Thursday, June 18, 2009

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All In the Family: Sergey Brin Loans 23andme $10 Million And Google Ponies Up $2.6 Million Top
Google is still tightly intertwined with 23andme, a company that helps consumers understand and decipher their genomes. 23andme has raised another $2.6 million from Google out of a total $24.26 million it is trying to raise in a Series B round of funding, according to regulatory filings. This brings the total amount raised from this round to $13.6 million, after May’s $11 million funding round. At the time, Mohr Davidow Ventures divested its stake in 23andme after investing in a direct competitor Navigenics. The juiciest disclosure in the filing is that Brin loaned the startup an additional $10 million which is being converted into Series B preferred shares. Earlier in 2007, he had loaned the company $2.6 million which was repaid from the proceeds of Google’s subsequent $3.9 million stake in 23andMe in May, 2007. The debt was repaid after the Google investment. It appears that Brin once again had to dig into his own pocket to help keep the company afloat. The filing also says one of the investors in the Series B round in May was New Enterprise Associates, which also invested in 23andme’s Series A round. And it mentions that Google has entered into a lease agreement with 23andme, possibly for office space, but it is unclear what exactly is being leased. 23andme, which was co-founded by Sergey Brin's wife, Anne Wojcicki, raised $9 million in a Series A round of funding from Google, Genentech, New Enterprise Associates, and Mohr Davidow Ventures in 2007. The company maps consumers' DNA and helps them find information about their ancestry and their risks of getting certain diseases (Michael tried it last year). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
The Pre App Catalog Is Tracking Way, Way Behind Apple's App Store. And It's Palm's Fault. Top
One month after the launch of the App Store in 2008, Apple had seen over 60 million downloads of its apps. The Palm Pre hasn’t been out for a month yet, but it’s about halfway there, so how close is it to that number? Not close at all. Not in the same ballpark. Not even in the same city. Palm’s App Catalog has seen roughly 666,000 app downloads in its first 12 days, according to the mobile analytics firm Medialets . And what’s worse is that the download momentum is slightly slowing down since the initial launch. So don’t be too surprised if one month after the launch, the App Catalog downloads are near 1 million. Yes, 1/60th of what the App Store was doing last year. So why is that? After all, reports are that the Pre itself is selling pretty wel l. Well, the reasons are fairly obvious, and are all Palm’s fault. Right now, there are only 30 apps in the App Catalog. That’s up from 18 at launch, but there have been no new ones in just about a week now. How many did the App Store have at launch last year? Over 500. And more importantly, the rate of expansion was massive — which led to those 60 million downloads in the first month. The reason the Pre has so few apps is because it has limited who has access to its webOS SDK. Even today, only select developers can get it, to start working on apps. And that’s better than it could have been — initially, Palm wasn’t planning to launch with an app store at all, according to Medialets . But that would have been a really bad move. The smartphone wars today are at least partially being measured by the various app stores, on top of actual device sales. While the iPhone is far from the most popular device around the world, the App Store has had over 1 billion downloads now, and has over 50,000 apps . If you were buying a phone today and had to choose between a device with 50,000 apps and one with 30 apps, which would you choose? Yeah. To be fair, Apple had a built-in advantage at the launch of the App Store — there were already a few million first generation iPhones out there. Palm attempted to launch the entire package: new device, new OS and new app store, all at the same time. As Medialets notes, the other company that did this recently was Google with its Android platform late last year — but it didn’t have to make the phone, HTC made the G1. Still, Android also failed to secure the type of launch the App Store had for its Android Market. It’s still growing, but not nearly as fast as the App Store. And don’t expect things to pick up anytime soon for the App Catalog. While more developers do have their hands on the SDK now, there is still no real infrastructure to do things such as app payments. That’s something that really hamstrung the Android Market early on. But farther in the future, Palm does have a second device running the webOS coming out . That should undoubtedly help move some apps. Of course, perhaps you heard, Apple has a new device of its own coming out tomorrow . [photo: flickr/ robert thomson ] Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Leave It To Chinese Quarantine To Reinforce The Value Of Social Media Top
After a whirlwind tour of East Asia with GeeksOnAPlane (see my assessment posts for China and Japan here and here ), I’m back in the states and almost fully recovered from a potent bout of jet lag. I’m not complaining, however, since several other members of our group came down with a nasty stomach flu on the return flight. And one member, Mike Su of Break Media , actually got picked up by the Chinese authorities in Beijing on suspicion of swine flu, only to be stuck in quarantine for five days before getting cleared and released. Mike, who had skipped the Tokyo leg of the trip and joined us in Beijing only a couple of days earlier, took his poorly timed incarceration in stride. Since he needed no real medical attention whatsoever (the officials nabbed him because he had sat two rows away from someone on the plane over who indeed carried swine flu), Mike was left to sit alone in a hotel room for days on end with just his thoughts and a computer. Finding nothing else meaningful to do, he decided to blog his entire experience for the rest of us to enjoy. The result is a set of some pretty amusing and informative posts about what it’s like to experience Chinese quarantine. Welcome to Hotel Quarantine will start you off with the back story, while The Seven People You’ll Meet In Hotel Quarantine is the post that should stand the test of time. Most relevant to the TechCrunch audience, however, is the second-to-last piece, Quarantine 2.0 , where Mike reflects on how social media helped make his time in quarantine bearable. He describes how he was able to use Twitter to interact with the outside world and live vicariously through the rest of the GeeksOnAPlane group. Skype and other live streaming services helped him tap remotely into the events we were attending. And blogging, of course, helped him pass the time and ensure that his experience wasn’t for naught. Kris Krug, who spoke at a TEDx event in Shanghai on Monday, noted that these days "If you don't stick it on the Internet, it didn't happen". For Mike, that didn’t sound like hyperbole, since no one could share his memories unless he published them online. As he put it, “[It's] not that social media replaces or reduces the need for human interaction, but when you're forced into a situation that specifically prevents human interaction, social media becomes your best alternative.” Well put, I think, and a good counter-argument to the idea that social media is a waste of time and ironically anti-social. Not that most of us live in a quarantine-like environment, but it’s important to step back and see just how much better we’re able to connect with other people through space and time these days, even compared to 5 years ago. The most inspirational part of his post comes as an update: Been thinking about all this more throughout the day. It's hard to imagine five years from now that we'll look back at this and think how primitive it was and how much things have changed. But in the meantime, how cool is it to live in a time with so much change, and so many things left yet to be discovered? I'm leaving this quarantine more excited than ever that I get to work in web technology, and to think, no matter how mundane something such as "What are you doing?", or a video of this kid starting a dance party is, we are changing the way we live our lives, and that's pretty cool. Hear, hear. Let’s hope Mike will join GeeksOnAPlane for the full tour when it travels next to Latin America or some other region, with or without a high sensitivity to transmittable illness. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
As Blogger Nears Its Tenth Birthday, It Still Dominates. But For How Long? Top
Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later , Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million. Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don’t count all the blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch. The vast majority of Blogger traffic comes from outside the United States, where its annual growth rate is 38 percent compared to Wordpress.com’s 59 percent. On a worldwide basis, Blogger blogs have a readership of 267 million people a month, compared to 143 million a month for Wordpress (comScore, April, 2008). The biggest countries are, in order: 1. U.S. 2. Brazil 3. Turkey 4. Spain 5. Canada 6. U.K. From a business standpoint, Blogger is good for Google because it creates millions of sites which can show AdSesne ads. It creates more inventory for Google. Only recently has Google bothered to start showing ads to the users of Blogger itself every time they publish a post . Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will Wordpress eventually catch up? Or will something else entirely overtake both of them? Today, two of the people behind the original Blogger, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another little service that is capturing people’s attention. It is called Twitter, you may have heard about it. In May, Twitter.com had 17.6 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website alone, making it bigger already than Six Apart. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Justin.tv Gains DVR Functionality Top
The thing that saved television watching for me was the advent of the digital video recorder (DVR). I love the idea that you can be watching something, but have to stop to do something else, so you just pause it, and it will record it so you can come back later and pick up where you left off. Now you can have the same functionality on the live-streaming video site, Justin.tv . While most live-streaming services offer archives of live recorded video, the nice feature here is the simple way to pick up just where you left off watching something. The feature, rolling out this afternoon, will offer a bar under each video that will read, “Continue watching this later.” If you click on it, all that live video will be recorded so that you can come back to it at a time of your choosing. You’ll receive a link to a place to come back and watch it with a message that looks like: Use the link below to continue watching this broadcast when you have time, starting from what you’re watching right now (to within a few minutes). This link will continue to work for 7 days. You could also use this link to share with friends if you all wanted to pick up watching something together. Unfortunately, unlike TV DVR, there is no way to fast-forward through parts that you may want to skip. But I’m told that such functionality is likely in the works for a later release. CrunchBase Information Justin.TV Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Facebook Makes It Easier To Search Your Inbox Top
Facebook has had a big week. The social network finally caught up to MySpace in the U.S., according to ComScore. News leaked of its upcoming Everyone button. And Facebook made some significant improvements to its search capabilities . Now the social network is improving its inbox’s interface, which previously was a little clunky and difficult to organize. The new design gives you filter options at the top of your inbox to help you identify unread messages as well as to report any spam, or unwanted messages you receive. Facebook has also ramped up its search feature within the inbox, which was lacking in its earlier version. To find specific messages, you can type a keyword or a friend’s name in the search box in the upper-left corner of the screen, and then the results come back only for messages from that person. Yes, this is pretty basic stuff, but it should make it easier to search your Facebook inbox. Facebook is keeping some of the same functionality as before. You can still view Updates from the Facebook Pages you are connected with. You can also manage subscriptions to your fan pages by clicking the “Edit Subscriptions” link beneath “Inbox of Updates.” Facebook says it plans to send messages from Groups and Events to Updates as well. Friendfeed has also updated its email capabilities today, making a few useful improvements its email alerts for new subscribers. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
FriendFeed One-Ups Twitter Again With Its Subscription Emails Top
A few months ago, Twitter significantly updated its new follower email alerts to show you information such as how many followers that person has, how many tweets they’ve sent, and how many users they were following. It’s a decent indication of if the person is someone you actually would want to follow back, rather than making you click through to the site to get that information. However, it was still lacking some context, such as what that person actually tweets about. The service FriendFeed has rolled out an update that adds this context. Now, when get an email alert from FriendFeed that you have a new subscriber, you get a big FriendFeed logo, followed by the user’s icon and a link to easily “Subscribe back.” Below that though is the key part. You now see: “Here are some of the things XXXXX has recently shared on FriendFeed,” followed by three recent FriendFeed updates from that user. On each of those items there are also links to easily comment or “like” any of the items. This three element context is a great addition to these updates because it shows you if that user is actually worth following or not. If Twitter had this you could see if that person was simply a spammer as well. Update : There’s also the ability to see which of your friends is subscribed to the person subscribing to you in the email, which is very useful. More on it at the bottom of the post. FriendFeed has a history of beating Twitter to the punch on a lot of things it should be doing. It had a search that could search tweets well before Twitter, has a functional IM service , and has at least partial “track” functionality right now. Some third-party services like Topify and Twimailer already add this advanced email notification functionality to Twitter, but most user still don’t know about such services. The new way: The old way: The Twitter way: Update : Oh and I initially missed this, but this is huge as well. The emails will also tell you if people you know are subscribed to the person who is subscribing to you. Obviously, Facebook has had such functionality on its site for a while, but in a notification email, it’s very useful. CrunchBase Information FriendFeed Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Google Flipper Is About To Jump Out Of The Water Top
Google is about to launch a new Google Labs project it calls Flipper , we’ve learned. No, it’s not a dolphin. As you can see in the screenshot, it looks like the project is a more visual way to read Google News , or to “flip through it,” as it were. While we have yet to use it, what looks nice about it is that you can not only browse by sections, but also by sources, keywords, and most importantly by elements such as “most popular” and “recommended.” The visual representation probably won’t revolutionize Google News’ often sub-par performance , but the better filters could. The URL currently takes you to a Google log-in page, but when you sign-in you’re greeted with: Please visit this page from any computer on the corporate network to automatically enable access for your account. Which means this remains internal to Google right now. But look for it soon. Click on the image below for a slightly larger version. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
First Look: Beejive 3.0 For iPhone Top
Before we start this first look, there’s something I have to admit: I hate most mobile IM clients. We see a whole lot of phones go in and out of the MobileCrunch office, each generally toting its own crappy, broken instant messaging suite. Be they slow, flakey, or just outright terribly designed, we’ve grown to have a nearly unshakable bias against them. With that in mind, know this: We love Beejive 3.0 on the iPhone, which should be hitting the App Store later today. Read the rest of this post >> Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Congressman Compares The Plight Of Iranians To GOP On Twitter, Sticks Foot In Mouth Top
Republican Congressman Pete Hoekstra sent out a tweet yesterday comparing the current oppression of Iranians and their reactions on Twitter to “what we did in the House last year when Republicans were shut down in the house.” Apparently Hoekstra is referring to the time last year where Republicans took to Twitter to express their anger after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi adjourned the House, preventing a vote on an energy bill. I don’t know what’s worse-the fact that he is actually comparing a Republican tiff with House Democrats to the oppression and brutality taking place in Iran or the fact that he used Twitter to express this clearly idiotic statement. You would think that a public figure would know better than to write something so ridiculous on a platform that millions of people can see. But according to CNN, Hoekstra has a reputation for Tweeting about things he shouldn’t. Apparently earlier this year, he Tweeted out details about a classified Congressional trip to Baghdad. Apparently, a rep for Hoekstra issued a clarification: “The two situations do share the similarity of government leadership attempting to limit debate and deliberation, and the ability of new technologies to bypass their efforts and allow for direct communication. That's the only point that he was trying to make." Whatever. Twitter is now abuzz with heckles at Hoekstra-I’ve included some of the best ones below that were listed on a blog that popped up in response to Hoekstra’s remarks: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Google Books Adds New Features And Tools Top
Google has launched a bunch of new features to Google Books in an effort to promote interactivity between readers and the online books. 1. Embeddable previews of books: This new feature allows you to embed a preview of a full view or partner book in your websites or blogs, just like you would with a YouTube video. You can also copy and paste a url link in an email to share the book with your friends. 2. Ramped up in-book search: For public domain and partner books, Google has made the ability to search for a term within a book a little bit more user friendly. When you search for a term on a book, you can now see an image from the part of the page on which it appears. You can also click on those images to navigate directly to the pages inside the book. And you can filter search results by relevance in addition to page order in the book or magazine. 3. Thumbnail view options: You now have the option to click on the thumbnail view button to see an overview of all the pages in a public domain book or in a magazine. 4. Contents drop-down menu: Via a contents drop-down menu, Google Books will now allow you to jump to chapters within the book–or articles within a magazine (the same technology supports the mobile version of Google Books). 5. Plain Text Mode: Google’s made it easier to see the plain text versions of Google Books. The tool bar now includes a ‘Plain text’ button to see the HTML version of the text, which Google says is especially useful for visually impaired users, who can use this format for text-to-speech and other types of software. 6. Page Turn Button and Animation: In addition to scrolling through the book, you can now also click the page turn button at the bottom of the screen. Google also has implemented an an animated line to move with the page turn to make it easier to keep track of your location in the text. 7. Overview Page Overhaul: Google has added an assortment of data about the book on its overview page, including reviews, ratings, summaries, related books, key words and phrases, references from the web, places mentioned in the book, and publisher information. Last October, Google signed a $125 million settlement with the Author's Guild to pay authors for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web through its Google Book Search project. More than 7 million books have been scanned by Google so far, a large portion of them out of print. The Settlement, though the site is up and running, is still up in the air, facing an antitrust investigation by the Department of Justice. And the settlement has draw its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Collecta Enters The Real Time Search Wars Top
As we become inundated with more and more streams of data from Twitter, Facebook, blog, Flickr, and everywhere else, we need better ways to search what is happening right now. Twitter, Facebook, and Google are working on their own real-time search efforts, along with a slew of startups including OneRiot , Scoopler , and CrowdEye (which launched last night). The latest entrant in the real time search wars is Collecta It just launched a few minutes ago, and it scours the Web for real-time information. Results come from Twitter, of course, but also from news feeds, blog posts, comments, and Flickr photos. Status updates on Jaiku and Identica are also captured. If you do a search for iPhone , for instance, you will get a constantly updating stream of results which flow down the middle column of the page. If you click on any result, you will see a bigger version of the Tweet or the entire comment or feed item on the right. You can filter the stream by stories, updates, comments, or photos by checking boxes on the left under Search options. Everything Collecta collects and indexes is then pushed out via an XMPP stream, which means that your search results get updated the second that Collecta recieves new information. When CEO Gerry Campbell gave me a demo yesterday, I asked him why Collecta doesn’t rank results by some sort of authority instead of simply showing a chronological stream. Campbell used to be the president of search at Rueters, and before that the SVP of search at AOL. So he is very familiar with the traditional search mindset of trying to show the most “relevant” results. He suggested that those types of filtering options could be added in the future, but he wanted to start out with a new experience. What you are getting with Collecta is the pure stream of what is happening right now. If you want to refine that then you can do that by refining your search terms. He wants to encourage users to perform searches and let the results wash over them. The second he starts re-ordering results by some sort of authority ranking, then something that happened an hour ago or last week might turn up at the top of results. (Of course, a simple time decay could solve that problem). I appreciate that he is trying to encourage new forms of interacting with search results, but at some point I think he really needs to add relevance filters as well. Collecta was founded in November of 2008, and raised $1.85 million in a series A round which closed in March 2009. True Ventures and Campbell were the investors. The company was co-founded by Jack Moffitt, Brian Zisk, and Patrick Mahoney. Derek Powazek of JPG Magazine fame is the creative director. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Demdex Comes Out Of Stealth, Offers Advertisers Their Own Behavioral Data Bank Top
Advertisers and websites all too often rely on other companies for data about their own potential customers. A new advertising analytics startup called Demdex came out of stealth mode today to give companies a way to store and make sense of all the behavioral data which they collect or which is collected on their behalf. They put all of this user profile data into a “behavioral data bank” and then score each user across more than 40 behavioral and demographic variables to come up with a “traitweight.” This number is supposed to be able to help websites segment their audiences better and advertisers target their messages more exactly. Demdex was founded in 2008, and its investors include First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures, Comcast’s seed venture arm. It raised a $1.5 million seed round in August, 2008. Update : I spoke with CEO Randy Nicolau to get some more details on the company. The service is a hosted model, and he is really trying to make sophisticated data mining accessible to a wider range of companies. It also normalizes across multiple ad networks, analytics service, and other data providers. All of this behavioral data is currently locked away in black boxes inaccessible to the advertisers themselves or the Websites. If a big advertiser decides to switch technologies or ad networks, all that historical behavioral targeting data typically gets left behind. DemDex makes the data portable and puts it in the control of the Websites and advertisers themselves. They can plug it into whichever ad server or service they are currently using. DemDex charges a recurring monthly fee based on the amount of data it stores for each customer. This fee can come out to about a penny per unique visitor per month, which would be $10,000 for every million uniques. The ability to more precisely segment and target audiences is supposed to more than make up for the cost. All the data DemDex collects is based on anonymous cookie IDs, but any consumer can opt out of receiving targeted ads from advertisers using DemDex at DoNotTarget,com , where they can opt out on a company-by-company basis. (If you opt out, you just end up getting a generic default ad from the same company instead of one which tries to guess what might appeal to you based on your inferred demographics or past behavior). DoNotTarget.com is open to other advertising systems as well, and he hopes to make it an industry-standard registry. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Here Comes The iPhone 3G S Top
AT&T has just released official word about the upcoming wave of iPhone 3G S device deliveries to its retail locations and directly to customers who have pre-ordered the widely anticipated phone. TechCrunch is here to make it easier for you to skim the information by breaking the press release down to the core items (no thank you required): When, how, where - the device will be sold in 2,200 AT&T retail locations and 211 U.S. Apple retail stores - you can expect these locations to open at 7 AM local time (pre-ordered only) - customers who have pre-ordered at an AT&T store should go to the same store they ordered the device at, with their receipt, but check their arrival date before to avoid disappointment - customers who have pre-ordered online can expect their devices to start getting shipped over to them today at the earliest - other customers can come at regular business hours and will be served at a ‘first come, first served’ basis Pricing (with two-year contract commitment) (ad verbatim) - $199 (16GB) and $299 (32GB) for all new AT&T customers and existing AT&T customers who have fulfilled their previous agreement. In addition, AT&T yesterday extended this pricing to iPhone 3G customers who will be eligible for a full upgrade in July, August, or September 2009. - $399 (16GB) and $499 (32GB) for existing AT&T customers who have not yet fulfilled their existing agreement but would like an early upgrade to iPhone 3G S. This early upgrade option is exclusively available for iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G S. Data plans - monthly plans for consumers start at $69.99 per month for voice and data, and families who share minutes get special rates (starting at $129.99 a month for two iPhone lines with bundled voice and ‘unlimited’ data) - small businesses are also eligible for special discounted service rates and can share up to 20,000 minutes per month between as many as 40 employees - all iPhone plans include nationwide long distance and roaming, Visual Voicemail, Rollover, and unlimited Mobile to Mobile calling MMS and tethering Coming ‘later this Summer’ and ‘in the future’, respectively. How many can you buy? - New customer: one iPhone 3G S per person - Existing customer: one iPhone 3G S per eligible telephone number - Online customer: one iPhone 3G S per household - Inheriting the good old iPhone 3G from someone else? Visit an AT&T store to activate your device. So, are you getting one? CrunchBase Information iPhone 3G S Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Lacy, Birch, Krim And Glaenzer To Attend TechCrunch Europe Awards Top
Preparations for The Europas - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 - are coming together. Held on July 9 in London, these will be the first Europe-wide awards ceremony for technology innovation, honoring the best tech companies and startups across the web and mobile scene from the continent of Europe. The first tranche of tickets are now on sale . Put July 9 in your diary, get a flight and grab a hotel through our hotel search partner . On the evening itself we will be joined by some of the great and good from the European startups scene, and some from the US. Check out who is coming already , and we’ll also be joined by a number of VIPs including Michael Birch (co-founder of Bebo), Stefan Glaenzer (co-founder of Last.FM), Sarah Lacy (author & TechCrunch editor) and Tariq Krim (founder of Netvibes and now Jolicloud). The main way is to make sure your company is able to be selected for nomination is to put it in CrunchBase , with all fields filled in, as well as key staff, like CEO etc. Don’t forget your logo and your picture! There are more details here . We will be releasing the list of nominees to vote on shortly. We’re also looking for sponsors for the award categories, details here . Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Mozilla Shows Microsoft Where $10,000 Is Buried Top
Yesterday, we poked fun at Microsoft’s tacky $10,000 online treasure hunt to get people to use IE8, at the domain TenGrandIsBuriedHere.com . We were hardly the only ones . Today, a developer at Mozilla, makers of IE rival Firefox, weighed in with his own way of mocking Microsoft: TenGrandIsBuriedThere.com . The site is simply a Google Map zoomed out to a certain point. If you zoom in enough, you’ll find a surprise. The developer took exception to Microsoft calling Firefox “old” on its site. That is a bit odd since IE is much older than Firefox. [thanks Alan ] CrunchBase Information Mozilla Microsoft Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
TinyPetition Aims To Become The Default Petition Engine For Twitter Top
Dan Blake from Harkness Labs - who is working on far more projects at the same time than he could possibly tell me about in just one conversation - recently filled me in on his latest Twitter-related venture, TinyPetition . Basically, Blake is looking to address the apparent need for a tool that allows the many opinionated people that inhabit Twitterland to voice their concerns about anything that gets their hearts pumping: a digital petition engine that can quickly spread online thanks to the viral nature of Twitter and the concept of retweeting in particular. We’ve already seen Twitition pop up, most recently for aggregating opinions from Twitter users on the iPhone 3G S upgrade prices AT&T is going to charge. So far, that service has racked up 41800 signatures for 730 topics. TinyPetition, in contrast, has only soft-launched its website so far and stands at about 5800 signatures for only 5 petitions. Still, Blake thinks he can eventually overtake Twitition, which prompts the question how he intends to do so. Well for one, Blake has access to an existing user base of millions he could potentially draw from, as he also happens to be the guy behind this website called PetitionSpot , one of the most popular online petition services in the world. It’s a good start: PetitionSpot boasts about 4 million registered users (although Blake says it’s more like 2 million who have actively shared petitions since the site’s inception) and these are all people who have already expressed their interest in signing digital petitions, obviously. We’ll see how far this gets TinyPetition further down the line. I’ve set up a test petition (unsurprisingly, about our quest to have Facebook management reconsider their policy on Holocaust denial groups ), which you can find at tinypetition.com/facebookholocaust . Here’s my tweet about it , which I’ve shared from the TinyPetition website (something seems to have gone wrong with it). Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Animoto Is Already Cash-Flow Positive, Raises Another Round To Go To 11 Top
In a world where most startups choose gaining users over making money, Animoto is an odd exception: It’s doing both. Since launching in August 2007, the company has signed up some 750,000 users, and some 10% of those are paying customers. And that’s allowed the company to run cash-flow positive since December of last year, CEO Brad Jefferson tells us. And it could keep going on like that, but like most startups that taste success, it wants to do more. So it has raised by far its biggest round of funding to date, a $4.4 million Series B led by Madrona Venture Group . With an already proven business model, Jefferson says the company just wants to accelerate everything it’s doing, and push harder. That means a more diverse roadmap and more importantly, a much broader distribution strategy with more partnerships. One of those partnerships with with iStockphoto , whose founder, Bruce Livingstone , participated in this round. For those not familiar with Animoto, the startup basically allows you to take your images and your music and mash them together to create cool videos. What makes the videos cool is the company’s technology that renders the pictures so they’re in-step with the music you’ve chosen, adding nice transition effects. We’ve gushed over it previously here , here and here . One relatively new area of focus for the company is the mobile realm. Back in December, it launched an iPhone app that allows you to create videos from your pictures and music on the device. The app already has 300,000 users. And Animoto has had version 2 of the app ready for months, but Apple has yet to approve it. Jefferson isn’t sure what the actual hold-up is since the first version submitted had very little different besides some upgrades from the first version. And later, Apple apparently didn’t like that it was pushing users to its site to sign up for pro accounts, something which should be rectified shortly with the iPhone 3.0’s in-app purchase system, according to Jefferson. The plan is to have an app that charge the same $3 (or less) that it does on the site to make premium videos (using full-length songs). And another reason the company is going to need that money is because it’s expanding beyond using photos for its videos and into also using actual videos. Jefferson wouldn’t say too much about it, but check out the Webby’s video below for a preview of how that will work. At this year’s Webby’s it won both the Judges Choice and People's Voice awards for Best Services & Applications. “We really believe we’re at the tip of the iceberg for cinematic artificial intelligence technology,” Jefferson says. “We want to allow users to create high production video that tells a story. That has the feel of a short form documentary. Right now that’s mostly teed off of music, but in the future it will be done off of meta data in the photos as well,” he says. Animoto has raised $5 million in funding total so far, including money from Amazon back in May that was rolled into this round. Prior to that a group of personal investors provided $600K. Additional investors in this round beyond Madrona, Livingston and Amazon include Jeff Clavier's SoftTech VC . Matt McIlwain , the Managing Director of Madrona Venture Group is joining Animoto’s board of directors. CrunchBase Information Animoto Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Yahoo Is Now Resorting To Selling Killer Domain Names On The Cheap Top
No sooner do we finish writing up Yahoo deadpooling yet another project, Gallery , do we get a tip that Yahoo apparently has another money saving/making plan: Selling off domains it owns. That’s exactly what it has done with contests.com , which sold during a live auction last night. What’s really odd though (aside from an Internet giant actually selling a domain rather than buying one), is the price at which it sold. Contests.com is a killer domain name. People like my mother love nothing more than going online and searching for contests to enter to win stuff. But what’s crazy is that Yahoo sold it for only $380,000. Let’s put that in some perspective. In February, Toys.com sold for $5.1 million in auction. Sure, that’s a better domain, but not over 10 times better. And a few weeks ago, Candy.com sold for $3 million . How Yahoo failed to secure even a million for the name is beyond me. Just poor luck in the auction? This guy , who apparently left right before the auction started last night is flabbergasted as well. I just really would like to know why Yahoo would even sell it in the first place? I know times are tough at Yahoo but is $380K really going to help much in the long run? No. Hell, it’d probably be better to keep the domain and just put a load of ads on it, perhaps even Google ads. Or, I don’t know, run some Yahoo contests on it. People on the web love that stuff, I hear. [photo: flickr/.larry page] [thanks Sahar] CrunchBase Information Yahoo! Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Exhibition Over: Yahoo Gallery Closing Top
One thing Yahoo has been very good at over the past year is closing down services. Today brings news of another one shutting down: Yahoo Gallery . Come July 14, it will be no more. Yahoo Gallery was a project that never left beta testing. It was intended to showcase cool applications that were built using Yahoo’s various services and APIs. And while it was a decent idea as a way to show off cool things like Flickr apps , it never really took off. Here’s Yahoo’s explanation message about the shuttering: Yahoo! Gallery will be shutting down on July 14, 2009. After careful consideration, we have decided to close the Yahoo! Gallery beta service. Although the Gallery gained a core of loyal users who enjoyed the service, Yahoo! has been reprioritizing some products to help us deliver the best possible experiences to consumers and developers. The decision to close the gallery is part of this larger strategy and will allow us to focus on helping our customers develop engaging applications using Yahoo! technologies. If you have submitted any applications, you can go to the My Applications page, then download any images or text descriptions you wish to save. The sentence, “The decision to close the gallery is part of this larger strategy and will allow us to focus on helping our customers develop engaging applications using Yahoo! technologies” doesn’t seem to make much sense. Isn’t that exactly what Gallery was supposed to highlight? But whatever — Deadpool , it is. Gallery’s closing follows the much bigger decision to shutter Geocities earlier this year. And Yahoo officially shuttered Yahoo 360 last month, and Jumpcut shut down two days ago. [photo: flickr/marshall astor ] [thanks Akash] Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Tinker Becomes A More Powerful Twitter Trends Discovery Engine Top
Tinker, the recently launched microblogging topic tracker from Glam Media, will be rolling out several new features to upgrade its service. Tinker, which we covered in depth during its launch here, allows users to quickly browse through different real-time Twitter and Facebook searches relevant to various current events, trends and breaking news. Each event, trend or news item is associated with one or more terms, which Tinker then searches for across all Tweets and then presents the relevant ones in a single stream. Tinker is launching a people section that allows users the ability to search and discover people on Twitter. Users can find people by name, but also by location and profession. This feature ends up being a comprehensive directory of Twitter users, listed by profession, category or interest, that helps find, follow and filter people that are micro-blogging. Tinker also lets you see the most popular and influential of the Twitterati, by categorizing the people that create events and breaking news by topics such as Information Technology, Media and Real Estate. Within each category, Tinker offers sub categories of popular Twitter users. So under politics, you can search for Twitter user who blog about conservative, liberal and Republican politics. Tinker has added a featured page, which provides users with lists of hot topics and trends to follow on Twitter, including streams on events, news, celebrities, and topics. Similar is the look and feel of the iTunes homepage, Tinker’s featured page let you browse through categories of the top trends on Twitter. And Tinker now allows a large range of topics to be tracked semantically, creating a powerful search capability across Twitter. On of Tinker’s most innovative features is the ability to go viral with widgets. After creating an event, users can share the event's feed using an embeddable widget, which they can place on their webpage or blog. These widgets allow users to both view the feed of an event and to submit their own messages, which can then be sent to Twitter and eventually sites like Facebook and FriendFeed. Samir Arora, Glam Media’s CEO and founder, says that the widgets are being used by brands and companies for advertising purposes. For example, the movie “Away We Go” has created a branded widget and event page, with a video and Twitter stream that can be embedded on any site (see below). Tinker says that the site is now running over 50 million widgets and applications a month on distributed sites and networks. Widgets are getting a slight upgrade, and now let users make widgets in different sizes and colors. As we said in our earlier review of Tinker, the site is the perfect answer to Fred Wilson’s call for a Twitter events firehose—a place where users could input a handful of keywords collectively referred to as an 'event,' which could be used to monitor current news as it happens in near real-time. Of course, there are trending topics on Twitter (which can be misleading ) as well as a plethora of Twitter apps out there that try to tell us what exactly the buzz is on Twitter. But Tinker does this and more by doing most of the work for users-by categorizing topics and events, dividing Twitter users by the topics they Tweet about, and letting anyone embed real-time streams into their own sites. 50 million impressions Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Stealth Startup 5to1 Raises $4.5 Million With All Star Founding Team Top
5to1 , a stealth startup founded by former Fox Interactive execs Jim Heckman (pictured left) and Ross Levinsohn , has raised $4.5 million according to a recent SEC filing. Heckman is the CEO of the new company. Levinsohn, a partner at Fuse Capital , is on the board of directors. The company isn’t saying what they’re up to yet. But Heckman has a history of successful startups - he founded Rivals.com ( acquired by Yahoo in 2007 for $100 million), and Scout.com (acquired by News Corp./Fox Interactive in 2005 for around $50 million). Other founders/execs/investors include Dale Strang , Mark Stieglitz , Michael Barrett and Woody Benson . A summary of funding from the recent filing shows the company closed $2.2 million in April 2009 and $2.3 million in June 2009, bringing the total to $4.5 million. Fuse, Prism, and several angles are listed as investors. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
What's Ghetto? Pushing Digital Album Sales On Twitter (Video) Top
If Twitter is good for one thing, it is for promoting whatever it is you have to sell. Some of the best self-promoters out there are rappers, and they’ve taken to Twitter just like every other type of celebrity. Just as Twitter can drive traffic to Websites , it can also drive music sales on iTunes. On a panel at the 140 Characters Conference yesterday, Xavier Jernigan ( @xjernigan , the director of digital marketing at Universal Motown Republic, described how Twitter help put one of his new artists, Asher Roth ( @asherroth ), on the map. Roth released his first album, Asleep In the Bread Aisle , on iTunes on April 20, a Monday. The night before he Tweeted out to his followers (he currently has 69,566) that the album would be on iTunes. And then he Tweeted out a short link which opened up to the album page in iTunes. With no other marketing , the album rose to become the No. 1 digital album for the week. Since then, it has sold about 100,000 copies. Update : As people point out in comments, Roth’s own team did a lot of groundwork before the album hit. Nevertheless, Twitter did play an important role in turning that early interest into iTunes sales. The key to engaging fans, as is well known by now, is for the celebrities themselves to really send out Tweets and show fans a more personal side. Then when they Tweet that a new album is out, it doesn’t seem like marketing. It seems like inside information. One rapper on the panel was Jim Jones ( @jimjones ), who has more than 500,000 followers. He’s also seen iTunes sales spikes after Tweeting out to his followers. In between releases, he entertains them with dirty knock-knock jokes and observations on “What’s Ghetto?” For instance, “drinking out of mayonnaise jars” or getting the last bits of ketchup out of the bottle by putting water in it and shaking it, that’s ghetto. So is using Twitter to move albums on Twitter. I caught up with Jernigan and Jones in the hallway after their panel and got them on video: Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 

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