Saturday, February 14, 2009

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MySpace Quietly Launches Site-Wide Image Search Top
MySpace has introduced a new image search feature to its integrated search engine, allowing users to quickly search through photos shared by their friends and the MySpace community. While MySpace did not officially announce the new feature, the company has confirmed that it recently went live, and indexes around 3 billion of the site’s photos. The addition reflects MySpace’s apparently increasing focus on its search engine, which also includes the site’s video and music content along with a Google-powered web search. Users are given the option to search through photos their friends have shared, those with viewing rights set to ‘public’ by other MySpace users, or images on Photobucket , which was acquired by MySpace’s parent company in 2007. MySpace says that all results are shown through a “social lense”, which means that the engine pays attention to keywords in your profile and who your friends are to try to generate the most relevant results. It’s a neat feature and one that I’m sure will improve over time, but in its current form MySpace Image Search is a little weird. While a search for “San Francisco” on Flickr or Google Image Search will generally yield city-scapes or famous landmarks, most of the results on MySpace feature people that you don’t know, with the famous landmarks in the background. Searches for celebrities like ‘ Lil Wayne ‘ tend to fare better, but you’ll still wind up with a number of MySpace users who have photographed themselves dressed up as the person you searched for. Like I said, it’s a little weird - though it can come in handy when you’re only concerned with looking through your friends’ photos. Much of the problem stems from the fact that Image Search relies on each photo’s meta-information, which includes tags and captions (about 4 billion of MySpace images don’t have any of this information, so they aren’t included in the index). Unfortunately, many of the photos on the social network are either poorly tagged or feature captions that are not particularly descriptive, which can lead to mixed results. MySpace wouldn’t comment on its future plans to improve the technology, but I suspect they’re working on some kind of image recognition engine that can provide more relevant results. We should note that Facebook has an image catalog of well over 10 billion photos (trumping MySpace’s by a significant margin), but the site’s setup with segmented networks and granular privacy settings probably isn’t conducive to a site-wide search. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Elevator Pitch Friday: Relenta Provides Economy Friendly CRM Solutions To Small Businesses Top
This week’s elevator pitch comes from Relenta , a SaaS email-centric contact and task management platform. The pitch was concise and explained the product well but should have indicated more clearly how Relenta’s business model is viable (a.k.a. how they are going to make money). Relenta is an all-in-one email/customer relationship management/group calendar/mailing list management/task management application that displays activity in a chronological stream for users. Relenta’s CRM doesn’t seem to be offering different services than other big name CRMs, such as Salesforce, Zoho or SugarCRM, but Relenta’s all-in-one package offers several different types of software in one application. Small businesses who are trying to cut costs (though in this economy, all businesses are being mindful of software expenses) could find this product particularly useful. Relenta’s monthly rate is $25 per user with an allowance of 2500 contacts per user. Users can also add contacts for an additional fee. It appears that customers are satisfied with Relenta’s product from its customer feedback site. And like we predicted, most of Relenta’s customer base draws from small businesses. Relenta’s price seems right nd customers (many of who used Salesforce previously) feel that Relenta’s customer service rivals those of the bigger CRM providers. It’s tough to tell whether Relenta’s product will take off in a sea of similar applications but its always fun to root for the underdog. Here are some screenshots of the system: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
YouTube Kills Our Video Download Tool Top
For the last few years we’ve offered a very basic tool for downloading YouTube videos that allowed users to enter the URL of any video to immediately get a link to a downloadable file. The tool does exactly the same thing as dozens of other sites and plugins, which have emerged because YouTube has long refused to offer similar functionality through its own site. Now, in light of yesterday’s news that the site is going to begin supporting downloads for a small number of videos, YouTube has apparently decided to crack down on these tools - and it looks like they’re making an example out of us. In the last 24 hours our tool stopped working, but every other method I’ve tried has worked fine so far, including a handful of other websites and popular Firefox extensions. It’s possible that YouTube was just disabling a certain technique of creating links to their video files that we happened to use, but it’s more likely that they singled us out (our tool has become very popular, and ranks second when you run a Google search for “ download YouTube “). When asked why our tool was being disabled, A YouTube spokesman referred us to this portion of the site’s Terms of Service (the company had a similar response when they sent us a Cease and Desist back in 2006): Section 5. Your Use of Content on the Site Part B. You may access User Submissions for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the YouTube Website. You shall not copy or download any User Submission unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the YouTube Website for that User Submission. The move isn’t particularly surprising. YouTube’s new download feature - and more importantly, the fact that it can charge for downloads - won’t become a viable cash cow unless the company can stifle these unauthorized downloads. But if this is the start of a trend then it is very premature. While you can download a handful of videos on YouTube, the vast majority of them still don’t offer that option, and users may soon be left with no alternative. And even if YouTube can eliminate all of these tools, the downloads may well be too little, too late: most people already use iTunes, Amazon, or Netflix for their video downloads, and while YouTube may get a massive amount of traffic, it’s unclear if many people be willing to actually start paying for the brief clips that litter the site. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
IVP's Chaffee: Why I Invested In Twitter Top
Why did Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital just plow $35 million into Twitter ? I talked today with Todd Chaffee , the partner at IVP behind the deal, and asked him just that. His answer: Our model is to find the winners and market leaders that are going to grow at a disproportionate level. Twitter falls in that category.  Twitter is bigger than a lot of people realize and growing faster than a lot of people realize, but it has not hit the mainstream yet. It is just starting. To Chaffee, Twitter is a new type of media property, pure and simple. He (conveniently) puts it in the same category as YouTube or Facebook. The bigger it can grow and the more addictive it can become, the more opportunities there will be for revenues from advertising and other sources. He says: From a business perspective, it is a media property that is growing very quickly. These newer media properties that have emerged are massive compared to older media properties. [Some people say] Twitter is whatever you want it to be. But at the end of the day you have this open, one-to-many network, and to enable that is this platform. But who cares? The reality is that it is a network/platform which has millions of users and thousands of applications. Twitter does three things. It facilitates social connections with friends, colleagues, writers, and celebrities. The second is knowledge transfer. It is a real-time mechanism for tapping the wisdom of millions of people. The third is social expression. It is a mechanism for the global community to express itself. Sounds good, but how will it make money? Chaffee is not so worried about that just yet: I love that here is this cry for revenue generation out of a company not even two years old, Relax, it is coming. But what gave him the confidence to invest? He ticked off four characteristics of Twitter that make it a potential game-changer. Open .  That makes it easy for others to build on top of Twitter and it also makes it searchable. Real time. It is a huge database of what is happening right now. Ubiquitous . You can get to it from just about any device. Scalable. (Don’t laugh) Persistent. It allows for an archive of what is happening and what has happened, which is searchable (see No. 1). Chaffee says: [Twitter is] the only thing we've found that has all of those things. None of the other things out there—Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn—has all of those variables. That is why Facebook tried to buy them. With more than $35 million in extra cash now in the bank, Twitter has a lot more time to figure out which business opportunities to pursue. For now, it’s investors just want it to keep growing as fast as it can and make the jump from early adopters and celebrity users to the mainstream.  But there are several money-making avenues it can pursue, from real-time search to premium marketing services for brands. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Google Japan Apologizes For Awkward PR Campaign, Gets Punished With PageRank Reduction Top
On Monday, we covered an embarrassing pay-per-post campaign Google launched in Japan with the aim of boosting awareness of a new keyword hitlist box on the Google Japan top page. It now turns out the move, which was (to my knowledge) first brought to light by Japanese super bloggers Masato Kogure and Akky Akimoto , triggered a number of repercussions. The aftermath in a nutshell: The campaign is now stopped, Google is embarrassed, apologizes and penalizes the Japanese site with a PageRank reduction. Just a few hours after the Japanese version of the TechCrunch article went online Tuesday, Google Japan issued a half-baked, vague apology on the official Google Japan blog , basically saying the Japanese subsidiary was unaware of their own terms of service . The campaign was halted and Google Japan ordered their outside PR agency to remove all existing paid postings in question. An email Google Japan sent out to bloggers asking for a comment states the following (the second half of the last sentence is a winner): Our internal guidelines have been violated in two ways: First, the blog posts were connected to Google (via the outside agency which we contracted), but failed to fully disclose that relationship. Our internal guidelines are committed to transparency, and this was not sufficiently transparent. Second, we have strict rules against doing anything that would artificially promote the ranking of our own sites — or even be perceived as artificially promoting their ranking. Having outside blogs write about our gadget and linking to our site may have had an impact on our own ranking, which is not acceptable under our guidelines. At Google, we believe in being open and transparent with our users, and do not condone these kinds of opaque communications. We would like to apologize for this episode, and express our gratitude to the community of users and bloggers who brought this to our attention so that we could put a stop to it. But the apologies obviously weren’t enough as Google has imposed a PageRank penalty upon itself, busting down the rank from 9 to 5 (Google.com has a PageRank of 10, while TechCrunch still stands at 8). Matt Cutts , head of Google’s anti web spam team, tweeted that he expects Google Japan's lower rank to remain as is for a while. Considering that Google stopped the campaign after a little more than 24 hours, the funding was openly acknowledged in the posts and apologies were issued, the self punishment may appear a bit too harsh at first sight. But Google is actually just replicating a punishment strategy it pursued against other sites that violated company policies in the past (Google Japan’s PageRank hasn’t been reset to zero , however). I doubt Google will lose any significant search traffic in Japan in the process, but think the measure is better than no measure at all. It should be OK now anyway as the company has been heavily scoffed at in the last few days and will probably have to live with a damage to its image for a while. But it’s Google , after all, and worse things than this PR meltdown could have happened . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Twitter Raises $35 Million Series C From Benchmark and IVP Top
Update: We just got off the phone with IVP partner Todd Chaffee who says this round was actually in excess of $35 million. Apparently, $35 million is just the total of what Benchmark and IVP put in ($21 million and $14 million respectively), while the additional amount put in by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital is still unknown. According to Chaffee, “Everybody wanted to protect their pro rata and then some.” Biz Stone just announced on the official Twitter blog that Twitter closed a third round of funding led by Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners last night. We have confirmation from IVP that the round was $35 million, and that Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital also participated. The news gels with our report last month that Twitter was raising a new round at around a $250 million valuation following Facebook’s failed attempt to acquire the company, with IVP as one of the leading investors. Stone says the company was not actively looking for additional funding because they haven’t burned through all of the money from the last round. But he was impressed by both of the VCs who led the round (and presumably also impressed by some very favorable terms). This is the first time either Benchmark or IVP have invested in Twitter. Union Square Ventures participated in both the Series A and Series B as well, while Spark Capital first joined for the Series B. For more information about Twitter’s funding history, refer to its CrunchBase profile . As part of this Series C deal, Peter Fenton from Benchmark will be joining Twitter’s board of directors. According to Stone, this round is intended for Twitter to go from strength to strength: Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate. Active users have increased 900% in a year and even though our web traffic is amazing, we see twice that traffic to the APIs. Interacting with Twitter over SMS is also getting more popular every day. Our relatively small team of 29 employees has accomplished quite a bit lately but it’s obvious that we have the world ahead of us. Stone has also indicated that it’s time for Twitter to get serious about making money, saying “We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service, further enable the robust ecosystem sprouting up around Twitter, and yes, to begin building revenue-generating products.” Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Ning's Doing Just Fine Without The Porn Top
At the beginning of last December, Ning reversed course on its anything-legal-goes policy by declaring a prohibition on adult social networks. The reason? Porn wasn’t paying the bills; instead of attracting advertisers, it was scaring them away. Legal adult content was also begetting illegal content, which drew the ire of both authorities and lawyers with DMCA notices in hand. Given the report released by CPM Advisors at the beginning of 2008, which suggested that Ning relied on adult content for much of its traffic, one might expect Ning to take a hit after shooing the smut out the door. But according to comScore traffic from January, that hasn’t been the case at all. Ning gave adult networks until January 5th to pack up their bags and leave. That gives us the rest of the month to see how the network of networks fared without them. And it actually fared quite well, picking up almost 1 million unique visitors in the United States (from 3.94 million in December to 4.79 million in January). That pickup is almost enough to pass Bebo, which attracted 4.97 million Americans in January and barely managed to halt a downslide that surely didn’t make AOL happy . What’s not clear is whether there’s been much dispute over what constitutes adult content . As far as we can tell - and as CEO Gina Bianchini outlined prior to the evictions - Ning hasn’t prohibited nudity entirely. Nudist social networks are still listed in its directory, for example, although all of them appear to be private networks. If you’ve run a Ning network with borderline content that has been either kicked out or allowed to stay, please let us know in the comments. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Xoopit Marries Facebook Status Updates With Gmail Top
Xoopit , a social networking email enhancement that allows users to locate files, images and videos in their inbox, has launched a new feature that lets Gmail users immediately see and set Facebook status messages and view profile photos of their Facebook friends while reading emails off a Gmail account. Users can also quickly see other information such as birthdays and mobile phone numbers. After downloading the feature, a user can easily update their own status directly from a Gmail account using Facebook Connect. Xoopit’s new feature is pretty neat and gives users the ability to bounce between Facebook and Gmail accounts seamlessly. And Facebook’s status message feature is one that most users check most frequently, so its particularly useful to the average Facebook user. The marriage of social networking and email is not a new concept. Yahoo and Google are both pretty open to incorporating social networking into their email applications, with Yahoo even potentially creating a social network around its email product (Yahoo mail has around 254 million users worldwide, Gmail has around 80 million users). It doesn’t appear that the Xoopit-Facebook feature is available to Yahoo Mail users but the Yahoo and Xoopit may not be far away from developing a Gmail-like relationship with Yahoo, as we wrote about late last year. The plug-in was a bit buggy when I downloaded it but I think its a nifty tool as a whole. It certainly saves me the time in switching back to Facebook to check status updates or update my own status. Now if only we could stream the news feed feature into Gmail. Here’s another screenshot of the new feature: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Another Baby Birth Streamed Live. Does This Cross A Line? Top
This isn’t the first time a guy tries to stream the birth of his child live on the internet (it happened on Ustream back in August 2007 ), and I’m confident it won’t be the last: Allan Branch yesterday streamed a minute of his wife’s c-section on live streaming site Qik , using a jailbroken iPhone . Right after the birth of his baby girl Sarah, she was even given her own Twitter account in addition. The video is actually just of his wife’s head and part of the surgery room. It doesn’t show any of the actual surgery or even the baby. You can find the video on Qik here , but here’s the embedded clip: Leaving aside the fact that Branch ignored the advice of the attending nurse, who asked him to turn it off (many hospitals prohibit any video taping in surgery rooms for malpractice reasons), doesn’t this make you cringe just a little bit? There’s no question that everyone has the right to determine how far he or she wants to go in sharing their private lives on the internet, but I imagine a lot of people will deem live streaming a child’s birth inappropriate. Are there no private moments left anymore? Personally, I think the video doesn’t cross a line at all, although I can hardly think of anything more private and intimate than a child’s birth that could be streamed on the web. That said, thanks to Allan, who is a Rails developer, for letting us know and all the best for his family! What do you think? Acceptable or opening up Pandora’s box?   CrunchBase Information Qik Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Now You Can Edit Google Spreadsheets On Android and iPhones Top
Google Spreadsheets can now be edited on Android mobile phones and iPhones. Up until now, all Google Docs (online docs, spreadsheets, and presentations) could only be viewed on mobile phones. Editable spreadsheets work inside the mobile browser, which for both Android and iPhone is based on Webkit . Jonathan Rochelle, the senior product manager in charge of Google Spreadsheets, showed me the app on his Android G1 a couple weeks ago. As he added rows, edited, sorted, and filtered on his phone, the changes would automatically be reflected in the same spreadsheet on his desktop. (I took a photo of him doing this—with my iPhone, naturally). Each row can be edited by clicking on an “edit” link, and columns can be sorted via a box at the top of each one which then pops open an overlay screen that allows you to select each name or other variable you want to view in that column. The feature went live this morning on Android G1 phones, but I am having trouble seeing it on my iPhone (that could be my phone, or the roll-out process to iPhones could be taking longer). Update : It is now working on my iPhone, although it is a bit buggy. The sort function brings up the slot-machine cylinder interface, but clicking on the Edit link doesn’t do anything. It works great on my Android, though. Nokia S60 series phones are also supported. You can check it out on a mobile phone by opening up the Google App or going to m.google.com/docs on your mobile browser. The new feature will be welcomed by anyone who wants to change a spreadsheet while on the go. It works only when the phone is connected to the Internet (no Google Gears version yet). And it works only on spreadsheets. Docs and presentations remain view-only on mobile phones for now. Update 2: Here is the Google Docs blog post on it. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
TechCrunch Roundtable At Mobile World Congress: Mobile 2.0 - Where Next? Top
TechCrunch is hosting a Roundtable and Meetup at Mobile World Congress on Thursday next week. “TechCrunchTalk: Mobile 2.0 - Where next?” at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona will feature an afternoon of panel discussions and some great evening networking with mobile startups and the investment community. The event will be live video streamed on TechCrunch. Please grab a ticket here. 2009 promises to be the year many of the predictions made about the rise of mobile may start to come true. Startups in the space are poised to take advantage of affordable mobile Internet access and sophisticated handsets like the iPhone. The question is, can they do it? That’s what TechCrunchTalk will seek to tease out from the assembled entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists that back them. TechCrunchTalk Mobile 2.0 will be at Hotel1898 Barcelona on Thursday 19th of February, 3pm-6.30pm, with networking over drinks till 9pm. Please contact our event organiser Petra Johansson on petra [at] twistedtree [dot] co [dot] uk for any enquiries about demo tables or sponsor packages. The topics will focused around a number of themes, including: - What will be the mobile trends over the coming year? - What are VC's looking for? - Can the power of the operators really be disrupted? - What value can be created in the mobile world in difficult economic times? To help us explore these questions we'll have on hand: Roundtable Discussion Davor Hebel, Fidelity Ventures Jean Schmitt, Sofinnova Peter Vesterbacka, Some Bazaar Bob Last, Taptu Marc Rougier, goojet.com Andrew Scott, Rummble (Two more to be confirmed) Roundtable Moderator: Mike Butcher, TechCrunch UK The event will be followed by product pitches from three to five companies (products or startups that actually launch at the event will receive extra consideration, but it is not a requirement). If you have a Mobile startup ready to launch on February 19 and would like to give a demo, send a brief pitch to TechCrunch UK editor Mike Butcher . The event is currently sponsored by LiveCLIQ Inc. Other sponsors slots are still available. LiveCLIQ Inc. LiveCLIQ is a leading provider of 2-way, 3-screen Digital Media Streaming, able to stream network and user media on Mobile, Internet and TV platforms. The Company offers its hosted services to media properties, consumer brands and mobile carriers. LiveCLIQ’s user media site, www.livecliq.net, that enables people to stream live and recorded video from their mobile phones to public and community destinations on the web. LiveCLIQ’s Magellan interface provides a media overlay upon Google Earth in which geo-located media are displayed with user, title and tags enabling contextual media searches. The Company’s founders include product and business leaders from Apple, Microsoft Xbox, Netscape, Motorola and MobiTV. LiveCLIQ is based in San Francisco, California. In addition, we’ll be holding a series of TechCrunch events in Europe this Spring and Summer, all focused on bringing together and networking the European tech community. The week after Mobile World Congress is TechCrunchTalk in Paris . If you wish to be on the mailing list for information about all the up-coming events, sign up on our Amiando account here . And there is lots more information here . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Comeks Runs Out Of Cash, Seeks Buyer Top
This was one of the weirdest incoming pitches I’ve received in a while. Finnish startup Comeks , which I’d never heard of before, contacts us to tout its product, a nifty application that lets you generate funny cartoons based on the pictures on your phone and enables you to push them out to social networking services, and then casually lets us know they’re up for sale. I got in touch with co-founder and CEO Arto Viitanen, who told me the startup simply ran out of money, after raising €400,000 from Accel Partners about two years ago when the outlook for internet and mobile startups was way better than in the current economy. With the seed funding, the company produced a tool called Comeks Shorts , which lets you send visual SMS messages for the price of a normal SMS message. Last week, they added to that service “Fun Photo Blogger”, a tool that lets you create funny cartoons with available artwork (speech bubbles, add-on stickers etc.) in combination with your own pictures, both on the web and from your mobile device (with the help of custom applications for J2ME, the iPhone and Android). I tested Comeks on my iPhone ( App Store link ) and actually liked playing around with it. It’s pretty fun to mess with pictures from your photo gallery, and you can easily share cartoonized images to other sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr, which basically turns it into a (free) visual microblogging application. You can see a bunch of examples of that on Viitanen’s Tumblr blog . I have the feeling that the company was a bit too early for this type of thing, and that the story would have been different had they only started out now, even though it would have been virtually impossible to raise venture capital for it in the current climate. The startup attracted about 170,000 registered users to date, but Viitanen admits that many of them are not active. The team has been taking on other projects for the past 6 months to be able to keep paying the bills, but has no intention of pulling the plug out of the Comeks service just yet. They’ll keep the servers running for the thousands of users that still make use of the application, and meanwhile they’re looking for a buyer to step in and pick up development where they stopped. Hope springs eternal. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Y Combinator's AngelConf Teaches Would-Be Investors How To Get Started Top
It’s no secret that Silicon Valley is teeming with wealthy tech veterans, many of whom are eager to try their hand at angel funding a few new startups. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them are put off by the logistics of figuring out exactly what they’re supposed to do (handing out money isn’t as easy as it sounds). In light of this, Paul Graham and the team at Y Combinator are putting on a special event, dubbed AngelConf , that will bring together some of the Valley’s most prominent investors to tell these prospective Angels how it’s done - and hopefully help give a new wave of startups a chance to make it big. The event will be held on March 5th at Y Combinator’s office in Mountain View and will be free of charge, though you’ll need to request an invitation from its homepage . Graham believes that there are probably 100 times as many would-be angels who haven’t actually gotten around to investing as there are actual ones. He should know - he spent seven years after selling Viaweb before he started his Y Combinator incubator. And during the time since founding Y Combinator he’s also found that the number of startups emerging is directly related to the amount of angel funding available. Even a modest boost in the number of angel investors could be a boon to the startup community, especially in light of the economy. From the event’s homepage: Have you thought about investing in startups, but didn’t know how? You’re not alone. Investing in startups seems mysterious and difficult. How much are you supposed to invest? What legal agreements do you need? Where do you find startups to invest in? How do you pick winners? AngelConf was designed to answer these questions. Silicon Valley’s most prominent angels have generously agreed to spend an afternoon explaining the secrets of angel investing, from mundane matters like deal terms to questions we all still wonder about, like how to tell which startups will succeed. Here’s the roster for the event, which includes our own Michael Arrington: Paul Buchheit Jeff Clavier Ron Conway Paul Graham Dave McClure Mike Maples Ariel Poler Aydin Senkut Jim Young Andrea Zurek Michael Arrington Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
CamSpace Brings Wii-Like Interactivity To Flash Gaming Top
CamSpace , the innovative technology that allows gamers to use their computer cameras to play Wii-like games , has added support for Flash, making its platform accessible to a much broader range of developers (prior to today CamSpace was restricted to traditional .exe games). To get started, users will still have to download the CamSpace client here , which includes a few dozen games and will be adding more on a frequent basis (sorry Mac users, CamSpace is still Windows-only). CamSpace’s technology revolves around detecting up to four objects in real-time, and translating their movement and rotation into in-game actions. To get started, users are asked to activate their webcams with their objects out of frame for a few seconds, then they hold them in front of the camera briefly until the system recognizes them. Any object will do, provided it is bright and has a near-uniform color (we used highlighters), and the tracking seems to work very well provided there’s adequate light. While many Flash games probably wouldn’t work with CamSpace, some of them translate surprisingly well. For example, the classic ‘Kick-Ups’ game that involves clicking on a soccer ball with your mouse to keep it bouncing in the air is very fun and addictive - I spent far longer testing it than I needed to, and looked a little ridiculous in the process as I waved a highlighter wildly trying to get the ball to stay up. CamSpace isn’t the first system to merge video with gameplay (I recall the PS2’s EyeToy did something similar if a little more basic, though it never really seemed to catch on). But it works surprisingly well and only takes a few minutes to install. That said, it still needs some work - the interface can be confusing, and the fact that it is still Windows-only is frustrating (though a Mac version is on the way). Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Google Pulls The Plug On Its Radio Ads; Retreats To What It Knows Best Top
Google is pulling the plug on its Google Audio Ads and Adsense for Audio products, and is looking to sell off its Google Radio Automation software business. The moves come less than a month after the company decided to stop selling print ads , another experiment to expand beyond Web advertising that went nowhere. Google expects to lay off as many as 40 people as a result of exiting the broadcast radio advertising business. We’ve added teh number to our Layoff Tracker . It also marks the failure of Google’s $102 million acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting two years ago, which formed the basis of these businesses. The dMarc deal could have been worth as much as $1.13 billion if the business hit certain milestones. But radio stations and the companies that own them never gave Google the advertising inventory it needed to make it a real business, despite Google’s outright attempts to buy market share . You’ve got to wonder whether dMarc would have made more inroads on its own had it not sold to Google. As it was, fear of Google’s growing power no doubt played a role in the lack of cooperation from the radio industry. And in this environment, even Google can’t fund money-losing projects forever. So it decided to take its marbles and go home, staying in the audio ad business only as it applies to streaming audio on the Internet. Google says it will still continue to pursue its dreams of serving better TV ads , but it is not clear Google is making much progress on that front either. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Rules of Engagement: Users Are Spending More Time On MySpace Top
We’ve dug a little deeper into today’s latest set of Comscore data. As we noted earlier today, Facebook continues to show tremendous growth, and may well catch up to MySpace in terms of U.S. unique visitors by 2010. But another interesting trend, and one that is important to advertisers, are the increases in engagement both networks have seen over the past year - a metric that MySpace has been building a firm lead in. Since last month, MySpace saw the number of minutes each U.S. user spent on the site per month grow 15%, to 266.3 minutes - a new record for the social network, and a 31% increase since last January. Facebook has also shown an increase over the last month, growing 4% since December to an average of 176.6 minutes per user, but has only grown around 3% year over year. And MySpace is still besting Facebook by around 90 minutes per user. As the graph below shows, MySpace has had the advantage here for quite a while, but the recent spike is likely due to the site’s launch of MySpace Music, as well as growth in MySpace Video . In the struggling economy people are spending more time at home, which tends to benefit these media-heavy sites. Page views are also up for both social networks, at least in the short term. MySpace’s page views are up nearly 10% since December to 579 pages per user per month, while Facebook has grown around 3% in the same time period to 337. Figures for both sites are smaller than they were a year ago, likely because they have both been introducing UI improvements like AJAX that don’t force users to refresh their page for every action. Such improvements generally help with lengthening visits as users are less likely to get frustrated, but they also lead to deflated page views. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
YouTube Hopes To Boost Revenue With Video Downloads Top
YouTube took a step towards monetization by allowing partners to charge users for downloads. In this “test” initiative, selected YouTube partners can offer their video downloads for free or for a fee (determined by the partner) paid through Google Checkout. Most videos in the test are currently charging about $1 each. The partner can also decide how the downloadable video will be licensed to the user - whether it will be restricted to a private non-commercial use video, or whether it can be used under Creative Commons. YouTube’s university partners, which include Stanford, Duke and UC Berkeley, are also testing free downloads of lectures and events. And a small group of YouTube partners (YouTube mentioned partners khanacademy, householdhacker and pogobat in their blog post) are using the test offer as a revenue generation and distribution tool. This initiative would also allow users to access videos offline. YouTube is a innovative product but very expensive and not profitable. Everyone knows that Google has been looking for ways to make money from YouTube, especially in a struggling economy, and it looks like as thought they are flirting with this option as a revenue generator. Google has rolled out several ways to generate revenue, including through YouTubevertorials , selling search results , and ad revenues from big content partners . Google hasn’t indicated how much YouTube would be making from this partnership but we assume that they are hoping to make some cut from this down the line. YouTube is soliciting applications from partners to collaborate on the pilot partnership, but it is restricted to US-based partners only. Will this work? We have a huge amount of traffic to our YouTube download tool so that may be an indication that this new venture could work out to Google’s advantage. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
VoxPop.TV Creates Pop Culture Games For The Masses Top
Ever seen a pop culture clickable game on MTV or Entertainment Weekly asking you to predict and vote on who is going to be a winner in a latest awards show? Or asking you to vote on who is hotter, Beyonce or Britney? Chances are the game was made by San Francisco start-up VoxPop.TV . The under-the-radar VoxPop.tv (the company’s services were launched in 2007) is tapping into a relatively niche market by creating pop culture contextual games for publishers like Entertainment Weekly , E! Online , and Maxim . Unlike traditional casual games, these highly contextual and sometimes ad-supported games are based on opinions and predictions on topics and current events (like the Oscars or the Grammy awards). Games range from an E! Online game on what celebrity wore the best outfit to an awards show to picking brackets for March Madness at NCAA.com . VoxPop has turned the games into free, shareable widgets for anyone to post on a blog, social networking site or website, and users can even create a “game lobby” of sorts by adding multiple games to a page. Users are able find games through VoxPop’s own Game Lobby or through publisher sites like Entertainment Weekly or BillBoard. VoxPop seems to be creating a solid revenue base from creating both ad-sponsored games for publishers and publisher-sponsored games. The turnaround for a game is around an hour, so VoxPop can create a “Who wore it best” game for the Oscars for a publisher and post it by the end of the awards show. And VoxPop hasn’t seen much of a dropoff in sales with the economic downturn. The company said that publishers have less staff and less content and are looking for online games, like VoxPop’s applications, to fill content. There doesn’t seem to be another company doing this niche work out there; and VoxPop said its main competitors are the in-house capabilities of publishers. But VoxPop says creating a pop culture games in-house can be costly and time-intensive. We recently wrote about Heyzap , another online gaming start-up hoping to break into the digital space. VoxPop’s co-founders, Mike Derezin, Bill Armistead, and Michael Hoffman, said the hardest battle was forming partnerships with publishers. Word-of-mouth publicity has helped tremendously, they added. VoxPop received around $2 million in series A funding from True Ventures in 2007 and currently creates close 60 new games a month. The company is hoping to create even more innovative games down the line and wants to offer self-service game production to publishers in the future. Here’s a sample game and screenshot: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Looks Like Facebook Just Took The Top Spot Among Social Media Sites Top
This past December we reported on how Facebook was coming up on Blogger to steal its top spot among social media sites when measured by total unique visitors worldwide. Now, it appears as though Facebook has finally done it. Data from comScore , which unfortunately goes only through December 2008, shows how Facebook’s visitors (221 million) basically matched Blogger’s (225.5 million) by the end of the year. That’s a gap of just 4.5 million versus the gap of 21 million that existed in November. Assuming Facebook’s upward trend continued in January (and Blogger’s remained flat), the social network sits on top of the roost now. Facebook stands out from the others not only because it’s the most popular; it’s also the only one showing consistently healthy growth. Chris DeWolf in a recent interview with Charlie Rose said how he doesn’t expect Facebook to pass MySpace by 2010 in terms of U.S. unique visitors (as we’ve predicted in the past). But that prospect is still inching towards reality, as shown by the graph below. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Fav.or.it Closes Funding Round For Corporates To Track Your Blogs And Comments - And Reply Top
Blogs and commenting aggregator fav.or.it has closed a new round of funding close to $710,00 from an angel round taking their total funding to date to around $1.5m. The UK-based startup is also launching a about to launch a new property, FeedBroker.net . This separates some of its functionality into a new site which would allow for licensing RSS feeds external to any other site, including fav.or.it, and send the lion-share of ad-revenue back to content owners - not unlike what Feedburner was supposed to do but never quite got around to it. Launched in beta in October 2007 and public from June last year, the site - with perhaps the most annoying URL known to man, but hey… - aggregates content from thousands of blogs and websites and streams them into a network of vertical channels. In this respect it’s not unlike a bunch of Google News Channels but the difference is logged-in users can comment on fav.or.it’s platform and the comments will appear on the original blog . Disqus already makes use of Fav.or.it's full API for commenting, for instance. Thus fav.or.it has been compared to “commenting systems” like CoComment , SezWho , Tangler , and Intense Debate . But it’s now expanding beyond this to allow brands to pay for channels that aggregate the conversation around their brand/product and use it to engage with customers. Think of it as a centralised command and control system. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 

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