’s business model with new revenue-generating offerings.
The HipCal announcement highlights Plaxo’s commitment to providing its members with the best tools and services for accessing and managing all of their personal information on any platform, email client, browser, or mobile device. The addition of HipCal’s team and technology will dramatically accelerate Plaxo’s efforts in the calendar space, bringing lifestyle management tools such as appointment management, iCal publication and subscription, and group calendars to Plaxo members by the end of 2006.
Fraternity Brothers Head to The Valley
Five fraternity brothers originated HipCal while attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), located in Troy, New York. The team quickly realized their online calendar and to-do list was more than a success among friends — lots of people were using it. They decided to turn school project into a business and HipCal immediately took off — inside and outside of RPI. In less than six months, the beta grew to thousands of subscribers and garnered awards from both South by Southwest (SXSW) and SEOmoz.org’s Web 2.0 Awards.
“Our goal with HipCal was simply to create a calendar that makes sense,†said Garret Heaton, co-founder and lead programmer, HipCal. “While we created a fantastic online calendar, as a standalone service, we realized more could be done to achieve its fullest potential. Together with Plaxo, we can give people one central, easily accessible service for all the information they need to organize their personal and professional lives.â€
“In the less than four years, Plaxo has fundamentally changed the way people think about the address book,†said Ben Golub, president and CEO, Plaxo, Inc. “With the addition of the skilled HipCal team, we plan to do for the calendar what we did for the address book. The combined Plaxo/HipCal vision will result in the most complete and convenient solution for accessing and updating all of your personal information, and for helping you to stay organized and in-touch with friends, colleagues, customers, and family.â€
Today, Plaxo offers a smart, self-updating address book that is accessible from any web-enabled device. Plaxo also provides members with universal access to their calendar, tasks and notes. An enhanced, fully integrated and always-accessible calendar raises the bar on what an address book should do giving Plaxo a distinct competitive advantage because it is the natural tie-in with the address book.
Plaxo will acquire all assets of HipCal, including the technologies, for an undisclosed amount. The five founders will become Plaxo employees, but will continue to maintain the HipCal service until its functionality can be incorporated into Plaxo. Plaxo intends to incorporate all of the existing HipCal functionality into its free service. In addition, Plaxo will develop premium, calendar-related services.
About Plaxo
Plaxo, Inc., (www.plaxo.com) is used by over 10 million people in over 83 countries, and enjoys a wide following in academia, government, and both small and large businesses, including 98 of the Fortune 100 companies. Plaxo makes it easy for members to connect to their personal information, friends and colleagues in the manner that is most appropriate. The company has created a network of people whose contact information is always up-to-date through seamless address book updating that occurs between linked members. Plaxo Premium Services expand the functionality of Plaxo and include Plaxo Address Book Optimizer, Plaxo eCards, Plaxo Mobile Access, and Plaxo VIP Support.
Founded in 2001, Plaxo is a privately held company funded by leading investment and technology firms – Sequoia Capital, Globespan Capital Platforms, Harbinger Venture Management and Cisco Systems – as well as individual investors Ram Shriram and Tim Koogle.
About HipCal
HipCal is an online calendar, to-list, and address book developed by fraternity brothers, Garret Heaton, Pete Curley, Chris Rivers, Tawheed Kader, Glenn Dixon, as undergraduates at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2005. The award-winning lifestyle management tool and development team was acquired by Plaxo, Inc. in May 2006.
Press Contact:
Mischa Dunton
Plaxo, Inc.,
650.810.1089
mdunton@plaxo.com
Pamela Preston
Breakaway Communications for Plaxo
212.616.6001
ppreston@breakawaycom.com
Tags: hipcal, onlinecalendaring, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=818  Pluck’s new BlogBurst product will be publicly launching tomorrow, May 2, 2006. We first had a look at it back in February, and since then the team has reached a number of important milestones: partnerships with their first mainstream publishers (San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Austin American Statesman and more), and 1,000 blogger applications.
The basics: BlogBurst is a service that takes pre-screened, categorized blog content and pushes it to mainstream publishers for a fee (charged on a CPM basis). To see an example, go to the Sf Chronicle Travel Section and look for the “Travel Blog Posts” area on the page. BlogBurst helps these mainstream publishers add more targeted content to their sites at a much lower cost than producing the content themselves. Bloggers benefit from extra exposure - each piece of content includes a prominent link back to the blogger’s original post, a linked icon/photo and a byline.
This is good progress for a service that is only two months old. If you are a blogger and would like have your content included, go to the main site to apply.
Disclaimer: I am an unpaid advisor to BlogBurst, and have done paid consulting work for Pluck in the past.
Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=819  Israeli startup Spotback, which I’ve been tracking for a while, will launch tonight (Monday) at 10 PM PST. Spotback is a personalized news portal that learns from user behavior over time to deliver the news that’s just right for them.
Web 2.0 news sites usually fall into one of two categories. Sites like Digg and Newsvine take user feedback and actions to affect what the entire community sees. Personalized sites like Findory change what they present to a single user based on his or her actions over time. Spotback falls into the latter category - a personalized news site that changes for each user over time based on what they like and don’t like (although they also have a Top Stories tab with the most highly rated news from all users).
 Each news item on Spotback can be rated by a user, saved, and/or emailed to others (click on image to right for larger view). Users may comment on any story. The source of the news item can also be marked, to tell Spotback to include more news like this, or to block items like it (or from that source). Finally, users can also customize the page to include whatever news categories they like (business, sports, etc.) or an RSS reader widget, which allows a user to add any news source that may not already be included in the Spotback index.
Here’s what I like best about Spotback - there is no requirement to set up a user account, you can simply access the site (personalized via cookie) if you choose to. If you do create a user account, you can rate other users and receive personalized news based on what they like and dislike, too.
Tags: newsvine, digg, findory, news, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=820  New blog search engine Sphere launched just moments ago and has also announced a $3.75 million round of venture financing. In addition to covering the launch of Sphere here, we have a podcast interview with CEO Tony Conrad and advisor Toni Schneider over at TalkCrunch.
Sphere, which follows in the footsteps of previous blog search engines like Feedster, Technorati and IceRocket, as well as offerings from Google and Yahoo, is doing things quite a bit differently than its predecessors (and its evolved dramatically since our first look at it back in October).
Sphere’s design, by the way, was created by Adaptive Path. See their essay on the project here.
The site is segmented into three main areas: blog search results, featured blogs, and related media.
Blog Search Results
Sphere search results can be viewed by date, relevance or a combination of both. Unlike Technorati, which determines a blog’s relevance based on the total number of unique links into that blog, Sphere is taking an algorithmic approach. For Sphere, “relevance” is based on three key factors: links in/out of blog; meta data around the blog (average length of posts, post frequency, etc; and a semantic analysis of the posts themselves). In our tests Sphere blog relevance is very good. We’ll do a more in depth review and comparison at a later date.
Another feature is a “custom date search”. In addition to preset date selections, if you do a custom date search by selecting it in the drop down box, you’ll get results just for that date range and you’ll also see a day by day breakdown showing results per day with the included term.
Each search result has a link to a blog profile that includes basic blog information (links in and out, average post frequency and length and additional information). In the future an extended profile for each blog will be available that will include information from the blogger as well, such as a photo, a zip code for geotagging, and topics the blog covers.
Featured Results
 The most relevant blogs for thousands of search terms are listed in the “featured results” area.
If you don’t see search results for what you are looking for, click over the the most highly rated blogs for your search term to research further. These results are based on the same algorithmic analysis as blog search.
Related Media
Want to go beyond blogs for your research? Click on “related media” and see related pictures, news, books and podcasts relevant to your query.
More Tools
As great as the basic search platform is, what I like best about Sphere is in the Tools area. Install the “Sphere It” bookmarklet and click it whenever you are reading something that you’d like more information on. Sphere will analyze the page in real time and present blog search results that are relevant to that topic. It’s important to note that this is not a search to find blogs linking into that page you are viewing; rather you are finding fresh blog content that is related to the subject matter of what you are reading. I’ve tested this and find it extremely useful.
Congratulations to the Sphere team for getting this launched, and taking blog seach another step or two forward.
Tags: TechCrunch, web2.0, web_2.0, search, blogsearch
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=842  AIM Pages, the new AOL Myspace competitor that we’ve been buzzing about for the last couple of weeks, launched this morning at aimpages.com.
First impression: The site is clean and organized (something I’m not sure the Myspace crowd wants), and module based (about me, photos, etc.). Modules can be dragged to any point on the screen. It’s not working properly with Firefox (or possibly at all), which I imagine will be fixed. UPDATE: I am using Firefox 2.0 on a Mac, not 1.5. This may be the cause of my problems.
If AIM Pages launched today as a stand alone company with no affiliation to AOL, I’d be ripping it apart. Personal publishing is very easy, and users have too many choices. Anything new really has to stand out, and AIM Pages doesn’t. AIM Pages is a slick looking Ajax product, but is not really raising the bar v. Myspace, Tagworld and others. I’m also disappointed that it’s not working properly in Firefox. Now, the fact that your AIM Page will be prepopulated with your AIM buddies is a big competitive advantage, and I imagine AIM will have some level of success due to that asset.
Screen shots below. Thanks for the tip Stowe.
Tags: tagworld, socialnetworking, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=843 YouTube announced a new feature today that allows uploading of videos from a mobile device that supports Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). Users need to create a moblie profile before uploading videos. Sign up here.
I use my camera phone to upload pictures directly to Flickr all the time (yesterday’s banana-yellow ridiculous rental car, for example). If my phone had the ability to create video, I’d be using this for YouTube all the time, too.
And by the way, I’ll never understand why Flickr gave the video market away to YouTube. Maybe they (Flickr) know something YouTube doesn’t know about the real costs of this business.
Tags: mobile, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=844  Google Trends launched today. It’s another analysis tool (and a good one), that allows you to see how often specific search terms are being entered into the Google search engine.
Up to five terms can be compared. And you can also view queries that contain either or two terms, using a vertical bar “|”. More advanced queries can be done as well - see the FAQs for details. Google also puts markers next to major news events that are about that search query, helping to explain surges. Data can be sorted by time, language, geographic location, etc.
In testing it I’m finding it works well for very highly searched terms, but terms that are very rarely searched show no data at all. Seeing trends on even obscure terms would be useful. Even so, Steve Rubel says Google Trends is “a must-bookmark for every PR person and marketer worldwide.”
Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=845  From recent buzz and confirmation from two trusted sources, it sounds like Yahoo closed its rumored acquisition of Joe Kraus’ Jotspot, and will be entering the wiki market. No official announcement of this, or any indication of price (buy Yahoo is famously stingy).
I’m putting this rumor at 85% likely, partially because Yahoo has a pre-existing business relationship with PBWiki to create wikis for Yahoo Groups. More as this develops. Our previous posts on JotSpot and its products are at this link.
Tags: pbwiki, wiki, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=846  CollectiveX, the group-focused professional social network founded by Clarence Wooten, will launch early Thursday morning.
The focus of CollectiveX is on the group, not the individual. Members of the group can interact via file sharing, messaging, calendaring and exchange of leads/contacts. It frankly answers to question that many social networks pose: Ok, we’re here, now what do we do? With CollectiveX, the entire point is to facilitate interactions among existing groups. As a member, you can be a part of as many groups as you like: boards, company teams, charities, whatever. For additional information, see my last post on CollectiveX, when it was just entering private beta. As I said before, CollectiveX is what LinkedIn should have been.
Screen Shots:
Tags: linkedin, socialnetworking, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=847  Through a partnership with Voxeo and Language Line Services, Skype is now offering real-time language translation services for Skype voice calls. 150 languages are supported.
Here’s what I like about this: It’s easy to use (add the service to your Skype contacts), its not horrendously expensive ($2.99 per minute, no other fees, taken out of Skype Out credits), and you can use this on the fly with no scheduling (you can get an interpreter on average in 45 seconds after an initial request).
One problem: I’ve verified that the service works on a PC, but it does not work at all on my Mac.
Now, if Skype just added a call record feature it would be perfect.
Tags: voip, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=848  A Google employee named Erica Joy has posted a number of screen shots of Google Notebook, which will launch next week at google.com/notebook.
Notebook looks like it is designed to be a flat out del.icio.us competitor, allowing you to gather content from around the web, add metadata like categories and, if you like, publish the information. More from Philip Lenssen.
Screen shots:
Tags: delicious, del.icio.us, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=849  The “early bird” discount for Supernova (June 21-23 in San Francisco, CA) expires tomorrow, Friday May 12 - If you are thinking of going, please be sure to register and save hundreds of dollars on the full registration price.
Also, if you use the codes below to register you will receive an additional $200 discount on the conference.
The discount codes are:
- Two-day main conference — crunch01
Full conference — crunch02
By the way, the TechCrunch co-sponsored Connected Innovators session at Supernova is going to be awesome. We had over 100 applications for the 10 spots. There are going to be some really cool new product announcements.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=851 I only delve into gadget territory occasionally, but this one is too good to pass up.
Sony announced the launch of the MouseTalk (trying to find an English link), a new VAIO PC peripheral that acts as both an optical mouse and an Internet phone. The clamshell mouse, which will be Skype certified, flips open to become an Internet phone to make and receive calls around the world through Skype. Features include: mouse wheel controlled mute, volume and number select controls, echo-cancellation technology and a hands-free mode.
I think this is brilliant and I want one for my Mac.
No Tags Tags: skype, sony, vaio, mouse, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0, gadget
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=852  BackupMyBlog is a new service (in public beta) that will automatically back up blogs daily (I love the heavy use of green in the design). This is a much needed tool. Wordpress, which is what we use for all of the TechCrunch blogs, has this feature built in, but inexplicably doesn’t backup images - so we do backups manually instead (and often forget for a day).
BackupMyBlog backups are fully redundant on two separate servers in two locations, so its extremely unlikely you’ll lose your main blog as well as both backups. However, the service has a 10 mb limit - something I don’t like - and older post backups are deleted as that limit is reached. Hopefully they’ll have options for more storage once the service is out of beta. Brian Benzinger has done a full test of the service and likes most aspects of it.
Most hosted blogs won’t be able to use the product - you must be able to add a PHP script on your blog server. If you are hosting your blog yourself, though, you should be using this or otherwise backing up your data.
The product is free during its beta period. No word on pricing after that.
This is the kind of thing I’d expect Feedburner to be doing.
Tags: feedburner, blogs, blogging, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=853  I just got word that Denver-based Gtalkr shut down yesterday and the founders, brothers Wes and Dudley Carr, have taken jobs at Google.
Gtalkr was a really cool Flash desktop/homepage tool that integrated gmail, gtalk and Yahoo maps (Yahoo has a Flash API, Google doesn’t). It launched in November 2005 and had a significant feature update in February. I’m sad to see it go, Gtalkr was one of my favorite apps.
I’ve pinged Wes Carr for the details. The last I heard from him he was closing an angel round of financing. Things obviously changed.
Update: I just spoke with Wes Carr, one of the founders. Wes was able to answer only some of my questions. In answer to “were you acquired?” he said “no comment, I cannot comment on that” which tell me that yes, they were acquired. Wes and Dudley will be moving to the Kirland, WA Google office within two weeks, both have accepted jobs as engineers. Wes also said that “they were very happy with the outcome”.
Wes had clearly been instructed by Google on what exactly he could and could not say. Again, that tells me that an acquisition took place - if it hadn’t, there would not have been those restrictions.
Tags: Flash, google, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=854  PhotoBucket, the company that drives 2% of total U.S. Internet traffic, will announce a $10.5 million Series B round on Tuesday. The round was funded by Trinity Ventures. General Partner Gus Tai will join the PhotoBucket board of directors.
This company is just exploding with growth. PhotoBucket is not a destination site. They’ve capitalized on the photo and video limitations of Myspace and other sites (restrictions on number of photos that may be uploaded, and/or poor tools for doing so) by allowing users to upload photos and videos very easily and display them on these third party sites. And those photos and videos are viewed over 50 billion times per month.
Photobucket is a consumer visual media hosting and publishing service with over 15 million members and 10 million unique monthly visitors, according to Media Metrix. 65,000 new members sign up daily. Members upload personal visual content including videos, images and graphic art and link it to over 50,000 social media, ecommerce, blogging and discussion Web sites like eBay, MySpace, Blogger, and Neopets. Photobucket serves over 50 billion image and video requests per month. Since the launch of its video services in April 2006, Photobucket members have uploaded nearly 1 million video clips at a rate of over 30,000 new videos per day.
 The fact that users are uploading videos at nearly the same rate as YouTube (30,000/day at PhotoBucket v. 35,000 at YouTube) is just outstanding - the video product is only a few weeks old. This suggests, strongly, that users want to store their photos and videos in one place.
PhotoBucket offers a free and $25/year premium version with more storage and bandwidth. They are cash flow positive and profitable.
Tags: photos, video, youtube, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=855  Moola is a new website, in private beta, that puts two visitors up against each other in a simple Flash game. The interesting thing about the site is that people are playing for real money.
Moola gives each new user $0.01 to start. You play against another player at your level, and the winner takes all of the money from the other person. So each time you win, you double your money. Win 30 times in a row and win $10.7 million. A user can “cash out” at any time and have a check delivered to them with their current balance. If you lose, you start over at $0.01.
The service is advertising supported. You have to watch a short video ad (every time I played it was for yellowpages.com) and then answer a question correctly about the ad. Once you’ve done that, you can play the next round.
 I tried playing a few games and it seemed legitimate. I can’t tell if I was playing against a computer or not, though. Moola always found a rival to play against me within seconds, and the games are very simple and could be easily played by a computer. Given how easy it would be for Moola to beat successful players by automated means, I would assume that the risk of fraud is significant. The CEO of Moola addressed this question on the Moola blog.
What’s more interesting is Moola’s business model: paying users to watch ads. At the very least, they succeeded in getting yellowpages.com stuck in my head.
Moola also has a multi-tiered referall system. When you refer a user, you get a 4% bonus calculated based on any money they cash out for the following year. You get a 3% bonus from any friends they refer, and so on to the fourth level. Multi-level referrer programs are smart, in a pyramid scheme kind of way.
It’s in private beta now. You can sign up for the beta on the home page.
Tags: flash, techcrunch, web2.0, web_2.0
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=856  Mecanbe is an Australian start-up founded by Adam Korbl that will enable you to track your goals in life. It still is in development but the founders were kind enough to take us through a first preview of the service.
Mecanbe is a service for self-coaching and self-improvement. As you can see from the screenshots below the service is very nicely designed and has many applications and functionalities. You can easily create a list of goals (eg.loose weight, write a good blog, run faster) rate them and publish them on your blog and if you don’t have one Mecanbe will provide one for you. It enables you to track your overall performances and ongoing progress.
I liked the flash-based dynamic world map (screenshot above) showing “Global Self-Development†as it happens. You can share your goals with others in the hope the community can contribute to help you in achieving them.
The interesting side of the application is the team-based goal management where you can see the progress of the team and compare it with yours on a specific goal. Interesting also is the leverage of the Flickr API to enable you to attach a picture to your profile and to any goal.
The design and the marketing approach look yet very much consumer oriented and this tool could be great if applied to organizations and corporate environments especially for team building and evaluation of individuals within a team.
Mecanbe is privately funded and their business model will be mainly based on advertising and premium services to be added in the future, hoping they will reach a critical size to monetize their audience. Todo-lists could evolve in that way to enlarge their scope of usage.
We will follow up that initiative as it evolves and we will add that as a Goal to achieve. The Website will open its private beta in a few weeks but you can register on their homepage.
ScreenShots (larger pictures here):
Tags: web2.0, web_2.0, techcrunch, todolists
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