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.

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.

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.

Acquisition for Clipmarks

New York based Clipmarks, a del.icio.us-like social bookmarking service, may have been acquired by Forbes. We have no information on the size of the transaction, but my guess is that it was on the very low side.

The service allows users to bookmark all or a portion of a web page and annotate it. It is then shared with the community and popular new bookmarks are “popped” to the top of the site. In some ways it is more competitive with Digg than Del.icio.us since popular stories are linked from the home page. See our post on Digg-like competitors from earlier this year where we talked about Clipmarks and others.

I never took much of a liking to Clipmarks - it wasn’t as interesting as Digg and was lost in the sea of social bookmarking competitors. But I congratulate them on the acquisition and look forward to seeing what Forbes does with it. I wonder if Condé Nast’s acquisition of Reddit last year prompted Forbes to take a look at some of the available competitors out there.

Google News Hypocrisy: Walled Off Content

TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera makes an interesting observation on the Google News story all over the blogosphere today.

One thing that bugs me: they’re now hosting original news content, yet they prohibit other aggregators from crawling it (per robots.txt restrictions and TOS). Of course Google News relies on the openness of other organizations with original news content.

Google crawls news sites and grabs their content for republishing on Google News. They rely on the willingness of those news sites to get distribution on Google. But Google restricts others from crawling Google News itself via their robots.txt file and terms of use, which state that “you may not…use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the [Google News] Service.”

That policy wasn’t a problem when Google was simply aggregating news from around the web. But now they are hosting original news content, written by people that are involved in the story. And they are telling the world that no one else can crawl that content and display it. Yahoo News, TechMeme and every other non-Google owned news service on the web is restricted from using that content.

The restrictive policy hasn’t changed with the new feature launch, and this may just be an oversight. We’ll find out soon enough if Google intends to build a wall around this news content, or share it with the rest of the web.