New York Based Ziki is a new social networking site that allows people to tag themselves and make connections with others through those tags. It also allows users to pull in RSS feeds from their blog, flickr photos, YouTube videos, etc. It’s Suprglu with social networking added on. I had all sort of problems registering (and I’m pretty good at registering for new services). Ziki requires too much personal information, such as my birthdate. Also, I repeatedly got errors trying to submit my registration, and never received my confirmation email allowing me to log in. My recommendation: ease up on the required personal information, fix the web form and email confirmation, and slowly encourage your customers to add more content to the site. More on Ziki here. → Read More
Plum, which I first saw at Demo in February, will be launching in mid to late May, co-founder and CEO Hans Peter Brondmo tells me. If you’d like to be notified the moment it launches, give Plum your email address on their home page. Plum is similar to Kaboodle and Stylehive in that it is a social bookmarking site that allows users to add a lot of metadata about bookmarks (including images). Bookmarked items can tagged and be added to a public, private or shared “collection” (there are a number of defaul collections and more can be added). One key way that Plum is different than other bookmarking site is that it allows users to bookmark items on their computer, not just on the web. A file that is open in certain desktop applications (things like photos, power point presentations, iTunes playlists, address book entries, email, etc) can be added to Plum by clicking a button on the Plummer, a small downloadable application for Windows or Mac. See the last screen shot below for a look at the Plummer. Plum also makes an effort to show related public bookmarked content through a feature called “connections”. These appear in the right hand column of a collection of bookmarks, and are a really interesting way to find stuff related to what you’ve already bookmarked. If Plum suffers from anything, it’s too many features. But the design and flow is intelligent and the help section answers most questions. See here for a video of Plum’s presentation at DEMO in February. In addtion to Hans, Plum’s founders include Margaret Olson and Julie Hanna Farris (founder of Scalix). → Read More
i4giveu is an Israeli site that allows people to post confessions and ask for the community’s judgement. Confessions can be posted anonymously and are tagged for easy browsing. It just launched, and some of the “confessions” seem a little canned or just plain dumb. And while this isn’t any kind of substitution for real therapy, the popularity of sites like PostSecret suggest that people really do like to tell their secrets on the Internet. Bonus feature: track comments to a confession via RSS. Welcome to the biggest Confession room in the world You have the opportunity to confess on every sin you ever committed and be judged by the community if you’re worthy of Forgiveness or Not. Every Confession is ranked with the Forgiven or No forgive ranking. Your reputation will be judged from Angel to devil upon your confession ranking , The higher the score the closer to Angel status you get and vise versa . Rank each confession after you truly decided on the sinners fate, The higher the score the closer to forgiveness. simple. What are you waiting for? i4giveu was founded by Alon Carmel, one of the guys I had lunch with in Tel Aviv last month. → Read More
For those of you who are fans of Pandora, Last.fm or both, you’ll like this mashup by Gabe Kangas. I wrote about it last month, when it was a bit of a hack. Now, Pandora is fully supporting the effort and has even given Gabe access to the Pandora API to create a more stable application. The mashup is basically the Pandora player, and listeners have the ability to add music played by Pandora directly to their Last.fm playlists. Last.fm favorite artists for the user are also displayed, and can be used to generate on the fly Pandora stations. What’s amazing to me about Pandora’s official sanctioning of the mashup is that it is effectively taking Pandora user data and sending it directly to Last.fm. Good for them for recognizing that openness is better than closedness. → Read More
Microsoft is building an online storage service, code named Live Drive, says Ray Ozzie in an interview with Fortune: Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data. It even has a name for that future service: Live Drive. With Live Drive, all your information – movies, music, tax information, a high-definition videoconference you had with your grandmother, whatever – could be accessible from anywhere, on any device. Ray also mentioned web storage in an executive staff memo published by Dave Winer last October. See “Seamless OS” under “The Opportunities”. I am banging down every door I know at Microsoft to get more information on this, but I don’t expect further comments. From what I am hearing around the valley, Google Drive is a 2007 product at best, largely because of product priorities and business model issues. According to sources, Google is trying to work out a way to provide the service for free (and there are very large bandwidth and storage costs with storage, obviously). If Microsoft pushes this, they’ll be first. More on this story from Mary Jo Foley. → Read More
Mozes is a Palo Alto based startup founded by Dorrian Porter that is tapping into the U.S. SMS (phone text) market. It allows you to do all sorts of things via sms. Hear a song on the radio that you like and want to bookmark? Text the radio station (ie, KROQ) to 66937 (which translates to “Mozes”). Mozes will note the time and station name and bookmark the song title in your Mozes page (and sms you the song information). Meet someone who has a Mozes keyword? SMS their Mozes keyword to 66937 and store whatever personal information they’ve elected to share. And online advertisers can use a Mozes keyword to give you more information on the product. Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch wrote a long review of Mozes with more information. Mozes faces a formidable chicken/egg problem – a lot of the value is realized only when a lot of people are using it. But it may be worth grabbing your personal keyword at Mozes now, just in case this is the next big thing. And you can use the radio station functionality right away. Mozes has stayed quiet but they will finally start making some noise this weekend and generate revenue at the Maker Faire this weekend in San Mateo. The Faire is being put on by O’Reilly Media for its Make Magazine – a magazine for DIY technology projects. The event is going to be huge (15,000 people are expected) and as people walk around the Faire, they will be able to save information about their favorite exhibitors using Mozes. Dorrian sees it as a micro testing ground for how they will deploy Mozes in the real world. To get started, sms “Dorrian” to 66937. You’ll add the founder to your friends list, and get an activation code. → Read More
Ted Leonsis at AOL writes about the recent AOL “MySpace Killer” rumors. Here are the additional details he gives: Here’s a better way of looking at it. The AIM Buddy List (which was introduced 10 years ago) was the orignial social network, and it has 43 million AIM and Buddy List users. We’re working on adding functionality to AIM that will really open it up — allowing developers, partners, and users to take part. It’s going to be fun. Rather than thinking of it as a killer of anything, let alone MySpace, it will allow our millions of users to express themselves in new and interesting ways and become a catalyst for new communities to grow and flourish. We’ll have more to say about it soon. I’ve done some digging, though, and it appears that a “MySpace Killer” is exactly what AOL is trying to build. From what I am hearing (and which isn’t contradicted by Ted above), AOL plans on building a social network on the back of AIM, which will pre-populate your AIM friends as your social network friends as well. So the key AIM integration will be to pre-build relationships into the new service. The service will launch at AIM.com, and individual user pages will be aim.com/[username]. Functionality will be similar to MySpace – with blogging, photo and music widgets available for integration. Also, third party companies are being approached to build widgets (similar to Live.com widgets) that can be integrated into the pages using AOL’s I Am Alpha API. If anyone out there has a screenshot or two, please send them to me. Anonymously is fine. → Read More
Stylehive is a social bookmarking site that is focused on shopping. I believe that there is promise in this space, which includes the just funded Kaboodle, as well as Wists and the upcoming Plum. Why? Because 80% of online shopping is “research” and only 20% is actually “buying”. Stylehive addresses the 80% piece of the market. Stylehive, designed by Emily Chang and Max Kiesler at Ideacodes, is also a visually stunning site – just check out the home page. They are focusing specifically on hot designs and trends. The key differences between Stylehive and a normal bookmarking engine is the attention to different types of metadata (descriptive tags, prices, etc.), and the focus on images. When you use the Stylehive bookmarklet to bookmark a page, the images are automatically included as well for inclusion. New functionality is rolling out regularly, including a commenting feature on all bookmarks yesterday. The company was founed by CEO Michael Carrier and is based in San Francisco. → Read More
Jingle Networks, which runs a free 411 service called 1-800-Free411, has raised $26 million in a Series B financing. The round was led by existing investor Liberty Associated Partners. Also participating were existing investors First Round Capital and IDG Ventures Boston, as well as new investor Comcast Interactive Capital. Our earlier profile of Free411 is here. The service is a free alternative to $1-$2 directory calls. The catch? You have to listen to a 12 second advertisement. It works mostly like normal directory assistance. You dial their phone number and go through an automated system that asks for the location, type of listing and listing name. While you are waiting for the number, you must listen to a 12 second advertisement from a competitor to the service. If you choose to use the competitor instead, you simply dial “1″ to redirect your call. Another difference is that if there is no local advertiser for the business type you have requested, the business receiving the call hears a short message at the beginning of the call telling them that the call is via Free-411. A tele-sales group follows up with the business to try to get them to advertise. Free-411 claims a 13% success rate in converting businesses to advertisers. And they are seeing explosive growth. Free411 is now handling 7 million calls per month – out of a total of 500 million directory assistance calls per month in the U.S. That’s about 1.5% of the total market. Investor Josh Kopelman from First Round Capital has another way of looking at it: “1-800-FREE411 has the potential to shrink an $8 billion market.” → Read More
AOL may be preparing to launch a Myspace-type social network sometime in the next few weeks, says Dave Winer. This went from rumor to “confirmed likely” in posts and comments by Jason Calacanis and Jordan Running (also here) (both now at AOL). A comment in the last link suggests that the new service will be open to non AOL members. This market is red hot. Mature players like Facebook and Fox-owned Myspace basically own their respective categories, and better-featured (and funded to the hilt) newcomers like Tagworld and Tagged gunning for the big guys. Even aging Friendster, mostly written off as living dead, has made a recent (if quiet) comeback based on Alexa stats. Fickle teenagers and young adults are quick to jump ship to the hot new thing, but these existing players will certainly not lie down for AOL. We’ll have more on this as it develops. → Read More
Photobucket isn’t as flashy as YouTube or Flickr, but they have 14 million users, 80 uploaded photos per second and, just two weeks after launching their video product are nearly matching YouTube with 30,000 daily uploaded videos (YouTube is 35,000/day). And, Photobucket is both profitable and cash flow positive. What is it? It’s the behind the scenes photo and video server for MySpace, eBay and dozens of other sites that either have significant restrictions on photo/video uploads or heavy fees. For users of those services, they often turn to Photobucket to host these files. Photobucket is not designed to be a destination site – their tools are focused on easy uploading, transcoding to flash (in the case of video) and posting to other sites. 63% of all media links to sites like MySpace are served by Photobucket. Compare that to 8% for Flickr and 1.38% for YouTube. And their tools work so well that they are not forced to compete on price. Photobucket does have a free product, but it’s capped at 1 GB of storage, 10 GB of monthly bandwidth and, for video clips, 3 minutes of total footage per clip (YouTube is 10 minutes). The $25/year premium product has higher limits: 5 GB storage, unmetered bandwidth and video clips of up to 5 minutes. They’ve just moved into video hosting (the official announcement isn’t until April 25), but after a quiet launch they’ve seen 250,000 video uploads and about 30,000 new uploads per day. Photobucket was founded in 2003 by CEO Alex Welch. The company is based in Denver and Palo Alto, with 35 total employees. They’ve raised just one round of angel financing on their way to profitability. And VCs in the know are knocking down their door to fund this startup that very few people have ever heard of. VP Sergio Monsalve gave me a walkthrough of the product today and is pictured in the image above. → Read More
Some of you may have noticed that we’ve included a “Subscribe to TechCrunch by Email” widget on the right sidebar of TechCrunch for the last few days. ReadWriteWeb and I have been quietly testing a superb new FeedBurner blog-to-email product that addresses every feature I requested on No. 2 of this list. This new (free) Email Subscriptions product launches officially this morning and can be found under the “publicize” link at Feedburner. Key features: Free Daily emails Blog Branding – Feedburner plugs are all at the bottom and minimized Very good HTML/CSS rendering – posts look just right in the email (see screen shot below) Blogger owns the email list and can export it at any time Feedburner has existing partnerships with Feedblitz and Squeet for their competing products – those partnerships remain in place and bloggers will have a choice as to which of the three services to use. My recommendation to bloggers: consider using this product. There are a lot of people out there who have not made the jump to RSS readers yet. You want to get your content in front of them, and this is another way to do it. Based on some stats that Fred Wilson (an investor in FeedBurner) published last year, we can expect about 1 email subscriber for every 5 RSS subscribers. Enter your email address: Delivered by FeedBurner You can register for the TechCrunch daily email in the widget above or in the right sidebar. → Read More
Facebook has raised an additional $25 million, this time from Greylock Partners. This eases rumors (for now) that the company has been looking for a buyer. I have been digging furiously into the aquisition rumors. Clearly Facebook was at the least testing the waters and had significant (and some say heated) merger discussions with Viacom, the parent company to MTV. Since Facebook has 85%+ of the college market, its unclear where future growth will come from. There’s tons of room to improve revenues on their exsiting user base, but Facebook has run out of college students in the U.S. and their high school/post graduation expansion model is unproven. → Read More
Simply Hired (TechCrunch profile) has raised $13.5 million from New Corp’s Fox Interactive group and Foundation Capital. Both investors will take board seats in the company. This is big news for Simply Hired. The Fox investment almost certainly signals that Fox’s other properties, including MySpace, could have a very close relationship with Simply Hired in the near future. And – Simply Hired’s competitor Indeed has taken money from the New York Times. These startups now both have some very heavy hitters supporting them and it will be interesting to see how things shake out. Another angle on this deal is what didn’t happen – this was not an outright acquisition by Fox, which has been on an acquisition tear lately. My guess is that acquisition discussions have been ongoing for some time, but the valuation on Simply Hired may have been too high for an outright purchase. All of this is speculation of course. But the jobs space just got more interesting. → Read More
As I’ve written many times before, the online video space is getting fairly….ahem…crowded (more). One company in the space, Grouper, is dealing with the competitive heat through humor (in an intelligent way – by using their product as the host). An internal Grouper email was sent out to all employees today that said “Grouper Street Fighter. Description: It’s coming for you…watch Grouper destroy the competition“. The email also had a link to a (Grouper) video that shows Grouper beating up (literally) its competitors. My favorite part is when Grouper does a flying face kick to YouTube. Previous TechCrunch posts on Grouper are here. → Read More
Yahoo isn’t just testing a new home page layout – they are also testing a new wifi service with selected users. The survey (screen shot below) suggests that Yahoo’s new messenger product will be able to access certain wifi networks and allow IMing and VOIP calls (this is assuming those networks are restricted in some way). They do not name the networks the may be partnering with, but do say: Now when you are on the move to the places that you go most – airports, hotels, coffee shots – you can stop twiddling your thumbs and start communicatinig via instant message with the people you care about most…all for free. If the service goes live, you will also be able to get unrestricted access to those networks for $7.95 per month, or two hours for $2.95. Screen shot below. Thanks Razvan for the tip. → Read More
Yahoo is testing a new home page design with some of its users, and Steven Cohen grabbed screen shots. There are a few differences but as far as I can tell this is a purely cosmetic makeover. The new site is cleaner and groups key resources on the left – things like email, My Yahoo and other Yahoo services and content. Comparison screen shots below: New Yahoo: Current Yahoo: → Read More
Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch has a long and excellent writeup on ScanR, a new free service that allows you to take a camera phone picture (or any digital picture) and turn it into a searchable PDF file. If you have a camera phone with at least one megapixel of resolution, ScanR is great for turning things like whiteboard images and paper drawings into something more usable. This is particularly interesting for heavy travellers who do not have a scanner handy. To use it, you simply take a picture and email it to scanr. They supply you with an enhanced pdf version by email. The company recently announced a $4.65 million Series A round of funding from Trinity Ventures and Thomvest International. → Read More
Om Malik wrote about PeerMind yesterday, a site I hadn’t heard of before (even though it launched in January). It’s a regularly updated list of the most popular music, movies, games, software and ringtones being downloaded on theEDonkey 2000 and Gnutella networks. Once this includes BitTorent, which is apparently coming soon, PeerMind’s lists will be a much more interesting indicator of consumer demand for media than other top lists determined by more indirect methods. PeerMind is published by Nareos, the creator of PeerBox, a mobile P2P file sharing application. What are the most popular downloads? Well, PeerMind may be accurate but the results aren’t pretty: Maddona’s “Hung Up” is the top song, and Ice Age 2 is the most popular movie. Yuck. → Read More
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