Tara Hunt, Riya’s chief blogger, says on her personal blog that they’ve had a million photos uploaded just two days after launching. Wow, that’s a lot of pictures. Congratulations (again) Riya. More on what Riya is all about here. → Read More
AjaxWrite, an online Ajax version of Word, is the newest entrant into the online office space. It opens and saves documents in Word format (you can also save in PDF), has good basic functionality and is fairly fast. I agree with Michael Robertson, the man behind AjaxWrite, that this and other Ajax Word products like Writely and Zoho Writer significanly reduce the need for most of the world’s population to buy Microsoft Word. AjaxWrite is bare bones by design and fast. If you need to read and/or edit a Word doc quickly, this is a workable solution and I assume it will get better and faster over time. AjaxWrite currently is Firefox only. Michael also tells us to look out for new weekly Ajax applications at his new site, AjaxLaunch. AjaxWrite is the first. I’m looking forward to the next. Will things like AjaxWrite have an impact on Microsoft’s Office revenues over time? Yeah, it must. Even so, Bill Gates says that he just doesn’t understand our infatuation with thin client versions of Word. That may be true, but at some point I expect Microsoft to come out with ad supported versions of their own clients…they’ll just wait, of course, until they have to. And Google has pushed the envelope with its recent acquisition of Writely. More on GigaOm. Om asks about the business model…If people start using this as an alternative to Word, money can easily be made on advertising around the site, with a premium paid version. It won’t be a huge money maker, but hey, that’s the point – to drastically reduce the cost of using Office for the average user. → Read More
Well, just as soon as one company stopped being evil, another one has stepped in to take its place. Jigsaw is a marketplace for contact information, and it is very efficient. It boasts detailed personal contact information for 2.5 million people, and 7,000 new people are added every day. If you want the name, title, email address, direct phone line and/or address of any executive of any company, there is a very good chance Jigsaw will already have it in its database and will sell it to you. And if you are a sales guy and have no ethical concerns about where you get your contact information, you probably already know all about Jigsaw. Unlike competitors like Hoovers and InfoUSA, which gather company information by semi-legitimate means such as scouring SEC filings, cold calling companies and asking for information, and reviewing other public documents, Jigsaw simply pays people to upload other people’s contact information. Users are paid $1 for every contact they upload, and some users have uploaded information on tens of thousands of people. See the demo (and note the other demos on that page as well). Jigsaw is also self correcting, and incentivizes people to also correct bad contact information. That’s right, the next time you hand out a business card to someone or otherwise divulge your contact information, you may be handing it out to the entire world. Here’s how it works: Sign up and start downloading contact information. This includes name, title, company, address, email and direct phone line. For example, a quick search brought up all of this personal contact information for Ben Golub, CEO of Plaxo (appropriately smudged): But wait, it gets much worse. Anyone can find out if Jigsaw has their contact information via a link on the home page, but amending or trying to delete that information simply puts a flag on the data with the changes noted – but the original information also remains.There appears to be no way to remove your own contact information from Jigsaw once someone has entered it into their database. There is no method that I was able to find on the website to do this (including in the privacy policy), and an email to the company asking about this went unanswered (its been three business days now). Jigsaw has a carefully worded privacy policy to deal with the fact that they are the antithesis of → Read More
PayPal has launched its mobile payment platform, called, of course, PayPal Mobile. Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch had the scoop and was also slashdotted an hour ago. This spells trouble for existing mobile payment provider TextPayMe. PayPal’s solution is fully baked, easy to use, and has some great features that take this beyond a way to text your friends money. To use the service, click here and sign in (you must have or create a PayPal account to view this). You need to register a phone and create a PIN. PayPal uses an automated system to call you on the phone and verify the PIN, and the phone is then usable. To send a person to person payment, you either text the payment amount and recipient’s phone number to PayPal, or call a toll free number and follow the directions. PayPal Mobile can also be used to pay for stuff as well. It’s called Text to Buy: Anytime you see Text to Buy next to something you want to buy—on a poster, in a magazine, at an event—you can securely order the item by text message. Use your phone to buy items like CDs, DVDs, books, electronics, accessories and much more. To use it, you text PayPal the item number, and they call you back to confirm the purchase. Done. I’ve confirmed that there are no additional charges for using PayPal Mobile. If you have a business or premium account, normal fees to receive money apply. And, of course, most mobile carriers charge for text messages. → Read More
Plaxo tends to bring on strong negative emotions in people. Frustration. Revulsion. Dismay. The reason so many people hate Plaxo? Those of us who aren’t customers, which is the vast majority of everyone, get multiple daily emails from those few misguided souls who’ve chosen to sign up for the Plaxo Spam Service (my name, not theirs). When you sign up for Plaxo, they make it misleadingly easy to spam your entire address book with your contact information and a Plaxo advertisement. And any updates they do are likely to be sent to their entire address book as well. As millions of people unwittingly do this, we, the non Plaxo users, are hit with a massive aggregate cost: dealing with all of this spam. Jeff Nolan and many others have dealt with Plaxo by putting it in their spam filter. I’ve gone through their multi step (and very hard to find) process for removing each of my five emails from their system (the process includes replying to yet another email from them to prove you own the account – how nice). And all along the way, as we are forced to deal with Plaxo spam and various avoidance processes, we are told by them that the best way to avoid the spam is to simply become a member of Plaxo. If you join Plaxo, you can fill out your contact information once and choose who gets to see your information. From then on, updates are handled through Plaxo so that you won’t receive any more e-mails. It’s like a stalker telling his stalkee that if she will only marry him, he’ll stop. And if you blog about Plaxo, or otherwise publicly voice your discontent, Plaxo will send a representative to patiently beat you into submission in the comments. Well, Plaxo has finally announced that they’ve harassed enough people into joining and won’t be making it quite so easy to for users to spam their entire address book. The words they chose certainly tell us that, at least internally, they fully knew how miserable they were making all of us: …we’ve always known that the update requests were a means to an end — our goal has always been to get as many members as possible so that these e-mails were unnecessary. And it looks like we’re finally getting to that end. As of last week, we’ve past 10 million members. We → Read More
Netvibes, a very popular Ajax home page product that I said was a Web 2.0 Company I couldn’t live without, will announce seed funding by Index Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Chappaz (founder of Kelkoo and Wikio) and Martin Varsavsky (founder of Jazztel, Ya.com and Fon). The size of the round was not disclosed. Over a million home pages have been created on Netvibes, and the service is available in a ton of languages. They are working on an API now that will allow for third party widgets to be created as well. Netvibes is headquartered in Paris and London. My original post on Netvibes is here. → Read More
One of the key new features of Windows Vista and IE7 is something called Sidebar, which is a gadget platform. This will allow Live.com gadgets to be used right on the Windows desktop.I wrote a little bit about this after attending a Microsoft event called Search Champs in January. Yahoo Music has very quietly released an Ajax gadget for Sidebar that will allow user to play Yahoo Music right from a Windows desktop, and it’s giving me a lot of ideas around the types of things that we’ll be seeing very soon. Before this, to use Yahoo’s unlimited music product (all you can download and listen to music for $5 per month) you had to download the Yahoo Music Engine, which is their version of iTunes (a client based media player). But based on what Ian Rogers writes on the Yahoo Music Blog, this will no longer be the case. You will be able to listen to music right from a Windows desktop without using the Yahoo Music Engine. I’ve included a couple of screen shots, including a close up of the player and a larger shot showing it on a Windows desktop. More screen shots are available on Ian’s post, linked above. You can also see a demo at this link, just skip ahead to 28 minutes and 10 seconds. So the really interesting thing about this is, what other web and desktop applications will we be able to use via a gadget on the Windows desktop? My guess is, pretty much everything. → Read More
This has been coming for a long time, but starting tomorrow (March 22) you can download (if you have a Windows machine, that is) the new Yahoo IM client with full inbound and outbound VOIP capabilities. That means that, like Skype, users will be able to receive call from, and make calls to, any normal telephone (standard telephone service is often referred to as “POTS”). Screen shot is below. Pricing is competitve to Skype: Phone Out: Call normal phone numbers in 180 or so countries from your PC. Pricing starts at $0.02 per minute. For more on rates, see here. Phone In: (for U.S., France and UK users only) – Receive calls on your PC from traditional and mobile phones for $2.99 per month or $29.90 per year. Free Voicemail: Free voicemail for inbound calls, and voicemail messages are linked from Yahoo Mail. Phone Out on Yahoo is a little cheaper than Skype on average (Skype rates, in Euros, are here). Phone In is also cheaper – Skype charges 30 Euros per year for their comparable product. Skype has video calls, of course, and Yahoo doesn’t. Neither company frustratingly, allows for call recording (Gizmo has this feature and I love it). Yahoo licenses GIPS VoiceEngine Multimedia infrastructure for the back end VOIP technology. → Read More
Israeli startup eSnips relaunched today with a new look and substantial feature upgrades. I did not have a chance to meet with eSnips during my recent trip to Israel, but CEO Yael Elish and VP Marketing Efrat Moshkoviz visited silicon valley a couple of weeks ago and i was able to get a demo. It’s hard to categorize eSnips. We looked at it as part of our review of online storage providers – and although eSnips does provide 1 GB of free storage for users, they clearly are up to something else as well. The core idea is to allow users to upload media files of any type – photos, videos, office documents, whatever – tag them, and either keep them private, share with other or make them public. But eSnips is also allowing bookmarking of web content, from a whole page to a line or paragraph. Others can comment on each piece of media or content as well, and rate a user created page. RSS feeds are available for everything. Given the social aspects of the service, eSnips is really a content-centric social network. eSnips also offers a client uploader for file transfers, and a toolbar for easier bookmarking. Both only work on Windows machines at this time, however. I like combining media and other files with bookmarked content, and although I’m not sure if eSnips in its current form will stand out enough from the crowd, I do think they are on to something interesting. If virality kicks in from sharing, they could have a winner. eSnips is free, and they will charge for storage above 1 GB and other services. → Read More
VideoEgg, a service that allows users to take video from virtually any device, transcode it to Flash and upload it for viewing on websites (see our posts on VideoEgg here) will be announcing the acquisition of Popcast in an hour or so. This news follows yesterday’s announcement by Internet TV company Brightcove that they have acquired Seattle-based metaStories. Look for more development in this space Internet TV players consolidate and define themselves around YouTube, the best known service. As a side note, Popcast was founded by Rob Lord, who is also founder of the recently released Songbird media player. See here for our posts on Songbird. → Read More
UPDATE: Riya is not launching a public beta today, but is sending out emails with credentials to people who’ve signed up for the alpha. In a few days Riya will be opening up registration for everyone. More on their blog here. Rumors are buzzing today that the long awaited, almost acquired photo facial recognition service Riya should be moving out of private alpha and launching a public beta sometime today. The main site is currently down and “asks for your patience”, which certainly suggests that something interesting is going on over there. Riya, which is funded by Blue Run Ventures, Leapfrog Ventures, and Bay Partners, is a service that automatically recognizes people in photos and groups them. Add a tag to the person and all of the photos are tagged with that name. As your friends and family join Riya too, many of their pictures will automatically be tagged with your data (and their other friends’ data) too. Riya is a company that I’ve loved from the start (screen shots here), even when it was called Ojos, and have written about it often. Congratulations to the entire Riya team if, in fact, it is launching today as I’ve been unofficially told. I am really hoping that they adopt a partnering strategy and get this built into Flickr and other photo sharing services. Or at the very least build a hell of an importer so that I can move my photos to them. Yahoo, if Riya works (it certainly did in my beta testing), please buy this company. → Read More
The rumor is that Google internally tested Google Finance through two full versions before releasing it today, and the extra attention shows. This is a great looking product overall. And they’ve taken things at least a step further than Yahoo Finance in its current form. The included information is similar to Yahoo Finance for public companies (stuff that can be scoured from public SEC reports and company related news), but there are some key new features: Use of Flash for charts to change features like timeline on the fly; drag and drop to move back in time Use of Ajax on the home page to switch between market views (Nasdaq, NYSE, etc.) Inclusion of recent blog entries relating to the company (see link in first bullet above) Private company information The flash charts are loading very slowly right now, i assume this will improve. The last bullet above is really interesting – they’ve created some original content for private companies and have indexed more from the web. Google Finance information will also be displayed at the top of normal seach results for public companies, in what they call the One Box area. Om says Google Finance is dissapointing and is little more than a “me too” on Yahoo. But in this case I disagree and am happy to give a nod to Google – Other than the very slow Flash charts, I like it, and I think this will push Yahoo to move its own finance property forward. More on Google Finance at John Battelle, SEW and Memeorandum. → Read More
Jeremy Allaire’s still-in-beta Brightcove is announcing the aquisition of Seattle based metaStories this morning at 8 am EST. This looks like a good match. Brightcove is focused on “Internet TV,” or creating an Internet outlet for media producers. Heather Green at Business Week calls it “distribution feeds to micro-audiences”. MetaStories, on the other hand, has tools for actually creating that content. Their main product, StoryMaker, is a publishing tool for creating interactive Flash content. → Read More
We just posted the second podcast episode of the new TechCrunch Network podcast site TalkCrunch. Nik and I spoke to Linkedin CEO Reid Hoffman and August Capital’s David Hornik about the past, current and future of social networking. Listen to the podcast here, or subscribe to the feed in iTunes or your favorite feed reader. Episode 1, “Google Calendar v. The Competition” is here. → Read More
I first wrote about Australia-based Skylook back in August when they released v. 1.0. It’s a plugin for Outlook that ties Skype very nicely into email. They’ve continued to innovate to stay ahead of Skype’s own Outlook toolbar product. And while Skylook isn’t free, it has a number of great features, including presence (see who’s online from Outlook), integration with the address book, call recording and transcoding to MP3 format, and archiving within Outlook. The Skype toolbar, in comparison, is basically a way to initiate instant message and voice calls through Skype from Outlook only. And you don’t have to initiate calls within the toolbar to record them. As long as Outlook is running in the background, Skylook can automatically record calls and instant message conversations and archive them for you. Note that Skylook does not support recording of video calls. There are a number of other great features, including syncing of Outlook and Skype contacts and receiving Skype voicemals in your Outlook inbox. For a complete list of upgraded and new features, see the what’s new page here. As I mentioned, Skylook isn’t free, although they offer a free basic option that doesn’t include recordings. Licenses run up to $50. → Read More
An early alpha release of Firefox 2.0 has been quietly released. I don’t care if it is an alpha, it has to be more stable than v.1.5. I’ve downloaded it and its working swimmingly so far on my Mac. In fact I am writing this post with it. The only problem so far is that it is incompatible with a screen grab plugin that I like to use. Firefox 2.0 is also available in Windows and Linux flavors, so have at it. Now here’s something interesting – I recorded a podcast this morning with Reid Hoffman, CEO of Linkedin and a member of the board of directors of Mozilla, and he didn’t mention a thing about this. Bad Reid, bad. Note that this is not available on the main Firefox site, only at the link in the first sentence of this post above. Nik has previously posted on his own blog about his frustrations with Firefox 1.5, not only the issues with plug-in’s not being compatible, but also the memory leak issues (which are known issues to the developers). Read more on Nik’s post here. Note: One new thing that is going to take some getting used to is the “x” close tab button right on the tab header instead of off to the right where it used to be. I’ve hit it accidentally twice now, and lost a bit of unsaved work on my Skylook post above. → Read More
Kevin Werbach’s Supernova is always a great conference, and this year it’s going to be even better – I am partnering with them to put on a new startup showcase during the conference that will feature ten of the hottest new companies on the web. Supernova 2006 will be held June 21-23, 2006 in San Francisco. Want to Present at SuperNova? If you would like to be one of the ten presenting companies, please complete the application form and submit it to techcrunch@supernova2006.com. The deadline for submission is April 28, 2006. Registration Discount TechCrunch readers have an exclusive $200 discount off normal registration fees, including the already discounted early bird rate. Send an email to tcreg@supernova2006.com to receive the discount code by return email (or ping me and I’ll give it to you). → Read More
14Dayz is a Netherlands based company that is still in private beta, although I’ve had a chance to test it out. It does one thing, and well: time tracking. It allows multiple project, categories and subcategories, and multiple users. Reports can be viewed in the browser, or exported in excel or pdf format. Pricing isn’t cheap. There is a free unlimited version that is restricted to a single project, which isn’t much help for people with multiple clients they are tracking. Pricing for the premium plans ranges up to $99 per month. The site is still in beta and needs some work before they launch. Saul Weiner, another beta tester, has posted a couple of helpful suggestions and I agree with him – navigation is poor, and I don’t like having to leave the main screen for things like new category creation. The back end seems solid, though. One other feature that is really needed is billing. The report has total time, but there is no way to associate a project or hourly fee to that time, nor is there an invoicing function. Building something like Blinksale into this would make it significantly more useful. → Read More
Digg is only a year and a half old, but it is already a significant social force that moves massive attention and traffic around the Internet. As has been noted for some time, it has been steadily closing the gap in alexa comparisons with Slashdot, and now has more than 800,000 average daily visitors. For further comparisons, check out digg vs. dot, a site that looks at crossposts on Digg and Slashdot. From recent personal experience, I can say that Digg certainly sends a lot of traffic to popular stories (whether that traffic ever returns is another story). And Digg continues to release new features to build community. It now allows ratings of individual comments. And users can now also track the activities of their friends on digg as well. Along with that power, of course, comes some negative attention as well – specifically people trying to game Digg for their own purposes. It can be as simple as using fake accounts to push a story up to the front page. As the site gets more popular, this becomes harder to do, but the reward (more traffic) also gets correspondingly larger. The increased costs are matched by increased incentives. The most recent story of abuse is a suggestion that people are using Digg to artificially inflate the price of a public company – Sun – by promoting a rumor that Google may be acquiring the company. Digg has a number of protections in place to guard against bad news – including user flags of suspicious posts. But the real story isn’t about how people are gaming Digg, or how Digg fights it. The important news is that Digg is so big now that people are trying to game it to do things like affect the stock price of a public company. That says a lot about the bright future of this young site. → Read More
At first blush, Assaf Arkin’s Co.mments looks like a competitor to CoComment, the tool that allows you to track comments you’ve left on blogs (see CoComment reviews here). But in reality it’s quite different. Co.mments reminds me the most of a sort of highly specialized blog bookmarking tool, focused on keeping all of the posts that you want to track (including comment discussions) in one place. You do not need to leave a comment on the post to track it with co.mment. And the best part is that you can use it without creating an account – it will track things and keep them organized based solely on a cookie. However, if you want to create an account to use it on different computers or browsers, you can. To track a post, you simply install a bookmarklet and hit the button to track the post and comments. This populates a page at co.mments that shows a post summary and all new comments on the post. You can also track all posts from all users on this conversations page. RSS is available for both your personal page and for the group page. As co.mments evolves, there are a number of features I’d like to see added. First is a way to tag posts while bookmarking them for easier search later, as well as grouping with other users’ bookmarks by tag. There also should be more social aspects in general – for example, I’d like to know if others (and who, and how many) are also tracking a post. One unavoidable issue – you can’t hit the bookmark button unless you are on the permanent URL for a post. Just being on Techcrunch.com, for example, won’t work. A nice feature would be a drop down list of all posts that are included on a URL (which would be easy to do by looking at the RSS for a page) if you aren’t on the permanent URL page for a post. The site is a bit raw and unstable. If it goes down, check again in a day or two. It’s worth it. Thanks Gabe for the introduction. See Robert Scoble for a bit more. → Read More
New York City
New York City
San Francisco, CA
