Wednesday, March 25, 2009

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Justin.TV Is Bigger Than Hulu . . . Overseas Top
Live video on the Web is starting to take off, judging by the massive jump in traffic that Justin.tv is witnessing. According to comScore, the live video site’s global audience saw a massive jump from 9.3 million unique visitors in January to 15 million in February, which is about the same number of people who went to Veoh and nearly twice as many as visited Hulu.com. Of course, Hulu is only available in the U.S., where it is fourth most popular video site , and its videos are watched on other sites as well. In the U.S., ComScore only shows Justin.tv attracting 1.4 million people in February. So most of its audience and growth is global, with particular strength in Spain, Brazil, Germany, and the UK. Quantcast, which directly measures all three sites, shows a similar trend. Globally, Justin.tv has 22.1 million monthly uniques, compared to 15.8 million for Hulu, and 11.9 million for Veoh. While the U.S. numbers are 3.9 million for Justin.tv, 14 million for Hulu, and 4 million for Veoh. (Ustream.tv seems to be the second-largest live video streaming site with 6.7 million global monthly visitors and 1.4 million in the U.S.). These are all site numbers, Quantcast also measures “network” numbers which presumably includes videos embedded elsewhere, and those are about double the site stats for each service. Justin.tv itself claims 1,800 percent year-over-year growth in unique visitors based on its internal Google Analytics numbers. What all of these number show is that live video is beginning to make its mark, and could soon challenge the top video sites for the attention of audiences. There are 428,000 channels broadcasting live video on Justin.tv. Of those, 40,000 channels broadcast 1.75 million hours of video each day. And the level of engagement seems to be just as high as on regular video sites. ComScore’s VideoMetrix estimates that the average Justin.tv viewer in ethe US. watches just over an hour a month (64.7 minutes), almost exactly the same as a Veoh viewer (64.5 minutes), but still well below a Hulu viewer (87.2 minutes). So why is Justin.tv so popular overseas? Could it be all the live sports events streamed over the service? Soccer and female wrestling seem to be particulraly popular. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Now that China Is the New Israel…What's Israel? Top
Tel Aviv, Israel— When I moved to Silicon Valley in early 2000, I quickly became fascinated with Israel. A very tight relationship had formed between the holy-land-for-all-things-tech and the actual Holy Land, bolstered by the success of people like Yossi Vardi and Checkpoint's Gil Schwed. The rapid pace of liquidity in the late 1990s meant Valley investors couldn't find enough start-ups to stuff their money into, and unlike dot com fluffiness that was roaming around San Francisco, Israelis were hard-core techies with a work ethic that seemed to defy basic human needs like sleeping and eating. Most of all, Israelis, particularly those in high-tech and cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, had a reputation for living like there was no tomorrow, because when you're surrounded by hostile neighbors there may not be. The 1990s were a period of a lot of structural change in the venture business. It was no longer about families and private money investing—money came from big public pension funds and endowments, and more of it was coming online as the baby boomer retirement accounts swelled and the American stock market made everyone richer. That kind of scale forever changed the venture game. Meanwhile, the Internet enabled companies to be flipped in under two years—also unheard of before. Similarly, Israel represented one of the first times the cozy boutique Sand Hill Road firms ventured overseas and made money as a result. For a time, Israel had more Nasdaq-listed companies than any other country in the world. Then the crash, happened here and there. Only Israel got a double whammy of the Second Intifada and a resurgence of violence starting around the same time. The talk was always that Israel would come back as a hub for brilliant, crazy, ballsy entrepreneurs, and the returns would come back too. Weren't these things just cyclical? A positive sign was how many Israeli VC firms were opening their doors. For much of the last ten years, investments in Israeli companies by Israeli VC firms has roughly equaled foreign investment in Israel, according to stats from Ben Gurion University’s School of Management. That’s a huge strength, as Valley and Boston investors always like to invest with local partners, and a lot of developing economies don’t yet have that local infrastructure. By 2004, an executive from Silicon Valley Bank was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle after leading a contingent of VCs back to the Holy Land saying Israel was poised to explode again. He crowed that the crash and violence aside, Israel was getting more venture money than anywhere other than Silicon Valley and Boston and it was only ramping up. But it turned out, he was wrong. Money continued to invest along the same $1.2 billion-to-$1.4 billion a year range, and returns fell off a cliff. Israeli companies have raised just over $10 billion since the beginning 2001, but acquisitions and IPOs have returned just over $860 million over that almost eight-and-a-half-year period. Bear in mind, the industry tends to measure performance over ten-year periods, and not many people expect a roaring acquisition or IPO market for the rest of 2009, and arguably 2010. Compare those numbers to start-ups in Europe, a continent that has long been characterized as risk-adverse, thanks in part to labor laws that work against start-ups. Sure, Europe is a bigger place, so its to be expected that European companies have raised a much bigger 36 billion in Euros since the beginning of 2001. But European companies have returned $6.3 billion. If you do the percentages, Israeli companies have returned 8.6% of the money invested over the last eight-plus years. I don’t know how to account for Euro-to-Dollar conversation rates over eight years’ time, so let’s pretend for a moment that it was 36 billion in dollars invested in Europe. If that were the case, European companies would have returned 17.5% of the capital invested. The real percentage is undoubtedly much higher, although still pretty poor as an industry. Most investors like to get all their money back, and then some. (All stats are from Dow Jones VentureSource.) Ten years after the peak of the last bubble, it's clear that when foreign investment fell in Israel from about $4 billion a year to $1 billion a year, the country wasn't just weathering a recession. Somewhere along the way, the entrepreneur scene here lost its mojo. Now, before the hate mail starts, let me be clear, that numbers aside, I still believe Israelis are singular entrepreneurs. There is interesting stuff here and always will be. There's an element of risk taking that even the Valley can't rival, and it's no secret Israelis are brilliant technologists. They also share a lot of qualities with some of the best entrepreneurs I know: They're born hackers. They love to work within constraints  to make something happen. They love when odds are stacked against them. They're ballsy. They're brash. As I said in this interview with Loren Feldman yesterday, they start companies like they drive. In either case—you don't want to be in their way. So I don't say this to trash Israel, but facts are facts. In sheer numbers, Israel’s place on the global scale of investing has been dwarfed by China, and matched by the United Kingdom. And after three days of talking to dozens of entrepreneurs and investors in Tel Aviv, this seems like a country wandering in the desert, looking for a new tech movement to own and dominate. What happened to Israel is a bit like what happened to Boston—the story and opportunity moved away from what the city's entrepreneurs were good at. In the case of Israel, security and encryption was always a strength, but that's not the growth industry that it was. In the case of Boston, enterprise technologies and telecom were always strengths. Now, as media has become the story of the last boom, it's not a surprise New York surpassed Boston in the amount of venture capital raised. Internationally, China has become the new obsession, with India a close second. It's not that Chinese entrepreneurs are better than Israeli entrepreneurs. And so far, there are certainly a lot of concerns about returns in China. But when it comes to international entrepreneurship—at least in terms of attracting those billions in U.S. venture dollars—entrepreneurs need to give VCs a compelling reason to come to them. In the 1990s, Israel gave them superior technologists. Now, China is giving them an exploding demographic that needs all manner of goods and services. Was a booming Israel just a relic of the 1990s boom like Webvan and the Pets.com sock puppet? I don't believe so. But I'm in Tel Aviv for the next two weeks looking for the company and the tech movement that will prove me right. If you find it, drop me a note. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
EMI Drops Lawsuit Against Project Playlist, Licenses Catalog Instead Top
Music search and streaming service Project Playlist may finally be turning the tide in its ongoing battle with the music industry. EMI Music, one of the three major labels which was suing Project Playlist for copyright infringement, dropped out of the litigation and is announcing today that it has licensed its entire catalog to the service instead. EMI joins Sony BMG , which was never part of the lawsuit, in licensing its digital catalog of music to Project Playlist. That is two down, two to go. Warner Music and Universal Music Group are still party to the suit. If Project Playlist CEO Owen Van Natta can get them to license their catalogs as well, maybe the vultures circling the company will go away. The service is currently banned on both Facebook and MySpace . Getting the other two labels on board would be necessary for lifting those bans. Warner and Universal don’t seem to be in any rush to settle, however. And Project Playlist doesn’t have much time. The number of U.S. unique visitors going to its site has dropped from 10.4 million in November, 2008 to 6.1 million in February, 2009, according to comScore. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Spare Change On Track To Process $30 Million In Micropayments On Social Apps This Year Top
While advertising revenues have been disappointingly low for most applications on Facebook and other social networks, another option app developers are increasingly turning towards is micropayments for virtual goods or premium features. Both Facebook and MySpace have admitted that they are working on their own payment systems, and Apple could play a role as well since it already has a payment system in place for iPhone apps (although even Apple is running into some bumps) . While the bigger players are fiddling with their payment system plans, nimbler startups are moving in to fill the gap. One of these is Spare Change Payments , which is trying to become the Paypal of micropayments. A year after launch, more than 700 apps across Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo use Spare Change for micropayments. Spare Change is processing $2.5 million a month in micropayments, which is a $30 million annual run-rate. The apps that are having the most success with micropayments are games and ones that sell virtual goods. Over a million people have already signed up for Spare Change. Hundreds of thousands of those use it actively on a monthly basis. And it is not all nickels and dimes. Last year, 250 people spent more than $1,000 apiece on digital goods through Spare Change. Now, the company is making it easier for consumers to pay through Spare Change with a new payment widget that pops up in each app instead of sending people off to a separate payments page. You can choose between several payment methods including a credit card, Paypal, Spare Change credits, or through your mobile phone bill. Once you buy a minimum of $2 worth of Spare Change credits, you can use them as currency for apps that charge as little as $0.10 at a time. It is also introducing a PIN ID for users who choose to tie their accounts to a credit card so that they can use the same PIN across any app that uses Spare Change. The experience is designed to be familiar to anyone who has ever downloaded an app from the iTunes store. You enter your PIN, and then go back to the app. The company accepts payments from 190 different countries. The first app to launch with the new widget is Mind Games on Facebook. It requires developers to add only three lines of code. Spare Change will roll it out to MySpace and Bebo soon. Spare Change is designed specifically for social networks. Customer support is done via the direct messaging systems inside each network, and the company analyzes the social graph to sniff out fraud. For instance, it looks at how many friends someone has and other factors to assign risk scores to individual consumers. Spare Change has been bootsrapped with only about $500,000 in seed funding, and two of the co-founders (Mark Rose and Simon Ru) previously worked at Paypal. For micropyaments, Spare Change is much cheaper than Paypal, which offers its own micropayment option . Paypal charges 5 percent plus $0.05 for transactions less than $12, but only for premium accounts that qualify (otherwise, for most small accounts, it is the normal rate of 2.9 percent plus $0.30) . In contrast, Spare Change takes a processing fee of 8 percent for each transaction. CEO Lex Bayer points out that while Paypal has a micropayments offering, it does not seem to be a huge priority. “PayPal is not well designed for micropayments or digital goods,” he says. The logic driving Paypal is to encourage larger transactions because that is where Paypal makes more money. A bigger concern for him should be if Facebook, MySpace, or Apple ever decide to jump into the micropayments game. Meanwhile, he has an opportunity to stake out a piece of the micropayments market and fight it out with the other startups eying the same prize. For instance, Zuora recently launched subscription billing for Facebook apps , Zong and Mobilecash are trying to tap into mobile payments (although the fees are still too high ). Whoever figures it out first will be collecting more than just nickels and dimes. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Spark Capital Launches Seed Funding Program Start@Spark Top
The latest venture fund to set up a separate seed financing program is Boston-based Spark Capital , a profilic investor in Internet and new media companies such as Twitter, Boxee, Tumblr, Veoh and KickApps. The initiative is dubbed Start@Spark , and is primarily geared towards startups from the Boston and New York areas. Early-stage investments will amount up to $250,000, and will not be restricted to information technology companies but also periodically be granted to startups offering financial or educational services. Entrepreneurs who get into the program will have access to Spark’s partner network and legal counsel, and will also be prepared for a second, more formal round of funding at a later stage if progress is deemed satisfactory by the firm. You can apply here . This is not the first program of this type we’ve seen. In fact, it seems like they’re popping up all over the place, conceivably thanks to independent initatives like Y Combinator and TechStars who’ve paved the way. Charles River Ventures debuted its “QuickStart” program back in November 2006, Sequoia simply invested $2 million of its own fund into Y Combinator to give them more runway, and other firms have set up platform-specific seeding funds in the past (e.g. Kleiner Perkins’ iFund and Bay Partners’ Facebook-apps only fund ). We should probably note Spark Capital in fact a partner to TechStars, and General Partner Bijan Sabet is listed as a mentor for the seed program, but undoubtedly they’ll be competing for the same investment sooner rather than later. CrunchBase Information Spark Capital Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Online Deal Marketplace FatWallet Gets A Facelift Top
Online deal marketplace FatWallet.com is getting a makeover. FatWallet redesigned its existing site to give it a slick, user-friendly interface. The money-saving site also added a new feature to organize its deals called Coupon Search, which is stocked with with online coupons for consumers. And FatWallet expanded its roster of retail partners. While the site originally had relationships with 800 retailers, it now gets deals from over 2,400 online retailers. FatWallet also revamped its Cash Back feature, which consumers get cash back from shopping at certain sites. The cash back feature actually has some pretty good deals. For example, if you book a United Airlines flight, you could get 4 percent back. The site also offers consumers a forum where they can share money saving tips and shopping deals. FatWallet has deals from some pretty well-known retailers like Dell, Sephora, Macys and Travelocity. And FatWallet’s forums for consumers are fairly extensive and useful, ranging from threads addressing the the best deals on tech gadgets to which credit card to get. Online coupons are becoming increasingly in demand as consumers looks for deals in the current economy. It’s of no surprise that FatWallet made its coupon offerings more prominent than before, especially when the competition for online coupons is stiff. CouponCabin, Retailmenot.com, Smash Deals, Gotodaily, and SavingPiggy are just a few of the multitudes of online coupon databases that compete to offer consumers the best deals at checkout time. But FatWallet has created other incentives for consumers to check out its site, like the community forums and cash back features, so perhaps the site could differentiate itself from the pack in the future. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Yahoo Shuttering Travel Bargains Site FareChase Today Top
Yahoo is cutting more fat today by closing its travel bargains website FareChase , which it originally acquired back in July 2004 and re-launched two years later. The company will be announcing the shut-down later today, and will start redirecting visitors of the service to its main travel site soon. The service let customers perform comparative searches for pricing on flights, hotels, cruises and cars, but it was apparently not enough of a strategic product enhancement for Yahoo Travel, hence the company discontinuing it altogether to tighten its focus and cut costs in these difficult times. Sounds like a plan to me. According to Travel Weekly , Yahoo signed a new agreement with partner Travelocity in late February 2009, ensuring that the latter could continue its role as the primary booking engine for Yahoo Travel. In the past, Travelocity sparred with Yahoo over the prominent role that Yahoo gave FareChase on Yahoo Travel. This is the latest deadpool decision from Yahoo in a long series of announcements. The company had previously sold off shopping engine Kelkoo and shuttered online storage service Briefcase , photo sharing service Yahoo Photos , social network Mash , live video streaming service Yahoo Live , Ads in RSS , web-based video editing service JumpCut and student community website / job board KickStart . Which service could be next on the chopping block? Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Please Miss, How Do You Re-Tweet? - Twitter Heads To UK Schools Top
No, it is not April Fools day - yet. The British government is proposing that Twitter be taught in elementary schools as part of a wider push to make online communication and social media a permanent part of the UK's education system. And that’s not all. Kids will be taught blogging, podcasting and how to use Wikipedia alongside Maths, English and Science. The draft plans were due to be published next month, but have leaked early. Children will also learn "fluency" in keyboard skills, and how to use a spellchecker. Luckily they will still be taught how to spell themselves, rather than rely on Mr Clippy. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Radionomy Doubles Funding For Custom Internet Radio Platform Top
Radionomy , based out of Brussels, Belgium (yes we do have a startup scene here ), has secured more funding in order to bring more enhancements to and enable scale for its personalized web radio application, which it is debuting in public beta today. The size of the financing round wasn’t shared in detail, but the startup did say its total capital now exceeds €1.5 million (roughly $2 million). Radionomy essentially offers everyone a chance to set up their own Internet radio station free of charge and share a personalized radio show complete with music programming, jingles and commercials with friends and the rest of the world. Users get to tap into readily available music libraries and jingles and add custom sequences, interviews, reports and podcasts to the mix, enabling anyone to build a genuinely personalized radio show and broadcast it for free, worldwide. Radionomy takes care of the associated costs (including royalties), and shares advertising revenue with radio station creators, relative to the size of their audience. Read more about the project, which is European in scope, right here . I’ve known the company and its founders for a while and have always been quite skeptical of the concept, since there are so many options these days for users to build custom music playlists and stream purchased (or non-purchased) tunes on the Web, leading me to believe few people would bother to set up their own radio station. But I’ve been playing around a bit with it earlier this morning, and have to admit it’s all pretty well executed, with lots of social features and decent search functionality. Turns out traffic to the web radios built by users is picking up nicely too. The company reports a growth of 175% in terms of audience in the past 4 months, and also says nearly 1 million unique users paid a visit to the platform in December 2008, citing independent research performed by Médiamétrie//NetRating. Also, about 26,000 users have registered for the invitation list so far, waiting to be accepted to the public beta version, which the company is launching today. The company has set its goal to 5,000 user-created radio stations by this Summer. Radionomy says it’s going to put more focus on developing its presence in France, where it claims to have become the number one music streaming website, before Last.fm, Jiwa and other more established players. They were probably cheering when Last.fm yesterday announced that they would be turning Last.fm Radio into a subscription-based paid product for its users outside of the US, UK and Germany. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
White House Using Google Moderator For Town Hall Meeting. And AppEngine. And YouTube. Top
Google is getting some major national exposure for both its AppEngine platform and Google Moderator , a simple tool that helps groups determine which questions should be asked at all hands meetings, conferences, Q&A sessions, etc. The White House is using Moderator, hosted on AppEngine, to determine which questions President Obama should answer at an online Town Hall meeting on Thursday. In just a few hours 6,932 people have submitted 7,037 questions and cast 236,048 votes on the site - which proves out the AppEngine promise that you can build highly scalable applications with little effort. The top question, based on votes so far, is “As a student, who like so many others works full time and attends school full time, only to break even at the end of the month. What is the government doing to make higher education more affordable for lower and middle class families?” Google also hosts the President’s video message for the meeting, on YouTube. I’m surprised he’s not wearing a Google tshirt, too. Google should be paying him an endorsement fee for all this promotion (Obama previously used Moderator for his Change.gov transition site). See our recent coverage of Google Tip Jar , which also uses Moderator. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
MySpace Toolbar Launches To The General Public Top
MySpace has just launched its official toolbar, giving users immediate access to their MySpace activity notifications regardless of what site they’re currently browsing on the web. MySpace has been testing the browser plugin since last year (we originally wrote about it in December), but it was only available to a limited number of users. Beginning today, it will be available internationally to all users, and the site will begin to publicize it. The toolbar is available on Windows for Firefox and IE users, as well as on Mac for Firefox (there’s no Safari support yet). You can grab it on this page , which also includes a nifty interactive demo of the toolbar so you can get a feel for it before installing the plugin. Using the toolbar, MySpace members can update and keep track of their status updates, messages, comments, and other alerts. The toolbar also includes links to a variety of MySpace’s services, along with its Google-powered search engine. I don’t think I’ve installed a browser toolbar since around 2002, but there’s no question that many of MySpace’s devoted users will love to get their friend requests and messages in real time. There have been a handful of unofficial MySpace toolbars released in the past, but they are occasionally broken when MySpace rolls out site updates and had to use scraping to detect status changes. But while they may not offer the same functionality and stability as the official plugin, some of them do offer one nifty feature that the official toolbar doesn’t have: the ability to hit a button to ‘Simplify’ a MySpace user’s profile, removing the irritating flare that some users seem to love so much. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook. Top
“A camel is a horse designed by committee.” ( source ) The camel/horse quote (no disparagement to camels meant, of course) perfectly captures the problem when too many people have input into a product. Seth Godin talks about how the Walkman would never have been built if Sony had asked its customers what they wanted (see Purple Cow ). A few days ago Robert Scoble talked about how a Porsche would be a Volvo if they let their buyers decide on features: “if you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they'd tell you things like "smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room, etc." He'd then say "well, they just designed a Volvo."” The bottom line is, when you listen to your users, you get vanilla. feature creep. boring. It takes a dictator to create the iPhone and change the course of an entire industry. Imagine if Steve Jobs let other people add features to that device. So I’m surprised that Facebook, which has stared down its users so many times in the past, is folding on the most recent redesign flareup and reverting back to some old features. Just because, oh, a million people demanded it . Facebook has always pushed the envelope with users, and those users always hate it (the original News Feed was hated, now people are up in arms to keep it from changing). In an interview last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked with me about how users are willing to accept change over time, and that Facebook would continue to push things along. Suddenly, though, they surrender because a few users have a belly ache over a redesign. If they wanted to make these changes anyway, they shouldn’t have titled their blog post “Responding to Your Feedback.” They should have just continued to ignore the ranting, and announced further changes. Showing that you’re listening to feedback just invites more of it. Someday, if they’re not careful, someone is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace, who in turn did it to Friendster. Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Facebook Relents: Users Get More Control With Redesign Tweaks Top
Facebook has just posted a lengthy letter to its users on its official blog detailing some of the changes we’ll soon be seeing on the site’s recently-redesigned homepage. Included among the new features are live updating to the homepage stream, which will make the homepage truly real-time (previously it would show up-to-the-minute results, but only when you refreshed the page). The feed will also begin to include photos tagged from your friends to the feed - something that I’m very surprised wasn’t included when the new homepage debuted (photos are often the first thing I check when I log into the site). Users will also have more control over what items from third party applications will appear into the stream (apparently users have been complaining that these have had too strong a presence in the current version). In a move that may be meant to appease some of the many users calling for the ‘Old Facebook’, the blog post also notes that the home page’s Highlights section will attempt to “mirror more closely the content that the earlier News Feed provided”. In my experience the current version of Highlights has been pretty underwhelming, but I don’t think that’s because it’s presenting news I’m uninterested in. Rather, I find the Highlights section to be too small to display many meaningful stories, and I feel like I’ve trained myself to look at the center of the page, so I often forget to look at Highlights entirely. These changes (especially the new Highlights) are clearly at least partially in response to very vocal base of users who hate the redesign, but Facebook isn’t going to be reverting back to the old News Feed any time soon. And really, it shouldn’t. As Robert Scoble pointed out , customer requests can easily lead the businesses they’re complaining to astray. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Whiskey Media Quietly Growing, Innovating With Former CNET Team Top
Former CNET cofounder and CEO Shelby Bonnie founded Whiskey Media in 2007 as a platform to build media and entertainment content sites. The company, located in stunningly beautiful Sausalito, California (north of San Francisco) has no outside shareholders pestering them for a quick exit - the five cofounders, all former CNETers (Shelby Bonnie, Mike Tatum, Ethan Lance, Dave Snider and Andy McCurdy) have funded the company to date with less than $1.5 million. I recently had lunch with Bonnie to talk about how Whiskey Media is doing. It has quietly grown in the last year and a half, and the team is preparing to unveil a number of new sites this year. We first covered the company in October 2007 with the launch of Political Base . It was, and is, notable because it’s built as a “structured wiki” - freely editable by anyone, but the data isn’t just one big unstructured blob like you see on Wikipedia and other wiki sites. Each section of a page is a separate silo, making it much easier to slice and dice data, and cross link around the site. Political Base was the primary inspiration for how we structured our own CrunchBase database of people, startups and venture funds. PoliticalBase is a PHP application and separate from Whiskey Media’s newer sites, ComicVine (comics), GiantBomb (games) and AnimeVice (anime). Those three new sites are entertainment and media focused, and written in Python using the Django web framework. More sites are coming this year on that platform. ComicVine originally launched in late 2006 as a PHP application, but was ported to the new platform last April and now sees over 10 million monthly pageviews. The newer sites, GiantBomb and AnimeVice, have 10 million and 800,000 monthly page views each. Most users are male, in the 13-30 demographic. Not bad for a startup with a handful of employees that’s burned through very little capital. And like Wikipedia, the readers create most of the content - they’ve added a million pieces of content to the sites to date, says Bonnie. The sites don’t look anything like Wikipedia, having a rich content experience more like Wetpaint , an unstructured wiki site that lets users create new wikis on any topic. Third parties can also access the content on various Whiskey Media sites via an open API. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Trusera's Health 2.0 Portal Nearly Out Of Money Top
Trusera , a ‘Health 2.0′ site founded by former Amazon exec Keith Schorsch, is facing tough times. The startup is nearly out of money, and Schorsch says that unless it can raise more funding by the end of April, it will have to shut down on April 30. Trusera launched ten months ago, offering users a community where they can share their stories about how they’ve dealt with health conditions. Instead of simply segmenting users into different groups according to the disease they are dealing with, Trusera also takes other information into account, including a user’s hobbies, location, and age. Using this data it tries to match users up with each other, so that their experiences and tips can be shared with the people who stand to gain the most from them. The other benefit of this matching system is that users can elect to receive Email updates whenever a new match submits a story or tip, which means that users don’t have to worry about constantly searching the site for new information. Trusera is well designed, with a friendly interface that lends a sense of community that makes the site seem like more than just a reference guide. It also has a few innovative features in the works, like a writing assistant that offers users tips as they write about their experiences (Schorsch assures me that it is nowhere near as annoying as Microsoft’s infamous Clippy). But while it has grown a dedicated user base, it is still fairly small (which isn’t too surprising given that it has been around less than a year). The site faces off with a plethora of competitors in this space, which include everything from similar online portals to more basic forums. Many sites also revolve around individual diseases, which can further segment these communities. While Trusera may be forced to close at the end of next month, Schorsch says that the company will continue to maintain the website content and platform on private servers, which they can reactivate down the line should they come across new funding. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
iPhone App Developers Gripe About Payment Delays and Dismal Customer Service Top
Are iPhone app developers getting paid on time from Apple? Not all of them. On this iPhone developer forum , there are numerous threads from developers who are complaining about delays in payments for January and not being paid the amount of money the developers are in fact due from sales. And we’ve received one complaint directly from an iPhone app developer that Apple is late on its payments for January. Apple’s contract, which is embedded below, says that payment will be made to developers within 45 days of the end of the month. That would have been a week ago. Developers are expressing a number of gripes with Apple that extend beyond just being paid on time. We also hear (and read) that reaching Apple by phone is a complete nightmare. Emails to Apple go unanswered and customer service reps put developers on hold for 30 minutes to an hour and sometimes hang up on callers after they’ve waited to speak to an agent. Each month Apple sends iPhone app developers a financial report, detailing their sales for the month but in February, Apple sent out this email: February iTunes Financial Report Update Due to system enhancements, your February Financial Report(s) will be delivered later than recent months. You should expect to see your February Report(s) available for download on iTunes Connect within the time frame for delivery as provided for in your contract. We’ve heard from one developer that he’s yet to have received the February report and its nearly April. To make matters worse, another iPhone developer says that even after receiving the report of how much he should be paid, he was grossly underpaid by Apple, by nearly $10,000. From the looks of the complaints on the forum, there are a number of developers who are frustrated with Apple’s customer service and payment system for iPhone developers. We have contacted Apple for a response and will update this post if we hear back. In the meantime, if you are a developer and have had trouble receiving payment or dealing with Apple, please let us know in comments. iPhone app contract - Get more Information Technology Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Raptr Spreads Its Wings With Gaming Partnerships Top
Raptr , the social network for people who like to play and discover games, is partnering with several big-name gaming companies to license and distribute games and spread its reach. The Raptr Partners Program includes Sony Online Entertainment, NHN USA, Gala-Net as well as hardware companies Razer and Bigfoot Networks. Raptr says that its reach could potentially exceed over 10 million players with these relationships. Users interact with Raptr just as they would on a social network like Facebook, except everything revolves around playing games. They get the ability to know when and what games their friends are playing across various gaming platforms as well as the ability to instant message with their friends. Users can also share their stats, rankings, achievements, and characters with friends. And they can automatically broadcast their gaming activity to their friends on Raptr and other social sites including Facebook and Twitter. Raptr Partners Program will give Raptr access to deeper data and content and will allow partner companies to work with Raptr APIs as well. The deeper data creates a better experience for users and for gaming companies. The partnerships will also allow Raptr to distribute co-branded games to users and will offer partners a way to access Raptr’s social gaming platform and potentially have their games be broadcast over several social networks. Raptr has the potential to not only associate with some big gaming brands but to also extend its reach as a popular gaming platform. Raptr will work with Sony to add a number of titles from Sony’s catalog of subscription-based and free-to-play PC games. Gala-Net will distribute Raptr to players of its games on its gPotato portal and GamesCampus will work to distribute Raptr on games hosted at its sports-focused portal. Raptr will also be bundled with the Bigfoot Network's Killer NIC gaming network cards. As we wrote in our review of Raptr last year, Raptr is positioning itself as a central hub for social networking and gaming to integrate into one platform. And these partnerships should only help the network add more compelling games and reach more gamers. But we also wonder whether gamers will take the time to actually interact with the social networking features and create a profile on the network. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Twitter Tweaks Its Title Tags For Better Google Juice Top
Notice that title tag for my Twitter profile page? It reads “Robin Wauters (robinwauters) on Twitter” where it used to say “Twitter / robinwauters”. For the TechCrunch Twitter account, it used to read “Twitter / TechCrunch” (only the username) instead of now “Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) on Twitter” (full name + username). Minor tweak, you say? Mundane change? Perhaps, but with an undeniably big impact on how high Twitter pages will be ranked in search engines from now on. Still skeptical? Do a Google search for your name, or try mine . For the longest time, my LinkedIn profile and now defunct blog about internet marketing used to show up as the first results, battling with other social networking profiles and websites. Today, it shows my public Twitter profile page as the number one result. The first thing anyone will click on when they do a search on my name. That’s huge. I tested a few users who’ve had a public profile for more than two years, and the results are telling: nearly all of them have their Twitter profile linked in the top 5 results when performing a Google search. Try it out yourself to see how high yours is ranked. We’re not sure when exactly Twitter tweaked the way it presents title tags, but when searching Google the old representation can currently still be found in the search results (i.e. you can still see Twitter / TechCrunch when you do a search for “Michael Arrington” ), so we’re assuming this is shiny new. Update: changes were made yesterday according to co-founder Biz Stone. The implications are not to be underestimated. Being the top result for a name search means business, just ask all those venture-backed startups building people search engines who are vying for the sweet spots on the first page. Consider the fact that Facebook is changing its profile URLs to better carry a person’s name for their profiles. Think about simple services like MeeID or UnHub who were on their way up the search results for full names of people who registered their personal profiles there. For most users with a public stream, Twitter is trumping them. If Twitter can dominate the number one spot for queries on people who have a public profile on the social micro-sharing service, that is one more entry point into Twitter which should help it continue to grow visitor traffic exponentially. Furthermore, more new users might be enticed to sign up to try out the service themselves because their friends or relatives are apparently using it too. Conveniently, this is all popping up at a time when the startup’s business model is becoming more and more apparent , its momentum is going through the roof and much larger companies are turning their heads to see what all that noise is about. Anyone still think Twitter is peaking , or even headed for the deadpool? CrunchBase Information Twitter Google Search Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Skimmer: A Better Stuff Reader Top
It’s hard to find a good stuff reader. Twhirl and Tweetdeck are good for Twitter and every other social networking whatever service has its own Air app, but there’s no one place you can put all your stuff in a readable and usable way. Enter Skimmer , a stuff reader by Fallon , an ad agency in Minneapolis. Presumably named after the great comedian and talk-show host Johnny Carson, Fallon has decided to brighten up its front walk with a unique Air application that brings Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, and Facebook to one place. Why is an ad agency creating a Twitter app? Had you ever heard of Fallon before this? Didn’t think so. Moving on. [Folks have pointed out they did the BMW films and a few other campaigns. Feel free to ask some people on the street who they are, though, and I believe you'll be quite surprised.] The folks at Fallon who showed me the service described it as a feed reader for designers. Fallon’s precious art department wanted to use the services we peons use every day but the application design was too muddled and messy. Their solution? Roll their own system using the latest in user interface design techniques taken from the catwalks of Paris. The application, available on Fallon’s website , is still pretty wonky. It crashed a few times for me on OS X and there are still some issues in posting Tweets. The real differentiator, however, is the way Skimmer shows Flickr photos, videos, and avatars. The photos and videos appear in-line whenever your Flickr freunden post new pics or your YouTube favorites churn out another video. The system also allows you to add large, hi-resolution avatars to your account so other Skimmer users can see the true you and not some 50×50 pixel representation. There are three screen modes - full, widget, and regular. The fullscreen mode is for crazy people who want their readers to take up the entire screen, the mid-sized is just about right, and the widget turns the reader into something more like Twhirl. If I were a high school chemistry teacher I’d write “Good ideas but needs work” on the top of Skimmer and hand it back with a B-. The app needs some technical polish - in terms of usability it’s already pretty slick - but if you’re looking for something to bring a few of your services into one fairly attractive app then give Skimmer a try. It can only get better. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Face.com Brings Facial Recognition To Facebook Photos (We Have Invites) Top
If there is one feature on Facebook which delivers “social utility” magic even to the most average of users, it’s Photos. In fact the feature is so popular that by Facebook’s own account 1 billion photos are uploaded every month—a staggering number that makes it the largest photo site on the Web. However, as with all good things, there are also drawbacks, and in this case discovery is high on the list. While Facebook makes it super easy to discover photos in which you were tagged, there is no chance that every one of those billion photos are tagged each month. And that leaves a big opportunity. Let me put it another way: How many photos of you are there on Facebook that you’re completely unaware of? Israeli-based Face.com will help you find them with ‘Photo Finder,’ a Facebook app that uses facial recognition to help members locate untagged photos of themselves and their friends. We have 200 special access invites available to TechCrunch readers who will be granted first access to the app, as well as preference on the waiting list. Get your invite here . Once installed, the app will begin scanning you and your friends’ photo albums, a process that requires a bit of time to complete, but the welcome screen will immediately display photos that were ‘Auto Tagged’. Users can either accept, decline or identify the correct individual themselves. The only users that have veto power to alter or decline a tag are the person who uploaded the photo and the person tagged. Facial recognition technology is taking off. Competing technology can be found in both Apple’s iPhoto and Google’s Picasa , but those are limited to searching only your personal collection of photos (although iPhoto lets you upload them with the tags to Facebook). With Photo Finder, you are not limited to your own photo collection. Users can search manually for photos of friends or browse for recently tagged ones. Users can also track specific users by flagging them for the “Watch List”. Photo Finder will prompt hits via Facebook’s ‘Notification’ window. The facial recognition technology was developed from scratch by the Face.com team over a year and half. It was designed from the ground up as a low-cost platform to meet two specific requirements: The first is recognition of “Faces in the Wild”. This applies to everyday photos that suffer from such issues as low resolution or bad lighting, or where faces are obscured with sunglasses, for example. The second requirement is to have the technology be scalable. In this respect Face.com claims to be able to perform facial recognition on all one billion photos currently uploaded into Facebook every single month using only a few machines. Photo Finder scans the photos of users and all their friends, along with “other albums in your wider network where there’s a high likelihood of your (or friends’) appearances.” To understand the sheer volume of backend work required, consider the following statistics: The first 150 users in Face.com’s system required 20 million photos to be scanned, resulting in 30,000 identified faces. My personal installation of the app required it to scan 79,449 photos which resulted in 11,933 tags of myself and my friends. Photo Finder will then go back and re-scan the albums after its initial scan to identify newly added photos. The social tagging feature within Facebook Photos gives Face.com a major boost because it can use those tags to train its system. It is important to note that Photo Finder does not add or alter Facebook’s own photo tags. Tagging that occurs through the app is stored in metadata accessible through the Photo Finder app alone. Also noteworthy is the fact that from a privacy perspective Photo Finder piggy-backs on the users’ Facebook settings and does not alter them in any way. Also, none of the photos are stored on Face.com’s servers. These only perform the heavy lifting required for the facial recognition and the storing of tags added through the app. Even though this is an Alpha version of the app and there are occasional bugs, it works remarkably well. I was quite surprised that it was able to correctly identify individuals in side shots, backgrounds, or in extremely poorly lit photos. It all depends on the amount of photos available, but as a rule of thumb the Face.com team aims for 90% accuracy. It seems that they have some real technology on their hands as evidenced by their scoring first place in the “ Labeled Faces in the Wild ” experiment conducted by the University of Massachusetts’ Computer Vision Laboratory (Face.com are identified as ‘Hybrid descriptor-based’ in the linked paper). It’s clear that Photo Finder was designed for mainstream viral appeal and I must admit that I found the app to be VERY addictive, spending at least ten minutes tagging people every time I played with the app over the course of the past two weeks. I have a hunch that once made publicly available the app is going to be incredibly popular on Facebook. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Study: In-Game Video Advertising Trumps TV Advertising In Effectiveness Top
A study commissioned by NeoEdge Networks , a Mountain View, CA-based casual gaming advertising network, says (surprise, surprise) that video advertising within online games is more effective than TV advertising. Preliminary results of the study, which will conclude at the end of this month, seem to indicate online gaming audiences are more inclined to remember and positively percieve brands who experiment with pre, mid and post-roll video advertisements inside Web-based games. Of course, studies ordered by commercial companies with a clear stake in the subject of the research like this one always need to be taken with a grain of salt, but the results are interesting nonetheless, and deserve a closer look. After all, major companies like Google and Sony are eyeing in-game advertising revenues in a big way, and for good reason: depending on which research organization you trust, spending on in-game advertising is supposed to grow to between $732 million and $1.8 billion by 2010, although I personally believe the current economic climate might prevent spending to reach even the more conservative prediction by the end of next year. For more context: some say in-game advertising will ruin the video game industry altogether, others believe standards will spur industry growth , and a recent article on our sister site Crunchgear (based on another study) suggested gamers don’t have a problem with in-game advertising at all. Anyway, going back to NeoEdge’s study, which was conducted in conjunction with research agency Frank Magid Associates, this is how they came to their conclusions: The research goal was to determine both the value of online video advertising inside of casual games and the most efficient use of video advertising in casual games. In partnership with advertiser Zappos.com, casual game players across the NeoEdge Network were intercepted with a survey request after game play. Consumers saw one of ten different online video advertising scenarios, which varied number of ads seen, frequency of ads and additional ad products. Over 2,000 consumers participated in the research study and over 1 million ad impressions were used to conduct the comprehensive research. According to Vicki Cohen, Executive Vice-President at Frank Magid Associates, the preliminary results show a 5x increase in unaided brand awareness over TV advertising where a game included a Zappos.com ad. Other key findings according to the release: over 80% correctly linked Zappos.com as the advertiser who “allowed them to play the game for free” (who knew gamers were such a grateful lot?), while 56% had a more favorable impression of Zappos.com because of their trade-off of watching an ad for free game play. I am skeptical that the reported uplift in percentages and absolute numbers can be generalized across all in-game advertising and more extensive research would be welcome for backing up the statement, although I am inclined to believe the notion that in-game advertising is generally more effective than TV advertising. Then again, which form of digital advertising isn’t? Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
iPhone Makes Up 50 Percent of Smartphone Web Traffic In U.S., Android Already 5 Percent Top
The iPhone now accounts for 50 percent of mobile Web traffic from smartphones in the U.S., according to an AdMob Mobile Metrics report released this morning. Over the past six months, the iPhone has taken share from Blackberry and Windows Mobile. In August 2008, the iPhone made up only 10 percent of mobile Web traffic from smartphones. During the same time, Blackberry’s share has gone from 32 percent to 21 percent (with the Curve and the Pearl coming in stronger than the Storm), while Windows Mobile has taken an even bigger hit, declining from 30 percent to 13 percent. Palm is also down to 7 percent from 19 percent six months ago. The only other smartphone operating system that is showing gains in mobile Web usage is Android, which has captured a strong 5 percent share just three months after launch. And that is up from 3 percent in January. The gains shown by the iPhone and Android show what is possible when phones are built with fully capable browsers and support a rich array of Web apps. On a worldwide basis, smartphones running on the Symbian OS (mostly from Nokia) still dominate mobile Web traffic with a 43 percent share. But that is down from 64 percent in August. The iPhone has gone from 4 percent to 33 percent of mobile Web traffic on a worldwide basis. All the other mobile operating systems are down as well. This data is extrapolated from AdMob’s mobile ad network and only looks at smartphone share. Overall, smartphones generated 33 percent of worldwide mobile Web traffic, up from 26 percent six months ago. The full report is embedded below. Admob Mobile Metrics February 2009 - Get more Information Technology Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 

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