Just when you thought the real-estate bubble had burst and the economy was going to hell, here comes another real-estate search engine. Today we see the launch of Roost, a real-estate site inspired by the lean look and feel of travel search engine Kayak. In fact, two of Roost’s board members and lead investors from General Catalyst Partners are also on the board of Kayak. Roost was founded in May 2007, and raised a $5.5 million A round. What makes Roost different is that, instead of trying to list all properties in the U.S. as Zillow or CyberHomes do, or take in feeds from individual real estate brokers as Trulia does, it is negotiating with Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) in each metro area to get a comprehensive set of houses on sale. Redfin also taps into the MLS. (The MLS is what real-estate brokers contributeto and use to find homes on the market, and up until recently MLS data was well-guarded from the Web). Roost launches with more than a dozen cities/MLSs, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. (Notably absent are San Francisco and New York). Roost is a real-estate search engine with comprehensive for-sale listings in the markets it covers, including for-sale-by-owner listings (which it does not show side-by-side with MLS listings because of industry restrictions). You can see all the photos for a particular house without leaving the search engine, you can see results on a map, and there are sliders (for price, bedrooms, square feet, etc.) to tweak results. It is a pretty-straight-forward site without a lot of bells and whistles. “We are laser focused on search,” CEO Alex Chang tells me. “We are not doing valuations. We are not creating heat maps. We are doing high-performance search.” On the back-end, Roost hosts a directory of real-estate broker sites and delivers search traffic to those sites based on a combination of natural results and paid search. “I send qualified traffic to the broker,” says Chang. “They are buying clicks from me.” That is the business model. But Chang is going to have to crow pretty loud to get noticed by prospective home-buyers who have many other real-estate search engines to choose from these days, and maybe less incentive to go house-hunting in the first place. CrunchBase Information Roost Trulia Zillow Redfin Cyberhomes Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
At a dinner last night at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 23andMe founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki announced that they are providing 1,000 free 23andMe personal DNA testing kits to conference attendees. Damn, I thought, I already paid $1,000 (more) for my kit (so much for the benefits of being an early adopter). Rumor is the company is also sending 100 free kits to attendees of the TED conference. Anyway, after long minutes of negotiation regarding a refund since I could now get a kit for free, Linda and Anne agreed to give one more kit out, to give to a lucky TechCrunch reader. Just tell me in the comments why knowing your genetic background is important to you, and we’ll choose a winner. We’ll stop comments after 24 hours and choose then. The company won’t say how many kits have been purchased, other than commenting that sales are “way above expectations.” Yesterday the company started selling kits in Europe and Canada. And they just recently launched their corporate blog, fittingly called “The Spittoon.“ I just recently got my 23andMe test results back. I’ll be posting highlights next week. CrunchBase Information 23andMe Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
http://www2.funnyordie.com/public/flash/fodplayer.swfthe parody video Tom Cruise WANTS you to see! on FunnyOrDie.com When the Will Farrell/ Sequioa backed ($15m+) FunnyorDie launched in March 2007 it made a huge splash with Farrell providing original content that quickly went viral. After an initial peak the traffic slowed right down, with some suggesting that it may not rise again. Content has always been the key, and as the Jerry O’Connell send-up of Tom Cruise above demonstrates, they’re still producing the right stuff. The positive side is that FunnyorDie has slowly grown since their initial post launch slump. According to comScore figures, FunnyorDie did 1.8 million uniques in December on 10 million page views. In perspective this placed FunnyorDie 5th on comScores humor index for the month, behind CollegeHumor at 4th, and ahead of The Onion at 11th. Notably that this is with FunnyorDie allowing their videos, like the one above, to be embedded on other sites, a move that would result in video views not being represented in comScore’s measure of site traffic. CrunchBase Information FunnyOrDie Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
As we speculated, Automattic, provider of the WordPress open-source blogging software and spam filter Akismet, has raised $29.5M in a Series B round of financing led by Polaris Ventures (which put in $20 million of the $29.5 million). Other participants in the round include The New York Times, True Ventures, and Radar Ventures. The large injection of capital will not only go towards the development of Akismet and WordPress (the downloadable software) but the development of WordPress.com (its hosted blogging platform), Gravatar (its avatar offering), and BBPress (an upcoming hosted bulletin board product) as well. WordPress.com recently boosted its storage cap to 3GB, far surpassing its competitors Blogger and TypePad. WordPress was honored twice at this past week’s Crunchies in the categories of “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Best CEO”. Last October, Automattic was rumored to have turned down a $200M acquisition offer. The question is: how much did the founders take off the table with this round? CrunchBase Information Automattic Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Critical Media, a New York City startup that operates Web-based video clipping and video syndication services for local TV and national news content, jut launched Syndicaster.TV. Geared at local TV stations and television groups, Syndicaster.TV lets broadcasters log onto the Web and capture video clips from any TV station minutes after they air. They simply select the portion of the video they want by highlighting the desired section of an accompanying speech-to-text transcript. Then they can download the clip as a WMV or Flash file for republishing to their Websites, automatically distribute them across the Web through ClipSyndicate (Critical Media’s TV-to Web syndication platform), or transcode the video clips and send them to iTunes. Syndicaster.TV is free to any broadcaster who is a partner in ClipSyndicate. “Bloomberg has been using it for four months, making 60 to 90 clips a day,” says Critical Media CEO Sean Morgan. The service is basically a combination of ClipSyndicate and his Critical Mention video-clipping service, which already captures TV signals from more than 600 TV Stations in North America and elsewhere and makes them viewable immediately on the Web. Now he is taking that video and making it instantly publishable to strengthen the position of ClipSyndicate. Since all the video gets translated into text, the broadcasts from each station can be delivered as an RSS feed to station executives. Morgan is also looking into creating a Syndicaster offering for radio stations, which would capture just the audio and allow them to publish radio-show segments, along with full transcripts embedded as searchable meta data. CrunchBase Information ClipSyndicate Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
http://progressive.playstream.com/playstream/progressive/flashplayers/FLVPlayer.swf Here’s a quick first look at the Comcast + TiVo interface that’s recently become available in the Boston area. Pros: Way better than the alternative Comcast DVR interface from 1982, it’s TiVo, dual tuner + HD for about what you’d pay per month for TiVo except you don’t have to shell out $299 up front for the TiVo HD box, Comcast OnDemand feature is intact. Cons: It’s way slower than “real” TiVo, no home networking or Internet features We also found out from sources that the required technician visit is a temporary measure to make sure installations go smoothly. In the near future, it’ll be a software push upon request. You’ll just need to pick up a new TiVo remote at your local office. Actually, you don’t need to pick one up because the regular Comcast remote works. Also, the networking features will be here in a later software update, except for things that would otherwise cut into Comcast’s revenue, like downloading Amazon Unbox movies and things like that. So you’ll be able to share videos and photos across the network and maybe view Internet video, but you’ll not be able to purchase videos or movies from anywhere besides Comcast. If anyone has any questions, please let me know and I’ll try to dig up the answers. → Read More
[photopress:ps3freexblnot.jpg,full,center] What’s a guaranteed way to stir the hornet’s nest that is the console wars? If you’re Sony you start an ad campaign reminding people that its PlayStation Network is completely free. The not so subtle “what doesn’t this ad say?” is that Xbox Live costs $50 per year. And then both camps started calling each other names. Wonderful. To me, $50 over the course of a year more or less rounds down to $0, but if I’m actively paying for something, I really shouldn’t have to deal with crappy network connections, free Xbox Live Arcade game or not. “The fun’s always free” says new PS3 online ad [ComputerAndVideoGames.com] → Read More
There’s something about ‘local’ that really gets our startup juices flowing in the UK. Maybe it’s that ‘children of Thatcher’ thing? (She was a greengrocer’s daughter). Nine-year old local search site TouchLocal has raised £7M (€9.4M) from Balderton Capital to combine a yellow pages model with a social community of recommending and reviewing users, following its Web 2.0 makeover and relaunch. Using its custom “Circles” social networking engine, TouchLocal users put other members into circles of trust that are graphically represented on screen. The re-launched TouchLocal will be jostling for position in the ‘local reviews’ marketplace against new younger upstarts including Welovelocal, Tipped, Trustedplaces and Qype, among others. And that’s not even to go into the mobile startups – like Rummble – interested in this space. Headed by CEO Tamar Ozmen, the site covers 114 UK cities, claims 18 million visitors a year and lists 2.4 million UK businesses. However, I’d somehow disagree with Ozmen’s view that “Facebook fatigue is already setting in” and it could be replaced by a ‘social yellow pages’ model. I’m just not that interested in plumbers, sorry. Meanwhile, the much smaller (in size of operation) privately-backed Welovelocal has commissioned a YouGov poll into printed business directories in Britain, revealing that 35% of British adults would prefer not to receive printed business directories at home, equating to in excess of 17.5 million books. That’s a lot of recycling. When asked which one of the following do you trust the most when trying to find local businesses / services, ‘word of mouth’ with 67%, won out by a wide margin. In the last 6 months, 51% of respondents said they had used the Internet to find local businesses / services, with printed directories on 24%. The sample size was 1,974 adults. This research suggests that ‘social search’ really does have legs as a concept. And these latest developments are just the latest in a salvo of shots that will be fired in this battle to win the ‘local’ reviews market. The question is, who has already been on the phone to equivalent US site like Yelp to talk buyouts…? → Read More
Ad-supported music seems to be gaining traction as a business model. We7, a UK-based music download service driven by advertising sales, has raised a $6M Series ‘A’ round led by musician/investor Peter Gabriel and Spark Ventures and UK VC firm Eden Ventures. The founders of We7 are John Taysom, chairman, and CEO Steve Purdham. Purdham founded SurfControl, a publicly-traded firm that was acquired by Websense last year for about £204m. After one year We7 says it has some 90,000 users and has delivered over one million ad-supported music files from a catalogue of over 80,000 tracks. Ad trials have been run for Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony Ericsson and Café Direct. Joining the board is Eden Ventures, Charles Grimsdale, who co-founded music distribution service OD2 (along with Gabriel), in Nokia’s hands since 2006, and is a co-founder of Eden Ventures. Global digital music sales were estimated to have a trade value of $2 Billion last year, but digital ad spend was around £2.5 billion in the UK alone, which makes one think that music may have a way out of the file-sharing nightmare it voluntarily got itself into. → Read More
The uber dorks have ported an AIBO tool over to the Pleo so you can make it do wretched things to satisfy your weird taste. Poor Ferbie. Robots Rule → Read More
TrackMyShipments offers a centralized delivery tracking service that is similar to TripIt. The concept is simple. Users sign up and forward emails they receive when ordering goods online to TrackMyShipments. The email can be in any format and any layout. The service then extracts the data to create a centralized tracking point for all deliveries. TrackMyShipments regularly pings the original service for updates, and can email or SMS location updates of tracked items to users. The Milpitas based service is a solid enough idea, although I can’t help that wonder exactly how many people have soo many packages on the way that they need a centralized management service for them. Perhaps this is a service that may find a stronger use base in the corporate sector where deliveries are more frequent, than with average consumers. CrunchBase Information TrackMyShipments TripIt Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Can you tell I’m obsessed with cameras lately? I’ve been closely watching the forums at DPR and today I came across some interesting posts regarding the Pentax K20D. One individual claims to have seen a handful of images taken with the K20D, which include EXIF files. There are also two purported images (super boring subjects) taken at ISO 100 and ISO 3200, but no EXIF files. → Read More
[photopress:attoops.jpg,full,center] Some people freaked out the other day when they saw that AT&T wanted to tack on a two-year contract to its “bring your own SIM card” plan. Why should I have to sign up for a contract when the entire rationale for contracts is to subsidize cellphone, which I’m providing? It was a typo. Relax. AT&T will not require you to sign up for any sort of contract when your bring your own SIM. Crisis averted! AT&T’s SIM-Only Offer Defies Logic [GigaOM] → Read More
The big day is almost here! All the heavy tele-hitters will be making offers on the chunk of wireless spectrum being made available by the FCC. There are 5 blocks, A through E. A and B are regional and may be bought by carriers hoping to strengthen their coverage in certain areas. E is one-way, so it’s useless for cool stuff like email, mobile web, and so on. C and D are where the action are. Big slices, big enough to build a nation-wide network on. They have catches too – C carries Google’s suggestion that it be open to any device or service, and D will have to be shared with public safety agencies. In any case, if you have a spare five billion dollars lying around, feel free to throw down with the telecoms and Google for a piece of the airwaves. Auction of key airwaves begins Thursday [Reuters] → Read More
Sure it’ll set you back $125 but look at that bottle. Yes, folks, that’s a full bottle of old Champy in an upside-down bottle with a giant cork, designed by Viktor and Rolf. It’s actually a nice Rose with the “fruity flavor of morello cherry, citrus, and mandarin” and will reverse any hangover. I kid! → Read More
From the creators of Project Gotham Racing comes The Club, which is some underground fight-club-like shoot out involving seven other blokes who are pissed about something. The demo is available now for XBL and comes out January 24th for the Playstation Network. The game itself ships February 19th for the 360, PS3 and PC. The Club → Read More
If you sell anything online, whether physical goods or services, you’re probably keenly aware of the 2-3% (plus $0.30) lost through transactional fees every time someone makes a purchase with their credit card. This fee rears its ugly head whether you use PayPal, Google Checkout, or Amazon Flexible Payment Service since those companies are largely just passing on the fees imposed on them by credit card companies. Noca, a startup founded by ex-Visa employees, is attempting to virtually eliminate transaction fees by bypassing the credit card companies altogether with its own online payment service. Since $5 billion goes towards online transaction fees every year in the United States alone, and since online vendors have particularly slim profit margins, the company thinks that the near elimination of transaction fees would be a huge boon for online vendors. Concurrently, Noca seeks to provide consumers with a more rewarding and more secure purchasing experience, thereby making its service appealing to both actors involved in a transaction. While Noca aims to eventually facilitate online payments for purchases of all sizes, it begins with a focus on micro-payments, and on micro-payments made through Facebook in particular. It has launched two Facebook applications to test its payments system out: OneClick Pay and HelpYourWorld. The former provides a simple way to send money to friends. As you can see in the screenshot to the left, the idea is to send someone a digital check; you actually enter your routing and account numbers into the application instead of using a credit card. This poses a significant obstacle to adoption (who remembers these numbers or carries around a check in their pocket?). But the company insists that using checking information rather than credit card information increases security and reduces the chances of identity theft. Plus, Noca is working to provide functionality that would allow you to enter your online banking credentials in lieu of your checking information. The latter Facebook application, HelpYourWorld, provides a good use case for Noca’s micro-payment system. Since the application solicits $1-at-a-time donations for a series of causes, it benefits greatly from Noca’s lack of transaction fees (especially the standard fixed one of $0.30). Noca hopes that many other Facebook applications with similar micro-payment needs will use its APIs to implement its payment service. As for the benefits to the consumer, Noca promises to provide strong and flexible incentives through cash back schemes, frequent flier → Read More
It’s not slated to hit shelves until March 11, but Sega just can’t keep a secret till then so today they revealed some tidbits about the online multiplayer modes for the second chapter of Condemned. → Read More
[photopress:vcross.jpg,full,right] This lady rules. Janice Turner of The Times—they have a decent football podcast—goes into the familiar “new technology is scary and stupid and I wish the Old Days were here again when I didn’t have to know what a Web site was and how to dial a mattress” crutch in a recent column entitled “Xbox is crack for kids” and subtitled “It’s an impossible task to police our children’s multimedia addiction.” It’s exactly what you would think it: a working woman trying to keep her kids from getting fat and lazy (or “common,” as the English call it) with all sorts of “a recent study says” justifications for her take-no-guff sass. The kicker: Because, unlike the TV-hating parents, I refuse to buy them portable gaming consoles, Xboxes, GameCubes, PS2s. These are Satan’s Sudoku, crack cocaine of the brain…. Playing videogames, children are mentally imprisoned, wired into their evil creators’ brains. And they play them – beepety-beep – on journeys, over family meals, any minute in which they find themselves unamused. How can you not love her? We’re all crack cocaine addicts who play Satan’s Sudoku all day. Checkmate, Janice! Please read her entire column. It gives such an insight to English (or British when it suits them to lump the whole island together) parenthood and English motherhood. With overbearing parents like Janice, it’s no wonder England produces so much deadpan comedy. Xbox is crack for kids [The Times] → Read More
Apparently some Canon reps technicians have loose lips and while jawing about how unpredictable their bosses were about announcing things, may have leaked a few specs for a phantom camera set to fit in between the 1D Mark III and the 5D. He also mentioned some possible upgrade specs for the 5D — maybe now is your chance to buy a used 5D on the cheap as all the pros ditch for the new freshness. The “3D” is rumored to have a smaller body but still a 15.1-megapixel full-frame sensor. And 12800 ISO? Yes please! See the rest of the shady specs after the link. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
