Thursday, February 12, 2009

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Why We Often Write About Twitter And Will Continue To Do So Top
As most of you readers know, we regularly cover stuff related to Twitter over here on TechCrunch. When we do, we often get bashed by people in comments for writing about the startup and the slew of applications that make use of the Twitter API so much. Sometimes we’ll get e-mails and - ironically - messages on Twitter from people who are downright angry or disappointed in us for doing that. So we wanted to take some time to explain why that’s the case, and why you’re likely going to continue reading about them on this blog. We should note that this post was fueled by Allen Stern from Centernetworks, who published an article yesterday about why he doesn’t write about Twitter every day that hit Techmeme shortly after. For the record: we don’t write about Twitter related news and applications every single day, just more often than most startups. Also, we’re not the only ones doing that (ReadWriteWeb, for example, had three posts related to Twitter up yesterday, four if you count the Ginx coverage too). So why is that? I’ll tell you why it isn’t first. It’s most definitely not because Twitter is currently the hot Silicon Valley startup with known faces running and backing it, because they raised millions in funding or because they almost got bought by Facebook for much more money than was invested in them. Heck, I work and live thousands and miles away from San Francisco and I don’t know any of the people tied to Twitter well enough to be biased because I would have a blind spot somewhere. But I am an avid Twitter user, and I see its value and potential growing every day. We all do here at TechCrunch. We see an ecosystem of developers swarming around the Twitter API like moths around a flame, and the quality of applications that come out of that ecosystem is limited only by their creators’ imagination (well not really, but you get the point). We receive e-mails in our tips inbox and profile submissions almost daily about Twitter related tools, and most of the time we take a mental note but don’t write about them. But sometimes something resonates with us and we want to share that with you. Why would you expect us to write about small startups getting seed funding (most recently FrugalMechanic , Diddit , Pollsb and Tvinci ) but not if it’s for a Twitter desktop application ( TweetDeck )? Why would you want us to cover e-commerce related startups ( WujWuj ) but not if it’s tied to Twitter ( TwtQpon , Dell , Tweba )? Why wouldn’t Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey joining Ustream.tv as an advisor constitute as tech news? And ask yourself: if all the talk about Twitter’s business model is so irrelevant, why does a post about its potential revenue-generating plans garner 175+ comments (and counting)? If nobody cares about Twitter, then why does a Kevin Rose guest post on how to get more followers trigger no less than 365 people to share their thoughts in comments? If it’s the Twitter downtime posts that bother you (just yesterday, it was out for about an hour ), why not just skip reading them? It’s not like the titles are misleading or anything. Point is, Twitter has grown into far more than just a messaging or status updating service, and anyone who really uses it or develops for it knows that. It’s where news gets broken and what more and more celebrities openly turn to to start getting social with the community. It’s an almost perfect crowdsourced Q&A tool. It’s a place where companies can do business while people can choose to engage only with their peers instead. It triggers and support the organization of worldwide charity events (e.g. today’s Twestival ). Basically, it’s as social as social networking services can get. And it’s still growing like a weed , too. That is why we like Twitter, and why we don’t intend to stop writing about it anytime soon (and we’ll mix the positive with the negative too). You have the comment section to give your opinion, as usual, but try and keep it classy. By the way, you can follow TechCrunch on Twitter (with the occasional update from Mike Arrington) as well as TechCrunch UK , Crunchgear and Crunchbase , and these are our individual accounts: Erick Schonfeld , Jason Kincaid , Mark Hendrickson , Leena Rao , Mike Butcher , Steve Gillmor , Henry Work , John Biggs , Greg Kumparak , Peter Ha and myself ( Robin Wauters ). (Image from Darkmotion ) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Nightlife Application Breaks Away From Facebook, Tries To Stand On Its Own Two Feet Top
The Scene , a new social network geared towards improving your night life, is making its public debut at the Twiistup 5 event in Santa Monica, CA today. After three months in beta, the company is announcing the seed round of funding it has raised from Velocity Interactive Group and angel investor Marko Babic. An iPhone application (for when you’re stumbling around the streets at 1:00am looking for the next bar) is also being released. The Scene has a very strong “let’s go out to a club and get drunk” vibe to it (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But it makes me wonder how many people who have this urge will actually boot up their computers and start planning out the best way to go about it, let alone carry the iPhone app around in their pockets and post updates to the site as their nights go on. The founders - four graduates from the University of California at Berkeley - obviously felt the need to create a whole new site around this idea, one that could possibly supplant MySpace as the most party-inclined social network around. The Scene started off as an application on Facebook called TheBarBook , which currently has about 6,250 monthly active users (although the company claims it has over 150,000 total users). It’s previous incarnation as a Facebook app shows through clearly in the new site’s design. Many elements, such as the Wall-like area called “My Feed” that displays prominently on the homepage, were blatantly recreated from Facebook. Things to do on the site include sharing your status, adding photos, creating events, viewing profiles, and making friends. The Scene is also a lot like Yelp, with a near identical set of search boxes at the top of each page that asks you what type of establishment you want to search for and where. Each bar, club and lounge in your area is given its own profile page where users can post quick notes (effectively mini-reviews) and add their own events. Perhaps most usefully, each venue page also shows a list of related places under the header “People Who Go Here Also Go To”. And you can see everyone else enjoys your favorite dive bar under a list simply called “People Who Go Here”. One thing I’d recommend to the team behind The Scene is to open up user profiles. Whenever I click on someone’s avatar, it takes me to a page where I’m abruptly informed that I can’t see the person’s information because I’m not friends with them. This is too much like Facebook where it needs to be a lot more like MySpace. After all, half the point of going out at night is to meet other people who like to have fun, too. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Innovative iPhone Developer Smule Raises $3.9 Million Top
Smule is one of our favorite iPhone developers - besides putting together ridiculously addictive apps like Ocarina ( iTunes Link ), the team is also especially adept at tapping into the iPhone’s network effect , even on something as basic as a virtual lighter . Today, the company has announced that it has closed a $3.9 million funding round led by Granite Ventures, with Bessemer Venture Partners, Maples Investments, and Jeffrey C. Smith (the company’s co-founder and CEO) also participating. The company combines the talents of Smith, an experienced entrepreneur, with Dr. Ge Wang , an Assistant Professor at Stanford’s Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (who is the company’s other co-founder). Wang is partially responsible for the development of ChucK , an “on-the-fly audio programming language” that allows Smule’s apps to create and transmit realistic music over the iPhone’s network connection. Wang also conducts the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (video here ), and the Smule Ocarina orchestra, which played at this year’s Crunchie awards (video here ). Some of Smule’s other applications include Zephyr , a interesting app that combines audio and visual effects to respond to your touch, and Sonic Vox , a voice shifter. Overall Smule’s apps have gained over 1 million users. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Mixx Still Growing (But Not Fast Enough), Relaunches Website Top
Mixx is steadily growing, and they’re hoping to spur even greater traffic increases with a completely revamped website. But every social news service is showing growth, and Mixx actually appears to be lagging if you compare publicly available data. Last time we wrote about Mixx, they were touting healthy traffic numbers and boasting the fact that Hitwise report suggested that its users are more mainstream than those of their main competitor Digg . Today, the company says its visitor numbers have increased to about 7 million per month (citing January figures), which is up from 5.8 million in October 2008. Meanwhile, all the big social news and discovery services are showing healthy growth, and Mixx appears to still play in the minor leagues. Take a look at this snapshot from Compete , for example, which show Digg is thriving and Reddit is steadily outpacing Mixx. Google Trends paints a slightly different picture but still pegs Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon to be more popular than Mixx. Quantcast , finally, says Mixx receives about a 1/5 of the amount of visitors Digg does. For the sake of comparison: Mixx raised $3.5 million in funding so far, while Digg pocketed $40 million to date. Mixx is launching a new website today to better serve their existing users, which they claim have provided all the feedback that was used to put together the revamped web presence. We’ll let you be the judge ( more info here ): Old Mixx New Mixx   CrunchBase Information Mixx Digg Reddit Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Yammer Aims To Bring Microsharing Inside Corporate Firewalls Top
Later today at the LA Twiistup event, the makers of Twitter-for-business application Yammer will announce a new, hosted version of its software that will enable companies to install it inside their corporate firewall. This was an inevitable move for the venture-backed startup to make if it wanted to expand its reach to larger companies who have security policies in place that would prevent users from communicating via the internet (something the normal SaaS version requires). Customers will be able to switch back and forth from the SaaS version to the hosted one, since Yammer promises to transfer network information between both versions upon request. Pricing is $12 per seat per year, although the company says it will change its pricing according to the size and scope of its customers. The Yammer software can be installed on top of existing infrastructure and comes with a licensing agreement and support contract. On a sidenote, Yammer has recently announced that it has open-sourced its iPhone application . The documentation can be found on GitHub . Yammer was the overall winner of the TechCrunch50 conference and recently raised a $5 million round of funding . We’re quite happily using it internally here at TechCrunch, although it’s had its uptime problems before. And if I can quickly slip in a feature request to the team: please add presence status updates for people in the network! Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Google Buys … A Paper Mill? Top
Consider it a sign of the times when internet company Google acquires the buildings and premises of a mill site from a paper, packaging and forest products company that caters to the print industry. Today, Finland-based paper group Stora Enso has announced that Google is buying the buildings and most of the Summa Mill site, where production of paper was ceased last month in January 2008, for approximately €40 million ($51.7 million). From the press release: Stora Enso has signed an agreement to sell the buildings and most of the Summa Mill site in Finland to Google Group of Companies for approximately EUR 40 million.The sale is expected to close by the end of the first quarter 2009. The transaction will improve operating profit by approximately EUR 38 million, of which approximately EUR 15 million is a reversal of earlier impairment, and will be recorded as a non-recurring item in the first quarter 2009 results. Google is expected to announce its plans or future investment “in due course”, and has agreed that part of the mill site will be further transferred to the City of Hamina for other industrial uses. Update: obviously the space is most likely going to serve as a data center, which has now also been confirmed by Reuters . An earlier (brutally honest) press release from Stora Enso reveals that the mill site was closed down because of “persistent losses in recent years and poor long-term profitability prospects” It continues: “Despite tremendous efforts by its employees, the mill cannot compete in today’s and tomorrow’s markets using expensive virgin wood fibre, much of which is imported”. You can read the whole release about further cost reductions and lay-offs here . (Thanks to Jens Agerberg for the tip) Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
The AP Reveals Details of Facebook/ConnectU Settlement With Greatest Hack Ever Top
This is almost too good to be true. The Associated Press has uncovered the details of the Facebook/ConnectU settlement using, of all things, copy and paste. After taking drastic preventative measures to keep the settlement confidential, including barring reporters from the courtroom and redacting portions of the documents, Facebook has been foiled by the most laughable lull in security I’ve heard of: Large portions of that hearing are redacted in a transcript of the June hearing, but The Associated Press was able to read the blacked-out portions by copying from an electronic version of the document and pasting the results into another document. Read that again. Just, wow. Now for the juicy details: The document reveals that Facebook’s internal valuation of the company is $3.7 billion, or $8.88 per share - far less than the $15 billion implied valuation established by the Microsoft investment in 2007 (though this comes as no surprise, as a value around $4 billion has been rumored for months). Under their settlement, Facebook agreed to pay ConnectU $20 million in cash and 1,253,326 shares of common stock. The stock was worth $45 million, based on the Microsoft valuation, but only $11 million under Facebook’s own appraisal. Something worth noting from these figures: Facebook paid out $20 million in cash, but only around $11 million in stock based on its own valuation (when the news of the supposed $65 million settlement was revealed yesterday by a lawfirm’s advertisement, many speculated that it was primarily in stock). The high cash value (at least compared to the stock) may indicate that the ConnectU founders really did have some compelling evidence in their case. Then again, $20 million in cash is still fairly insignificant to Facebook - it may have well been worth paying even if there was no damning evidence given that it was supposed to make the case go away forever. So much for that. Via Techmeme . Update : If you’d like to see the full text for yourself, you can find the PDF of the relevant document here . It appears that the issue is tied to the PDF, as the ‘copy/paste’ trick works with this document. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Diddit: A Social To-Do List For Your Life Top
Diddit , a new site launching today to the public, is looking to help you check off all the things you’ve done with your life, and discover new things that you’d like to do. The site allows users to browse through thousands of activities in categories ranging from the bars you’ve visited to “Bizarre Retro Candies” you’ve eaten at one time or another. To coincide with the launch, Ludic Labs, the company behind Diddt, has also announced that it has closed a $5 million funding round led by Accel Partners with KPG Ventures also participating. At first glance, the site seems a little pointless - I don’t particularly care if my friends know that I’ve eaten Pop Rocks during my lifetime or that I’ve visited AT&T park (though I should note that I had similar thoughts when I first discovered Twitter). But after exploring the site a little more thoroughly, I can see why it might become very addictive. For one, it’s a great place to look if you’re trying to think of things to do during a day trip or a night out on the town. Interested in California’s Gold Rush? Check out the list of historic museums, parks, and landmarks that focus on just that. Want to experience Polynesian culture in the San Francisco Bay Area? They’ve got a list for that too. But the site isn’t just focused on destinations - it has sections for just about everything you could have experienced, including books, movies, games, and foods. If you’ve discovered a new author you’re interested in, there’s a decent chance you’ll be able to find a collection of their best works, along with reviews from other users. Every item in a list - be it a book or an amusement park - has its own profile, which offers a listing of user reviews, ratings, and other essential information (the profiles are very similar to those seen on Yelp). And while today is the site’s first official unveiling, it has quietly built up a user-base of 10,000 who have shared 750,000 items, so there’s plenty to read about. Diddit shares many features in common with a number of other sites (for example, Yelp offers a huge library of user reviews and lists, as does Amazon ). But its broad scope and already-thriving community may help it get a foothold, especially if it can acquire dedicated users who genuinely care about building up a list of their accomplishments (diddits) and To-Dos (wannados). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Ginx Reinvents Twitter's Interface For The Sake Of Sharing Top
I met up with Randy Ching, co-founder of Ginx alongside eBay founder Pierre Omidyar , this afternoon to finally get a glimpse of what their secret startup is all about. We first wrote about Ginx last month when it was revealed that parent company Peer News had raised $2 million in funding. At the time, we could only infer its purpose from Omidyar’s twitter account, which was hooked into Ginx somehow. Now we know that it’s basically an interface for Twitter on steroids. Ching explains that the most fundamental purpose behind Ginx is to help people share news and other content over the internet. Citing the figure that 20% of all tweets contain links, Ching says that Ginx was built to make better use of them, to encourage more sharing of links, and to connect people who didn’t know each other already along the way. Functionally, Ginx is a replacement for the experience of using Twitter at Twitter.com. The small development team behind Ginx has used Twitter’s API to rebuild virtually all of the functionality found at Twitter.com. And then it has gone a few steps further to make sharing links easier and more powerful. For example, when you look at tweets in Ginx, you don’t see TinyURLs that obfuscate their destinations. Rather, Ginx pulls out the original URL and displays it alongside the webpage’s title and an image from the page, if available. You can also click a tab to view only tweets that contain links, or only tweets that contain links that you have visited previously (for when you want to go back to something you once came across on Twitter). When you click on a link, it takes you to the page but leaves a bar at the top with the Twitter username and avatar of the person who shared it with you. A box lets you enter a reply to that person, retweet their message, send a direct message to the person about the page, or create a brand new tweet with the link. This is intended to make it easier for people to respond to the content they’ve found on Twitter. Back in the Ginx interface, the service tries to keep track of what people are saying about a particular link, even when they’re not in your follow list. Just click on the conversation link below a shared link and you’ll see a thread of messages pertaining to it, from anyone who uses Ginx (in this way it’s like FriendFeed but the replies are not restricted to people within your social circle). Ching says that this feature in particular is meant to help you discover new people with similar interests. ( Update: I think I was a bit confused about this feature. It appears as though the conversations thread only shows replies to a particular person’s tweet that contains a link, not all messages about a particular link that has been shared on Twitter). While Ginx is ostensibly focused on spreading journalism through the Twittersphere, it also takes liberties to improve the Twitter interface in a variety of unrelated ways (hell, if you’re going to rebuild the Twitter interface, you might as well go all out). There’s a feature that lets you view people’s timelines as they actually see them so you can get a better sense of what conversations they’re engaged in. When you copy a link into Ginx, it automatic calculates how long it’ll be once shortened so you have more room to type. And when you click on a term preceded with a hash mark (e.g. “#obama”), it’ll take you to a page that shows all tweets with that tag. Right now Ginx is a sophisticated extension to Twitter, but Ching insists that the company will not limit itself to only one social network. It plans to eventually support lots of other networks in the future, perhaps when the other’s have opened up their APIs as much as Twitter has. As far as monetization goes, there are no firm plans on that front either, but Ching suggests that any revenue model may eventually have something to do with helping publishers spread their content to new audiences. Even as things stand currently, Ginx is an intriguing service that essentially flips the idea of Digg on its head. Instead of the wisdom of the crowds dictating what you read online, Ginx intends to help you discover and share news with people you trust. Ginx remains in private beta but we hope to share invites with readers soon. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
FrugalMechanic Gets A Tune-Up With A New Round Of Funding Top
Start-up FrugalMechanic.com , an online product search engine for auto parts, received seed funding for an undisclosed amount from Seattle venture capital firm Founder’s Co-Op . The fund typically invests between $250,000 to $500,00 in start-ups. FrugalMechanic, like a Froogle for auto parts, has gained a niche following of mechanics and consumers as a nifty price comparison tool in the auto market. Founded in July of 2008, the site doubled traffic from December 2008 to January 2009 and boasts over 5 million auto parts from 50 retailers. In an economy where everyone is looking for a deal, FrugalMechanic’s growth isn’t surprising. And when cash and credit are tight, consumers may be looking to repair cars with new auto parts instead of buying new cars. FrugalMechanic plans to use the funding add new consumer-friendly features to the site as well and to offer a greater selection of parts by adding new categories. In an efforts to cross-brand the site, FrugalMechanic recently partnered with CarDomain.com to allow automotive enthusiasts an e-commerce solution to searching for parts on their own sites. Here’s a screen shot: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Google Raises The Social Bar With New Friend Connect Feature Top
Google is now making it easier for Websites to surface Friend Connect features with what it is calling the Social Bar. This is a toolbar that Websites can add to their homepage or any other page they wish, and then they can add links for drop-down gadgets that lets site visitors do things such as sign in via Friend Connect, see who else has signed in recently, check out comments, or site members, all from Social Bar. Here is an example . Basically, the social bar is a small strip that webmasters can layer on top of any web page, either at the top or at the bottom. That way, website visitors are provided with a bit of information, and the bar also lets them interact with any social feature the site incorporates through drop-down gadgets. As Software Engineer Christopher Wren explains in the announcement blog post, this is a good way to save on pixel space and keep putting the actual content of the site forward first. Here are some of the gadgets Websites can include in the Social Bar, from Google’s brand new Social Web blog : On the far left, visitors can join your site, see their identity, and edit their profiles and settings. Your visitors can also delve into your site’s activity stream to see what’s happening throughout your site. It includes links to recent posts made anywhere on your site, helping other visitors quickly find where the hottest conversations are taking place. The wall gadget can host a discussion for the whole site, a section of pages, or each individual page, letting your visitors easily read and leave comments. Lastly, visitors can see the other members of your site, check out their profiles to see how like-minded they really are, and even become friends. The toolbar approach is both an attempt at ubiquity and invisibility at the same time. Google wants Friend Connect to be everywhere, but at the same time it doesn’t want to seem too pushy about being everywhere. Hence, the seemingly innocuous toolbar. But that toolbar expands with pop-down gadgets, which takes advantage of Google’s strengths with creating gadgets in iGoogle and elsewhere. Can a Facebook Connect toolbar be far behind?     CrunchBase Information Google Friend Connect Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Western Europe Stimulates Worldwide Growth In Mobile Porn Top
Juniper Research released a report today that claims that the global mobile market for adult content grew by around 36 percent, to an estimated $2.2 billion, in 2008. Juniper also estimated that the market will be worth $4.9 billion by 2013, largely dominated by increased demand for video-chat services. Demand for mobile adult content seems to growing at a fast pace since the research company’s 2007 report estimated revenue to reach $3.5 billion by 2010. With 2008 revenue already past the $2 billion mark, the forecasts could become a definite reality. But this growth is not happening in the United States. Western Europe remains the largest market for the adult mobile services, especially video-based applications, mainly due to the increased adoption of 3G mobile phones in European markets. Western Europe’s share of the revenue was 42 percent in 2008, whereas North America accounted for only 2 percent of revenue in 2008. The lack of widespread availability of 3G phones is not the only reason the U.S. and Canadian market is not catching on to adult mobile services. The report indicates that the US market is constrained by carrier reluctance to introduce age verification systems. Other markets, such as Indonesia and Switzerland, have even tightened the laws governing the access of mobile adult content. But with the potential revenue stream in the billions, will U.S. carriers re-think the opportunity in this area? Playboy and adult entertainment company Private Media Group have both expanded their mobile operations in the past year and focused on international ventures. Perhaps its only a matter of time before more flesh will be seen on U.S. iPhones. Just don’t expect Apple to lead the way . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Google Book Settlement Site Is Up; Paying Authors $60 Per Scanned Book Top
Last October, Google signed a $125 million settlement with the Author’s Guild to pay authors for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web through its Google Book Search project. More than 7 million books have been scanned by Google so far, a large portion of them out of print. Today, the Google Book Settlement site went up, which allows authors and other copyright holders of out-of-print books the ability to submit claims to participate in the settlement. What do they get? Authors, publishers, and other copyright holders will get a one-time payment of $ 60 per scanned book (or $5 to $15 for partial works). In return, Google will be able to index the books and display snippets in search results, as well as up to 20% of each book in preview mode. Google will also be able to show ads on these pages and make available for sale digital versions of each book. Authors and copyright holders will receive 63 percent of all advertising and e-commerce revenues associated with their works. With Google Book Search now available on mobile phones , downloaded e-books could become an interesting digital side-business for Google. (But please Google, convert the scanned text into something more easily legible on the screen). Remember, this settlement is only for the millions of out-of-print books that are making zero revenues for authors and publishers today. So it is not a bad deal all around. Copyright holders have until January 5, 2010 to make a claim. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
WujWuj's New Focus: Make Online Retail Go Viral Top
When online retail service WujWuj first launched, it focused on helping people pool their money to buy gifts for friends and family. That never really took off, so the service was shut down and is now being reborn with new focus on so-called “group buys”. A group buy is a type of sale in which the price of an item drops as more people commit to purchasing it. Consumers benefit from lower prices as more people commit, and retailers benefit from an increase in sales volume. Essentially, it’s a way for retailers to incentivize their consumers to market their goods for them, because customers will be inclined to spread the word about deals. WujWuj CEO Monti Majthoub tells me that most group buys are currently organized in online forums like FatWallet and AnandTech . His new GroupBuy system adds more structure and “viral” potential to the process by leveraging the power of widgets. Here’s how it works. WujWuj’s retail partners enter their goods into the GroupBuy system and then embed special GroupBuy widgets on their websites. Each widget shows a photo of the item on sale and how much the price will drop as more people commit to buying. Consumers who have already committed to buying (after seeing the products on retailers’ sites) can grab the widgets and embed them on their own social networking profiles and websites, which will then lead their visitors back to the same WujWuj purchasing form. Customers are guaranteed to pay no more than the maximum price they’ve indicated for a good, and once the time period is up for a particular group buy, all of those who have committed to purchasing will pay the lowest price reached. WujWuj lets retailers charge customers with their own payment gateways and it collects just 1.9% of all successful sales as a fee. Will this system make online group buys more popular and viral? Majthoub is cautiously optimistic. He points out that several other companies (such as previously reviewed eSwarm) have tried to improve the group buy process and failed. But he also believes WujWuj may have finally devised a system that’s so simple for both retailers and consumers that it might actually work. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Virgance: Harnessing The Community To Save The World (Business Plan Included) Top
Virgance , a new startup headed by Powerset co-founder Steve Newcomb , is looking to change the world - and make some money doing it. The company, which features the tagline ‘Activism 2.0′, has announced that it has closed a round of seed funding and is already profitable. Now it’s ready to reveal itself to the masses, and hopefully make the world a better place in the process. Virgance focuses on fostering and promoting benevolent, wide-reaching and important campaigns that also stand a good chance to make money. The Virgance engineering team, headed by VP of Engineering Naseem Hakim (who helped build the very popular Facebook app Circle of Friends), is building a platform designed to help promote these campaigns across a number of social platforms. Newcomb describes the platform as “the next iteration of what President Obama did” - leveraging the power of social media to reach the masses. But these campaigns are not simply about raising awareness - they have to let the community somehow interact, and they have to have a solid business model. Depending on the campaign, Virgance gets a portion of the incoming revenues. Over the course of the next two years Newcomb plans to deploy as many as 20 campaigns, in the hopes that a handful of them will be “homeruns” (he calls this the ‘EA’ model, likening it to the video game giant that produces dozens of titles a year, a few of which are very successful). The company’s first full-fledged campaign is 1 Block Off The Grid (1BOG), which helps homeowners looking to install solar power systems team together, using their collective buying power to get discounted rates from solar providers. The system seems to work: in Q4 2008 only around 250 people in San Francisco transitioned to solar; during the campaign’s first quarter, it has already signed up 1,200 people (Virgance’s cut translates to around $1000 per house). Virgance was apparently so pleased with 1BOG’s success that it acquired the effort in November - and it’s likely we’ll see similar acquisitions in the near future. You can explore Virgance’s other four ventures, including Carrotmob.org on the company’s website, and more are going to be announced at the company’s SF Beta 3.2: the Virgance Equinox event on April 7th. The company’s name is a reference to Star Wars (it’s from Episode I, so don’t worry if you don’t get it), and refers to a “powerful new force in nature that can be used for good or evil”. Newcomb says that Virgance represents a new force that is powered by the community, but stresses that it is meant solely for good - the company will not support overly negative protests or campaigns, even if they are ultimately supporting a good cause. He also notes that while some may associate Virgance with liberal causes, he has seen positive reactions from many conservatives, explaining that Virgance is just a good idea that appeals to people from all walks of life. Newcomb has a long history with startups: he previously founded Loudfire, Promptu Mobile, and Powerset (which he left in 2007). He also sits on the board of Serious Business , the company behind the hugely popular Facebook app Friends For Sale. Newcomb is also taking a unique approach to building his team. Acknowledging that many of the Valley’s best and brightest are keen to create their own startups, Newcomb invites them to work at Virgance with the understanding that they may well decide to move on in a year or two. In light of this “future-founder” mentality, the company holds classes every other week to teach these employees the subtle points of being a startup founder - in many ways, it’s an incubator within a startup. The company also stresses transparency, holding regular meetings where team members can ask each other questions that they “have to answer”. Virgance seems to have a good thing going, though I question how effectively its team can create a single platform that can be applied towards all of the diverse campaigns the company winds up teaming with (I’m always wary of nebulous platforms that sound too flexible to be true). That said, having to make a few tweaks for each campaign wouldn’t be the end of the world, and it sounds like Virgance won’t have any trouble finding the talent to do it: the company is one of only a few that can claim that it offers a respectable salary and is trying to change the world for the better - an attractive prospect for those engineers who might be growing tired of toiling away on less wide-reaching projects. There are a few other well-known companies in this space, the best known of which is Causes , which has over 21 million active users on Facebook. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Spotify Opens Up In The UK - If It Can Handle The Traffic Top
P2P music streaming startup Spotify has removed the “invite only” barrier from its streaming music service in the UK. Till now it’s been keeping growth in check with an invite-only subscription method. Since it started in Sweden it has that market pretty much sown up, although, bizarrely, it remains invite-only in Sweden . But invites have been spreading across the planet like wildfire for this very simple to use service. And others are using it whether they are in the UK or not . However, it has even warned users that if it can’t take the traffic it may put the invite-only hurdle back in place. “We want to make sure that everyone who uses Spotify gets the same fast, uninterrupted experience so providing a stable service is our priority,” the company says on its blog . “If growth happens too fast and it starts affecting quality we may have to re-instate the invitation system, hopefully this won’t happen.” The service has licensing deals with the Big Four record labels (EMI, Warner Music, Sony BMG and Universal) and other smaller players. It’s P2P client streams in Ogg (quality equivalent to 192kbps MP3) instantly with no delays. The business model (for the free version) is unskippable ads every 5/6 tracks but a monthly subscription wipes these out. Spotify has wowed users with its catalogue but as the service has grown it’s started to attract more interest from the music industry and not in a good way . As one users comments on their blog: “Just like to say, i'm using spotify less and less since you've been removing music constantly. 50% of my playlists are now gone.” Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Redfin Rolls Out The Welcome Mat For Foes Amidst Real Estate Crisis Top
In a surprising move, online real estate brokerage Redfin is entering into partnerships with real estate agents from more than a dozen other brokerages in areas that Redfin’s in-house agents can’t reach. Redfin appears to have changed its tune from its founding when the firm wasn’t really getting along with real estate agents . In fact, Redfin seemed to be founded with the mission that consumers could avoid fees associated with hiring and using a real estate broker. With the real estate market contracting and credit tightening, Redfin has been forced to reconsider its business model. It seems that these partnerships with real estate agents was necessary for Redfin to expand throughout the country without having to hire more agents. Redfin was previously limited to showing listings in the metropolitan areas of Seattle, San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, Washington, and Chicago and will now be adding a presence in counties in Northern California, Illinois and Washington. Redfin laid off 20 percent of its staff in October of 2008 and reported slower revenue growth last year than in years before. The firm is also hoping to make the real estate market more transparent by posting consumer reviews of in-house and partner real estate agents on its website. For every transaction completed by a partner agent, Redfin will earn a 30 percent referral fee (of the agent’s commission), but half of that fee is given back to the consumer. The returned fee to the customer averages around $1000 to $2000. Here’s a look at a sample review of a in-house Redfin real estate agent (not a partner agent): Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Yahoo Readies The Meter For Its First Web Services Business Top
Yahoo is announcing several changes to its Search BOSS service, which lets developers incorporate web results from Yahoo’s main search index into their own web apps. The biggest of these changes intends to transform one of Yahoo’s most innovative projects into a real business. Since launch, the BOSS API has been provided entirely for free. Now Yahoo is putting in place a freemium model where it’ll be free only for developers who generate fewer than 10,000 queries per day. After that, a tiered pricing model will kick in that charges for BOSS as if it were a utility (think AWS ). Rates will vary depending on the type of query (web result vs. spelling correction, for example), how many results the developer wants returned per query (with a new maximum of 1000 results), and just how far the developer goes over the free queries cap. The pricing scheme is also backed by a newly introduced service level agreement. Yahoo plans to start charging for BOSS in late second quarter of this year. Will the service actually start making money for the company then? It’s hard to say since Yahoo won’t divulge how many developers use BOSS in production or how many queries they each generate per day. All we know is that Yahoo BOSS, on the whole, reached 10 million queries per day this past December. For Yahoo to make no money even after the pricing scheme goes into effect, it would have to have enticed over 1,000 developers, each making no more than 10,000 queries per day. There’s a decent chance that this will indeed be the case, since 10,000 is a fairly high number of queries (our entire blog network here at TechCrunch generates only a few thousand queries per day). Yahoo is still in the phase of attracting developers to its first real web services business, so it makes sense to keep things free for most users. But the company may very well be forced to lower the free queries threshold later on in order to produce a substantial return on its investment. The upside to this new SLA for developers is that they’re given complete freedom to run any advertisements they want alongside the web results they pull from Yahoo. There may have been an effort on Yahoo’s part to generate a return on BOSS through advertising, but somewhere this idea must have been dropped in favor of giving developers the freedom to shop for ads anywhere they want. Placing a restriction on the advertisements that partners could run would have imposed its own enforcement costs as well. To offset the (mostly downer) news that’s Yahoo’s going to begin charging its most demanding developers, the company is simultaneously announcing a few technical upgrades to BOSS. The same semantic markup used by SearchMonkey , the tool used by site owners to customize the way their pages show up in Yahoo’s results, will now be included in the XML returned by BOSS. The example below shows how extra information marked up on a LinkedIn profile page (in RDF or microformat) will be sent alongside normal results data. The BOSS API is also being amended to allow for longer abstracts (developers can now request 300 characters instead of the standard 170). And the Site Explorer API is getting rolled into BOSS so that developers can more easily retrieve data about inbound links to their pages. Disclosure: Yahoo BOSS powers TechCrunch’s own search engine , and I personally worked with the Yahoo team to get it up and running. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Google Brings Location-Awareness to Email Top
Google appears to have a new obsession with knowing and broadcasting your current location. A week after announcing Latitude , which shares your location with friends on Google Maps and threatens to render several startups irrelevant , an engineer has developed location-aware email signatures for Gmail. After turning on the “Location in Signature” feature in Gmail Labs , you’ll see a new checkbox in the Signature area of your settings that says “Append your location to the signature.” Once the box is checked, all of your subsequent emails will end with something like “Sent from: San Francisco, California”. By default, Gmail determines your location by looking up the geographical data associated with your public IP address. Since this isn’t always very accurate, Google encourages you to install its Google Gears browser extension software, which can more accurately identify your location using WiFi. This project doesn’t appear to be related to Google Latitude, at least from a programmatic point of view. But expect Google to release a variety of “hooks” into the Latitude platform throughout its products, since it’ll be most useful as a platform not a standalone application. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Pollsb Nabs $1.3 Million In Funding For Lousy Interactive Polling Widgets Top
Pollsb (short for Polls Boutique) has raised a Series A round of $1.3 million led by DFJ Tamir Fishman Ventures and early-stage investors Zelkova Ventures and PhilQuo Ventures. The Tel-Aviv, Israel-based startup had previously raised $700,000 from incubator and seed funding provider Connector Media, which brings the total invested in the company to $2 million . Here’s how they pitch the service: Pollsb is your ticket for a self-discovery ride. Our ride will allow you to learn new things about yourself, and about the way others perceive you. It’ll help you get instant feedback, and ultimately assist you in developing what we call social identity. It’ll even introduce you to some pretty cool people and help you find some pretty cool stuff people like you seem to enjoy. The Pollsb ride is fueled by questions, on every topic in the world. Joining you on it are all the other active participants on Pollsb. The insights we provide you stem from where you stand in relation to them. If that sounds a little vague, it’s because it is. But I signed up for the service and discovered it is in fact a - gasp - polling application platform (slash social network), and quite frankly not the best one I’ve ever come across. Pollsb lets you create polls and mini-surveys based on text, photo, video and/or audio, assign a category to it, tag it and turn it into a widget (see example below). The poll can be shared with the Pollsb community and by e-mail, but the process also involves the creation of embed code with direct integration to WordPress, Blogger and TypePad blogs. The user experience is really below par in my opinion, and the widgets are fairly limited (only 5 answers per poll, for example). Pollsb also seems a little thin on the business model front; I doubt placing default Google AdSense advertising units will prove to be enough to give their new investors a return any time soon. They also invite advertisers to buy into their “innovative, tailor-made solutions to engage their precise target audience, tapping into their needs, preferences and opinions” but it’s not clear how they go about this. As I was writing this, I got an e-mail from someone at Pollsb who saw the poll I created for testing purposes telling me that the polling part of the service is only the “fuel that facilitates what they’re trying to do”, which is help users and companies learn new things about themselves, get quick self-feedback, and brainstorm with others. Fair enough, but good luck telling the rest of the world that you’re not a polling application. create a free poll on pollsb.com CrunchBase Information Pollsb Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 

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