I’ve launched an index of companies and products that have been written about here on TechCrunch. This is a much quicker way of finding information on things I’ve written about than using the search function. In fact, I was having trouble finding my own posts using standard search. If you know the name of the company, go to this page and simply click on it to see a list of all of the posts that mention it. This is self generating. Rachel Cunliffe took the basic code for the Ultimate Tag Warrior wordpress plugin (which was writen by Christine Davis) and modified it in a few key ways to suit my needs. The result is a page that lists each company I’ve written about. The interface for the publisher is basically the same as UTW. The changes Rachel made are mostly to the output page. We will post this to the WordPress Plugin Database later today or tomorrow so that anyone writing for WordPress can use it. Planned enhancements include creation of the index in OPML format as well. This index is also permanently linked from the top of the left sidebar on any TechCrunch page. → Read More
BillMonk is a new service that allows people to easily keep track of financial debts among friends. It’s a simple idea and they’ve executed well. The idea is a user who wants to report a debt owed to him or her (such as a shared bill), or an IOU to another person, simply enters it on BillMonk. This is very easy to do on BillMonk, even for more complicated transactions like a bill shared among a lot of people. You simply input the amount of the bill and the email addresses for those who participated. There is also an SMS feature to allow users to text in bills on the phone. I like the way BillMonk keeps track of all of the various transactions a user has with different people, and the current amount owed at any given time. For instance, if I buy dinner for my friend Orli Yakuel and we decide to split the $100 bill, and later I owe her $8 for coffee, BillMonk knows that she only owes me a total of $42. When I tell BillMonk that she’s paid me $20, it automatically lowers the amount owed to me to $22. Of course, if the people I am emailing are not yet using the service, they can sign up. So they’ve got the viral angle covered. It’s useful, and really easy to use without FAQ references. There is also a way to SMS bills in via a mobile device. As of now, however, they have not integrated paypal or any other payment API. Scott Loftesness and John Cook have also recently written about BillMonk. The company was founded by Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom, who previously worked at Amazon. → Read More
What happened to Ning? It was the perfect service at the perfect time. Mashups are hot right now. Really hot. David Berlind oversold his MashUp Camp in a week and now has an impressive waiting list forming. And John Musser’s list of mashups continues to grow (see Richard MacManus’ post on this too). The idea of Ning, which launched in October 2005, is brilliant. Let people easily create social applications tailored with difference web services. Allow others to clone those applications and take the code from them directly into whatever they are building instead of building from scratch. Watch everything evolve as better and better stuff gets built, which in turn is used to build even better stuff. Ning leverages the platform by aggregating the applications and selling advertising and premium tools/features. But the reality of Ning is that it’s lost whatever coolness it had, no one uses it and Ning is going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when they finally do roll out better functionality. Here’s are the problems: First, You have to know PHP, or at least HTML, to build anything unique on Ning. They promise to create tools to allow non-programmers to build stuff in the future, but for now, 99.9% of the Internet population is effectively locked out from creating new stuff. Second, there is no support for the key web service APIs out there that people are really excited about mashing up. Instead, Ning has created a suite of custom applications…but which lack the scalability and functionality of what’s out there on the open web. Yes, you can pull in services like Google Maps if you have the programming skills to do so (see here for an example), but Ning does not pull these in as modules to get you started, which would be really compelling. Third, Ning keeps all of the applications under the ning.com roof. This has benefits like free hosting, but application creators don’t get control of the page to add advertising and they cannot get user registration data direclty. Users create a Ning account to use the mashups. That’s great for really small time stuff, but no one serious will build on the platform. Fourth, Ning did everything wrong in communicating with their users. At first they called it 24hourLaundry and no one knew what Ning would be. With the benefit of hindsight, this looks silly. No → Read More
People are calling Australia-based BluePulse the “meebo of cell phones” and they may be right – although it is also a platform that allows developers to build phone access to just about any internet application as well. The engine behind Bluepulse is platform and tool set they have created called the OADP which claims to “allows developers to develop mobile applications without having to worry about supporting the hundreds of different devices available on the market, connectivity issues, distribution and billing.” The test applications they’ve built on the platform are pretty compelling. The headliner is access to ICQ, MSN and Yahoo instant messaging applications. They also have an application to access tv and movie guides. Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch has tested the software and says “Bluepulse will be one of the first category dominant players in mobile 2.0″. Also see the comments to that post, where a founder of Bluepulse explains their revenue model and other aspects of the business. → Read More
UPDATE: (Jan. 19) I am now 95% sure this rumor is innacurate after receiving yet more information. UPDATE: (Jan. 18) This rumor is highly speculative at this point after reading additional emails I’ve just received: Rumors are flying that Silicon Valley based YouTube (profiled here) has signed an agreement to be acquired. Whoever the buyer may be, it’s not News Corp. They have confirmed directly to me it has not acquired YouTube. YouTube raised $3.5 million in venture capital just three months ago from Sequoia. It was founded in February 2005. → Read More
UPDATE: This event is now full. I apologize to everyone who did not get on the wiki list. The fifth TechCrunch Meetup is on Friday, February 17, 2006 at the TechCrunch house in Atherton, California. We will celebrate the launch of Naked Conversations, the new book by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble. Bring your copy of Naked Conversations and get Shel and Robert’s autograph, or purchase a copy at the party at a significant discount. Come help us celebrate with champagne, hors d’oeuvres, music by Pandora, podcasting by Podtech, a fully tented and heated backyard and other surprises. As with all of our parties, late night demos will be held in the back room. Due to space limitations, attendance is limited to the first 200 people who RSVP on the party wiki. Because of the crowd limitations we must observe, RSVP’s will be checked at the door and if you are not on the list, you will not be able to get in. This will be our most extravagant event so far, thanks to the generosity of our sponsors: Eurekster Flock Kaboodle Pandora Pluck Rojo Zazzle → Read More
VideoEgg is announcing that it has closed a venture round with August Capital, and David Hornik has joined the board of directors. They are not disclosing the size of the round or the valuation, although I’m sure that information will be floating around later today as well and I will update as appropriate. SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., — (January 18, 2006) — VideoEgg, Inc., a leading innovator in web-based video publishing solutions, today announced that it has closed a venture round with August Capital, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurial teams throughout the information technology market spectrum. The company also announced that David Hornik from August Capital will be joining VideoEgg’s Board of Directors. Early funding for VideoEgg was provided by First Round Capital prior to its launch at DEMOfall in September 2005. This is yet another one of Josh Kopelman‘s (First Round Capital) early picks that looks to be a winner. I wrote about VideoEgg and described its service on September 21, 2005 and October 25, 2005. There are a bevy of other financing announcements for various startups being announced over the next couple of weeks. → Read More
Netherlands-based FeedXS, which launched today, forces you to think about RSS in it’s purest form: a way to broadcast content. Jeroen Bertrams, one of the founders (the other founder is Hans Veldhyzen van Zanten) said in an email: “we are trying to make rss feeds accessible for the masses”. The idea is to allow anyone to publish an RSS feed. Skip the blog. Go right to a feed, perhaps as a replacement to email to distribute personal news about yourself. The company feed is here, for instance. It’s more of an administrative interface and the content is designed to be read via the actual feed only. The publishing interface has a few formatting helpers but is in need of an overhaul. But there is something really unique here – you can publish directly from MSN messenger. Once you are registered on the site you simply add “msn@feedxs.com” as a contact. You have to authenticate yourself (log in) the first time, and after that publishing is very easy. So who’s the target market? Well, not bloggers, probably. And given that there is a need to understand what RSS is and how it is used, it’s not for mainstream uses either. But it is an extremely easy way to broadcast content to people via the MSN messenger feature. And I love that it exploits RSS in a somewhat new and interesting way. → Read More
Kevin Burton’s TailRank is making real gains against blog-news innovator Memeorandum, which I wrote about here and here. Memeorandum and TailRank are both trying to aggregate blog and other edge content in near-real time and group content by topics/events. The result is a “newspaper for the blogosphere” that delivers breaking news to readers far ahead of traditional news services, or even Google news (the downside is that conversation swarms can occur around ultimately baseless stories). Compare TailRank’s original interface from a post back in September to what they have now. In addition to a more usable interface, Tailrank has also started to group blog “conversations”, where different bloggers talk about similar topics, in a way I have not seen anywhere except Memeorandum to date. Memeorandum is still better at breaking news – A headline on Memeorandum may not appear on TailRank until a day or more later – but TailRank is still much younger than Memeorandum and could catch up. And new companies like Australia-based Tinfinger (still pre-launch and sans content) and Blogniscient (profile) are gunning for this space as well. The core back end difference between the services is that Gabe Rivera, the founder of Memeorandum, hand picked the original “seed” blogs with subsequent sources discovered by his system (guaranteeing quality but sacrificing breadth), whereas most of TailRank’s content comes directly from users who upload their favorite blogs in OPML format (the file format that most RSS readers like Bloglines and Rojo use to store feeds). The additional breadth of coverage offered by TailRank may be the cause of its lag behind Memeorandum in breaking news. → Read More
<img style="float: right" src='http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2006/01/flecklogo.jpg'class="shot2" alt="" /Fleck is either a joke, or a real service trying to be humorous during the pre-launch period. Either way, it’s funny. Fleck is: patent pending, world changing, paradigm shifting and user experience enhancing technology. Tagging, search, blog and social networking, every WEB2.0 hype is covered. While the Fleck homepage suggests its a joke by naming every web 2.0 buzzword (above), the blog is more serious. And it’s a terrific domain name to waste on a joke. → Read More
Santa Monica-based TagWorld, a MySpace competitor, launched an admirable music product last month. Tomorrow they launch video and an upgraded upload client (the uploader is PC only for now). As an aside, TagWorld claims half a million member registrations (launch was in November 2005). This is far short of MySpace’s 50ish million, of course, but it is impressive growth. Video Tagworld is taking a decentralized approach to video. Users may upload video in just about any format directly to their TagWorld storage (all users are given a gb of storage to use for video, music and any other type of file). Alternatively, videos from YouTube and other video sharing sites can be “bookmarked” directly into the My Videos area, and/or directly into the user’s TagWorld page for streaming to visitors. I have not seen a solution that offers both uploading and bookmarking functionality, allowing users to choose to upload or just point to another site for video. This seems like an evolutionary step forward to me. File Uploader Since TagWorld is also operating a virtual storage service as well by giving users a gb of free storage, they’ve developed a client based uploader tool to handle large files and folders. TagWorld automatically detects if a file is music/audio, video, or another type of file and categorizes it approriately. If a user uploads a folder containing a video, and song and a word document, those files are places in My Music, My Video and My Files, accordingly. Again, I’ve not seen this on any other service. A mac client is in development. The Uploader is live now, Video goes live tomorrow morning around 9 am. → Read More
The online Learning Management System space is set to grow massively over the coming years as more and more education takes place on the web. Nuvvo launched a few days ago with an interesting service in this market. Nuvvo, which is free, allows educators to create courses with an great Ajax interface (watching the tour makes me realize how useful Ajax can be with applications like this). There are also modules to assist with charging students for the course (if the educator chooses to charge), create tests, grade, etc. The hard work goes into creating the content, not figuring out how to use Nuvvo. Current courses are listed here. Nuvvo makes money from ads and by taking 8% of any course fees set by the educator. Since 2000, Moodle has been a popular open source choice in this space. However, Moodle requires a server installation whereas Nuvvo is a web application. Moodle also generally requires more techical expertise, while Nuvvo does a lot more hand-holding. A Nuvvo executive prepared a comparison chart of the two solutions with additional information. What I haven’t been able to do is review an actual course, which requires an application. → Read More
Reliable sources are reporting that SearchFox, which announced that it will be shutting down as of January 25, 2006, has sold its assets to Yahoo. At least some of the employees have moved over to Yahoo as well. There is no indication of price. It is unclear whether this was a straight acquisition resulting in the announced shutdown, or if Yahoo stepped in after the announcement for an opportunistic deal. Regardless, it’s nice to now that the SearchFox product will (or may) live on. → Read More
“News 2.0″ sites are launching faster than I can keep up. Gather is the most recent. Gather is a social news site that allows user to submit content and generate a revenue share based on activity on the site. They boast $7m in venture funding over two rounds. So that’s the good news. I usually don’t post about companies I don’t like unless I can be constructive. I am going to point out some weaknesses in Gather.com. These are only my opinion, but I think there are some serious flaws here. First, the site is poorly designed, very cluttered and doesn’t clearly state what they are doing. Second, Newsvine (early post on them), which is still in private beta, has shown the power of combining news items with user comments. It’s an obvious way to combine edge content with user interaction and prove the value of being a middleman. Gather doesn’t do this. Third, the revenue sharing won’t work. Steve Rubel says why – the market is saturated (although unlike Steve I applaud them for at least trying to get advertisers directly and fighting Google’s ridiculously undisclosed revenue share percentage). My main issue is that I don’t think this will provide enough of an incentive to get users attention. Fourth, Gather encourages tagging of news items and yet has a rigid directory taxonomy (meaning at the end of the day that they do not trust tags to create their directory). Bad idea. Go with the tags, drop the taxonomy and see what develops. Bloggers are generally giving Gather a big thumbs down. Mathew Ingram does a particularly good job in talking about all the competitors. He left out the massively funded Inform.com though, another service that has struggled with product direction but that is clearly taking criticisms constructively. → Read More
I wrote about Jon Aquino’s YubNub back on June 13. It was just two days after I started the blog, and so not many people read that post. Lot’s of people know about YubNub though. It is an “Internet command line” that allows anyone to create a new function and access other web services from the YubNub command line. A command consists of at least two pieces of information – an application identifier and a specific command. Some of the more popular commands are here. Don’t see the command you need? Create your own. Want to use YubNub without going to the site? Install the plugin and skip a few steps. Oliver Starr wrote about YubNub today on MobileCrunch, including a look at its uses on a mobile browser. → Read More
Podzinger, which I wrote about briefly last month along with two other services, officially launched a couple of days ago. Podzinger is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts In my post last month, admittedly when Podzinger was still deep in development, I could not make it work. I am still having problems with core funtionality. Podzinger uses speech recognition technology that is supposedly also used by the CIA and other government organizations to turn podcast audio into searchable text. In a few quick searches, it seemed to be returning relevant results. Results can be listed by date or relevancy. Users can listen to podcasts direclty from the search results, or download the file. Users can also subscribe to the feed or the search results via RSS. This is where I ran into problems. A “killer” feature of Podzinger is the ability to listen just to the snippet that contains the search term. Links appear within the result that can be clicked on to hear the snippet. I see the links and click on them, but cannot get a single one to play. This issue is addressed in the FAQs, and it suggest either using Real Player or being patient. However, I am getting actual errors, not just long delays. When I click on a snippet, why is there sometimes a long delay from the time I hit play until the time I hear the audio playing? Most media players including Quicktime require that the file be downloaded before play begins. You should not experience this delay with RealPlayer, since it supports something called the Range feature of the HTTP1.1 protocol that makes it possible to begin playing almost immediately at any point in an audio file. Assuming they get this working properly, it’s a great way to search for content within podcasts and other audio files. A perfect new feature would be the ability for publishers and users to tag additional content within the file and allow others to jump right to that. Also, Podzinger is obviously fully transcribing the podcasts…although I cannot seem to find the full transcriptions anywhere. If the transcription exists and has a permanent URL, I imagine podcasters would link to it like crazy. Podzinger is supported by advertising and is also rolling out a cost-per-click product to allow podcasters to sell advertising into transcripts. → Read More
Dogster, led by founder and CEO Ted Rheingold, turned two years old yesterday. The company is located in San Francisco. Dogster is a home page site just for dogs. You can see the page for my dog, Laguna, here as an example. A key part of the site is social interaction among dogs, and Laguna has a number of “friends” that are linked on the page. Dogster also allows tagging of photos, and has just launched a Groups feature (there are already 239 Groups) In general, humans do not interact and you do not know who the dogs’ owners are. For a lot of dog-crazy owners, this is perfect. Needless to say, Dogster has some pretty loyal users, and the site statistics reflect this: Total human members: 153,000+ Total pet pages: 185,000 (130k dogs, 55k cats) Average new pet pages per day: 525 Page serves December 2005: 10,100,000 Total photos on the site: 750,000 Distinct friend-to-friend connections: 5,030,000 Virtual treats givens: 7,079,000 Total forum postings: 232,000 (1,500 new posts a day) Total pet diaries: 28,000+ Dogster even has a search engine for dog friendly hotels. The story of Dogster is great, too. Ted was out of work and taking odd jobs here and there, and decided to just follow a dream and create the site. Within 3 months the site was cash flow positive and by month 18 Dogster was profitable. The company never raised outside funds other than from friends and family Dogster generates revenue from premium accounts ($20 per year), advertising, and sponsorships both on the side and for things like “The World’s Coolest Dog and Cat Show“, which was sponsored by Target, Nintendo and others. The show, by the way, had 20,000 entrants and over 1,000,000 total votes. Catster (launched in June 2004) is Dogster’s sister site, but I hate cats and refuse to write about it. → Read More
Microsoft has renamed its Fremont project to “Expo” and have put up a landing page, complete with a request for email once it launches. They have also included a screenshot: The Expo team, led by Garry Wiseman, has also posted information about the service, which will be tightly integrated with MSN Messenger and MSN Spaces. Listings will be free: What it is An online marketplace and social networking site What it gives you • Free ads that are easy to post • Browse through a wide range of categories ranging from merchandise, events, personals and services • Keep your dealings within a trusted network like your MSN Messenger Buddies , friends or co-workers; or open them up to anyone • Find listings just in your area, nationwide or anywhere in between • Add your listings to your MSN Space with one easy click • Get detailed maps and directions for things like garage sales, homes for sale or concerts • Communicate with people via MSN Messenger right from Expo’s site → Read More
I’ve been watching three new web 2.0 classifieds sites – BlockRocker, rbloc and theadcloud. And for those of you who say I focus on silicon valley companies, I have a surprise for you – all three of these companies are located outside of the U.S. BlockRocker is in Winnipeg, rbloc is in Calgary and theadcloud is in Chile. None of these are in any position to kill of Craigslist any time soon, but all three have interesting features and contribute to the overall discussion of what a classified ad site should be all about. I wish I could add Microsoft’s Fremont project to this post as well, but I do not yet have a green light to write about them. Here are the details on each: BlockRocker BlockRocker, which is a one man show created by Rod Edwards in Winnipeg, is focused on geography. The site has integrated Google maps in a way that reminds me of Trulia (for real estate search). BlockRocker launched on December 1, 2005 and is still working out some bugs. The site allows publisher tagging of classifieds and has RSS feeds for all searches. Listings are free. rbloc rbloc, which is also based in Canada, hasn’t really launched yet (there are no listings). But the functionality is there and I like aspects of it. rbloc is completely focused on local (the name is a play on “our block”, as in our street). It supports both set price and auctions for ads, as well as “wanted”. The idea is to create more of a marketplace around similar stuff. Also, they have a paid ads area to the left of listings. Actual ad listings are free. Some actual content would be nice, of course. But I’m always patient with new services, unlike all of you people. theadcloud Chile-based theadcloud is the youngest of these very young services, but already seems to have the most legs. Everything is tags, tags, tags – no taxonomies here. Listings are free, and you can submit to as many cities as you like (all cities have feeds, as do tag searches within cities). And they have another feature which I really like – user comments on individual ads. This thing is only days old, but I really like it. → Read More
I am very pleased to announce a new TechCrunch Network blog – MobileCrunch. MobileCrunch is being written by long-time “mobile” blogger and entrepreneur, Oliver Starr. Oliver just left his current blog, the very popular The Mobile Technology Weblog, to join me. Oliver Starr is a serial entrepreneur with experience in technology,wireless and fiber optic telecommunications, mass distribution, e-commerce, biotechnology and alternative medicine. He’s also an Analyst and Associate Venture Partner at Angel Strategies, a Venture Capital Fund managing over $300M in assets as well as the CMO (Chief Mobility Officer) and a Director of Business Development for Web 2.0- company operating in stealth mode that is due for a major launch in the coming weeks. Prior to MobileCrunch Oliver was the author of The Mobile Technology Weblog which he grew from 250,000 hits per month to over 650,000 hits per month with 2.5 million unique visits through the end of 2005. In addition, Oliver has been contributing articles to publishers on and offline for almost 2 decades. His work has appeared in scientific journals, health magazines, sport-specific publications, and much to his chagrin, been widely stolen, and even plagiarized all over the World Wide Web. The reason for MobileCrunch? The mobile space continues to take off and it needs quality bloggers to cover the space. I do not have the qualifications or time to properly write about it. Having a mobile all-star like Oliver on board to share his thoughts is a wonderful opportunity, and of course I jumped at the chance to work with him. The feed for MobileCrunch is feeds.feedburner.com/Mobilecrunch. → Read More
New York City
New York City
San Francisco, CA
