Wednesday, September 16, 2009

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Twitter's Next Headache: API Name Squatting Top
Twitter continues to work through username squatting issues by reassigning trademarked and even non-trademarked user names to their more appropriate owners. It’s a manual process that sometimes takes weeks, but with Twitter’s growing importance more and more brands are trying to lock up their usernames. Now, though, Twitter has a new headache, and poor organization and planning around Twitter’s third party developer platform is to blame. When Tweets are published there is an additional layer of information below the main message that says when the message was posted, and how it was posted. Here’s an example message Michael Arrington just posted from the Seesmic Twitter web app. If you click on “Seesmic” in that Tweet it takes you to Seesmic.com. But there’s a problem. Twitter’s API allows developers to register any application name, and Twitter messages posted from that third party application will show that name and will link to anything the developer wants. Only names that contain “twitter” or “tweet” are filtered out. Everything else is fair game. Robert Robb from TweetBorder emailed us about this, and show this test Twitter message that was posted from “Windows.” He also registered the Microsoft name but deleted it to avoid any legal trouble. We’ve checked, and the TechCrunch name has already been taken by someone. This isn’t a big issue yet, but we expect to become one shortly. And if you want to avoid the hassle of trying to get your name back from the Twitter API, we recommend you take steps to register your name and application now. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Twitter Closing New Venture Round At $1 Billion Valuation Top
Fast growing startup Twitter will soon be joining a select group of startups with private venture round valuations of $1 billion, we’ve heard from multiple sources. CEO Evan Williams disclosed the round to employees at a recent all hands meeting. The company will raise around $50 million, we’ve heard, although the final amount of the raise is apparently not yet locked down. Twitter raised $35+ million earlier this year in a round led by Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners. That round valued the company at $250 million. The company has raised a total of around $55 million to date, and sources tell us they have approximately $30 million left in the bank. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
PayPal Partners With FundRazr And Lottay To Test New Adaptive Payments API Top
Recently, PayPal announced its flexible payments API, called Adaptive Payments (which we scooped ) gives developers full access to PayPal's features, allowing them a lot more freedom in building applications, which includes the ability to accept and distribute payments. PayPal is timing the official availability of these APIs with its PayPal X Innovate 2009 conference in November. According to PayPal, developer attendees will receive exclusive access to the new APIs that won’t be available to non-attendees until 2010. And PayPal will be unveiling its platform roadmap for the future, which should be interesting. We already got a little sneak preview of the PayPal’s future vision a few weeks ago. Of course, it’s always helpful to see what developers can actually do with this new API to see it’s true power and connectivity. PayPal has been beta testing the new flexible payments platform with select developers over the past few months and it just so happens that two of testers are TechCrunch50 demopit companies. FundRazr is a Facebook app that lets any individual, organizer or volunteer collect money on behalf of a social group, sports team, school club, charity, or campaign or. The startup is using PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API to process the transactions. Lottay, another TechCrunch50 demopit company that is building its platform off of PayPal’s new API, lets you create an online gift that people can put money towards. Users can create gift pages on Lottay with detailed descriptions and pictures of a particular goal or gift and then friends can contribute to the site via PayPal. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Alibaba Turns 10 – Aims To Create 100 Million Jobs, Employ 10 Million People Top
This is a guest post by Shanghai-based entrepreneur George Godula. His company Web2Asia partners with Western Internet companies for market entry in Eastern Asia, and also does early stage investments in local tech startups. George had the opportunity this weekend to attend Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group ’s 10 year anniversary celebration, dubbed the “Alifest”. Alibaba is best known for its international B2B e-commerce and sourcing market place Alibaba.com , but also operates Taobao – the “eBay of China” and largest C2C Internet retail web site, Alimama – an online advertising exchange and affiliate network – as well as Alipay , China’s most popular third-party online payment system modelled after Paypal but offering additional features such as escrow services. Alibaba’s chairman Jack Ma, a former English teacher, founded Alibaba in 1999 out of his Hangzhou apartment. Ten years later the company has grown to China’s second largest Internet company , after digital entertainment giant Tencent. His company Alibaba.com’s 2007 IPO on the Hong Kong stock exchange was the second largest Internet offering ever after Google’s debut on NASDAQ in 2004. Since 2005, Yahoo! is a strategic shareholder when it acquired 39% of Alibaba Group for US$ 1 billion. In return Alibaba operates the portal Yahoo! China , but the secondary role Yahoo! China plays for Alibaba became evident when Ma shared his vision for the next 10 years of Alibaba during this weekend’s press conference. This was once again underscored yesterday when Yahoo! sold $150 million worth of shares in Alibaba.com . Jack’s dream is to focus on empowering and encouraging small and medium sized enterprises (SME’s) across the globe and it centers around 3 major goals for the next 10 years: Goal 1: 10 million people “work at” Alibaba By “working at” Jack symbolically referred to millions of SME entrepreneurs that will not literally be employed by Alibaba but are turned to “netrepeneurs” and independently utilize and work online with Alibabas trade platforms and software solutions: Alisoft was established in January 2007 and offers software as a service solutions for SME’s. In July 2009, Alisoft was merged with Alibaba Group R&D Institute to lay a solid technology foundation to further develop Alibaba Group’s businesses. At the same time Alibaba Group this weekend announced the establishment of a new subsidiary focusing on cloud computing. In the medium run, it is evident that Alibaba will strive to emerge as a leading software solution provider for SME’s, eventually competing with Western players such as Salesforce.com . Goal 2: 100 million new jobs created worldwide by Alibaba A megalomaniac target at first glance, this could very well become reality when considering Alibabas resources and Jack Ma’s obviously wide-reaching personal connections that became more apparent to me through the course of Alifest. In May 2007, Alibaba.com introduced the Ali-loan program offering financing to small Chinese businesses in partnership with leading Chinese banks. This model was now hinted to be extended across other countries in cooperation with Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen bank. The second corner stone to achieve this goal involves Alibabas training department, Ali-Institute that was upgraded this July to become a new profit-oriented business unit under Alibaba.com. During the cleverly staged Alifest program speakers such as Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus, former president Bill Clinton (both over video) and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz underpinned the importance of fostering SME development across developing nations and endorsed Alibabas global efforts. This is quite remarkably for a Chinese company. Provided, you still consider it as such: “In 10 years we wont make differences between local or international companies any more, but only between differences in integrity”, Jack Ma said during his speech this weekend. All points considered Alibaba is indeed in a powerful position to shape the worlds economy in the coming decade. Taking Alibabas already undisputed status among SME manufacturers in what is soon to become world’s largest economy, even the third proclaimed goal by Jack Ma can seem plausible: Goal 3: 1 billion people trading on Alibaba Group’s platforms The roadway to Alibabas most eager goal was visualized to us impressively when Alibaba.com’s CEO David Wei gave us an exclusive tour of his company’s new headquarters. (Which by the way also has a basketball court inaugurated by another of Jack Ma’s friends Kobe Bryant, who was also present in Hangzhou this weekend) David presented us Alibaba’s realtime trading statistics generated from the three pillars of its business: international trade, domestic Chinese wholesale and domestic Chinese retail. (the according graphs can be seen in the picture above from left to right). During the time of our visit last Friday evening at around 7pm Chinese time, 2.87 million concurrent users were active on Alibaba.com’s B2B portal. According to David the daily average concurrent user number is 4 million, around 10% of its 42.8 million worldwide registered users. The groups domestic C2C e-commerce marketplace Taobao holds around 78% of the online consumer market in China. As of mid-2009, it served 156 million registered users. Transaction volume on Taobao reached nearly US$ 11.8 billion in the first half of 2009, and by that exceeded the largest retailer in China in transaction volume during the same period. David continued to say that “Alibaba’s combined trading statistic give us 3-6 months lead time to predict Chinas domestic trade and export volumes”. These are without doubts immensely powerful insights to possibly the biggest driver of our current world economy. Not without reason, Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma was one of the first to recognize the economic downturn in February last year, when he predicted “a though (economic) winter is coming , dark clouds are forming and the thunder is coming closer” during the annual Alibaba all-employee conference. “Today, the darkest period for Chinese exporters is over”, Alibaba’s CEO David Wei confirmed to us. I asked David to tell us more about AliExpress – a new international wholesale platform for small-sum orders from its Alibaba.com database of Chinese manufacturers. He confirmed “the platform is still in beta but bound to launch in rather weeks than months from now”. The service offers minimum orders as low as 1 item, escrow payment and delivery with full tracking. Advertising “factory prices on even the smallest orders” the service is de facto a B2C marketplace just like Amazon and in part eBay that connects the Chinese manufacturers on Alibabas existing B2B portal Alibaba.com with the US consumer market. It will also be the first international roll out of Alibaba’s online payment and escrow system Alipay now competing with PayPal China in fight for Chinese SME merchants. Alipay currently facilitates about 4 million online payments worth up to US$100 million per day. It surpassed 200 million registered users in early July 2009. With AliExpress the company for the first time attacks eBay directly in its home market. In China the US company already lost against Alibabas Taobao, giving up its domestic eBay platform and partially selling it to Chinese Internet group TOM Online in 2006. Not included in that sale, however was eBays and PayPals cross-boarder business of Chinese merchants selling to US consumers, that continues to be operated by PayPal China itself. This remaining eBay asset is now under serious threat, with Alibaba entering the B2C export business. The move nevertheless comes with many risks for Alibaba. Only in December last year, Alibaba’s competitor Global Sources Direct , a division of NASDAQ-listed online sourcing platform Global Sources, announced it would discontinue its wholesale services. The platform was established in 2005 as a joint venture between Global Sources and eBay. A major part of the failure was attributed to the fact, that in such a cross national market place setting, it is impossible for its operator to guarantee quality, availability and delivery times. Instead it has to rely on the goodwill of its merchants, which in a developing market like China is a huge challenge. It remains to be seen how Alibaba can solve this problem better than its competitors. Additionally to its international challenges Alibaba Group is under constant attack from rising Chinese rivals such as Baidu’s new C2C e-commerce platform Youa . Since the end of last year China’s number one search engine Baidu.com has blocked all Taobao merchants offers in its natural search results, leading to a huge loss of search volume. In retaliation Alibaba Group, previously one of the biggest ad spenders on Baidu , stopped all its PPC campaigns. In the "Art of War", Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu writes “concentrate your energy and hoard your strength”. However, Alibaba’s Jack Ma seems to ignore this advice by competing on multiple battlefields both at home and abroad, potentially stretching his company's resources too thin. Yet the man reinforced his modesty in yesterdays closing speech when he said “looking back we are now a big company, but looking ahead we are still a very small company”. Having seen Ma passionately in action this weekend, it is clear that he's lost none of the tireless energy that has made him successful, instead gaining in charisma and determination that will be necessary for the next 10 years ahead. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TC50: Meet The Whuffie, A New Currency That's Based On Your Online Reputation Top
It’s a sad fact of life that many of the most insightful and helpful people on the web (and in real life, for that matter) aren’t financially rewarded for their efforts — they may well be satisfied with the good they’ve done, but that doesn’t help to pay the rent. The Whuffie Bank , a new non-profit organization that’s launching today at TechCrunch50 , wants to fix this by launching a new currency that rewards people for their positive contributions on the web. The startup is hoping to promote change in the web by rewarding users with a positive impact on the web with this karma-like digital currency. The service will monitor your activity across various websites, including things like comments, posts, and more. When you complete positive actions, you gain Whuffies, and you lose them when you do something that the organization deems to be detrimental. The company hopes that as we use the web more and more in our day-to-day life this positivity will extend beyond the web. To get started you enter your username on Twitter (Facebook support will be coming). The site displays how many Whuffies you have, along with a graph of your progress over time. The site ranks its users by Whuffies, in the hopes of helping surface the top users in different fields. The algorithm takes into account ‘public endorsements’, or the number of times a user’s tweets are retweeted, or a Facebook post is Liked. It also takes into account who is making the endorsement, and the content in the messages that are being posted. You can make offers to other users using Whuffies as payment (for example, I could ask someone to help me draw a logo, offering 100 Whuffies as payment). The company says it was inspired by the Creative Common nonprofit model. The name comes from Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire, and Robert Scoble: RH: The problem with this kind of currency is you need banking system… There are people on the web whose political views mean nothing to me. This will be very difficult, but as a concept I think it’s cool. DC: I was thinking about Reid’s comment and the interesting thing about virtual currencies is that even when they’re not scarce, you can make people think they’re scarce. In Zynga, chips cost a certain amount of money. It’s a challenge to incite scarcity, but you can do it. We’ve seen things like this before. Chamillionaire: I want to hear in one line, what do I get? Seems like a lot of work.. A: We try to have ways to detect people who are trying to exploit the system. This project isn’t sustained on accumulation of work or capital. In order to be wealthy, you have to be respected by other people that are important. Calacanis: Mike, doesn’t Facebook have a social currency going on that’s unspoken? MS: I think the devil is in the details. It depends on context. I could say they have lots of likes and comments. It means they post interesting things, but what does that mean. A: Purpose of making this non-profit. Guaranteed that it would make this independent of any social platform out there, ensures transparency. Images Video: Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TC50: Clixtr Launches Location-Aware Photo Sharing For The iPhone Top
We’ve all been there: the classic group photo, with twelve friends side by side doing their best to look as happy as humanly possible. The first shot is easy — but wait, the guy next to you has their own camera, so it’s time for another one. And then another. Soon muscle fatigue kicks in, and those happy smiles fade into grimaces as everyone wonders why isn’t an easier way to share their photos. Cue Clixtr , a new location-based photo sharing platform that’s launching today at TechCrunch50 . The app is available on the App Store now, and you can download it now for $2.99 here . Clixtr’s service is primarily designed for concerts, weddings, and other major events where lots of people are taking lots of photos, with no good way to aggregate them all together. The service revolves around an iPhone application that uses the smartphone’s integrated camera, data connection, and GPS to faciliate quick photo uploads to a shared album. Using it is simple: take a photo, and upload it to Clixtr. If the app detects that you’re near where a lot of other people are uploading media, it will group them into an album. You can browse these albums directly from the iPhone app in a stream view. You can also use an ‘explore’ function, which uses the phone’s GPS to locate any events that are going on at any nearby events. To create an event, you simply enter a descriptive name, and then invite friends who are nearby to view and participate in the album. Of course, photo sharing sites have been around for ages. But few of them are really based around location — instead, you usually have to create an album and manually invite each of your friends. If you don’t have someone’s contact information they’re out of luck, and the whole process can be time consuming and tedious. Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, and Robert Scoble: MS: I think that was awesome. I’m curious how you can do mapping to events. Do you have to be invited. Michael Arrington: full disclosure for MS, at some point, you will have location. MS: It’s something we’d like to do… A: When you launch the application, we show events that are nearby. Events are server side and sent back donw. RS: My phone doesn’t let you do anything while it uploads the photo. But it’s a nice install. Don’t have to do signup. Q: How does it make money A: Costs less than a cup of coffee at 2.99. Possibly location based advertising. RH: I think doing local photo could be good. I would up incentive for participation. One thing that could be distinctive for when Facebook app starts doing their own. If all my friends are already on graph A (Facebook), that’s hard. You’ll need to up level of incentive to participate. DC: I would look at what Foursquare is doing, with the game element. People want to be mayor of a certain place. Video: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TC50: Simply Add A Social Network To Any Site With Stribe Top
The idea of adding a social network to any site is a compelling one. Currently, most sites do this by creating their own networks using service like Facebook Groups and Ning. But those obviously aren’t actually your own site, they are other sites set up under your site’s name. Stribe’s goal is to move the network back onto your site. The service, opening to the public today at Techcrunch50 , provides a free and easy way to place a social networking layer over any site. This layer exists on your site in the form of a bar at the bottom of the page. This is not unlike the Meebo chat bar that you may have seen on this site and others recently. But Meebo was really only about chat (and sharing), Stribe wants this bar to be a full-fledged social network on your site, including members, comments, and yes, chat. Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect offer some of this functionality, but again, that’s not actually your social network, it’s Google or Facebook’s social layer laid on top of your site. As such, neither of those are very customizable, at all. Stribe is completely customizable if you know what you’re doing (or have a developer who does). Maybe you don’t want the bar at the bottom of the site — you can move it. Maybe you don’t want it to be the default black — you can change it. But if you just want the defaults, it’s as easy as installing one bit of JavaScript code onto your site to get it working. People who register to be a member of your site by way of Stribe also become members of the larger Stribe community. This means that if you have a friend who is a member of another Stribe-powered network, you can still chat with them even when you’re on different sites. Stribe will run on the “freemium” model, offering much of their service for free, but charging a fee to those customers who are of a certain size (according to site traffic). That will range from $10 to $50 a month to use Stribe to create a social network for your site. CEO Kamel Zeroual and CTO Gael Delalleau presented at the conference today. Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased) The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire MS: No integration with any social network there now? Was that intentional? KZ: The point is that you just need to control and see what is going on, on YOUR website. DC: 37Signals says that sometimes products do too much, you should do less. With many product, you can do too many things, and it becomes difficult to figure out what to use it for. KZ: The low-hanging fruit is the community, but we’re trying to reach out to different markets. C: Are you saying, if I’m Walgreens, this will turn it into a social network? This is different from Twitter, you are just at a site and you want to interact. KZ: That’s exactly the point, man. RS: Enterprises already have tools like this thought. What makes this different? KZ: There are a lot of sites that don’t want to use someone else to become a social network. Images: Video: Other Coverage Connected communities matter: Introducing Stribe Stribe. CrunchBase Information Stribe Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TC50: Radiusly Aims To Put Twitter In A More Professional Setting Top
While Facebook continues to grow, and some companies are getting more comfortable with using it for things like Pages, LinkedIn still fills the gap for users who want a more professional setting for social networking. A new service launching in public beta today at TechCrunch50 , Radiusly , wants to take the idea of Twitter and put it in more of a professional setting, as well. But unlike Facebook and LinkedIn which exist as two totally separate networks, Radiusly wants to integrate its service with Twitter. Users will be able to publish an update they leave on Radiusly to Twitter (and Facebook, as well). But the key selling-point is that in the Radiusly environment you can also do much more, such as have a professional profile, resume, sample works, and photos. Ideally, a Radiusly users would be someone who loves the concept of Twitter, but wants to be able to maintain their work-related tweets in a separate environment, where they could also share other professional information. As more and more companies wake up to the idea of using Twitter as a means of communication, a service like this could be compelling to them. Of course, there is a lot of competition out there for the business Twitter market. Aside from startups like CoTweet, (TechCrunch50-alum) Yammer, and Blellow, Radiusly could be looking at both LinkedIn and Twitter itself making more moves into this arena shortly. We already know that Twitter is gearing up some professional tools for businesses to use, but whether those will be things similar to what Radiusly offers, no one is sure yet. Meanwhile, if LinkedIn wanted to, it could easily make itself Twitter-centric. It doesn’t appear that they are going to do that, but you never know. Radiusly plans to using a subscription/freemium model, offering some services for free, while charging a subscription fee for others. There will also be sponsored search listings, job listings, and banner ads to bring in revenue. CEO Chris Sel and VP of Business Development Adarsh Pallian presented it today at the conference. Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased) The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire RS: I think you’re aiming at the right target, but you hit the wall. Brands tell me they won’t want to advertise on Twitter. You’re just not there yet, I’m not sure why. Q: Reid your thoughts? RH: In a rare position, I agree with much of what Robert was saying. The real key is how do you exchange information on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, not that they need a new way to search for some of this. DC: I agree with Robert and Reid, I don’t really get why I would go there. I kept trying to figure it out, to be fair when Twitter first launched I didn’t get it either, now I work there. C: I gotta be Simon Cowell too. I can’t see why someone would need this. Images: Video: Other Coverage: TC50: Radiusly says companies should forget Twitter, microblog with us instead VentureBeat. CrunchBase Information Radiusly Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TC50: Lissn Is A Broader Twitter Meets A Simpler Google Wave Top
A lot of people use Twitter to have conversations with others, but that’s not really what it was built for. Initially, Twitter was just supposed to be a place to update what you are doing; the @reply only came around because people started using it to direct a conversation at another user. Now conversations are one of the most interesting things about Twitter, and a new startup launching in private beta today at TechCrunch50 , Lissn , wants to build a new platform from the ground up with conversations in mind. If you’ve seen the video demos or had a chance to use Google Wave at all, Lissn may seem familiar — it has the same type of real-time conversation aspect. The difference, of course, is that this is the main function of Lissn, while Wave is trying to be a lot of different things wrapped into one. Lissn is all about having conversations with people, and allows others to watch, and join in as they’d like. And because anyone can join in on these conversation threads, Lissn can tell what the most popular topics being talked about are. And it highlights those for other users to see, and lets them get involved in the conversations too. You also have friends on the service, and you can see what conversations your friends are engaged in, and can decide whether or not you want to join them too. Lissn also automatically translates conversations in your native language, using Google Translate. There is also a location-based element to the service. Using your IP address (or manually putting in a city) you can see the conversations happening around that area. Another service that has similar conversation capabilities is FriendFeed. Of course, the future outlook for that service is murky since Facebook recently acquired them. And FriendFeed also had many more features such as aggregation of social data, Lissn is just about conversations, keeping it simple. As for a business model, Lissn will show ads based on keywords within conversations, just like Google does in Gmail. Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased) The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire Q: Dick, you’re working for Twitter now, what do you think? DC: I like it but on the business side, Google Ads isn’t going to work. Random conversations are hard to monetize. But I like the idea of sponsored conversations. This is kind of like Twitter meets Get Satisfaction. RS: Conversations are interesting, but I’m not sure I see enough that pulls me in here. Why would I leave Twitter to come here. MA: Twitter is all about short conversations, this takes that idea and extends it to longer conversations. RS: So why is this different from FriendFeed and soon Facebook? DC: I’ll answer this, and I want shares in the company (kidding). The answer there is the local conversation. People looking for a good pizza place in Noe Valley, etc. This is an interesting vehicle, for I want to ask questions in a local context. MS: I think there is a big separation between big conversations and the local conversations. You need to think about how to separate those out. The local conversation has to be colored by your social network, I think. It’s about your friends. RS: That was a huge problem with FriendFeed too. With too many people participating, there’s just too much. C: Right, how many people can have a conversation? Like a trending conversation on Twitter, you can go back so far, to so many message. MA: Yeah, it’s mostly about live conversations. But it’s also interesting to just listen, especially what celebrities have to say. Myke Armstrong showed off the demo of listen today at the conference. Video: Other Coverage: TC50: Lissn is like Twitter for longer, public conversations VentureBeat. CrunchBase Information Lissn Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TC50: Threadsy, A Communications Stream To Rule Them All Top
Email. Twitter. Instant Messaging. Facebook. Those are just four of the most popular ways to communicate online. And actually, the average 23-year-old has 6 different accounts that they check for messages each day. Maintaining and keeping up with that is either basically impossible, or flat-out impossible. That’s where Threadsy comes in. Launching its large beta today at TechCrunch50 as a free web app, Threadsy wants to take all of your online communication and shove it into a single service. All of the messages directed at you (email and Twitter @replies, for exmaple) will be put into a single stream of message, called the “inbound” column. Meanwhile, all of the activity streams that you simply follow (Twitter, Facebook, etc), will be put into a single activity stream, the “unbound” stream. The result is one service to rule them all. The great thing about this is that you no longer have to sign into multiple accounts while remembering who is trying to communicate with you. Everyone also has a profile on Threadsy which shows all the social networks you reside on. While the thought of putting all of your communication in one place is nice, quantity will obviously be an issue. But Threadsy is more than just communication aggregation, it also promises to provide deep context about the people you are communicating with, so you can filter and manage the stream. You can also filter by the type of service (for example, only seeing tweets or Facebook messages). In terms of monetization, like a lot of other communication platforms, Threadsy will show contextual advertisements. But the service says that unlike something like Gmail, it won’t always show them, and instead will only do so when it could actually help the user. Threadsy currently looks at over 40 social sites on the web to get this information. CEO Rob Goldman and VP of Engineering Udi Nir demoed the app today at the event. Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased) The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire RS: I think this is great for me. But are there enough people who will care about this? But I want it right now! RG: That’s a great point, we followed FriendFeed closely, but we’re trying to pull all the information that’s required. DC: This is the PIMP problem (personal information management). I like that this tackles that aspect of day to day problems. RH: It’s a good communications platform but Google has tried this before. It’s a tough challenge. SP: It’s beautifully built, but this is a huge challenge. But this looks very good and clean. I’m not a user of something like this, because this is more for power-users, and I don’t think all inboxes are created equal. A Facebook message is lighter than a regular email, and Twitter even less. RS: How do you make money off the stream? RG: We think current webmail misses the mark by focusing on low value ads across all message. We only want to focus on 2, 3, or 4 percent of your messages. RS: What about hooking up with Tumblr or Posterous for curation? RG: It’s exciting to see what people do with this. MA: So FriendFeed is dead to your Robert, is this it? RS: Maybe. C: It definitely depends on how it feels when you try it out. I feel like I’m cheating on my MySpace, so I think this is brilliant. How safe is this though? Everyone could get everything if they got into your account. Video: Other Coverage: TechCrunch50: The Better Social Network AppScout. Threadsy: All Your Communications, All in One Place Technologizer. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TC50: CrowdFusion Merges The Best Features Of Blogs, Wikis, And More Into One Unified CMS Top
As content sites on the web mature, they continue to blur the line between straight news sites, social hubs, and references for structured data. No longer are these sites just home to editorial content — many of them have created databases of the products they cover (take for example TC sister site CrunchBase offers a comprehensive directory of companies and people in the startup community). Unfortunately, content management systems and databases that run these increasingly diversified sites don’t always play nicely together. CrowdFusion , a TechCrunch50 finalist launching today, is an impressive new CMS system that’s looking to eliminate these hassles. To put things simply, the platform helps streamline content writing, database management, and social features by combining features of blogs, wikis, and more into one unified platform. To help give an idea of exactly what Crowd Fusion can do, the startup walked us through the process of creating a blog post. First, the CMS can present a writer with stories they might want to cover: the platform has an integrated feed reader, which can intelligently determine when there’s a breaking story that your site has yet to write about. The CMS can then facilitate actually writing the post by importing excerpts into your new posts (with links to the original articles). It can also suggest related blog posts for you to include at the bottom of your post (you can simply drag and drop to rearrange or remove the stories). Say a gadget blog wanted to write about a new phone that had just come out (today’s demo featured our super-secret iPhone Killer, the CrunchPhone). Because the CMS can integrate the site’s gadget database directly into the CMS, adding a new product is simple — you can add it to your database using a small widget on the same page that you’re writing your blog post in, without having to leave the page. And because the blog system is integrated with the product database, you can generate intuitive tables comparing multiple existing phones against the new one. CrowdFusion has a plugin architecture so it’s extensible. The company is open-sourcing the CrowdFusion platform, and will be releasing it in public beta today. Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, and Robert Scoble: DC: There are only so many blogs and companies that will need something like this. The millions of blogs out there won’t need this. We’re talking about the TechCrunch, Glams of the world. I think the challenge will be how big can you make the market? RS: He didn’t say it, but (founder) Brian Alvey built the backend for Weblogs, Engadget, big publishing sites. A: There are top publishers who know what I’ve built (big names like Engadget). But lots of people aren’t going to just immediately move over, so we open source it. Clicker is exactly the sort of thing you build on this. RH: Getting people to adopt will have a slow curve. In tech I don’t think you’re ever the last everything. I think what you’re doing is exactly right, with plug-in arch and open source. A:I’d love to be doing this for 10, 20 years. A:We’re big fans of MySQL model where you have an industrial strength free product anyone can use. We figure we can build a valuable business with scaling, hosting, etc. Videos: Other Coverage TC50: Crowd Fusion wants to be the ultimate tool for web publishing VentureBeat. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
TC50: Find The Perfect Scene, Every Time. AnyClip Is A Search Engine For Movie Clips Top
Darth Vader’s fatherly coming out. Tinanic’s King of the World moment. There Will Be Blood’s sobering lecture on milkshakes. Whether you want to poke fun at something, embellish a love note, or just prove a point, there’s probably a movie scene out there that can help you do it. People reference scenes all the time in their daily lives, and on the web it’s not uncommon for a blogger to accentuate their post with a particularly relevant clip. But for their popularity, there still isn’t an established site that’s known as the place to find a movie clip — YouTube and Hulu are always worth a shot, but they can be very hit or miss. AnyClip , a new startup that’s launching today at TechCrunch 50, wants to be the solution, with a searchable database of movie scenes. There are, of course, other places to look for movie clips on the web. But these all have their faults: YouTube is riddled with content that may be somehow related to the scene you’re looking for, but acted out by people who most definitely aren’t the original actors. All of Hulu’s content is licensed straight from content owners so you don’t have to worry about issues with user-generated clip, but their library is still quite limited. To help make the search engine as accurate and thorough as possible, AnyClip draws its data from a number of sources: first, it has compiled publically available data on the web and associated it with each film. The site has also created a Mechanical Turk-style operation, with a team of humans inputting meta data for each film (workers are contributing from all over the world, with most of them coming from the US and Israel). On average, each film in the database has 500 tags. The site is also launching a public API, which will allow developers to query its database of movie clips from their applications. SP: The content deals are really hard. A: Yes, they’re very challenging. We’re in discussions with everyone. Mickey Schulhof (former Sony of America CEO) is a principle investor. SP: I’ve seen deals like this take a decade… A: Everyone has an emphasis on long from, but nobody is paying attention to the short formats. As a result you can acquire content for less than you would elsewhere. SP: I think fear is a big factor, and if you’re focusing on short form content you may be able to overcome some of that fear. RH: I think you’ll be competing with tags on YouTube clips. Another question is I would elaborate some kind of discovery. One of the other things is that people will only type so much on a search, but they’ll keep clicking on things. And the more money you make the more the studios will try to renegotiate deals to take that.. A: We invigorate interest with these clips, so it helps them. Jason Calacanis: If not all the studios sign up. What do you think you can do with fair use? Could you do 15 seconds of content? A: I’m not that interested in having tons of content that they don’t want us to have. We can’t build a business on the backs of their content illegally and hope it works. Over time we will get it all. AnyClip is a dream, a vision. We can start with very comprehensive comedy, or horror coverage. JC: Do you see this going into other verticals, like AnySportsClip? A: There’s a reason we didn’t name it AnyMovieClip. But we’re on film now because they’re used to selling it. SP: I totally believe your argument that this allows studios to better monetize back catalog. Lets people monetize stuff that there would be no other reason to talk about. This is the kind of thing that absolutely should happen. But it will take twice as you long to make those details. Images: Videos: Other Coverage: TC50: AnyClip searches movies for quotes, famous moments VentureBeat. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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