The latest from TechCrunch
- DAZZ Offers A Way To Preview Photo Gifts Prior To Purchase
- ToysRUs Buys Toys.com At Auction For $5.1 Million
- Y Combinator's FathomDB Takes The Hassle Out Of Managing Your Database
- Mitter: Friendfeed For Online Videos (And Other Media)
- 8 Little Things We Still Can't Stand About the iPhone
- Diomede Offers Green File Storage In The Cloud For A Fraction Of The Cost
- Startup Launch: Buzzable Creates Twitter Groups Around RSS Feeds (500 Invites)
- Live Stream: TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable
- Will the Future of the Web Be More Like the Present?
- Mufin Incorporates Powerful Recommendation Engine Into New Native Music Player
- Gary Vay•ner•chuk Expands His Web Video Empire With Obsessed TV
- The New York Times Expected To Launch Local Blog Network On Monday (Confirmed)
- OSLO aims to break down mobile social network barriers
- Print Your Favorite Wikipedia Articles As Books, Courtesy Of PediaPress
- MicroPlaza Is a Link-Catcher For Twitter (100 Invites)
- Web 2.0 Expo Europe 2009 Cancelled
- Facebook Pages Redesign Coming
- JPG Magazine Has Been Acquired, Lives Anew
- Ning Launches Rich, Persistent Chat Feature
- Cloud Computing Roundtable Sold Out, But It Will Be Streamed
- Digg Is Working On a Toolbar To Go After StumbleUpon, TinyURL, and All The Rest
- HP Upline Gets Disconnected, Heads To The Deadpool
- AIM for iPhone Grows Up, Paid Version On the Way
- Alaska Airlines Begins Testing Satellite-based In-flight Wi-Fi
| DAZZ Offers A Way To Preview Photo Gifts Prior To Purchase | Top |
| Photo gift service Personello has launched a simple but useful web service dubbed DAZZ that lets you preview a wide variety of goods with uploaded photos on them, completely automated and with both custom images and video clips. It seems like a no-brainer for any personalized photo gift service provider to offer a similar functionality, but to the best of my knowledge DAZZ is currently the only one of its kind. What you do is create an account on the DAZZ website and upload a photo that you’re considering printing on things like mugs, mousepads, t-shirts, teddybears, snowglobes, jigsaw puzzles etc. to give away as a gift. The startup’s ‘DAZZigners’ will then strip out the background and create a collection of so-called photostyles (e.g. Flowers, Heart, Sepia, Pop Art, etc.) centered around the main subject of the photo. DAZZ subsequently lets you preview a bunch of items and also put together a video that shows a number of items in a sequence which should help make up your mind. For each type of item, you also get to see a separate animated video clip showing you the personalized gift in question in a relevant setting. (screenshots embedded below) The biggest downside of DAZZ is that it takes several hours to get your photostyle previews ready, so it’s not the most ideal way to trigger impulsive purchases (although you are notified by e-mail once the previews are ready for your evaluation). Also, the video player inexplicably doesn’t offer a way to embed videos in your own website or blog so you can only play them when logged on to your account on DAZZ.com. I think Personello, a startup based in Germany, was right to execute on this idea and offer a way for potential customers to visualize personalized photo gifts prior to purchase. Many people are not aware of the fact that photos can be printed on a slew of regular things, and this could open their eyes to the possibilities of giving away personalized gifts and significantly lower the threshold for them to actually start buying stuff. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| ToysRUs Buys Toys.com At Auction For $5.1 Million | Top |
| In a heated bidding war , ToysRUs bought the domain name Toys.com at auction for $5.1 million. ToysRus really wanted the domain, for obvious reasons. Everyone except ToysRUs and domain holding company National A-1 (owner of domains such as free.com, boys.com, girls.com, and divorce.com) bowed out of the auction at $3 million. The last $2 million was just those two companies going back and forth for hours. ToysRUs really didn’t have much choice. If it wants to be the first thing people associate with toys it really couldn’t afford to allow anyone else to own that domain, even in this economy. Who says real estate is dead? Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| Y Combinator's FathomDB Takes The Hassle Out Of Managing Your Database | Top |
| Our Cloud Computing Roundtable just saw the launch of FathomDB , a new Y Combinator startup that offers database administration as a service. The startup manages many of the tasks that database administrators typically have to deal with, like database backups, monitoring, and launching replacement servers in the event of a crash. The service is primarily operating with MySQL databases hosted on Amazon’s EC2, but will expand to support other cloud-based computing services as they become available. And because it uses industry-standard systems, developers won’t have to modify their code to make it work with FathomDB, and they aren’t locked into the service. Aside from routine maintenance tasks, FathomDB also offers an array of analytics tools that help developers track the status of their servers and identify where their performance bottlenecks are. CEO Justin Santa Barbara says that the system isn’t necessarily meant to actually replace database administrators, but instead to take care of low-level tasks so that they can focus on more complex and important issues. Final pricing for the service is still being determined, but the company plans to charge a small (~10-20%) markup over standard EC2 prices. Disclosure: FathomDB is a sponsor for today’s Roundtable event. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Mitter: Friendfeed For Online Videos (And Other Media) | Top |
| Sometimes it’s hard to remember which video you have seen, left a comment on, rated, or who recommended it to you. And it’s getting harder to cut the noise in the heavily crowded online video space ( YouTube users alone are uploading 15 hours of new content every 60 seconds ). This is where Mitter , a service provided by Tokyo-based Metacast comes in (the site is available in English). Mitter wants to do for video what recently introduced Dutch startup Twones does for music. The service tracks viewing patterns over multiple video services and generates a social feed based on that information. And much like Twones, Mitter doesn’t make much sense without installing an add-on for Firefox or the Internet Explorer (there is also a browser-independent bookmarklet available). To date, the Mitter toolbar has been distributed 1.5 million times. It’s now being actively used by more than 150,000 people, mostly in Japan. Mitter is all about aggregating metadata of online videos and using the information to let users socialize around it. Once the tracker is installed, you will see a Mitter button next to every video accessed on 14 different sites like YouTube , Veoh , Seesmic etc. After pressing the button, you can tag, rate and comment on the video (the service calls this activity “mittering”), which will be then added to your history on the website (this happens even if you don’t mitter the video). In addition, the activity can be posted to Twitter and several Japanese blogging platforms. Your history can be set to private or shared with friends. Other users with a similar taste can follow you, receive updates on your video viewing log and possibly find new content that’s of interest to them (Mitter->Twitter, get it?). It’s also possible to join discussion groups, view rankings of popular videos and dig up videos that are similar to the listed one (and share the relevant video, too). Mitter does fill a gap in the rapidly growing web video space but there are some drawbacks. Even though the site wants to let you share “experiences” (and not necessarily the videos themselves), it would make a lot more sense if users didn't need to navigate away to watch videos. The English version still lacks Non-Japanese members who may find it hard to connect to the Japanese usership (and its taste) and there are hardly any comments or tags in English to be found at this point. This can obviously only be overcome through increased participation of Non-Japanese users. CEO Kengo Ito says in its current form, Mitter is just covering a snippet of one’s life log. The company’s ultimate goal is to build a “social lifestreaming service” that automatically keeps track of a person’s complete online media consumption behavior. Think FriendFeed for media. This is a big plan and just yesterday, Mitter broke out of the video geek community by following what you watch on TV (Japanese only for the time being). Music, movies, video games and other media will be added to user feeds in the near future. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| 8 Little Things We Still Can't Stand About the iPhone | Top |
| The iPhone is like the bacon-wrapped scallop of the mobile world. Both are quite visually pleasing relative to their peers, easy to use, and generally liked by the masses. Spend a little too much time with either, however, and you start to see the flaws. With the scallops, the grease and animal fat that was oh-so delicious on the way down begins to clog your arteries and slow your saunter. With the iPhone, the interface that seemed oh-so-polished when it first met your fingertips begins to show signs of oversight and imperfection. We’ve been using the iPhone for just a few months shy of two years now, and a few things that once seemed trivial have come to drive us up the wall. You’ll find no mention of the glaring faults (The lack of MMS, Copy and Paste, etc) in this list - we’re talking about the stuff that we just can’t believe made it through Apple’s user experience team. Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >> Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Diomede Offers Green File Storage In The Cloud For A Fraction Of The Cost | Top |
| At today’s TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable event, a new storage company called Diomede launched in private beta with the goal of offering low cost cloud-based storage that is also very energy efficient. The basic premise behind the service is that not all data in the cloud needs to be immediately available, but that most people still pay for the immediate access anyway. While most data centers have their servers and disk drives operating 24/7 with near-immediate access, Diomede allows customers to designate files that they don’t need instant access to, and places them either as ‘nearline’ or ‘offline’. These files have an access time of five minutes or four hours, respectively, but cost only 1/12 as much as standard cloud providers to store and take as little as 1/60th the amount of energy. If you’d like to try it out, go to this page and enter the invite code ‘tcrunch’. The service offers a full API to developers, and also allows them to view metrics like the power consumption of each individual file. Possible applications include allowing developers to set their redundant file backups (which rarely need to be quickly accessed) to ‘offline’, where they can be stored at only a fraction of the normal cost. Deomede is the latest venture from Steve Iverson, who was CEO of MediaMax, a file storage company with a tumultuous history that closed its doors last year. While the company had its issues, it’s unclear if they can be attributed to Iverson or were primarily related to engineering blunders and investors. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Startup Launch: Buzzable Creates Twitter Groups Around RSS Feeds (500 Invites) | Top |
| One of the most requested features for Twitter is the ability to create groups. While users wait (and wait and wait) for Twitter to add this feature, a number of startups are going ahead and showing how it should be done. The latest of these is a LaunchBox Digital startup called Buzzable which just launched today. Buzzable lets you create Twitter groups around RSS feeds, and does so in a very compelling way. Right now anyone can browse public groups, but you need an invite code to create a new group. Anyone with a twitter account, however, can join a public group and post a message. We have 500 invites. Just use the promo code: techcrunch. You sign in using your Twitter ID, which lets you join and create both public and private groups centered around different topics. Some of the public groups right now include Android , Kindle , the New York Knicks , and the White House . There is even one for TechCrunch . Groups are built around RSS feeds. So the TechCrunch group is simply our feed. But you can set up topic-specific groups which pull from a number of feeds, including Google News, Eventful, Digg, Yahoo Finance, Twitter itself, blogs, and so on. You can set it up so that the feeds are filtered by keyword (such as “Android,” Kindle,” “Knicks,” etc.). Members of the group can then discuss any headline by commenting in-line. Each comment can be pushed out to Twitter proper as well. Both RSS headlines and comments can be “Buzzed” up by popular vote. The result is a combination of RSS content and Twitter conversation, all in the same stream. By priming the pump with the RSS streams, Buzzable hopes to stimulate conversation, even among people who don’t normally Twitter twenty times a day without prompting. In addition to micro-messages, images and YouTube videos can be added to each comment. And since Buzzable uses your Twitter ID, every time you create a group, it asks you if you want to invite all of your Twitter followers. Every Buzzable member can also be followed on Twitter simply by clicking a follow button on their Buzzable profile. Buzzable groups can also be republished as their own Twitter account. In these ways, Buzzable tries to take advantage of the viral nature of Twitter itself to create as many entry points as possible for new users. Each group can also be republished as a separate RSS feed or as an embeddable widget (see below) Buzzable’s co-founders are Satjot Sawhney and Ashish Kundra. The company was part of LaunchBox Digital’s 2008 summer incubator program. LaunchBox founder John McKinley is chairman and the lead investor. Check out the demo video below: Buzzable Demo: Creating a Group from Satjot Singh Sawhney on Vimeo . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Live Stream: TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable | Top |
| Here’s the live stream of our Cloud Computing Roundtable , which kicks off at 2:30 PST with product demos from a handful of early-stage cloud-focused start-ups, with commentary from a panel of experts. Shortly thereafter our roundtable discussion will bring together a dozen panelists from some of Silicon Valley’s most acclaimed companies who will discuss the future of cloud-based services. Thank you to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring the roundtable stream (powered by ustream and camera work by FutureWorks .) Twitter Hash Tag: #tccloud Live Videos by Ustream Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Will the Future of the Web Be More Like the Present? | Top |
| When I was a kid one of my favorite parts of Disney World was Tomorrowland's Carousel of Progress . It was steeped in 1950's futurism: Why, of course! Every family will have their own electric paint mixer in the future! And I only wish I'd been old enough to see this gem before it was torn down and replaced with a souvenir stand: The Monsanto House of the Future, a house built entirely of plastic. Disney likes to talk up inventions the house featured that wound up becoming commonplace, like the microwave oven. What it leaves out are all the ones that never did. You know, the type of things we saw on the Jetsons: flying cars, our food in pill form, robot butlers and maids. Sadly, as it turns out the "future" looked a lot like the past, just more streamlined. Had Tomorrowland stayed in tact, it would have looked more like the Tomorrow-that-never-happened-land. I've been thinking about Tomorrowland for about three days. It started when I read Farhad Manjoo's excellent piece on Slate about the "Jurassic Web." He painted a picture of what the Web was like in 1996. It was mostly a place you went and then thought, "OK, I'm here. Now what?" He reminded us of the sheer wonder the first time you could search on Amazon by author or browse through Yahoo's hand built "directory" of Web pages. The note Manjoo struck at the end of the piece was pure Silicon Valley: If all this happened in just 13 years, what will the next decade of the Internet hold? Will we look back on YouTube, Facebook, Hulu and iTunes as primitive? This is where Tomorrowland and the Jetsons come in. There seems to be a pattern of diminishing innovation the longer a new technology is on the market. The early years—even decades— of, say, the plane, the car, the telephone, television, computers all saw rapid innovation, such rapid innovation that people would look back with the same kind of wonder that we do thinking of the Jurassic Web. "Can you believe you used to have to crank a car engine?" "What do you mean TV was only in black and white?" But at some point, the innovation gets more evolutionary than revolutionary. Sure there are advancements in digital filmmaking and editing equipment but has anything in movies yet transformed the medium as much as the change from silent pictures to talkies? At some point, the technology stays the same while the cultural importance of it, or the way it is used is what changes. Put another way, the technology that was used to film a movie like "Deep Throat" wasn't what changed society and the industry, it was the content of the movie itself. I know it's heresy to write this on a site that entrepreneurs and technologists read: But what if the bulk of technology innovation on the Internet is, well, done? Already, if you think about Web 2.0, the successful companies are building off the technology that was pioneered before—whether it's the browser, broadband, or the open source stack. Sites like YouTube and Twitter may be technically hard to scale, but are they really technical leaps in innovation, or more of a creative, cultural leap in how existing technology is being used? Of course, the Internet is still very young. It certainly took technologies like the mobile phone more than 13 years to go from that embarrassing brick that took up half of a briefcase to the iPhone. Some could argue the mobile phone is still ripe for as much game changing innovation, as new models like the Palm Pre promise to integrate the browser experience throughout the user interface. Is it simply too early in the Internet’s lifecycle to even raise the question of whether Internet innovation has peaked? As someone who writes about the Web for a living, I certainly hope so. But then again, everything has happened faster on the Web. No other technology has been so rapidly adopted by such a large number of people. Is it possible this is it ? Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Mufin Incorporates Powerful Recommendation Engine Into New Native Music Player | Top |
| Mufin , an automated music recommendation engine that actually works (most of the time), has released a new native media player in public beta. The player includes a powerful recommendation engine based on technology developed at the Fraunhofer Institute , allowing users to quickly generate playlists similar to any song they have in their library. The player is for Windows only at the moment, but Mac users can still try out the recommendation technology at Mufin.com , which launched to the public in November. You can see a full list of the new player’s features here Mufin’s core technology is based on finding recommendations based on knowing a few songs that you like. Unlike Apple’s Genius feature, which creates recommendations based on aggregate data compiled from user listening habits, Mufin actually analyzes the sound file itself, ‘listening’ to 40 audio characteristics as it tries to recommend similar songs. In my testing the service has usually worked surprisingly well, though there are sometimes a few bizarre results. Oftentimes these apparent errors actually do share characteristics with the original song I used to gather recommendations, but they are very obscure and sometimes in a completely different genre (which is both the blessing and the curse of using such audio-based recommendation engines). Mufin’s new player incorporates this recommendation technology, alongside a standard set of features that you’d expect from a modern audio player. Beyond creating the recommended song playlists, Mufin’s Player also brings a new twist to music management by allowing users to sort their songs by the way they sound (versus by song title or artist name). But aside from that I’m not sure if there’s a compelling reason to use it over iTunes at this point, especially since you can download a Mufin plugin to integrate the site’s audio recommendations into Apple’s music player (though the plugin is limited to creating playlists, and doesn’t allow users to sort by sound). Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| Gary Vay•ner•chuk Expands His Web Video Empire With Obsessed TV | Top |
| Gary Vaynerchuk is going after the Oprah set. The wine wholesaler who launched a career as a Web video celebrity talking about wine and marketing just launched Obsessed , a new video talk show hosted by Samantha Ettus . With Obsessed, Vaynerchuk hopes to move beyond niche programming on the Web to appeal to a mainstream audience. The format of the show is an in-depth 30 to 40 minute interview with guests that appeal to 25 to 55-year-old women. The first interviews on the site right now are with food writer Mark Bittman and floral designer Preston Bailey. Future guests will include Today Show travel editor Peter Greenberg, TreeHugger founder Graham Hill, and BlogHer founder Liz Stone. (They are working on some bigger names as well). Ettus will host the show and be the main star, while Vaynerchuk will come on at the end for 3 minutes to talk about wine, which is his thing. He is the host of Wine Library TV and also serves up regular videos on gary vay•ner•chuk , mostly about marketing. “There is only so much content I can pump out,” Vaynerchuk say. “I need to own as many media properties as possible.” Vaynerchuk and Ettus are co-producers of the new show. Each owns half of Obsessed TV, the production company behind the endeavor. Vaynerchuk’s other projects include a T-shirt search engine and Corkd , a wine rating site he promises to pay more attention to this year. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| The New York Times Expected To Launch Local Blog Network On Monday (Confirmed) | Top |
| If this post on a local blog about Brooklyn has it right, the NY Times will be debuting a neighborhood blog project next week on Monday. Here’s the gist: Look out, local bloggers, the Gray Lady is moving in on your turf. Starting next week, The New York Times will be rolling out a neighborhood blog initiative starting mid-day on Monday. Our home soil of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill will be one of the two pilot sites (the other site will cover Millburn, Maplewood and South Orange in New Jersey). According to an email that was forwarded to us, the subject matter will include “cultural events, bar and restaurant openings, real estate, arts, fashion, health, social concerns and anything else that goes on in the ‘SoHo of Brooklyn.’” Still according to the blog, the local blog network will be filled with content from the paper’s editors (one for each site) but also rely partially on citizen journalism i.e. unpaid contributions from locals readers who will be able to post everything from short video clips to wedding announcements. Apparently, the network will also feature a map-based real-estate listings section will tie back to the NY Times’ main real-estate site. Update: Jim Schachter, editor for digital initiatives at The New York Times, confirms the news in comments: We expect to sell ads to local merchants using our telesales and self-serve ad solution. Our two pilot sites are staffed with full-time NYTimes reporters. That's not cheap. Obviously, it's also not a sustainable model. We're trying to figure out what would be. Can we create a combination of journalism, technology and advertising that people who don't work for us can adopt? How much or how little oversight by us would be needed to keep the quality high? Would people pay to be associated with us? Would there be enough revenue that some split between us and a non-NYT blogger would work? I'd love to know what readers here think. The New York Times and blogging, it’s not a new relationship. The institution operates a good number of blogs on its own, it acquired and started using BlogRunner back in November 2007, it co-invested in blogging platform WordPress and Federated Media Publishing , and it’s doing all kinds of good stuff with APIs nowadays. That said, its Internet advertising revenues are dropping while its visitor numbers are also in decline. The local blog initiative could be a way to counter both trends, although Sarah Lacy could have a thing or two to say about the former, based on her most recent BusinessWeek column on the expected slow-down of the local advertising market . (Hat tip to Jonathan Butler) Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| OSLO aims to break down mobile social network barriers | Top |
| We’ve had OpenId to make the transport of your ID easier between Web sites. We’ve had initiatives on Data Portability to make it easier for you to move your data around between social networks and other apps. But what we haven’t had yet is a way to allow you to share your location between different mobile social platforms. That’s something that a new, largely European-inspired, initiative hopes to address. The alliance, called OSLO (Open Sharing of Location-based Objects) includes many of the players in mobile social networking and location-based social software. Twelve startups, all of whom serve their users with location-based services, have signed an agreement to enable their combined 30 million users to share location information and interact between networks. Currently most location-based systems operate in a similar fashion to instant messaging systems, and don’t interoperate. The question is, will Google’s Latitude and Yahoo!’s FireEagle come on board? Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Print Your Favorite Wikipedia Articles As Books, Courtesy Of PediaPress | Top |
| Did you know that you can assemble your own wiki pages from Wikipedia and print them out in book form? You can, for a while now , thanks to a partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and a German startup called PediaPress . Last week, the wiki-to-print feature was activated for six more languages besides German but as of yesterday the functionality is also being tested on the regular English Wikipedia (restricted to logged-on users only for now). You can check it out here , but you might want to visit the help pages first. The books can be created with a table of contents or category lists and can be downloaded as free PDF files but also ordered as a printed book from PediaPress. PediaPress books are bound in dimensions 8″ x 5.5″ with a color cover and black & white interior, and the prices are reasonable. The cost of a book depends on the number of pages contained in addition to a base fee (starting at $8.90 for 100 pages) and worldwide shipping that’s charged extra. As indicated by the Foundation, the roll-out for English Wikipedia users will be gradual out of fear for scalability issues, so it’s currently still in test mode. We’re trying to find out when the organization will open it up for non-registered users and will update this post if we learn more. You can find a sample book on the fascinating subject of ‘Amphibious Aircrafts’ here (PDF). And if you’re wondering if PediaPress got a sweet deal out of the partnership, the answer is yes. The Wikimedia Foundation receives (only) 10% of the gross total for each book sold. Another part of the agreement is the development of open source software with the goal to ease the reuse of wiki content in other media or applications. (Image from Wikipedia , hat tip goes to Ross Masters ) Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| MicroPlaza Is a Link-Catcher For Twitter (100 Invites) | Top |
| It used to be that if a link was worth sharing, people would bookmark it for all to see on del.icio.us. Now, they just Twitter it (with a shortened URL). Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to separate out all the Tweets with links in them, and sort them by time or popularity? That is what MicroPlaza does in a nutshell. MicroPlaza is still in a very limited private beta, but I have 100 invites for TechCrunch readers. Once you log in, you are presented with a stream of headlines, along with everyone who Twittered the link to that page. You can see a personal timelime made up only of links from people you are following on Twitter, or a public timeline to see what everyone is linking to. Each timeline has its own RSS feed. The headlines can be sorted chronologically or by popularity. The more people who Twitter about the same link, the more popular it gets. Each time someone Tweets a link, it becomes more popular (although there is a time-decay function so that you only see the most recently popular links and associated headlines. Since most of the time these links are articles or blog posts, MicroPlaza distills the headlines for you and gives you a sense of what is capturing everyone’s attention on Twitter. Any headline can be bookmarked, and you can group the people you follow into different “tribes,” and then keep track of each tribe. MicroPlaza also lets you look at everyone you are following and see their most recent links. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Web 2.0 Expo Europe 2009 Cancelled | Top |
| A message on the German O’Reilly community blog indicates that the Web 2.0 Expo Europe , an annual event held in Berlin, Germany, has been suspended for this year in the face of the worst economic downturn in decades. ( translated version here ) The event, co-produced by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb, had been running for only two years. Web 2.0 Expo Europe was widely known as an outstanding event for the European tech community with a host of excellent speakers, but like many companies O’Reilly and TechWeb are feeling the sting of the declining economy and are being forced to make difficult decisions. Obviously, this is bad news for European entrepreneurs and startups. We’re still trying to get an official comment at this point. The blog post reads that Europeans who would like to visit Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco can register using the code “websf09eu” and thus enter a lottery to win a free entrance ticket plus 3 free nights at a hotel and $1000, but also acknowledges this is not a real substitute for a full-fledged European counterpart of the Web 2.0 Expo. Let’s hope it’ll be back once we get through the storm. (Disclosure: I run Plugg , an alternative European Web 2.0 conference, and Web 2.0 Expo SF is one of our sponsors here at TechCrunch) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Facebook Pages Redesign Coming | Top |
| Facebook launched Facebook Ads in November 2007 to give brands and businesses a way to create a presence on Facebook and interact with users. Starting next week, says a source with knowledge of the new product, those pages will be substantially redesigned. Today there are countless pages ( example ) that highlight brands. These pages are free to set up, and the Facebook sales team then encourages those brands to buy Facebook ads that point back to the pages. The brands get users who become fans of the page and maybe leave a wall comment. Facebook gets ad dollars, and users never leave the Facebook site. Those pages include standard Facebook features like a Wall for user comments, a News Feed showing changes and updates to the page, and places for photos and videos to be uploaded. Many advertisers also spend a great deal of money customize the page with applications and widgets showing off various products as well. Look for a much more streamlined look to Facebook Pages next week though, with a multitab interface very similar to what Facebook launched to users in 2008. The default view will show the Wall (which may include negative comments unless they are routinely deleted). All the custom apps will be pushed to a second Boxes tab. The Pages will also likely mirror the look of normal user profiles, with an image in the top left corner, etc. The Facebook sales team is soft selling the concept to advertisers now, some of whom aren’t pleased with the changes, we’ve heard. Many of these advertisers have spent significant money designing the pages, and lots more on top advertising the Pages through Facebook. Now the Pages will be changed. Users may love the changes and interact more with the pages. Or they may not. As usual with changes at Facebook, people (in this case advertisers) will scream bloody murder, and then likely settle down. The timing on the change doesn’t seem to be a coincidence - MySpace recently announced that they’ll be launching their own business profile product in the near future. As with last year’s stacked announcements on data sorta-portability, both companies want to be first with new products and features. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| JPG Magazine Has Been Acquired, Lives Anew | Top |
| JPG Magazine , the innovative photography magazine that was composed of user-submitted photographs and shut down last month, has been revived. The magazine’s assets have been acquired by a group of investors who will also continue to employ some of the magazine’s staff, we’ve confirmed with a source with knowledge of the deal. JPG launched in late 2006 with the novel idea of cutting back on publishing costs by accepting user-submitted photos and relying partially on the community to edit the magazine. But despite reaching near-profitability, the periodical announced that it was shutting down on January 2nd when its parent company 8020 Media ran out of money. Within a few days it became clear that JPG might still have life , as a number of potential buyers including Smugmug entered talks, but until now the future of the magazine was in limbo. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Ning Launches Rich, Persistent Chat Feature | Top |
| Tonight Ning will introduce new chat functionality, giving Ning network administrators the oft-requested ability to integrate a rich chat environment similar to the one launched on Facebook last April. Ning’s new chat system is Flash-based, presenting users with a persistent chat bar along the bottom of their screens as they browse through a Ning network. Users have the option of chatting through an interface at the bottom of their screen, or can ‘pop-out’ their chats into their own windows. While the interface will remain consistent across each network, users won’t be able to chat with members outside of the Ning network they’re currently browsing. Ning originally introduced a more basic chat feature last summer, but that version uses either dedicated chat pages or sidebar iFrames, which means they aren’t always visible as users navigate through a network. But even the basic version has proven to be very successful - Ning’s chat traffic has skyrocketed, as seen in the Compete graph below pitting Ning’s IM domain against Meebo’s homepage. To be fair, the graph probably doesn’t take into account Meebo’s traffic that occurs offsite (Quantcast reports that Meebo’s entire network sees more like 12 million uniques), but it’s clear that Ning Chat is rapidly gaining traction. Aside from its growth in chat, Ning has also been posting some impressive stats recently, growing to 4.8 million uniques in January (a 368% growth year over year) despite the fact that the site recently banned porn networks, which some believed were responsible for a significant amount of Ning’s traffic. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Cloud Computing Roundtable Sold Out, But It Will Be Streamed | Top |
| Tomorrow's Cloud Computing Roundtable is sold out. But we have good news. For those of you who can't join us in person, we will be live-streaming the event. Thank you to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring the roundtable stream (powered by ustream and camera work by FutureWorks .) Tune in on TechCrunchIT or Sun.com/cloud TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I will be grilling our panel of cloud-computing heavyweights about where we are with this technology and where we need to go. As Gillmor wrote in a post on TCIT : Short term, cloud computing will slip in as a cost-saving rationale. Near term, the social clouds will expand across workgroups, across business domains, and finally cross-cloud. Then the Golden Age of the Cloud will occur, where applications and services only possible in that environment will guide the next wave of business architecture. On Friday, the dialogue will be about when, not if. When did cloud computing begin? How far are we into the cycle? Is cloud computing a baby or an old man in diapers, and are we going backwards or forwards so fast that we can't tell the difference? Or are we and cloud computing meeting in middle age, each ready for the other? I am also happy to announce the startups who will be giving the main demos prior to the roundtable and the panel of judges who will be evaluating them. Here are the companies and what they will be showing off: Veodia —Video recording through the cloud. BrowserMob —Stress testing Websites via virtual browser instances. Diomede Storage —Cheap, green storage with power-saving technologies at one tenth the cost of Amazon S3. Or so they claim.. Appirio —Stitching together three different clouds. Can it be done? They will be judged by: Dan'l Lewin , Corporate Vice President, Microsoft George Zachary , partner, Charles River Ventures Geoff Ralston , CEO LaLa David Bernstein , VP/General Manager, Cisco David Kralik , Silicon Valley office Director of Newt Gingrich And then we will hold the roundtable. Again, our roundtable participants will be: Marc Benioff , CEO, Salesforce.com Vic Gundotra , VP Engineering, Google Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo Paul Buchheit , Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail Werner Vogels , CTO Amazon Mike Schroepfer , VP of Engineering, Facebook Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning John Engates , CTO, Rackspace Roundtable Moderators: Erick Schonfeld, co-editor TechCrunch Steve Gillmor, editor TechCrunchIT Thank you to Microsoft and the BizSpark team for hosting us at their Mountain View campus. And thanks to Charles River Ventures , Ribbit and FathomDB for sponsorship support of the roundtable and reception. We looking forward to learning more about a dozen early-stage companies at the roundtable reception. We have a few tables left for companies who would like to demo product at the event, but otherwise we are over capacity. Contact Jeannie with sponsorship inquiries ( jlogo@earthlink.net ) Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Digg Is Working On a Toolbar To Go After StumbleUpon, TinyURL, and All The Rest | Top |
| A super-secret Digg toolbar has been spotted in the wild . We tracked down a beta tester who gave us the skinny on its features. The toolbar lets you Digg or Bury the page you are on, and shows how many Diggs it has already received. There are also links to show related pages, as well as more pages from the same source voted highly by the Digg community or marked as up and coming. Then there is the “Random” button which works like StumbleUpon. It takes you to a randomly-generated page based on your past input and overall Digg voting. By the prominence of this button, it appears that is a feature Digg will be trying to highlight. Users can also share the page via Facebook, Twitter, or email via icons at the top. A drawer slides down to expose additional functionality. Now, here where it gets interesting. For each page, the toolbar creates a shortened URL similar to TinyURL or bit.ly that starts instead with http://digg.com/. . . followed by a six-character code such as “http://digg.com/d1gVha.” When you share a page via Twitter or Facebook, it is that shortened URL which is used. And in fact, for the beta testers, the toolbar can be wrapped around any page simply by sticking “http://digg.com/” in front of any URL, which then gets converted into a shortened version. This technique works for pages that have never been Dugg as well. I could see this feature eventually showing up as part of a browser add-on so that Digg URL’s could be created with one click. The toolbar is not an add-on to existing browsers. It is actually creating a large i-frame around the original Webpage and delivering it on the Digg.com domain. Users can click on an X to get rid of the toolbar frame and be taken to the original page, and the original page gets the hit as well. (This is a similar technique to what Ginx does with its Web-sharing Twitter client). But by running all of the recommended pages through its own domain, Digg can run all sorts of analytics on each page such as how many people viewed it, where people clicked to next, and so on. It is amazing that Twitter has single-handedly created this need for shortened URLs and that a relatively large player like Digg now wants a piece of that market. Click on the screenshot below for a larger image: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| HP Upline Gets Disconnected, Heads To The Deadpool | Top |
| Well, that didn’t last long. HP’s Upline, a backup service that offered unlimited storage for $59/year, is closing its doors. Since launching last April, Upline has faced issues with extended downtimes - a pretty major offense for a backup solution. But it’s likely the ultimate reason for the shutdown is that Upline was never really able to get much traction in a crowded space with very little in the way of differentiation. That said, there’s clearly money to be made in online storage, as evidenced by Hitachi’s recent acquisition of storage and backup solution Fabrik this week and EMC’s $76 million acquisition of Mozy in 2007. Below is the letter sent to HP Upline users, who will have until March 31 to download their files. In a classy move, it looks like HP is going to refund all fees customers have previously paid for the service. Thank you for your interest in HP Upline. HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31, 2009. HP will no longer be backing up your files to the HP Upline servers as of Feb 26, 2009 at 8 am Pacific time. HP will keep the file restore feature of the Upline service operational through March 31, 2009 Pacific time in order for you to download any files you have backed up to Upline. If you have a paid subscription to HP Upline, you will be refunded the full amount of the fees you paid for the service. That refund will be credited to the credit card account or PayPal account that you used to subscribe to the Upline service. If you do not receive the refund prior to March 31, 2009, please contact our customer service team at https://www.upline.com/support/email.aspx. HP looks forward to offering you additional technology products and services in the future. Thank you. HP Upline team HP Upline has been added to the Deadpool . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| AIM for iPhone Grows Up, Paid Version On the Way | Top |
| While there may still be a lot of confusion surrounding the future of AOL, that didn’t stop the folks in Northern Virginia from recently overhauling their popular AIM instant messaging app for iPhone (and iPod touch). Available in two tasty flavors, free (”AIM Free”) and paid (”AIM Paid”), AIM 2.0 for iPhone now provides SMS notifications, has location-aware services, and supports multiple accounts (among other updates). It appears as though all of the application updates have been included in both the free and paid versions, with the major (and obvious) difference being the inclusion of ads in the buddy list of the AIM Free app. So, what’s the big deal here? What do all the changes mean? Well, for one thing, now when you first sign in, the app will ask you if you want to share your current location: Want to see where your friends are hanging out? You can share your location with your Buddies (or everyone) and see Buddies who are sharing their location. Users are given three options: 1. No, don’t share location (default); 2. Share only with people on my Buddy list; or 3. Share with everyone. Once you’ve made your selection (let’s say we pick option 2 or 3), a new Group will be added - “Near Me” - showing other contacts within your vicinity. As Ars Technica points out, “there is no control over how large one’s nearby radius is” and thus, it is not exactly clear how near or far any of your contacts may be from your current location. What you can control, is the frequency of your location updates by navigating to: My Info > Preferences > (scroll down) Frequency. Here, you can select between 3 options: 1. On Startup; 2. Every 5 min. (default); or 3. Every 2000 feet. Beyond location-awareness, AIM 2.0 also features SMS capabilities. Users now have the option to send an IM to a screen name, or alternatively, can send an SMS to a contact’s phone number (works on both iPhone and iPod touch). The app now includes both a buddy list and a contact list, to take advantage of these new features. Also, you can now stay logged-in for up to 24 hours, even if the AIM app has been closed. This allows you (iPhone users only) to get notifications via SMS when you receive a new IM and offers a work-around until Apple enables real Push notifications. Other notable new features include the ability to use photos (taken with an iPhone) as buddy icons and the option to configure/switch between multiple screen names at any time. Are these new features enough to take down competing IM apps such as IM+, Fring, Truphone, and others? Only time will tell. AIM Free (2.0.1) is currently available for download, while the cleverly named (but as yet unpriced) AIM Paid is still pending approval (at the time of this writing). Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Alaska Airlines Begins Testing Satellite-based In-flight Wi-Fi | Top |
| Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
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