AdBrite might have just secured an additional $23 million in funding, but at midnight tonight its business prospects may look decidedly dimmer. Competing ad network Etology is cutting deals with some of AdBrite’s biggest customers to take over their ads. A big chunk of the ads that AdBrite serves are for porn sites on behalf of the AVN Media Network. These AVN Ads make up 31 percent of AdBrite’s total daily impressions (259 million out of 824 million total, according to the respective Websites). Yes, porn is the lifeblood of many of these online ad networks—don’t act so surprised. Since December, 2004 AdBrite has been supplying the technology, billing, and payment platform for AVN Ads. Now that deal is going to Etology, who will manage the site from now on and relaunch it with a new look. Before that happens, AdBrite is trying to redirect all of its members to its own new adult advertising sub-brand, BlackLabelAds. If you go to the AVN Ads Website, you will see a big pop-up trying to switch advertisers and publishers with existing accounts over to BlackLabelAds. Yet, according to Etology, it has already secured the loyalty of 1,268 (and counting) of the biggest porn sites on AVN Ads, including YouPorn, PornTube, and RedTube. (Out of 6,614 total). Those 1,268 sites account for 108 million daily impressions (or 42 percent of AVN Ads’ total, and 13 percent of AdBrite’s total). The other 151 million impressions are still up for grabs. Etology is trying to lure them with a 75 percent share of revenues, versus the 70 percent they got from AdBrite. I caught up with AdBrite co-founder Philip Kaplan on the phone to get his take. He notes that all the current 6,614 sites that run AVN Ads have AdBrite code on them, and that is going to stay there unless they take it off. “If you were an AVN Ads user before, you are automatically a BlackLabelAds user.” But he is really not too worried about losing the porn business because it is not where he sees the future: Adult is an interesting thing. It is a lot of pageviews, it is not a lot of revenues. Most of the major players support it, but as the Internet advertising business is growing and more mainstream advertising is coming from TV and print, it is becoming less and less significant. In the meantime, he → Read More
http://blip.tv/scripts/flash/showplayer.swf?tabType4=guide&tabUrl4=http%3A%2F%2Fendscore%2Eblip%2Etv%2F%3Fskin%3Drss&tabTitle4=End%20Score&tabType3=guide&tabUrl3=http%3A%2F%2Funboxing%2Eblip%2Etv%2F%3Fskin%3Drss&tabTitle3=Unboxing%20Live&tabType2=guide&tabUrl2=http%3A%2F%2Ffilmcrunch%2Eblip%2Etv%2F%3Fskin%3Drss&tabTitle2=FilmCrunch&tabType1=guide&tabUrl1=http%3A%2F%2Fbleedingedge%2Eblip%2Etv%2F%3Fskin%3Drss&tabTitle1=The%20Bleeding%20Edge&logo=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Egearlive%2Ecom%2Fvideo%2Fgearlivewatermark%2Epng&file=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Ffile%2F509287%2F%3Fskin%3Drss&fullscreenpage=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Ffullscreen%2Ehtml&fsreturnpage=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fexitfullscreen%2Ehtml&linkfromdisplay=false&showfsbutton=true&brandlink=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Egearlive%2Ecom&brandname=Gear%20Live%20Video&showguidebutton=true&showplayerpath=http%3A%2F%2Fblip%2Etv%2Fscripts%2Fflash%2Fshowplayer%2Eswf iPhone not holding a charge? Ninjas running down your battery at night? The kids at Gearlive did a great video of a full iPhone disassembly and battery replacement. Good stuff. via GearLive → Read More
It seems Jeff Gerstmann, formerly of Gamespot, had a falling out with management over a review of Kane & Lynch and either was fired or left of his own accord. The game’s maker, Eidos, was upset by his unfair assessment of this holiday blockbuster featuring Dean Kane and Willie Lynch, two gun-toting country western singers who are out to fight the mob in downtown Toronto. The game is full of fiery crashes, huge cut-scenes, and a soundtrack by Shooter Jennings and Jack Johnson collaborating for the first time as a red-hot folk rock combo. Will Kane and Lynch play the Grand Ole Opry? Will Kane learn to love again? Will Lynch get rid of that cold sore? Find out in Eidos’ Kane & Lynch, available now at Best Buy! Anyway, big blow to impartiality in game reviews, good to see someone standing for objectivity in journalism, all that. Seriously. Buy the game. We get a commission. Gamespot Editor Fired Over Kane & Lynch Review? [Kotaku] → Read More
Welcome to Bizarro World, people. In the land of the rising sun, the Wii is undisputed king. Well, the DS is really, but we’re talking consoles here. Apparently some kind of Star Trek-type time-space continuum warp has resulted in a distortion of reality, and 183,217 PS3s were sold during November, topping the 159,193 Wiis sold during the same month. Gentle reader, I am as shocked as you are. Shocked and appalled! Of course, inter-dimensional hijinks aside, the long-expected releases of such games as Assassin’s Creed, Uncharted, and Need For Speed: Prostreet might have had something to do with it. PS3 tops Wii in Japan for first time [Yahoo! News] → Read More
Flux, a new social network joint venture between Viacom and SocialProject, had a limited launch in September. The platform is the cornerstone of Viacom’s social network strategy. Instead of building independent networks for MTV and its hundreds of other brands, they’ve built a distributed platform that shares users, infrastructure and content, but allows for distinct branding and community building around each property. And Flux isn’t just for Viacom – third parties are using it as well. When Flux launched it had only a few hand picked non-Viacom partners. Today they are opening up the platform for anyone that wants to join. Like Ning, it’s fairly easy to create a Flux social network. The look and feel can be customized via templates or by uploading your own CSS, and the network can be mapped to your domain name. Once created any Flux member can join your network with a single click. Since Flux is already gaining users via their launched Viacom and other properties, this gives young communities a deeper pool of users to draw from. And the fact that new users do not need to create a new profile, friends list or login credentials gives them a greater incentive to join. User data is exportable, Flux says, if the partner creates a privacy policy stating that. Partners have three integration choices. fShare, the basic integration, allows users to take content from the site and easily embed it into other social networks. Flux Lite allows partners to create a basic social network. Flux custom gives nearly full control over the look and feel and has additional features. Partners can choose any integration, it just takes a little more work to use the custom features. Flux will add new developer features over time as well. The chart to the right (click for larger view) shows the various options. We’ve created a test social network on Flux, at techcrunch.flux.com. And we’re also integrating their fshare functionality into the main TechCrunch site as an illustration of how it works – see the button below each post. Flux partners can choose to show Flux ads on the site, or use their own. Flux says they are currently selling at a $1.50 CPM and will split that 50/50 with partners. If a partner chooses to display their own ads instead, they must split revenue with Flux 50/50 as well. Flux v. Ning Flux and Ning have → Read More
I’m not going to get into the details of this story, it’s best if you just click the link and read. Pay attention, because after the part where the 35-year old guy pretending to be a 20-year old guy convinces the college girl to have sex with the real person to get back the video tape of her doing college hockey players earlier, it gets weird. Local man charged with blackmailing woman for sex [The Press Republican] → Read More
Good afternoon. Hey, what ever happened to riding your bicycle like a normal human being, using it as a method to get you from Point A to Point B and, on the weekends, Point C? I don’t know and I don’t much care. If loading a 20-pound bike up with 200 pounds of stereo equipment brings joy to someone’s life, I say GO FOR IT! If your hundred-some dollar bike has $4000 worth of gear strapped to it, I say YES!! More information and photos (some of which are truly amazing) at the link below. Bicycles That Carry Powerful Beats, and Even a Rider or Two [New York Times] → Read More
Samsung has announced the r410. The latest slider from Samsung has a QWERTY keyboard, stereo Bluetooth, speakerphone (wow!), a built-in VGA camera with night shot, advanced voice recognition, IM and e-mail. Battery life is a paltry 2.5 hours, though. But it comes in red and black. → Read More
OK. If this is real — and there is some indication that it is — then we’ve got ourselves a genuine breakthrough. We reported that TAG is making a phone, but we had no idea that it would be a damn watch phone. TAG Heuer has pretty much gone the sports route, offering quartz pieces to unsuspecting rubes. However, if this phone/watch comes to fruition, they’ll have a hit on their hands. Keep in mind that these are just mock-ups and there is no indication of how thick this thing is. The UI looks fairly basic — a crown for scrolling through selections along with an MP3 player mode. My question is this, however — how the heck did that stuff all that garbage into there and how do you talk into it. Dick Tracy, here we come. First mockup images of Tag Heuer Mobile Phone [LuxuryLaunches] → Read More
Somebody over at Boy Genius Report has the hook-up. They’ve got the full specs for the new Blackberry 9000, although the one picture they have (also above) looks kind of shady. Anyhow, here’s the lowdown: 420×380 screen, 1GB of memory, a 624MHz Intel processor. It also has the 1-2-3 punch of GPS, Wi-Fi, and 3G, none of which are to be found on my phone. Depressing? Hell yes. But it seems like my medication (and yours) will be arriving in mid-2008. BlackBerry 9000 specs revealed [Boy Genius Report] → Read More
We already knew about the parental controls, Xbox originals and the cyber stalking social networking feature and now we have a few more details on the fall update for you to ponder over until 2AM PST on December 4th. Inside Xbox will be a direct feed of current news straight from Xbox.com to your dashboard. The world is ending as we know it. You can have a full blown profile like you would on Facebook or whatever social networking site you troll. We’ll finally be able to watch full-screen movie trailers and there’s codec support for enhanced video. Navigation through Dashboard is said to be much easier with dedicated Game Store and Video Store buttons. We’ll see what the rest of the fuss is about on the 4th. → Read More
The Chocolate is still around? Looks like it. LG has released a brand new Choco in Blue Ice. It’ll be available next Friday, December 7 for the low, low price of $79.99. That is all. Press Release → Read More
The time has come to say goodbye to Ed Zander, a dear friend of the CrunchGear family. And by "dear friend" I mean a guy we mentioned six times, were you to search for "Zander" on our site. We’ve had a great ride, huh? Thanks for the memories, Ed. We’ll never forget the RAZR, RAZR2, ROZR, RUZR, RIZR, and all the other great phones whose models names contained the first letter of your soft and gentle last name. Good luck to you in your next adventure, an adventure that begins on January 1, 2008. We welcome your company’s chief operating officer Greg Brown with open arms, but we’ll never forget how you touched our lives forever. Goodbye, Moto. Zander out as CEO at Motorola [Computerworld] → Read More
Website-creation tool Doodlekit is over a year old but has somehow managed to fly under the radar, even after releasing its free version this past October. Several similar services are out there: Weebly, Synthasite, Jimdo, Google Pages, SiteKreator, and Sampa to name a few. They all intend to make it possible for non-techies to make modestly attractive and functional websites without touching a line of code. Doodlekit succeeds in this respect, but it goes even further by providing a suite of advanced features, all of which can be set up with a few clicks of the button: forums, customizable forms, shopping carts, advertising, user accounts and profiles, restricted areas for approved members, file uploading, full site search, RSS feeds, photo albums, blogs, basic site statistics, and domain mapping. Some of these features are available for free, but many will require that you pay $15 or more per month. See this pricing sheet for how the service packages break down. All in all, it’s nice to see a website creation tool that appreciates the fact that many low-level users won’t be satisfied with flat pages anymore. They want to collect data from their users, support small online communities, publish rich media, etc. Doodlekit is moving in the right direction while others (with the possible exception of SiteKreator) continue to provide a fairly limited range of dynamic content possibilities. As the WYSIWYG market develops, I’d like to see companies like Doodlekit leverage easy database creation/management tools like upcoming Blist. Then, a wider range of people will be able to collect, manage, and publish their organizational data online without needing to rely on web developers. As for more short-term improvements to Doodlekit, it would be nice to see an even better WYSIWYG HTML editor (I have yet to find any online that doesn’t end up frustrating the hell out of me). They could also take some tips from Weebly and implement drag-n-drop editing functionality, which I find more intuitive and satisfying than clicking through several pages to make changes. Suggestions and long-term visions aside, Doodlekit strikes me as a solid offering in its current incarnation. The company says it has reached 1,700 hosted sites since starting to offer a free version six weeks ago. I expect that number to increase substantially as the word gets out. CrunchBase Information Doodlekit Weebly Synthasite Jimdo Sampa Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Each week MobileCrunchArcade compiles the biggest news from the world of mobile gaming. I-Play announced this week that it has sealed the deal with Pandemic Studios to publish Mercenaries 2: World in Flames for mobile gamers. The soldiers of fortune return to stop a power-hungry tyrant from taking over Venezuela’s oil supply. This power play turns the South American country into a war zone that enterprising mercenaries can turn a profit on, especially with oil near record prices. But the mercs aren’t just interested in petrol dollars, this time it’s personal. I hope that commy bastard Hugo Chavez doesn’t read Mobile Crunch — his days are numbered. If you’d like to hit your favorite politician you love to hate, Cellufun’s new game The Mobile Ring might just be the ticket. This game features US presidential candidates including Clinton, Obama and Giuliani, (If you don’t know who these people are this isn’t the game for you.) as boxers out to knock you down with higher taxes or continued war. High scores will be listed on Cellfun’s leader board and as certain politicians become more popular to fight, their boxing abilities will change. Players will also be able to vote on other public figures like TV pundits to be added to the ring of contenders. Did I mention that it is free? Now I have your attention. Go to wap.cellufun.com on your mobile browser and let’em have it. Com2us released Tower Defense this week. Inspired by real-time strategy games, Tower Defense plays like the non-mobile version. A player can progress in Story Mode. Ten chapters need to be mastered by building towers and defeating enemies with different fortifications and 116 monsters. High scores are posted and players can qualify for prizes. Once all ten chapters are mastered, Custom Mode is unlocked. This allows players to edit their own maps and share them with friends. Tower Defense is available to AT&T mobile subscribers. I always build Ivory Towers. That’s where I live. CMP’s Game Developers Conference Mobile 2008 (GDC Mobile 2008), the definitive industry event for mobile games has published its roster of featured speakers and highlighted sessions. The annual two-day, multi-track summit will take place Monday Feb. 18 and Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2008 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco during the Game Developers Conference® 2008. Featured speakers for this year’s event include established mobile entertainment veterans John Szeder, CEO of → Read More
Artist’s rendering I love financial analysts. They get “super-secret” news from “super-secret” sources — mostly the same sources we all have — and tell people to buy or sell stocks based on the same hunches we all have. The hunch du jour on Wall Street is that Apple’s stock will go up after the launch of an ultra-portable laptop at MacWorld in January. The ultra-portable we can believe. AppleInsider has the scoopz: Earlier this month, AppleInsider cited well-respected sources who, following nearly two years of internal development on Apple’s part, are finally pinning the thin and lightweight 13-inch sub-notebook for an unveiling on January 15, 2008 as part of the company’s annual Macworld Expo announcements. → Read More
This is a pretty neat mod from ShakerRacer that uses the N95′s accelerometer via Bluetooth. Are our recent N95 winners willing to rig an RC with Bluetooth and test this out for us? → Read More
For a group that’s so concerned about the money it loses due to illegal music downloading, the RIAA sure spends a hell of a lot on lawyers. Money that could be better spent on innovation instead of protecting a broken, backward, expensive distribution system. → Read More
I found this here. I do not know what it is and I am very scared. Nobody likes cable companies, but now you have a reason to loathe Comcast a little less. New England Comcast customers can pay $2.95 a month to get the TiVo interface in their cable box in addition to the normal $16.94 a month charge for a DVR, ratcheting the cost up to about $19.89. This is a good move for Comcast because it makes them look less like backwards Neanderthals and it’s a good move for TiVo because now their R&D team can eat again and build up some energy to produce an HD product that people actually will buy. It’s just not win-win for that $2.95 burning a hole in your pocket every month, but you don’t count. Comcast to Charge $2.95 Extra for TiVo DVR Service [Mulitchannel] → Read More
U.K.-based peer to peer lending startup Zopa is gearing up for their U.S. launch. Reports of the launch have been circulating for some time (WSJ), but now it seems only days away. The service will be available at us.zopa.com, but is currently under password protection. Zopa’s peer to peer lending service differs from U.S. rivals by working with credit unions to offer person-to-person loans instead of a loans coming directly from lenders on the service like Prosper and Lending Club (works through Facebook). GlobalFunder.com is a yet-to-launch competitor. With Zopa, lenders will place their money in Zopa branded CDs that are then loaned out online. Borrowers apply for loans through their online community by posting their case for the loan and filling out relevant details about their credit risk. Interest rates on five year loans can range from 8.75% to 16.99%, depending on their credit risk. It’s worth noting that Zopa’s investor, Benchmark also invested in Prosper. The lending market is anticipated to be very large. According to the research firm Online Banking Report, around $100 million in new P2P loans will be issued this year, mostly by Prosper, with new loans growing to as much as $1 billion in 2010 and $9 billion in 2017. Prosper already registered an S-1 with the SEC and reported $96.4 million in loans. Adding further details to the launch, Allen Stern received an email outlining some differences between the U.S. and U.K. (which TCUK covered) versions. The key differences listed are: No risk for investors. Your funds will be federally insured. No more worrying about whether your borrowers will pay your loan back. Pick who you want to help. Investors will choose exactly who they want to help. Set your rate. Investors will choose how much they want to earn, up to a ceiling. No waiting. Borrowers will get their loans immediately upon approval. Lower your monthly payment. Borrowers can actually reduce their loan payments after they’ve borrowed. They’ll do that using rich profiles… CrunchBase Information Zopa Prosper Lending Club Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
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