Netvibes, one of the leading ajax desktops online, announced today that they have added a module for Meebo, a cross-platform web IM system. Netvibes is a great way to make RSS visually appealing and usable, but the inclusion of Meebo in the platform takes things to the next level in terms of interactivity. People who use multiple computers can now use any terminal to read their feeds in NetVibes and IM through AIM, MSN, Yahoo and GMail/Jabber all with one single log in. Early out of the gate the integration is a little choppy, but hopefully things will come together with more use and tinkering. That may be easier said than done since there’s so much ajax here but presuming they can make it really work I think this is a great partnership. The Meebo implementation opens in a separate tab in NetVibes but makes a sound to notify you of new IM messages if you’re on the main NetVibes tab. The audio notification can also be heard if you’re using an application other than your browser. It’s a nice system and it’s good to see these two popular tools working together. I expect this will be a big hit with users on both sides. We last wrote about Meebo when an extension was developed for Firefox and Flock. That extension was created by an outside developer but today’s move was in-house, as have been many innovations around the Sequoia funded service. The company’s primary competitor is e-buddy, which was formerly known as e-messenger. The Paris and London based Netvibes is funded as well, has millions of users and a whole ecosystem of resources to utilize. The company was one of the 12 Connected Innovators at the TechCrunch sponsored event at SuperNova last month. Netvibes faces loads of competition from a long list of ajax homepages. The partnership between these two companies is a very cool step in the direction of web services all integrating together and it helps these two stand out amongst many in their respective classes. Update: The integration should work so that a single login to NetVibes also logs you into all your IM accounts through Meebo. When that happens then these services will really be folded together well and create a smoother experience than multiple browser tabs could. Meebo tells me this feature is on it’s way. → Read More
Sweden-based Rebtel have launched a product that will allow users to dial any international number at the cost of a local call. It works by having the two ends of the call use local connections (over low-cost local calls) to a VoIP point and then bridge the call to the recipient at the other end over the net. I am sitting here at AlwaysOn conference watching the CEO, Hjalmar Winbladh, demo the product as part of the CEO showcase that Mike Arrington is moderating. Rebtel has received a good reception with the audience and the judges here as it seems to be a simple, yet inovative solution for the high costs of long-distance telephone calls. You can try the product by filling out the form on the front page of their website. It will send an SMS to both the initiator of the call as well as the recipient and then connect the two ends. It will setup a local number for each friend you setup. The cost of each number that is setup is $1 per week, which is for unlimited calling to the other end. The company is based in Sweden and was founded by serial-entrepreneur Hjalmar Winbladh, the founder of SendIt (which was acquired by Microsoft in ’99) and a General Manager for Microsoft Mobile solutions in Europe. → Read More
Madhens is a new site for auctioning off image ad space on web pages for a set period of time. It looks like a simple, smart system. It’s already scored real estate on ThoughtMechanics, the #6 blog on the Technorati 100. Through August the revenue split goes 90% to site publishers, 10% to Madhens. Over the long run the company founder says he intends to offer an 80/20 split. Madhens was created as a summer project by Zack Coburn, who’s just graduated from high school in New Hampshire and operates out of his bedroom under the company name Zeegry.com. I like Madhens. It’s well thought out. Ad space is auctioned by the day, week or month. Advertisers can see their traffic stats in real time and compare them with previous ads that have run in the same space. Publishers can veto the auction winning ad in the final 24 hours before it is run. If they veto the ad, a Madhens ad takes its place for the duration of the timeshare. Other advertising services offer auctions of text ads, graphic ads charged per click or impression or ad space at a fixed price for a period of time. Madhens is unique as far as I know in offering an auction for varying periods of time for graphic ads. While other ad systems like Google Adsense have to worry about click fraud (and are now disclosing numbers to ad buyers) that’s not an issue for a system like Madhens. It looks like a good service and advertisers might want to get in quick while the bids are low. Adspace on Thoughtmechanics only has one bid on it as I post this! → Read More
Sometimes simple systems work the best and SayNow might be one of those cases. The service, still in private beta, is targeting musicians on MySpace who want to exchange voice messages with their fans. They can record voice messages, SMS alerts are sent when new messages are available and fans can leave messages in response after listening to a recording from the musician they are following. Of course this model could be applied to any one-to-many form of communication in a mobile enabled context where vocal intonation and ease of use are important. Though easy to use, SayNow is less simple than it might appear and is a possible acquisition target for a larger company interested in integrating voice recognition, SMS and a compelling consumer experience. I like the service as it stands though too and can imagine it being successful without being acquired. Good functionality, clear demand and viable business model. The eight person team behind SayNow is based in Palo Alto and has gone through one undisclosed round of funding. SayNow is billed as a more personal way to communicate with your fan base, voice being more personal than text, while still protecting privacy by mediating between two sides of a phone number exchange. Though the system is still in private beta, beta testers and my own initial exploration of the system make it clear that SayNow has been put together very professionally. For such a seemingly lightweight use, this is an application that’s had some time invested in its development. Voice recognition and an ajax web interface that responds to your phone activity give the system a great feel. To see a SayNow MySpace widget in action, check out featured artist AM Kidd’s MySpace page. Among the featured artists using SayNow are several with tens of thousands of friends on their MySpace acount. I think this is service is going to be met with a definite demand in the social media market. It’s not a cool technology looking for a market. The long term revenue model appears to be wrapping phone messages in advertising; something I expect will be quite viable if the service catches on. I don’t think that people will mind hearing a company name and one line of advertising before or after their message – in exchange for communicating with an admired musician. Before I used SayNow to send a few messages, I wasn’t → Read More
Limelight Networks, the content delivery technology behind such Web 2.0 leaders as MySpace, Facebook and XBoxLive, has received a new round of funding. Limelight is also widely believed to be the content delivery provider for YouTube. Goldman Sachs led the round of $130 million invested so that Limelight can increase its capacity. Limelight is the number two player in the online content delivery network space, behind Akamai, the service provider for Apple’s iTunes. Panther Express, another content delivery network, received funding this week as well. This round of investment in Limelight means that one of the key providers of media delivery services, a keystone function in the new web landscape, has received a big boost in strength and a big ally in Goldman Sachs. And this has been finalized at what some people are calling a post-net neutrality time. Founded in 2001, the Tempe, Arizona based company received received $15 million in funding from the Silicon Valley Bank last summer. Ordinarily I wouldn’t write about an infrastructure investment here. Net neutrality makes this relevant, though. Advocates of the (now arguably deceased) movement to prevent a two tiered internet consistently point to the importance of cheap bandwidth in making innovation happen. YouTube, for example, sucks bandwidth like there’s no tomorrow and if they had to pay a premium rate (were the net not neutral) then they may not have been able to afford to launch in the first place. That’s the argument, but the reality is that at a certain point it’s not just Google or YouTube dealing unmediated with the companies that own the “tubes,” if you will. Companies like Limelight stand in the middle. Limelight in particular is a vital part of the infrastructure for some flagship Web 2.0 companies. Not to mention they have been the advertiser that has kept Doug Kaye’s excellent ITConversations alive – they deserve thanks for that. Just as online storage becoming a commodity thanks to services like Amazon’s S3 and Omnidrive has enabled startups to innovate without having to provide for their heavy data storage needs themselves – so too do service providers like Limelight take a big burden off of online media companies and make further innovation possible. This newest funding announcement will help make a key friend of innovation even stronger in a potentially contentious time ahead. → Read More
Berkeley, CA based SightSpeed, an IP video and voice services company, is launching its 5.0 product tonight. While many of the changes are upgrades to its video product suite (including a new video codec) and user interface (which is already good), SightSpeed makes several introductions in this launch. Among them, it’s adding new PSTN out and in-calling features to extend SightSpeed functionality to mobile and regular phones. And it’s leveraging its video expertise to add a new “place-shifted” TV service, which gives users a “Slingbox-like” experience without the hardware. A small remote control icon lets you flip through channels being served up via your TV at home. With an already highly regarded video product that touts video at 30 fps and ultra low latency, the move to add TV is a natural extension of its technology. Additionally, it could prove to be a savvy competitive move, with Novac’s Skype-based TV product being one of what will be many entrants in the place-shifted space. In a highly competitive space with a slew of well-funded competitors like Skype – product quality matters. SightSpeed really delivers. Their affordable video conferencing service is stunning. We aren’t alone in our enthusiasm. Read, for example, Davis D. Janowski’s breathless account of SightSpeed’s new feature set at PCMag. → Read More
New York-based Daylife finally showed a hint of itself today via one sentence in a long post by Jeff Jarvis, who’s working with the company. He says “Daylife will gather, analyze, organize, and create a new, distributed platform for the world’s news.” I don’t know anything more about the company than what Jeff says, which is unusual for one reason: I’m an investor. I participated in an angel round of financing over a year ago (before TechCrunch) and the company has kept me completely in the dark as to when they’ll launch, feature set, etc. This is understandable given the conflict of interest that has arisen with TechCrunch since then. The screen mockups and demo I saw when I invested were impressive, although I’m sure they have very little to do with what is being launched over a year later. To be blunt – I have no idea how Daylife will compare to, say, Newsvine and Digg, two news companies I fawn over regularly. I eagerly await a glimpse of what they will launch, and will have someone else write about it on TechCrunch (as I did with Edgeio, a startup I co-founded). Dave Winer, another investor, also noticed Jeff’s post today and wrote briefly about it. → Read More
TechCrunch would not be possible without the support of our sponsors. Most companies that have requested sponsorship on TechCrunch have been turned away – we accept companies where we like and respect the products they are shipping. Our six sponsors are Adobe, Ask, EV1 Servers, Logoworks, Text-Link-Ads and Zoho. Logoworks Logoworks will create a new logo for your business, as well as other stuff like a website, business cards, etc., for a very reasonable price, starting at $300. They work with a number of independent designers and you see logo ideas from a bunch of them before deciding which you like best. We wrote about Logoworks back in May. Zoho Zoho is putting together one of the best Ajax web office suites. There is a debate occuring about the business model viability around sites like Zoho – see Robert Scoble and Pandurang Nayak – but what I find interesting is the potential for Zoho and its competitors to potentially disrupt the huge enterprise office market. Zoho is a company to watch. Text-Link-Ads Text-Link-Ads is one of the best revenue generating services for blogs and other websites today. It is a great deal for advertisers as well – check out TLA’s Link Buying Starter Kit for $100 in free ads. Adobe Flash and Ajax are turning into the dominant technologies for building new web applications. There is some seriously cool new stuff coming in the near future from Adobe as well. Our favorite Flash application right now? Gotuit. Check it out. Ask Ask is linking its sponsorship spot directly to its new blog search engine, which we wrote about here at launch. EV1 Servers Choosing your hosting provider is the most important decision you’ll make when your site grows big enough to need it’s own server (or even a shared server). EV1 specializes in customer service and serious up-time. And it’s damn inexpensive too. I love the landing page they put up for TechCrunch readers. If you are interested in becoming a TechCrunch sponsor or advertiser, please review the information here. → Read More
College oriented social network Facebook announced a Back to School partnership with iTunes today that could have been an interesting teachable moment about buying music online through legal means. Instead the deal will offer millions of “samplers,” preselected playlists of 25 songs per genre, given to Facebook users for free. What’s the lesson here? That the iTunes music store is a highly controlled environment that provides an inferior user experience compared to P2P networks. Twenty five free songs of your choice would have made a much cooler promotion. Even that would have been pretty unimaginative. Here’s a link to launch the Alternative sampler in the iTunes music store. Ten million “samplers” will be given away over the next ten weeks, so that’s the equivalent of $247,500,000 worth of downloads at full price. But of course music downloads are in reality almost free, so they aren’t spending much money on it. Facebook and iTunes have had a long running relationship prior to this promotion and few new customers are likely to be introduced to the iTunes Music Store for the first time as a result of it. The theory may be that students will discover new bands through the promotion and will then buy more songs from those artists. It seems more likely to me that a large number of those students will take their free songs from iTunes and then download entire albums via the P2P networks they learn about from their school mates. The problem is that “free and legal” is not a sufficient value add when it comes to a youth demographic. Imagine if the promotion did something like this instead: instead of an anonymously compiled mix tape of random songs, each week Facebook users could download for free 25 songs compiled by a notable expert in that week’s genre. Perhaps that expert could even do a live streaming conversation midweek talking about why they chose the songs they did and answering listener questions moderated by an interviewer. Now that would be interesting. I’m sure there are a world of possibilities here and the promotion as it stands just seems lazy and boring. Facebook has a huge userbase – 8.3 million users, the company says, with half logging in daily. I talked to an online video service exec last week who told me that the MPAA people know that everyone laughs at their anti-piracy messages at the movies. → Read More
The porn industry has always had an “early adopter” model. We’ve covered a few porn related sites that have adopted new web features in the past (notably Heatseek and Social Porn). PornoTube (Note: NOT WORK SAFE), which integrates YouTube-like features, is the most recent example of the trend. While YouTube has a clear policy banning porn, PornoTube has a policy that is just the opposite. PornoTube offers on demand Flash videos (our sponsor Adobe will be proud I’m sure) of user uploaded pornography, including video, audio and photgraphs. The site is surprisingly well designed and has social features like rating, commenting, etc. All videos are tagged and can be browsed via a tag cloud or by straight or gay content. There are RSS feeds for various categories. Videos can also be embedded into other sites. The site is free for users. For more technically saavy users, bittorent has long been a source of free pornography. But PornoTube, which is usable by anyone with a computer, could be disruptive to sites that are charging for similar content. I imagine PornoTube will have similar copyright issues as YouTube, however, and will have to pull that content down over time. They even have a “beta” in their logo. Check it out, if it’s your thing. CrunchBase Information Pornotube Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Otavo is an Ontario, Canada based service that’s just moving into public beta today. We posted about them in April and now that the service is public, it looks good. Otavo users can ask and answer questions, organize and comment on bookmarks and share their goals in a social context. Think del.icio.us + ask.metafilter + 43Things wrapped in a nice UI with points for participation and prizes for the top users. Very cool. Company founder Amanuel Tewold told me the company’s name, Otavo, has two meanings. It’s an acronym for Organizing Text, Audio, Video Objects – and it’s the Esperanto word (a transnational language) for Ottawa, where the company is based. After creating a profile, you can use a nicely designed javascript bookmarklet to create a new “quest,” or link an URL you are on to one of your preexisting quests. Quests and questions can also be started from on the main site. Anyone can comment on your quests and they can add your quest to their profile. Profiles come with a blog and include social networking functions, like the ability to send messages to your friends in the system. The “floster” (silly name for “floating poster”) is a nice bit of DHTML that embeds in the page you are bookmarking, meaning that you can click back and forth to grab text without losing your bookmarking tool behind your browser. Otavo believes that AdSense will be particularly contextual when set beside user quests, questions and bookmarks. That makes sense to me. They are also looking to offer their technology as a white lable solution to niche institutions like libraries and colleges. Tewold told me that the delay from April to now was spent almost entirely on developing the UI and it’s paid off – this is the kind of system that nontechnical users will likely feel very comfortable using for social bookmarking, goal sharing and other information organization needs. Users are awarded for a variety of activities, the biggest rewards coming for inviting new people into the system and adding new quests. The top users will receive prizes and other users will be entered into drawings for prizes so cool they haven’t been determined yet at launch. This is a charming alternative to revenue sharing from ads, but the company believes that primary way that participation will be driven is the structure of site. Almost all of the functionality here → Read More
There’s a number of little tools emerging that pop up information from off-site when users hover over a link, but here’s the coolest one I’ve seen yet: Pop-up Politicians. This ajax widget from the Sunlight Foundation lets anyone link US Congressmembers’ names on their blogs to a popup window about that politician. Here’s an example of the tool in action. Bloggers covering matters of US politics can easily layer Sunlight’s widget into their posts – to add value to blog coverage and help a cool organization spread its work. The window includes links to the politician’s page on Congresspedia, a wiki covering US Congress members, the page at OpenSecrets.org that tracks said politician’s campaign contributions and the Washington Post’s congressional voting database. Chalk this one up as a simple, but truly useful, way that ajax, wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies are being leveraged. → Read More
Amazon disclosed this weekend that they would be entering the video download space in mid August. AdAge reported on Saturday that Amazon Digital Video will be a subscription service operating through a desktop client. The company has already cried uncle on music downloads and will focus instead on video, a milieu it believes is still free of domination by a single vendor. ABC/Disney appears to be outside the new project, partnering instead with iTunes. The Amazon service will apparently offer both TV episodes and movies, both download to own and rentals may be included. Amazon already has a variety of film related properties online, it owns the Internet Movie Database and offers a Netflix style DVD rental service in the UK and Germany, for example. If anyone can pull off a DRM laden, desktop client driven video download service on a massive scale it’s probably Amazon. The brand’s mindshare in all things e-commerce is massive. I do wonder though, whether getting video online is a practice that will remain most common among the young and hip for some time. That demographic may be more interested in exploring use of non-traditional vendors than older customers might. They are also probably more willing to just grab videos from illicit P2P networks. All of these vendors, including Amazon, are going to have to come up with something awfully compelling (carrot or stick) to get the kind of business in this medium that they seek. It will be interesting to watch the Amazon launch next month and see if they can bring anything other than largess to the game. → Read More
Mac users feeling spurned by Windows development for Skype can take heart – the company released a beta version of Skype for Mac 1.5 today. Video support is finally included, though it’s a separate download. Drag and drop contact adding and file transfer are smooth. You can even drag and drop someone from your contact list into a group chat. The biggest change though is in the look and feel of the UI. It’s nice, Skype feels far more sleek than before. It is a beta, so more changes are likely. The ability to launch a call from inside a chat is gone, though you can leave a voice mail from inside IM. Skype for Windows last updated to version 2.5 in May. That version included support for Skypcasts, group calls with up to 100 participants. Previously, Skype users on non-Intel computers were limited to 6 participants (the subject, in fact, of an AMD subpoena). The new Mac Skype still has no SkypeCast support and my Intel Mac is limited to bringing four other people on a call with me. This is also another version of Skype that fails to offer call recording – an awesome feature of competitor Gizmo Project. Along with the news today that at least according to one study, the quality of VOIP calls is falling with increasing demands on the network, this new version of Skype leaves me feeling like I want more from the medium. Consumer VOIP has been around for long enough now that it would be nice to see eBay turn its mega-acquisition into something really fantastic. I don’t think it’s quite there yet. → Read More
We first wrote about Australia/Silicon Valley based Omnidrive, an online storage company, in late 2005. Since that time we’ve extensively reviewed various online storage services, including rumored products from Google and Microsoft, as well as Amazon’s storage API solution (update here) for application developers. This space continues to heat up, to say the least. Fast forward six months. Omnidrive is yet to launch, but they’ve continued to build out their service. Last week they invited in a new round of beta testers for their product, which includes an online and client interface (Windows only, Mac still in development). I’ve tried out the service and am posting a few screen shots. The online interface (which is all I have tested so far) works very well although there are still a few bugs. One feature that I really like is the ability to set up a special kind of folder, called a “live folder” that is associated with a URL that contains a RSS feed. Any enclosures in that feed (images, sound files, whatever) are automatically uploaded to that omnidrive folder. To test this, I uploaded the URL to my flickr page, and the images contained in the feed (the last 20 pictures uploaded) were now copied automatically to my Omnidrive account. As I add more pictures to flickr these images will automatically sync with Omnidrive. This will work just as well with podcast and videocast sites, etc. Omnidrive plans on sending hundreds of invites out per day until they open it up to the public, which they say will be sometime in September (expect delays). They have also released a web services API along with toolkits and example projects for developers to build applications that access Omnidrive storage. With the API a developer can either build applications that existing Omnidrive users can use, or they can create their own users and use Omnidrive purely as a backend. The API extends to being more than just saving and retrieving a file with user management, payment management, media handling and the ability for the users of a partner application to use their desktop tools to store, retrieve and access files. Pricing for the API has not yet been announced publicly but “will be competitive against S3 and other offerings” with a basic API account being free. Competitors Streamload and Mark Cuban-backed Box.net also have API offerings, and we plan a post in the → Read More
Podcasts are fun to listen to, but they’d be even cooler if you could listen live and IM your feedback to the host in real time. The soon to launch service BlogTalkRadio will make that possible. BlogTalkRadio is targeting bloggers who want to hold a live telephone conversation with up to 5 people on a phone line at once. Anyone can listen live to the call on the phone or through Windows Media Player, like a live web radio show. Listeners can also download an archived copy of the conversation later. Revenue from contextual advertising is split 50/50 with show hosts. The site is live and users can register for accounts, but it looks like calls won’t be able to be performed until tomorrow. Will a significant number of text bloggers want to go live by voice through a service like this? I’m not sure they will, but if they do BlogTalkRadio looks like a good service. It’s certainly trying to cross some barriers into easy multi-media self production – and make it live. In cases where the two media are integrated well this could be very cool. The New Jersey company is headed by CEO Alan Levy, a telecom entrepreneur who sold a previous start up called Destia Communications to Viatel. Previously profiled TalkShoe is a similar service, but requires a Windows only desktop client. TalkShoe has a more complicated revenue sharing model and doesn’t say what percentage of the advertising goes to show hosts. It allows up to 25 callers at once, compared to BlogTalkRadio’s 4 callers at a time. Waxxi, another service we’ve profiled here before, offers a similar service. Radio Handi is yet another option, see below in comments for more info. BlogTalkRadio looks simple to use. Blogging requires one skill set, though, and juggling live phone conversations mixed with IM from listeners requires another. I imagine that a relatively small number of good blogs will produce good talk radio through a system like this. But maybe I’m wrong. I’m sure many people will want to give it a try. If successful, live talk radio could offer a powerful way to deepen the connection between a blog and its readers. CrunchBase Information Blog Talk Radio Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
There is something unique about Netherlands based Nowsy. It’s an Ajax home page that has many of the features of funded startups like Netvibes and Pageflakes (and Google IG and about ten other unfunded sites). Nowsy does not have all of the bells and whistles of Netvibes or Pageflakes, but it does have most of the basics – easy module additions based on RSS feeds, Drag, drop and delete functionality to tailor the page to your liking, and easy new page creation. There is one thing Nowsy is doing differently than the other services, and it’s smart. They’ve added a search box at the top of the site that queries all of the services in all of the modules on a page when you enter a search term (I assume they are doing this by indexing the feeds on their own servers for later searches by users). If you’ve added your favorite sites to Nowsy, the search feature is very useful. → Read More
Seattle-based Zillow, which raised $32 million in funding in 2005 from Benchmark Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures, has raised another $25 million. This round of capital comes from a new investor, Boston-based Par Capital Mananement. No word on valuation. This comes on the heels of a recent (and massive) distribution deal with Yahoo. Zillow, essentially a mashup of maps and historical real estate sales information, has now raised a whopping $57 million in capital. Other than supporting their 118 employees, it’s unclear what they plan to do with the money. John Cook has good information on Zillow’s recent stats, noting that in June the company had 2.1 million unique visitors, ranking 11th among real estate Web sites. Note that Jobster, another Seattle startup, has also recently completed a large financing, bringing their total to nearly $50 million raised. CrunchBase Information Zillow Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The user numbers coming out on Google Talk are staggeringly terrible. Comscore usage numbers show that nearly a year after launch Google is a distant, distant 4th after MSN, Yahoo and AIM. They hold a pitiful 1% of total instant messaging market share, with 3.4 million unique users in May 2006. See the Comscore chart below for more details (I wonder where Skype IM falls in those stats). Note that Comscore does not include Google Talk usage within Gmail itself (where it is embedded), but even factoring that in, the numbers are just awful. The NYT picked up on this as well, noting that “Google Talk chat software had only 44,000 users in June”. Om Malik notes that there have been only about a million total downloads of the client. Where does Google go from here? I suggest they roll some heads and figure out a real product strategy. → Read More
Silicon Valley based TheFind has a beta signup page live and will be launching sometime in the next 45 days. The service will be a very technology heavy comparision shopping engine. TheFind has been running a showcase shopping search engine called Fatlens around secondary ticket sales for the last year. The new service will leverage the same technology as Fatlens but expand into significantly more shopping categories. “We will have everything except travel” co-founder Siva Kumar told me on the phone today. TheFind was founded in 2003 and has taken $8 million in venture funding from Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners & Cambrian Ventures. → Read More
New York City
New York City
San Francisco, CA
