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.