Wednesday, August 26, 2009

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RightsFlow Scores $1.5 Million For Consumer Facing Site To Obtain Music Rights Top
RightsFlow, a startup that manages music licensing and payment services, has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from Originate Ventures. Launched in 2007, RightsFlow helps online music services, record companies, distributors and artists license music and lyrics while also managing payments for the rights-holders. RightsFlow says that the funding will be used to develop new products and services, one of which will be launched this fall. Currently named “Clearance Form” (I’m told this name is temporary), the product will be a consumer-facing site that will help coordinate payments between the licensee and licensor. So if a cover band or artist wanted to obtain the licensing rights to a particular song, they could go to the site to find and pay for the proper license. RightsFlow’s co-founder Patrick Sullivan told me that the site will be “cost-friendly” and meant for the masses but didn’t shed any light on the pricing model. Music licensing has been a controversial topic recently, with the National Music Publishers Association filing copyright infringement lawsuits against two companies, LiveUniverse and Motive Force, for operating Web sites and applications that offer users free lyrics. Sullivan says that RightsFlow aims to mitigate this problem by providing any artist or band with a cost-effective way to license songs. And RightsFlow will handle payments within the site, acting like an Amazon for music rights. Competitors to RightsFlow include Royalty Share, Music Reports and the Harry Fox Agency. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Collecta Now Lets You Share Your Search Results In Realtime Top
Realtime search for the most part is still mostly about searching Twitter. So it is probably a good idea for fledgling realtime search engines to make it easy to share specific Tweets found in the search results back on Twitter. Since most of the results are Tweets, and search is just another form of navigation and discovery when it comes to the realtime stream, you want to be able to retweet directly from your search results. OneRiot already does this, and today Collecta is adding a similar sharing feature. Although, Collecta also lets you share any result on Facebook, Mixx, Reddit, Delicious, and Stumbleupon as well (but, oddly, not on Digg). Collecta launched last June . In addition to sharing individual results, you can also share the entire search by clicking on “Share this search” under the search term in the left-hand column to pass the link around for your specific query. For instance, here is what people are saying right now about the death of Edward Kennedy . You normally wouldn’t think about sharing regular search results other than as a link, but realtime results operate under a different dynamic. Collecta’s results also now include a little avatar in front of each one, giving it more of a social feel, and making it more familiar to Twitter users. Is this search or a new way to navigate the stream? With realtime search, you are mining the conversations around the Web, tapping into the collective consciousness. So each result should be a jumping off point to start a new conversation. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Bechtolsheim's Arista Networks Releases A Virtualized Network OS For The Cloud Top
Andy Bechtolsheim's cloud computing startup Arista Networks , which sells 1 0-Gigabit Ethernet switches aimed at handling the loads at cloud-computing data centers, has launched a new product today called vEOS (virtualized Extensible Operating System) Software. The software sits on top of their switches and glues physical, virtual, and cloud servers, using VMWare. Arista's Network's switches act as a link between those physical servers in corporate data centers, virtualized servers, and the cloud. With vEOS, IT organizations can now move workloads from physical servers to virtual machines and to cloud infrastructures while maintaining segmentation, trust boundaries, and policy control. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
What Is Going On In Facebook's "Outside World"? Top
When we wrote about Facebook ’s minor design changes earlier today, we didn’t take an extremely close look at the screenshots that were embedded in the accompanying blog post the company’s design team published about the tweaks. If we had, we may or may not have noticed that they featured two nuggets that most definitely deserve a second glance, but FBhive most certainly took notice. What did they see? Well for starters, Facebook Product Designer Alexandre Roche's profile appears to have an extra filter for his news feed, labeled ‘Outside World’ and accompanied by an icon that represents a laboratory beaker (likely because it concerns an experimental feature). Additionally, FBhive has spotted what appears to be a new ‘plus’ icon and number next to the Comment and Like numbers for a Video in the Highlights section of Roche’s profile page. This calls for speculation! FBhive - assuming it’s not a third-party application - believes ‘Outside World’ is a filter that would display content from other websites and applications you’ve subscribed to inside Facebook. This would extend the social network into a giant web-based RSS reader that could integrate seamlessly with the sharing features offered by Facebook. Makes sense to us, and we can imagine this would make waves in Webland if true. That is, if it ever sees the light of day. The second thing FBhive spotted in my opinion is far more intriguing. As reported by the Facebook-centric blog, the (+) sign that appears next to the number of comments and likes of a highlighted video - uploaded by Facebook employee Helen Min - looks like the icon that is used for Facebook Credits (check for yourself here ). These can be used by members of the social network to purchase virtual gifts in Facebook’s Gift Shop or to interact with a select number of third-party applications such as GroupCard and SocialCalendar. Unless of course it isn’t a plus sign at all and we’re looking at it the wrong way (Erick says it looks more like a diamond). Question remains then what it represents, possibly the number of shares or reposts, or a shortcut to bookmarking content? If it is in fact the Credits icon, the question is why this virtual currency could in the future possibly be assigned by users to content like videos and possibly other multimedia. FBhive thinks it could be a way for publishers, amateurs and professionals alike, to monetize material uploaded to the social networking service by directly getting tipped by viewers and fans through micro-payments. Again, this is a plausible explanation, and an exciting one to think over considering Facebook’s highly anticipated payment platform (which is currently being tested ). Care to speculate a little more? Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Branchr Advertising Acquires Online Collaboration Software Maker Atomplan Top
Branchr Advertising , the CPC (cost per click) based internet advertising company that allows fair ad distribution without contracts or setup fees, has acquired small business project and contact management application Atomplan (formerly Avecora OnDemand ), we’ve learned this morning. Financial details were not disclosed, but Branchr Advertising Director/Founder Christian Owens mentioned that the deal was a cash and equity acquisition. Atomplan is a small business organization and team collaboration suite, delivered on the web, on-demand. Among Atomplan features are task and deadline management, group messaging, calendar, contact management and allocation, wiki pages, and Twitter-style status updates. The service was formally run by startup Avecora , which is now moving its focus from web applications to consumer electronics, we’re told by the company’s 17-year old CEO Mark Bao . Branchr self-reports currently serving 100 million ads per month, across more than 2,300 websites. Its competitors include Fusion Ads , which claims to have served nearly 18 million ad impressions last July, and The Deck . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
What Michael Birch Did after Selling Bebo and How He Thinks You Should Celebrate Your Birthday Top
For all the billions of dollars created here, Silicon Valley is remarkably stingy when it comes to giving. I first wrote about this when I moved here in the great Web 1.0 Internet bubble. Back then, as companies went public all around us, one-third of households earning $100,000 or more gave $1,000 or less to charity—roughly half what the rest of the U.S. gave per dollar earned. And those were the fat times. I don't have comparable data to back it up, but anecdotally it seems the Web 2.0 generation is doing a better job at giving. Or at least Bebo founder Michael Birch is. Birch has spent the last six months working with a team of two other people to build a social giving site for the popular organization, Charity:Water. It launched its beta site today, and with just a Tweet announcing it nearly 400 members have already raised some $3,000. Charity:Water's accountability and simplicity of purpose has made it a popular charity in New York, Hollywood and increasingly the Valley.  Here’s the value proposition: One-out-of-six-people on the planet doesn't have access to clean drinking water. $5,000 buys an African village a well. Every dime you donate, goes to these wells. You can even watch the wells being tapped for the first time via Web video. The non-profit is turning three in a few weeks, and it's raised more than $10 million over that time—much of it in $20 increments from a base of some 60,000 donors. It was Obama-fundraising-math before that was invented. As a result some 700,000 people in the world now have access to clean drinking water. It was all started three years ago when Scott Harrison, reformed bad boy and Charity:Water founder, asked people to come to a huge New York party for his September birthday and donate $20 at the door instead of giving him a gift. He raised $15,000 and built six wells in Uganda. (They were cheaper than the wells Charity:Water usually builds because three were shallow wells and three were rehabs of existing wells.) Like any great accidental entrepreneur, Harrison knew he was on to something. In addition to all kinds of creative fund raising, detailed in the video below, the following year, Harrison opened his birthday to everyone via the Web, asking them to donate $32 dollars, since it was his 32 birthday. That year, he raised $59,000 and other September birthday babies brought the total to $150,000, which went to wells in Kenya. Not bad, but they had to HTML hand-code each participant’s site. Pretty laborious work for a small non-profit. The next year he got more September babies to “give up” their birthdays, and a company called InspEnv.com built them a site, but it wasn’t hugely social or scalable. Still 800 people "gave up" their birthdays and raised some $965,000 dollars to bring some 50,000 people clean water in Ethiopia. But Harrison knew that the value of a lot of micro-giving campaigns like Kiva and the popular Facebook application, Causes, is rooted in the ability to make small donations super-easy to solicit and to make via existing online social graphs. He was trying to figure out sites that knew when a huge number of people's birthdays were and after MySpace and Facebook, he came across Bebo. Early last year, he cold-emailed Bebo founder Michael Birch to ask if he'd be willing to send a note out to his September born users and Birch wrote back that it was "a bad time." It was actually a great time for Birch—he was selling the company to AOL for $850 million . Once the deal was done, Birch called Harrison and suggested he build him a site that could help people born in any month instantly "give up their birthdays" for Charity:Water's mission. It was fitting since Birch’s next project was his pre-Bebo project, a site called Birthday Alarm . Nine months later, Harrison is about to turn 34, Charity:Water is turning three, and Birch has finished the site. For a free project, it’s a pretty nice looking site. The recession makes this perfect timing. If you’re panicked about money and job loss, giving up your birthday is an easy way to give to those less-fortunate without having to spend a dime yourself. My husband has a September birthday and has already signed up . I plan to sign up for my birthday in December. You can create your own campaign in a matter of moments and with a few clicks, share it via all your existing social networks. I’m sure the coders who were up until 4 a.m. last night will have mixed feelings about this, but this is one time I really want to see TechCrunch users break a beta site. [Photo credit: Scott Harrison] The story of charity: water - The 2009 September Campaign Trailer from charity: water on Vimeo . CrunchBase Information Michael Birch Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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