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June 2006
June 11, 2006
June 12, 2006
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=932
The Windows Vista Beta 2 download weighs in at a whopping 3.2 GB (even the product guide is over 70 mb). You can download the file or order a DVD. Microsoft is strongly pushing the DVD option, noting that their servers are under severe strain from downloads and that many customers are simply unable to obtain the software this way:
Microsoft, of course, has chosen to ignore the most efficient file distribution method in existence - bittorent. Chris Pirillo and Jake Ludington have, without any endorsement from Microsoft, created VistaTorrent with instructions on downloading the file through Bittorent. They also point to the Microsoft site that will generate a key for the software.
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=933
The investment that Simply Hired took from Fox Interactive seems to be paying dividends already. Tonight at 9 pm PST MySpace, a subsidiary of Fox Interactive, will unveil MySpace Careers, a new job site on MySpace powered by Simply Hired. This is interesting news mostly because of the massive traffic that the MySpace home page drives - and the new site has a link on that Myspace home page. No word on the deal terms, although I assume there is a revenue split based on the numerous advertisements MySpace is including on the new site.
Deals like this show the positive impact a corporate investor can have on a startup. Note that competitor Indeed took an investment from the New York Times last year, and they partially power the NYT online jobs search engine.
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=934
One True Media will announce today $5 million in new funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. The service provides online video and photo slide show editing and sharing.
One True Media’s service is highly usable, is well positioned to target families and online social network users but leans towards lock-in in its approach to the tension between the viral nature of online multimedia and it’s business interests. This tension is caused by the company’s business model, which aims to monetize data storage and the creation of hard-copy artifacts like DVDs and photo books. Given the company’s target demographics, difficulty exporting files to other systems or sharing without the creation of a simple account may not be a serious threat to the growth of the service.
This is exactly the kind of high-quality system that could make web based multimedia editing and sharing a mainstream activity. It may not make the “data wants to be free” crowd happy, but it could show that Web 2.0 is for more than just geeks.
History
Formed in February 2005 and launched in December of the same year, One True Media is headed by CEO Mark Moore and co-founder John Love. Moore is trained as a computer scientist, began his career at Oracle and has founded three previous startups. Love has an MBA and a background as an IT executive. Mark Fletcher, head of Bloglines until last week, is an angel investor and advisory board member.
This week’s announcement that Kleiner Perkins is investing in the company means that One True Media joins a portfolio that includes WebMD, the women’s online community iVillage, Audible, Amazon.com, Google and more than 450 other companies. Founded in 1972, the Kleiner Perkins team includes Bill Joy, William R. Hearst III and many other notable figures. Kleiner Perkins partner Randy Komisar, a former CEO of LucasArts Entertainment, has joined the One True Media board.
Usability
The strongest part of One True Media is the system’s usability. The flash uploader and drop down menus for selecting everything from clip duration to transitions are likely to provide just the right amount of creative control for the service’s target customers. The zoom-to-crop and simple pan functions might seem corny, but when it’s baby pictures or high school memories set to Coldplay on MySpace - that’s ok. One Coldplay song is available, along other 50 other songs by default and users can upload any Mp3 file for the soundtrack. The audio mixing function lets users drop the music or video sound to relative degrees, clip by clip, in case someone says something important in between guitar riffs.
Business Model
One True Media is focused on helping users create slide shows they will want to purchase on DVD (1 for $25, price lowered with quantity), turn into a printed book ($30 for first 20 pages) or store long-term online ($4/month). Premium subscription allows captioning, unlimited upload, 20 GB storage, personalized video players, up to 5,000 views per month and access to their files in MP4 format. Unpaid accounts can store files for 60 days. The company also offers video and photo scanning and restoration services.
Access to a user’s files is limited to either premium subscription or purchase on a DVD. So if you were hoping to give One True Media a try for free , take what you created and leave the system with it - you are unable to do so. This may be acceptable to many parents and MySpace users.
More difficult is the requirement that an account be created before a non-registered user is shown the code to embed a video in another site. Of course a page’s source can be viewed and the code needed is right there, but the ease of access provided by YouTube, for example is not there. Using the “email this slide show” link also requires registering for an account. Anyone can view a slide show without an account.
Nonetheless, the company says it is seeking to harness the viral spread of online multimedia. If this happens, it won’t look like the Web 2.0 darlings to date in photo and video sharing. One True Media is a different kind of business and is clearly taking many steps to get users registered. More than 330 thousand users registered in the first six months the service was online.
Partnerships
Behind extreme usability, One True Media’s partnerships with other online services is going to be the biggest factor in its future. The two biggest partnerships to date are with TypePad to offer a video player widget for bloggers and with Johnson and Johnson’s BabyCenter.com. One of BabyCenter’s features is a bulletin board with prominent links to One True Media’s co-branded BabyCenter video page.
The company will be dedicating significant resources to developing and increasing capacity for similar partnerships as key to their growth strategy.
I was very impressed with the usability and high-profile partnerships of One True Media. I like the subscription business model. Presumably, though, the company is hoping that a large number of people will buy DVDs or photo books. I imagine that most people comfortable today with manipulating photos and video online are not going to pay to have their slide shows burned to DVDs. This service is easy enough to use, though, that it may be adopted by far more people who are interested in purchasing such services.
If more partnerships are formed with large, nontechnical online communities then the people who discover the service will find a strong system for making a compelling slide show. They may be just the kinds of people who will pay for such a service, despite current trends of free multimedia services online. That seems likely, and the future looks good for the partnership between Kleiner Perkins and One True Media.
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=935
I started writing TechCrunch one year ago, on June 11, 2005. Looking back, it’s been the best year of my life, although there were also some incredibly difficult times as well. I’m sure years from now I’ll have more perspective on things. All I can say for now is that I’m exhausted.
For people interested in statistics, here they are. This will be the 884th post on TechCrunch, and 23,713 comments have been left on those posts. Hundreds of companies and products have been featured here over the last year. Traffic and RSS subscribers continue to grow - there are around 65,000 RSS and email subscribers based on my Feedburner count, and TechCrunch serves 2-3 million page views per month. TechCrunch is now my full time job, and then some.
I’ve looked back at some of the milestones, always marked with a blog post. Six weeks after the beginning, we had 500 RSS readers and I decided it was time for a redesign. Fred Oliveira, who’d previously criticized my design skills, came in and built a great new look for the site (see it here).
In October, I launched CrunchNotes, a new blog where I could write more freely about whatever was on my mind.
I remember writing this post, thinking after a long day of writing, that six months had passed, when really only five had (I changed the post title after publishing). At that point, last November, TechCrunch had 8,000 RSS readers.
In January, long time blogger Oliver Starr partnered with me to write MobileCrunch, a blog focused on new companies and products in the mobile space. MobileCrunch recently passed the 3,000 RSS subscriber mark, and is going strong.
In February, TechCrunch France launched. TechCrunch France is now one of the largest blogs in French, if not the largest, and was recently added to the default feed in Yahoo Mail France. My friend Ouriel Ohayon writes the blog while working full time as a venture capitalist in Tel Aviv, Israel.
TalkCrunch, a weekly (ish) podcast, launched in March. I’ve learned two things about podcasting since then. First, I love to talk to people. Second, I hate editing sound files. On the topic of podcasts, I want to thank Steve Gillmor for including me on the Gillmor Gang. I love being on those weekly podcast calls.
Lots of people have written guest posts on TechCrunch. Fred Oliveira, Keith Teare, Nik Cubrilovic, Frank Gruber, Adam Bouskila and Neil Kjeldsen have all written from time-to-time. Thank you to all. More recently, Marshall Kirkpatrick has joined and will be taking a big part of the writing load off of my back (more on that in a future post).
I think that the best part of TechCrunch, though, has been actually meeting people in person. I’ve had the opportunity to meet people who share my passion for startups in Israel, London, Seattle, and many parties (here, here, here, here, here) here at my house in Silicon Valley.
Thanks to everyone who emailed me today to say “Happy Birthday”. And thank you to Brian Oberkirch for writing on his blog.
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=936
BloggerKit, an easy to use tag-based interface for the Amazon affiliate program, is officially launching today. The company founders say their service allows greater control over what is advertised than other systems and is easier to use. Unlike MyPickList, a similar service Mike profiled here earlier, BloggerKit requires very little interaction with other sites and has a great revenue model. BloggerKit users will have their Amazon affiliate ID used in 85% of the links that appear on their site, with the remaining 15% using BloggerKit’s affiliate ID.
The company was founded by Boston area Li Li, who has a Computer Science and Business PHD from Carnegie Mellon and Xi Zhang, who has a masters from the Harvard School of Design. Both founders also collaborate on Shenguonet, a popular portal for the Chinese community in the Boston area.
BloggerKit asks for your Amazon affiliate ID and provides a few lines of javascript code to paste into your template. Each post can then be ended with keywords that will determine which Amazon products appear beside it. Keywords are inserted using something like the following: “bk_keywords:canon camera, apple ipod.” Couldn’t be much simpler. While MyPicklist has partnered with far more affiliate programs, it appears to rely on users tagging particular items of interest to them on other affiliate sites.
Most important my be the revenue sharing model. While MyPicklist is reported to give users “approximately” 40% of affiliate revenue generated and does not offer this detail prominently on its website, BloggerKit proudly says it’s using your affiliate ID 85% of the time. BloggerKit is not as flashy looking as MyPicklist, but if it is targeting an increasingly sophisticated group of young users then I think that will be ok.
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=937
Plugaid is an innovative and easy way for bloggers using systems that don’t support automatic trackback discovery to show the conversations that their posts are a part of. The tool targets systems like MySpace, Xanga and Blogger.com. I think it will be very welcome there.
Plugaid was co-founded by a student from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology named Trent Kang. It’s currently in Alpha mode, collecting emails for interested future users. The creators have started a conversation that can be participated in for testing, as I’ve done at the bottom of this post.
It uses embeded flash to display participating blog posts discussing a particular post, with drop down excerpts and links to the full posts. The photo of each linking blogger is also displayed if available. Users must provide nothing more than a password that can be used to remove the link from the display if they wish to do so later.
One downside may be that participation in a plugaid discussion doesn’t appear to provide a direct link in HTML to other posts in the conversation and thus doesn’t help with link love. I imagine this is not a big concern to many likely users, though.
The language used by Plugaid is a little unclear, as well, and could use some clarification.
It’s a simple tool, with no clear business model yet, but I think it could really catch on.
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June 13, 2006
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=938
The multimedia and user-generated online atlas service Platial will announce a new live offering called Today Nearby at the Where 2.0 conference starting tomorrow. The new service will combine RSS feeds of news, photos, videos, events and places with Google Maps and Google Earth. Content will be mapped from Reuters, Flickr, Eventful, YouTube and other users’ maps. Updates to locations of your choice will also be available for subscription.
Platial is one of a number of services that allow users to easily create their own maps on top of Google’s API, but it’s notable for its rapid adoption and financial backing. The company says that Platial hosted 200,000 place maps in 300 cities in its first 5 months since launch. See, for example, Public Biofuel Stations (surprisingly, all East Coast US) or this guy’s Hopeless Romantic Map, chronicling a world’s worth of personal heartbreak, apparently over one woman.
The company’s backers include Kleiner Perkins, Omidyar Network, Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky.
Platial’s newest service makes sophisticated, if logical use of RSS feeds from a wide variety of sources. Leveraging so many syndicated multimedia sources could position Platial well in a field that includes competitors such as Wayfaring, CommunityWalk, Frappr and others. Each of these services has a unique feature set, but display of multimedia and news from off site is particularly compelling.
That will be even more true if users are able in the future to layer selected feeds over their own created maps or make some other creative integration of this new offering with the basic Platial service. The Today Nearby service seems to act primarily as a secondary offering beyond map creation; it will be used for monitoring place-based multimedia, events and maps made by Platial users who are concerned with the same locations you are.
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=939
QuickMuse is a new site where well known poets battle it out in a fifteen minute race to pen the most compelling text inspired by a thought provoking quote about art. The live event is archived so you can watch each keystroke beside a ticking clock and then discuss the race and poetry in the site’s forum.
It’s fun to watch the pauses, deletions, misspellings and bursts of text that come from great poets writing against the clock.
QuickMuse has lassoed some high quality poets. The first contest, or agon as the Greeks called them, was between Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon and Thylias Moss, recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship and the Whiting Award. The second agon, held last week, pitted former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky against the prolific author Julianna Baggott. This Wednessday will see Marge Piercy write race the clock and Jonathan Galassi. On June 27th, New Republic poetry edtior Glyn Maxwell and Thylias Moss will square off. Then on July 12, it’s Carol Muske-Dukes and Kevin Young. All live events happen at 9:30 PM EST and are then archived on the website.
QuckMuse was created by Ken Gordon, a poetry enthusiast and the editor of JBooks.com, a site about Jewish literature.
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=940
It’s worth noting the massive increase in users and traffic at MySpace over the last few months. Paul Kedrosky summarized the key October 2005 MySpace metrics from a BusinessWeek article late last year. Those stats, along with more recent April Comscore and internal Myspace data, are summarized below.
MySpace has 75 million users (see somewhat dated comparison stats here), is growing by a massive 240,000 new users per day, and is generating nearly 30 billion monthly page views (that’s 10,593 page views per second). The number of page views generated by each unique visitor is stunning - clearly these users are very, very passionate about the site, and it’s unclear if they do much else on the web besides hang out on MySpace.
MySpace hasn’t overtaken Yahoo yet in terms of page views (see UBS Comscore Analysis PDF here), but they are a solid second and are ahead of giants like MSN-Microsoft, Time Warner (including AOL), eBay, Google and Facebook.
MySpace also has the sixth largest market share among search engines, even though they aren’t, actually, a search engine.
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=941
Yahoo! Answers unveiled a new promotion today called “Ask the Planet,” where celebrities, notables and allegedly interesting people will pose questions that users will answer for a chance to win prizes. The celebrity line up is interesting and should garner a lot of attention.
Questions will be posed to users by the following:
- Marilyn von Savant, the holder of world’s largest IQ, begins the promotion today with a question about the best way to help kids in school.
- Friday through Sunday will be your chance to answer a question from Donald Trump, in exchange for a $5,000 spending account.
- CNBC’s finance guru Suze Orman’s prize is 3 oz of pure gold.
- Click and Clack, or Tom and Ray Magliozzi from NPR’s Car Talk will participate. The prize for their question is free gas for a year. And all you get for Donald Trump’s question is $5,000!
- Arrianna Huffington will pose a query about News and Events, the winner will get a trip for two to DC. Thrilling.
- Al Gore’s question is tied to a free 2006 Prius.
- Stephan Hawking’s social science question gets one person a trip to the Smithsonian.
- Bono will close the event and Yahoo! will donate $25k to his One campaign in honor of the winner.
It’s called Ask The Planet, but the company claims that it is legally prohibited to give prizes to anyone outside the US. That’s liable to raise some ire. Likewise, in the spirit of mass page views - I mean scientific inquiry, the winners will be selected and random and users are encouraged to offer more replies for greater chances to win. The company plans to plaster ads for the campaign all over the US. None the less, looks like an interesting campaign that’s liable to raise the profile of Yahoo! Answers significantly. Is asking your audience to all throw their answers in a hat the best way to solve the world’s most vexing problems? Call me cynical, but I’m not sure it is.
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June 14, 2006
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=942
It’s been nearly eight months since Silicon Valley based Flock released a developer version of its Firefox based browser. Today at 3 pm PST they are releasing their first public beta version, available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines, at Flock.com.
Flock is a Mozilla based browser (see also Songbird, another application built on the Mozilla code base). They’ve built additional features to the core Firefox code base that make the browsing experience more seemless, including photo integration with Flickr or photobucket, social bookmarking integration with Del.icio.us or Shadows, a blogging tool and a RSS reader.
Photos
Firefox has also raised a new round of financing led by Shasta Ventures, rumored to be in the $10 million range.
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=943
After months of anticipation, eBay announced tonight its pilot integration of Skype, the internet telephony giant it acquired last September for approximately $4.1 billion. The announcement was made tonight at eBay Live!, eBay’s annual community conference.
Beginning June 19th, US eBay sellers will have the option of adding a SkypeMe button to individual item listings in 14 select categories. Prospective buyers will then be able to contact the sellers by voice or instant messaging. Users can currently add a SkypeMe button to their personal profile, but not to individual items for sale.
The categories included in the pilot project will be:
- Automotive GPS devices
- Camera and photo lenses and filters
- Wired networking routers
- Skype devices
- VOIP / Internet telephony
- Diamond solitaire rings
- Real estate (residential, commercial)
- Manufacturing and metalworking
- Beds
- NBA basketball cards
- Silver coins
- Lost in Space collectibles
- Radio control toys
- Cars and trucks
The categories above were selected because eBay believes that instant communication of such goods would help sales, the items are complex or local delivery is required.
The Skype acquisition and its price have been widely questioned since last September. If this pilot integration anywhere near as successful as the 2002 acquisition of PayPal has been then most of those questions may be put to rest.
Whether sellers will welcome voice or IM contact from prospective customers remains to be seen. A more sophisticated offering enabling users to, for example, select only IM or IM and voice contact, or a permission request process letting sellers see a user’s eBay reputation before accepting a call would have been a good thing to see.
Some observers warn that enabling voice communication via Skype will only make transactions easier to complete outside of eBay auctions, thus cutting into the company’s monetization of transactions.
Last week’s announcement of eBay’s new hosted blogs quickly proved interesting when some sellers put their blogs to use in building their reputations by educating prospective buyers in subjects related to their eBay stores. A similar use of auction-specific Skype communication could emerge and prove eBay better at leveraging high-profile acquisitions than other big web players seem to have.
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=944
In support of New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park event, Google Books has created a nice landing page aggregating the complete works of the author. What better use could there be for Google Booksearch? What could better improve the PR of the controversial opt-out system for in-copyright books that Google has set up? To be fair, it’s search results won’t display the full text of books unless they are out of copyright.
The forthcoming Windows Live Booksearch announced last week a partnership with the Universities of California and Toronto and that program will take an opt-in approach to indexing copyrighted works, meaning that most rights holders will have to submit the works before they are included in the Live.com database.
These two big players will be competing soon for all your book-searching needs. Expect Google to come up with more themed offerings and simple, elegant project pages.
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idea generation
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collaborative note taking - live
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another web-based word processor
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=945
The Kingston, Jamaica based Vibesnetwork officially launched today its newest online social networking service - Smutvibes. (Warning: this site is full of very naked people.) VibesNetwork CEO and President Delroy Frazer says that Smutvibes will give many adult users what they want out of a social networking service, a place to have uncensored conversations about sex, and will create a separate space for those conversations outside of teen-filled social networking sites elsewhere.
Competition is steep in this sector, but Smutvibes delivers good functionality. It will look especially familiar to MySpace users. Smutvibes is an interesting entry into a serious market; lead competitor AdultFriendFinder, for example, is in the top 50 sites most visited on the web according to Alexa. That puts it above Facebook, About.com and NYTimes.com.
Swingers, singles and other interested parties will find all of the basic social networking features on Smutvibes. Photo upload, private chat, blogs, commenting and more. There’s also an events board that looks like its getting good use. I’ve already tested out all the features with photos of myself under a pseudonym and I’ve met a lot of really great people. Just kidding.
How will teens be kept safe from SmutVibes? Registration is not allowed for those who provide a birth date indicating that they are less than 18 years old.
Membership is free and I can imagine ad revenue is a real possibility. See also the company’s partner site, Christianvibes.com.
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=947
In honor of National Gay and Lesbian Month, the online job search service SimplyHired has launched a GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered) friendly job search feature. The new filter searches within companies given a perfect score for GLBT friendly policies by The Human Rights Campaign.
SimplyHired points out that there is no US federal policy prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation and workers in 34 states can be fired at any time based on these factors. That’s not right and it’s good to see a startup moving in to help with the situation.
SimplyHired is based in Mountain View, California and also offers filters for mom friendly jobs, dog friendly and other types of niche job requirements.
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=946
Cooliris is a service that provides pop-up previews of the contents of a link when you hover over it. Previously only available for Firefox and Explorer, the company has now released a version for Safari.
While other services perform this function for Firefox and Google search results, the new Cooliris Safari plug-in offers previews of links in Google (Web, Images, News, Groups, Froogle), BBC News, CNN News, Craigslist, eBay, Del.icio.us and RSS feeds. The company’s primary competitor is Browster.
In other Mac friendly news, web messaging platform Meetro will launch a Mac version tonight as well. See also previous TechCrunch coverage of Meetro.
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June 15, 2006
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=948
Valleywag got the scoop today that a next version of the hugely popular news site Digg will include many new categories outside of technology. Whether other communities of interest and expertise will follow and fill an expanded digg space seems to be the question.
Here are the Valleywag discovered screenshots side by side with screen captures of the corresponding sections of the current design.
Above, two categories lists, the new one on the right. Categories and login are moved together to the left margin of the screen. Non-tech categories prominently displayed.
More pics and some graphs after the jump.
Above, new design allows stories to be viewed by popular daily, weekly, monthly or recently.
Many people are concerned that the petty banter seen on technology topics will only be worse around political news. Many have tried to create digg-clones on non-tech topics, most with little success.
Two comparisons that might be relevant, if imperfect, are the following:
Traffic at Memeorandum, before and after the tech part was given it’s own domain at techmeme.com and politics were counted separately.
Compare traffic at the global super network of user generated content, Indymedia.org to the geeks of Digg. Here’s how one contest between politics and tech has played out to date.
In other words, I question whether the technology of Digg will be taken up by people with other interests, or whether the digg style news technology is only of interest to those interested in technology.
Just for fun, here’s a pic of what Digg looked like in its first iteration - back in the dark ages of January, 2005.
Thanks Archive.org
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http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=949
PubSub co-founder Bob Wyman responded to rumors that PubSub is falling apart on his blog today.
He says the problems were not that the company lacked killer technology or great employees, but instead lays the blame squarely at the feet of ex-CEO and co-founder Salim Ismail. Bob trashes Salim quite publicly:
What has prevented us moving forward is a battle with a group of minority shareholders, some of whom claim to be lead by our ex-CEO Salim Ismail and are, in any case, primarily his “friends and fami