Stealth Startup Kango Working on Semantic Search For Travel

Does the world really need another travel site? With Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, TripAdvisor, Farecast, TripHub, Yapta, and many more, prospective travelers already have more than enough to choose from. (With an estimated $87 billion in travel booked online, it’s no wonder why). Soon they will be able to add Kango to that list.

The startup, which has been in stealth-mode until now, does manage to add a new twist to search travel. It is indexing 18 million opinions and reviews across 1,000 travel-related sites to derive the best travel search results based on what type of trip you want to take. If you are planning a romantic getaway in Big Sur, you will get one set of results. If you specify that you are looking for a family outing instead, you will get another. Or you can look for pet-friendly hotels and activities. Of course, you can also search by price or amenity, like any other travel site. And you can see where each hotel or activity is located on a small Google Map.

picture-204.pngBut what’s promising about Kango is the way it slices up search subjectively. Kango is building a semantic search engine focussed narrowly on travel. It parses the language in all of those reviews and guides, and categorizes them by generating tags for them. “You cannot wait for users to add tags, you have to derive them,” says CEO Yen Lee. So hotels that have been reviewed across the Web (on sites like Yahoo Travel, TripAdvisor, or Yelp) with words such as “perfect,” “relaxing,” “couples,” “honeymoon,” or “spa” would rank higher in a search for romantic travel. Hotels associated with the words “kitchen,” “pool,” and “kids,” would rank higher in a search for family trips.

Whether this will be enough to draw people from other travel sites is hard to say at this point. But Kango’s executive team has an impressive pedigree. Lee is a former general manager of Yahoo Travel. His search architect, Huanjin Chen, used to be the search architect at eBay. His natural-language search scientist, Boris Galitsky, used to do work for the British government. And his head of marketing, Elliott Ng, headed up marketing for Intuit’s QuickBooks and is the founder of Netcentives.

Lee estimates there are 6 billion to 8 billion travel-related searches done every year, and he thinks Kango can help expose more of the hidden gems in travel that today don’t quite make it to the first page of most travel sites. He plans to make money on travel-specific search advertising, rather than on booking or listing fees.

Kango will be rolling out a limited beta in the next few weeks, and is reserving 100 spots for TechCrunch readers who sign up here.

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Google Math: Buy $1,000 in Radio Ads, And We’ll Give You $2,000 Back

Here’s a good brain teaser for those famous Google job interviews: If you pay me $1,000, and I give you $2,000 back, how much profit does that leave me?

Unfortunately, this is not a hypothetical question. It’s an actual promotion for Google’s radio ad network, known as Google Audio. That’s right, Google is offering $2,000 to any advertiser who spends $1,000 on a Google Audio ad campaign. The $2,000 comes in the form of a credit on future ad campaigns, but part of it still comes out of Google’s pocket since it needs to pay the radio stations who will run the ads. It amounts to a “buy one, get two free” offer and is good through the end of the year.

This is but the latest piece of evidence that, while Google may be golden in online advertising, its forays into off-line advertising have yet to catch on. Google must be having a real hard time selling those radio ads to have to resort to such a blatant attempt to buy market share. It’s not the first time it’s tried such tactics either. Last year, in an effort to jumpstart Google Checkout, for instance, Google paid $10 for every $30 in sales that merchants directed through its PayPal competitor. I’m not sure how well that went. But last time I checked, PayPal was still around.

Just because Google has cash to burn doesn’t mean it should use that cash to try to buy market share. If it truly has a better way of buying and selling radio ads, advertisers and radio stations will quickly figure that out on their own. It is not a good sign when Google has to resort to paying customers to try out a new product.

The Man In The Arena

Yossi Vardi is one of the people I’ve had the pleasure to get to know since starting TechCrunch. You can find him at technology events worldwide - just look for the smiling, wild-haired guy surrounded by a pack of people.

To understand what he has accomplished, see his wikipedia entry. He is most famous for being the original investor in ICQ, but he’s also invested in over 60 other companies.

Yossi was generous enough with his time to join our panel of expertes at TechCrunch40 last month. At one point in the discussion of a group of startups he quoted Theodore Roosevelt from a 1910 speech given in Paris, and drew an analogy to today’s entrepreneurs:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

I spoke with Yossi this week and asked him about his investment approach. He generally invests in young entrepreneurs and only takes common stock. If someone has failed before he’s even more likely to invest - “It makes them want to win even more,” he said. He generally doesn’t look at business plans at all, and just invests in the individual.

I am not nearly as eloquent as Roosevelt or as smart as Vardi, but the words ring true to me, and it was a very special moment at the conference when Vardi spoke about this. If you are an entrepreneur (or think you may be), forget the critics (even us) and the naysayers and just do what your heart tells you to do. You may be wasting your time, but at least you got into the arena. And if you fail, make sure you fail while “daring greatly.” Then, get into the arena again, having learned from your mistakes.

Tailrank 2.5 Launches. It Still Falls Short

Tailrank founder Kevin Burton notified us that version 2.5 of his news aggregation site has launched, as well as a new version of the engine behind it called Spinn3r. We’ve taken a look at the new site, and in our opinion it still falls short of being a useful application.

We’ve been a bit harsh on Tailrank over the last few months, even suggesting that it may be time to deadpool it. But the site was without any content at all for a few weeks, and when Burton said it was fixed the site was filled with spam (Burton writes about the spam attack here).

So back to the new version…the spam is gone, but the stories are all at least a day old. Burton originally promised this release in early July. It came three months later, which is not unexpected when software is involved. But he knew that we’d be taking a critical look at the site. If his indexing engine can’t keep up with the news, how can he expect people to spend time visiting the site? We just criticized competitor shoutingmat.ch yesterday for the same problem. This is a competitive space (Techmeme is the clear leader, and there are lots of others), and anything short of perfect won’t stand a chance.

We’ll keep giving Tailrank the benefit of the doubt and hope to see it improve soon. But I’m not sure anyone else out there will do the same.

Attendi Wants to Search Inside Your Head

As if the more than 20 billion Web pages out there aren’t enough, a new startup coming out of stealth mode today called Attendi has come up with a new twist on “people search.” This is not to be confused with the type of people search that Facebook is getting into (actually searching for people—see also Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou), or the type of people-powered search results that Mahalo, Wikiasari, and others are exploring (also known as social search). Actually, Attendi could more aptly be called chat search because it wants to search what’s in people’s heads as expressed through online chats. Attendi is launching at DEMO fall.

Attendi is half a social network, and half a knowledge database. Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Members, known as “Attendis,” will create profiles on the site describing their areas of expertise, hobbies, and interests, as well as adding links to their blogs, social networks, or simply Websites they identify with. The site, which opens in beta today, dynamically creates tags that define what each person knows and cares about (they can also add their own tags). It is built on top of the Lucene open-source search engine, and the Jabber instant-messaging protocol.

When someone searches for a topic on Attendi, what comes back as results are profiles of other “Attendis” whose tags match the search request. And if they happen to be online at the moment, even on another IM system, the other person can initiate a chat discussion with one of them to ask questions about that topic. “Attendi will just be a way to broker your availability,” says CEO Drew Rayman. Every chat is archived, indexed, and becomes fodder for future search results.

Attendi is based in New York City, and Rayman is also the founder of an interactive ad agency called i33. He plans on selling search ad sponsorships based on Attendi topics, as well as a live chat ad unit that only pops up when a company’s online customer service rep is at the ready to do a hard sell through IM. It’s that kind of in-your-face advertising, though, that might drive people away from an IM-centric search engine and never give it a second chance.

Making topic-specific IMs searchable is certainly a novel way to create a knowledge database. But Attendi faces a huge hurdle in getting anybody to actually use its system. What’s the incentive? There is no existing network of super-smart Attendis anyone would want to tap into. One way around this chicken-and-egg problem, though, would be to take advantage of free advice that tens of thousands, if not millions, of people are already giving away for free online in the form of comments that people leave on blogs. There is no easy way to search across those. (Startups like Big Swerve, which was in the TechCrunch40 Demo Pit, are already onto this).

Bloggers today install search boxes from Google or Eurekster to allow readers to search through their posts. Why wouldn’t they also install a way to search comments if it were available. Attendi would be better off trying to build such a service to gain traction for its technology. It could offer a way to power comments for blogs that would make those comments searchable both on that blog alone and across all Attendi-powered blogs. That way, those people who leave their opinions across the blogosphere in the form of comments would surface in Attendi search results. Tapping into blog comments would be a great way to seed its knowledge network.

Pownce vs Digg: Who Will Kevin Rose Back?

I’ve speculated previously on the growing conflict Kevin Rose has between his roles at Digg and Pownce, and now it would appear that we may finally be on the eve of Rose being forced to decide between the two.

Leah Culver, a co-founder of Pownce with Rose has made a bizarre post to Digg suggesting that Digg’s new features were a direct copy of those from Pownce:

Since I originally came up with the Pownce gender list, I’m somewhat miffed that Digg copied Pownce.

Culver also linked to an image on Flickr which she subsequently deleted.

The first and most obvious question: has there been a complete break down in communications and trust between Pownce’s founders that they now find it necessary to air their dirty laundry (ironically) on Digg? Second: why did Culver delete the picture after posting the link on Digg? Was pressure brought to bare?

As much as we all admire Kevin Rose’s tenacity and creativity, there is always a point where you can be wearing too many hats. Rose has three (Digg, Rev3, Pownce), which I’m guessing is at least one too many, possibly two.

Google Analytics in AIR; That’s What I’m Talking About

Having just bought a Mac after ten years of Windows, I feel as though I have a heightened appreciation for products and services that are pleasurable to use. And while I love websites that implement Ajax or Flash effectively, few online destinations can match the usability of a well-designed desktop application.

That’s why I found Google Analytics AIR beta, publicly released on September 17th, to be such a breath of fresh air (no pun intended, really).

This unofficial AIR version of Google Analytics delivers the functionality of browser-based Google Analytics but with greater usability and a richer experience. If you haven’t heard of AIR (once named “Apollo”), it’s a platform developed by Adobe that enables web developers to deploy their web services outside of the browser so they function more like traditional applications.

This is the first AIR program that I have tested that really gets me excited about the platform. As a beta program, it’s not perfect (I ran into a few errors), but overall it has been executed very well. It’s also nice to see such a full-functional program developed using someone else’s API (in this case, Google’s).

Check out Google Analytics AIR beta and give the developer, Nico, your feedback to help make this thing even better. If you don’t already have AIR, you need to download it to use any AIR-base applications (as with Flash).

Thanks Orli.

Correction and Update: Google doesn’t actually have their own API for Analytics; Nico says he had to make his own to build this program (not exactly sure how that works).

He also says that both Adobe and Google are involved in this project now. Adobe has included the application in its Showcase program, and Google product managers and engineers are providing him with feedback and helping him make it more secure.

Nico says that beta 2 of Google Analytics AIR will be available around the time AIR beta 2 is released to the general public. He’s currently focusing on improved international support and the integration of AdWords.

Real Time Search Soon At Twitter

We just got word from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey that the company will be launching a real time search feature “very soon.” Type in a keyword or keywords and any time a Twitter is created that includes those keywords, you’ll be notified via IM or SMS. They’ll add the the ability to access this via their API in the near future, Dorsey says.

The feature hasn’t launched yet, and we’re unsure on some of the details. For example, I’m not sure if you can limit results to just people you are tracking, or if you can get results via RSS or email instead of or in addition to SMS and IM. Either way, Twitter is clearly adding features and functionality at a quick pace, which is good to see. Hopefully, the worst of the downtime is behind us, too.

The fuzzy image to the right is a sample user interface that we received from Twitter.

Update: Dorsey says in the next couple of weeks they’ll allow historical search as well. Also, for now, searches can only be done on all Twitter users. Over time, users will be able to refine searches by friends, geography, time and/or language. For now, results are only returned via SMS and IM - RSS, email and the API will come later.

Parakey: Did Investors Get Left Out In The Cold?

When Facebook acquired Parakey in July, everyone assumed the stockholders of that fledgling startup would be popping the champagne bottles. No matter what the acquisition price (it wasn’t disclosed), if the sellers got Facebook stock in return for their Parakey shares, it would likely be worth a fortune down the road.

It turns out that wasn’t the case. The acquisition price, say two sources close to the deal, was paid in cash and was “less than $4 million,” providing investors with just a 2x return on their investment. Meanwhile, Parakey founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt were rewarded handsome stock options to join Facebook as employees in lieu of any cash compensation.

The primary investor in Parakey was Sequoia Capital, but a number of angel investors also participated in the sub-$2 million round that closed in December 2006. The investors were told about the acquisition in mid 2007 just prior to it closing. The terms of the deal were fully disclosed to them, including the number of shares that were being granted to Ross and Hewitt.

Some of those investors clearly weren’t happy with the fact that they were getting a 2x cash return while the founders received different, and likely far more lucrative compensation. Their preference would have been to receive Facebook shares or simply to have kept Parakey as an independent entity with a chance for a larger liquidity event down the road. But reputation matters in silicon valley and they made the decision not to disrupt the deal to avoid being labeled as difficult investors. Clearly, though, it left a bad taste in their mouth.

Even as investors are lining up to fund new Facebook applications, some others are saying they’re unlikely to invest in startups that are focused only on that popular social network/platform. The fact that Facebook is now involved in directly funding some of these application developers via fbFund only makes them more wary - the company may simply pick off the most talented developers and leave the companies, and any investors, behind.

It is often hard to muster up much sympathy for the venture capitalists that fund all of the startups popping up in silicon valley and elsewhere. But their money keeps the system running smoothly. If they don’t see a fair return based on the risk they are bearing (most startups fail outright and are a write off), that well oiled machine could come to a grinding halt.

In this case its not clear that investors were treated unfairly. They did get double their money back for a six month investment, after all. But the Parakey acquisition is an important data point that will be considered by others in the future. Just because Facebook comes knocking on your door doesn’t mean its going to be a big payday for everyone involved.

GarageSeek Rates Mechanics, But Yelp Will Kill This Category Too

It seems like every time you turn around there’s another site out there trying to help you rate this, that, or the other thing. There’s Rapleaf (people), StreetAdvisor (neighborhood), YourStreet (neighborhood), SodaRatings (soda), and the list goes on (we wrote about Urbanspoon yesterday). Now there’s a new one in private beta, GarageSeek, for rating mechanic’s garages in your area.

With GarageSeek users will be able to share their experiences with mechanics and rate them on several different metrics. When live, the site will provide a potentially very useful service, the ability to check reviews and avoid hiring a shoddy mechanic. However, while a complete database of real reviews is useful, a lot of review verticals don’t offer a real reason to contribute when they start and fragment reviews across multiple domain names users may not care to remember.

Yelp largely solved the chicken and egg problem that comes with user review services, even if they allegedly paid users for reviews to start. They raised over $16 million and generated traction on the service through having a system seeded with content, rewarding top users with over-the-top parties, and focusing on a service that a wide variety of people use frequently, restaurants. The other large people-driven review site, Insiderpages, had the advantage of $9 million in financing and starting back in 2004. Despite this, Insiderpages went through a slew of layoff and eventually sold off to CitySearch for $13 million.

Yelp is already in the auto repair category, and is poised to expose their audience to other review verticals as well. They’ve already moved into non-geographical service reviews such as media outlets. The one question these review verticals need to ask themselves is “Can niche vertical review sites survive up against one general review site, Yelp or otherwise”? My feeling is no.

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Todays Takeover Rumor Bought to You By Google And Sirius

The Motley Fool is running a story on a rumor that Google is considering a takeover offer for US Satellite Radio provider Sirius.

The merger between Sirius and XM has yet to be approved by Federal Regulators and hence Sirius would become a takeover target if the merger failed. Google is still seeking more inventory for its Adsense for Radio program; hence buying Sirius would provide it with its own radio network from which they could sell advertising.

It would be easy to dismiss the rumor as being fanciful, and many already have, however any serious Google watcher knows that Google’s ambitions seem to have very little or no bounds. The advantages of Google acquiring Sirius from an advertising view point are obvious, and Sirius also streams a portion of its content over the web as well; a service that would bring Google into internet radio broadcasting. However, there is one additional factor that isn’t being discussed much: Sirius’ Loral FS1300 satellites.

Sirius’ current three elliptical orbiting Loral FS1300 satellites are being primarily used for streaming the Sirius Radio service, but are planned to be used for streaming television as well. More importantly: they can push data two ways; the Loral FS1300 satellite being used by may other companies for that very purpose. In buying Sirius, Google would own 3 orbiting satellites (with one spare and one being built) which they could use to provide internet access or a related data service to the United States and Canada. Google + Sirius would equal Google being everywhere over the largest market in the world. Capacity may dictate a non-universal use for the satellites (such as providing an ISP service), but they could work for an in-car internet service or similar mobile function. Bringing highspeed, low cost internet access to the car has long been dreamed about, Google could be planning to do just that.

You Be The VC: Reality Programming Comes To Venture Capital

You Be The VC is a new competition from New York based Bang Ventures that brings an American Idol style popular voting format to seed capital raising. Wannabe startups put forward their startup ideas to an expert panel, and then the best of those ideas are presented to the public for voting. The top three companies win $15,000 each, Boston Office space and incubation services.

The model is not dissimilar to Y Combinator, TechStars and similar programs, with the obvious difference being a popular vote.

The arguments relating to growing voyeurism of modern society are heated ones; as some one who has read Ben Elton’s excellent take on the medium “Chart Throb” I’ve become very skeptical towards popularity contests, although I still find myself watching them from time to time. You Be The VC is a clever way of exposing Bang Ventures and the sponsors to a broader audience, but on the other hand I can’t help than think that it cheapens the whole Venture Capital profession, at least a little bit. I’ll probably revisit the site though to vote :-)

Entries close in December and entrants must either be a US Citizens or have US Residency. Winners must also take the offer of Boston accommodation and cannot opt to take the cash alone.

Sclipo Releases Live Video Teaching For Hire

Sclipo, a video how-to site similar to SuTree and 5Min, lets you post short recorded educational videos. Recorded video, however, has it’s limits. It’s largely a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn’t let you clarify your instructions or adjust according to the background of your pupils. To confront these short comings, Sclipo has softly launched a new live video feature, “Sclipo Live”. Sclipo Live lets you teach for money one-on-one through live video conferencing. It’s currently available by invite only.

The live video sessions are organized into a directory listing the time of the session, who’s leading it, and what it’s about along with a price. The actual teaching session features live video feeds of the teacher and student along with chat. The whole session is recorded and synced with the chat for easy review later. After the session is concluded, the student can rate their teacher.

The feature set is currently pretty basic. There are now built in testing features or free-form whiteboard. Screen sharing is a noticeably absent feature.

Sclipo joins a host of other companies aiming to monetize user generated content through a consulting marketplace. Ether and Wengo are two services aimed at helping professionals charge for their consulting time. Ether does this through a pay per call model while Wengo does it through a paid a one-on-one video conference.

If You’re Not A Model, Don’t Bother Reading This

Heard of ModelsHotel? Its a hot new social network that you have absolutely no chance of joining. That’s because the site, founded by Jesper Lannung, is for the models only - enabling “models to stay in touch through a gated community.”

To get in you have to be a professional model and invited by the site or by other members. Once you’re in, you can do standard social networking stuff - post pictures, videos and profile information, and find romantic matches so you can have beautiful little photogenic spawn together.

They’re a year old but have been off our radar until this evening when the Wall Street Journal did a profile on them. A choice quote:

Models spend a lot of time in isolation, traveling from casting to casting, often in cities where they don’t know anyone else. But like Shannon Rusbuldt, a 22-year-old model with Elite Models, many fear exposing themselves to unwelcome solicitations from wannabe photographers, agents and suitors. Mr. Lannung, who is represented by Ms. Rusbuldt’s former agency, persuaded her to join by assuring her that his site is similar to other social networks, “but without the creepy people.”

Poor models. It’s good that they have a place to hide from the creepy people (i.e., the rest of the population).

The site may actually be a bit too selective though. 2,000 people have tried to join over the last year, says Lannung, but he’s rejected half of them. That makes for a pretty thinly populated social network. MySpace, by comparison, adds well over 100,000 members daily. Still, high end advertisers are said to be targeting the site to get access to those 1,000 trendsetters. The company is now trying to raise $1.5 million in venture capital, which I honestly hope they raise so that I can continue to make fun of them (and their VCs) before eventually depositing them in the Deadpool.

If you’re hot but not quite model material, check out Darwin Dating, another obnoxious site that is focused on matching up beautiful people on dates. Their tagline? Online Dating Minus Ugly People.

Google May Add Comment Feature On Shared Reader Feeds

Google Blogscoped got their hands on an internal video created by the Google Reader team where they discuss future plans for their popular service.

There’s a pile of interesting information; highlights include Google developing a new way for publishers to notify Google of updates, plans to integrate more social features into Reader including recommendations based on existing subscriptions, a new service called “Activity Streams” that will be a Facebook style feed of activity including integration with Gmail, and new ways to monetize feeds by tapping into Reader.

On the stats side, the video provided some interesting insights: two thirds of all feeds only have one subscriber, and are only polled for updates every 3 hours. Feeds with multiple subscriptions are polled every hour (so Reader is intentionally slow at picking things up). The Google Reader backend stores 10 terebytes of data from 8 million feeds, and according to Feedburner stats Google Reader is the most popular feed reader, followed by My Yahoo.

Its great stuff from the Reader team, and kudos for their ongoing innovation of a great service; but there was one negative: Google is interested in allowing users to comment on items they share, but this currently isn’t a priority.

Please Google, drop the idea altogether.

We all know about the constant battles Google has had with newspapers over Google News, and what seems by some reports so far to be a failed strategy of allowing comments on News Feeds. With the exception of the licensed wire stories which are now reproduced in full, those news stories are always presented only with a small fraction of the story itself, the equivalent to a part RSS feed; ultimately readers must visit those news sites to get the full story and the use of data in this way is usually argued to be fair use.

Google Reader’s share tools on the other hand republish full blogs post for all to read without obtaining permission from blog publishers. So-called link blogs in Reader already break copyright and in a small way undermine blogs and content creators. If Google offers a comment service on “shared” items they are in effect creating copyright infringing blogs; after all they’ll have chronological entries and comments so they’ll look like blogs, even if they don’t provide a fully customizable CMS.

There will always be those who argue that any syndicated content is fair game for republication; it’s the favorite defense of spam bloggers. RSS feeds are in the most provided for personal use/ viewing and are not provided (unless otherwise specified) for someone to use that information to republish on their own site in full, be that powered by Google Reader, Blogger or WordPress.

Google To Invest $10 Million In Green Startups

Google will be investing up to $10 million in “green” startups, the company said today. Specifically, they are looking to invest $500k - $2 million in multiple for-profit startups that are focusing on electric/hybrid transportation. Details are here.

But startups don’t have much time to fine tune their pitches - proposals requesting funding must be submitted to Google by October 22 2007.

This inches Google ahead in the race with Yahoo and other tech companies to show who cares most about the environment.

Does Social Media Make You Dumb?

The “Mainstream Media” has had somewhat of an antagonistic relationship with “New Media”. Journalists have bemoaned blogging on several occasions, stating simply that “Journalism requires journalists”. Once again journalists are gracing us with another study linking the success of the social news sites to the downfall of society.

The study, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), compared the mainstream media’s headlines for one week against those of a host of user-news sites. Specifically:

“PEJ took a snapshot of coverage from the week of June 24 to June 29, 2007, on three sites that offer user-driven news agendas: Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. In addition, the Project studied Yahoo News, an outlet that offers an editor-based news page and three different lists of user-ranked news: Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most Emailed. These sites were then compared with the news agenda found in the 48 mainstream news outlets contained in PEJ’s News Coverage Index.”

The comparison looked at the top stories (by percentage) from their news index compared to the top headlines (by percentage) for the social sites.

The study found that while the mainstream media talked about important issues like immigration (10%) and Iraq (6%), the only story gaining traction on social news sites was the iPhone. No surprise there. The study does concede that these user generated newsfeeds may not mirror the important news of the day because they may serve has an auxiliary source. However, it ignores the sheer volume of news that passes across their front pages. While mainstream news sites have a limited staff of journalists and real estate to highlight the days news, Digg and its cohorts can link to these stories with plenty of room for LOL Cats photos. For example, Putin’s dissolution of the Russian government made the top 10 of Digg today. So did the iPhone unlock.

Moreover, the study of social sites reveals what users are actually reading, whereas the mainstream news statistics point only at what they’re writing. Much of that “hard-hitting” journalism may not be getting the readership the coverage suggests. Where PEJ sees this as a clean stream of news, I see an echo chamber.

Similar to when the music industry went online, users are no longer forced to buy in a bundle. Instead they can select the stories/tracks that appeal to them without subsidizing the content they don’t want.

Photo credit ChrisL_AK

Apparently Old People Aren’t Dying To Use Eons

The take up of social networking services among over 50’s would appear to be not booming at nearly the same level as the birthrate of the United States in the 50’s and 60’s, with news that Eons has shed 24 staff members. Another twelve employees have left “voluntarily,” bringing the total headcount reduction to around 50%.

According to a report on Xconomy, Eons founder Jeff Taylor, who is too young to use his own site, “called together his remaining staff and engaged in a moment of remembrance for the 24 colleagues he had just laid off…in a dramatic, sobering, but ultimately healthy and air-clearing scene.”

Eons launched in August 2006 with a over 50’s focused social network that included an obituary feature which Michael Arrington reported as seeming “both gimmicky and somewhat distasteful.” The Obituary section includes notable deaths and additional features like deaths near your location “all tastefully wrapped in funeral home, medicare and netflix (?) advertising.”

The sector is far more crowded than when Eons launched, with sites such as BOOMj and others attempting to deliver are more friendly version of MySpace and Facebook to seniors.

Sequoia Capital and General Catalyst, who have invested $32 million in Eons over two rounds, are said to have demanded the restructure.

Update: Here’s a look back on their original ad campaign:

Prince To Adopt New Symbol: Tool

The still popular with some TechCrunch readers 80’s pop idol Prince has announced his intention to sue YouTube, The Pirate Bay and eBay for copyright infringement.

Prince said that in YouTube’s case it could not argue it had no control over which videos users posted on its site: “YouTube … are clearly able (to) filter porn and pedophile material but appear to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content which is core to their business success,” Prince said.

Reuters noted that it is rare for an individual artist “of Prince’s stature to take on popular Web sites while some up-and-coming performers actually encourage online file sharing to create a fan base and buzz around a record.”

Prince was most recently in the news after he decided to give away his latest album “Planet Earth” with an English Sunday Newspaper; some reports indicated that most readers wouldn’t even take the album for free. To those few remaining fans Prince has, those who seek to share his music with others on YouTube: sorry folks, Prince doesn’t love you.

Update: apparently folks feel that Prince isn’t washed up, so strike that until I find another way to describe the act of giving away albums and punishing your diminishing fan base.

Google Launches Australian Election Site

In what is claimed to be a world first (for Google), Google Australia has launched a dedicated Australian Election site.

The Google 2007 Australian Federal Election site offers links to YouTube videos from Australian political parties, a Google Maps mashup that provides House of Representatives electoral information by seat, and “election gadgets” that provide previous statements made by MP’s and Senators, Google News feeds and a Google Trend feature that tracks mentions of parties and issues. Data can also be viewed in Google Earth.

We’ve seen Google become involved in elections before; YouTube’s Presidential debates are well known. The Australian election site takes the idea one step further by offering a one stop shop of related information.

It’s not perfect, least not yet. Candidate information is lacking in Reps seats, probably due to the fact that in the Australian Election process candidates have 7 days to nominate for a seat once the election is officially called and hence there is no official list of candidate from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC). However it wouldn’t take a lot of effort to add some candidate information with the two major parties having long since preselected candidates for the election; a good example is in the Australian Prime Minister’s seat of Bennelong, where the Australian Labor Party (ALP) has preselected a high profile candidate Maxine McKew, a former Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) journalist who is getting a lot of media in Australia. I’d note also that Google Australia’s Head of Corporate Communications & Public Affairs, and the lead on the Election site Rob Shilkin would know that this information is freely available as well, given he is was formerly involved in the Liberal Party. The use of YouTube is certainly different (and I’m not being totally polite); watching the Prime Minister deliver YouTube exclusive messages in a suit like he was making an address to the Nation doesn’t really strike a chord with me.

Disclosure: in a past life I was a Howard Government Staffer…twice, but since cured.
googelection.jpg

Get A Yahoo Mash Invitation At InviteShare

Yahoo Mash, Yahoo’s new social network experiment, sent out the first batch of invitations moments ago. The service is invite only at this point. Get yours at InviteShare now.

I am seeding the first few invitations. Then it’s up to you. Once you get an invite, come back to confirm it and invite a few more people to keep things going. The more people you invite, the higher you will appear on waiting lists for future private betas.

Desperation Time? Synthasite Gives Stock Away To Users

Is this a brilliant PR move, or a sign of desperation? Web site builder Synthasite, which we took an early look at in November 2006, is giving 1 million shares of stock away to users.

Users earn shares by creating templates. Each template accepted by the company earns 1,000 shares for the creator. “We’re only selecting the best templates,” the company says.

The company won’t say what percentage of the company they are giving away, but do say that the shares are valued at $250,000. Since Synthasite has not raised significant outside capital, that valuation doesn’t mean much.

“If SynthaSite was ever acquired or became a listed entity, these shares would be worth exponentially more than what they are today,” the company says. That’s a bold statement, and one that would almost certainly get them in trouble if they were located in the U.S. Since Synthasite is located in South Africa, U.S. securities regulations don’t apply to them. So if you’re a designer willing to take a little risk, go get those shares.

Synthasite has a sophisticated site creation tool that competes with a host other startups and Google’s own page creator. Other competitors include Weebly and Jimdo. Webjam, Sampa, and Freewebs are creating communities around easily editable personal websites.

Touchscreen iPod? Fat Nano? Find Out ASAP from CrunchGear Tomorrow

Whatever Steve Jobs chooses to unveil tomorrow at a special media event in San Francisco, yours truly will be on location sending the guys over at CrunchGear the news as it unfolds. They will be posting all announcements to CrunchGear so be sure to keep checking that blog throughout the day to get your fill of Apple mania.

Live coverage will begin at 10:00 AM PST (1:00 PM EST) sharp on Wednesday, September 5th. The event is expected to last an hour and a half, but tune in at the beginning to find out what Steve will be wearing.

The rumor mill informs us that we have these announcements in store for us:

* Video iPod with 3.5-inch touchscreen display
* iPod Nano with video, a 320×240 display, 12 and 16GB capacities, and CoverFlow technology
* iPod support for digital radio and the purchasing songs from iTunes over WiFi
* Redesign and increased storage for the iPod Shuffle

FEC Determines That Blogs Count As Media

In two determinations handed down yesterday, the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) found that political blogs and bloggers are media for the purposes of US Electoral Law.

The first case was a complaint against the well known left wing blog The Daily Kos. Conservative blogger John C.A. Bambenek claimed that the site should comply with campaign finance laws because it charges a fee to place advertising on its website and it provides “a gift of free advertising and candidate media services” by posting blog entries that support candidates. The FEC determined that the website falls “squarely” within the media exemption and is therefore not subject to federal regulation under the Act; ipso facto: under US law blogs are formally recognized as media organizations.

In the second case, the FEC rejected allegations that Michael L. Grace made unreported expenditures when he leased space on a computer server to create a blog which advocated the defeat of Representative Mary Bono in the November 2006 election. The Commission found that the respondent did not fraudulently misrepresent himself in violation of 2U.S.C. § 441h and that the Act exempts from regulation volunteer activity by individuals.

In the FEC’s Internet regulations, the Commission clarified that an individual’s use, without compensation, of equipment and personal services for blogging, creating, or hosting a website for the purpose of influencing a Federal election are not expenditures subject to the restrictions of campaign finance law.

Essentially it reaffirmed the right of American bloggers to exercise their free speech rights without being subject to US electoral law, in the same way that media organizations are able to.

TechCrunch40 Keynote Talks: Marc Andreessen, David Filo, Chad Hurley, Michael Moritz and Mark Zuckerberg

It’s just two weeks until TechCrunch40 kicks off on September 17 in San Francisco. Last week we announced that we’ve doubled the number of presenting companies from 20 to 40. And today we’ve announced the two keynote sessions to be held at the conference, in addition to the 40 new products (see our partner Jason Calacanis’ blog post about this here).

* The first keynote session, “Humble Beginnings,” features Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz interviewing three legendary founders - Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Opsware, Ning), David Filo (Yahoo) and Chad Hurley (YouTube) about the early days of their startups - when money was scarce, users were few and far between and most of the quality coding was done in a garage or other low-rent office space.
* The second keynote session is a talk I’ll be having with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is the hottest startup on the planet right now and has gone through significant strategic evolution this year. I’ll have 45 minutes to talk with Mark about the early days of Facebook, their recent growth and transition to a platform, as well as the future of the company.

The full agenda for the two day event is here.

The event is quickly selling out, although we made a couple of hundred more seats available two weeks ago by removing some tables and otherwise rearranging things to accommodate more people. A list of some of the financial and press attendees is here. Register for TechCrunch40 here.

Something Going On At Twitter?

At first I thought it was just another Twitter outage, and then (after a couple of hours of Twitterrific not working) I tried connecting to Twitter directly:

twitter.jpg

There isn’t a page on Twitter (including their blog) that can be accessed as I write this (3:30am PST Thursday). It may just be sugar coating on yet another period of downtime; an alternative to the Twitter downtime bird that replaced the Twitter cat some time ago, but if it is, it’s the first time I’ve seen it. On the other hand, something might be going on at Twitter: more stable servers perhaps? or even a new feature launch? Watch this space.

Update: Twitter back up as at 5am PST. A notice on Twitter states that Twitter would be down for 2.5 hours from midnight, looks like they were 50% of the way there is terms of downtime. At the time of writing there is nothing on the Twitter blog explaining the reason for the downtime. Looks like a regular outage with sugar coating.

Exclusive: Screen Shots And Feature Overview of Delicious 2.0 Preview

Social bookmarking site Delicious launched a limited, invite-only preview of version 2.0 of the service this afternoon. The new site can be accessed at preview.delicious.com, although only invited users can actually get in.

The Delicious service (no longer “del.icio.us” and now residing at delicious.com) boasts 3 million registered users and 100 million unique URLs bookmarked.

If you are invited, all of your existing bookmarks are imported to the preview, although any changes you make will be lost when the new service launches - so it’s just for trying out and giving feedback. Del.icio.us is saying that there is no guarantee that the final product will look exactly like the preview, since they are taking user feedback very seriously.

The preview shows a substantially different interface than the current Del.icio.us site, and a number of new features.

Founder Joshua Schachter says this is a complete code-rewrite of Del.icio.us. More details below.

Read the rest of this entry »

PayPerPost: Wasting Investor Money While Offending Native Americans

Ah, PayPerPost. The controversial Florida-based startup that is leading the effort to tarnish the blogosphere makes another PR blunder. And this one’s a whopper.

The company has been chronicling their startup days on a video blog called RockStartup. There have been some embarrassments before with the video blog - such as when a viewer noticed that the company had purchased $700 chairs for employees with investor capital and then yelled at a painter for standing on one (CEO Ted Murphy, pictured above, later said the chairs were purchased used).

But the most recent episode is where the company really takes the cake. All employees of the company were taken on an all-expenses-paid trip to Club Med, where as far as I can tell they spent their time getting drunk and dressing up as Native Americans, complete with lots of red face and body paint (something many Native Americans find both racist and offensive, and which has been equated to Blackface). The company also hired something called a “Creative Thinking Coach” to guide them through the whole experience.

The only question I have is…Did Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the main VC behind PayPerPost, really greenlight this debacle?

400 Million Downloads For Firefox In Less Than Three Years

Firefox has been downloaded 400 million times in the three years since v 1.0 launched. It’s been roughly doubling every year. After six months they had 50 million downloads. 100 million after a year, and 200 million after two years.

There are 120 million or so regular Firefox users.

About 50% of TechCrunch readers use Firefox, according to our Google Analytics account, and it is the most popular browser. Internet Explorer is second with 40% and Safari with 6.6%. I didn’t expect to see Playstation Portable on the list, at no. 10.

AllofMP3 To Rise From The Dead

The owners of the now infamous cut price Russian MP3 retail site AllofMP3 have posted that the site will soon recommence trading.

The announcement follows a Russian court decision August 15 that found AllofMP3’s previous CEO was not guilty of breaching Russian copyright laws, and therefore the AllofMP3 service was legal.

EMI, NBC Universal and Time Warner had led the legal case against AllofMP3, with the US Government previously threatening to escalate the dispute regarding AllofMP3 to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

According to AllofMP3, “The service will be resumed in the foreseeable future.”

FotoFlexer Raises The Bar On Online Photo Editing

Online photo editors keep getting better and better. For hardcore image manipulation, desktop software like Photoshop or Gimp will always have its place, but online editors are free, easy to use and a lot of fun. We covered most of the online editors back in February (Fauxto, Picnik, Picture2Life, Preloadr, PXN8 and Snipshot). But a relative newcomer on the scene, Berkeley-based FotoFlexer, is worth a look.

The site first launched in July with basic functionality and integration with Facebook. This last week they relaunched a new site with more tools, direct access to your desktop/laptop webcam, and they also now integrate with Flickr, Picasa and MySpace.

Upload a photo, or grab one from a supported service, and edit it by changing colors, adding effects, bulging or pinching areas (to make body parts look larger or smaller), etc. You can also turn any image into a sketch or cartoon. I spent about 10 minutes creating the different versions of the picture to the right (original is top left). The most fun is changing hair color, although the image third down on the left is my personal favorite.

Fotoflexer says they incorporate their own artificial intelligence algorithm to figure out the right way to alter images. And whatever it is they’re doing, it works. You simply point out a few areas of the site you want to remove or alter and it figures out the rest of the pixels pretty quickly. You can do all of this in Photoshop, but it takes a lot longer. And unlike most (but not all) of the online photo editing tools we’ve previously covered, FotoFlexer also supports layering for more complicated image editing.

FotoFlexer also now integrates directly to your webcam and to take a quick snapshot and edit it. Many of the effects are similar to the Photo Booth application that comes installed on all Macs.

The integration with third party services is a great feature as well. Pull down photos from Facebook or another service, alter them and re-upload in a few minutes.

The service runs in Flash and was built on the Flex platform with mostly custom tools. The company has not raised any capital and has 15 employees, all in the Silicon Valley/Bay area. About 50,000 people use their Facebook application and/or the website directly. I expect that number to grow as social networkers discover the joy of turning their pictures into cartoons, or turning their hair color to Fuchsia.

SpiceWorks Raises $8 Million; Google Adsense Even Supports IT Software

IT software maker SpiceWorks just closed an $8 million in series B financing. The funding round was led by Shasta Ventures with participation from Spiceworks series A investor, Austin Ventures. Their series A was $5 million. Shasta Ventures co-founder and managing director, Ravi Mohan, and former Dell senior executive, John Hamlin, have joined the Spiceworks board of directors. The money will be used to support over 120,000 users as well as software development and sales and marketing.

SpiceWorks’ software is an IT Desktop suite, consisting of a Network Inventory, Help Desk, Reporting, Monitoring and Troubleshooting applications. Taking a page from a lot of the consumer applications we profile on TechCrunch, their software is completely free and ad supported. Ravi Mohan of Shasta calls the shift toward ad supported systems the “consumerization of the enterprise”.

The ads are served via Google AdSense along a sidebar as you use the application. The idea is that IT professionals get a free suite of the basic tools they need and advertisers get access to a targeted audience that spends a lot of time in front of those ads (lots of page views).

Are we going to see the ad-supported model spreading across enterprise applications? Not likely, considering the great support and set up costs associated with most enterprise installations. However, SpiceWorks’ free bundle of basic IT programs helps differentiate themselves in the highly competitive category of SMB IT tools.

Videohybrid 3.0: I Can’t Believe This Hasn’t Been Banned Yet

Videohybrid, a site we first linked to in April as part of a broader post on online video piracy, has relaunched with a new version that is just asking for trouble.

Videohybrid 3.0 marries Q&A functionality with social voting. Users are now able to submit movies, and TV shows they are looking for online, other users who would like to see that video as well vote for the request. Digg style the top requests rise to the top of the list.

Users who respond to video requests earn points that go towards an overall ranking system. Videos are now exclusively embedded on site; unlike Bit Torrent and other services that require downloads Videohybrid is a one stop shop where pirated video can be played immediately on the same page, YouTube style, complete with user commenting and related features. Videohybrid doesn’t offer embedding code for the videos to be displayed elsewhere; from what I can gather the videos are all pulled from other sites, including some well known ones as well: a full rip of the movie Pulp Fiction was being served from Google Video.

There are other sites around operating in the same space; where Videohybrid differs is in its seamless delivery and rather amazing catalog of content. Something this good (from a user perspective, not a legal one) just can’t last. Here’s hoping the two teenagers from Lynbrook High School in San Jose who started the site have it hosted in a country well beyond the reach of the MPAA.

Slide Users Adding One Million New Widgets Daily: That’s a Lot Of Widgets

San Francisco based social network widget provider Slide has hit new highs, with reports that they are now serving over one million new widgets daily.

Slide provides widget based photo slideshows that users can embed in a range of social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Friendster.

Slide has impeccable backing, being founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin and funded by Mayfield Fund, Khosla Ventures, BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund with a rumored round of $20million in November 2006.

Slide’s Facebook apps alone have a combined usage number in excess of 10 million users. comScore reports that Slide was serving 117 million unique visitors a month as of April 2007.

Slide competes directly with services including RockYou, Flektor, and Photobucket.

Farecast Now Provides Data On Fairness Of Hotel Pricing

Seattle based Farecast, a startup that launched about 18 months ago to focus on predicting flight prices and guaranteeing users against increases, just expanded to help people find deals on hotel rooms as well.

The hotels area of the site helps users see prices based on a number of travel search engines (Orbitz, CheapTickets and ReserveTravel). All the results are shown on a map along with price and other basic information.

But the service also looks at each of the hotels to let you know if it’s priced attractively or not. For most hotels, the star rating isn’t enough to tell if the price is too high or low v. local competition. Over the long run market forces even the playing field, but a traveler unfamiliar with a specific hotel can (and often is) overcharged occasionally. Farecast will help you understand if you are getting a deal or not on that specific hotel.

Hotels with good deals are marked in red. Over priced rooms are blue. Click on the image for a larger view of the interface.

This is much different than their flight business, which is based on helping people predict if airfares will likely increase or decrease before the flight date. But travelers looking for a good hotel at the best price possible will find this equally useful.

Wiki Jacking

Following the decision in January by Wikipedia to strip SEO benefits from outgoing links by adding the link-nofollow tag (see our coverage of how the rule doesn’t apply to certain third party wiki links) the once rampant gaming of Wikipedia has all but disappeared. SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin posted during the week on a new technique being used that instead of building Google juice to a particular site, aims to knock others off the top positions on Google by promoting the position of Wikipedia pages to the top of each specific Google search query. I’m not quite sure exactly what color hat the method may be (and Rand asks the same question), but it is clever.

Zivity: Silicon Valley Elite Dabble in Adult Content

Porn is big business, and the industry has been quick to adapt by copying successful features of new consumer Internet sites. But one thing we haven’t seen until now: respected Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors taking a direct interest in funding or running these sites.

The potential payoff from a successful adult site is clearly too high for Silicon Valley to continue to ignore the space, though. And San Francisco-based Zivity is going to be the first experiment out the door. The founders say Zivity isn’t porn, but that certainly depends on how you define the term. The primary content of the site is naked female models.

The company’s founders include Scott Banister, a co-founder of the recently acquired IronPort, as well as other technology veterans. CEO Jeffrey Wescott led security software architecture and scalability at IronPort, and co-founder Cyan Banister was also an IronPort exec. They’ve raised $1 million in funding, although they aren’t yet disclosing any investors other than Banister. Rumor has it that a number of former paypal execs may have invested.

Like Suicide Girls, Zivity is a social network surrounding pictures of attractive women. Users can log in and join the network and view non-nude photos for free. If they want have the clothes taken off, it costs $10 per month.

Paying users get 5 votes per month to give away to models that they like. And every vote from a user is money in the pocket of the model and photographer - they get 80 cents per vote received. The default split is 60 cents to the model and 20 cents to the photographer, but that can be negotiated by models and photographers who’ve achieved a certain level of status in the system. This is where Zivity differs substantially from Suicide Girls, which pays its models a flat fee for their content.

The company is keeping the look and feel of the site under wraps for now, but did send me the screen shot I’ve included here. They also confirmed this is a Flash interface for viewing the photos, although the site itself is built on Rails.

Zivity is raising a second, larger round of financing now, and will launch later this year. Beta accounts are slowing being given out now.

Previous Adult/Porn coverage on TechCrunch - see PornoTube, Eroshare, Heatseak (porn browser), Socialporn and others.

InviteShare In The Press

Associated Press writer Rachel Metz covers InviteShare, the company we acquired last month that lets users get hard-to-find invitations to private betas.

I spoke to Rachel a couple of times while she researched the article. She mentions the fact that some startups might not like the fact that InviteShare allows people to bypass the normal invitation mechanisms they set up. But she also gets the fact that if someone wants into a beta badly enough to go through InviteShare, they are probably the perfect person to test the product. And the days of people paying for beta invitations on eBay should be long gone now.

CrunchGear 1st Birthday Bash Recap and Photos

We at one of the “other” Crunch blogs celebrated our first birthday last night and we have a plethora of pictures featuring some of the New York tech scene. It wasn’t quite a bunch of tanned, attractive people partying under a fading Palo Alto sunset, but was still a party. Special thanks to all the sponsors and Blast Media for allowing us to give out great prizes — including a robotic Elvis from Wowwee.

Google Adds Embedding To Google Maps

View Larger Map
Google announced the addition of YouTube style embedding to Google Maps this morning.

Google Map mashups have been popular for a long time now, however for the non-programming inclined including a Google Map on a blog or website hasn’t always been easy. The new embed feature (as above) now provides an easy way for anyone to include an active map on their site.

Embedded maps can be customized in terms of size and can also include driving directions, search results, or a user generated map.

Largest Pligg Partner Defects After Announced Sale

Pligg, a popular open source content management system that lets developers quickly create Digg-like clones, put itself up for sale a week ago.

Today VideoSift, which has 1 million monthly unique visitors and claims to be the largest user of Pligg’s software, emailed to tell me they have developed their own software and will stop using Pligg. The new site goes live this Friday, August 25.

VideoSift says their new platform is built exclusively for video aggregation and will serve their needs better than the Pligg software. They were also hesitant, they say, to continue to contribute to the Pligg open source project. They cite a “serious security breach” that compromised part of their database and was based on a simple exploit that shouldn’t have existed. The Pligg community moved quickly to respond and patch the problem, they say, but it left them feeling vulnerable.

The sale of the company put them over the top, and the company says they have some misgivings about the Aferro GPL license, particularly about how code resales are handled.

VideoSift is a loss for Pligg at a crucial time during their sale process. Not only is the site generating more traffic than other Pligg sites, they were named the best video aggregator by PC World late last year. These are the kind of banner partners Pligg needs to get a good sale price.

A screenshot of the new site launching this Friday is below.

Update: After reaching out to us to write this story, the founder of VideoSift is now saying that we mischaracterized his position. Instead of trying to properly characterize his position, here’s his email to us. You decide if the story is inappropriate or not.

Pligg is a good general CMS, but there were a few considerations for moving off:

We started VideoSift shortly after Pligg was ported from the Spanish language Digg clone Meneame.net written by a talented Spanish coder, Ricardo Galli. ( http://meneame.net/) Pligg has gone through a lot of revisions and changes since then - and we haven’t moved with them.

About 2 months ago, there was a serious security breach at VideoSift (and other Pligg based sites) that compromised part of our DB. The breach was based on a simple hack that would have been found by analyzing the Pligg source. Although the Pligg community was quick to respond and patch the problem- This pushed us farther down the road to closed source.

And lastly, although we were well on our way to writing our new software, we have some misgivings about the pending sale of Pligg. Pligg is licensed under the Aferro GPL which is pretty strict about the re-sell of code.

The new VideoSift has been rebuilt from the ground up to work well around video aggregation. Our community loves it, and we can’t wait to launch it this Friday.

Thanks and cheers,

Brian Houston
VideoSift
Sydney, Australia

CrunchBoard Jobs

Here are some of the most recent CrunchBoard job posts:

• Facebook Application Developers at Coolapps.com in New Hope, PA

• Director of Business Development at Truveo in San Francisco, CA

• Web Designer at BWE an IAC company in Charlotte, NC
  

• Java Guru at MTV Networks in New York, NY

• Experienced Web Hacker at Zivity in San Francisco, CA
  

• Java Technical Lead/Architect at The New York Times in New York, NY
  

• Software Engineer/Architect at CastTV in San Francisco, CA
  

• Business Development at Panache in Encino, CA
  

• Flash Developer at IAC/Dow Jones in New York, NY
  

• Director of Product Management- Also Director of Engineering at GreeneSearch in San Francisco, CA

Facebook Will Use Profiles To Target Ads, Predict Future

is planning a new advertising system that will target ad delivery based on profile information added by Facebook users.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, the new system will “let marketers target users with ads based on the massive amounts of information people reveal on the site about themselves” with future development that is aiming to (in true Orwellian style…or should that Minority Report style) “predict what products and services users might be interested in even before they have specifically mentioned an area.”

Monetizing social networking platforms through advertising has been a hard task for a long time now. For example, although News Corp may be reaping revenues from MySpace today, most of those revenues comes indirectly, such as through the Google search deal. MySpace rates have previously been reported to be a small fraction of 1 cent CPM.

Facebook seems to be experiencing stronger advertising rates, with recent reports indicating that Facebook charges around $10 CPM. There is always scope to improve, and certainly the more upmarket demographic of Facebook should provide high paying advertising opportunities if and when the ad delivery is sorted out and well targeted.

There will be some who will question Facebook’s moves. Google has previously come under fire for delivering contextual advertising in Gmail based on the content of emails a user had received. Facebook is not only going to use user data and networking activities to deliver targeted advertising, they are going past that and trying to produce preemptive targeted advertising based on what they think you might want in the future.

If Facebook can create a system that accurately preempts user desires, it’s not unreasonable to consider that Facebook could easily become the next Adwords as well; not even Google can currently predict the future.

CrowdStorm Revamps, Seeks Wisdom Of Your Crowd

Social shopping site CrowdStorm has launched a beta trial for their new site revision. It’s been seven months in the making. CrowdStorm always had a social bent, with users supplying the listings and reviews for products listed on the site. However, the new version is a significant upgrade that incorporates content pulled from around the web with relevant reviews intelligently selected from other users. You can sign up for the trial here.

Before, the site was entirely dependent on user submitted products and written reviews. The new site adds a host of other review sources, such as expert reviews (Cnet, TrustedReview, Stuff …), buyer guides, video links, and q&a sessions. Users can bookmark their own relevant product review content on the site. It also brings in new price search engines such as Amazon, eBay, and Shopping.com.

CrowdStorm hopes not only pull content from the web, but also let you take your content with you. You can take your reviews and post them to other blogs, review sites, or online stores. The hope is that CrowdStorm will function as a hub for review content instead of a walled garden.

The more significant change is how it takes advantage of user generated content. CrowdStorm has a new algorithm that ranks user reviews in aggregate and for each user based on the quality of reviews, the similarity between users, and social network relationships. The idea being that similar users closely linked to you have more relevant and trustworthy reviews. The algorithm can also generate a relevant crowd of experts you can ask questions.

It’s very similar to what VibeAgent is doing with their travel review system. Analyzing the social network graph has become a sensible way to deal with the potential spammyness of user generated sites and I expect to see it incorporated into even more products.

Thumbalizr: A Really Good Idea, If It Worked

Thumbalizr is a newish online image tool that allows users to take screen shots of web pages.

Users can customize the dimensions of each screenshot taken, from standard sizes through to a custom option. Screen shots can consist of an entire page, or just a standard screen shot. To use Thumbalizr, users simply type the URL of the site they require a screenshot of, and hit the “thumb it” button. The image is then available for download in various sizes by pixel.

Thumbalizer is a really good idea; I’m a regular creator of web page screenshots so to not have to manually take a screen shot, open it in Photoshop, crop it, resize it, save it then upload it appeals to me, as I’m sure it would to others who frequently create screenshots. There is only one significant problem with Thumbalizr: it regularly doesn’t work. It happily made screenshots of TechCrunch, but it failed on a range of other sites. Hopefully they will fix the issues shortly.

Check This Guy Out

Bill Snitzer, one of the tech guys at BitGravity, is driving to Los Angeles and showing it live on the Internet. He’s got a webcam up showing the drive and a Google Map mashup with a GPS device showing his progress.

Bitgravity, located in Burlingame, California, hasn’t officially launched. But the company is the content delivery network (CDN) for Revision3 and other video sites. The quality of the video on this site is significantly better than what you see with other live streaming services like Justin.tv and Ustream. I’m looking forward to hearing more about the streaming technology, as well as the Google Maps/GPS hack (some resources for GPS mashup here and here).

Thanks for the tip David.

Attack Of The Fake Bloggers

Whilst Fake Steve Jobs has gained the most attention in the fake personal blog scene, a number of other fake blogs have been launched this year. Here’s a quick run down of a few that might be worthy of adding to your feed reader…or maybe not.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
No list of fake blogs would be complete without the master. Although the blog may have lost its edge since Daniel Lyons was outed as the writer, the site still maintains a strong following and Lyon’s way with words still makes for delicious reading.

The Secret Diary of Steve Balmer
I’ve been reading this fake blog longer than most on this list, and I’m yet to unsubscribe. It’s not as well written as its Steve Jobs equivalent, but it has the occasionally side splitting post. Probably the closest of the bunch to being a direct clone of Fake Steve.

Larry Ellison’s Fake Blog
A decent read, if it times a little heavy, but in context it works. Fake Larry made a brief guest appearance on Fake Steve a little while back, so it’s not inconceivable that the author is Daniel Lyons as well, or someone else who perhaps works with Lyons.

The Secret Diary of Jonathon Schwartz
As the header reads: “Dude, I was the first CEO to even have a blog.” Of course the real Schwartz does maintain his own blog. The way this is written tone wise makes it sound just like Schwartz.

The Secret Diary of Bill Gates
Unfortunately what could have been the best of the bunch is a let down. Poor context and tries too hard to be funny; the difference between clever satire and stupidity is lost on fake Bill Gates. Some may disagree though.

Moving away from corporate heads, there are a number of other fake blogs out there, here’s a couple

Fake Scoble
To quote the about page: “Scoble himself is so unintentionally hilarious that this site is superfluous –but hey it will be fun. Fake Scoble is about low hanging fruit. Actually, it’s about the fruit beneath the tree. Obvious jokes are going to be the rule of the day.”

The Secret Diary of Brad Stone
“I outed Fake Steve Jobs. Have you heard of him?” Hit and miss, but has its moments. There must be something ironic though about there being a fake blog for the person who outed the most famous fake blogger of them all.

There is even a blog dedicated to news about fake blogs: I am not Fake Steve.

See also our coverage of mass produced fake bloggers from Newsgroper here.