Tuesday, February 24, 2009

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Reunion.com And Wink Morph Into MyLife.com Top
When Reunion.com and Wink announced their merger in early October 2008, the company indicated that it would be relaunching under a different brand name and with a completely overhauled website in early 2009. That day has finally come, and henceforth the merged companies will live on as MyLife . The website for Reunion.com already redirects to MyLife.com, while dedicated people search engine Wink still has its own web presence. MyLife, however, already integrates Wink’s technology, which means the new hybrid social platform is now a full-fledged search engine which not only finds people—thanks to aggregated search across social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace—but also helps visitors connect with them all on the same site. On its company presentation page , MyLife boasts that it can locate over 750 million online profiles via its search index today. Reunion.com has been getting decent traffic lately, rising to 15.4 million U.S. unique visitors and 18.2 million worldwide last month, according to comScore. Google Trends also paints a picture of continued growth, albeit almost exclusively for North America. That basically means MyLife is now effectively the fourth largest social network in the U.S. after Facebook, MySpace and Classmates.com, leaving behind a bunch of more talked-about companies like Bebo, LinkedIn, Digg and Imeem, if you compare comScore data for January 2009. According to Founder and CEO Jeffrey Tinsley , Reunion grew 92% last year and its revenues for 2008 was somewhere in the vicinity of $52 million. Up until now, the company has raised $26.4 million in venture capital over two rounds, and it has used $6 million of this capital to acquire five companies to date (Wink, GoodContacts, MyAddressBook, Planet Alumni, and HighSchoolAlumni.com). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
TC50's plaYce Launches Real-World, 3D Game Platform as a Service (500 Invites) Top
plaYce which showcased at last year’s Techcrunch50 is today announcing the beta launch of its Game-Platform-as-a-Service, aimed at assisting game developers bring high-quality 3D game play right into the browser. Games in plaYce are based on 3D renderings of real cities such as San Francisco and New York. 500 private beta invites for both users and developers are available exclusively to TechCrunch readers here . Casual games on the Web are quite bland when compared to “Tripple-A Games”—high budget titles typically produced by game studios such as EA. The type of games developed and/or distributed by the likes of Zynga, SGN, Kongregate or Oberon just don’t cut it for “real” gamers which are used to superior high-quality game play and graphics. plaYce tackles this matter by allowing high-quality games to be streamed into the browser. The company claims it delivers quick-engagement by initiating play within a minute for games ranging from 300MB up to a few gigabytes in size. Granted, that is indeed quite a bit of time to wait for a game to load, however, the game quality is in a different league than the quality of current casual games (see the video embedded at the end of the post). Users are required to install a 7.7MB plug-in (the “plaYce player”) in order to play games utilizing plaYce’s technology. IE & Firefox are supported on PCs, with Linux and Mac coming soon I’m told. plaYce is targeting independent game developers who will be able to port existing games or build new ones from scratch. The company’s Game-Platform-as-a-Service includes: Game Streaming – Where the user’s current and predicted point of view in the game define what piece of data needs to be upload to the client. Graphics Engine – In-browser complex rendering including soft shadows, shaders, lights, particle effects, etc. Game Arenas - Currently San Francisco, Manhattan and a few large open terrain areas, with two major European cities and Hong Kong on the way. Game developers can also model 3D arenas in any standard 3D modeling tool and then import it. Game arenas that “float in space” are also supported. Facebook & OpenSocial Integration – Allows users to import friends into games. Micro transaction & Virtual Goods – Game developers will be able to implement these in any game. In-game advertising – Provided through Massive and Double Fusion . Services – Game lobby, security, asset management, quality of service. Like any technology there are “performance envelops”… Game developers will have to be aware that the scenes are streamed and that there are hardware considerations (CPU, graphics card, etc.). Developers should also be aware that the plaYce API is written in C++, with the next version supporting Lua . The company’s business model will be based on micro-transactions, virtual goods, in-game ads, and rev-share with game developers. Developers will not be charged for the use of the platform. plaYce is showcasing its technology with Downtown Defender , a game it developed itself (it does not plan to enter the game production business). The company describes the game as: Downtown Defender brings the game mechanics of "Desktop Tower Defense" and the emotion of a realistic, giant monster movie into a tight, high impact experience. Using a Black Hawk Military helicopter, players will defend San Francisco from waves of massive creatures by dropping powerful gun turrets into strategic positions. Players will also need to rescue people on the ground from being eaten alive. The more people the player collects, the greater man power they will have for their turrets. Here’s a video of the game play: > Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Why Social Networks Are Good for the Kids Top
The other day I asked somewhat tongue-in-cheek whether Tom Friedman had ever visited Silicon Valley. Today, I'm wondering if Lady Greenfield has ever used a social networking site. The professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford and the director of the Royal Institution has the United Kingdom up in a tizzy about the idea that Facebook, Bebo and Twitter are warping their children's minds. She warned that social networking sites "are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilized, characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize and a shaky sense of identity." I'm not a psychologist, nor am I a parent, so let me start by saying she might be right that these sites are harmful in some cognitive way. But I think she's wrong to assume social networking is devoid of a "cohesive narrative and long-term significance." I can see where she's coming from, but like a lot of people who don't actually use these sites, she's missing a fundamental shift from Web 1.0 chat room days to Web 2.0 social networks: Real identity. We no longer "go to the Internet" to interact with some shadowy user name where we pretend to be someone we're not. Ok, maybe people on Second Life do. But sites like Facebook and Twitter are more about extending your real identity and relationships online. That's what makes them so addictive: The little endorphin rushes from reconnecting with an old friend, the ability to passively stay in touch with people you care about but don't have the time to call everyday. Facebook makes me a more considerate friend because I now remember people's birthdays. Over Geni, I stay in touch with my niece who I used to see once a year, but is now helping me map out our family tree. Via Twitter, my parents and in-laws know everything happening in my life so that when I call home, we have substantive conversations, not the awkward, "So…..whatcha been up to?" variety. In dozens of cases, these sites have made my real human relationships longer lasting and more substantive. They have actually given me a longer narrative, because it has rekindled friendships with dozens of people with whom I'd lost touch. Greenfield may well have a point when she argues that the young brain can't handle over-stimulation of "fast action and reaction." But isn't that the same argument we've been making about all technology and entertainment for decades now? Indeed, I’m of the MTV generation and all those fast cuts and blaring sounds were supposed to warp my brain long ago. (I know some TechCrunch commenters who would argue it has…) Everything has a trade off, and I'd argue the benefits in communications, education and collaboration of the Web far outweigh the negatives, and indeed give us greater benefits than we get from TV or Guitar Hero. I do share one concern with her: Whether over saturation online leads to a lack of empathy. This is something that is being debated throughout the blogosphere right now. As we all become public personas in our own sphere we're increasingly subject to the same abuse, scrutiny and haters that actual celebrities have to deal with. Such anonymous venom is, after all, why you are reading a post from me on TechCrunch right now. But I'm hopeful that the direction social networking is headed in is the answer to this, not the problem. As more of our social graphs move online, via Twitter or Facebook, the more the same social pressures of the real world come to bear. Compare anonymous YouTube comments with Twitter comments. Generally, Twitter is more kind and substantive, especially among users who Twitter under their real names. Now compare that to comments on Facebook. Almost all of the comments on someone's photo, video, status are supportive and empathetic, because the site has mimicked real world relationships and with that real world pressures. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
12Seconds Teams With TweetDeck, Enhances Third Party API Top
12seconds.tv , the ‘ video Twitter ‘ that allows users to send brief video clips counting twelve seconds in length, has announced that is now fully integrated into popular Twitter client Tweetdeck , which will now allow users to both record and receive 12seconds messages (previously they had only been able to receive messages). The site is also going to begin allowing third party sites and applications to integrate 12seconds recording functionality through an API (as with TweetDeck, they previously had been unable to record messages). Developers will need to request a key to access the API, and will gradually be allowed to access the system over the next two weeks. The news marks a significant win for 12seconds, as it will instantly help expose it to the many TweetDeck users, many of whom are considered Twitter ‘power-users’ and are thus more likely to be interested in this kind of rich media sharing. Other services that have also been integrated into TweetDeck include TwitScoop , which tracks hot trending topics on Twitter in real-time, and StockTwits , a Twitter-based community revolving around stocks and investments. Loïc Le Meur’s Seesmic is behind TweetDeck competitor Twhirl , so it’s worth noting that the latter Twitter desktop client already offered integration with a video conversation service. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Sedo Pushes For More U.S. Domain Parking Business With RevenueDirect Acquisition Top
Online domain name marketplace Sedo has acquired RevenueDirect , a domain parking and monetization service, from its parent company and registrar Dotster . Sedo, itself owned by the German internet marketing and media company AdLINK Group , is pushing for a bigger foothold inside the United States as it does in the rest of the world. As DomainNameWire points out, the deal makes sense because Sedo is a significant Google advertising partner across the globe, while RevenueDirect has a similarly strong relationship with the search and online advertising giant in the U.S. Sedo also closed a strategic partnership with Dotster to further integrate its services into their registration and inventory management solutions. The financial terms of the acquisition remain undisclosed. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Happy Kindle 2 Day! Top
We should be getting our review units in any minute. Is there anything in particular that you want to know? First, check out this and this then leave your questions in comments. Thanks! Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Google Groups Page On Gmail Shows Adult Material Amidst Serious Outage Top
It’s bad enough for Google that businesses and consumers across the globe are being left without web access to Gmail for hours , but to add insult to injury someone hacked the created a Google Groups page on Gmail (link NSFW) at the worst possible time, adding images that leave nothing to the imagination as well links to adult content elsewhere on the net on top of the page. Update: per comments, this is not an official Google group but a user-generated one most likely deliberately set up now to take advantage of the fact Google has other things on its mind right now than checking up and moderating new groups on the subject of Gmail. Title edited. That said, this is the very first result that shows up when you search for ‘Gmail down’ so they might wanna take a look at this quickly. Update 2: someone at the Googleplex just did and deleted the group, which was up for at least 25 minutes. Update 3: weird, it dissappeared for a while but now you’re able to access it anyway after a warning message. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Trouble In The Clouds: Gmail Turns Into Gfail Top
Thousands of Twitter messages carrying the words “gmail” or “gfail” will teach you that Google’s free web-based e-mail platform is currently down around the world . A Google spokesperson told Pocket Lint that their engineers are working on it but have no clue why the errors are turning up. Meanwhile, a Google representative posted this on a its help pages : We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by February 24, 2009 6:30 AM PST detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. (POP3 / IMAP seems to be still functioning, and the problem doesn’t appear to affect other Google Apps at this point) I’m not buying the small subset part, and considering the fact that Pocket Lint says the problem started occuring around 10:20am GMT, 3 hours before even telling everyone what’s going on is an incredibly long timeframe in my opinion. Update: Gmail is supposed to be coming back now, at least for some. But Google is also dealing with people posting adult content on Groups pages related to Gmail. Update 2: there’s a status box on the Gmail Help homepage that says the outage started at 1:30 AM PST, which means the problems have been occurring for nearly 2 hours and a half at the time of this update. The message now reads that access has been restored without any indication of time. Update 3: the problem appears to be solved for most users now, 3 hours after Google indicated that it was aware of the errors. This comes a couple of weeks after the chaos when a reportedly human error caused Google’s search engine to erroneously flag the entire internet as malware . Curious to see what their response to this outage will be, as this is not the first time this has happened . Good thing Gmail went offline with Google Gears some time ago. Update 4: Google’s official statement was just blogged . If you've tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we're having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email. We're working very hard to solve the problem and we're really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won't be able to send or receive emails. We're posting updates to the Gmail Help Centre at http://mail.google.com/support/ and Google Apps users can visit the Google Apps help centre at www.google.com/support/a. Thanks for bearing with us while we sort this out. We’ll report back as we make progress. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Mio.tv Picks Up Spanish Social Network Wamba For €4 Million Top
Latino-targeting online entertainment and communication services provider Mio.tv has acquired Spanish social network Wamba for approximately €4 million euros with earn-outs according to various Spanish and Latin-American media. Considering the fact that the startup had raised €3 million from early Skype investor and serial entrepreneur Morten Lund back in 2007, this isn’t exactly a home run for the Spanish company. Nevertheless, this is good news for Lund, the colorful European web celebrity who TechCrunch UK earlier this year reported to be personally bankrupt after a series of investments gone awry. According to earlier reports, Lund retained 40% of Wamba shares in return for his investment. Mio.tv aims to become the default bilingual online portal for the millions of latinos on the web, offering a slew of online video channels, gaming, social networks and communication services. The company’s Chairman and CEO, Manuel Garcia-Duran, told EuropaPress that Mio.tv is buying Wamba for its reach in the Latin-American community and cites 8.4 million registered users for the social network. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Founders At Work: Uncovering The Truth Behind A Hotmail Founder's Claims Top
In 2007 Jessica Livingston , a founding partner at Y Combinator , released a book called Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days in which she transcribed over thirty extensive interviews with some of Silicon Valleys most notable successes. Included in the book was an interview with Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia , who detailed the experiences he had raising money for the webmail startup and its subsequent acquisition by Microsoft for a tidy sum of $400 million. In the interview, Bhatia made some strong accusations regarding early-stage venture fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), stating that DFJ had actively tried to dissuade other VCs from investing in the company (so that they could be the only ones to invest in Hotmail’s funding rounds). He also denied that DFJ’s Tim Draper had come up with the idea of including ‘viral’ taglines at the end of each message inviting new users to join Hotmail, instead attributing the idea to Hotmail co-founder Jack Smith. Today Livingston has written a blog post asserting that some of the statements made by Bhatia are incorrect: I received evidence yesterday that some of the things Sabeer Bhatia said in his interview in Founders at Work were false. The evidence indicates that (a) Tim Draper rather than Jack Smith had the idea of putting a Hotmail ad at the bottom of emails sent by the service, and (b) that DFJ didn’t disparage Hotmail to other VCs interested in investing. The corrections are notable for a number of reasons. While Founders At Work may not be a national bestseller, it has become very popular in the startup community (it currently ranks second on Amazon’s list of books in the ‘High-Tech’ category), so Bhatia’s claims may well have impacted DFJ. In the tight-knit Silicon Valley community, reputation is extremely important among VCs and such statements can be damaging, even if the events involved occurred well over a decade ago. The fact that Tim Draper was also apparently responsible for one of the elements that helped make Hotmail massively successful also serves to dispel the myth that most investors’ only contribution is money - clearly, the good ones have far more to offer. Livingston isn’t at liberty to share the evidence that led her to believe that Bhatia’s statements were false, but the fact that she wrote the blog post indicates that it is extremely compelling (authors don’t take such corrections lightly). It also sounds like Bhatia had previously requested that the statements in question be removed from future editions of the book, though he didn’t indicate that they were untrue (it sounds like his burnt bridges were coming back to haunt him). In a post on a message board, Livingston writes: Sabeer approved the interview before publication, but after the book was published he asked me to remove those parts if there was a second edition. He didn’t say specifically that the things he said were false, just that they hurt people’s feelings. (Many people in the book cut stuff out of their interviews, but usually because the material was controversial or confidential, not false.) But once I got evidence that what he said was actually false, it seemed appropriate to post a statement about it immediately. None of the other things people said in interviews were false that I'm aware of. Since leaving Hotmail, Bhatia has begun a number of other ventures, including Live Documents , an online Microsoft Office clone that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere fast. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Microsoft Quells Severance Firestorm, Lets Ex-Employees Keep Their Cash Top
On Saturday we published a letter sent out to some recently laid-off Microsoft employees explaining that they had been overpaid in severance - and that Microsoft wanted some of its money back. Something had clearly gone wrong during Microsoft’s first mass layoffs, as we began to receive more reports that ex-employees had gotten similar letters, and that some had actually been under paid. One original tipster has detailed how he felt when he initially got the notice: Right away I was angry because when I got my severance check, I immediately created a budget to stretch this out as long as possible. I know we’re in a recession now and I don’t know how long I’ll be unemployed. And now here comes this letter totally destroying the budget and on top of that, there’s no detailed information on how the error occurred, no details breaking down the severance pay. Microsoft initially refused to provide any details on the incident, instead stating that it was a “private matter between the company and the affected people”. And then the news began to spread. Since Saturday, well over 300 news outlets have covered the story. Many of them have deemed this to be a huge PR misstep, but it’s likely that Microsoft PR never even knew about the letter in the first place, and were only alerted to it after the fact. In any case, it’s clear that nobody ever considered how people would react if the letter leaked to the public. Today Microsoft has announced that it will allow the former employees to keep any overcompensation they were sent (with overpayments averaging around $4,500), and that those who were under-compensated would be paid in full immediately: Last week, 25 former Microsoft employees were informed that they were overpaid as a part of their severance payments from the company. This was a mistake on our part. We should have handled this situation in a more thoughtful manner. We are reaching out to those impacted to relay that we will not seek any payment from those individuals. While there was some speculation that the issue could have been widespread (perhaps extending to many of the 1,400 employees laid off on January 22nd) only around forty five people in total (including 20 who were underpaid) were affected by the billing issue. Each of them is being personally contacted by Microsoft HR chief Lisa Brummel. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
With Chernin Out At News Corp, What Happens To FIM? Top
Peter Chernin, the long-time president and COO of News Corp, is leaving the company after protracted negotiations over his contract could not be resolved. Chernin’s salary was $28.8 million in the last fiscal year, which was $1.3 million more than even Rupert Murdoch’s take-home pay. Chernin helped Murdoch build and oversee his vast media empire over the past 20 years, and his departure no doubt will raise all sorts of questions about the future of the company. He will be leaving when his current contract expires on June 30. For instance, what will happen to Fox Interactive Media (FIM)? This particular corner of the Murdoch empire is where News Corp keeps all of its Web businesses: MySpace, Photobucket, IGN, Scout, Chernin was its biggest supporter and internal sponsor. Peter Levinshon, the leader of FIM, was considered to be within Chernin’s camp. Although Chernin and Murdoch worked hand-in-hand, they are also very much opposites and a competitive rivalry always existed between the two. News Corp executives often identify with one boss or the other. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, for instance, is considered a Murdoch guy. With Chernin gone, perhaps this is as good a time as any to take another look at FIM and what purpose it serves. Its original purpose was almost as an internal M&A fund for Internet startups. But now those businesses have grown up. Other than MySpace, which contributes the vast majority of FIM’s revenues and profits, it is not really clear what the point of FIM is. Photobucket could just as easily be part of MySpace. And some of the other businesses could be integrated into other operating units, or sold off. The overhead of running FIM with all of those expensive lieutenants could be reduced as well. Investors would certainly like to see MySpace broken out as a separate business, instead of having to back out estimates of its performance based on FIM numbers as a whole. Complicating matters is that the employment contracts for MySpace founders DeWolfe and Tom Anderson are up for renewal later this year (each one reportedly makes $15 million a year). Would DeWolfe want to broaden his control to new fiefdoms within News Corp, or would he try to avoid taking on what appear to be deadweight businesses? Or maybe FIM just remains as it is: an anachronism within News Corp. (Photo by What Counts ). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Aqua Moto: It's Like Wave Race For Your iPhone Top
It’s no secret that the iPhone is one of gaming’s hottest new platforms, and while many of the games on the App Store leave something to be desired, every once in awhile we stumble across a game sporting very high production values that rival dedicated videogame systems. This weekend, Resolution Interactive unveiled a new game called Aqua Moto that is strongly reminiscent of Nintendo’s classic game Wave Race 64 , allowing gamers to race Jet Skis through a variety of 3D environments. You can grab a free ‘Lite’ version of the game here , but at only $3 the full version (which includes far more tracks) is a bargain. Beyond its impressive graphics, Aqua Moto shines because its controls are perfectly suited for the iPhone. As gamers tilt their iPhone from side to side their character swerves left or right, and tilting the phone forward or backward controls the acceleration. This isn’t the first game to employ this kind of control scheme - dozens of similar racing games have been released on the App Store since its launch last July. But most of those games are car-based, which means that the controls are often much more ‘twitchy’ and tough to control. Aqua Moto favors broader motions as the vehicles are water-based, which makes the gameplay feel much more natural (and is also a bit more forgiving). My biggest gripe is that the game fails to tap into the iPhone’s network effect - it would be great if the game supported multiplayer, even if only across a Wi-Fi network. That said, its championship mode seems to be long enough to satisfy most gamers, and is certainly worth the $3 price of admission. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Picnik Is Emerging As One Of The Fastest-Growing Photo Sites On The Web Top
When I was looking at traffic numbers for the top photo sites this weekend, another stat caught my eye. Online photo editing site Picnik is also quickly climbing the ranks of photo sites from seemingly nowhere. In January, according to comScore, the site attracted 6.6 million unique visitors worldwide, a tenfold increase from the year before. On comScore’s list of the largest photo sites, Picnik ranks No. 14, above Shutterfly and AOL Pictures, and just below Snapfish. Unlike those services, however, Picnik is not really a place people store their photos. Rather, it is a place where they touch them up and manipulate them before they post them on MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Smugmug, or somewhere else. Picnik is a powerful, cloud-based photo editor that is i ntegrated directly into Flickr , SmugMug and other photo repositories. Competing online photo editors such as Fotoflexer and Photoshop.com (formerly and Photoshop Express ) attract only a fraction as many users (1.4 million uniques for Fotoflexer and 760,000 for Photoshop.com. I asked CEO Jonathon Sposato for more details. He offered that 45 million photos were uploaded in January, and that 45 percent of Picnik’s traffic is direct, 28 percent comes from search engine, and that only 18 percent comes from partner sites such as Flickr and Smugmug. Picnik offers a base version of its photo editor for free, and then tries to convert power users into paying a subscription for more features. While Sposato won’t get into the conversion rate of free to paid members, he says that the percentage is increasing, renewals are increasing as a percentage, and he says that Picnik is now cashflow positive, a little more than two years after launch. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
GumGum Adds B5Media, DailyFill To Its Image-Licensing Network Top
Image-licensing network GumGum is growing by leaps and bounds. Measured as an advertising network, it is now a Quantcast Top 100 site , reaching 13.7 million people in the U.S. and 23.5 million worldwide. More than 1,000 Web publishers are licensing images through GumGum, which allows them to pay based on how many people see the image or use them for free with embedded advertising. Today, GumGum is adding blog network B5Media and gossip site DailyFill to its customer list. They join Glam Media , MTV, and Gawker. Sites that rely on celebrity pics particularly like GumGum’s model. Sites contract directly with photo agencies, and GumGum keeps track of who is using what images and how many times they are viewed. That is what those Quantcast numbers are counting, thus GumGum acts like an ad network for images. Typical CPMs (cost per thousand views) are $0.15 - $1.00 per image for sites that opt to pay instead of accepting ads in their images. This kind of licensing model makes much more sense on the Web, where small sites want the same quality images as large sites but don’t have the resources to pay the same rates. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Microsoft Research: A Look At The Intriguing Social Desktop Prototype Top
Late last week, Microsoft Research shared a couple of things about Social Desktop , a prototype of which they are debuting at TechFest 2009 in a couple of days (along with dozens of other things). From the looks of it, this will be a much talked about product even if it stays in proof-of-concept phase for now. And if they decide to open it up even just a little, this could be a major breakthrough in tearing down the virtual wall between the desktop and the web, a trend we’ve been noticing for years. The service would essentially be capable of providing you with a secure unique ID for all the files and folders on your desktop, enabling users to share, comment on, tag and search files like photos and videos via a dedicated web page powered by .NET. Think of this as social URLs that link to files which could easily be pushed to third-party services like Twitter or Digg but also Microsoft’s own Windows Live Messenger without the need for you to copy, move or upload anything. Furthermore, social interaction around the files would be visible from inside the Windows desktop OS, blurring the line between the desktop and the web even more. You can have a URL drill into a subportion of a document or a PowerPoint deck, or data can come from a Web service or a database. Social Desktop is a local service that maps the user's local data into a .NET service bus service, enabling local data to be accessible through firewalls. Social Desktop also provides a Web-service view over the same data, with inherent RSS event streams for any container. New data sources can be mapped into the URL hierarchy, enabling a distributed view to be built. There are simple sharing paradigms that enable URLs to be shared temporarily or permanently. Social Desktop runs on Silverlight and leverages both the Windows OS and Windows Azure , the software giant’s very own cloud services platform which Microsoft announced in October 2008. TechFlash reviewed the service as well last week, and asked the project leads how Social Desktop differs from Live Mesh. The response came from Lili Cheng, who manages Microsoft Research’s Creative Systems Group: “In the Mesh model, you can almost imagine your PC being pushed to the cloud,” she explained. “In this, you can almost imagine the Web being embedded inside your desktop.” I don’t know about you, but to me this all sounds very promising and I’m curious if using Social Desktop would change my file sharing habits. Even with the plethora of free, simple and fast online backup and sharing services around, there’s still a trust barrier not easily overcome by startups who need to market their services extensively on an inherently low budget to reach any kind of scale. Besides, Social Desktop even relieves you from the not-so-cumbersome task of moving a file to the cloud in order to store or share it, so that makes for one hell of a substantial benefit compared to other services where you’d be required to register and do a series of actions before that happens. Unfortunately, a Microsoft spokesperson told NetworkWorld that Social Desktop at this point is merely a research prototype which will not be a feature in Windows 7, nor will it be available for public use. But I still want to get my hands on Windows 7 Beta (it makes use of the new operating system’s file-preview functions) right now even if just to test this application once (and if) they release it. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Bebo Zeroes In On Lifestreaming For The Masses; Gets Massive Bump From AIM Profiles Top
In the first of several major product changes that will sweep through AOL in the coming months, the company is adding more lifestreaming capabilities to its Bebo social network today, including activity stream updates from rival social networks Facebook and MySpace. It is also introducing a visual timeline called a “Lifestory” that puts uploaded photos, events, and (soon) videos into a scrollable, chronological series of postage stamp icons at the top of members’ profile pages. Eventually, people will be able to subscribe to other Lifestories, including those from brands and bands, and embed them in their own profile pages or elsewhere. The timeline will also become the centerpiece of a Bebo iPhone app coming out soon. The new features should all help to reinvigorate a site that has been in the doldrums lately. But Bebo’s biggest boost will come later this week when AOL migrates all of its AIM Profiles members over to Bebo on Wednesday and Thursday. This single move will more than double Bebo’s presence in the U.S., where AIM Profiles is even bigger than Bebo. According to comScore, Bebo’s unique U.S. visitors have been in decline the past few months to 5 million in January, whereas AIM Profiles has seen an upswing to 8.5 million. (See chart below). Worldwide, Bebo has 22.6 million monthly visitors. At the center of AOL’s new product strategy is its “Lifestream Platform.” Think of it as FriendFeed for the masses, with personal AIM updates mixed in. Already, Bebo members are able to keep up with their friends’ activities on other sites, such as Flickr, Twitter and Delicious. Now Facebook, MySpace and YouTube are being supported as well. Whenever any of your friends do something on these services, their activity stream shows up on your Bebo page. Once you link an account to Bebo, it automatically keeps track of all of your new friends on that service as well. (The technology is based on AOL’s acquisition of Socialthing! last summer). If you are an AIM member, all of your AIM buddies now seamlessly appear on Bebo. And through Bebo’s recently launched Social Inbox , you can get all of your lifestream updates, instant messages, and email in one massive feed. But is this a capitulation to the two big social networks out there? No, says David Liu, the senior vice president and general manager of AOL’s People Networks: We are not trying to connect everybody to everybody—that is Facebook—just to the content and people important to them. Bebo is just the beginning. He plans on rolling out the Lifestream platform across revamped versions of AOL’s IM clients (AIM and ICQ), mobile apps, and even other Websites later this year. Regardless of any second thoughts that AOL may have had after buying Bebo, it is a central part of its strategy today. AOL has a huge and active group of millions of IM users that it has been wanting to turn into a social network for years. Now it has a place for them to create profiles and interact, but more importantly it can take the central communication model of social networks—the lifestream—and pour it back into its IM clients. It is an ambitious undertaking. But will AOL’s take on lifestreaming be compelling enough to keep existing members from leaving? And more importantly, will it be compelling enough to attract new members from eleswhere on the Web? Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
After MySpace And Facebook, Oodle To Power Brand New AOL Classifieds Top
Classifieds aggregation service provider Oodle is on a roll and definitely one of the startups worth following closely this year. After signing up two social networking juggernauts - both MySpace and Facebook - the company is now apparently also behind the just launched AOL Classifieds platform, per blog post by Greg Sterling . The news comes right after a significant financing round announced earlier this month, when 3 VC firms invested $5.6 million in the company, bringing the total in funding raised to a healthy $21.6 million . Meanwhile, its traffic continues to surge (see Crunchbase profile for some upward-pointing visitor number graphs). I would be very surprised if Oodle ends 2009 without being acquired for a price that puts a big smile on the faces of their investors. For context, from the release: AOL Classifieds is expected to serve as a platform for sellers to promote their listings by leveraging the reach of Oodle’s network of more than 250 partner sites. Buyers can expect to find deals with access to more than 40 million listings aggregated from more than 80,000 different sites. In addition, AOL Classifieds links consumers directly to classifieds listings on other properties within the AOL network, including AOL Autos, AOL Jobs, AOL Personals, and AOL Real Estate. AOL Classifieds is the latest addition to the AOL Local Network, which is an online local network with a monthly reach of 54 million unduplicated unique visitors. In addition to the launch of AOL Classifieds in the U.S., a site for Canada is also available beginning today. An AOL Classifieds site for the UK will be launching later this week. (Via Techmeme ) Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Kyte Launches Turn-Key iPhone App Platform Top
Given the incredible popularity of the iPhone, many entertainers (and the studios backing them) are eager to establish a presence on Apple’s App Store, but don’t necessarily want to invest in the resources needed to independently develop their own iPhone applications. Today Kyte has launched its iPhone Apps Framework - a turn-key solution that allows Kyte partners to create applications that can include video, live chat, and monetization options with a minimal amount of development costs. Alongside the launch of the new platform, Kyte is announcing five artists from IGA records who have already released their iPhone applications, including the following free apps [all iTunes links]: The All American Rejects , Keri Hilson , Lady Gaga , The Pussycat Dolls , and Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em . Besides Twitter feeds, RSS, and chat, Kyte also offers a listing of each artist’s most recent videos taken using Kyte.tv ’s mobile phone video apps. And, perhaps most importantly for the artists, each app features a list of links to songs in the music section of Apple’s iTunes store. Kyte isn’t the first company to launch a platform for branded iPhone applications. Other options include Infomedia’s Mobile Syndication Solutions , through which MC Hammer built his app . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Skimlinks Gets $1m To Give Publishers Control Of Affilate Ads Top
Funny how a recession concentrates the mind. In just over a year UK startup Skimbit has made the full journey from Web 2.0 era “decision-making tool” with a vague business model about affiliate advertising, to re-engineer as an affiliate aggregator for publishers. Re-launching as Skimlinks , it now aggregates 11 affiliate networks for clients like The Daily Mail newspaper in London. The move means it has now attracted first round investment led by Sussex Place Ventures with participation from UK government body NESTA (yes, in the UK there are public funds for startups), The Accelerator Group , and Angels Duncan Jennings ( eConversions ) and Alex Hoye ( Latitude Group ). The amount was undisclosed but is understood to be in the vicinity of just over $1 million (£700,000). Competitors like the older Dianomi and Chicago-based Science Revenue appear to have more clients, but given they are North America focused, Skimlinks has an opportunity to break out more in the UK and Europe. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Put This On Your T-Shirt: Spreadshirt Scores €10 Million Top
German custom apparel company Spreadshirt has secured €10 million in funding from Kennet Partners and returning investor Accel Partners , which led an undisclosed round of Series A funding for the company back in 2006. Spreadshirt, which competes internationally with companies like CafePress and Zazzle , was founded in 2002 by graduate student Lukasz Gadowski (currently still acting as Chairman of the company) and has become one of the most significant players in the field of personalization and online ordering of custom goods and clothing over the years. The company also lets private individuals and commercial organizations set up their own online merchandising outlets as resellers of the Spreadshirt service. Spreadshirt says the financing will be used to develop its online platform and its push into the North American market, where its two main competitors, venture-backed CafePress (Foster City, CA) and Zazzle (Redwood City, CA) are based. According to a January company blog post , 1 million t-shirts were sold in 2008 via Spreadshirt. They’re also open about the missed growth estimates put forward at the end of 2007: growth was at 40% for the year instead of the aimed-for 50-80%. As a result, the company was recently forced to do a round of lay-offs and reorganize some of its departments. (Source: Deutsche Startups ) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 

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