I’ve heard from three independent sources that YouTube may have very quietly raised another $25 million in venture capital after raising two rounds totalling $11.5 million from Sequoia Capital. YouTube’s last round ($8 million) was announced just a month ago, on April 5, 2006. There are two reasons why I think this rumor may be accurate. First of all, YouTube is on a roll: 35 million videos are watched daily and they have 13 million unique monthly visitors. Bandwidth costs for all of these videos adds up: Forbes reports that YouTube’s bandwidth fees are approaching $1 million per month. Since YouTube is revenue-free (they just started placing ads on the site in March), they need more than $11.5 million in capital to keep up with growth. Second, it is also understandable that they would raise a lot of cash over two rounds given that Sequoia Capital is involved and almost certainly has veto rights over new rounds of financing. Sequoia will want to maintain their equity share of the company (probably in the 25-30% range), but won’t want to pay current prices for those shares by participating in a new market valued venture round. The solution? Do a round at a lower valuation where only Sequoia participates, and then follow up with a subsequent round (possibly only days later) with new venture capitalists at a significantly higher valuation. This is the VC game, and funds like Sequoia can pull this off with their hotter startups. Like I said, this is only a rumor (and I’ve been dead wrong with YouTube rumors in the past), but this one makes a lot of sense. → Read More
Genius, Inc. launched their first product tonight: SalesGenius. It’s targeted to sales and marketing teams and allows these professionals to track the activities of sales leads on their corporate websites. CEO David Thompson, a former WebEx executive, gave me a walkthrough last week. A lot of analytics packages already offer the ability to track user behaviors on websites. The difference with SalesGenius is that it requires absolutely no IT integration on the company side, and ties actions to specific leads. The method that they use to do this is actually quite clever. If you are a sales professional, you use the SalesGenius Outlook plugin or web based email product to send an email to a lead. Any URLs back to your corporate website are automatically converted to Genius URLs, which are served through a proxy and allow Genius to track their clicks and subsequent actions on the site. The sales professional can then contact leads with the additional information that Genius provided to them. This isn’t a consumer facing application, but a lot of sales people read this site and I think this may be very relevant to them. The basic product is $49/month per user and includes a 30 day free trial. There are aspects of the service that trigger questions of privacy. For more, see Dan Farber, who says it’s “Not exactly a stroke of genius, but useful” and Rafe Needleman, who calls aspects of the service “disturbing”. → Read More
In March, Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive, said he’d acquire five or so new companies in the near future. On Monday morning they’ll announce two of them. The first announcement is a confirmation of the previously rumored NewRoo acquisition. The second announcement is the acquisition of New York based kSolo, a service that enables its users to create, share and rate their own recorded music (web karaoke). Both of these acquisitions are excellent “plug-in deals” for Fox’s massive MySpace property, with nearly 70 million users. Terms are not going to be disclosed, although rumors put the deals at less than $10 million each. Look for a press release Monday AM. Here’s the full text of the press release: → Read More
From the well-sourced rumor file: Facebook, which began allowing employees from a handful of companies to become members last week, may be adding another 1,000 companies on Tuesday. Facebook determines if a person is a member of a college, high school or corporate network based on their email address. As they add companies, anyone with an email address from that company can become a member of that company’s network on Facebook. Here’s something I’d love to have: a TechCrunch Facebook network. I would issue email addresses to TechCrunch readers and we could have a private network of people who want to discuss new startups and share information about themselves. I don’t think this is in Facebook’s plans, but I’d enjoy doing it. → Read More
Wyaworks, a new startup, “aims to do for web development what blogging has done for publishing”. In other words, Wyaworks wants to help non-coders build usefull web applications. the “Wya”, by the way, stands for “write your apps”. Their first application is called WyaCracker, a form builder. The site is in private beta, but the beta access code can be requested by email from the “try the beta” link on the left sidebar. Wyacracker allows users to build simple web forms and publish them on websites or via email. Resulting data can be viewed on the site or exported to excel. It’s very rough on design, but the core functionality works. And unlike competitor Form Assembly, which is also a great form builder, its free (to be fair, Formassembly has much more robust functionality at this point). I really like applications like this that perform a task that is easy for coders but hopelesly complex for non-coders. I hope they give the site a redesign to allow the underlying application to shine, and I’m looking forward to future product releases. To see more on Wyaworks, check out Phil Sim’s Squash blog. → Read More
The one thing I wish my digital camera had was wifi so that I could auto-upload photos without the extra hassle of connecting the camera or memory card to a computer. There are cameras being released now that have this capability. However, the vast majority of cameras sold, plus the 100 million digital cameras already out there, don’t have any wireless capabilities. Eye-Fi is tackling the problem from a different perspective. They’re building wifi directly into the flash storage. Their first product will be a 1GB SD card with built in Wifi. For about the same price as a 1 GB flash card sells for today – $100. You’ll be able to upload photos, or whatever, directly from your device to a computer using the built in storage wifi capabilities. There’s lots more buzz on this. See Robert Scoble and Scott Beale, who are just as excited as I am about Eye-Fi. No guidance on when this will be available, but they have working prototypes. If Eye-Fi owns the intellectual property around this, look for them to license the technology to flash memory producers. I will buy this the second it becomes available. → Read More
Yahoo announced Local Featured Listings today, a way for local businesses to advertise on Yahoo Local search results. This is not pay per click advertising, but rather first come, first serve service that allows local businesses to advertise on Yahoo Local for a flat monthly fee. This is the same pricing model used by offline yellow pages – small businesses are very comfortable paying a set monthly fee. Local businesses that would like to have a permanent place in local search results can use Yahoo Local’s automated system for placing ads. There are just six total slots on each results page (three at top, three at bottom). I’m confused as to the exact pricing. The blog announcement (linked to above) states that ads can be purchased for “a flat, monthly rate starting at $29.95/month, depending on the business category and location”, whereas the linked rate card states that pricing ranges from $15-$300 per month based on ad location, business category and geography. Either way, this compares very favorably to offline yellow page advertising options, and will be attractive to advertisers. I thought there was a window of opportunity for a startup or open source project to enter this space before the big guys came in to dominate (see no 7 here). And while I still think there is an opportunity here (particularly for an open source project) for a true online yellow page business directory, that window may be closing fast with today’s announcement. For more on the offline yellow page angle, see John Battelle’s post earlier today. → Read More
Live.com Shopping launched today (official blog post), and all I see is a big message saying they don’t support Firefox. It doesn’t work with Safari or Opera either (same Firefox error message for all non IE browsers). The entire Mac audience has been shut out of Live Shopping. I’ll fire up my Windows machine to test it out later. In general, Microsoft has been good about supporting Firefox for its new live.com products. Live Shopping should have been delayed until it supported Firefox, too. Most bloggers and journalists use a Mac and/or Firefox and this audience was just completely alienated from Live Shopping. Ian McAllister, the Program Manager for Windows Live Shopping, has more. Just as a point of interest, here is today’s browser breakdown for TechCrunch: → Read More
Palo Alto based Renkoo, which just raised $3 million in venture financing, is opening its doors this morning to beta testers. They’ll immediately let in the first few hundred requests and then trickle in new users after that (if you don’t see a box to request a beta account, they haven’t switched over to the new site yet). Once you are a member, you can invite others to use the service. Renkoo, like competitor Skobee, helps people plan events (the pre-evite stage). Want to gather a couple of friends and discuss when and where to have drinks next week? Renkoo is a perfect choice to help you do this. Socializr, Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams’ new startup, is also rumored to be entering this space. I’ve tested Renkoo off and on during its development cycle, and it’s evolved rapidly. CEO Adam Rifkin gave me another walk through today to see some of the recent feature additions. To use Renkoo, you set up a new event and invite people. If they are not yet Renkoo users, they will receive an invitation. If they are, they’ll receive a new event notification. Once people start interacting over an event, things get interesting. Renkoo is an early “Comet” application (allowing real-time two way interactivity in a browser – Google Talk and Meebo are based on underlying Comet technologies). That means the event page updates in real time as your friends give their input. The experience is similar to instant messaging. Users who aren’t logged in see the comment stream once they are. Renkoo also allows instant messenger, email and sms notifications of events, comments, etc. (all user controlled). Once an event is finalized, it can be exported in icalendar format (for desktop calendars like Outlook and iCal), or Google Calendar format. Support for additional web calendars and microformats is coming soon. Renkoo was founded by Adam Rifkin, the founder of KnowNow, and Joyce Park, formerly a senior web developer at Friendster and an author of PHP5 and MySQL Bible. Screen Shots (click for larger view): → Read More
San Diego-headquartered Goowy (a Mark Cuban investment) just publicly launched the enhanced IM and storage products that I tested last month. Goowy users now have Meebo-like IM funtionality built directly into their Goowy desktop, and 1 GB of free online storage via a partnership with Box.net. Goowy has also rolled out significant enhancements to their email client, including a three-pane view that looks and feels a lot like Outlook. Goowy is turning into an excellent desktop replacement – users can choose to use a Goowy email account or Pop in whatever email service they currently use (including Gmail). CEO Alex Bard tells me that over 100,000 people have logged in and used the Goowy email client in the last 90 days. Everything is currently free…Goowy will layer in paid premium services down the road. You can also try Goowy without registering through their demo account. → Read More
Facebook, which is rumored to be generating about $1m per week in revenue, is now allowing new users from corporate networks to join their social network (based on email address) in addition to high school and college students. Niall Kennedy was able to register using a microsoft employee email address. I was not able to register using my TechCrunch email – only certain companies are currently supported. It makes sense for Facebook to continue to look for new markets (this was predicted previously). 85% of college students already use it – growth must come from a different group of users if they are going to be able to attract the $2 billion price tag they’ve been asking for. Update: Inside Facebook lists the ten companies that are Facebook-enabled: Accenture, Amazon, Apple, EA, Gap, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, Pepsi, PWC and Teach for America. → Read More
Fluxiom, based in Vienna, is a first rate online storage and file management product. I’d even go so far as to say that it is the most usable storage product I’ve tested. A key issue with online storage is the uploading function. Typically files are uploaded one at a time via a web interface, which is fine for just a file or two but breaks down under heavy usage. Flickr and some other sites have mitigated this problem by creating a desktop-based application that users can drag multiple files into. Sites that don’t have this are seriously limited in their ability to serve customers. Fluxiom has come up with a unique way to deal with the issue without a desktop uploader – by allowing users to zip up files and upload them all in one go. While this works in theory, and I was able to upload a zipped folder with multiple files, Fluxiom did not automatically unzip the folder and I could not determine a way to do it with the service. Fluxiom in general handles files extremely well. Uploaded files can be viewed by thumbnail or file name. Thumbnails can be resized with an Ajax slider (gimmicky but cool). Sharing, versioning and other features are all supported, as is tagging in a limited form (you must predefine tags beforehand, they cannot be created on the fly when uploading files. Fluxiom’s search is also very good. So, on the product side, I have no complaints other than the issues I had with uploading zipped folders, and the desire to tag-on-the-fly. On to Pricing. Fluxiom is smoking something if they think they can mass market their product with no free version and minimum pricing of 9 Euros (about $11.21) per month for just 200 MB of storage. And while they offer a 30 day free trial for all accounts, they require a credit card to open an account. If you don’t terminate before the end of the free trial, your card is automatically charged. Pricing for online storage has effectively been benchmarked by Amazon’s S3 – $0.15/month/GB of storage and $0.20/GB transferred. At those much more reasonable prices, Fluxiom’s 200 MB product should cost $0.03 per month (plus a bit for bandwidth), not 9 Euros. To look at this another way, Fluxiom’s pricing is 373 times what Amazon would charge for the same storage. Yes, Fluxiom has built a nice → Read More
Yahoo launched Yahoo Go today, a DVR and general Microsoft Media Center competitor based on the recently acquired Meedio technology. The feature list is comprehensive: Use Yahoo Go to manage photos, search Yahoo videos, watch stored movies on your hard drive, listen to music and manage television shows via a full DVR (like Tivo or Microsoft Media Center). Yahoo Go is only available for Windows machines. It’s going to be hard for Yahoo Go to compete with Microsoft’s Media Center for the simple reason that it won’t be built into millions of PCs like Media Center is. But at least they are now in the game. More from GigaOm (my head still hurts from drinking scotch with you last night, Om) and Dave Zatz. Screen shots below. → Read More
Wallop, previously a semi-forgotton Microsoft Research “sandbox” social network and photo sharing project, was spun off into a new, independent, venture backed business. Wallop was previously at mywallop.com – the new company is at wallop.com. The new entity is led by CEO Karl Jacob, a Sun Microsystems and Microsoft veteran. Karl is a seasoned entrepreneur as well – this is his fifth startup (he was a founder or co-founder of On Ramp, Dimension X, Keen (now Ingenio) and Cloudmark). The new entity has raised a Series A round from Bay Partners. Microsoft will retain a “minority stake” with a non-voting board seat. Not much is being disclosed about Wallop yet, except that it is significantly different than the existing Wallop project. I’ve seen a bit of what they plan to offer, and I’ll say that this is not another “me too” social network offering. And there are a number of unique business model twists that they aren’t announcing yet. The launch is scheduled for this summer. One interesting thing to note: the current Wallop site is all-Flash. hmmm. Existing MyWallop.com beta users will not immediately be affected by the change. → Read More
Unlike the plethora of project management systems available today Devshop stands out because it is focused on one thing – managing software development projects and assisting project managers with delivering quality software on time. Devshop was largely developed and founded by Ottawa, Canada based former developer and project manager Craig Fitzpatrick (who writes a great blog about project management theory and devshop at www.uncommonsenseforsoftware.com). Devshop is in a private beta at the moment but I have been using it for the past few weeks (evaluating it for our own use). Like many of us who are responsible for delivering software, Craig was frustrated with existing project management tools such as Microsoft Project as they were over-complicated and didn’t help in eliminating scheduling and other problems responsible for the fact that over 70% of software projects fail. Generic project management applications (such as Basecamp) are very good for smaller-scale projects, or for other projects such as organizing a wedding, but are a let-down when it comes to managing teams of developers. The idea behind Devshop is to really focus in on the unique risks that cause software projects to be late. The solution focuses on project management, quality management and requirements management. It takes care of the managerial aspects of a project rather than trying to be a source code control tool and everything else – project management on it’s own is very broad so having this focus from a product is very good. When managing a project with DevShop you don’t set start dates for tasks, but rather you assign tasks to somebody and set a priority. Devshop will take care of scheduling from there based on when tasks are complete, their priority, dependencies and any constraints it may have. Managing time properly is crucial in software management and Devshop does a lot of this work for the project manager. Devshop has taken an innovative approach to solving some of the pains of project management by using risk analysis which can gauge the impact changes to schedules have. With other solutions project schedules are often locked in after initial planning, which causes problems when there are delays or when tasks change (which always happens). Devshop allows your schedule to be more fluid and dynamic – and it will forecast the impact certain changes and delays will have allowing the project manager to plan accordingly or to undo changes. It will → Read More
Supernova, including the TechCrunch New Company Showcase, is being held in San Francisco on June 21-23, 2006. There are a number of deadlines coming up. The early bird (significant) discount period expires on May 12, 2006. Note that 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). If you would like to present your company at the New Company Showcase, the firm deadline for application is April 28, 2006 (this Friday). If you would like to be one of the ten presenting companies, please complete the application form and submit it to techcrunch@supernova2006.com. See you there! → Read More
Microsoft just released Beta v.2 of IE7 and announced it on the IE blog. They’ve also announced toll free phone support and other feedback and support products for users of Beta 2. The English version only was released tonight. German, Finnish, Arabic and Japanese version will be released over the next three weeks. We acted on a lot of the feedback and bug reports from the previous public releases. In particular, I feel good about changes we made based on reports from web developers around some CSS behaviors, application compatibility feedback, reliability data (yes, we do analyze the information that comes when you click “Send Error Report”), and user experience feedback. People on the team will post additional details about changes over the next few days. I was among a number of journalists and bloggers present at a Microsoft announcement dinner this evening. I’ll say this for Microsoft – they are taking the browser war seriously and without arrogance. The key features are tabbed browsing (including “Quick Tabs”, a way to see multiple web pages on a single tab), a continuation of the minimalist approach on the UI and toolbars, and enhancements to the RSS reader built into the browser. The team says they’ve made significant improvements in CSS rendering as well, a problem I noticed in the previous beta version. → Read More
eBay’s feedback system is, arguably, their most valuable asset. It provides the grease necessary to make complete strangers comfortable enough to buy and sell from each other. But it’s a closed system – only eBay transactions can affect a user’s feedback score. And as much as eBay doesn’t like it, these users (and more) buy and sell stuff through services other than eBay all the time, online and offline. There is tremendous demand for third party services to incorporate eBay’s feedback system into their applications to make them more usable. But don’t expect to see eBay embrace mashups any time soon, or ever. Last year I asked for an open version of eBay’s feedback system to be created (see no. 3 here). I also suggested that iKarma, who’s in this space, make changes to their product to address this larger market. But until now, no one came at this problem head-on. Enter Rapleaf, a new San Francisco-based service created by Auren Hoffman and Manish Shah that is a fully open version of eBay’s feedback system. It’s in private beta, but will be launching to the public on May 7, 2006. Rapleaf will allow anyone to leave feedback for anyone they’ve transacted with. Others can use this feedback to help them determine if they are doing business with someone who’d likely to engage in fraud. Rapleaf is eBay feedback for the rest of the web, and the offline world. There are three important things to understand about Rapleaf – the interface and basic feature set, fraud prevention and detection, and their API set and related policies. Interface and Features Rapleaf allows any user to leave feedback for anyone (whether they are a user or not), based on a unique email address or phone number. Type that identifier into the search bar. If no results occur, you can be the first to leave feedback for that person. This can be someone you’ve bought or sold with, or just a friend that you want to endorse. Like eBay, a free-text area is included for comments in addition to a positive/neutral/negative rating. A person’s feedback rating is a raw score, with a point added for a positive review and a point subtracted for a negative review (just like eBay). Non-transaction endorsements are calculated and shown separately. Various stats are calculated and displayed based on feedback ratings by others (see screen shot below). Fraud Prevention → Read More
I’ve spent the weekend setting up and using a Sonos music system in my house. Sonos sells hardware that connects to your home network to play digital music and internet radio stations (and also Rhapsody) around your house. Each piece of hardware is a separate zone, so different music can be played in different areas of your house, all controlled by a single wireless hand held device. It’s a lot of hardware – two ZP80s, a ZP100 (plus speakers) and a controller, but my house is now completely unwired for music, and I’m about as happy as a person can be. This stuff is expensive, but amazingly simple to set up and use. You plug any one of the main units into a router, install software on your PC or Mac, and then plug other units in around the house where you want to play music. Point it to your music collection on your network, or use Rhapsody or the pre-selected internet radio stations. The ZP80 units are smaller and need to be plugged into some sort of amplified device – stereo system, computer, etc. The ZP100 units have an amplifier built in and can be plugged directly into speakers. These are all interchangeable, you can use a ZP100 in one room, a ZP80 in another (which is what I have done). They are also modular, so you can add new components over time. The controller works a lot like an iPod and has two features I’m using heavily. The first is the ability to queue up songs on the fly (add songs to the queue while you are listening to another). The second are the genre-specific radio stations built into the software – I’ve been listening to Los Angeles based KROQ all weekend. If you are a music junkie, this is for you. Total setup time: 25 minutes. We’ll be testing out more gadgets at TechCrunch in the near future. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
