Friday, January 29, 2010

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Delicious Rolls Out A Few More Appetizing Features Top
Social bookmarking service Delicious is kicking the year off with a few enhancements to its service and interface. Delicious, which has made Michael’s favorite products list for the past three years, allows you to store, access and share your bookmarks and links from around the web. The service has updated its bookmark display options in a more compact interface, combining all of the options to th right of the Tagbar. Tag Options has been reshuffled and moved it to the sidebar where the tags are actually listed, which makes sense. Within the bookmark display menu, you can now filter your bookmarks by Only Private or Only Public. You can also indicate whether you want to show the history of who you’ve sent bookmarks to, giving you the ability to hide who you’ve shared your bookmarks with. And you can open your bookmarks in a new browser tab instead of within the same window. Delicious has added a new browsing feature that helps save you from the annoyance of bouncing back and forth from Delicious when viewing more than one bookmark in a row. Via the “Browse these Bookmarks” tab, Delicious will open up a small frame at the top of the page, which will allow you to see a visual snapshot of your bookmarks as you browse through the list. Acquired by Yahoo in 2005, Delicious was one of the pioneers of social bookmarking. The site recently became a little more Twitter-centric, with more emphasis on the realtime web. Unfortunately, Delicious’ founder, Joshua Schachter (who left Yahoo last year, to go work for Google ), wasn’t such a big fan of the Twitterification of the service. Schacter also revealed his regrets about selling the startup to Yahoo.
 
TechCrunch Europe's Mobile Meetup, Barcelona 17 Feb, MWC Top
We’re hitting the 2010 GSM World Mobile Congress again. And TechCrunch Europe will be returning to Barcelona on Feb 17 for yet another interactive and live-video-streamed session. We’ll be featuring some of the most innovative and interesting mobile startups and investors in Europe. You can get your tickets to the event here . Here’s the programme for the day so far.
 
Citysearch Unleashes CityGrid, A Massive Local Advertising And Content Network Top
The momentum around local online advertising is growing, especially with the expansion of the Web to mobile devices and flowering of Geo-mobile apps which need a way to make money. Today, Citysearch is throwing its hat into the local advertising ring with teh launch of CityGrid , a set of APIs which makes all of Citysearch’s local listings content and advertising available to other Websites and mobile apps. The APIs include more than 15 million local business listings, 3 million user reviews, and access to 500,000 local advertisers looking to reach people near their places of business. I sat down with Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti at IAC headquarters in Manhattan to get an overview of CityGrid (watch the video interview above). Citysearch itself is a 12-year-old site which Herratti has been updating , but it is not really growing much anymore and it is feeling considerable competitive pressure from Yelp and, even more so, from Google Local . To counter that pressure, Citysearch already distributes its local listings content to about 100 sites and mobile apps with a collective reach of 100 million people (about a quarter of that is Citysearch.com). “I thought what if I took all the tools that we put together to build Citysearch and put it on a platter, an API and web services layer,” says Herratti. Specifically, he is referring to all the descriptions of local businesses, the reviews, photos, videos, hours of operation, offers, menus, metered phone numbers, merchant messages, and more. “What if I open that up to publishers big and small?” he asks. “I let them take it and enhance their experience, and get more pageviews.” You can see elements from Citysearch listings already scattered throughout the Web. A New York City bar like The Ainsworth, for instance, will have a CitySearch page , but the same summary description and reviews will show up in a Bing search , on Local.com (with a Citysearch photo), Urbanspoon , Yellowpages.com , MerchantCircle , and so on. Other existing partners include Mapquest and mobile apps like Loopt and Buzzd . Tons of Websites and mobile apps would love to have access to this database of content to build out their own sites and apps, and now they can via CityGrid. But much of this content is also advertising. Citysearch operates on a pay-per-action model. Local merchants can sign up to get sponsored spots in search and elsewhere, and they pay for things like every time someone clicks on their menu, a video, their own merchant description, or makes a phone call for a reservation. They are paying for leads, and the same actions trigger payments on partner sites as well. But in that case, Citysearch is splitting the ad revenue with the publisher. Many of the ads come from other local advertising sites as well, such as Superpages, Yodel, Spafinder, and limos.com. In that case each advertising dollar is split three ways. But ever since Citysearch opened up to those 100 partners, it went from 150,000 paid listings on its own site to 500,000 across its network. “My goal is to get to one million,” says Herratti. Now that it is an open API, he might just reach that goal. Developer who sign up for the API can create local directories on a self-serve basis and will start getting paid once they meet a minimum threshold of ad impressions or actions. While Yelp’s rise is certainly something to worry about, CitySearch’s biggest competitor is actually Google, which is driving a lot of local search to its own Local Pages and has been making a big push lately to sign up local merchants. Herratti positions CityGrid as a way fro local advertisers to reach consumers everywhere else. There is search marketing on Google and then there is the rest of the Web and mobile apps. Ironically, if you look up the Ainsworth on Google Local , the pictures and some of the reviews are also from Citysearch, but Google isn’t a paying partner (the content is made available through an older deal). It makes money off the search ads on the side.
 
The iPad Runs Flash? Top
Listen: cry me a river about Flash and multi-tasking. If Apple wants to keep multi-tasking for their own apps in an effort to prevent folks from making their OS run like Windows Mobile on a good day, be my guest. Push servers work great for always-connected applications. As for Flash, I think it's all political. Anyway, rant over. Those little minxes at 9to5mac found Flash running in Safari on the iPad . If you watch the video after the jump, you notice that when they browse the NYT you can see the Dining section pop up. The Dining section is usually represented by video in a Flash box.
 
Review: Crush the Castle for iPhone/iPod Touch Top
Every so often you find a game so addicting that you can't stop playing it. I'm that way with two games on the iPhone: Fieldrunners and Civ Revolution . Close runners up are iShoot (there are only so many times you can launch nukes) and now Crush the Castle . Designed by Armor Games , CtC was originally a Flash game ported to the iPhone. To play you load up a trebuchet with weapons (rocks, firebombs, whatever else) by tapping once. You tap again launch and then tap to release at some point in the arc. The items swing out into space and land at some point on a castle that is essentially made of beams. The beams react in a naturalistic way meaning they move as if they were real beams and you then crush little people underneath them. Rinse. Repeat.
 
Tagged.com Wins $201,975 In Default Judgment Against Spammer Top
Social networking company Tagged.com has been awarded more than $200,000 in a default judgment against Erik Vogeler, who spammed thousands of Tagged members by sending them unsolicited messages with links to an adult dating website. In a ruling issued earlier this week, a U.S. District Court Judge in the northern district of California found Vogeler guilty of sending messages to 6,079 Tagged users and assessed damages of $25 per violation for a total of $151,975. Court also ordered Vogeler to pay Tagged $50,000 in attorneys’ fees and to cease sending commercial emails through Tagged.com. More information is expected to be shared on the Tagged blog soon. Update: blog post is up . Tagged, which has raised close to $14 million in venture capital to date, claims over 80 million registered users worldwide. Ironically, the social networking company has itself been the subject of numerous customer complaints for sending deceptive bulk mail since its inception in 2004, and is regarded as a phishing and spamming site by some consumer anti-fraud advocates. In November 2009, Tagged settled a court case with Texas and the New York Attorney General over its practices, coughing up $750,000 in penalties . As part of the settlement, Tagged has adopted privacy reforms and altered its invitation processes. Tagged co-founder and CEO Greg Tseng was previously co-founder and CEO of Internet startup incubator Jumpstart Technologies , which in March 2006 was fined $900,000 for alleged violations of the CAN-SPAM Act, then the largest ever penalty for illegal spam. The irony is strong with this one.
 

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