Thursday, March 19, 2009

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It's Official: Cisco Buys Pure Figital (Flip Video) For $590 Million Top
Earlier this month we reported that Cisco Systems had acquired Pure Digital Technologies, the makers of the popular Flip Video cameras. Today, Cisco officially announced the deal, which was for $590 million in stock. (We had the price at “north of $500 million). Pure Digital will become part of Cisco’s consumer business group, which includes Linksys home routers and set-top boxes from its acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta. Cisco is calling the Flip cameras a new form of “visual networking,” whatever that means. In reality, the Flip is built for the YouTube generation. It is designed to take videos and immediately upload the to the Web. (Its output is a handy USB stick that flips open and plugs in directly to a computer). In other words, it is a device that encourages activities that consume a lot of bandwidth. As a networking company, Cisco wants you to use as much bandwidth as possible. It is also looking for new growth markets across consumer devices, enterprise Web communication apps (like WebEx , Postpath , and Jabber ), and even into enterprise servers and storage. Pure Digital has raised $68 million over the past five years from Sequoia, Benchmark, Steamboat Ventures,and others. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Google Opens Up Google Books To Sony eReaders Top
Sony and Google's tag-team tactics might not hurt Amazon and its Kindle reader, but this is certainly a step in the right direction. For who, exactly, we're not so sure. Sony announced a bit ago that Google has opened up more than half-a-million of its books to Sony's eReader. The catch? All of Google's archived books are about as old as your granddad, if your granddad were 80-years-old.
 
Lending Club Gets A $12 Million Credibility Boost Top
P2P money lending service Lending Club has closed a $12 million Series B round with Morgenthaler Ventures as the lead and joined by existing investors Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners. The total capital invested in the company is now $30 million . (It raised $12 million in angel and Series A funding in 2007, and then another $6 million in a Series A extension in September, 2008). The company, which started out as a Facebook application for social money lending, hasn’t had it easy so far. In April 2008, it was forced to put a hold on lending activities because of regulatory issues, and ultimately filed for SEC registration during the summer of that year. Then the economy collapsed and Lending Club along with other P2P lenders were heavily affected . The SEC suspended loan activities one of Lending Club’s main competitors, Prosper , at the end of last year, citing obvious reasons that these companies should be regulated by the SEC as a securities seller. Another P2P lender, Zopa , hightailed it out of the U.S. market at about the same time. With some of its main competitors out of the battlefield (but others remaining), the company will no doubt use the new capital to push for dominance in the space. Lending Club says it’s growing quickly, doubling its user base over the past 5 months and handing out returns to users of over 9% net. It also announced a new chief marketing officer, Pamela Kramer, who joins from Etrade, where she held the same position. If the company manages to weather the storm without too much damage, it will be very interesting to see how social lending evolves in the future - now that banks and other ways of loaning money have lost a lot of credibility across the board - and how vital the role of Lending Club in that story will be. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Internet Explorer 8 Available Today Top
You'll be able to download Microsoft's newest web browser, Internet Explorer 8, at 12PM Eastern time today ( link here ). Microsoft promises that IE8 "is one of the fastest browsers on the market today" (uh-huh) and features new goodies like Web Slices , Instant search , and Accelerators – basically right-clicking on highlighted text to bring up a list of routine tasks like mapping, e-mailing, definitions, translation, and more. The browser has been in beta for over a year now, so it'll be interesting to see how the final product performs. What would it take for IE8 to lure you away from your current browser?
 
Kontagent Now Offers Uber Analytics For iPhone And Web Applications Using Facebook Connect Top
Kontagent , one of last year's fbFund winners and social analytics platform, has launched measurment tools for iPhone and web applications with Facebook Connect support. Kontagent's application integrates tightly with platforms such as Facebook to offer widget and Facebook application developers a high level of analytics data. Now Kontagent is offering its free tools to Facebook Connect iPhone and web apps so that the applications can have access to the startup's powerful measurement platform. Kontagent will provide the same in-depth data it provides to Facebook Apps to the Facebook Connect iPhone and web apps. This includes detailed data of demographics based on geographic location, age groups, gender, user engagement times and other variables. The platform provides powerful A/B testing across any viral channel (a button, an invite or a notification) that sits inside Facebook. Kontagent also will also offer developers viral optimization tools to track the virality of the application on Facebook. For example, the platform will track how much time it takes users to receiving a viral notification and then act on the notification or invite.
 
eBuddy Surpasses 10M Downloads On GetJar Top
With the entire tech word endlessly buzzing about the latest new smartphone, it’s easy to forget that around 75% of handsets sold are basic feature phones - often lovingly referred to as “dumb phones”. With these phones generally lacking an official “App Store” of their own, users turn to the web to find new applications. One of the most popular resources for this purpose is GetJar , a repository of over free 20,000 applications. While GetJar offers a number of applications for smartphones, their primary game seems to be J2ME-based applications for phones with a bit less muscle. Of GetJar’s free offerings, 3 out of 5 of the most downloaded applications are IM clients. Later this morning, one of of these IM clients, eBuddy Mobile Messenger , will be announcing that they have surpassed 10 million downloads on GetJar’s app store. eBuddy is easily the most heavily downloaded application in GetJar’s catalog, pulling in roughly 375,000 downloads each week. In the 72 weeks since their November ‘07 launch, eBuddy has claimed the #1 download spot for 34 of them. At the time of announcement, they’re already well on their way to 11 million (Currently at 10,783,054). According to eBuddy, much of their success is due to GetJar’s in-house advertising system, which they call “Get Traffic”. Through this system, developers bid for above-the-fold placement in GetJar’s search and browse pages, only paying when a user downloads their application after clicking through the advertisement. While they aren’t sharing exactly how eBuddy’s download numbers have improved since they began advertising, GetJar does tell us that the ad system generally improves an app’s download rate by roughly 200%, with eBuddy CEO Jan-Joost Rueb saying they’ve grown “exponentially”. No word on how much eBuddy’s campaign has cost them, but we do know that bids begin at $.01 and occasionally go upwards of $.50 per download. While this Pay-per-download model seems quite beneficial for developers, some of the ads do seem a bit misleading to us. Partnered applications are often placed within a box labeled “Selected”, which our consumer-side would have assumed meant “Apps we’ve manually chosen to highlight”, not “Apps that pay us money to be here”. As far as we can tell, the user is not told that the application is being highlighted due to a paid partnership. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Nimbuzz Pushes New iPhone VoIP App, Supports Calling Over 3G Top
Nimbuzz is launching a brand new VoIP application for the iPhone / iPod Touch today, making it one of the most comprehensive communication tools for the platform available today. It took several weeks for the Dutch startup to get the app approved for the iTunes Store, but now that it’s finally there it’s well worth taking a look. ( iTunes link ) You could already make free calls to your buddy list over WiFi, but as of today Nimbuzz also enables VoIP calls to landlines and mobiles via Skype-Out, and thanks to partnership agreements with global SIP providers like Gizmo5, Vyke and SIPgate you can now also call over WiFi using the iPod Touch device. And for those not on WiFi, Nimbuzz is introducing a so-called “Dial-Up VoIP” option that lets users make calls over 3G in over 50 countries , using a fresh interface with a full dial-pad (screenshots below). Another new feature allows Twitter updates via the Personal Message option in the mobile social messenger app. Solid stuff. In other news , Nimbuzz has announced a deal with major Italian social networking portal Giovani.it , which will incorporate its communication services into the community website (which has over 2 million active users). This is very similar to an earlier agreement Nimbuzz reached with Germany’s largest social networking portal, StudiVZ . Nimbuzz has raised over $25 million in three rounds, mostly from Luxembourg-based Mangrove Capital Partners . The company claims it is growing at 20,000 new users per day now, with a 25% active user base in over 200 countries. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Twitterville Falls For Premium Accounts Hoax Top
It’s mildly funny and very obviously a hoax, but this article on humour site BBspot didn’t stop many a Twitter user from thinking it is real . The author of the post mocks Twitter’s lack of an apparent business model after 3 years in operation, and writes that the startup’s CEO Evan Williams today finally announced plans to introduce a paid premium account scheme. Never mind that the news would have gotten broken on an obscure blog when the U.S. is mostly asleep, but other things should have given away that this concerns a hoax. For instance, the words. Premium accounts will come in four tiers: Sparrow, Dove, Owl and Eagle. The details of the accounts are as follows: - Sparrow ($5/month) – Users get 145 character limit, 5 extra random followers. - Dove ($15/month) – Users get 160 character limit, 25 extra random followers, 1 random celebrity follower, auto-spell check, “Fail Whale” T-shirt. - Owl ($50/month) – Users get 250 character limit, 100 extra random followers, 2 random celebrity followers, 30 minutes on recommended list, auto-spell check, “Fail Whale” hoodie. - Eagle ($250/month) – Users get 500 character limit, 1000 extra random followers, 3 celebrity followers of their choice, 5 hours on recommended list each month, Twitter Concierge for Tweeting while user is asleep or busy (and more), auto-spell check, “Fail Whale” tuxedo, custom “Fail Whale” page when service is down. As I said, only mildly funny but so blatantly tongue in cheek that I’m surprised that so many are buying it (pun intented). That said, what would be your opinion if Twitter would turn charging users for premium accounts into a revenue stream, instead of what it seems they’re actually doing ( paving the way for text advertising on-site )? CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Beejive IM Moves To Block Out iPhone Pirates Top
BeeJive IM , a popular instant messaging application, saw an update to its iPhone variant this week which added Facebook support to its corral of services. In the hours after the release, reports began to trickle in that something wasn’t quite right. For what seemed like a random group of people, the screen would read “PC LOAD LETTER” whenever the user tried to establish a connection to any IM service, then quickly switch to a Youtube clip from the movie Office Space . What had happened? Had Beejive been hacked? Was it an easter egg gone awry? Turns out, it was completely intentional: it’s an anti-piracy measure. This evening, we’ve received an official statement from Beejive on the matter: We have recently implemented new anti-piracy measures in BeejiveIM for iPhone. We have tried to keep our approach fun with an error message and a video. But we hope our message is clear: please respect the work of developers. A quick Google search for “Beejive” and “PC Load letter” turns up only a few dozen results, a number of which are people complaining that they’ve been banned unfairly. We have been unable to confirm any of these reports. Some are theorizing that Beejive is simply banning any jailbroken iPhone they detect. We’ve got at least one jailbroken iPhone floating around the office running legitimate copies of Beejive, and it is still fully functional. Other reports indicate that deleting the pirated app and purchasing a legitimate copy does not immediately fix the issue. This leads us to believe they are detecting if the user is running a modified version of the application (likely the info.plist file, which requires a specific line to be added during the application cracking process), adding any user flagged as using a modified copy of the application to a blacklist by way of their handset’s unique device id ID. Beejive nearly always makes references to the movie Office Space in their promotional iPhone screenshots, generally using character names as screen name placeholders. The “PC LOAD LETTER” message continues this tradition - it’s the error message that the office printer displays up until it meets its end at the business end of a baseball bat, as shown in the clip users see immediately after the error. Screenshot of the error: Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Naveen Jain's Intelius Scam Begins To Crumble. Good. Top
A year ago we wrote about Naveen Jain’s current startup, Intelius. Jain left previous the company he founded, InfoSpace, in disgrace in late 2002 after violating insider trading laws and other sketchy activities. After leaving InfoSpace Jain started Intelius, across the street from his old offices in Bellevue, Washington. In that post we outlined how Intelius, at the time in the process of becoming a public company, was growing revenue via a scam: Intelius has been on the receiving end of hundreds of consumer complaints alleging fraud, many of which are around a partnership the company has with Adaptive Marketing and a "product" they offer called Privacy Matters Identity. Every time a customer buys a product at Intelius, they are shown a page telling them "Take our 2008 Consumer Credit Survey and claim $10.00 CASH BACK with Privacy Matters Identity." The user is then shown two survey questions and asked to enter their email and click a large orange button. They can choose to skip the survey by clicking on a small link at the bottom of the page. Undoubtedly a lot of consumers do the survey and move forward to the next page - it only takes a second. But what most people don't do is read the fine print, which gives no real details on the $10 cash back (in fact, it is never mentioned again, anywhere). Instead, in light gray small text, users are told that by taking the survey they are really signing up to a $20/month subscription. Intelius forwards your personal information, including your credit card, to Adaptive Marketing. The next day a $20 charge appears on your credit card, and each month afterwards. Now, nearly a year later, Intelius is being deservedly buried in lawsuits and consumer complaints. A long Seattle Weekly expose on Jain and Intelius describes the various legal issues facing the company: 121 complaints to the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, 822 complaints to the Better Business Bureau, a lawsuit in King County Superior Court accusing Jain of inflating financial figures and a Federal Trade Commission investigation for possible violation of laws regulating how credit information is disseminated. More at TechFlash . As an aside, all these negative stories are really piling up for Google searches on Naveen Jain. Jain has clearly been using basic SEO tacticts to try to drive those stories down. He maintains at a handful of sites, Naveenjain.com, naveenjain.org and naveenjain.us, naveenjain.info, all of which use his full name in almost every sentence and talk about his philanthropic efforts. All of the sites link to eachother, creating a small link farm. Still, the bad news is out there. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Early Beta Data From Microsoft AdSense Competitor Encouraging Top
We are getting reports that Microsoft’s PubCenter , a self serve thirty party ad publishers platform through AdCenter , is doing quite well with beta testers. Microsoft began testing PubCenter last summer. One beta tester we spoke with said PubCenter is paying significantly more than Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher . All three of these programs let third party publishers add contextual ads next to their content via a self-service format. Google has dominated this space in the past (and all other contextual advertising) because it offers publishers higher fees for ads. But this might change when Microsoft unveils PubCenter to the greater publisher community, particularly if Microsoft is aggressive in revenue splits to gain market share. Currently, PubCenter is being tested by a small subset of web publishers. Our tipster says that he receiving from four times more in revenue Microsoft than Google AdSense. And the money isn’t the only advantage PubCenter has over AdSense. The advertisement themselves are are higher quality than Google’s ads, he says, and equally as targeted towards the content. He says that Microsoft seems to be more stringent about letting advertisers into the program, versus what seemed like an advertiser free-for-all though Google’s AdSense. Of course, with a smaller inventory of advertisers, it’s tougher to provide contextual ads for obscure content. We also heard that Microsoft is allowing publishers to get creative with ads by allowing them to set background images. Google AdSense only allows publishers to change the color of the ads. Microsoft is allowing test partners to publish Google ads on their site as long as the publisher doesn’t have an exclusivity agreement with Google. Third party ads are a controversial concept, since advertisers expect the click throughs and conversions that they get from search. Google has been sued for fraud because ads placed on parked pages weren't producing results. But if Microsoft is offering a better program, with nifty, more targeted ads, then publishers and advertisers alike might make the switch (or use both, if possible). Microsoft recently enlisted digital media executives, including execs from IAC, Wall Street Journal Digital Network, The New York Times Co., Time Inc. and Viacom Inc. to consult on next-generation advertising platform. Microsoft said this about PubCenter in February: PubCenter will be built on the existing adCenter Publisher architecture that is currently in beta and will include the convergence of technologies and tools provided by the former Atlas and Rapt solutions, as well as a self-serve offering. The new platform will provide innovative forecasting and order management solutions, advanced analytics tools, and enhanced targeting functionality to enable all digital media publishers to have access to the tools and technology they need to provide valuable and relevant ad content to their advertising partners. Here are some screenshots of Microsoft’s ads on a publisher’s site and an ad with an image in the background: Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Y Combinator Demo Day Spring 2009 Top
The 16 startups from Y Combinator’s spring session presented their ideas and initial products at Y Combinator’s Silicon Valley office this afternoon. Of the 16 startups in this group, 8 have already launched, 6 are in the process of launching and 2 remain in stealth mode. Most of them have been in development for only three months. Y Combinator celebrated some good news recently. They are raising $2 million in capital themselves, from Sequoia Capital and a number of prominent angel investors for a new entity, managed by Y Combinator, that will make investments in new startups going forward. Foodoro Foodoro is an online marketplace marketplace where people can buy specialty food directly from artisanal foodmakers. Launched a few weeks ago, Foodoro aims to be an online e-commerce site for artisanal food makers, exposing these vendors to a greater audience of food aficionados than they would get from their own sites or selling solely to specialty food stores and managing their e-commerce completely. We wrote a review of Foodoro here. Skysheet Skysheet, not officially launched, is a web-based spreadsheets service that has the speed and feel of Excel. AirBnB AirBnB , a startup we wrote about a few weeks ago, is like the eBay of space. Its an online marketplace for any sort of accomodation, including hotels, extra bedrooms in peoples’ homes, apartments, and commercial properties. We reviewed AirBnB here . reMail reMail is a mobile iPhone app that allows you to import your Gmail or AOL mail accounts and then search conversations and emails by topic, person or subject. The app also has built in folders that let’s you easily access emails that pertain to certain subjects, like flight information. Cloudkick Cloudkick is a web-based cloud management system of servers on Amazon’s EC2 or Slicehost. Cloudkick allows you to manage all your servers in once space, letting you set up new servers with the click of a button and also offers voice, gives you easy to read graphs and monitoring of servers and email alerts in the event of a server problem. We reviewed Cloudkick here . Divvyshot Divvyshot is a “dead simple” group photo sharing web platofrm where people can upload hundreds of photos and then be able to share them with anyone. The startup also has an iPhone app that lets users upload and monitor event activity in real-time. We recently wrote about Divvyshot here . Echodio Echodio syncs your iTunes libraries across multiple computers and devices using Boxee. Using cloud sync, the Echodio lets you drop music tracks into an Echodio playlist and then streams them to computers and devices. We reviewed Echodio here . Heyzap Heyzap , sort of the YouTube for casual games, allows any website to access over 6,000 games and then be able to embed the games into their own blogs or websites through a widget. The games update automatically, giving publishers fresh game content. We wrote about Heyzap here . Nambii Nambii produces dating iPhone applications, including the Mobile Dating, a Match.com-like dating app; Kiss or Miss, a kissing app; and DateMap, a location-based date finding app that lets users find people looking for dates by geographic location and availability. Picurio Picurio is trying to replace iPhoto. It’s a webased application that is made to feel like a desktop app. You can drag and drop photos into albums and then automatically sync them with Facebook, with virtually little to no upload time. Propable Propable is a property management system that rest apartments from property owners at market rate, then furnishes them, and rents them out as rooms to young professionals. Propable charges a rent fee that includes wifi, cable, maintenance, gas, and cleaning, clearing a large markup for the unit and making property owners money. thesixtyone thesixtyone is the Digg for indie music. The startup has built filter for rating music, while also being able to listen to tracks and albums, earn a ranking reputation, and achievement badges for rating good music. Read our review of thesixtyone here . Voxli Voxli is a simple web-based voice conferencing services for gamers. Anyone can create a voice conference room on the Voxli homepage for up to 200 participants. The startup is planning to expand beyond the gaming market, hoping to become a convenient replacement for Skype. We recently reviewed Voxli here . Wattvision Wattvision makes it easy for you to monitor the power use of a home or business by installing a sensor on your energy meter. You then get a live view of your home’s energy use online, with fast updates and easy to install sensors. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
The Financial Times Launches Its Own Business News Search Engine (Newssift). Top
The Financial Times Group, which is owned by the British publisher Pearson, is not exactly the place you’d expect to find the latest search engine. But a startup deep within the bowels of the organization called FT Search is launching one at 8PM ET tonight called Newssift . It is a semantic search engine that sifts through business news, and it is not half bad, especially for bigger companies and broader topics. Robin Johnson, the CEO of FT Search, used to run the Financial Times in the U.S. as its president. He’s been working on Newssift for the past two years, and currently employs a team of 25 people. “The object was to create a tool to allow a busy business person to assess what is the skinny on a problem they do not know the answer to,” he tells me. Newssift indexes about 4,000 business news sources, from online newspapers and blogs to news portals and research sites. It is ingesting about 120,000 articles a day right now and applying semantic tags to each one. In the end it can categorize each article by business topic, organization, place, person, and theme. When you type in a search term, each of those columns gets filled in with associated keywords, allowing you to drill down to exactly what you want even if you are not sure at the outset what you are looking for. The back-end clustering is powered by Endeca . A search for “Sun Microsystems” brings up further suggestions for refinement, including “IBM,” “Jonathan Schwartz,” and “market share.” You sort of graze around, adding new keywords as they are presented to you. Each keyword you select is added to your string, and corresponding article results appear below. A sentiment pie chart indicates what percentage of the stories are positive, negative, or neutral. Another one breaks the results down by source (Online News, Magazines, Newspapers, Blogs, Research). Clicking on any shaded area filters the results further. Searches can be saved, creating an interesting prospective news search tool. You can create your own memetracker for any industry or topic. I am not sure I would use Newssift every day to stay on top of the latest news, but I can see it as a useful research tool when I have to really dig deep into a topic. It does better with business news than technology. Still, it is worth checking out in that it employs several subtle navigational techniques that make it more of a discovery engine than a search engine. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
10% Layoffs At Ustream Top
Ustream , a live streaming video service based in Mountain View California, has laid off 4 people, or about 10% of staff, we’ve confirmed. At least two of the four staff let go were Director level or higher. The downsizing has been added to the Layoff Tracker , which has tracked over 300,000 layoffs since last year. Ustream has been in the news a lot lately and continues to innovate on the iPhone. The company has raised $13.1 million over two round of financing. The most recent round was a year ago, in April 2008. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
David Lynch Is So Weird. 500 Beta Invites For His Transcendental Meditation TV Site Top
Filmmaker David Lynch is weird. But you already knew that. It is what makes him a great filmmaker. I’ve always been a big fan. But I’m not so sure about his new Website, David Lynch Foundation TV . The foundation is “dedicated to providing students with the opportunity to learn how to meditate.” Apparently, Lynch is really into transcendental meditation. The new video site shows Lynch talking about the benefits of transcendental meditation and what it is. It will also showcase documentary footage from Foundation events and benefit concerts. Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Sheryl Crow, and Eddie Vedder are giving one at Radio City Music Hall on April 4. The site promises to deliver a daily dose of David Lynch (he talks about movies as well a meditation) and free concert footage. I would share a video here, but they are not embeddable (actually they are, see below). I told you he was weird. The DLTV site doesn’t publicly launch for another six days, but if you are into David Lynch or meditation, you can get beta access by registering here with the code twinpeaks . We have 500 invites for TechCrunch readers. You guys need to learn how to relax. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Windows Live Messenger Now Lets You Add Chat To Your Website Top
In a move to extend the reach of its Windows Live Messenger chat service, Microsoft today released some tools to add chat to Websites . Any Website can add a chat feature and tap into the 320 million active Windows Live Messenger users. It is quick and dirty way to add a social element to any Website, and at the same time it is yet one more distribution point for Live Messenger (consumers who want to chat on Websites with the feature will have to sign up if they don’t already have an account.). The growing acceptance of Facebook Connect , which offers Websites much more than chat, is lighting a fire under other Web companies to offer similar services. Chat is the sort of feature that most sites wouldn’t build for themselves, but which increase visitor engagement on a site (even is that is engagement with other users instead of with the site itself). AIM, ball is in your court. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Google Launches Chrome Experiments To Showcase JavaScript Applications Top
Nearly all of the time I dedicate to work and personal life on my computer is spent inside a browser, so speed and using software that ‘just works’ are very essential to me. As a Windows user, I currently use both Firefox and Google Chrome , but unless I really need a certain extension lacking on Google’s browser I’ll use Chrome as much as I can and avoid opening the many tabs I usually need to fire up in Firefox. I don’t even look at all the tests comparing the speed of all the browsers anymore. I tried all the latest versions of all the familiar browsers on my machine, and Google Chrome - which yesterday got an even speedier beta version - just makes my browsing experience more of a delight than an annoyance, even if it only feels faster. Even so, it’s safe to say its adoption rate can hardly be deemed staggering, which is why Google puts so much effort into promoting the software program on its own (vast) advertising network. (The fact that Google Chrome is lacking a Mac-compatible version doesn’t help). Today, Google is launching another initiative that is meant to drive more awareness for the JavaScript processing speed of its browser and the V8 engine it runs on, in the hopes that it will lure more users into trying it out and subsequently sticking with it. The project is called Chrome Experiments and basically features - at launch - a total of 19 JavaScript-based games, tools and visualizations created by a number of external designers and developers such as REAS , Toxi and Mr. Doob . I tested most of the mini apps and they’re nothing special as such, most of them are basic games and random visualizations, although some stuff I’ve never actually seen inside a browser and particularly not built with JavaScript. For instance, some of the experiments include a visual effect controlled by the user’s physical movement caught via Webcam, a video puzzle spread across different browser windows, and Flash-like graphics done in Javascript. The website, besides being distinctly black, lets people try out the browser apps and rate, comment on and share them. Developers and designers are meanwhile encouraged to voluntarily create other experiments using JavaScript (and other languages) and submit them for review. And we thought the team was focused on building a version supported on Macs. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
SXSW: Foursquare Scores Despite Its Flaws Top
Before this year’s SXSW event kicked off, a number of bloggers suggested that this year’s breakout hit might be foursquare , a new location-based social application with a gaming twist that was created by the guys behind the now-defunct Dodgeball service. As the ‘interactive’ section of the festival winds down, I think it’s safe to say that foursquare was not the must-have app of SXSW the way Twitter was two years ago . But it had a strong showing, and once I actually figured out which of my friends were using the service (which is more difficult than it sounds), I found foursquare to be an indispensable app during my time here. foursquare’s primary function is to help you figure out where your friends are. Users frequently ‘check-in’ with the app to update their current location, which is then broadcast to their friends. At this point the service primarily operates from its recently-released iPhone application , though users can also check-in from the foursquare website (at least in theory - more on that later). Aside from a basic ‘friend’ system, foursquare’s social features are pretty limited compared to services like Loopt and Brightkite . In lieu of a full-fledged social network, foursquare incorporates a gaming element, awarding users with points and merit badges for ‘checking in’ at a variety of locations. It’s here that the app really shines: these rewards give users an incentive to check-in frequently (a necessity given the fact that the iPhone can’t automatically update your location as you travel), and it’s far more fun than it sounds. Badges are awarded for completing specific activities, like venturing outside of the city limits, or checking in from a roving karaoke RV (they exist, and they’re awesome). Most badges are ambiguously named and the criteria for unlocking them is a mystery, which makes ‘figuring out’ how to earn them a fun game in itself (some of the criteria for the badges at SXSW began to spread virally at SXSW, and were often the topic of bar chatter). By the end of my week here I found myself ignoring the points system altogether - points seem to be awarded for totally arbitrary reasons and my rank of 240th on the service’s leaderboard was discouraging. But my desire to unlock more badges never waned. foursquare is surprisingly fun and addictive, but the application has some really annoying flaws that may have kept it from reaching its full potential at SXSW. For one, inviting your friends to join is far more painful than it should be. There’s no way to use phone numbers in your address book to see if your friends have registered, nor can you send your friends invitations to join from within the app (I eventually resorted to manually Emailing my friends). And the foursquare website oddly has even less functionality that the iPhone app. The developers are well aware of these omissions (most of them were dropped as they tried to get the application ready in time for SXSW), but that didn’t make them any less frustrating. The real test for Foursquare begins now that SXSW is winding down. The awards system worked perfectly for the five-day event, but I feel like any sense of urgency to earn badges will be gone once everyone heads home. That said, Foursquare could easily build a business centered around multi-day conferences and concerts, creating customized branded applications for each event (it could even potentially charge restaurants and other POIs that wanted to get listed as one of the event’s badges). Foursquare was built by the guys behind Dodgeball, an early location-based social network that was acquired by Google in May 2005 and languished there until it was finally axed in January. The new service have quite a few similarities, though foursquare benefits from the GPS and slick interface afforded by the iPhone. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Delivery Agent Is Monetizing Product Placement For TV Networks Top
Want the latest jeans that Lauren Conrad wore on MTV’s pseudo-reality TV show, The Hills? Or maybe you want to snag the Dwight Schrute bobblehead toy that is shown on NBC’s The Office ? Delivery Agent is helping television networks capitalize on this content by creating an online marketplace for products and merchandise that are seen on television shows. Delivery Agent has signed on all the major networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, and MTV Networks. And the company just signed deal to launch e-commerce storefronts for Discovery Networks, TLC, Animal Planet, the Military Channel and the Science Channel. This is sort of like GumGum’s ShopThisLook feature, except for TV. Here’s how it works. Delivery Agent creates a catalog of products appearing in networks’ movies and shows. The products then can be purchased through an e-commerce site called “Seen On” integrated into the show’s website. Products can also be purchased through Delivery Agent's stand alone retail site, SeenOn.com. By outsourcing all e-commerce for products seen on their networks to Delivery Agent, networks are able to monetize their content while keeping their overhead costs low. CEO and founder Mike Fitzsimmons says that Delivery Agent handles all the buying and selling of the products and then pays the networks royalty fees based upon these sales. Delivery Agent has also begun another effort to monetize product placements by coordinating advertising from the brands that manufacture the products that are shown on a networks’ TV shows. Delivery Agent will go through the index of products that will be airing on a show prior to when the episode airs, and then reach out to the brand and offer them the ability to buy an ad package. Fitzsimmons claims revenues are growing at a healthy clip, but declines to specify what they are. Even so, with a recession looming over the retail and e-commerce sectors, it’s logical to think that Delivery Agent’s sales, both in terms of e-commerce and advertisements, could be negatively affected. Delivery Agent is trying to move into the mobile space by sending product alerts to fans of shows with information about what products are featured, and is looking into international markets for future expansion. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Fennec (Firefox Mobile) Shows Off Its Beta Top
The mobile version of the Firefox browser, Fennec, is now officially in beta . It works only on the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, but developers can also download it onto their computers. The Fennec browser is designed to make maximum use of the limited screen space available on mobile phones and tries to do everything possible to minimize typing. It incorporates the Firefox “awesome bar,” which acts as both navigation and search bar. Start typing in a URL or search term and it auto-suggests web pages based on your past Web surfing habits. Various searches, including Google, Yahoo Answers, and Wikipedia, are one click away via links at the bottom. The browser also remembers all your passwords, just like Firefox. It supports Flash. And add-ons can be created for the mobile browser. The user interface takes some zooming and panning concepts which were previously previewed by Mozilla Labs . Each Web page expands to fill the entire screen, but moving the page to the side reveals different controls, including bookmarks, back and forward buttons, tabs, and different tools. We’ve seen what competition has done for browsers on the PC. Today, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and IE are all trying to leapfrog one another (well, at least the first three are). Efforts like Fennec, mobile Safari for the iPhone, the Android Web browser, Opera Mini, Skyfire, and others are injecting the same healthy competition into mobile browsers. I can’t wait to be able to try out Fennec on my mobile phone (if Apple or Google let me). Below is a video demo by Madhava Enros, who is in charge of designing the interface for Fennec. Fennec Beta 1 walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Producteev Enters Public Beta (Get One Of 20 Lifetime Memberships) Top
Producteev , the task-management service that launched in private beta at LeWeb is now in public beta and anyone can sign up. I described Producteev as “Netvibes for group product management” because its dashboard presents a grid of boxes for each group task at hand. The public beta version now has a more fully featured activity stream that includes micro-messaging along with status updates, allowing team members to attach files and send direct messages to each other. The product is available in English, Spanish, German and French. And native clients for the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Nokia are coming soon. (The iPhone app is awaiting approval from Apple’s iTunes Store). The company is also now charging for three or more user, after a one-month free trial. Subscriptions start at $5 a month. CEO Ilan Abehassera is giving away twenty free lifetime “gold” memberships (a $79/month value ) to the TechCrunch readers with the best comments about why they need to be better organized in their daily work. (He will reply to the winners in comments below). Here is how I described Producteev when I first wrote about it: Producteev starts with a grid of blank boxes on a Web page. Each box represents a different project to which you or other people you work with can add tasks. One box could be product development, another one could be a marketing project, a third could be an event. You can set permissions on who can see a given project on a box-by-box, project-by-project basis. Each task has a status (pending, active, done, etc.). For any task, reminders can be set and comments can be added. Tasks can be sent directly to Producteev via Twitter, email, or IM (Windows Live, Messenger, AIM, or Yahoo Messenger). You can also be notified through these channels whenever a new task is assigned to you, a new task is added to a project, a comment is made to one of your tasks, or the status on a task has changed. Producteev will be competing for mindshare with all the other online project management and workgroup collaboration tools out there, including Basecamp, LiquidPlanner, Yammer, Wizehive , Socialtext , and so on. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Big Blue Wants To Swallow Sun For $6.5 Billion Top
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iStockphoto Expands Audio-Licensing Business Top
At the SXSW Music Festival, the people from Getty Images-owned iStockphoto (where they must be kicking themselves for making that name such a familiar brand on the web now that they’re about much more than photos) will be formally launching the most recent addition to its network today, with a collection of 30,000 royalty-free and single-production audio tracks unsurprisingly dubbed iStockaudio . This was actually partly (and unwillingly) announced early last month , but has now expanded into a much more robust audio-licensing offering. iStock's Standard Audio collection now includes more than 11,000 royalty-free, user-generated sound effects and music tracks from 500+ artists along with a fresh Pump Audio collection of over 18,000 single-production music tracks. Pricing hasn’t changed since its launch: royalty-free tracks still start at $2 each with Pump Audio tracks going from $29. For context: you may remember indie music agent Pump Audio was sold to Getty Images in June 2007, and the latter subsequently started selling music tracks under a different brand name ( Soundtrack ) a couple of months later. Anyway, iStock is now touting itself as the “first company to offer stock imagery, video footage, vector illustrations, Flash files and audio for purchase under a single payment model, on one site”. Since we can’t think of any others off the top of our heads, we guess that’s right. It will be interesting to look back at actual audio sales at next year’s SXSW festival, so we’re hoping the company will share revenue and growth numbers then. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Slides On The Go! SlideShare Launches Mobile Site Top
Presentation buffs can now get their fix when they’re on the move, thanks to the mobile website SlideShare just launched about an hour ago. Simply point your mobile phone browser to m.slideshare.com and you’re good to go. Note that the mobile version is in beta at this point and was hacked together at Open Hack Day India last month (using Yahoo’s Blueprint platform), so there may still be some technical issues, warns the company. At the mobile site, you can take a look at the latest, featured and popular presentations if you’re using any smart phone and/or on all phones that have Opera Mini installed, and you can also search for slidedecks. There’s no requirement to download or install software on your phone, and it lets you log in to your account to view your favorite slidedecks and messages from your contacts. Comments are currently not displayed yet, and it doesn’t support upload from mobile phones, but other than that it works like it should; on my iPhone at least. Update: here’s a short presentation about SlideShare Mobile from … SlideShare Introducing SlideShare Mobile: use SlideShare on the go! View more presentations from Amit Ranjan . To the best of my knowledge, this is the only mobile website that does this at this point, and considering SlideShare is one of the most popular cloud-based presentation sharing services there’s bound to be a heap of great content you can watch on the go. If there are any others, speak up in comments. SlideShare’s been doing some cool stuff lately, like launching a free Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 plug-in that allows for one-click publication of your presentations to the cloud, and support for embedding YouTube videos in SlideShare-hosted presentations. The company is based out of San Francisco and raised over $3 million in capital to date, from VC firm Venrock and a number of prominent angel investors like Dave McClure, Mark Cuban, Saul Klein, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian and more. (Thanks to Christian Heilmann for the tweet tip) CrunchBase Information SlideShare Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Amazon Shutters Unpopular Alexa Site Thumbnail Service Top
Amazon Web Services is discontinuing the Alexa Site Thumbnail service, which has been providing developers with programmatic access to millions of thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites that were stored in Alexa’s index since July 2006. New subscriptions are no longer being accepted, and existing subscribers will only have operational access until June 12, 2009. The service hits the deadpool . Alexa Site Thumbnail was a paying service (developers were charged $0.0002 / thumbnail URL returned i.e. $0.20 per 1,000 thumbnail URLs) but in an e-mail sent out to developers Amazon admits that it never really took off and that the company will do the smart thing and focus their resources on more popular services. Update: commenters are pointing to Girafa and PageGlimpse as alternatives. There’s also Websnapr , bluga webthumb , scURLr , etc. Dear Alexa Developer, We are announcing the deprecation of the Alexa Site Thumbnail service as of March 13, 2009. After this date, the service will be closed to new subscriptions. The Alexa Site Thumbnail service will continue to be operational for existing subscribers for 90 days, until June 12, 2009. Use of the service has been relatively low, and we have decided to focus our resources on more broadly used services in order to provide the greatest benefit to Alexa customers. Thank you for your use of the service. We regret any inconvenience to you. Thank you, The Alexa Web Services Team (Hat tip to Marc Hodgins ) CrunchBase Information Amazon Web Services Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 

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