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.

The Fascination With ToDo Lists Continues

The amount of energy web entrepreneurs put into creating the perfect online ToDo list is surprising. In May 2006 we ran through a boatload of them in a comparison post. After all that entrepreneurial effort, you’d think the online ToDo list would have been perfected.

Apparently not. Now DabbleDB, a beautiful little database-centric application builder based in Vancouver, Canada, has created a bit of buzz around its own ToDo list application, built on the Facebook platform.

The app, called Dabble Do, uses the DabbleDB back end to create a simple ToDo list on Facebook. There are some bells and whistles. For example, for dates you simply type in “tomorrow” or “next Wednesday” and the app figures out what you mean. You can also set ToDo items for your Facebook friends and follow up by “cracking a whip.” It’s a good way to stay organized.

Will Facebook’ers use this to keep themselves organized? The email/messaging feature on Facebook is very popular (I wish I could just have it forward to my normal email, though). Perhaps adding other features of Outlook, like ToDo lists and calendars, will catch on, too. In my mind, though, social networking is very different from office-like organization applications. That’s why I wasn’t particularly excited when Zoho (an office suite) added their own Facebook application a few weeks ago. So I’m fairly tepid on Dabble Do.

The bloggers seem to like it, though, and I’ve been wrong more than once before. See Mathew Ingram, Read/Write Web, Paul Kedrosky (an investor), Donna Bogatin and others. Ah, I love the blogosphere.

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.

Wow - Clown Co. Got That $1 billion Valuation (still nameless though)

Is ANYONE at NBC or News Corp. embarrassed that they can’t agree on a name, even a working name (or a website), for their new Not-A-YouTube-Killer video joint venture?

It was announced in March to fanfare, and a steady stream of news has been written about it ever since. But no one has a name for it, not even the New York Times which reported today that the joint venture managed to find someone willing to throw $100 million at it for 10% (reports that they were pitching this came out in June). And so we keep referring to it as Clown Co., which is the name Google execs reportedly refer to it as behind closed doors.

But back to the news. Providence Equity Partners, a Rhode Island based private equity firm, put up the $100 million to buy 10% of a company that didn’t exist three months ago. I hope that means a launch is imminent. It would be hard to launch without a name.

Nokia Publishes Access Code For Mosh Private Beta

If you are going to have a private beta, it may be a good idea not to publish the access code to the site on your forums. But that is exactly what Nokia did with their new Mosh service.

If you want to see what Nokia Mosh is all about, just type “ALLACCESS” into the box on the landing page. You can then register for the service.

Mosh is actually a great idea, albeit not great enough to counter the iPhone tidal wave that is coming. It’s a portal that can be accessed from a normal computer or a Nokia mobile device where users upload and share content - applications, games, images, etc. These are then downloaded to the mobile device.

Coincidentally, Yahoo is also working on a new service with the working name “Mosh.”