Dabble DB, a Vancouver-based startup that has created an extremely useful and easy to use database application product, will announce a small (but undisclosed) series A round of financing on Tuesday. The round is being led by Canadian venture firm Ventures West. Paul Kedrosky, an advisor to Ventures West, has joined the Dabble DB board of directors. Dabble DB is a wonderful application that we first wrote about in March 2006. We also linked to a seven minute demo video of the product here. DabbleDB will also be opening its site to the public on Thursday. → Read More
Guba, a pioneer in the user-generated video content space, became a pioneer of another sort today, when Warner Brothers’ film and television content went on sale on Guba.com at 2 PM PST. Through its deal with Warner, Guba will initially sell almost 200 movie and television titles (quickly expanding shortly thereafter), ranging from new releases like “Good Night and Good Luck” to ‘classic’ television content like “The Jetsons”. Guba will offer two services to users. View-On-Demand (VOD) is priced from $1.79 to $2.99 and affords the user a 24 hour rental. Download-To-Own (DTO) will range from $9.99 to $19.99 for newer titles and allows unlimited viewing on 2 computers and 1 portable device, while allowing a single DVD burn for backup. The service will play content through Windows Media Player on a 640X480 screen. Downloads are progressive and will run up to 1.3MB/second. The deal sounds similar to the Warner/BitTorrent deal, but Guba is out to consumers first, so kudos to them. To be honest, my money was on Apple to get there first since the Pixar/Disney merger. But Apple’s power probably worked against them here. Having a broader online distribution network in place will give the studios more leverage in negotiations. As to Guba being one of the chosen few, CEO Tom McInerney offered: “We treated the studios with respect, we listened and were responsive to their needs. Our proprietary technology gave the studios confidence that we could protect their copyrighted material and that our user-generated content could exist side by side with their premium content.” I can’t think of any negatives for Guba in this deal. I don’t know how long it will last, but a lead is a lead and any differentiation in this space is a plus. Good buzz, extra traffic, and the goodwill of at least one major Hollywood studio, which might help them soon add another, will be a nice shot in the arm. On the studio side, I like the concomitant release through web and DVD. It shows Warner is starting to get it. But what I don’t like in the deal is the pricing. While the VOD pricing seems reasonable when compared to a video rental, DTO is too high. Equivalent pricing through the two channels will hurt web uptake. These are savvy consumers. Distribution costs through the web are lower and, while I haven’t reviewed the experience yet, I doubt the → Read More
How do you make money by giving away free software? Automattic, the company that’s home to several key developers of the free open source blogging software WordPress (used by this blog and many more) has announced today a new service called the Automattic Support Network. It’s intended help large organizations and enterprise users leverage WordPress and the community around it. Automattic already offers hosted WordPress blogs and the great blog comment spam protection service Akismet. Enterprise customers subscribing to the Automattic Support Network service will gain access to several people behind WordPress’s birth and their assistance in scaling, customization, implementation, performance and more. Team member Toni Schneider points out on his personal blog that WordPress is already used by companies like the New York Times, CNET, and About.com. One of the best things about WordPress is its community of user developers. The new plugins and services developed by that community make WordPress a richer blogging system than any single company with closed source code could offer. Premium subscribers to the new service will get expert assistance in navigating this landscape of third party developers. I love WordPress and I think this is a solid idea. The premium service’s price point of $5000 per year per contact person within the contracting company sounds like a good deal, presuming a satisfactory amount of support is provided. In depth customization will be offered at further cost. I’ll be interested to see how well this works for everyone involved. If it works well, it’ll be a great example of what I think is shaping up to be a key Web2.0 paradigm: build your reputation by giving away a high-quality service to consumers, then monetize support for enterprise customers. → Read More
The much anticipated Digg 3.0 launched this morning as promised. My first thoughts are – it’s beautiful, although it isn’t stable yet (search in particular seems to be breaking, although there are other small bugs too). The integration of Ajax to move between topics and betwen headline and new stories is really well done, and is by far my favorite feature. With regard to the new features, I get the impression that Digg is trying to get good stories up to the home page as fast as possible, something I didn’t really pick up on in our podcast with the Digg founders. At least three features seem to push this. First, putting an “upcoming” stories tab right next to the headlines tab makes it much easier to switch between the two categories, so more users will look at upcoming stories too, instead of just reviewing the headlines. Second, the “cloud view” (not a new feature) for upcoming area clearly shows which stories have momentum by making them bigger in the tag cloud – these stories will naturally draw more attention and diggs, more quickly pushing them to the front page than before. Finally, the new “agreed on” feature to see stories that at least two of your friends have dugg (in left sidebar) will again draw user attention to those popular but not yet headline stories. Combined, these features make it much easier for users to see stories that have a lot of momentum but aren’t yet on the home page. I will ask Digg if one of their goals is to get stories to the home page faster than before, and if the new features are successful in doing that. → Read More
ZapZap is a new audio and video podcast directory service based in Japan, just launched this weekend. While podcast directories are launching fast and furious, this one is particularly nice. Ajax is used just right, digg-type voting is central, synch with iTunes or play on site. The aesthetic is attractive and there are English and Japanese sections of the site. ZapZap’s creator is an irreverent 25 year old named Jon Anthony Yongfook Cockle, born in England and living in Tokyo. You have to wonder how sites like these are going to differentiate themselves from others offering similar functions. ZapZap does have a full feature set, it looks great and being available in two languages is a smart move. The only thing I’ve seen anyone offer lately that ZapZap doesn’t include yet is a javascript bookmarklet to tag an offsite podcast into your personal archive, as Pluggd offers (see review of Pluggd). Tags aren’t used for categorizing podcasts, either; that’s one step ZapZap is considering when scaling becomes an issue, finding podcasts could become increasingly difficult when the number of offerings increases. The little touches here are nice. Each time a podcast you are subscribed to posts a new episode, it receives a “zap” vote. It’s easy to email a link to an episode to someone. Subscribing is simple. Offering a link to subscribe in iTunes instead of trying to compete with iTunes is smart. The functionality is just plain smooth. There’s no business model apparent yet. Text ads could appear on the page. Ordinarily I would be exasperated to see one more podcast directory, but this one really is good. → Read More
Palo Alto based Ning made a significant change to their application interface on Friday, removing the mandatory sidebar on applications and replacing it with a fully customizable javascript bar across the top of the page. I met with CEO Gina Bianchini a week ago to see the changes. Gina also gave me an update on how Ning is doing in general. Ning is a site that lets users create customized applications through Ning modules and third party web services. CCHits is an example – users contribute links to creative commons music. Other users vote on the music in a Digg-like fashion, and the best music makes it to the top of the site. Or see Trail Reviews, which combines trail discussions and voting with Google Maps. One of my favorite applications is Bookmarks, a surprisingly useful social bookmarking service (like del.icio.us). And for beer and sports fans, there’s Team Sports Bars. Applications on Ning can be cloned by other users who want to do things a little differently, by adding or removing modules or web services. Applications are hosted by Ning and share users (meaning once you’ve signed up for one Ning application, you are registered for all). Ning generates revenue from advertising placed on the applications and through premium options. For example, an application creator can pay $8/month to have advertising removed, or pay $5 per month to map an application to a custom domain. Other premium options are also available. Ning Stats Ning launched in October 2005. Since then, 14,000 applications have been created. Ning has registered users in 176 countries and 47% of users are non-U.S. So far, Ning users are there to participate as well as watch – on average, for every two new users to Ning a new application is built. Alexa page view stats show some positive trends, although Ning clearly hasn’t hit “hockey stick” growth stage yet. Ningbar Ning has replaced the mandatory (and much criticized) sidebar it places in every application with the Ningbar (more details from Diego Doval, Ning’s head architect, and Brian McCallister), a customizable, dynamic javascript strip across the top of apps. Screen shots are below, showing the strip in its starting and expanded positions: Ning still has a long way to go before users can add and remove modules and web services without any programming skills. Look for a release, scheduled for end-of-summer, to finally open up the → Read More
Tag metasearch engine Gada.be (TechCrunch posts describing the service are here) is getting a name change and a redesign at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle later this week (Chris Pirillo founded the company and also runs the conference). The new service will be called TagJag (and will be at TagJag.com). Like Gada.be, TagJag can be queried easily from a mobile device. Gada.be launched in October and, according to the company, serves about 30,000 daily queries. See more about it in the About section of the site. The new site will go live next week – screen shots of the new TagJag are below. → Read More
The online office suite Zoho launched a new presentation tool this week called Zoho Show, for use in creating and displaying remote presentations on the web. Zoho parent company Adventnet is a TechCrunch sponsor. Thumbstacks appears to be the primary rival faced by Zoho Show, and both have certain advantages and disadvantages. This newest offering is the 12th Zoho web based application, including a word processor, spreadsheet, chat, CRM, an app creator and more. Zoho Show’s most important feature is that you can import Power Point (and open office) files. That’s it’s primary advantage over Thumbstacks. Unfortunately, there’s a 1 MB upload limit on those files, so substantial Power Point files won’t work. Zoho files can also be exported to power point files or put up on the web with single click, whereas Thumbstacks exports to HTML. Both Zoho Show and Thumbstacks offer remote controlled online display of slideshows, and both make it easy to toggle between public and private. When private is selected, both systems display an error message if you try to load the public URL. Zoho Show does not appear to support the creation and manipulation of arrows, which seems like a huge problem for presentations. Thumbstacks does. According to the Thumbstacks developer’s blog this was a real technical feat, browser support for arrows. Instead Zoho offers some images of arrows that you can move around and resize. I don’t look forward to having to do that. Both services support easy import of your photos from Flickr, but only Zoho’s prompts you to login to access the photos you’ve marked private. I can imagine private web based presentations being put together with private web stored photos, and if that’s what you’re looking for you may not want to use Thumbstacks. Thumbstacks seems to have struggled on Macs since inception and has a limit of 5 viewers at once for slide shows. Overall I get more error messages and UI struggles on my Mac with Thumbstacks, but being able to add arrows to my slides is very important to me. While Zoho Show is a more polished offering from a commercial vendor, until they add support for arrows at least I can imagine myself using Thumbstacks to create most slide shows just for showing people over the phone. I’d use Zoho Show if I was working on something collaboratively with people who use Power Point – and I’d → Read More
San Francisco based GoodStorm will soon launch a new program called MeCommerce that will allow bloggers to insert product listings in a javascript and iframe box on their sites and keep 50% of the retail mark-up for themselves. Blog readers will be able to purchase books and CDs inside the box without leaving the blog page they are on. Blog publishers can populate their boxes by tag or with specific items of their selection. I think this is going to be big. An image of the purchase stage of a MeCommerce block is available on right. I tried to post a demonstration, but could only get WordPress to display it in the sidebar and not in the post. To see a demo check out the MeCommerce site. The point is that each of those blue bars drops down when clicked to display all the fields you need to purchase. The initial display is made up of the front covers of selected books and CDs along with some explanation text. This purchase stage appears when an item is clicked. MeCommerce is accepting requests for beta invitations, accounts will open on June 30th. I think this kind of revenue split and attractive functionality make a powerful combination. GoodStorm currently offers a service that gives individuals and organizations an online store to sell custom designed, on-demand manufactured t-shirts. Users receive 70% of the markup from manufacturing costs. The company was founded by August Capital’s Andy Rappaport. We first covered GoodStorm when it launched in December. → Read More
Digg 3.0 will launch Monday, June 26, in the morning PST. The launch is being announced this evening, and Digg has made a number of screen shots available to me which are included in this post. Richard MacManus and I interviewed Digg founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose about the new launch, and we also spent some time talking about new Digg competitor Netscape, as well as other Digg related issues. Listen to the podcast on TalkCrunch. In addition to a redesign (that retains the essential Digg “experience”), Digg is adding a number of news categories beyond technology. Topics are grouped into six “containers”, including technology, entertainment, gaming, science, world & business, and online video. The default view on Digg is still the technology container, although users can change that view and can also deselect individual topics within containers to further refine what they see on the home page. There are other significant feature additions as well (we go through all of them in the podcast). In addition to seeing what your friends have dugg, users can also just see stories more than one friend has dugg, further filtering new stories to what they might really want to see. Also, changing views between top stories and new stories won’t require a page refresh – Digg has added Ajax features (sparingly, they stress) to switch quickly between headlines and new stories, and among topics/containers. Digg is looking more and more like the newspaper of the web, and is challenging even the New York Times on page views (Digg surpassed rival Slashdot long ago). About 800,000 unique visitors come to Digg every day, generating 9 million plus page views. The site is doubling in traffic every two months. And the amazing thing is that Digg does all of this with just 15 employees. Digg has raised $2.8 million in venture funding from Greylock and Omidyar as well as angel investors Marc Andreesen, Reid Hoffman and Ron Conway. Given the tremendous growth and passionate users, something tells me they are going to have a rather large liquidity event. Screen Shots: Update: Photos from the Digg party tonight are here (Scott Beale) → Read More
One of the top stories in the blogosphere today is a new Hitwise chart finding that Photobucket has a 46% leading market share in online photosharing and that Flickr is in 6th place with only 6%. This was a big surprise for parts of the blogosphere where Flickr is a hot topic. I looked up these two sites on Alexaholic and found traffic results quite different from the Hitwise graph. Many people have long alleged that Alexa produces low-quality results, is easy to game and is worthy of lots of other criticism. If that’s is the case, is Yahoo! really the most visited site on the web? Is MySpace really number 5? Many of us talk about those numbers, from Alexa, often. (Though Hitwise seems to find similar numbers.) Graph below: Flickr traffic in blue, Photobucket in red. Webshots.com in green. Speaking of graphs, here’s some interesting ones that quantify what many people in today’s discussion are saying: the loudest voices in the blogosphere are missing the boat by talking about Flickr all the time. Flickr may be worthy of blog coverage for its innovation or it’s participation in innovative communities or its role in controversy – but among most of the bloggers online Photobucket is a much hotter topic! Check out these graphs, measuring the times that the words Flickr or Photobucket appear in blogs with many inbound links (“high authority”) according to Technorati vs. in blogs without many inbound links. I think the results are remarkable. Here’s some imprecise but telling math: high-authority bloggers appear to write about Flickr about 3 times as often as they (we) write about Photobucket. The blogosphere as a whole uses the word Photobucket 3 or more times as often as we use the word Flickr. (TechCrunch has used the word Flickr 11 times more often than the word Photobucket.) Does that mean high-authority bloggers are out of touch with the bulk of users? It may; it may also mean that being interesting doesn’t equate with mass adoption. In the graphs below, “high authority” on top, all blogs on bottom, Flickr mentions on left, Photobucket mentions on right. → Read More
Seattle based start-up Pluggd opened their podcast directory for public use today; the company aims to make podcast listening easier for nontechnical users. It has several features that I think look great. Company CEO Alex Castro came from Microsoft, with an emphasis in multimedia. The Pluggd team also has members with backgrounds at Real and ESPN.com. Pluggd offers a few things that really differentiate it from other podcast communities. A javascript bookmarklet lets you send podcasts you discover off-site to your Pluggd bookmark list. That list is different from your subscription list so you can evaluate podcasts before subscribing. As I test it, sometimes the bookmarklet works for autodiscovery of podcasts and sometimes it doesn’t. Since the service launched just minutes ago, I hope that will be taken care of soon. The Pluggd search engine actively crawls the web for new podcasts to index, instead of relying only on user submissions. The podcast player can be put in a pop-up from the listening page, so you can navigate around or off of the Pluggd site without breaking the podcast you are listening to. The site design is totally unpretentious without looking unprofessional, too, I like that. The service takes two thematic approaches that are interesting. First, Pluggd believes that social networking and podcast listening work well together. That means that commenting and list sharing are available throughout the site. Second, the company believes that the majority of podcast listeners are listening at work and at school, in a web browser instead of a mobile device. There has been a growing chorus of voices arguing that prime time media consumption hours are shifting from night time to 9 to 5 work hours and Pluggd seems well positioned to respond to that. The podcast directory space couldn’t be much more crowded, but I like this one. Presuming that all the early kinks get worked out, it looks good. → Read More
The telephone-time monetization system Ether officially launches today, after beta testing since March. The company calls its new stage “zeta.” Ether lets you set a price for people who want to call you on the phone. The company provides a phone number, billing services and will also do pay-per-view for documents or other files. A button on your website lets potential callers click for information about your services. All of this for just 15% off the top of what ever you decide to charge callers. Ether is a service of San Francisco based Ingenio, a company founded in 1999 that says it does 20 million minutes of paid voice commerce transactions each quarter for customers including AOL, Microsoft, YellowPages.com, and the IRS. Ether seems like a pretty cool model, though concerns are consistently raised about the quality of offerings available. Looking around the site and doing a search for the Ether code in the blogosphere, probably the classiest case of this service put to use so far is by our fellow new web service review blogger, Pete Cashmore. Maybe I’m just saying that because I have a soft spot for new web service review bloggers, though. See also our previous coverage of Ether when it launched into beta for more info and discussion. → Read More
Next week will see a number of moves by MySpace to try and protect young users, the New York Times reported today. The biggest change will be that users registered as over 18 years of age will be required to enter the full names or email addresses of users under 16 years of age in order to contact them. Usernames are sufficient to send a friend request to anyone in MySpace now. The obvious flaw in the plan is that ill intentioned adults can easily register as being of any age, thus bypassing the adult-child restrictions. Additional changes to be made include a new ability for anyone to mark their profile page private and removal of advertisements for adult services like dating sites on the pages of youth users. Automatically making all profiles of users registered below the age of 16 might be more effective, but would likely make the service far less popular among children who enjoy meeting other children they do not know in the offline world. There may be no definitive way to protect children online from adults who seek to harm them. It is also worth noting that, according to a 2000 study by the US Department of Justice (pdf) (or in HTML), 34% of US juvenile sexual assault offenders were family members of the victims. Education, parental guidance and deeper cultural change than is possible in the online world may be the only available solutions to the endangerment of children. A debate over MySpace’s responsibility in these matters breaks out in comments, below. → Read More
The battle of the Ajax web chat services took a new turn today when old-school E-messenger.net relaunched as Ebuddy.com. The Netherlands based company has also secured a round of funding from an as yet undisclosed, but top tier, VC firm. E-messenger (now eBuddy) has been around since 2003, offers chat in a pop-up box and added Ajax functionality in February. It’s been challenged by upstart Meebo since late last year. Meebo requires chat to go on in a browser window. Both services support MSN, AIM and Yahoo, but Meebo also supports Jabber/GTalk. These appear to be the two major players in the field, Meebo from the US and Ebuddy from Europe. Both now have VC funding, Meebo having received money from Sequoia Capital in December. → Read More
Though a pile of recent mainstream media coverage and a Jeff Bezos round of investment may have turned many readers on to the virtual world of Second Life only recently, it (like many parts of the Web 2.0 world) is not entirely new. The virtual world is celebrating it’s third birthday starting today. According to the Second Life history wiki, the world’s creators Linden Lab took the project public on June 23rd, 2003. At an exchange rate of roughly 250 Linden Dollars to the US Dollar, the Second Life economy offers as as many goods for sale as four Walmart stores. Linden Lab reports that the Second Life economy is on a pace to hit $60 million in user-to-user transactions this year and is growing at a rate of 15%. From the American Cancer Society to Wells Fargo Bank, a wide variety of organizations have opened virtual offices in Second Life. Even TechCrunch is a part of the action. If you can’t make it in person to tomorrow night’s SuperNova Connected Innovators event, cohosted by TechCrunch and Yahoo!, you can join us at a Second Life simulcast from 6:00PM – 8:00PM PST. Thanks to Wagner James Au for his excellent Second Life news coverage. → Read More
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a somewhat negative post about an unlaunched startup in Boston called Swaptree. Ouriel wrote a follow up post comparing Swaptree (unfavorably) to a French service called SplitGames. Since that time I’ve had a chance to talk at length with Swaptree founder and CEO Greg Boesel about some of the perceived shortcomings of the service that I pointed out. That conversation, and an eye-popping demo he walked me through, made it clear that I had made some incorrect assumptions about the service. Swaptree will allow users to swap media items (books, CDs, DVDs and video games) with other users without the use of cash. Swaptree will not charge a transaction fee, relying instead on contextual advertising revenue that will be placed on the site. For a new user, the idea is that you type in a few items that you own and are willing to trade (using the UPC or ISBN code) and you’ll see thousands or tens of thousands of items that people are willing to trade for your stuff. My assumption was that Swaptree was going to have a difficult time creating a demand curve. Getting a new user to type in a couple of things they are willing to trade is easy. Getting them to type in things that they want and associate them with things that they already have to trade would be much more difficult. At the end of the post, I suggested that actual money served as a very nice stored value currency, and that’s why eBay has been so successful. It turns out that Swaptree actually has a fairly interesting and much simpler way to build the demand curve of items. In addition to maintaining a list of items that a user wants to trade, they simply build a long list of items they want to own as well. This list can be created by clicking on items on the Swaptree site, or even easier ways like importing your Amazon wish list or using a plugin to click on items on Amazon directly and have them included on your Swaptree “wish list”. When I saw the demo, I was convinced that large numbers of users could be enticed to do this. If there is a match, any match at all between an item that you have and an item that you want, Swaptree suggests that a trade → Read More
How different are things now that Bill Gates at Microsoft has made his symbolic hand-off of power? Microsoft tonight announced a new partnership with Creative Commons, the organization dedicated to providing content producers a legal alternative to “all rights reserved” copyright law, to offer a new tool for easy insertion of Creative Commons licenses into works created with Microsoft Office. For more info and background on Creative Commons, check out this interview I did off-site several months ago with the organization’s CTO, Mike Linksvayer. → Read More
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