Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch


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 (including high profile investors such as Jason Hurschhorn, Mike Slade and Casey Wasserman). 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. 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 whater 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
 
I Love Rewards Raises Another $1.6 Million For Employee Rewards Program Top
I Love Rewards, the Canadian operator of employee rewards and sales incentive recognition programs for companies, has secured a $1.6 million ($1.8 million in Canadian dollars) in an extended Series B round from Ontario Venture Capital Fund. These funds add to I Love Reward’s previous Series B funding roun d in May led by GrandBanks Capital with prior investors JLA Ventures and Laurence Capital participating, bringing the company’s total Series B funding to $7.7 million ($8.7 million in Canadian dollars). The company raised $4 million in Series A funding in 2008 from JLA Ventures and Laurence Capital. The company says this round of funding will be used to expand its sales and marketing efforts. I Love Rewards operates employee rewards and recognition, sales incentive and service award programs for corporations, including Microsoft, Marriott, ConAgra and Bell. Rewards are distributed as 'points' that are then used by employees to choose brand name reward merchandise (i.e. Apple), experiences (i.e. travel and special events), gift cards and virtual awards (i.e. music downloads). Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Amazon Associates To Pull Out Of North Carolina Due To "Unconstitutional Tax Collection Scheme" Top
We’ve received numerous reports of Amazon Associate members in North Carolina receiving emails stating that Amazon is going to have to discontinue the service there due to a pending change the in state’s tax structure. Sometime in the next two weeks, Amazon expects that it will be terminating the service for all North Carolina residents. That will be very bad news for a lot of people who rely on Amazon’s popular affiliate sales program as a source of income. Here’s the full email: We regret to inform you that the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) appears ready to enact an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates. You are receiving this e-mail because our records indicate that you are an Amazon Associate and resident of North Carolina. Please note that this is not an immediate termination notice and you are still a valued participant in the Associates Program. All referral fees earned on qualified traffic will continue to be paid as planned. But because the new law is drafted to go into effect once enacted – which could happen in the next two weeks – we will have to terminate the participation of all North Carolina residents in the Amazon Associates program on or before that same day. After the termination day, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com nor will we accept new applications for the Associates program from North Carolina residents. The unfortunate consequences of this legislation on North Carolina residents like you were explained in detail to key senators and representatives in Raleigh, including the leadership of the Senate, House, and both chambers' finance committees. Other states, including Maryland, Minnesota, and Tennessee, considered nearly identical schemes, but rejected these proposals largely because of the adverse impact on their states' residents. The North Carolina General Assembly's website is http://www.ncleg.net/ , and additional information may be obtained from the Performance Marketing Alliance at http://www.performancemarketingalliance.com/ . We thank you for being part of the Amazon Associates program, and we will apprise you of the General Assembly's action on this matter. Sincerely, Amazon.com So what exactly is this “unconstiutional tax collection scheme”? Here’s what the site news-record has to say : The tax change is part of a package passed by the House last week in its attempt to rewrite the budget. Lawmakers are struggling to fill what they say is a $4.5 billion gap between the money needed to keep government operating as it is and the revenue the state is due to take in next year. As part of the effort to bridge that gap, House members broadened the number of items to which state sales tax would apply and have to be collected by retailers. The tax on the category "digital click-throughs" under which the Amazon agreements fall would raise $13.2 million next year, according to estimates by the General Assembly's fiscal research arm. With its “scheme” and “unconstitutional” wording, Amazon is clearly not happy about this. It also notes that other states have thought about similar measures but rejected them. But hey, that’s a pretty huge budget gap, makes me worried for what California might do. And what’s with the Carolinas and getting into dustups with web companies ? [thanks Mark ] Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Twitterfeed Gets An Overhaul, Adds Analytics Top
If your Twitter feed is beginning to replace your RSS feed , you can probably thank Mario Menti. Back in March, 2007, he created the initial prototype of Twitterfeed in London as part of a BBC developer program. Twitterfeed is a simple publishing tool which turns any RSS feed into a Twitter stream. Each feed item becomes a new Tweet consisting of the headline and a shortened link to the story or blog post. Today, 170,000 publishers are using Twitterfeed to convert 300,000 feeds into Twitter streams. By one count , Twitterfeed is the third largest Twitter client, being used by 6.5 percent of all Twitter accounts and at one point was generating 9.2 percent of all Tweets .But it is not really a Twitter client, as investor John Borthwick of betaworks pointed out to me last night while we were riding in one of those bicycle rickshaws across Manhattan (I do not recommend this mode of transportation, we were in a hurry and there were no regular cabs available). Nobody uses Twitterfeed to consume their Twitter stream, so it is not really a client like TweetDeck or Seesmic Deesktop. However, a lot of people use it to populate their own Twitter account with messages. So many people, in fact, were pushing their feeds through the service that Menti’s one-man shop was having trouble scaling the service. About a month ago, he sold a majority stake to betaworks and The Accelerator Group (TAG), and today it is relaunching with a completely rebuilt back-end, which should improve reliability. Working with betaworks (which includes a stable of interconnected real-time startups including TweetDeck, bit.ly, and Chartbeat), the new Twitterfeed now also includes a basic analytics dashboard which brings in bit.ly data so publishers can see how much traffic is coming to their site from Twitter. They can also compare that side-by-side with traditional Feedburner stats to see where most of their redares are coming from and which source is growing faster. Twitterfeed is also adding more sign-in options. In addition to OpenID, it now accepts usernames and passwords from Google, AOL or Yahoo accounts. But one big drawback the service still needs to address is the lag time between a post hitting a feed and the corresponding Tweet hitting Twitter. It can still take a half an hour between those two events. When you are talking real-time, that is 30 minutes too long. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Bing Is Still Drawing Crowds, Search Share Jumps To 12 Percent Top
Microsoft’s new search engine Bing had a strong showing in its second week, according to the latest comScore stats. You can see our analysis of Bing’s success in its first week here . Microsoft sites' average daily penetration among U.S. searchers reached 16.7 percent during the work week of June 8-12, up 3 percentage points from the May 25-29 period (which was prior to Bing's introduction) and up over 1 percentage point from its first week. Microsoft's share of search result pages in the U.S. increased to 12.1 percent during the period of June 8-12, which is also 3 percentage points above the pre-introduction work week of May 25-29, and up 1 percentage point from the week of June 2-6, 2009. If you take a look at the number of Google search for Bing over the past 30 days on Google Trends, searches peaked but then leveled off to a steady pace. And though Bing is still growing, according to comScore’s analytics, the growth is steady from its first week to its second week. Bing may have come just in time for Microsoft. In May, before Bing’s debut, Microsoft’s search share was down nearly 1 percentage point to 5.0% from 5.9% a year ago, according to comScore’s search data. Google’s U.S. search share, in contrast, increased nearly 2.7 percentage points year-over-year to 60.1%, while Yahoo’s share was 13.9%, down nearly 1.6 percentage points from a year ago. Whether or not Microsoft can sustain the initial curiosity around Bing and keep its market share gains over the long term remains to be seen. But Microsoft is pouring $80-100 million in advertising for Bing and is certainly seeing considerable growth, even to the point where it may have leapfrogged Yahoo for one day. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Aviary Launches Falcon, A Browser Based Image Editor Top
Aviary, the small New York-based startup with the ambitions of recreating Adobe Photoshop’s most popular design tools in the browser, has launched a simple, free tool, called Falcon, that lets you quickly grab and edit images within the browser. Falcon, since it is web-based and works in any browser, can be used on a Mac or PC. Skitch, another similar fast, simple editing tool, is a desktop app that only works on Macs. Both Skitch and Falcon offer a simple subset of tools which was previously only available in Photoshop. As we’ve said in the past, these simple tools are especially useful to bloggers and others who spend a lot of time manipulating and editing images on the fly. The beauty of Aviary is in its Firefox plugin, called Talon, which let’s you grab a screen shot or portion of a screen at any time and automatically imports the image into Aviary’s browser-based editing platform. When you click on the icon on your browser when you are on a page you want to capture, you are given the choice of capturing a portion of the screen, the entire viewed screen, or the entire page (below the fold). The option of capturing the entire page is a useful; and a feature that Skitch currently doesn’t allow. Once you capture the image, Falcon gives you the option of editing the image on Aviary.com, saving the image to your desktop, copying it to your clipboard or hosting the image at Aviary.com. Aviary’s in-browser editing platform is similar to Skitch’s desktop app and adds much of the same functionality. You can add arrows and text to an image, as well as crop, rotate, and resize your image. Falcon also has a built-in color picker tool to extract web color values from images and screenshots. For more design power, you can port your image into 4 different powerful Aviary tools, including color editor, advanced image editor, effects editor and vector editor. Once you are finished with editing your image, you can save the image as a PNG or JPG either on your desktop or host it on Aviary. Aviary Pro members can gain additional storage options like privacy and watermark control for $24.99 per year. Like with Skitch, images that are uploaded to your Aviary account can be commented by other users, and there are a number of options to embed that image in other websites or link to an image from other sites, like Twitter or Facebook. Aviary has also released the API for Falcon, so that any website can integrate the tool. The drawback of Falcon is that if you don’t use Firefox, the tool isn’t as simple as with the plug-in. You have to import a image into Aviary’s browser editing platform or or you can paste link into the platform to get the entire page imported in, which you can then edit. Since we first covered the company, Aviary had kept most of its tools in private beta. Only four have become publicly available: Phoenix, an image editor along the lines of Photoshop; Peacock, a so-called "visual laboratory" for pixel-based images; Toucan, a color palette tool; and Raven, a vector-based image editor that mimics (and therefore competes with) Adobe Illustrator. Adobe also released a simple, browser-based photo editing tool at Photoshop.com, but it is designed more as an application to edit photos as opposed to grabbing and editing items and screenshots from websites . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Have A "Cheap" iPhone 3G Plan? Don't Expect A "Cheap" iPhone 3G S Upgrade. Top
So, after a tidal wave of criticism from the iPhone early adopters, AT&T is doing the right thing — kind of. Today, AT&T issued an update to its policy regarding the iPhone 3G S upgrade price. Previously, only those existing customers who were eligible for a new phone subsidy (typically those within a few months of their two year contract expiring) would get the best price for the device. That meant no current iPhone 3G owners were getting it because that device is only 11 months old. But now, AT&T will offer the best price to some iPhone 3G owners — but which ones? Basically, it looks like those the most expensive contracts. “We're now pleased to offer our iPhone 3G customers who are upgrade eligible in July, August or September 2009 our best upgrade pricing, beginning Thursday, June 18,” AT&T writes. But don’t be fooled, that’s far from everyone. If you read a few lines above you’ll see “For example, iPhone customers who spend more than $99 a month per line with us generally are eligible for an upgrade between 12 and 18 months into their contract.” As an iPhone 3G AT&T customer, I decided to check my eligibility using “check eligibility” tool on Apple’s website. The date I’m eligible for the upgrade according to that site is December 12, 2009 — well outside the July, August or September rule. I bought the iPhone 3G on day one, so why am I not eligible? Because I’m not paying enough — by 33 cents, apparently. My monthly bill is $98.67. As someone with the 450 anytime minute plan (the lowest), I would venture to guess that I’m in the same boat as most of you out there with iPhone 3Gs. I opted to get 1500 text messages tacked on to my plan for $15 a month mostly because I hate AT&T’s (and all other carrier’s) ridiculous text messaging pricing . So I saved myself $5, which would have gotten me unlimited texts, but more importantly, would have put me over the $99 a month threshold. But look at the wording from AT&T again. If those paying more than $99 a month are eligible for upgrades after between 12 and 18 months, I would assume those paying $100 are towards the 18 month part of that window, while those much paying much more are closer to the 12 month line. So this is just a guess, but if my $98.67 isn’t eligible until December under the old rules, I would imagine you’ll have to have a monthly bill in something like the $120 or above range to hit the September window needed to trigger the fully subsidized iPhone 3G S price. The new upgrade prices will go into effect tomorrow on AT&T’s eligibility tool, so we’ll know for sure then. But when that happens I fully suspect I’ll see my iPhone 3G S offer to be the same $399 or $499 as it is today. And if you’re on the lowest iPhone 3G plan, you can expect the same. I completely understand why I wasn’t originally eligible for the subsidy (that’s how it works, AT&T subsidized my phone last year over the course of a two year deal), but I don’t like this new arbitrary pricing cut-off at customers with $99 a month contracts or higher. All AT&T iPhone plans are expensive — to the point where AT&T is trying to find a way to bring them down a bit. I thought that it would be in AT&T’s best interest to offer all iPhone 3G early adopters a fully subsidized iPhone 3G S simply because it would lock us in for another 2 years of expensive monthly service. That’s something AT&T shouldn’t pass up given the rumors swirling about the company losing its iPhone exclusivity after next year. But now, for many users still not eligible for the iPhone 3G S full subsidy, who likely won’t upgrade, they’ll be free to do as they wish next year. Including leave AT&T. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Really Love Firefox? Skin Your iPhone, Laptop or Even Your Car with Firefox Artwork Top
Mozilla has teamed with Infectious , a startup that lets users easily customize iPhones, laptops and even cars with high quality stickers of commissioned artwork. From time to time Infectious works with corporate partners to create custom stickers. Here’s an example of an iPhone with a Wordpress theme , for example. We’re also talking to them about designing custom stickers for the CrunchPad. The Mozilla project brings art from five Infectious artists that you can buy now. iPhone skins cost $15, laptops skins are $30 and car decals are $35. 25% of the proceeds go to the artist and the Mozilla Foundation. In a couple of weeks Infectious will also open up the project and let any artist submit work. One or more winners will be selected by user voting and input from Mozilla and Infectious, and users will then be able to buy those skins, too. More info on the Mozilla blog . Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Yahoo Rolls Out A "Real-Time" Toolbar Top
Yahoo released a new browser toolbar today for IE and Firefox which lets you add icons for your favorite Yahoo apps and Websites. When you click on the icons, you get a drop-down preview of your favorite sites, mail, stock quotes, or news feeds without having to go to those sites directly. It is only real-time in that you can check for the latest updates without going to those sites. From the Yahoo blog. Small previews drop down from your toolbar, giving you real-time information without ever having to leave the page you're on. The toolbar is completely customizable, so you add from a large Websites or apps you want to keep handy. But if it really wants to be real-time, Yahoo needs to make it easier for you to preview your personal activity stream across sites. Other add-ons such as Friendbar try the streaming ticker approach, which I find too distracting. But perhaps a drop-down stream preview or built-in notifications when new items appear in your stream (whether that is Twitter, Facebook, or something else) would be preferable. Yahoo also made search faster from the toolbar, incorporating some search assist technology from its Inquisitor acquisition. It suggests refined queries as you begin typing and sites that you’ve clicked on in the past. (The Inquisitor app for the iPhone is also worth checking out). Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
iPhone OS 3.0 Just Launched. Here Are 20 Things To Do With It. Top
Here it is, folks. At long last, version 3.0 of the iPhone OS has launched here in the US, bringing with it just about every feature the phone should have had from the start - and a whole lot more. If you hadn’t already coaxed an iPhone developer into letting you piggyback on their account or (gasp!) actually shelled out for a developers membership, the past 3 months have probably been pretty grueling. You read the blogs , and kept up on every new feature to be uncovered . Maybe you even made a list of all the things you wanted to check out first. No? Well, here you go. Read the rest of this entry >> Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Ask Waves Its Arms To Tell Everyone It Also Does Q&A Search Top
One of the most active sub-genres of search right now in terms of startup and new product activity is question and answer sites. Some searches are subjective and best answered by another human being. The success of Yahoo Answers proved this and spurred a raft of competitors to try their own hand at making Q&A better. These include Answerbag , Wiki Answers , Mahalo Answers , Aardvark , and Hunch . Now Ask , arguably the original Q&A search engine (in that it encouraged searches to be asked as a question, not that the answers came from other humans), is waving its arms to remind people that you can ask questions and find answers there as well. In fact, it is doing a little more than that. Today, it launched a Q&A tab on its site which taps into a new database of 300 million pairs of questions and answers, which it has crawled and indexed from around the Web. In other words, it is crawling the other Q&A sites to look for the best answers to a particular question. It is also applying some semantic and clustering filters to group similar questions together and to try to surface the most relevant results. It is more of a search engine for Q&A sites than a Q&A site itself. You can’t answer any of the questions, just search for what other people have answered on other sites. At first glance, I find it a bit unsatisfying. I asked it, What is the best Q&A site? Yahoo Answers seemed to be the consensus, but no other choices even surfaced. I tried, What is the newest Q&A site? and it turns up only a single result from someone on Yahoo Answers asking how to go about creating a new Q&A site. Does Ask even search Mahalo Answers? If it did, it would have found this question (”What other question and answer services have you used, tried or have found interesting besides Mahalo Answers?”) that includes a long list of more than 25 Q&A sites, many of which I had never even heard of (including Afraid To Ask , Ask An Owner , Blurtit , and Quenchmark ). It is not just that the answers on the handful of queries I tried weren’t so great, it is that taking a purely algorithmic approach to Q&A is the wrong answer. Obviously there are way too many Q&A sits out there and Ask is trying to find the best existing answers from everything that is out there across different Q&A sites. But offering Q&A search without letting people ask new questions or improve the results by offering their own answers kind of misses the whole point of Q&A. It is people helping out people to find the best answers to their questions. At least the Q&A startups are trying to move the ball forward by building a community and incentives around Q&A (Mahalo Answers), machine-learning and game-play (Hunch), or let you tap into your direct social circle for more trustworthy answers (Aardvark). These sites get smarter the more people who use them and some of them offer personalized answers as well. The right answer to any question often depends on who is asking. Ask thinks there is one or two right answers for everyone. (Image above courtesy PhotoXpress ). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Visual Search Engine SearchMe Moves Ad Platform Out Of Beta Top
SearchMe, the search engine startup which presents search results as a stack of full-page previews that you can flip through, is bringing its ad network out of beta. The SearchMe ad platform, which was originally named AdView when it launched in February, is the visual search engine’s version of AdWords, except that instead of selling paid text links, it intersperses ads into results of clickable previews of entire webpages, videos, or other visual advertising. SearchMe’s advertising is appealing because the website becomes the ad itself, making the ad larger and more visually stimulating. So if you search for “Volvo” on SearchMe and if you flip through to the third result, it will be an ad that shows a landing page for Volvo’s latest models. Ad units can also be a YouTube video which can be played without leaving SearchMe. As we wrote in our previous review, SearchMe’s approach is similar to what StumbleUpon does, with ads placed in every 20 or so Stumbles. During the beta period, SearchMe let 600 advertisers experiment with the network, with 50 of the participants being big-name brands, including Campbell’s and Volvo. SearchMe’s CEO and co-founder Randy Adams says that CPCs are $0.25 for the advertisers. And click through rates are high—at around 8%. While visually appealing landing pages could be a potentially effective form of advertising, there needs to be enough unique visits for the advertising to be valuable in the long term. In February, SearchMe had about 3 million monthly visitors in the U.S, according to Quantcast. In April, the site had grown to 4 million monthly visitors. But in May, the number of U.S. visitors plummeted to around 750,000 visitors in the U.S. SearchMe says that this drop in numbers is due to the fact that the search engine was spending $500,000 a month in advertising and driving a lot of traffic to the site. The startup is now spending little to no capital on advertising and is in the process of closing distribution deals to place the search bar in browsers and toolbars. SearchMe maintains that advertisers responded positively to the network and type of ads, and especially the click through rates. And the startup also says it’s not in competition with search engines like Bing and Google, who have the lions share of search traffic. Instead they are out to compete with other visual search engines like Middlespot, Viewzi and Snap. Sequoia-backed SearchMe originally launched the private beta of its search engine in 2008 and to date has raised $43.6 million in funding. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
SugarSync Makes File Syncing More Social Top
Sharpcast’s SugarSync, an application that synchronizes data across desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, and even televisions, is rolling out a a few features designed to make the service more interactive and social. The idea behind SugarSync is that it allows you to back-up any kind of digital file, including videos, spreadsheets, photos and documents, in the cloud and access it from virtually anywhere via a variety of devices. You can read our reviews of SugarSync here and here. Syncing is becoming a popular technology trend as people split up their digital lives across devices and the Web and are looking to the cloud to enable this across devices. Apple offers syncing through its MobileMe service. There is also competition from Windows Live Mesh from Microsoft, which won a Crunchie for best technology innovation earlier this year. Startups Dropbox and Mozy also provide popular syncing services in the cloud. SugarSync is stepping up to the plate by trying to add more interactive features. The service has improved folder sharing, letting users share files with anyone in their Gmail, Hotmail, AOL or Yahoo Mail contact lists. Users will also be able to directly upload photos stored in SugarSync to Facebook, with functionality for additional social networks to be rolled out in the near future. SugarSync is also trying to get users to promote the services by increasing the size of their accounts for free if the user refers someone to open a new account. Users can refer others automatically by sharing a SugarSync folder with them or by sending an invitation through Facebook or Twitter. SugarSync offers and free and paid service, with prices ranging from $25 to $250 a year depending on storage size. SugarSync is also enhanced the interface of its free mobile applications for Blackberry, Apple iPhone, and iPod Touch. SugarSync, which raised funding earlier this year, doesn’t release data on how many users the service has but did tell us that since its launch, more than 1 billion files have been backed up and synced to SugarSync, with 550 terabytes of total data backed up and synced in SugarSync’s cloud. If SugarSync continue to add useful features, like the ability to publish files to social networks and making mobile applications more user-friendly, the site could seriously compete with, and maybe surpass, the big guys, like Apple, and the innovative startups. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 
Adgregate Markets Snaps Up Widget Maker Gydget Top
Transactional advertising network provider Adgregate Markets , a finalist at the most recent TechCrunch50 conference , has announced that it has recently acquired Gydget , a venture-backed startup in the widget business. Gydget, which powers a platform for fan-driven, viral widgets primarily centered around entertainment and consumer brands, will be folded into Adgregate’s ShopAds , a fairly innovative advertising network that enables customers to complete secure transactions within Flash-based ad banners. Adgregate Markets seems to be onto something, recently proven by the fact that the company scored a distribution deal with Google’s DoubleClick , enabling advertisers on that platform to integrate ShopAds widgets with just a few mouse-clicks. The press release boasts about the Gydget ad network currently reaching more than 30 million impressions per month, and also mentions ShopAds widgets have currently been installed 200,000 times. While the acquisition makes sense on the surface, when you dig a little deeper you’ll note that Gydget seemed to be running out of fuel anyway (not surprising considering the economy we’re in and the general slow-down of the widget business): backed by over $1 million in venture capital from Felicis Ventures and Sunbridge Partners, its founder and CEO Gerardo Capiel recently bailed the company to become VP Product Management for MySpace (presuming he still has that job today, considering the massive lay-off round announced yesterday). The terms of Gydget’s acquisition were not disclosed. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 
Socialcast Offers New Freemium Version Of Its FriendFeed For The Enterprise Top
True Ventures backed Socialcast is launching adopting the freemium model for its FriendFeed-like collaboration and social network SaaS for businesses. A finalist for the 2009 Crunchies Award for "Best Bootstrapped Startup," Socialcast is a communication tool businesses can use to incorporate social networking with real-time messaging to share knowledge across enterprises. Socialcast's software combines social bookmarking features, Twitter-like microblogging and FriendFeed-like streaming into one platform. And the software integrates with other social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and Del.icio.us. Socialcast can also import activity from your iPhone, Gmail account and YouTube. The best part is that all of this activity is private, making Socialcast a competitive program for real-time, internal communication within businesses. The new version of Socialcast will become even more like FriendFeed, including real-time activity streams complete with real-time track functionality that allows user's to stay updated on subjects of interest, groups, projects, keywords, etc. Socialcast will also be rolling out an Adobe AIR desktop app, as well as the in-browser software. While the app is useful, we’ve complained in the past about the strange quirks and bugs in Adobe AIR. The software, which used to be $1 per user per month, will now be completely free for an unlimited amount of users but businesses can choose to add paid features to Socialcast. This includes the ability to see analytics and mine data from a group’s network, providing a tag cloud and stats on which employees communicate most and least often. Another premium feature is a consultancy service provided by Socialcast on how to help employees adopt and deploy the technology (which doesn’t seem that difficult so this may not be worth paying for). For a extra fee, users can also choose to put Socialcast behind a firewall for extra protection. Socialcast is similar in some ways to Yammer, a winner at last year's TechCrunch 50, is a similar Twitter-like microblogging and communication platform for businesses that has gained popularity. But Socialcast seems to have a lot more bells and whistles than Yammer in its interface. Cubetree also offers a social network and microblogging platform for the enterprise. And of course there’s the mysterious and hyped Google Wave. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
New Funding For A New World: eRepublik Raises €2 Million Top
Madrid, Spain-based eRepublik , makers of what the startup refers to as a ‘massive online social strategy game’ (MOSS), has just raised €2 million - approx. $2.8 million - in Series A funding from AGF Private Equity . The company had previously raised up to €750,000 in seed funding from the VC firm and a host of angel investors, bringing the total invested to €2.75 million or a little over $3.8 million. eRepublik, its first MOSS, is set in a browser-based mirrored version of the real world in which players (called citizens) can participate in politics, set economic policy, start businesses, engage in wars with other countries and interact socially with other players while they’re at it. The company pitches the virtual world to have an edge over other strategy games played online because it’s not nearly as time-consuming; 15 minutes per day they say should suffice. According to the company, traffic numbers are going through the roof: the eRepublik website is said to have received over 3.7 million visits in May, with citizens from some 200 countries having spent over 55 million minutes and generating 95 million page views navigating the virtual world during that month. Pretty impressive for a small European company (eRepublik Labs only has 30 employees). The fresh funding will be used to extend eRepublik in terms of new features: eRepublik co-founder and CEO Alexis Bonte says they’re only at about 25% of what the game should become in the near future. The company is also expanding the eRepublik platform into other languages - the company just launched a Spanish language version this month - and is busy preparing the launch of multiple new games. Here’s a video of Bonte interviewing Guillaume Latour, a partner at AGF PE who will be joining the startup’s board: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
Yeah, What Is A Browser Anyway? Top
My esteemed colleague MG Siegler just posted about an admittedly quite in-your-face campaign from Microsoft down under, criticizing Redmond for a ‘pathetic’ attempt at trying to make people switch from using whatever browser other than IE they’re using at the moment in exchange for a chance to win $10,000 . I don’t necessarily disagree - it’s fair to say there are far better ways to market browsers than covert bribery and making the competition look like bad eggs - but it doesn’t really surprise me and it won’t work anyway. But do the browser wars us geeks follow so closely matter to John Doe at all? Here’s a video some NY-based Google employees put up on YouTube a while ago, titled ‘What is a browser?’: Pretty funny, and as Orli Yakuel said on Twitter , it kind of puts these browser wars (IE8! Safari! Firefox! Chrome! Opera!) in a whole different perspective. Note the difference in culture, though. While Microsoft is trying to lure people away from using browsers like Firefox or Chrome with cold hard cash (or at least a chance to get some of that), Google employees don’t make a big fuss about letting people use the brand names of competitors in their videos and they humorously handle the fact that none of the people interviewed knew what Google Chrome is to begin with. And by the way, the guy that said he’s probably not the right one to ask because he’s not into computers that much, is not that far off: “I don’t know, I guess the Internet is just where you, you know, find anything and I guess you browse the same way.” Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
 
If Only The Hungry Used IE8, They Could Get $10,000 Rather Than $0.14 From Microsoft Top
I love the range of Microsoft’s campaigns to get people to use Internet Explorer 8. They spread from offering to feed the homeless if you download it, to offering you the chance at $10,000 dollars. It’s quite impressive, really. I think we all know my feelings about Microsoft using charity in a misleading way to drive IE8 downloads, but this latest promotion is just kind of pathetic. Microsoft has a campaign in Australia to give away $10,000 that it has buried “somewhere on the Internet.” But the catch is that in order to find this money, you need to be using IE8. Apparently, if you stumble upon the site where Microsoft placed it using that browser, you’ll get some sort of notification and the money is yours. Sadly, I don’t have IE8, so instead I get this rather rude message on the page: “But you’ll never find it using that browser. So get rid of it, or get lost.” That’s a nice FU to Mac users who don’t even have the option to use IE. Not that it should be surprising. What else is interesting about this campaign is that it’s also directly tied to Twitter. Microsoft is suggesting that users who wish to play this IE8 treasure hunt also follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter to get daily clues. Finally, at the bottom of the page it reads, “Tell your friends. It’s not as stupid as it sounds.” At least they acknowledge that it sounds stupid. Actually though, it’s not that stupid, it’s just kind of desperate. If Microsoft really wants to get people to use IE8 it should rely less on tacky gimmicks and more on making a great product. If you do that, the users will follow — and you won’t even have to pay them. [thanks Andy] Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Phase 4 Of Facebook's Systematic Attack On Twitter: The Everyone Button Top
If you were to distill Facebook down to its core magic, you’d have Twitter’s real time news stream with a really expensive -to- maintain photo site bolted on. And while Twitter isn’t exactly posing much of a current threat, Facebook isn’t taking any chances . Just as Friendster and MySpace tried to buy Facebook in the early days (and nearly did), Facebook is now trying to take Twitter out. First was the acquisition attempt . Then came a focus on real time content streams. Today we saw phase 3 - a search engine for public status updates and other content that a small percentage of users are able to test. Next week, we hear, phase 4 of Facebook’s systematic attack on Twitter is scheduled for beta testing: the Everyone Button. Facebook currently has complicated privacy settings to let users control who sees what content they post. There are 27 different settings for most Facebook content, plus another 17 for applications. Most users don’t bother. If Facebook is going to leapfrog Twitter and become the place for the real time news stream, they need more than a new user interface and a search engine (they must be livid to see things like this - Twitter will forever be associated with the civil unrest in Iran, just the most recent example). They need public content as well. And that means encouraging users to post at least some of their content publicly. The current privacy settings don’t allow for specific status updates and other messages to be treated differently than other messages. That’s going to change. Users will be presented with a variety of privacy choices every time a message is posted to Facebook - everyone, friends and networks, friends of friends and friends. They’ll also be allowed to customize the settings further. But the top choice, and the one most people will choose, is “Everyone.” That means you can have an entirely private profile but occasionally choose (or, Facebook hopes, always choose) to have status messages, links, photos, events, etc. be public and findable in that shiny new search engine. It’s not clear that Facebook will be able to quickly convince its users to make content public. Just a couple of years ago there were revolts over the launch of the news stream itself , and it wasn’t all that long ago that college students were super not happy about all the old people being let in. But none of that matters. Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg’s world, and we just live in it. He’ll bend us all to his will. Watch your back, Twitter. I hear Phase 5 is a doozy. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
 
Your iPhone 3G S Is Here. But You Can't Get It Until Friday. Top
Following up on our earlier story , it looks like Apple is holding back delivery of the iPhone 3G S units that we pre-ordered over the web, until Friday. This, despite the fact that they’re already in the United States, and many had been scheduled to be delivered tomorrow. Earlier, several reports came in of disappearing delivery dates from online shipping trackers. That missing date has now been replaced on numerous people’s invoices with the following: “THE RECEIVER REQUESTED A HOLD FOR A FUTURE DELIVERY DATE. UPS WILL ATTEMPT DELIVERY ON DATE REQUESTED “ Yes, you are the receiver, and no, you probably didn’t request the hold. Instead, this is likely Apple’s way of telling the delivery service not to deliver the package early. Not surprisingly, reports indicate that the “date requested” for delivery is Friday, the official iPhone 3G S launch day. A lot of people who had pre-ordered were excited to learn their new devices may be here early, but Apple, it seems, is one step ahead. Perhaps if you’re able to track down the UPS warehouse where yours is being held, they’ll let you pick it up early. Let us know if you successfully do that. At least you can still play with the 3.0 software today and tomorrow, despite earlier rumors that it may be held back too. [photo: flickr/ darin moran ] [thanks Gee-Hwan] Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
 

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions




You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.

No comments:

Post a Comment