Monday, September 21, 2009

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Bing Keeps Pecking Away At Search Share And Making Gains Top
Every month since its launch , Microsoft’s Bing search engine keeps taking a little bit of market share. In August, Bing gained 0.4 percent to end the month with 9.3 percent of search query volumes in the U.S., according to comScore’s Qsearch estimates. Meanwhile, Google’s share came down 0.1 percent to 64.6 percent and Yahoo/s remained flat at 19.3 percent. In other words, Bing showed the only significant gain, while everyone else stayed relatively flat. That $100 million marketing campaign must be working, or maybe it’s the improvements Bing is making to the search experience, or maybe it’s both. Whatever it is, it is translating into nearly a half-point market share gain every month for the past three months. Bing is up a total of 1.3 percent from its launch at the end of May. Yahoo, however, is down 0.8 percent in that same period, so the combined gain is only half a point. But Yahoo has stabilized its share, and if Bing can continue to nibble away at the same rate, Google will have to start to actually worry. In August, it grew faster than Google for the first time, with a 31.9 percent annual increase in search queries compared to 21.6 percent growth for Google and 16.8 percent for Yahoo. How long can Bing keep it up? U.S. Core Search Share, August 200 9 (Source: comScore qSearch) Google 64.6% -0.1% m/m +1.3% y.y Yahoo 19.3% 0.0% m/m -0.4% y/y Microsoft 9.3% +0.4% m/m +0.9% y/y AOL 3.0% -0.01% m/m -1.3% y/y Ask 3.9% 0.03% m/m -0.4% y/y (Table below via JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Interview: A Conversation With Founder Larry Halff About the Relaunch of Ma.gnolia Top
Many of you may remember Ma.gnolia —the nifty social bookmarking tool that unfortunately imploded at the beginning of this year. Founded by Larry Halff almost 4 years ago, the site had a different aesthetic and attitude toward sharing information. It was one of the more community-minded tools I remember from that era, offering features like the ability to "thank" the sharer of a useful link, for example. It also possessed clean design and careful site organization. In my opinion, its take on sharing data really differentiated it. Like many great things, Ma.gnolia didn't start out to be big, but rather started out to be good—and it was. And, as is often the case with things that are good, Ma.gnolia become big by virtue of that goodness. Ironically, even though the membership of the service reached hundreds of thousands of account holders and tens of thousands of regular users, the infrastructure supporting the site was still incredibly small. It was run almost solely by Larry and the hardware and bandwidth he could support by himself. Unfortunately, there were some technical limitations to the honorable yet fragile DIY set-up running behind the scenes that ultimately led to the site's premature demise. I was really bummed to watch the VOD-cast explaining the catastrophic nature of the data loss back in February and have thought about the site often, since that time. I was able to catch up with Larry a while back and talk with him, not about what went wrong with Ma.gnolia 1.0 but rather what is in store for Ma.gnolia 2.0, if anything, and also pick his brain about the future of social bookmarking. If you were a fan of Ma.gnolia in the past, you will be happy to know that it is scheduled to relaunch September 22, by invite only. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Do You Believe In Magic? Moonit Looks To The Stars For Relationship Advice Top
Last week as I browsed the TechCrunch50 DemoPit I stumbled across a startup called Moonit that offered to “uncover why you hang with your friends, hate your boss, and have the hots for that special someone.” Intrigued, I asked one of the site’s founders to give me a demo. She asked me for my name, date of birth, and Email, then entered her own information. Voilà! We had a 73% compatibility rating, along with a page of text detailing why we would be good co-workers. At first I was perplexed — clearly the site had done some analysis of our social graphs to generate these results. But I hadn’t entered my credentials for Facebook Connect, and it didn’t seem like it was looking at my Twitter or LinkedIn accounts either. Eyebrows raised, I asked the founder for an explanation. Moonit’s secret? The “science” of astrology. Here’s how the site explains it: “Moonit is a social compatibility tool that is rooted in astrological and psychological underpinnings. We use thousands of years of data from the stars to help determine whether two people are compatible from a romantic, platonic and professional perspective. Then we track your relationships to help you learn from them over time so that you never make the same mistake twice, kinda like a virtual relationship therapist. We know you could probably figure out if you’re compatible with someone after a few interactions, but we can save you some of that time so you can spend it doing fun things instead.” Now, let me be perfectly clear: I don’t pay attention to horoscopes at all, and think astrology has about as much basis in science as the Flying Spaghetti Monster . I would never use these tests for anything other than my own amusement. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of people out there who do play close attention to this stuff — to discount it entirely simply because it’s based on what many would call a pseudoscience or superstition would be to miss a significant market opportunity. And even if you believe that they’re totally bogus, the tests can still be entertaining. Moonit’s core functionality stems from its compatibility tests, which include exams for personal relationships, friendships, or professional compatibility. I’m not going to get into the astrology behind them since I don’t understand it in the slightest, but Moonit does feature things like Facebook Connect and Twitter integration, so you can easily pull in your friend lists and syndicate your results. There’s also a section that saves your past results, which you can track over time. Aside from these compatibility tests, it seems like the site is placing a heavy emphasis on catering to a young crowd that’s interested in relationship advice and celebrity gossip. Moonit offers a blog called ‘The Stars’ that includes recent celebrity news and another called ‘The Couch’ where you can ask the Moonit community a question (most of which seem to be related to personal advice and dating issues). Moonit could easily crash and burn over the next few months — there are countless other astrology-related sites on the web, and it’s sort of difficult to prove that Moonit’s algorithms are more accurate than its competitors’ given that they’re all based on celestial bodies. That said, Moonit does look nice, and it doesn’t seem to be taking itself too seriously — if it can figure out the right mix of astrology and pop culture, I could see it gaining some traction in the teen and young adult crowd. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Live From the New King Abdullah University of Science and Technology Top
I’m in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for the inauguration ceremony of KAUST , the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. This is a 30-square kilometer state-of-the-art research institution with faculty and students from all over the world. For the next couple of days I’ll be getting some behind-the-scenes access to technology in use here, both for education and research, as well as the tools used to bring this place together. KAUST was brought about, rather obviously, by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Says the king: It is my desire that this new University becomes one of the world’s great institutions of research; that it educates and trains the future generations of scientists, engineers and technologists; and that it fosters, on the basis of merit and excellence, collaboration, and cooperation with other great research universities and the private sector. The university, as the name implies, is science-focused. It offers degrees in nine fields of study: Applied Mathematics and Computational Science Bioscience Chemical and Biological Engineering Computer Science Earth Science and Engineering Electrical Engineering Environmental Science and Engineering Materials Science and Engineering Mechanical Engineering As a well-funded, brand-new university, there’s a lot of top-notch tech here. From a nanofabriacation lab with a Level 100 clean room (no more than 100 particles per square foot), to a room filled with ten Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrometers, to Shaheen, the fastest supercomputer in the Middle East, the facilities at KAUST are a researcher’s dream. I plan to dig into more, but here’s two quick overviews of things I found remarkably impressive: Shaheen, and the CORNEA immersive virtual reality facility. Shaheen Shaheen , currently the 14th largest super computer in the world, is comprised of 16 IBM BlueGene/P racks, offering 220 teraflops in its current configuration. The plan is to raise that to a petaflop by 2011. That’s a huge performance jump in just two years. It has more than 65,000 processors. It’s also the largest system that the U.S. Department of Commerce has ever permitted to be exported, and as you might expect Uncle Sam places some usage restrictions on it. Right now, Shaheen draws 1.2 megawatts of power, and has an enormous cooling requirement. The room in which Shaheen lives is pretty bland, and doesn’t make for very good photography. But here’s a photo, nonetheless: We weren’t permitted inside because it’s operated inside a clean room environment. Aside from the fact that KAUST has been a construction site until just recently, there’s also serious concern about the effects of salt from the Red Sea coming into the room, so the project coordinators are playing it safe by restricting access and strictly controlling the environment. CORNEA CORNEA is a CAVE system that projects images onto all four walls, the ceiling, and the floor of a room in order to create a truly immersive virtual environment. Users within the room wear active stereoscopic glasses to produce a 3D effect. CAVEs aren’t particularly new, though they are still super cool. Two things set KAUST’s CAVE apart from all the rest. First, it has the world’s highest resolution at 100 million pixels, and second, it has a phenomenal audio system inside the room. Speakers placed in the room pick up sounds and project them back in any of a number of programmable acoustic configurations. So if you’re walking through a visualization of an actual cave, your voice will echo and reverberate. This is actually amazingly hard to describe in text, and even harder to capture on video. Here’s a quick video I took while inside CORNEA: When the audio is on, you really do feel like you’re in a larger space. Then when the audio is muted, you feel like you’re in any other room in the world. It’s very impressive what a dramatic effect sound has on our sense of sight. If you guys have any techie questions for the KAUST staff or faculty, leave ‘em in the comments and I’ll do my best to get them answered! Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Brizzly: Faster, Better, More Open Top
Brizzly , the web-based Twitter client that was first unveiled at our Real-Time Stream Crunchup in July, continues to roll out the improvements. After allowing users to upload and host their own pictures on its servers a few weeks ago, last week saw them give the service a significant speed boost, which also brought stream auto-updating. Today, the service rolled out the ability to send invites to other friends. If you haven’t tried out Brizzly yet, you really need to. It’s a great way to use Twitter from the web thanks to its inline images and videos, new reply and message indicators, and most importantly, the ability to group the people you follow. You can also mute people in your main feed if they’re at a conference, or doing something for a set period of time that you really don’t care about. I’ve gushed previously about the grouping feature, but the auto-updating is really nice as well. Rather than having to reload the page each time to see if there are new tweets from the people you follow (as you must on Twitter), Brizzly will pull in news ones automatically every so often. Long time users of Twitter will remember that it used to automatically pull in new updates back in the day (the feature was killed off to reduce server strain). This is also standard on FriendFeed (though Brizzly is not working quite that fast yet). Brizzly also recently updated it own tutorial video to walk new users through some of the features. Find it below. CrunchBase Information Brizzly Twitter 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
 
Foursquare Hasn't Started Playing The Monetization Game Just Yet Top
There’s some hoopla today that the location-based social network Foursquare has found its business model (and as such, has beaten the more mature Twitter to one). But hold your horses. While Foursquare does have an idea for how to eventually make money (as we’ve discussed in the past ), they aren’t actually focusing on making any just yet, co-founder Dennis Crowley confirmed to us today. While there is a Foursquare For Business section on the site now, there is no monetization plan for any of these deals yet. “ [We're] really just focusing on getting the product working properly (crashes / UX etc). [It's] worth noting that we don’t want to shoehorn biz stuff in at the last min, which is why we’re trying to get local merchants involved now. Even if all the deals are freebees, ” Crowley wrote to us in an email. That being said, obviously, Foursquare eventually hopes these types of deals (dubbed “Mayor Deals”) become a business of some kind. But having just raised its first seed round of funding , and only having been in existence for a few months, Foursquare has some time. And it seems smart to do this type of stuff the right way, rather than just “shoehorning” it in, as Crowley put it. Crowley also says that they’ve been adding a good number of these specials recently. And they finally have a tool that makes it easy to do so. So we should be seeing more such deals in the future both on the mobile apps, and the website. You can see the current list of deals on the right hand column of this page . As you can see, most are in California or New York, which is where the service is most popular right now. When Foursquare does decide to attempt to monetize such deals, it’s unlikely to be quite as straightforward as simply flipping a switch and accepting money to show coupons. For example, if there are tangible incentives to be a mayor of an establishment, this is likely to encourage cheating. Foursquare has been working on ways to combat that, but depending on how good the deals are (a free beer sounds pretty good to me), it will undoubtedly be a challenge. There’s also the issue of price. How much do you charge a business to show these deals? Certainly it’s in the a local businesses interest to have these types of deals as it will probably drive more traffic to their establishments, but Foursquare would also already be getting a bump from the fact that the deals also entice users to use Foursquare. Such deals would likely have to happen on a massive scale for Foursquare to make significant money. And if/how quickly that happens will be a testament to the power of local and location services overall. CrunchBase Information Foursquare 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
 
Rearden Commerce Raises Another $40 Million, Lays Off 18 Percent Top
Rearden Commerce, the under-the-radar automated online assistant that helps people organize travel needs and other services, has raised another $40 million in a Series F funding from JPMorgan Chase. This latest round brings Rearden’s total funding up to $240 million since the company’s launch in 2000. JPMorgan Chase is a marketing partner and a pre-existing investor . Greg O’Hara and Rick Smith, both general partners from One Equity Partners, JPMorgan Chase’s private equity fund, will be joining Rearden’s board, although the funding comes from Chase Capital Partners. Unfortunately, the funding is bittersweet for the company because it coincides with a round of layoffs. Rearden let go roughly 60 employees from a staff of 335 employees (or 18 percent), following a round of layoffs last November of around 10 percent (or 40 employees) of the company’s staff. At this point, with so much capital invested in the company, the best hope for Rearden investors to see a returns is if it goes public. Rearden is hoping for an IPO, but before it files it wants to hit profitability, and therefore it is cutting its way there. Public investors are going to want to see evidence of sustainable profits and clear revenue growth. Investors generally prefer companies that are hiring to keep up with growth than cutting back to hit their numbers. Rearden is better known in the corporate world, offering its services to more than 5,000 corporations, up from 1,700 in May, 2008, with over 2 million individual employees using the service. American Express resells the service to its business customers. Last year, Chase also signed on as a reseller and marketing partner, offering the Rearden’s personal web concierge service to its bank cardholders. Rearden offers enterprises an automated personal assistant that helps their employees organize any sort of travel-related task. They can set their profile up with the types of restaurants they like, whether they like aisle or window seats, and their preferred car provider, and Rearden will book all aspects of their trip for them. Rearden also launched a mobile version of its service that will sync up with their calendar, message them with alerts and allows them to make changes to their itineraries and bookings. The service also keeps track of reward miles and points from airlines, hotels, and rental cars, and lets employees use those points to book additional travel and other services. The service will even keep track of travel credits and apply them to future trips. The company had a banner year in 2008, raising $100 million in funding, growing the company’s client and user base and expanding into the mobile space. The site also acquired Global Ground Automation to assist with limousine and other ground transportation reservations, and ExpenseWire to simplify expense reporting for users. Rearden is still planning to target consumers directly, after promising to roll out a consumer-facing service for the past few years. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Tweet Scenes Launches Yet Another Twitter Background Creator Top
Companies and brands always want to have their Twitter profiles and background images fit their profile. Tweet Scenes is hoping to make the process of creating backgrounds for Twitter users much easier. You upload your logo, photos, text and links, and give some basic background information on your company and what you're looking for. You then pay a flat fee ($129) up front, and get your design done in three business days. Tweet Scenes is owned and operated by a web design and development company ( Carnes Media ) with over a decade of design and branding experience. Carnes Media has done sites like Tatango , who we recently covered, Derek Media , and many others. There are lots of free alternatives to Tweet Scenes, like TwitterBackground.com , which is currently the number one free Twitter backgrounds site. According to Nathan Carnes , the founder of Tweet Scenes, there aren’t any good Twitter background companies that make good quality backgrounds for the brands on Twitter. Also, you should consider the fact that there are numerous third party applications that don’t use Twitter.com, so you will never see the backgrounds. It’s a little unclear why someone would pay $129 for a Twitter background when you could get one for free — if you wanted to spend that much you might as well just find a designer to do it for you. If you don’t like the background you get, there’s a money-back guarantee. You can find an example of one of the backgrounds below. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
RedesignGoogle: A Contest To Revamp The World's Most Popular Search Engine Top
There’s no question about it: Google is great at search, and its huge lead over competitors is well deserved. But the site’s spartan design can sometimes leave something to be desired — sure, the company gradually makes tweaks to it, but we haven’t seen many radical changes in a very long time. Now WebMynd , a Y Combinator startup that launched back in early 2008, is looking to help spur the search giant to make itself a little better, or at least give it a few ideas to help. Tonight, WebMynd is launching a contest appropriately called RedesignGoogle.com that invites designers from around the world to give Google a makeover. WebMynd has posted all the details details on its blog , but here’s the gist of it: designers are invited to revamp Google using any CSS modifications they’d like. The contest starts accepting submissions today, and will run through November 1. Then, a number of judges (which include Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, the WebMynd team and — full disclosure — myself) will pick the best designs. The winners will take home a brand new MacBook Air. The nice thing about the contest is that it isn’t purely theoretical — you’ll actually be able to start using the new design in your browser, using a stripped down version of WebMynd’s browser plugin. The Plugin, which launched back in March, gives users the ability to customize their search experience and includes a number of other features, like a comprehensive browsing history (advanced features won’t be enabled by default on the streamlined contest plugin, but users will be able to turn them on). Here are a few of the early submissions to the contest. You can see a full gallery here . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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