Friday, March 6, 2009

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Lifeblob's Redesign Takes Social Timelines To The Next Level (Invites) Top
Social timelines are going mainstream (see AOL/Bebo ), but startups are pushing them to the next level. Today, Lifeblob , the Indian startup working on ways for you to visualize your life on the net, is introducing a refreshed version of its social timeline creation tool. With it, you can easily patch together a visual representation of your life’s most memorable moments by timestamping certain events and enriching them with photos, text and videos. The end result can easily be shared on a variety of social services, or embedded into any blog or web page (example below). It’s an invite-only service for now, but we have an unlimited amount of invite codes for you. It’s simply techcrunch and you can use it to sign up here . Lifeblob is one of the investments of SeedFund , the Google-backed VC fund who actively looks for early-stage financing deals within the Indian startup community. The company raised its first round of financing of approximately $1 million from the fund in August 2008. It employs only 4 people for now and its business model is centered around advertising - which it will start rolling out after its general launch - and premium services (like branded timelines, etc.) Public timelines on Lifeblob can be searched by other people with ease. If they’re not protected, anyone is able to both view and share the “lifeblobs” with the rest of the world (thanks to an integration with SocialTwist’s Tell-a-Friend service). Privacy settings allow your updates to be private or publicly visible, or for your friends only. You can also opt not to be listed in the Lifeblob directory at all, while still getting a shareable dedicated URL for your timeline (here’s an example for Michael Arrington ). Lifeblob isn’t so much about the concept of lifestreaming as it is about being able to visualize moments in a person’s life, while showing relations to other people whose moments intersect with theirs. Those intersections can take the form of people, places, events, associated tags, and so on. Each intersection shows up as a stacked tile, which launches the associated timeline when clicked on. For example, if Mike Arrington met up with Gary Vaynerchuk, Loren Feldman, and David Recordon after a conference (here’s the photographic evidence that this did indeed happen) and all of them would have indicated this in their timelines or been tagged, you’d get a timeline that shows that connection inside the interface and lets you explore more relations and other people’s lifeblobs simply by clicking around a bit. It also works as a marketing vehicle. For instance, here is a timeline of all of Woody Allen’s movies , with connections to timelines for actors who have appeared in his movies. The UI is nice, but if you click any of the frames in the embed above with a screen resolution lower than 1024×768, you’ll immediately notice it still needs quite a bit of fine-tuning, as you can’t resize it properly and the menu items are all over the place. That said, it’s a pretty cool service reminiscent of tools like Dipity and Kronomy but with a more social approach. Definitely a tool I’d consider using to recap events, which I think it is most suited for. Turning your whole life into a lifeblob seems like a whole lot of work, unless you could auto-update from other services (right now, only Picasa is supported). Here’s a screencast on how it works: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Boxee Adds App Store, Hulu Hack Top
We've already shown you one dirty way of re-enabling Hulu on Boxee but now there is an official work around direct from Boxee via RSS. The latest build adds support for video RSS fees and so...all you need to do is add Hulu's public RSS feed to the app's reader. It's surely not as sexy as the past application, but it's better than nothing. Plus, App Box and auto update show how fast this alpha release is maturing.
 
Topify Lets You Manage Your Twitter Followers Via Email (200 Invites) Top
If you are not a Twitter power user, you can ignore this post. But if you find yourself increasingly relying on Twitter and spending way too much time managing your followers, trying to figure out who they are, or responding to their private direct messages, you’ll want to try out Topify Created by former TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon and Arik Fraimovich as a tool they needed for themselves, Topify lets users manage their followers and respond to direct messages directly from their email inbox. Topify is essentially a time saver. Once you set it up (we have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers ) by replacing your email in Twitter’s settings with one that Topify provides which redirects back to yours, you get an email every time someone follows you. The email contains a snapshot of that person’s Twitter activity: a one line bio, location, number of followers and followees, Twitter update count, Twitter tenure, and last Tweet (see image). It basically tries to gives you enough information to decide whether you want to follow that person back, which you can do simply by replying to the email. Topify also lets you reply to direct messages (Twitter’s version of private messages) by replaying directly via email. This saves you the step of having to go back to Twitter and login before responding. These are all basic features which should be part of Twitter, but until then you can use Topify. For public replies to your Twitter messages, you don’t get an email (because Twitter itself does not offer such notifications). Adding @replies might flood your email inbox, but I actually would prefer getting those as well because I find myself often missing replies and not responding until days later, if at all. As Twitter grows and more people come on board, this tool is especially useful during its viral phase, when the number of followers any individual is accumulating on a daily or weekly basis should be accelerating. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
BackType Gets More Conversation Tracking Features, Seed Funding Top
BackType , one of the better conversation tracking tools we’ve come across so far, is releasing a couple of new features today that arguably make it a top gun in the space. The startup, launched in August 2008 on $15k thanks to Y Combinator’s summer program, has also closed a round of seed funding to the tune of $300,000 from True Ventures , led by the firm’s founder and partner Toni Schneider , notably also the CEO of Automattic (the company behind blogging powerhouse WordPress). BackType, unlike commenting enablers like Disqus, JS-Kit, IntenseDebate and coComment, offers a one-stop destination for retrieving comments on just about any topic across a wide variety of blogging platforms and social services (Twitter, FriendFeed, etc.). You can do a simple keyword search but also track people specifically, e.g. Michael Arrington . Evidently, you can subscribe to search query results by RSS feed and e-mail (based on a keyword or only for an article you indicate). You can also feature your own comments across the web on your own blog using a widget. Today the company is introducing a new feature dubbed BackType Connect , soon to be included in their API , which makes it even easier to follow conversations centered around a certain blog post or article. All you need to do is go to the website and enter the URL of the post, and BackType will fetch all the conversations around it and display the gist on one page, along with some stats. As you can see in the second screenshot, there’s also a dedicated tab for ‘tweets’ i.e. Twitter messages, which comes in handy with Twitter now being a real-time search engine and all that. But it doesn’t stop there. BackType is today also launching BackTweets , a separate website where you can track conversations that are going around on the micro-sharing service, based on keywords or URLs (even when they are shortened!). For an example, check a search for ‘techcrunch.com’ . They also created a special page tracking the top links on Twitter , which can be somewhat compared to the functionality of Techmeme (or Tweetmeme , of course). UberVU ( our coverage ) and Artiklz ( our coverage ) offer similar services, although in terms of quality of returned results BackType wins the race, at least for the couple of keywords and websites addresses we tested. In this day and age, it’s essential for individuals, companies and brands to track conversations on the Internet, and BackType makes for an excellent service for weeding through comments on the social web, which can often prove invaluable. The startup still offers the basic functionality for free and is currently still figuring out how to make money from enabling companies and publishers to track those conversations, but it’s not like there are no opportunities there. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Robert Scoble To Leave FastCompany Top
Super-blogger Robert Scoble is leaving his full time job at FastCompany, he confirmed by phone tonight. He first joined the company nearly a year ago and has been running their FastCompany.tv site. He says he’ll continue to write a column for the magazine, but his video work with them is over. Part of the reason behind his departure: His long time sponsor, Seagate, hasn’t renewed their $1 millionish/year contract, he says. As for what comes next, he says he’s nearly ready to unveil a new project. Scoble continues to be on the cutting edge of new Internet technologies, sometimes taking things to an extreme. He was once briefly banned from Facebook for violating their terms of use, and we’ve (only half jokingly) called for an intervention over his excessive use of services like Twitter and Friendfeed . Whatever he does next, it’ll be worth paying attention to. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Comment Consolidation: JS-Kit Acquires SezWho Top
JS-Kit , a company that offers an array of Javascript-based commenting, polling, and ratings widgets, is acquiring the assets of SezWho , a competing enhanced comment system. JS-Kit will continue to keep SezWho’s service running for the next 30 days, during which users will be offered a choice of moving over to JS-Kit or choosing an alternative system. SezWho offered a universal reputation system for comments, allowing visitors to log in using their Email address or OpenID, establishing a reputation system that carries across onto other SezWho-enabled sites. And unlike some other comment systems, blog owners didn’t have to worry about handing over their data to SezWho - for quite a while one of the primary criticisms of some competing services, like Disqus , was that they housed the blog’s comment data, effectively keeping their owners hostage (this is no longer an issue, as these services now offer synced comment archives). JS-Kit’s acquisition of SezWho is not particularly surprising. There’s definitely a need for enhanced commenting systems, but this space is overdue for consolidation. The problem with having all of these discrete commenting systems is that for the most part, they aren’t compatible with each other. Users’ comment histories and reputations are segmented across a handful of competing services, which sort of defeats the point. And aside from JS-Kit, most of these services are free, leaving them vulnerable to drops in advertising revenue and perhaps also deterring major companies from entrusting their data with them for fear that they might go belly up. In the current economy, most of the services are either forced to shut down or seek an acquisition. Aside from its acquisition of SezWho, JS-Kit has also bolstered its presence with the acquisition of Haloscan last summer. The company has also established partnerships with a number of major companies, including Sun and World Now . Some of the smaller services may be dying out, but JS-Kit still has some strong competition. Last fall IntenseDebate , another commenting system, was acquired by Automattic, the company behind the incredibly popular WordPress blog platform. IntenseDebate continues to operate on other blog platforms, and is also slowly having its technology incorporated into WordPress itself. Another increasingly important player in this space is Facebook, which just released a new commenting widget that allows sites to quickly integrate Facebook Connect with only a few lines of code. Users can have their comments relayed back to their Facebook News Feeds, where the conversation can continue. Some large sites have little interest in handing over their data to Facebook without getting much in return, but it’s a system your everyday blogger will love. And that’s a scary prospect for the rest of the widget makers. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Facebook Apps Can Now Use Chat To Go Viral Top
Facebook has just announced that applications on Facebook Platform can now be able to take advantage of the site’s built-in chat functionality, which launched last spring. Developers will now be able to present users with a list of their Facebook Chat buddies, tailoring the list to best suit their application (for example, they can choose to only present friends that already have the app installed). Facebook users have been able to use Chat and their Facebook apps simultaneously since Chat launched (one of its biggest selling points is that it remains open at the bottom of the screen, no matter where on the site you go). But until now applications didn’t really have a way to tap into the power of Facebook Chat to help make their applications more social. Aside from adding an enhanced social element to applications, the new feature could also help apps go viral much more quickly than they would using the standard Email invite system most Facebook apps employ. Developers can now present users with a list their friends who are online (even those that don’t necessarily have their apps installed), who they can then send invites via chat messages. Invites sent over chat have a greater sense of urgency and intimacy, so it’s likely that they’ll be more effective than invites sent through the site’s Email system. Of course, integration with Chat gives apps on Facebook yet another way to try to spam you. In the dark ages of Platform, when every app seemed to spam users with reckless abandon, I might have been more concerned about this, but I suspect Facebook already has some measures in place to prevent abuse. And even if they don’t, you can always just sign out of Chat if things get bad. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Live Stream: Y Combinator's AngelConf Offers A Crash Course In Angel Investing Top
Today some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent angel investors and entrepreneurs are coming together for AngelConf - a crash course in angel investing that is designed to get the many wealthy tech veterans littering the Valley involved in the startup scene. The event was put together by Y Combinator’s Paul Graham , who believes that while there are many potential investors in Silicon Valley, most of them are unsure how to actually get started (he suggests there may be only one actual investor for every 100 would-be angels). AngelConf is designed to help these potential investors get on their feet, with tips on everything from the legal paperwork involved to picking out the best startups. For more details, check out our past coverage here . The event is being streamed for free by Justin.tv . Watch live video from Angel Conf on Justin.tv Included among today’s speakers are: Michael Arrington Paul Buchheit Jeff Clavier Ron Conway Michael Dearing Paul Graham Carolynn Levy Dave McClure Page Mailliard Mike Maples Ariel Poler Naval Ravikant Aydin Senkut Jim Young Andrea Zurek Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Google's Tip Jar Uses Crowdsourcing to Help People Save Money Top
Google is using its Moderator product to help people share ideas on how to save money in recessionary times. Moderator is a tool that helps groups determine which questions should be asked at all-hands meetings, conferences, and online Q&A sessions, among other scenarios. Google has set up a site called Tip Jar , which is powered by Moderator, to gathers money-saving tips in one place and allow visitors to vote and rank them in order of usefulness. The most popular tips will rise to the top of the list. And users can submit tips to the lists as well. Google’s Tip Jar breaks down tips by categories, which include finance, shopping, food, vacation, family and others. A sample of some of the more popular tips include: “Go to the grocery store with your belly full. You won’t buy too many things because you just ain’t hungry.” “Utilize online bill pay with your bank. It keeps you in much closer contact with your money, as you can keep a very close eye on your balance and be in much less danger of overdrafting. It saves you money on stamps and paper checks.” “Buy a flask and carry your coffee/tea to work with you. Coffee and tea only costs pennies to make yourself, but costs $1 or more elsewhere.” “Eat out one fewer time each month. If it costs you $25 to eat out, but only $5 to eat in, then the $20 you save each month allows you to almost completely fund a $500 emergency savings account.” Although Google designed the site to provide tips about saving money, there are many users who are making suggestions on other subjects, such as how to be more environmentally-friendly in everyday tasks. Those tips could easily be an entire separate site, so there is definite potential to create Tip Jars for popular and trendy topics. Tip Jar is a good example of the power of Moderator. Google Moderator is a fairly useful tool to engage a crowd, whether it be within an organization or across the entire web. Google Moderator even caught the eye of the Obama Administration, which recently used Moderator to power part of its Open Government initiative on Change.gov. Moderator was built by Google Platform Engineer Taliver Heath as a side project on top of  Google’s App Engine . CrunchBase Information Google Moderator Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Ustream Launches Mobile Video Broadcasting Apps Top
Live video startup Ustream is making a big push into mobile. Today it is launching a mobile business division, as well as a new set of mobile video broadcasting apps (which can be found here , after login). Right now, the apps work on a wide variety of Nokia phones, including the N95, and on the iPhone, but only jailbroken ones. Alas, the company is still waiting for approval from Apple to release the app through iTunes. Meanwhile, its view-only iPhone app for watching live video streams is approaching one million downloads. The broadcasting app, however, is what we are excited about. It includes integrated chat, audience polling, and GPS mapping. The polling lets broadcasters ask their audience what they want to see or what actions they should take in a live broadcast situation. Another key feature: mobile video broadcasters can send out a message via Twitter or Facebook to their audience to tell them when they are about to start streaming live. (See video below). Under the hood, Ustream has developed its own low-latency streaming technology which reduces the amount of transcoding that needs to be done on the server as well as the amount of buffering that needs to be done on the phone. Ustream wants to bring its large audience for live streaming videos on the Web (it claims 15 million monthly uniques across both its site and embedded players) over to mobile phones. In the mobile video streaming race, it is fighting for position with Qik and Kyte (their official iPhone apps don’t allow for broadcasting yet either, although Qik has one for jailbroken iPhones ). But this is a battle for the hearts and minds of tomorrows mobile video streamers. Taking a page from Kyte , Ustream is getting celebrities and rappers like Lil Wayne to broadcast using Ustream. Below is a promo video showing UStream’s new mobile app on an iPhone: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
BizShark Takes A Crack At Creating An Automated CrunchBase Top
If you are looking to do some quick competitive analysis, a new site called BizShark offers a wealth of data about companies. Bizshark is a nifty automated information aggregator. It pulls together the latest business profiles, news, financials, web analytics, social footprint, marketing strategies, and other business information by searching across more than 50 Internet business databases. The site is pretty comprehensive and features a particularly useful tool that compares businesses with their competitors by analytics, traffic and news volume. Using its “CompetitorSort algorithm,” BizShark constantly monitors online discussion threads on related companies, products, and services and then uses a filter to rank the competition by link authority. BizShark aggregates data from Wikipedia , our own CrunchBase , Technorati , Compete , and Google Search . Secondary sources for information include Yahoo, Quantcast, Alexa, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Indeed, BackType, and other sites. BizShark doesn’t allow users to edit or contribute data to its system, forgoing the Wiki model. Its approach is similar to Quarkbase and KillerStartups’ Dataopedia , an information aggregator that lets users see all the data it can find about a website (Dataopedia also uses Crunchbase data). BizShark also offers premium services, where uses can pay a monthly fee of $19 to $69 per month to access employee contact information, SEO intelligence and in-depth revenue analysis. Guy Kawasaki, a fan of all things aggregated , is an adviser. This is undoubtedly a useful tool to find business, analytics and financial information about a company in one centralized place. But without its own human input, particularly on the information that is more difficult to track by an algorithm, such as job moves, funding announcements or product introductions, there is always the possibility of misinformation. We’ve seen other aggregators, such as automated tech news site TechMeme , add a human element to their operations after realizing that algorithms aren’t perfect. But BizShark argues that because it relies solely on aggregation and algorithms for information, it is completely objective. While objectivity is good, accuracy is better. Regardless, BizShark is definitely worth checking out. Here are a few screenshots: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Yahoo's Inquisitor Makes Search Shine On The iPhone Top
Last May, Yahoo acquired a startup called Inquisitor which offers a search plug-in for all the major browsers. Today, Inquisitor is available as an iPhone app and it shows how certain features, such as Yahoo’s Search Assist, really shine on a mobile device where you want to keep your typing to a minimum. When you start typing a search in Inquisitor, a list of suggested keywords automatically appears below (just as it does on Yahoo’s regular search engine on the Web). The more letters you type, the more refined the suggestions become, allowing you to select one before completing the word in the search box. Results are presented in large, easy-to-read gray boxes, with favicons and two lines worth of text. Abbreviated news results from two sources appear at the very top if they are available, and can be clicked through to see only news results. Once you click through to a Webpage or article, it is framed by the app. A toolbar at the top allows you to return to your search, making for more fluid navigation. You can always escape the app to view the app in the iPhone’s regular Safari browser as well. There is also an option for emailing links. Despite all the advances in mobile Web devices, they are still constrained. Features that simplify navigation or remove unnecessary steps can still be the difference between a usable app and one that you never return to. Inquisitor is one app on the iPhone I will be returning to when I want to do searches, which is often. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Joost Continues Fight For Relevancy, Teams Up With Social Network Netlog Top
Don’t count out Joost just yet. We recently wrote it still has a heartbeat despite the fact they made the wrong bet years ago by underestimating the power of the web for watching videos. They finally switched to Flash late last year , giving up on P2P , and introduced some social networking features around the video viewing experience to battle established players like Hulu, TV.com and YouTube. Now it’s taking a step beyond that by forming an alliance with Europe’s leading social networking service, Belgium-based Netlog , theoretically expanding its reach to 40 million people. The deal will allow Netlog’s audience to access Joost’s video library straight from its starting page, where they’ll be able to view, share and comment on 57,000+ music videos, TV shows, etc. Activity will be pushed to users’ news feeds, a feature Netlog copied from Facebook like many other community services did after its enormous success became obvious. Earlier this year, Joost was added to the Boxee media directory , but I think this is a more significant partnership. Netlog is growing fast, especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle-East, and it has famously replaced leading local social networks in many countries in Europe and Arabic speaking regions as community portal of choice thanks to its viral nature and extensive language translation program. Targeting mostly young people, it’s been actively looking to expand its array of entertainment services, most recently with the addition of multi-player games and now with videos from Joost. I think both will benefit from this and further anchor their position in Europe while everyone seems to be looking at what happens in the U.S and Asia. Netlog raised €5 million from Index Ventures in April 2007. For the sake of comparison, Joost raised $45 million , coincidentally in part from the same investor, who we recently reported raised a new €350 million venture fund . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Zoho Writer Gets A Makeover And Some New Features Top
Zoho , makers of an awesome web-based software suite comprised of document, project and invoicing management tools, has given its online word processing tool Writer a fresh look along with a couple of new features worth checking out. The Chennai, India-based startup says Zoho Writer 2.0 comes with hundreds of improvements, for the most part on the user interface. But the makeover isn’t the whole story. Zoho is also introducing a couple of enhancements and new features worth highlighting. The menu toolbar, for example, has been completely redesigned and renamed to reflect these changes. Now called the ‘MenuTab’, it categorizes the features as tabs based on functionality and mimics the familiarity of traditional office software by opening a drop-down menu upon clicking. This should make users who are making the switch from the well-known desktop word-processing software programs feel right at home, unless of course they’ve grown accustomed to Office 2007’s ‘ribbon’ menus by now (which I have, by the way). The sidebar in Writer has also been changed to look more like the sidebar in Zoho Sheet. It now includes search functionality (very welcome), multi-selection of documents and support for performing several actions in one go. There were several other enhancements to the application in Header/Footers with support for auto-insertion of fields, Collaborative Editing, inclusion of Word and Character count in status bar, and so on, but maybe it’s best if you just give it a spin yourself. After all, it’s free. Also worth noting is the fact that the changes will be reflected to all applications using Zoho Writer, including internal applications and third-party ones making use of the Zoho Writer API . Update: here’s a screenshot tour (best watched in fullscreen) I like Zoho a lot, especially because of their offline capabilities, easy access thanks to support for Google and Yahoo IDs and the group sharing across different apps feature. That said, some people will simply stick to desktop software for office tasks no matter what, and Zoho is going to have to fight an uphill battle to keep the rest of users from flocking to the web-based applications offered by companies with a vast reach (Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.). Or maybe Zoho will keep on surprising everyone.   CrunchBase Information Zoho Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
It's Time To Start Thinking Of Twitter As A Search Engine Top
At a dinner tonight with a friend the conversation turned to Twitter . He just didn’t get it, and he’s certainly not the first person to tell me that. Specifically, my friend didn’t understand the massive valuation ($250 million or more) that Twitter won in its recent funding . I told him why I thought it was more than justified: Twitter is, more than anything, a search engine . I told him what I thought of Twitter as a micro-blogging service: it’s a collection of emotional grunts. But it’s wonderful nonetheless. And enough people are hooked on it that Twitter has reached critical mass. If something big is going on in the world, you can get information about it from Twitter. Twitter also gathers other information, like people’s experiences with products and services as they interact with them. A couple of months ago, for example, I was stuck in the airport and received extremely poor service from Lufthansa. I twittered my displeasure, which made me feel better - at least I was doing something besides wait in an endless line. I’ve also Twittered complaints about the W Hotel (no Internet, cold room) and Comcast (the usual Internet gripes). More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com , the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer . People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff. Twitter knows it, too . They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable - somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today. And as John Battelle says, its not clear that Google or anyone else can compete with Twitter at this point ( Facebook’s giving it a solid try , though). And it’s not just ads that can bring in the money. Brands need tools to make sense of all this data that Twitter doesn’t yet supply. Third parties like Scout Labs are going to be mining this data themselves, I’m sure. But there are lots of other ways Twitter can tax the utility they are bringing to brands. If they manage to turn down the acquisition offers like Facebook did a couple of years ago , there’s no reason Twitter can’t find revenue streams that will support them as a standalone company. Possibly even a public one. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Global Warming May Get Its Very Own Top Level Domain Top
I’m deadpooling this .ECO top level domain right now. Not because it’s global warming/eco related, there’s plenty of money being thrown around to support just about every crazy green idea out there. I just don’t think the world needs another top level domain, and certainly not one that is designed for “individuals to express their support for environmental causes, for companies to promote their environmental initiatives, and for environmental organizations to maintain their websites.” People like .COM domains , or alternatively country level domains. These other ones are little more than traps to force brands to protect their trademarks during expensive pre-sale periods. The company behind the domain gets the most of the money, and ICANN, the quasi-governmental, quasi-mafia organization that oversees this mess gets their cut as well. The more domain names that get registered, the more money ICANN makes, which lets them hire more staff to stick their noses into more things. Meanwhile, they’re making a mess of the Internet. Al Gore is partnering with the company to help secure ICANN approval and then promote the domain. Which goes without saying. Fred Kreuger, previously the founder of Tagworld (now Social Project ), is one of the founders. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Y Combinator's Airbed And Breakfast Casts A Wider Net For Housing Rentals As AirBnB Top
AirBed and Breakfast , an online portal for renting space on a stranger’s airbed or couch, has re-launched its website to AirBnB , an eBay-like marketplace for all accommodations. Now a Y-Combinator start-up (the startup is currently in the winter session of the incubator), AirBnB, which launched as AirBed and Breakfast last August , found that users wanted to use the site for more than just renting space in someone’s house and were actively posting rental listings for apartments, houses and vacation rentals. The founders, San Francisco designers Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky , and software engineer Nathan Blecharczyk , quickly realized that increased and varied choice is more appealing for consumers and are now re-branding their site to incorporate a variety of local accommodation options. There is also a monetary benefit to opening up the site, says Chesky. For each rental, AirBnB takes a 7 to 10 percent cut of the traveler’s payment (as the rental price of the accommodation goes up, AirBnB will take less of a cut) and also takes a flat 3 percent cut of what the seller receives. With an increase in number of listings and a greater amount of pricier listings, AirBnB has had a jump in the number of transactions and seen a 50 percent jump in revenue plus created a profit. Vacation rentals can be a big business. Recently, HomeAway , a popular vacation rental site, raised $250 million in a venture round and was valued at more than $1 billion. The site still allows users to post airbed and couch listings, which continues to be popular amongst consumers. But with a wider market, AirBnB has 2500 listings and close to 10,000 registered users. While AirBnB has no plans to follow eBay’s auction site model, the start-up would eventually like to post listings directly from the enterprise world (in this case, hotels and property managers), which eBay has been able to do with its marketplace. Now that AirBnB is diversifying its accommodations, it will also face a fair amount of competitors in the rental space. Vacationrentals.com and Free-rental.com are just a few of the many short-term rental property listing hubs available for consumers. But AirBnB maintains that the combination of its former business of renting couches and the apartment and vacation rentals, all at relatively inexpensive price points, will make the start-up popular. With the downturn in the economy wreaking havoc on expensive travel plans, inexpensive home rentals may become more popular amongst consumers. AirBnB provides relatively cost-effective alternatives to staying in a hotel. For example, I saw a listing for a nicely-furnished one bedroom apartment in Midtown for $160 per night. That’s not a bad deal for an entire apartment. And AirBnB offers rooms and couches in cities like Washington D.C. and Paris for under $20 per night. And for of our readers who are looking for a place to crash or a vacation rental, AirBnB is offering $50 off any trip that is booked from now until Monday, March 9th. All you have to do is type in “TECHCRUNCH” when booking. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Y Combinator's Divvyshot Launches Dead Simple Group Photo Sharing Top
Divvyshot , a new Y Combinator company that makes sharing photos between groups very easy, has just launched in private alpha. The site allows groups of users to share full-resolution photos collaboratively both through online galleries and using native clients that will launch in the next few weeks. There are currently 700 invites available, which you can grab here . Divvyshot albums can be edited by multiple users, and can be set as private (only allowing designated friends to upload photos) or public, which lets anyone upload their photos to the album. All photos are presented at a fairly high resolution on the site, and are also available at their original quality for download (you can also download entire albums at a time as .zip files). Once the site’s native clients are released (they’re coming for both Mac and Windows), users will be able to simply drag their photos into a designated folder on their desktop, and they’ll be automatically uploaded to the online group albums and to every other group member’s native client. Founder Sam Odio says that he hasn’t settled on a monetization plan, explaining that he has considered going the SmugMug route and charging for bandwidth/storage. But he’s also thinking of trying to generate revenue by appealing to certain target demographics and then selling them highly relevant customized goods. For example, he believes that Divvyshot will likely appeal to Sorority girls, who may be eager to share their photos between close friends but not on social networks like Facebook. Divvyshot could capitalize on this demographic by selling personalized items (perhaps branded with the sorority’s logo) that featured their photos. Divvyshot looks nice and seems to work well, but it’s going to have no shortage of competition. There are already quite a few photo sharing sites that allow for group collaboration, and services like Apple’s MobileMe allow for photo sharing through desktop clients (you could even conceivably use something like Dropbox ). That said, if it can effectively separate itself by offering a more intuitive (or cheaper) service, it may be able to carve out a niche. divvyshot sneak peak from Sam O on Vimeo . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
280 North's Atlas Bridges The Gap Between Web Apps And Native iPhone Applications Top
Back when the iPhone first launched and the App Store was still a twinkle in Apple’s eye, the only way to get your goods onto the platform was to develop them as an iPhone-optimized web page - otherwise known as an iPhone Web App. Unable to make use of much of iPhone’s functionality (like the GPS, camera, etc.), Web Apps were quickly considered the inferior option when Apple unshackled the iPhone SDK, opening the doors for the standalone Objective-C apps which have since flooded through the App Store. It was great news for Objective-C developers and consumers looking for rich applications - but not so much for those who’d grown accustomed to developing for the web. At the recent Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, Y-Combinator-backed 280 North announced Atlas , a drag-and-drop visual editor for building desktop web applications with Cappuccino , 280 North’s Javascript-based framework. Near the tail end of the presentation, 280 North co-founder Francisco Tolmasky gave the audience a sneak peek of one of Atlas’ best features: iPhone support. The real trick? Atlas can wrap up iPhone Web Apps like native applications, granting them access to a significant portion of the iPhone API and allowing them to be sold through the App Store. This lowers the barrier of entry for iPhone development substantially, allowing those with Javascript knowledge to create fully functional applications on the platform without requiring them to learn a whole new language. The same limitations that apply to Javascript apply here, presumably - in other words, don’t expect to be throwing down ultra-rich OpenGL-based 3D games, but mid-range apps (such as Twitter clients, RSS readers, etc.) should be completely doable. How the API-related stuff works is still a bit of a mystery. 280 North is keeping mum on their methods for the time being - not only for the sake of maximum impact when Atlas launches in the coming months, but also because they’re still determining which of a handful of approaches will work best. I’d assumed that Atlas compiled the user’s code within a wrapper which served as a middle man, passing API calls to the iPhone and returning the results, but a quick chat with Tolmasky indicated that this wasn’t necessarily the case. If it works as demonstrated, it’s a wonderful idea. We’ll have to keep an eye on this one. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Google Health Now Lets You Share Your Medical History With Loved Ones Top
After months of rumors, Google Health finally launched last May, promising to store our medical records in a secure way that is more accessible, easier to understand, and useful than traditional paper records. Since then we haven’t heard too much about the service, which isn’t particularly surprising given the sensitive nature of the information involved (this isn’t a space where Google is going to take new feature additions lightly). Today, Google has announced that it has launched a significant new feature, giving users the ability to share their medical records with designated family or close friends. The general idea behind the feature is that oftentimes during emergencies family members may not know the details of your medical history, like medical allergies. Such information can be lifesaving, but sharing extremely personal medical information is not something that should be taken lightly. Google is taking lengthy measures to ensure the security of the data, associating invite links to specific Email addresses and allowing users to track who has viewed their records. All shared records are also read-only. One security measure that I don’t understand is the 30 day expiration Google Health is placing on each Shared link. Unless users resend their link every month, it sounds like this feature would be effectively useless in the event of an emergency. I’d prefer a system that allowed me grant permanent access to a close family member, which I could revoke at any time. Update: A commenter below points out that this expiration may only apply to the link itself, and that the sharing relationship remains in place indefinitely provided the link is used within 30 days. Google has confirmed that this is the case. For those users who’d prefer to go the low-tech route, the site is also launching a new feature that makes it easy to print out wallet-sized snapshots of your medical profile, which you can distribute to close family or perhaps just keep in your own wallet. The site is also launching a new graphing feature, allowing users to visualize the progress of health-related metrics like their blood pressure or cholesterol. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
PluggedIn's 'Hulu For Music Videos' Heads To The Deadpool Top
PluggedIn , a startup that launched back in April 2008 as a Hulu for music videos , is closing up shop. The company has run out of money after negotiations for a $2.5 million Series B funding round fell apart at the last minute. Co-founder Brett O’Brien says that PluggedIn is currently seeking buyers for the company’s technology and team for a price of around $3 million (the company’s cost of investment). PluggedIn differentiated itself from the plethora of other music sites by offering a library of over 11,000 licensed High Definition music videos, presented in a simple and aesthetically pleasing interface that was not unlike Hulu’s. Users could browse through over a million artist profiles (which were dynamically generated from content on sites like Wikipedia), and could use an app built on Adobe’s AIR platform to automatically generate a user profile featuring their favorite artists. The site also offered some basic social functionality, though it sounds like PluggedIn development was cut short before ultimately launching a “distributed social media player” that could be embedded elsewhere but still retain interaction between site members. Despite its attractive interface and high quality videos, the site never really took off. This is probably because there are already a number of very well established music communities, like MySpace Music , which have millions of users and many of the same of music videos (albeit at a lower bitrate). HD quality is a nice perk, but most users simply don’t care enough about it to jump ship and join an entirely new community. And unlike some of these competitors, PluggedIn requires the Move Networks video streaming plugin, which raises the barrier of entry (though it is fairly common since it is also used by Fox, The CW, and ABC). That said, PluggedIn’s technology may well be an appetizing prospect for websites that already get a significant amount of traffic. PluggedIn has been added to the Deadpool . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Loopt Adds "Friends You May Know" And Advertisements To Their iPhone App Top
Social networks suck if you can’t find friends that use them. This is especially true for those social networks oriented around sharing your location; for the most part, you end up knowing where you and three other people are before you get bored and give up. Following a trend made popular by Facebook, the mobile social mapping service Loopt has added a “Friends You May Know” feature to their iPhone application, allowing you to find and follow friends-of-friends without having to know their mobile number. Fun new features don’t just write them selves, though, so Loopt has also added a few advertisements throughout the application for the sake of getting some revenue out of their iPhone endeavors. Before this release, not knowing someones mobile number also meant you couldn’t be their friend on Loopt. You could always hop into “Mix” mode, which allows you to chat with people in your general area, but making that friendship connection still required asking them to send over their digits. With this new addition, you just need to know the mobile numbers for a few of their friends. Of course, if someone doesn’t want you to know their phone number, they probably don’t want you to know where they are, either - so you’ll still need their explicit approval. The concept has proven quite successful on other services (friend counts seemed to sky rocket when the feature was added to Facebook back in March of last year), and it should prove especially useful for Loopt. A good half dozen or more services are battling for users in the social mapping arena right now, and Google’s entry into the field doesn’t make things any easier . Add in the fact that the entire concept is fairly new and relatively foreign to most, and Loopt needs to make every possible connection as easy to discover as possible. As mentioned above, this is the first iPhone Loopt release to carry advertisements. Nothing too obtrusive here - they went with AdMob ads, which most iPhone users should be perfectly used to seeing just about everywhere. Oh, and the mandatory disclosure: Loopt built a special version of their application for TechCrunch users, and we consider them a sponsor. The TC’d version doesn’t carry the new friend finding feature yet unfortunately, but it should find its way in before too long. You can find Loopt for iPhone on iTunes here. [iTunes Link] [PSGallery=14rifoi14j] Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 

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