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.

Twitter Adds Gmail Import Feature

Buried by the news this week of Twitter adding search was another Twitter feature release: invite friends.

The new invite friends option in Twitter allows users to invite friends by adding an email address or by importing Gmail contacts.

Twitter investor Fred Wilson writes that to date “Twitter has made it nearly impossible to find friends on Twitter. That’s a very big shortcoming of an inherently social service. It sort of makes me wonder how Twitter got any users at all.” According to Wilson the new feature overcomes that problem and that he “just tried it out and it worked great for me.”

See our previous Twitter coverage here.