Company: Truveo Launched: Beta launch on September 14, 2005 Location: Burlingame, CA Truveo is a video search engine that beta-launched a few days ago. Jeff Clavier, an investor, writes about Truveo here. If you are looking for video content, this is the place to go. Founded two years ago by a seriously smart team of search experts, Truveo is tackling the very difficult problem of creating metadata from video out of whole cloth – unlike text-based content, it is very difficult to determine context of video and audio content without a human to actually view it (which is error prone and doesn’t scale). Truveo takes an innvoative two step approach to indexing new content. The first step is a straight web crawl to find the videos. The second, more important step, is to create metadata about the content, beyond what is available in transcripts and feeds (most video content has neither). They’ve created a “visual crawler” that looks at surrounding content to determine context. Finding all the video files on the web is only part of the challenge. For video to be searchable, it is also necessary to collect meaningful text metadata to associate with each video file. Of course, we rely on standard techniques, such as mining closed-caption transcripts and importing RSS feeds. The vast majority of video on the web, however, does not have any closed-caption or RSS metadata available. Fortunately, our visual crawlers come to the rescue. Whenever our visual crawlers find a new video on the web, they can also “visually” examine the context of the surrounding web application. In most cases, this examination reveals a bounty of rich and detailed metadata related to every video. With our unique approach to crawling, not only can we find the videos that the other crawlers miss, but we can also collect rich and relevant metadata for each video. As a result, when you search for video with Truveo, you can always find high-quality, relevant search results. The next time you are looking for a web video to watch, we invite you to try our search engine and see for yourself. The best thing is, this stuff actually works. Try searches for Hurricane Rita and Daily Show. There are advanced search options and preferences that will assist users in finding relevant content. Sadly, the “adult filter” is turned on by default. You can also filter out paid content. The → Read More
Attendees for the TechCrunch Meetup/BBQ this Thursday, September 22, are starting to roll in. If you are coming, please remember to sign in at the wiki. If you’d like to give a private or public demo, please note that as well on the wiki. See you tomorrow! → Read More
Feedburner released important statistics on their service yesterday. If you are unfamiliar with Feedburner, check out our original profile. The graphs show total feeds managed by feedburner and total subscribers to those feeds. Both show hockey-stick like growth that looks similar to data released by Technorati (see item no. 2 in a past TechCrunch weekly summary). I believe that these stats are very relevant to the blogospere in general. We are in a steadily increasing tide, that is increasing at an increasing rate. All boats are rising. Feedburner now manages about 100,000 feeds and about 4.3 million people subscribe to those feeds. The growth rates are obvious: Paul Kedrosky notes that the number of feed subscribers is doubling approximately every 60 days. What I’d like to know is what percentage pay the $5 per month for the Pro product. If it’s around 5% (that’s my guess), then FeedBurner revenues (not including advertising) would be about $300,000 or so annualized. The only thing left to ask is, do you have your FeedBurner sticker yet? I do. We’ve previously written about Feedburner on September 7, 2005, July 15, 2005, July 4, 2005 and June 14, 2005. → Read More
Google will launch a wifi service in the near future. Details are slim, but the buzz is growing. It looks like the basic concept is a secure VPN – you sacrifice having Google see everything you do to ensure that other people on whatever wifi network you are on cannot (wifi sniffing is easy and widespread, and many passwords are transmitted without hashing). Om Malik, GoogleRumors and Tris Hussey write about this. Google has not publicly commented, but there are a number of links referring to the service on the Google website: wifi.google.com/faq.htm – refers to a product called “Google Secure Access,” which is designed to “establish a more secure connection while using Google WiFi.” wifi.google.com/faq.htm – offers a free download of Google Secure Access, carrying the headline: “Your wireless connection is almost ready to use.” Is this web 2.0? Nope. But it’s interesting. And with all of Google’s recent product launches, the idea of Google Purge becomes, if possible, even funnier. Additional Reading John Paczkowski, RatcliffeBlog, Dana Blankenhorn, The Stalwart, ebiquity, Peter O’Kelly → Read More
ObjectGraph has a basic dictionary web app with ajax that’s worth mentioning. Type in a term and the results appear as you type each letter. It works much like Google Suggest. There are a number of dictionary options, and a thesaurus. From Download Squad. Personally, I find this firefox extension dictionary much more useful – but ObjectGraph’s ajax implementation gets them extra points. ObjectGraphs’s blog is here and a description of how it works is here. → Read More
New day, new (notorious) mash-up envolving Google Maps. Placeopedia is a great mash-up that combines Google Maps with Wikipedia, creating a visual representation of topics by place – thus allowing you to search for articles that relate to a certain location in a map. Placeopedia tackles the problem with Wikipedia of not having a visual guide to where (in a map) articles refer to. Naturally, it doesn’t make sense to localize every single article, but where correctly used, this may become an extremely powerful (and fun) tool. → Read More
After the success of our first meetup and bbq in Atherton last Thursday, we’re doing it again this week. About 25 people showed up last week, and we expect quite a few more this week. If you are in the bay area, please join us. The event is being held at our house/office in Atherton. A Wiki for the event is here and includes specifics and directions. If you are coming, please add your name to the bottom of the wiki. If you don’t know how to edit a wiki, you can’t come. We’ll be bbq’ing from 5-6:30, and will have plenty of wine, beer and soft drinks throughout the evening. Computers for demo’ing products are avaiable in the living room and in a back office. Fire pit is outside to keep things going late into the evening. If you’re looking to meet other entrepreneurs and VCs, or want to get the buzz started on your startup, this is the place to be (if you aren’t at DEMO, that is). → Read More
If you’re a regular at Techcrunch you have probably been wondering why the site has been so slow lately. With the growing number of readers we’ve been having, the site has been getting massive ammounts of traffic and the server we were on wasn’t enough to hold everybody. So, in order to better serve you, we just changed servers and are now feeling much better. The new machine is a Quad Xeon with enough ram to hold everybody and their friends in, and hosted at Dreamhost (affiliate link – click here if you want to visit dreamhost without using our affiliate code) that are really good with keeping their clients informed of the status of things. Plus, they’re super friendly and have a blog in order to be transparent with their clients. So anyway, this isn’t major news. If you’re seeing this news post you’re now looking at the new server and that means you’ll be much better served from now on when it comes to browsing Techcrunch. If you have any problems with the page thought, feel free to email us and let us know. Thank you. → Read More
Peter Van Dijck, author of one of my favourite books on IA (That many of you will probably like: Information Architecture for Designers), has launched Mefeedia some time ago, and is getting rave reviews about his video aggregator. In fact, the reviews have been so great that it is a part of the “Best of the Web” by BusinessWeek’s editor. If you haven’t seen Mefeedia yet, here’s what they have to say about themselves: Mefeedia is an aggregator, a video feedreader. It is a place to watch videobloggers. Before you ask: we don’t host the videos. We just point to them. There is a ton of commercial video on the web. Porn, the late show, you name it. Even though you can find some of that on me-tv, we’re really about real video created by real people. So we focus our functionality on that. We try to make it easier to tell your story, share your worldview, and find others who are telling their stories. Some people have mixed feelings about videoblogging. While some say it will never pick up, others say it’s going to be huge by the end of the year. Personally, I believe it is a fascinating area, and anything that gives more power for people to publish their own video/audio/text materials in a decentralized way is a great thing. We’ll see where it goes. For now, congratulations goes out to Mefeedia for the pick. → Read More
Company: FilmLoop Launched: Private Alpha Location: Palo Alto FilmLoop is a winner. You can quote me on that. There are obvious similarities with Slide, but FilmLoop is different. As noted by Dave Winer this morning (he told me yesterday something cool was launching today), FilmLoop took another step clser to launching, replacing a nondescript “sign up here” page with a full description and demo of their soon to be released product. Full details can be seen in their brochure here. Introducing FilmLoop, a visual communications network that uses client-server architecture to provide direct, real-time, and bi-directional updates to the user’s PC desktop. Strings of images called “loops” move across the desktop screen to tell stories, showcase products, communicate ideas, and build brands. For businesses, FilmLoop is a direct real-time connection to consumers’ desktops. For individuals, it’s a new way to instantly express oneself and share images with friends, family, and colleagues, as well as continually monitor activities such as online auctions and dating postings. Creating and viewing loops requires a client download. Creation looks to be simple – drag and drop pictures and images into your “loop” (I’m assuming they’ll have an API for this as well). You can send your loop to people (I’m thinking it’s an excellent way to share photos among family members). Public loops can also be searched for and subscribed to from the site. And multiple people can add pictures to a loop. And “With a simple click, frames can open to a zoom view, link to video, audio, flash, or directly to “click to buy” or “bid” page on any website. Open to a zoom view, link to video, audio, flash, or directly to “click to buy” or “bid” page on any website.” Obviously there is a business angle here as well. FilmLoop will launch for windows only, with a mac version to be released this year. Founders Kyle Mashima Prescott Lee → Read More
A couple of days ago I wrote an editorial on our focus in mash-ups, and how we were going to start posting the ones we find the most interesting. So to kick things off, here’s a great project that mashes Demographics information with Google Maps creating an extremely interesting result. AnalyGIS, in partnership with SRC, has developed a proof-of-concept application that combines the features of SRC’s Allocate demographics engine and Google Maps. Check it out in action by clicking this link. More information is available at AnalyGISs site, but the interesting thing to note is how these mash-ups are great information visualization techniques built around services that otherwise wouldn’t have that ability. → Read More
Web 2.0 This Week September 11-17 What a week! Skype gets acquired, Google launches RSS search and del.icio.us turns two. Lots of good web 2.0 stuff below. TechCrunch has moved from our offices in Los Angeles to Atherton, right in the heart of silicon valley. We had a TechCrunch Meetup/bbq at our house/office in Atherton on Thursday and will have another one this Thursday, September 22, from 5 pm to about 10 pm (although last week I had to kick people out at 2 am). It’s an open event with lots of entrepreneurs and VCs attending. Invitation post and wiki will be up no later than Tuesday. But keep you calendars open. 1. Recent TechCrunch Profiles Listal, SoloSub, Fooky, Feedburner (update), Feedster (update), Wikipedia (update), Facebook, WSFinder, Microsoft, Skype (update), Searchfox, Zimbra, Juicy Fruit, Google Blog Search, Meebo, Yahoo Instant Search, Last.fm, Loomia (update), NetVibes, Odeo (update), Pluck (update), Flock (update), Measure Map (update), Memeorandum 2. eBay Buys Skype eBay acquited Skype for $4.1 billion last week (including earn outs). The eBay analyst call discussing the transaction has been recorded and is available here, and the associated power point is here. 3. Google Launched Blog Search Google launched a blog search engine to mixed reviews. See our profile here. 4. Del.icio.us Turns Two Joshua Schachter’s Del.icio.us turned two years old last week. Congratulations! 5. Yahoo Instant Search Yahoo released a beta version of Instant Search last week, which uses ajax to instantly show relevant results based on your search query. Our Profile is here. 6. Microsoft will/will not win the Web Molly Holzschlag writes a lively post responding to Steve Ballmer’s statements in a Business Week article that Microsoft will “win the web”. We won the desktop. We won the server. We will win the Web. We will move fast, we will get there. We will win the Web. Molly writes that Mr. Ballmer’s attitude is “deplorable” and says: The Web belongs to everyone. The Web’s core vision and value is to be platform independent. Microsoft has no right to think it can win a tool that is for the people, of the people, and ultimately – by the people. The comments to her post are great as well. 7. Subscribe to this blog Richard MacManus, who writes the excellent Read/WriteWeb blog, recently started a ZDNet blog called Web 2.0 Explorer. It’s a must read. His introductory post on web → Read More
Company: Memeorandum Launched: September 2005 Location: Mountain View, CA I’ve been using Memeorandum for about a month (since Bar Camp in August). Gabe Rivera, the creator, gave me a private demo and set up a demo site for me (no longer active). Like Robert Scoble, I was hooked immediately. This is a HUGE thing to me. If you are a busy executive and only have five minutes a day to see what the blogs are saying, this is THE PLACE to come to every day. Memeorandum is the result of Gabe’s frustration with tracking blogger conversations about a given topic. Search engine weren’t producing intelligent results, and links from blogs didn’t tell the full story. So like any good entrepreneur, he set out to tackle the problem. And boy did he come up with a compelling solution. It’s one of those sites you just keep coming back to, every day. The Service Memeorandum is a way to track blog conversations relating to political or tech issues (Gabe can and probably will add additional verticals in the future) in a highly effective manner. When you go to the site you see what is being talked about the most in the blogsphere at that moment. The most highly linked articles appear at the top and in bigger font sizes. Less popular items are below. Super-popular items eventually are pushed down as newer popular stuff goes up. Here’s how it works: A post is written. People start to link to it. If enough people link and it becomes very popular, it goes up in the “New Item Finder” area in the top right. If more people link, it will go up in the main area. If a link includes conversation and discourse (substantial text in addition to the link), the linking blog is noted underneath the popular post. All of this is automated, which is the really beautiful part of the service. Memeorandum is very low noise, too. It tracks about 2,000 blogs today – only content from those blogs comes up on the site. Yes, it’s a limitation, but it results in very relevant and high quality results. Gabe will add more quality blogs over time. It sounds complicated, but it is a very useful way to monitor conversations about popular things going on in the blogosphere. Things went crazy last week, for instance, when Google launched its blog search engine. Memeorandum → Read More
We’ve been beta testing Measure Map, Adaptive Path‘s new blog analytics tool, for a couple of weeks now. We previously wrote about Measure Map here and Heather Green also wrote about it here. Measure Map is an extremely useful tool for bloggers. It uses ajax and flash intelligently. Integration is very simple (adding a javascript snippet into the blog template). It provides detailed analytics on every aspect of your blog – how readers get to your site, what they read, whether they comment and what links they use to leave. We can’t post screen shots or feature comparisons yet, but I will say this: tools like Measure Map, Mint, and Feedburner that track blog analytics are extremely useful. They take a much needed step past existing server log analyzers. Not only are the statistics much more readily available (and real time), but they also provide very granular data on exactly the areas bloggers care about – things like comments, trackbacks, links in and out, etc. The conversation aspect of blogs. Anyway, Measure Map is evolving and stats are erratic this weekend. I realized just how much I’ve grown to rely on it when it wasn’t fully available to me. Kevin Hale has a list of additional analytics services here. → Read More
Del.icio.us turned two years old on September 15, 2005. Happy Birthday, and Congratulations Joshua! → Read More
If you haven’t heard about Flock yet, check out this Wired story and our profile of Flock from August 26, 2005. It is still in private beta, although you can request a beta invitation on their home page. Not sure of your chances though. Chris Messina sent out an email to Flock beta testers yesterday announcing that they are moving from beta 0.2 to 0.5 and making some product changes. Social Bookmarks (they call it “Breadcrumbs”) are being phased out after a lukewarm response from testers, and they will be adding new functionality. They’ve also announced that Flock will be publicly available sometime in October: We’re going to be phasing out our online breadcrumb service and replacing it with a couple more… established options. Oh, and don’t worry, we’ll make sure you can take your existing breadcrumbs with you. So in the meantime, keep posting to our service, but know that we’ll be shutting its doors come November 1. Questions? Just let us know. So back to the next release. Let me first say that we’re all very excited about the ideas we’re baking into Flock 0.5. Second, we’re set to launch something public in October! So between this Friday and then, we’re going to need lots of intrepid testers to pound on our stuff and let us know what works, what’s broken, what you like and what you can’t stand. I must say I’m even more impressed with Flock – it is a very bold move to simply drop functionality that must have hundreds of developer hours behind it. They are obviously serious about listening to beta feedback and building an exceptional product. Chris also pointed to flickr pictures of the flock office and people taken by Flocker Lloyd Budd. → Read More
Pluck (previous profiles) is quietly building a very nice suite of web 2.0 products (see Shadows as well). They announced two new products on September 12 – InSite RSS and InSite Blogging. Both products are aimed at online content publishers, particularly online newspapers. Both can generate significant revenue for Pluck, as they charge for these services. Pluck also announced their first customer for these products. I spoke with Dave Panos, the CEO of Pluck, via email about these products and their first customer deal. InSite RSS InSite RSS is a tool to allow sites to integrate RSS feed content directly into their websites, adding significant stickiness to their users. InSite RSS: Allows publishers to provide their readers with personalized news services that leverage millions of available RSS feeds. With InSite RSS, portals can deliver a “My News” style offering, giving users control over feed discovery, subscription and consumption. InSite RSS keeps sites on par with major web portals and ensures that all feed source providers are referenced and linked to appropriately. InSite RSS leverages Pluck’s award-winning consumer RSS technology and Pluck’s FeedFinder service for RSS feed discovery. InSite Blogging With InSite Blogging, site users/readers can create their own blogs. For sites with a local focus, like online newspapers, this can be a very effective tool for adding stickiness, as well as increasing content creation on local issues. While editorial control can be an issue (as the LA Times found out quite painfully), this can be a way for newspapers with an online presence to stop the customer bleeding they’ve had to suffer over the years. InSite Blogging: A hosted, managed solution that enables publishers to offer community blogging as part of their web sites. The service allows publishers and web portals to offer readers a fully-featured citizen journalism program complete with photos, community tools, tagging, categorization, management and reporting. Once embedded into a web site, the service opens new sources of content and contextual advertising space while building reader loyalty and page views. InSite Blogging is built on technology Pluck acquired earlier in 2005 from EasyJournal, a third-generation community of hundreds of thousands of active bloggers. First Customer Pluck also announced their first customer for Insite Blogging – The Austin American-Statesman, a Cox newspaper and Central Texas’ leading daily newspaper (it basically owns Austin). The blogging sites can be seen here and here. An example blog (lots have sprung up → Read More
The guys at Odeo have just launched a Dashboard widget for mac users who want to listen to their podcasts straight from their desktop. Due to its nature it is OSX Tiger only – even though with Yahoo Widgets it shouldn’t be much work to have something going for Windows too – but if you run it on your machine, make sure you check it out. It’s always good to see companies embrace new capabilities of operating systems and being creative with them. Also, it is great to see the Odeo guys aren’t sitting down and keep working on cool stuff that us podcasting aficionados can use. Great! → Read More
Netvibes, a project started in France by Florant Fremont, is the latest web-app based on the idea of personalized homepages and like some others (like Start and Google’s personal homepage), it is powered by some nicely developed Ajax. Their goal is best put in their own words, so quoting their blog post about the launch on the 8th september, The aim of it is to provide a place on the internet where you can set just the content you like, a super easy way of building your personnalized homepage, available anywhere, anytime. No registration is needed, however if you want to access your page from another computer you’ll be able to do it by registering with your email address and a password. The project itself looks pretty good: modules are intuitive and the page interaction’s easy to catch up on with just a few seconds. There are a few other things on the slate too, apparently, like modules for Flickr, feed searching, bookmarks, etc (a proper list is available on their blog). All in all, while it is another solution for a problem that many people are tackling, Netvibes looks like a pretty good Ajax-based homepage, so you should definitely check it out and take your conclusions. Ed. note: And it’s nice to see Techcrunch as one of the default feeds too. We’re honored. → Read More
Mash-ups, or the use of distinctive services for the creation of new and interesting applications, are one of the most interesting concepts behind the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Here on Techcrunch, we’re always up for the challenge of talking about innovation with services and apps, so we have decided to start covering Mash-ups more frequently. What this means is that besides the profiles and articles you’re already used to reading on the site, we’ll be talking about the cool stuff people are building by combining the platforms companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay and everyone else are setting up. This is a fascinating field, in a quite fascinating era for computing. This being said, and since we are always up to see what our readers are doing, feel free to send in comments or emails about what you find interesting about the Web 2.0, mashups, platform services or anything you believe fits on Techcrunch. We’re ready to listen to what you have to say, and we’re definitely up to seeing what cool projects and products you are all working on. → Read More
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