Paris/London based NetVibes, which provides a personalized Ajax homepage, released significant upgrades yesterday, including new plugins and community sharing features. Tariq Krim, NetVibes CEO took us through this new version. First they have released 2 new plugins accessible in the default feed menu. One is displaying hottest digg news and the other helps you monitor Ebay activities. They have also released keyboard control that facilitates browsing and usage (edition, delete, help) within pages and tabs. But the key innovation is elsewhere. NetVibes launched Ecosytem (accessible at eco.netvibes.com) which is a directory of contents and services for NetVibes that is managed by its users. It will enable anyone to easily create, share and rate any feed, plug-in or even tabs. You can directly add any item you wish within your NetVibes homepage directly from the directory just by clicking the “+” button. The directory can be browsed by item, tags and a search engine is also available. For example you can add a “web2.0” tab or a “world cup” tab to your homepage that include a good selection of feeds. And you can also populate the directory directly from your homepage by clicking the “publish to ecosystem” button present either on the left of the “refresh” feature on the top right of each “feed block” or within the menu of each tab (check screenshot on the side). You will then land to an editing page to give some detail on the item you wish to share (see screenshot below). Sharing is only public for now and i think it could be also great to have private sharing with your friends. In other words NetVibes is more community oriented enabling users to interact with developers and vice-versa. NetVibes has also released an API that enables the development on new plug-ins (more than 74 already present). 8 new were added since yesterday and some very interesting are on the way (video, netflix, myspace) This happens right after PageFlakes announced an investment from Benchmark. It looks that the field competition is getting hotter. More on NetVibes blog. → Read More
Ask.com, which owns the most popular stand alone web based feed reader, Bloglines, has just rolled out its long awaited new blog search engine. Ask/Bloglines has been the subject of a considerable number of jokes over the last year, after promising a blog search engine last summer. The new engine should put those jokes to rest. And the company is taking the product and the launch very seriously – Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone walked me through the product personally earlier this week. The search engine has two separate user interfaces. It can be found on the Ask.com home page (link to blog search on the right sidebar) as well as Bloglines. The underlying engine is the same, although the interface and functionality is slightly different on the two sites. Ask.com Blog Search Searches can be conducted by “posts”, “feeds” or “news”. The news option conducts a search from 7,000 pre-approved blog and news sites to reduce noise. Results can be narrowed to a specific period of time (anytime, last hour, last week, etc) and can be sorted by relevance, date or popularity. “Popularity” is determined based on the their “ExpertRank” algorithm and several sources of Bloglines data, such as subscriber count, links, citations, etc. A blog with more links and more subscribers on Bloglines will have more relevance than other blogs. “Relevance” factors in both popularity and freshness to give meaningful recent results. There are a number of other features worth noting. Feeds related to the query are listed on the right sidebar, along with RSS information for subscriptions. Each search result contains additional options as well: a binoculars graphic (scroll over for popup with last five posts from result), “Save” (save result to a clipboard), Subscribe (to a feed reader) and Post To (Digg, Delicous, Newsvine etc.). Advanced search features are accessed via an javascript drop down menu at the top of the screen. Bloglines Blog Search Bloglines is using the same back end search engine as Ask.com, although the interface and feature set has notable differences. A key feature is a “+” button next to each result. Click on the button and the full post is presented with original formatting (not quite the original formatting actually, but pretty close). Another difference – each result has a “more info” link that shows the number of bloglines subscribers for that blog and any citations for that post. My Thoughts on → Read More
The new Yahoo Video product is launching tonight (Wednesday) at 9 pm PST. The big change? Yahoo Video is targeting YouTube by allowing user-generated videos on the site. The biggest disappointment? The product is not being integrated (yet) into Flickr. Yahoo Video will continue to allow major video publishers direct API access to the site, as well as crawling the web for relevant videos as well. But now, regular Internet users will have an easy way to upload videos and create their own video blog channel on Yahoo Video. The only limit on uploads is file size – each file cannot be larger than 100 MB – but there are no time, bandwidth or total storage limitations. Videos can be set to public or private, and viewers can search and sort videos by popularity, category (pre-defined by Yahoo) or tags (user created). Like YouTube, videos can be rated by viewers, commented on, embedded into other websites, etc. The biggest benefit to using Yahoo over other competitors may be the potential for exposure. Popular user generated videos will be periodically featured in a number of places on the new Yahoo home page when it launches. And unlike YouTube and other video sites, Yahoo is not going entirely with Flash. They’ve built the uploader tool from scratch, and the default player is Windows Media format. For Mac users and others unable to use this format, a Flash player will be used instead and automatically. The product is slick and will certainly be popular – partially because this is Yahoo, and partially because they’ve created an incredibly robust and complete video search tool with home grown videos and stuff crawled from the web. But what I really want is to see video upload functionality included directly into Flickr, a totally different user base. People will upload videos on Yahoo Video to get distribution and fame. People will upload videos to Flickr for sharing mostly with friends and family, and to have a safe long term place to store them. I’m much more interested in the latter. → Read More
Seattle based Redfin is making two major announcements today. First, they’ve closed an $8 million Series B round of financing, from Vulcan Capital, BEV Capital and Madrona Venture Group. This follows a (roughly) $1m Series A round in January 2006. New CEO Glenn Kelman, the founder of Plumtree, joined the company in September 2005. Second, Redfin is expanding their service out of the Seattle area to include the bay area in California (and will be expanding to Los Angeles, San Diego and nationwide soon). They have an intruiging and aggressive business model. Instead of providing useful real estate information to consumers and then pointing them to real estate professionals like competitors Trulia and Zillow, Redfin is doing their best to completely remove real estate agents and brokers from at least half of a home sale. Redfin combines MLS listing information (homes for sale) with historical sales data (homes already sold) into a single map. If you find a home you like and want to place an offer, Redfin will represent you in the buying process (they have a call center with licensed real estate professioinals to guide you). Here’s the good part: They reimburse you 2/3 of the buy-side real estate fee directly on closing. The average amount reimbursed to the buyer is $11,402 (and that is based on relatively low Seattle home prices). Redfin is also testing a seller-representation model, called “Direct for Sellers”, that will handle all aspects of a sale for a flat fee (currently $1,350). On a $500,000 home sale, this saves the seller $13,650. Everything isn’t rosy for Redfin, though. They’ve been operating in Seattle for a number of years and have numerous war stories to tell about threats, stalkings and other disturbing behavior towards their employees and some customers from, apparently, angry real estate professionals. Hopefully things won’t get out of hand as they continue to disrupt this stubbornly inefficient market. I haven’t met the Redfin team yet, but am looking forward to seeing them tonight at the TechCrunch Seattle party that I am co-producing with them, Farecast and Triphub. Screenshot (showing $106,000 refund on a $5.3 million San Francisco house): CrunchBase Information Redfin Glenn Kelman Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
San Francisco based SixApart, which owns the Typepad, MovableType and LiveJournal blogging platforms, will start letting users test their new Vox (formerly Comet) hosted blogging platform on Thursday, June 1. Initially a few thousand people will be let in, and they will ramp up from there. Vox was initially introduced last fall at a DEMO conference (click here for details and a video archive of Mena Trott’s presentation). Vox is half a blogging platform for newbies (albeit with rich and deep functionality) and half social network. The “new post” functionality is WYSIWYG and allows very easy uploading of images, audio and video, as well as book information (for reviews) from Amazon. Privacy settings can be set for each post, as well as descriptive tags. There is an obvious focus on social networking. A friends list, called “neighborhood” is prominently displayed on each page (see screen shots below). If you want to add any person on the list as a friend, simply hover over their picture and a number of options pop up. Vox is not a platform at this point for hard core bloggers who want complete control over the look and feel of the site. But it combines a great interface with the type of functionality most people really want – integration with Flickr and YouTube, easy book reviews, etc. This is aimed squarely at MSN Spaces and AIM Pages. Vox will be free and advertising supported. More screenshots here. → Read More
Utah-based Logoworks, which just relaunched a major new user interface, has an innovative and inexpensive way of creating corporate and other logos for customers. They outsource the project to interested and pre-approved designers who come up with design concepts. You then pick the concept you like best and iterate from there. Designers are paid bonuses based on having their designs chosen, and so a very efficient and competitive market is created around each logo creation project. I went through the initial stages of the process to see what the Logoworks designers could come up with. After a couple of days I received an email linking to logo concepts (many of them are below). Logoworks stresses that the initial compositions are simply concepts, and asks that you pick one of the concepts and go forward with iterations. Some of my initial concepts: The ability to tap into a number of different designers who will have very different logo concepts, combined with the rock bottom pricing, is pretty compelling. Logoworks has a number of different pricing plans ranging from $300 and up. If you are in the market for a new logo, you may want to give this a look. Discount Code: If you go to Logoworks using this link – www.logoworks.com/techcrunch, they will take $50 off any order. I am not receiving any commissions or other payments for any purchases – I just asked them to give TechCrunch readers the biggest discount they could. The discount is good until June 13, and you’ll see the original prices crossed out and the discount shown when you select “start my logo”. → Read More
Silicon Valley based Sharpcast, which closed a $13.5 million round of financing in early March (and $16.5 million total over two rounds), is now open to the public. The official announcement is tomorrow – Wednesday – but the site is open now for new registrations. Sharpcast is important, but hard to understand at a glance. The basic idea is to remove the hassle of syncing data across computers and mobile devices. The first product, Sharpcast Photos, showcases the technology quite well. In the future we’ll see products from Sharpcast that allow auto syncing of contacts, calendars and documents as well, all from their native applications (outlook, ical, etc.). Sharpcast Photos, though, allows users to upload photos to a desktop application. It is available only for Windows machines today, with a Mac version promised soon. Once the photos are in the desktop application, users make a few option selections and the photos are then placed on the web, synced to other computers and synced to a mobile device. The process works all multi-directionally, too. Upload a photo the web and it syncs to the desktop (and mobile device). Take a picture with the mobile device and it syncs to the web and the desktop. I saw a demo of Sharpcast at the DEMO conference in February, and then again a couple of weeks ago from CEO Gibu Thomas and Marketing/Business Development Director Allen Bush. The application is extremely well done and the syncronization is near instantaneous to a mobile device. If anything, the Sharpcast guys have waited too long to launch the product. I found distressingly few bugs to complain about. This is the future. The question is whether Sharpcast will be part of it or not. If they execute, they will be. → Read More
German startup Pageflakes, an Ajax-rich personalized home page (an early profile is here) will announce a Series A round of financing led by Benchmark Capital on Wednesday. The size of the round will not be disclosed, which suggests it was on the low side. In late March, Paris-based competitor Netvibes announced a $1 million seed round. Both Netvibes and Pageflakes compete with Microsoft’s Live.com and other personalized start pages. And while they have nowhere near the traffic of Live.com, users routinely comment that they like the speed of the Pageflakes and Netvibes sites in comparision. Benchmark is actively investing in European headquartered or focused new consumer web startups. They recently led a $15 million round in Bebo, formerly headquartered in the UK (and now in San Francisco). → Read More
FeedBlitz, a Blog/RSS to email service, announced an angel round of financing today from Tom Evslin, a previous AT&T and Microsoft executive. I’ve been very hard on Feedblitz in the past (see no. 2 here), and have been trashed right back by founder Phil Hollows. But today I’m going to just say “congratulations” to Phil and wish him luck. This round of financing will help him compete with Feedburner, who recently launched a competing service. → Read More
Photo search and facial recognition site Riya is now about two months old (see here for our past Riya posts). Founder and CEO Munjal Shah is in the process of memorializing the highs and lows of the launch process, and this is must-read stuff for entrepreneurs looking to launch a company down the road. I may update my “Don’t Blow Your Beta” post based on some of his advice. Part 1 is up now, look for further installments on the blog. Bookmark this stuff, it’s free consulting. Disclosure: This is the first time I’ve written about a direct advertiser on TechCrunch – Riya became a sponsor a couple of weeks ago. → Read More
CNET very quietly launched a simple new photo uploading site called AllYouCanUpload last week. At first glance it doesn’t appear to be very special or disruptive. But it is. By launching AllYouCanUpload, CNET just pulled the rug out from under at least two startups (photobucket and imageshack) that focus on providing image hosting for users who want to display those images on other websites, like Myspace, eBay and others. This is a big business – a lot of traffic flows through photobucket today, and it is a profitable and well funded company. AllYouCanUpload is a site that makes uploading photos as easy as it can possibly get. They’ve removed all of the friction. You do not need to register for an account. You just use the uploading tool and you are shown the image along with codes to post the photo on sites like Myspace, ebay and others (I’d also like an option to have the image links emailed to me). Unlike Photobucket and Imageshack, AllYouCanUpload is completely free, and no advertisements appear on the uploading areas of the site (there are ads on the hosted part of the site, which you see if you click on a hosted image). There is no limit to the number of photos that can be uploaded or the total amount of storage that may be consumed. There is no limit on the size of an image, and images are not resized unless you request it. And possibly most importantly, there are absolutely no bandwidth restraints. This last point is important. With other services there are caps on bandwidth. That means if a photo is particularly popular and is viewed a lot, the user account will be shut down after a cap is reached. That won’t happen with AllYouCanUpload. This is not a destination site – if you lose or forget the URL for your photos you will have to re-upload them because there is no search feature or user account. CNET suggests you go to Webshots, their main photo site, if you want those destination site features. But for users of Myspace and other social networking sites that just want a place to store photos, AllYouCanUpload is a seriously cool site. If it gets traction (and it will, even if it didn’t have CNET behind it), it will force PhotoBucket and Imageshack to rethink their offerings. And that is great for consumers. See → Read More
Fo.rtuito.us is a brand new site, complete with last minute bugs, that is soft launching this week. When you register at Fo.rtuito.us it randomly introduces you to another member. You have four days to interact with that member via anonymous email to see if you can become friends. If after those four days both people decide they would like to stay friends, they are added to your permanent friends list. You are then introduced to another person. I like the innocent simplicity of the site and its goals (“We want…to open their eyes to the world they’re missing by not learning about others”), and hey, it may help a lonely person with some time on his or her hands to find a friend or two. I also wonder about the usefulness of this model to established social networks like Myspace. At the very least, adding a feature like this would add some page views from those users who don’t have a full list of friends on the site already. Fo.rtuito.us is completely open for new users, so give it a try if you are interested. → Read More
Limbo is a San Mateo, California startup with funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Azure Capital. The purpose of the service is to auction off things like plasma TVs, iPods, cars and event tickets, with bids being placed via text messages. The hook is that the winner of the item isn’t the highest bidder. The winner of each auction is the person with the lowest unique bid for that auctioin, meaning no other person bid that exact amount. If lots of people bid $0.01 and you are the only person bidding $0.02, you win. The company is quick to issue press releases around the incredible deals that winner’s managed to get. This press release, for example, talks about a Salt Lake City woman named Sondra Peterson who won a $35,000 Hummer on a bid of $36.65. It’s not quite that simple, of course, or Limbo wouldn’t have much of a business model. Bids must be placed via text message or via regular phone. I placed a bid on the 42 inch plasma TV and it required a total of four messages – two sent and two received, to finalize it. Based on my pricing plan, that’s $0.22 on my cell phone bill, some of which Limbo will receive in revenue share. Also, the TV is a Limbo premium auction, which means I was charged an additional $0.99 for my bid. That’s a total cost to me of $1.21, and Limbo is going for more: my last text message said “Too High! Your bid of 1938c is unique, but there are 265 lower unique bids. Bid again? Rply “HDTB XX” where XX is yr bid in cents. *Bid award: 10 Loot” If I place another bid, another round of text messages will be billed to my phone along with another $0.99 bid charge. With all of these charges it isn’t hard to see how Limbo can become profitable on a per auction basis. All of these “loot” points are designed to get me to bid often as well. You get these each time you bid, and they can be traded in for tshirts and other items once you’ve accumulated enough of them. If you aren’t skeptical enough after understanding the basics, the fine print may be enough to keep you away. Auctions run for a very long time (the TV auction runs from May 15 to June 5. Such a long → Read More
Seattle-based Farecast, now in private beta, is an airfare pricing comparision tool that also uses a predictive algorithm to recommend when you buy your ticket. So the idea is to show the user not just who has the cheapest ticket, but whether or not waiting might make sense as well. Look for Minneapolis-based Flyspy to launch a similar service in the near future. The site is well designed and the interface clearly communicates pricing and predictive information. At this point in the beta you must choose Seattle or Boston as the departure city, so I looked at Seattle – Los Angeles flights. The cheapest option was $329 (on American Airlines), and Farecast tells me with 80% certainty that the lowest fares will rise by $50 over the next seven days. Ok, great. But Southwest, which has flights for $308 round trip, isn’t included in the price comparison. And that’s the real problem here. Farecast is a nice solution that distills useful information from complete pricing chaos by the airlines. But Southwest doesn’t play those games, and doesn’t open their service up to comparison engines like Farecast. So the lowest and most understandable prices are excluded from the service. While I like Farecast, and will use it to see if I can get a flight for less than Southwest charges, what I’d really like to see is our airlines pull their collective head out of their collective ass and adopt a pricing model that makes sense. One, for instance, that doesn’t require a proprietary algorithm like Farecast’s to understand. John Cook has more. Sign up on the home page for a private beta invitation. Thanks Noah for the invitation. → Read More
Our Prisoner is, clearly, a publicity stunt for the email company producing it. It will be a six month long, twenty four hour a day Internet television program that will follow the life of a 35 year old man named Kieran who is, according to the site, a loser. He will not be able to leave the house, and the only room that won’t be on camera is the bathroom. Everything he does, from when he sleeps, what he wears and eats, and who he dates will be determined by a vote of the viewers. If you want to be the next prisoner for a future show, you can sign up on the home page. I just don’t see this working out very well for the company or for poor Kieran. Something tells me it will get old, fast. → Read More
We had a very successful TechCrunch party in London last Monday. Next up – a party in Seattle co-produced with Redfin. And its just a few days away, next Wednesday, May 31, 2006. The party is being held at ConWorks, which is an artsy warehouse-style space on the south shore of Lake Union that will hold up to 800 people (and it sure looks like a fun place to have a party). This event is free and open to everyone. Event Information: Date: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 Location: Conworks, 500 Boren Ave N, Seattle, WA 98109 (Map) (View) Time: 6:30 – 11:00 pm RSVP: Please add your name to the wiki The sponsors for the event are Redfin, Farecast and Triphub. Thanks to them this party is completely free for everyone. We had a number of other sponsor requests, but we are completely covered on costs – thank you to everyone who offered. John Cook from the Seattle PI and John Moe at NPR have also helped extensively with the planning. Thank you to all. If you plan on attending, please sign up on the wiki. → Read More
Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch writes about Spinvox, a UK based company that converts cell phone voicemails into text SMS or email messages (or both). Now this is something I would use. This has been around for a while in the UK but is just rolling out in the US (it requires a deal with your cell phone carrier to work). No deals have been announced yet, but apparently in the UK people are using this like mad – and it isn’t cheap. See MobileCrunch for more. → Read More
FeedCollectors, in private beta, is one of Jeff Pulver’s new projects. Like Dave Winer’s Share Your OPML, FeedCollectors provides a mechanism for users to upload their OPML file of feeds that they read. There are subtle differences to SYO, though. Feedcollectors is also a social network where you can add friends and see what they are reading, and users can also create public collections, which are topical based feed collections. The most popular collection is called “NYC” and features a number of blogs on the city. Each collection can be tagged, rated and commented by users. There are a total of 150 collections so far from the limited number of users who have access to the site. And like SYO, FeedCollectors is using this feed data to generate interesting data on people’s reading behaviors. What I like best about these services are the data that’s created once a statistically relevant number of people upload their data. Seeing what people are actually reading, deep into the long tail, is compelling stuff. → Read More
This is just for fun, although it’s also a nice demonstration of multi-user Ajax. If you like the old Milton Bradley Battelship game, you’ll enjoy spending a few minutes on SinkMyShip, an online Ajax version of the game. It’s free, no registration is required (just pick a username for the session) and you can find an opponent in the game lobby. A chat function allows for constant heckling. There’s not much to review, except to say that it works, it’s very well designed and it’s fun (compare to this javascript version of Battleship). Thanks Brian for finding this. → Read More
