Prague based Allpeers cofounder Matthew Gertner came by my house today to install the product and let me try it out. Allpeers is a Firefox extension that creates a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files – If you choose to, you can share any file on your network with one or more of your friends. They will be able to see what files you choose to share (even getting an RSS feed of new files you include), and with a single click download it to their own hard drive. See my original post on Allpeers for more information. Matt took me through installation and setup of the product, and he shared a number of files with me. The interface for adding friends and sharing files is intuitive. Adding a file into Allpeers requires only dragging it from the hard drive into the browser, and sharing the file requires only a single click. The service is not yet freely available, and Matt says that 35,000 people have requested to be notified by email when the service goes live. As I wrote before, Allpeers is the “Killer App” for Firefox – Mozilla based Flock and Songbird should immediately be working to convert the basic Allpeers extension to work on their platforms as well. Allpeers will be launching by the end of March 2006. → Read More
On Friday Rojo will be officially releasing Feedshare, a new way for blogs to promote themselves on other blogs. The service is available now to test. The idea is that a blog include a Google Adsense-type ad unit on the site (I’ve included this in the bottom left sidebar of TechCrunch). Two ads are served in the unit and there are vertical and horizontal ad units to choose from. For ever two ads served, the publishing blog gets an impression on another blog. FeedShare is a service that helps bloggers with similar interests promote each other. As a blogger participant you give exposure on your site to other blogs in the network, and in return your blog will be promoted on similar sites in the network. You give exposure by displaying “Feed Listings” (see examples) which display the name and description of blogs and other feed publishers. When visitors click on these listings they can then subscribe to the RSS or Atom feed for that blogger or publisher in any one of several feed readers. You then create a listing for your OWN blog and for every impression you donate to the network on your blog, you will receive a listing on someone else’s blog or in Rojo.com. The goal is to help build the feed subscriber base to your blog, increasing awareness and traffic to your site. Rojo plans to sell the second ad to third parties, first on a cost-per-impression basis. Later they may experiment with cost-per-click and cost-per-subscirber models as well. Tags can be set by the blog publisher to control the types of ads shown on the site, as well as what types of sites your ads will be shown on. Ads link back to Rojo and are recommended for subscription to Rojo or other feed readers. A discussion forum for Feedshare is here. → Read More
Podbop launched today, and for music lovers it may be the most interesting mashup we’ve seen yet. They’ve combined concert events from eventful and mashed the data up with band sites that include downloadable music. The result? search for any city in the U.S. (hopefully this will soon expand to become a worldwide service) and get results (including RSS for future events) that include all upcoming live music and links to download music supplied by the band. If the band has no music available, Podbop will show a blogdigger search for that artist along with the eventful data. Here’s the best part. Subscribe to any search (Los Angeles, CA, for example), and the MP3 files are included as enclosures in the RSS feed. The service is new and data is limited. But look for this to be a cult favorite. And if they release an API, look to see Podbop’s data mashed up with other services, too. In the meantime, I’ve subscribed to the San Francisco feed. → Read More
Microsoft Office Live went into beta today. The service was first revealed at a Microsoft event last fall – you can see my post about it here. This is not an online version of Microsoft Office. It is a set of online tools for businesses to help them have a web and email presence at a very low cost (starting at free with ad support). The core tools are a free non-microsoft domain name, website and up to 50 email accounts with 2 GB of storage each. For a small company needing a informational website, it will be great. Given that the domain name, website building, hosting and email will all be free, this will be very attractive to a small business. For customers needing more, Microsoft will offer a suite of additional productivity applications – 22 in all were announced last fall. They will also support third party applications – ADP’s payroll software was shown integrated into Office Live. A set of APIs will be available for third parties to add their application functionality into Office Live. Among the additional applications is an office document collaboration tool. You can share an office document real time with others, allowing them to view and edit it. Impressive. Office Live should become a starting point for small businesses wanting a web presence and a general platform to run their business operations. If you are interested in participating in the beta, sign up at the main Office Live site. It is currently only open to U.S. businesses – the full service will launch later this year. → Read More
TextPayMe is coming out of beta on a SMS payment service (U.S. only) that allows anyone to send money to anyone else via cell phone. You simply sms the payment to another phone number. For example, to send $15.27 to a friend with mobile number (206) 555-1234, you would text “PAY 15.27 2065551234″ to SMS@TextPayMe.com. The service is currently free, and they are giving every new user $5 to sign up (this really reminds me of the early days with paypal, where they also gave $5 for every new signup and you could beam payments between Palm Pilots). Your TextPayMe account can be tied to your bank account for moving money into and out of the virtual account. You can also give TextPayMe your credit card for “overdraft” payments. It looks like they will eventually charge for transactions, but the service is free for now. Before everyone gets too excited about TextPayMe, note that PayPal is launching something similar, called “PayPal Mobile”. What would be ideal is if this was picked up by the cell phone service providers, and payments were simply credited or debited from your phone bill. I’d also like to see something like this partnered with BillMonk. To test the service, sign up for an account and sms $5 to my cell phone. → Read More
Stickam will launch tomorrow, February 15. The service allows users to easily create video and audio files, and additional tools to easily post these files to a website with a code snippet. The media files are played on the destination website in Flash. Bunchball has similar technology for integration of flash games into blogs and other websties. Stickam is free, has no bandwidth restrictions and up to 500 mb of storage. These are the kinds of tools that are already integrated quite nicely into sites like Tagworld. But if you are a more serious blogger and want to add just a bit of flair to your blog, Stickam may be for you. → Read More
Google just announced that they have acquired Adaptive Path’s Measure Map (one of my most loved companies, more posts on them here). No word on price…my wild ass speculation is $5 – $10m. Measure Map has not raised outside capital, and seems to be more of a drain on Adaptive Path resources at this point than an asset – the service has lagged very badly over the last few month, becoming unusable for larger blogs (although it has improved significantly recently). This will be a good addition to Google Analytics. Note that Jeffrey Veen of Adaptive Path wrote the post on Google’s blog. Jeffrey and other Measure Map employees will be moving over to Google along with the acquisition. Here’s what I love the most about this acquisition: Measure Map is still in private beta. → Read More
I agree with Fred Wilson – email can be an important way to syndicate blog content. Fred has about 1 email subscriber for every 5 RSS subscribers. Until now Feedblitz was the only real choice to bloggers. I’ve chosen not to use it because of the heavy orange feedblitz branding included in emails. And while they’ve made improvements in their service, there are a number of features which are unacceptable, like the fact that they group blogs into a single user email unless a blog is paying the premium fee, etc. Tonight I heard about Squeet, a new competitor in the space. But while Squeet seems fine for a user looking to get email from a feed, it does not supply the necessary tools to bloggers to allow them to promote the service. What I’m looking for is a service that provides a “feedburner” level of features and service: zero service provider branding on emails I am in control of the email list; no spamming by the service provider options on frequency of emails options on email template I’m happy to pay for this service, although I think there should be a free version as well that has ads within the email. I actually think it would be smart for the provider to share ad revenue with the blogger. Feedburner is the obvious company to build this product, but they have a partnership with Feedblitz and seem to be making no move to build their own. I’ve been asking Constant Contact build a blog specific product, but so far no luck. They are just not set up to auto-send daily content from a blog. Maybe MailFeed will be the answer. → Read More
Assigning some sort of quality to real time search is necessary. Tracking incoming links to a particular post doesn’t work because, well, since this stuff is real time there is no time to track links. Memeorandum does track blog post links in near real time, but with a very small index of blogs. Tracking this across the entire blogosphere is much more difficult. Robert Scoble points out that Technorati has taken a shot at the problem, though. They’ve quietly released an “authority” slider to allow results to be filtered. See results anywhere from all blogs, to just blogs with hundreds of links. They assign authority to a post based on how many links a blog has. The image below shows the slider at the top and the text within the imagedescribes how it works. The slider is a bit buggy but works. This is another good way for people to sort results to find what they are looking for. Steve Rubel uses this as an opportunity to talk about how everything has devolved into a big popularity contest. He’s right…but what is a better way to determine authority other than links into a blog? → Read More
Ning is announcing on their company blog that they will be releasing new suff on Wednesday. I’m looking forward to this, and I’m hoping that they make me eat my critical words on them. If the release includes features that I saw at their office a couple of weeks ago, I suspect I may. → Read More
If you want to try out 3bubbles chat, which I wrote about here, go over to the newly launched 3bubbles blog and click on the chat link at the bottom of the post. Or to enter the chat directly, click here. → Read More
Ajaxian and Philipp Lenssen are talking about Google Trogdor, a rumored ajax editor for creating webpages. Who will be the first to release an ajax interface for customizing blog templates? And speaking of Google rumors, exactly how long does it take to create an ajax calendar to integrate into Gmail? Everyone else has done it already. → Read More
I managed to finally get a first hand look at Dabble.com, the new media bookmarking and sharing service that Mary Hodder has founded. According to Mary there are 97 different video hosting services – including Google, Youtube, etc. I can certainly believe this, and I’ve written on a bunch of them already. Many of these services are quite popular, and people have a number of favorites at different services. Dabble will allow people to gather all of these favorites in one place, using standard bookmarking tools like tagging, comments, etc. And there is a big focus on sharing. Simply drag and drop a video from a friend (or anyone) to your area and you have it bookmarked. To play videos, Dabble simply opens the player in the video hoster and frames the page. Their hope is to generate revenue by partnering with these hosting services, and they seem to be well on their way with a number of partnerships already in place. Dabble will also be adding sound and image file bookmarking. Dabble’s early employees include Paul Wicks and (advisor) Deb Schultz, in addition to Mary Hodder. Angel investors include Evan Williams and Mark Pincus. For more on Dabble, see Om Malik, who’s been talking about this off-blog as well. I agree with him Dabble could be interesting. → Read More
If you have a few minutes to kill, check out Alexadex, a marketplace for web sites. You get $10,000 to start. Prices are based on the alexa ranking for the sites you are buying or selling. Welcome to the alexadex, where players compete for fame and glory by buying and selling shares in sites on the world wide web. The price of a share is set at the site’s daily reach per million, according to alexa.com. You get $10,000 just for signing up, so get started! My strategy: I plan on buying shares of companies just before I write about them, and selling quickly afterwards. My first purchase was Alexadex.com. I love stuff like this. Ok, back to real business. I highly recommend buying dabble.com. hint, hint. → Read More
Edgeio is a startup that I co-founded with Keith Teare last year. Because of the clear conflict of interest I won’t be writing about edgeio that much on TechCrunch. Instead, I recommend subscribing to the edgeio blog to get information about our vision, features and the upcoming launch. The service itself will open its doors in the next few weeks. Only a few people outside of the company have seen the product. A couple of days ago Keith gave a brief demo at a SDForum Search SIG event in Silicon Valley. Rob Hof from Business Week was in attendance and wrote his thoughts on his Business Week blog. To get a better understanding of what Edgeio will be, see his post here. To sign up to be notified of the launch, enter your email address at edgeio.com. → Read More
Silicon Valley based 3Bubbles, which launches next week, is going to be an awesome way for bloggers and other websites to extend the conversation on the things that they write about. They have created a very easy to integrate Ajax based chat interface that can be added to every blog post automatically. By simply adding a code snippet into the blog template, a link will be included in every post (think comments, trackbacks, and now chat) to open a chat window where readers can debate and discuss the post. The service will eventually integrate advertising into the ajax chat window, and the company says that they will split revenue with bloggers. Alternatively, bloggers can pay a monthly fee for the service and either turn off ads, or keep all of the advertising revenue. 3bubbles was founded by Drew Golkar and Jeremie Miller, and is lucky enough to have Stowe Boyd as an advisor (Stowe is also writing about 3bubbles today). The hope is that Jeremie Miller’s involvement (he is the inventor of the Jabber protocol) will ensure that 3bubbles will be scalable enough to handle all of this distributed traffic. A somewhat comparable service, ajchat, has had serious trouble keeping the service stable. 3bubbles is going to be wildly popular with bloggers. The two times I’ve added chat to TechCrunch (the ajchat post and the bunchball post), a rich discussion popped up immediately. This is also a brilliant idea for news sites like Memeorandum and NewsVine. Sign up for the 3bubbles beta here. → Read More
Microsoft’s new classified product, Live.com Expo, has started to roll out additional beta testers. Expo is centered on the idea that people will trust others within a group, and so is allowing classifieds networks within groups. Users can choose to search classifieds just within their immediate instant messaging buddies, or within an email group (such as anyone with a boeing.com email address), or “everyone”. This week they added all University of Washington students to Expo, and Garry Wiseman, who is leading the project, tells me that more are on the way. There is no set date yet on when Expo will be live to everyone. Additional screen shots are below. I also included a basic screen shot in my last post on Expo. → Read More
CollectiveX, a startup founded by repeat entrepreneur and venture capitalist Clarence Wooten, has the chance to disrupt Linkedin. I gave a teaser about CollectiveX back in November of last year. I can disclose a little more about the service and its features now, although they will not let me post any screen shots other than the one shown below. CollectiveX is Linkedin the way it should have been done in the first place. The interface to create your bio is question and answer based with nice ajax features. The result is a professional looking and easy to peruse bio. CollectiveX also has advanced calendar, message board,file storage and other features. But the biggest difference between CollectiveX and Linkedin is that CollectiveX is completely group-focused. You must be associated with at least one group to join and all of the activity focuses on your groups. This makes a lot of sense – groups will form (each with its own subdomain) virally as members start new groups. For instance, a board of directors group might use CollectiveX to coordinate board meetings via the calendar, upload board minutes for review, and use the discussion board to plan future meetings or follow up on action items. One of the board members may set up a separte group for her church group or charity organization and invite others to join. And so on. CollectiveX also leverages contacts in a much more intelligent way than Linkedin. Everyone you know is not linked to you. Instead, you choose which contacts you want to share with each group. The revenue model makes sense. Groups of less than ten people are free. Over ten and you pay a small fee. This is a winner. I think David Hornik may agree that this is a “Social Network 3.0″. Sign up for the beta here, which will be coming within a couple of weeks. → Read More
Google is launching a new version (3.0) of their Desktop Search product, possibly tonight. The biggest change is the option to store your hard drive index on Google’s servers instead of locally on your own computer. This allows searches from a remote computer (such as a work computer). This is of course a touchy privacy subject, but the ability to search from a remote computer will be very welcome by some users. While Google has not yet released v 3.0, they are making significant changes to policies on their desktop which previously stated that hard drive data would never be stored on Google Servers. Compare this new language talking about searching across computers to this old language stating that “these combined results can be seen only from your own computer; your computer’s content is never sent to Google (or anyone else).”. Look for the second link to be updated soon. The new feature, called “Search Across Computers” stores file content on Google servers. In order to share your indexed files between your computers, we first copy this content to Google Desktop servers located at Google. This is necessary, for example, if one of your computers is turned off or otherwise offline when new or updated items are indexed on another of your machines. We store this data temporarily on Google Desktop servers and automatically delete older flies, and your data is never accessible by anyone doing a Google search. Search Across Computers is optional and only works with certain types of files: Web history (from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, and Mozilla) Microsoft Word documents Microsoft Excel spreadsheets Microsoft PowerPoint presentations PDF files and Text files in My Documents Look for an announcement on Google’s Desktop Search Blog. Yahoo and MSN, which have competing products at desktop.yahoo.com and desktop.msn.com, store users’ hard drive index only locally. For additional commentary, listen to Steve and I debate the issue on a new Gillmor Daily, just posted here. UPDATE: Google has announced this. → Read More
It isn’t entirely fair to compare the new Yahoo Photos with all of the early stage companies showing their stuff at Demo. But its a very impressive product and it’s good that they came here to demo it. The new Yahoo Photos will be launching this spring. Everyone knows that Yahoo owns Flickr, the wildly popular photo tagging and sharing service that they bought in late 2004. But what most people don’t know (I didn’t) is that around 30 million unique monthly visitors come to Yahoo Photos (the other Yahoo photo service) v. about 8 million on Flickr. Flickr has mind share; Yahoo Photos is driving real (unique) traffic. An all new Yahoo Photos is being released in March. It combines many of the most-loved features of Flickr (like tagging and sets) with some entirely new stuff that is pretty compelling. Exclusive screen shots of the new service are below. Yahoo Photos will be entirely free, and will allow uploading and archiving of an unlimited number of original high resolution pictures. Revenue will be generated from advertising on the site, along with premium printing and other services (books, calendars, prints, etc.). Like Flickr, Yahoo will also be allowing users to pick up prints at their local Target store. Features Yahoo Photos will integrate popular Flickr features, like tagging and sets, as well as popular printing options mentioned above. The screen shots below show some of these features. They are also doing new stuff. They have two types of “sets”, or albums. The standard sets work very much like Flickr. But “Smart albums” allow dynamic creation of albums based on rules (ratings, tags, date, etc.), and also allow inclusion of photos from friends. With smart albums, users can create albums like “highly rated” or “new” that will always be created on the fly. The all photos view is much better than Flickr. Many more photos can be viewed at once, and an Ajax interface allows for mass dragging and dropping into a tray at the top of the screen for inclusion in albums, sharing (via email and instant messaging), etc. They have not integrated RSS feeds for photos and albums yet, but this is coming. The Yahoo photos team includes Darryl Eaton, Will Aldrich, and Scott Schiller, who were all here at Demo this week. Screen shots: → Read More
New York City
New York City
San Francisco, CA
