Company: Gataga <img src='http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/gatagalogo.gif' alt='' border=1 / Previous Profile: June 13, 2005 What’s New? Gataga has just notified TechCrunch of new functionality: – Gataga photo search (through Flickr) – Gataga Mobile Photo Search: The new functionality allows tag searches of flickr images. It works well, if a little slow (give them time, their server has been crushed with users). This is a great addition to the overall tagging meta-search, and hopefully will be integrated with normal searches in the near future. Our favorite test is to do a search on Selma Hayek, our favorite actress. Here’s the results (remember, just flickr for now): RSS feeds for searches are avaible. I would like to see the URL change to a set URI for the search as well, an easy fix (allows for posting to the search, emailing, etc.). Gataga Mobile: If you have a cell phone or mobile device that supports XHTML (WAP 2.0), you can get Gataga results on your mobile device (point your device to gataga.com/m. Technorati and Flickr tags only at the moment, but these guys get new functionality up fast – expect more soon. Screen shots here: Tags: gataga, tagging, web2.0, techcrunch, tags, search → Read More
Company: BadFruit What is it? BadFruit has a product called BadApple that is a plug-in for iTunes. It expands ITunes functionality to view and add podcasts directly into iTunes. This is NOT the iTunes support for podcasts announced by Steve Jobs a few weeks ago that will be included in the next version (4.9) of iTunes (and will allow for creation and charging as well). BadFruit is independent from Apple. At this point, BadApple supports adding and listening to podcasts, but not creation and charging. It is a PC only product, no plug-in for Macs is yet available. There is very little information on the BadApple website. Some info from the SF Chronicle though – “At this point, there is no official indication of BadFruit’s origin. But a handful of signs seem to link the site to MP3Tunes.com, the online song store opened a few months ago by MP3.com founder Michael Robertson. Log files created by the software indicate that it talks to a server hosted by MP3Tunes. Code inside the software package, once downloaded, also show links to MP3Tunes. The privacy policies displayed by MP3Tunes.com and BadFruit are also identical in almost every way, with details such as the name of the company and the name of the service changed. BadFruit’s terms of use say that any legal actions concerning the software should be taken in San Diego County, where Robertson’s companies are based.” Link Here is the whois information for Badfruit.com In their own words, “Podcast support for iTunes is here! Download the free BadApple plug-in which expands the functionality and interoperability of iTunes software. (iTunes is music software which works with iPod MP3 players.) BadApple adds interoperability to view and download podcasts directly within iTunes software. There’s no need to download and learn other software programs because everything happens right in the iTunes software. After downloading and installing BadApple, you will have a “Podcasts” link you can click on from iTunes. You can use this to browse through categories to find the Podcast you want. Each podcast has a description. Once you locate a podcast you are interested in, double clicking on the podcast will load it to your library. When you plug in your iPod the podcast will be loaded to that depending on your settings. BadApple is free software. There is no charge to download the software or use the software.” NOTE: Comments on their → Read More
Company: Technorati Technorati fully launched their new beta with a slightly different look than the beta announced 10 days ago (profile here). Complete list of new features can be seen here (Dave Sifry’s blog) and at the new Technorati corporate Blog (link). I saw this earlier at the technorati site, and saw this post at The Blog Herald. The new site is great, adds lots of new features and we look forward to future improvements. It’s hard to say that I like it more or less than the “old” technorati – things grow on you and it takes time for new stuff to settle. But so far, I like it and the new feature set is strong. Screen Shots: Relevant Links: Technorati Blog Jason Calcanis (doesn’t like the new look, makes good points about Google) Blog Herald on the new design “I’m not sure a Japanese style cartoon theme is the way to go” PlanetOzh Tags: technorati, technoratibeta, web2.0, techcrunch, blogs, blogging → Read More
Company: Google (Wallet) What is it? This hasn’t launched yet, but there is some buzz around the blogosphere (and the Wall Street Journal) that Google is planning on launching a competing payment service to PayPal. Is this Web 2.0? I think so. If its p2p, which I imagine it would be, then it certainly is. From the WSJ article: “For Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., a payment service could represent a significant expansion beyond online advertising, which generated 99 percent of its $3.2 billion in revenue last year, the Journal said. Online-payment providers typically take a commission on each transaction.” Google has a hill to climb – paypal has 72 million users (PayPal accounted for $233.1 million, or 23 percent, of eBay’s revenue during the first quarter). However, they’ve done this before with search (v. everyone), advertising (v. overture) and email, although not with a social network (see orkut – when’s the last time you logged in?) Gary Price noted that the company “Google Payment Corporation” was created by Google a couple of months ago: “I did a bit of research (love that deep web (-:) after reading the article and discovered that two months ago Google filed the paperwork with the California Secretary of State and formed the Google Payment Corporation. Interesting.” Gary also noted that someone registered “googlewallet.com“. More on this as it develops. Relevant Links: Battelle on Google Wallet SocialPatterns on Google Wallet SearchEngineWatch on Google Wallet AP story on this Business 2.0 blog post on this Delicious Tag: GoogleWallet Technorati Tag: GoogleWallet WSJ Article StellarBay on this USA Today on this Seattle Times on this Hitchiker’s Guide to 650 on this SiliconBeat on Google Wallet Charlene Li on Google Wallet Tech Beat on Google Wallet Meg Whitman on Google Wallet Infectious Greed on this “it is seismic stuff” GMSV on Google Wallet (saying the service will not be p2p, which really questions whether it should be on TechCrunch as a Web 2.0 play ) Tags: paypal, googlewallet, web2.0, techcrunch, onlinepayments, google → Read More
Company: Weblogs, Inc. Founded: September 24, 2003 Location: Weblogs, Inc. 2200 Colorado Avenue, Suite 729 Santa Monica, CA 90404 Phone: 310-828-8284 Fax: 310-861-0600 or Weblogs, Inc. The Chrysler Building 132 East 43rd Street, Suite 1000 New York, New York 10017 What is it? The Weblogs, Inc. network of weblogs (WIN) is a blog network – literally an affiliation of weblogs that are each focused on a particular industry or topic. For instance, my favorite weblogs, inc. blogs are The Web 2.0 Weblog, engadget, tvsquad, therssweblog and cinematical. There is a list to all weblogs, inc. blogs at the home page. In their own words: “Our Philosophy In Three Parts — Why we are doing this? Traditional journalism is, in a word, broken. We’ve spent the last decade working in publishing (online and offline) and we believe that traditional journalism is imploding. News outlets like the New York Times are experiencing huge embarrassments like Jayson Blair. We believe these episodes are based on the increasing pressure media companies have to watch their bottom lines, as well as the fact that these outlets do not allow user feedback. If The New York Times was formatted like a Weblog, then the subjects in Jayson Blair’s stories would have been able to note the errors on The New York Times’ own Web site! Something that simple — empowering your readers to comment — could have prevented serious damage to the reputation of a respected news source. On top of the unnecessarily one-way journalism being practiced today, the media space is suffering from the appearance of (and in some cases outright) impropriety. Do you really trust CNBC to report on their parent company GE? How did you feel when CNBC had the then CEO of GE, Jack Welch, on air all day? How do you feel when reading Time magazine’s coverage of AOL? Do you really trust ABC News to report on Disney? Even if these media outlets are doing a good job, and many of them certainly are, it is difficult to believe that you are getting unbiased news when journalists are working for the companies on which they are reporting. We believe participatory journalism is a better model than one-way journalism. Of course, participatory journalism is harder, more work and still developing as a discipline. We sincerely hope to help this field mature. Talent wants to be free. One of the after effects → Read More
Company: Furl Status: Founded in the spring of 2003 by Mike Giles. Acquired by Looksmart on September 23, 2004 Origin of the Name: “The origin of the name came from the very geeky description of what the system does – File URLs. If you can enter a URL and see it in your browser, we can save it for you. Once the name started being used and it was time to find a replacement, we just couldn’t come up with one we liked more. It’s short, simple and pretty easy to remember. And as an added bonus, the definition of “furl” is “to roll up and secure,” which is exactly what we do with all the interesting Web pages you find online.” Link What is it? Furl is a social bookmarking site often compared to Deli.cio.us (TechCrunch review of delicious here). However, there are some key differences and many people use both obsessively. At its core, once you’ve signed up with furl, if you find a site/post that you want to retain, you can “furl” it and it is saved for you. You can find the site/post later by searching for tags that you’ve associated with it (or other meta data), or by a text search. If you understand delicious but are unfamiliar with Furl, the best way to describe Furl is a more structured delicious. There are much deeper meta data options when bookmarking a page, for instance. With delicious, currently, you can only tag a page and annotate it with notes. With Furl, you can tag it, categorize it with pre-populated items, rate it and add notes. Many Furl users like these options when tagging pages. Some users don’t need the extra data, and don’t like the time it takes to fill it out. To see this visually, here is a screen shot of a furl bookmark: Furl also does other things differently than delicious. The site you’ve bookmarked is saved at Furl (each member gets 5 gigs of storage), which means you can keep data even if the page changes. And, this allows for super-fast text searches on pages you’ve bookmarked, something delicious can’t offer. John Battelle puts it this way: “So what is it about Furl that made me write that past paragraph? After all, it’s just a web page-saving application. Right? Well, yes and no. Furl does a good job of helping you manage your → Read More
UPDATE: More recent profile of Digg here. Company: Digg What is it? Digg is very early stage, sort of pre-beta. But its getting some buzz. Think of it as slashdot but potentially better. We first came accross it at TheShiftedLibrarian and after checking out the service ourselves we were quite impressed. In their own words, “Digg is a technology news website that gives editorial control back to the community. Most technology websites allow users to suggest content by submitting links or stories to an editor. If the editor believes the story to be relevant to the masses, he or she moves the story to the homepage. With digg, users also submit links for review. But rather than allowing an editor to decide which links go on the homepage, the users do.” Stories are first submitted by a user, along with a category. Other registered users will see the story and can “digg” it by clicking on a link. The more it is “digged”, the more popular it is and good things start to happen with the story. Once it has 15 diggs, it’s automatically moved up to the home page. As an example, we submitted our vskype profile from a few days ago. A search of “vskype” on digg shows the story along with others here. Users can choose to digg the story, blog on it, add comments, report it as spam, etc. Friends (and everyone else) can see what storied you digg by looking at the URL for your username. For instance, the stories that Techcrunch has “digged” are at digg.com/users/techcrunch. Stats for the user are also shown (and we are now determined to make ours outstanding) “User profiles are one of the most powerful features of digg. Once logged in, digg bookmarks each story for which you have clicked ‘digg this story’. Users and friends can then browse your profile (digg.com/users/username), to see what you’ve been digging throughout the day. Have several friends using digg? Use your favorite RSS reader or Firefox’s live bookmarks to keep track of them all. RSS feeds are available on almost all pages and user profiles throughout the site.” There is also good, functional search: Everything is available via RSS, which is a necessary feature of course. Awesome! The current release is scheduled to be updated on June 26, including a new design and new features. Currently, the site is running slow but → Read More
Company: BlogAds What is it? BlogAds is an Ad network for big blogs, and only big blogs. From their site, you generally need at least 1,000 daily readers. From their FAQs: “What is the minimum daily user number a blog should have before they can consider blogads? Blogs without a laser-sharp focus on one topic or community AND an audience of 1000 readers a day usually do not attract advertisers. But some blogs with a sharp focus AND an audience of thousands a day do NOT get advertisers either. One test: have more than a handful of companies expressed an interest in advertising on your blog?” The ads are “skyscraper” format and can include images, text and a link. See the screen shots below for examples. Publishers choose the blog(s) that they would like to advertise on, based on price, length and subject matter. Prices are not CPM or CPC based – rather the ad runs for a length of time in exchange for payment. Ads may run for 1 week, or 1-3 months. Prices currently range from $10 – $4500 per week. Most of the top blogs use blogAds: “All blogs in the top 30 have an income stream. Only one blog had no advertising or affiliate programs (it did have a donation button though). The most popular Income Stream on these Blogs is BlogAds – 23 of the top 30 have them.” Link (from April 28, 2005) And they seem to be making a reasonable amount of money: “The average blogger makes $30 $50 a month selling Blogads, with some pulling up to more than $5000 monthly. As advertiser appreciation rises, your yield should rise. Blogads receives 30% of your ad fee, unlike other networks that charge far more or won’t even tell what they take.” Link In fact, some blogs make the majority of their revenue from Blogads: Link Overall, it is a great and popular advertising network for bloggers with very large audiences (this is not a long tail play, at least yet). Since CPM and CPC rates are not an issue, all a blog needs is a big and relevant audience to attract advertisers, and the money rolls in. Screen Shots: Founder: Henry Copeland Relevant Links: About General Faq Publisher faq Advertiser faq Blogads blog Quickonlinetips Marketingfacts on blogging ads (shows nearly 80% of ad revenue from blogads) Problogger on ads Hillside meditations on ads → Read More
Editors Note: PostSecret is not a for-profit company as far as I can tell. But it is beautiful and interesting and I feel like profiling it here because, as we say in our About section, we are profiling companies “that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the web 2.0 space”. Clearly, PostSecret is making a cultural impact on the web. Website: PostSecret Location: Germantown, Md. Launched: January 1, 2005 What is it? Postsecret is a weblog that asks people to submit 4-by-6-inch postcards that contain anonymous secrets. The postcards are scanned and placed on the website. PostSecret has thousands of daily visitors and a quick check of RSS reed subscriptions shows thousand of people get RSS feeds daily with new postcards. In their own words, “Each secret can be a regret, hope, funny experience, unseen kindness, fantasy, belief, fear, betrayal, erotic desire, feeling, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.” It is a beautiful site and a wonderful idea. A few Comments left on PostSecret: “When I read these, I don’t feel so alone.” -Calgary “I wish I could give all these people on the site a hug and tell them it’s ok to be human.” -Washington DC “Your site is truly inspirational, I’m left feeling full of compassion for my fellow human beings – We’re the same the world over.” -England. “I cryed when i saw your site. Its truly amazing that so many people have so many secrets like mine. I wish i could just tell most of these people it will be ok, cause i myself have never had anyone tell ME that…and it would help.” -West Virgina “So many of my secrets are there, without even sending a card.” -Mexico Screen Shots: Relevant Links: NY Times on Postsecret Technorati Tag: Postsecret Delicious tag: postsecret Flickr tag: postsecret BoingBoing on Postsecret Internet Archive SophisticatedSecrets on PostSecret Travels with Rhody on postsecret Tom Keating on postsecret → Read More
Company: Rojo Location: San Francisco, CA Launched: Closed Beta – October 2004, Open Beta – April 20, 2005 Funding: “Rojo received seed financing from TPG Ventures and individuals such as Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway. Rojo’s most recent round of funding was lead by BV Capital and TPG Ventures.” What is it? Rojo is a web-based RSS Reader (list of all here) that combines great “standard” RSS feader features with tagging and social networking. It is an interesting experiment that is getting a lot of buzz. The service is completely free for users. It includes adds in the user interface. In their own words, “Rojo means “RSS with mojo” and in this spirit our company is dedicated to providing the best RSS feed reader around so that busy people can manage and read content as efficiently as possible. Our vision is that the next generation of feed reading requires new forms of organization so we built in the ability to tag your world, your content, your feeds, and even your friends. We believe that analytics and community based features are what make feed reading accessible and appealing to technophiles and new consumers alike so we provide RojoBuzz, which tracks which webpages are most linked-to by the feeds you read. With Rojo’s community features you can share stories, feeds, tags, contacts, and profile information with your friends and colleagues, making it easy to find, discover, and share interesting content. This is what we are dedicated to providing. This is what we are passionate about. “ Signup was easy (with standard email confirmation), and I was able to import all of my feeds from bloglines (although this process could easily be simplified – I would much rather just tell them “bloglines” and my username, which some other web-based RSS readers do. Export of feeds via OPML is also offered. Rojo’s magic – what makes it stand out from the crowd – is the ability to tag posts, feeds and contacts. You can use those tags to sort and find your content, but you can also use them to find other potentially useful content from others, including your contacts. Adding contacts and sharing tags and feeds is very simple. Taggin of posts and feeds also partially solves the ranking problem with blogs – it helps the cream rise to the top. There are some other excellent reviews of Rojo out there and we’ve → Read More
Company: Podscope Location: Fairfield CT Launch: April 19, 2005 What is it? Podscope makes audio files searchable by text keywords. It works pretty well. Search results show lists of podcasts that include the keyword, with links to the podcast. Also, you can also listen to a short 10 second snippet of the portion of the cast that includes the term you’ve searched on. This requires Macromedia Flash. This is great for research and ego searches. For instance if you here is a link to search results for podcasts that include the term “Dave Winer”. Click on the + sign next to a result and you can listen to the snippet: In their own words, “What is Podscope? Podscope is the first search engine that actually allows you to search for spoken words within any audio or video file. We’re starting with podcasts and will be adding all types of multimedia in coming months. How does it work? Just like any other search engine. You enter a word or phrase in the input box, and we’ll show you a list of results. By clicking on the (+) sign next to each result, you can select snippets of audio to help you decide whether to listen to the whole podcast or even subscribe. If you know about Search Inside the Bookâ„¢, that’s what we do for audio/video. No, I mean how does the technology work? Well, we could tell you, but then we’d have to… Um, magic.” The company is either affiliated with or uses technology by tyeyes. There are a few easy-to-add features that would make this very useful – persistent search and RSS feeds for searches. I’m betting they’ll be added soon. Screen Shots: Relevant Links: FAQ submit a podcast podscope blog Delicious Tag: Podscope CommunityGuy on Podscope Mediapost on podscope MyDogII on Podscope (negative review) → Read More
Company: Trumba Launched: June 10, 2005 Funding: $4.75 million in July, 2004 – Funded by August Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Link What is it? “The word Trumba is actually an old Sardinian word for the kind of horn the town crier would blow when announcing the day’s news to villagers.” Trumba is an online calendar. Think Outlook but where multiple people/groups can author and view the calendar. Share it with some people, or publish it to the web. Yes, it’s Outlook on steroids. Trumba brings together Visio co-founders Jeremy Jaech and Ted Johnson with Visio CTO Peter Mullen. The user interface is well thought out, easy sailing. Having Kleiner and August behind you helps you hire the best of the best, so I’m not surprised at its ease of use. The signup process was one page, with a standard email confirmation required. Adding a new calendar item was a snap, and the level of detail you choose to include is up to you. Overall, it is a pleasure to use. You can also create multiple calendars (think work, friends, family), and have different colors for each to keep track of them. The product is not free, however. A sixty day free trial is included. After that, the price is $39.95/year. In their own words, “Trumba OneCalendar is a new type of calendar service — a connected calendar. Trumba OneCalendar brings all of your schedules together — work, family, community and fun — into one easy-to-use calendar that keeps you connected to the people and groups you care about through events you share.” One thing to note about open source competition: Dan Gillmor says “My current hopes are on the Chandler project at the Open Source Applications Foundation. (Disclosure: The project’s funder, Mitch Kapor, is also one of my seed investors.) Chandler still isn’t ready for prime time, either, but there are definite signs that it will be a huge help for people like me.” Key Features: – web based, no downloads – Create unlimited calendars – Publish group calendars as web pages – Share a calendar privately – Email upcoming events to a distribution list – Synchronize with Microsoft Office Outlook – Access your calendar from any Internet-connected computer – works with nternet Explorer 5.5 or later, Mozilla 1.4 or later, Netscape® 7.1 or later, Firefox 1.0 or later, and Safari 1.2 or later Screen Shots: Management: → Read More
Company: Deli.cio.us Launched: early 2004 Funding: Seed funding in early April, 2005 (rumored $2 millionish) by Union Square Ventures, Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Kopelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O’Reilly, and Bob Young. What is it? Deli.cio.us is also one of the defining web 2.0 applications. It was created by Joshua Schachter. Delicious made tagging popular. It is an open-bookmarking service with tagging. You tag your bookmarks (any URI, meaning a web page or a single blog post), which helps you organize the data. The exceptionally cool thing about delicious is that you can view the data that others have tagged in many different ways. There are tools you can add to your browser, etc. to easily tag URIs as you view them. The second screen shot below shows this in action For instance. deli.cio.us/marrington shows all the delicious tags I’ve ever created. Likewise, del.icio.us/joshua shows all of the tags created by Josh Schachter, the founder. You can also view the data by tags. del.icio.us/techcrunch shows all techcrunch tags added by users. Replace “techcrunch” in the URL with anything else and see the results. You can also view popular tags at del.icio.us/popular. And so on. RSS feeds are available for any search/browse string, so monitoring new tags is a snap. Every day, people find new ways to use delicious. In their own words, “del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others. Once you’ve registered for the service, you add a simple bookmarklet to your browser (see below). When you find a web page you’d like to add to your list, you simply select the del.icio.us bookmarklet, and you’ll be prompted for a information about the page. You can add descriptive terms to group similar links together, modify the title of the page, and add extended notes for yourself or for others. You can access your list of links from any web browser. By default, your links are shown to you in reverse chronological order, with those you’ve added most recently at the top. In addition to viewing by date, you can also view all links in a specific category (you define your own categories as you add the links), or → Read More
Editor’s Note: Yes, I know Flickr is not a newly launched web 2.0 company and in fact it is now part of Yahoo. However, I’m the editor so I can write about whatever I want. And besides, I needed to put something up to move the etamp post down – people are complaining. And believe it or not, some of our readers have requested things like “can you explain this flickr thing?” Company: Flickr Status: Acquired by Yahoo in March 2005 – Link What is it? Flickr is one of the defining web 2.0 applications. You can upload photos. Lots of services do that. But what Flickr did as well was to allow sharing and tagging of photos, allowing for rich networking and sharing of pictures and, more importantly, experiences. And, Flickr has the critical mass to have a massive network effect. In their own words, “Flickr is a revolution in photo storage, sharing and organization, making photo management an easy, natural and collaborative process. Get comments, notes, and tags on your photos, post to any blog, share and chat live and more!” Flickr is also free, and easy to use. Features: – 20 megs of free uploads per month (unlimited for pro account – $25/year) – easy posting to blogs (just need to authenticate your blog first) – post by email (great for camera phones!) – sharing, public and private – new option to have pictures printed – easy tagging of pictures, your friends can also tag your pictures – easy uploading tools – RSS feeds for everything – tool for mass-organizing photos – pro account is also ad-free Screen Shots: Relevant Links: Press/major media reviews FAQs Flickr blog Technorati tag: flickr Delicious tag: flickr BBC on Flickr QuickOnlineTips on Flickr Acquisition The Great Flickr Tools Collection (updated regularly) → Read More
Company: etamp.net What is it? eTamp is a web-based RSS reader. As a publisher you can add your feed without authentication (you must input your RSS feed, it cannot pull it from the base URL). It was easy to add Techcrunch. As a user, you can add from pre-selected content via browsing or searching. It doesn’t appear to flag new content. Screen Shots: Relevant Links: RSS Compendium Blog → Read More
Company: Talkr Location: New Hampshire Launch Date: April 18, 2005 What is it? Talkr is a site/service that converts text feeds directly into audio files. For instance, to listen to this post, click here. As a blogger, signing up is relatively simply. Steps: 1. Make a request at the site here 2. They quickly send a follow up email, with a link to a user agreement that you must physically sign and fax or send back to them. The agreement allows them to place ads into the audio, so that is another potential revenue source for them (and I’m fine with that since they aren’t charging me for the service) 3. Once you return the documents, they send another email with directions on setting it up at your blog. This consists of adding an html snippet (note the talkr gif under our xml gifs at the top of our sidebar. You also have a URL structure to allow any post to be listened to – See above for the audio of this post. The audio can be downloaded as an MP3 file as well. As a listener, there is fairly deep content to scroll through, and you can add any other blog you like (up to three for free). Given that they have only been live for a month, the content is actually quite good (heck, it includes Techcrunch ). There is both search and browse capability, and there are links to a few on the home page to allow easy testing of the service. The recording is automated, but good quality. The main problem is that you lose hyperlinks and images. In their own words, “Talkr provides a service that allows you to listen to your favorite text-only news sources rather than read them. If you can point us to an RSS feed (a machine-readable version of your favorite blog or news source) we will convert that feed from text to speech. Talkr can also provide you with a podcast of your favorite news sources. This means that you can plug your MP3 player into your home computer once a day and Talkr will provide you with hours of audio content with no additional work on your part. Talkr will keep tabs on your feeds and send audio to your computer as those audio files become available. Does this cost money? Well, yes and no (mostly no). Talkr has → Read More
Company: Qumana Location: Vancouver, BC Launched: June 13, 2005 What is it? Qumana is a wysiwyg blog editor. Most (ok all) blog interface software is less than wonderful to use, and even though html knowledge isn’t strictly necessary, you find yourself using code shortcuts more and more often to get things to look and act the way you want them to. Qumana is different – it works like a combination of Outlook and Word and is an absolute delight to use. In fact, I’m using Qumana right now to write this post. In their own words, “QumanaLE is a free blog publishing application that offers bloggers choice and control when writing for the Web – creating posts and inserting Technorati tags into individual items. QumanaLE helps writers quickly capture, organize and edit chunks of content. Users drag-and-drop pieces of text, links, pictures or images. Then, with one click you can add Technorati tags. Edit and publish the blog post … to as many blogs as you wish … or save it as a draft to work on later. Turn your content into a draft Word document by saving it as HTML or RTF and opening the file in Word – or QumanaLE – later.” The download is quick (file size is about 4 megs), and including blogs is relatively straightforward. You’ll need to know where an “xml-rpc” file is if you are hosting your blog yourself or using one of the less well known services. But once you’ve located that and set up your blog, posting is a snap. There are other wysiwyg blog front ends out there. I’ve personally used blogjet and ecto and found them useful but not useful enough to forego the standard wordpress interface we use. Neither are free (although they have free trials) - Blogjet is $40 and ecto is $18, and both lack features included with Qumana. The biggest problem with all of these front-end options is that you cannot create categories/tags while posting – you must do that with your normal blog interface. This due to the shortcomings of xml-rpc, not the front-end software, so even Qumana can’t overcome this. However, they do have a very, very nice feater to automatically add Technorati tags to the post, which solves a big part of this problem. And you can always log into the blog interface after the post → Read More
Company: vSkype Location: Santa Cruz, California Launch Date: June 15, 2005 What is it? vSkype is a new product launch by Santa Cruz Networks (disclaimer: Keith Teare, a partner at Archimedes Ventures, was formerly the CEO of Santa Cruz Networks). vSkype is an add-on to Skype that lets you have up to 200 people on a video call. We tested the software out this morning and it works very, very well. Voice and video quality was more than acceptable. A bunch of video add-ons for Skype have emerged over the last few weeks, including jyve and spontania. We have not tested these services yes and so cannot compare them with vSkype. In their own words, “How is vSkype Beta different from other Skype video plug-ins? vSkype Beta provides fast real-time video between you and all of your Skype contacts – up to 2.3 frames per second (fps) for anyone using a standard 56K modem, and up to 24 fps for anyone using DSL, a cable modem, or a corporate broadband connection like a T1 line. vSkype Beta also allows you to share display data. Any open application, or even the entire desktop, can be viewed by other participants during a vSkype Beta call. In addition, vSkype Beta’s “Add to Call” feature allows you invite other Skype contacts to your existing call. This eliminates the disruption of having to create a new call each time you would like to add new callers. With vSkype Beta it is possible for up to 200 people to participate in a single call or meeting without degrading overall performance. All those people can broadcast video at the same time, if they choose, and each participant can view any 8 people at a given time.” “vSkype Beta allows users to securely conduct video calls in groups from 2 to 200 and share applications, spreadsheets, presentations, or photos with others on a call. In future releases users will be able to download and play Santa Cruz Network’s games with other Skype users and access our library of camera personalities, wallpaper, and drawing tools. Professional users will be provided with various call controls, white boarding, meeting moderation, bandwidth control, and recording and archiving tools through our network of partners.” Om Malik has a great comment on vSkype: “This cannot be good for NetMeeting or Web-Ex, which will have tough time competing with a much lower cost offerings. I → Read More
Company: PubSub Location: New York Launched: February 9, 2004 What is it? PubSub, which is short for “publish and subscribe”, is a future search engine. It’s also called “persistent search”. Users input keywords on subjects that they are interested in. The keywords are stored, or “persistent”. PubSub’s matching engine compares these stored/persistent queries against newly-discovered pages on an ongoing basis, in real time. What this means: If you would like to be notified of websites that post about subjects you are interested in, you input the search terms, and PubSub will notifiy you as posts appear that include your keywords. A great (necessary, really) feature is the ability to store any persistent search and view it via RSS in your favorite reader. At TechCrunch, for instance, we have stored search terms like “Web 2.0″ and are notified in our RSS reader of all new posts or articles that include the term “Web 2.0″. People generally refer to what PubSub does as either persistent search or future search, whereas regular search engines like Google are refered to as retrospective search. Persistent search notifies you of future content as it is created. Retrospective search engines help you find content that is already out there on the web. If you find it hard to get your mind around this, try it out, and make sure you take the RSS feed from your subscription so that you don’t have to go back to the site to check and see if there are any new results. As the alerts start rolling in to your RSS reader, you will be very pleasantly surprised. PubSub is also very strongly behind a structured blogging initiative which helps bloggers structure topic-specific posts like reviews (books, music, etc.) and events. A wordpress plugin is available at structuredblogging.org, that we use here at TechCrunch as well as on our personal blogs. We like pubsub and have many, many subscriptions to keep us up to date on topics that interest us. As an example, here is the RSS feed for our subscription to “web2.0 and web 2.0″ (where we seem to consistently find great posts from a blog called the Read/Write Web, the second best Web 2.0 blog on the net . Key Features: – Future or Persistent search at lightning-fast speeds (subject only to RSS time limitations) – web based – IE or Firefox client option – see screen shot #3 → Read More
Company: FeedBurner Location: Chicago What is it? FeedBurner is a service that takes a normal, everyday RSS or Atom feed of any kind and turns (burns) it into a FeedBurner feed that you can then distribute to readers for use in any RSS reader. The company currently hosts more than 60,000 combined RSS and Atom feeds for over 40,000 content publishers. The company’s hosted service currently processes over 5 million daily views of RSS content including podcasts and video weblogs. One reason a blog or website owner would want to use this is because it simplifies the RSS feed. The Feed URL for Techcrunch, for instance, is “http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch”, which is a much simpler format that standard RSS feeds. Also, most blogging software offers a variety of RSS feeds – Atom, RSS 1.0, 2.0, etc. Sometimes these feeds don’t work properly with some readers. And if a site can get most of its readers to use the single Feedburner feed, they can take advantage of the great statistics and tools to see where readers are coming from and what they are clicking on. FeedBurner offers two services – a free version and a Pro version that costs between $5-$16 per month depending on the number of feeds managed. The stats for the free version are great, and the pro version also shows more detail and a “who’s syndicating me” feature. The Pro version has a 15 day free trial. The big reason for using FeedBurner, however, is that it can automatically add Google Adsense adds to your feeds, allowing you to easily generate revenue if you have a large enough audience. There are a number of influential bloggers who don’t like this service, however (and other aspects of FeedBurner as well) – see Relevant Links below for more information. One drawback to FeedBurner was the difficulty in turning it off and moving your feeds off the network (while retaining your audience). The method for doing this was complicated and clunky (or required you run your site from your own server) and so many top bloggers stayed away from their service. However, on June 10, 2005 FeedBurner announced (this is the FeedBurner blog) a new feature to allow easy transition away from FeedBurner whilst retaining your readers. Nice move. So FeedBurner offers ease of use, great stats, revenue AND a relatively painless way out. Thumbs up from TechCrunch and that’s why we → Read More
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