The latest from TechCrunch
- Google Expands Its Reference Section With Its Own Dictionary
- Bedrock Thinks Publishers Should Create Their Own Ads
- Mobile Roadie Partners With Ustream To Power Official iPhone App For LeWeb
- Zoosk Lands Another $30 Million For Social Dating
| Google Expands Its Reference Section With Its Own Dictionary | Top |
| Google has quietly rolled out its own online dictionary, complete with multilingual support and accompanying photos. The new site was first discovered by the LA Times Tech Blog, and you can access it at Google.com/Dictionary . It works exactly as you’d expect: type in a word, and Google will give you the definition, part of speech, and maybe a similar phrase or two. If you’re logged in, you can star a word for future reference. The new dictionary obviously isn’t good news to the many other web dictionaries. Answers.com, in particular, stands to lose out, as it is currently Google’s default whenever a user clicks the “define” link on a Google results page. The Times article says that Google now uses its own dictionary as the default, but I’m still seeing Answers.com as the source, so apparently the switch isn’t live for everyone. Google has actually offered some dictionary features for a long time. If you Google a query using the format “Define: word “, the search engine will present you with a handful of definitions it finds on sites scattered across the web. Some of these definitions usually come from well known online dictionaries; others, from obscure web sites, which can make the results inconsistent. These aggregated definitions have been available on Google.com/dictionary before now, and now compliment Google’s own in-house definitions. For those wondering if Google might further expand into territory traditionally owned by reference books — it already has. Last year it launched Knol , a user-edited encyclopedia. That venture hasn’t gone very well: after failing to draw much interest as an encyclopedia, people started using Knol as a poor man’s Craigslist. Image by ElektraCute CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Bedrock Thinks Publishers Should Create Their Own Ads | Top |
| The problem with most ads is that they suck. Publishers sign up for ad networks and they have to take what they are given, which is usually some weight-loss ad showing way too much belly flab. But what if Website publishers could create their own ads? They know their audience best, right? That’s the idea behind Bedrock , an ad network created by the founders of GumGum , which is itself an unconventional way to display shopping ads on celebrity photos . The way Bedrock works is that publishers create ads on their site, which could be as simple as a text ad, an image, or a Flash animation. Then they pass a set of keywords associated with that ad to Bedrock through APIs and Bedrock has advertisers bid on those keywords just like they do with search ads. Every time somebody clicks on the publisher-created ad, it goes to a different advertisers based on who is bidding the most for the underlying keywords in a realtime auction. Let me illustrate this through an example. If you run a gadget site and you have a bunch of forums where people like to talk about Plasma TVs, you could create a generic ad with a graphic that says “Buy a Plasma TV.” You pass Bedrock the keyword “plasma TV” and advertisers who want to buy that keyword bid for your clicks. In particular, though, Bedrock is aimed at non-standard real estate for ads, such as widgets, feeds, chat rooms, desktop clients and so on where standard online ads don’t work so well. For instance, DocStoc has been trying out the ads with its embeddable documents. Sounds simple. Except I could easily see publishers try to abuse the system by not clearly indicating what is an ad and what is content, or hiding the ad directly in the content. So Bedrock won’t necessarily result in better, more relevant ads. For instance, a publisher could simply hyperlink valuable keywords in an article and make that an ad, or place a line of text under real headlines as an ad, which borders on being an advertorial. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except that advertorials also suck. The founders Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir suggest you don’t do that, but rather label the ads clearly as such. They created Bedrock for themselves because they needed to generate ad inventory for GumGum images. They already produce hundreds of millions of impressions a month through GumGum which they monetize in this fashion for themselves, and so Bedrock is a generalized service that came out of that. Investors in GumGum include MySpace COO and Userplane founder Michael Jones , First Round Capital, GRP Ventures, and CrossCut Ventures. What do you think, can publishers create better, higher-performing ads than advertisers? Here’s a video explaining what Bedrock does: Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| Mobile Roadie Partners With Ustream To Power Official iPhone App For LeWeb | Top |
| As mobile web usage increases, conference attendees need real-time, updated information on the go that can be accessible from mobile devices. Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps develops iPhone apps, has developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, the foremost European technology conference organized by French entrepreneur and Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur and his wife, Geraldine. LeWeb 2009 is set to take place next week in Paris, France. The LeWeb App, which is free, essentially puts the entire conference in the pockets of show attendees and lets anyone who isn’t attending the conference watch a live stream of the events directly from their iPhones. The LeWeb App packs in the essentials for attendees, speakers, and participants, including a detailed show schedule and agenda, speaker bios, and directions. To help people network at the show, the app contains a list of show attendees with a link to their Twitter profiles. The application also supports Facebook Connect and Twitter integration, so that all comments and Tweets can be blasted back out to Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag for LeWeb. And the app features push notifications so administrators can send alerts and updates easily to iPhone users. Mobile Roadie has partnered with Ustream to enable iPhone users to watch LeWeb live inside its own app. For now, Mobile Roadie only offers iPhone apps but will soon offer the ability to develop apps for the Andoid in January. The beauty of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that it offers a dead simple mostly-automated system to build apps and have them posted to Apple's App Store in as little as a week. Launched earlier this year, the startup develops mobile apps for other conferences, events, and venues, as well as musicians, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| Zoosk Lands Another $30 Million For Social Dating | Top |
| Zoosk , the dating service with a focus on social networks, has closed a $30 million Series D funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with existing investors Canaan Partners and ATA Ventures participating as well. Bessemer’s David Cowan will be joining the Zoosk board of directors. We last covered the company in October, when it reached the 40 million user milestone (12 million of whom are active). The site has been cash flow posistive for the last two months, and is on track for $20 million in revenue this year. After launching in December 2007, Zoosk gained popularity through its social network applications available on Hi5, Bebo, Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. It also has a standalone site at Zoosk.com, as well as an AIR client. The site tries to differentiate itself from dating portals like Match.com by getting distribution on as many platforms as possible, as well as by targeting a 25-35 year old demographic. Cofounders (and co-CEOs) Alex Mehr and Shayan Zadeh say that that the company will use the money to continue building itself into a leading dating site on the web. The company is also planning to further expand to new platforms: soon it will be launching a strong push on mobile, including a new iPhone app. Zoosk may also begin offline marketing efforts to raise awareness. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
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