We promised we’d start publishing some of the more entertaining emails we get in our inbox, in the probably ridiculous hope that publicly shaming people may actually lessen the flow of these absurd messages.
A couple of weeks ago we posted a harried email written by a reader looking for legal help (see No, Don’t Sue Facebook. Yes, Do Get A New Boyfriend).
Now we’ve got another one. Hachette Filipacchi Media, which publishes notable magazines like Elle, Car and Driver and Road & Track, wants a little help with their search engine rankings.
The company’s Digital Outreach Coordinator, Automotive Group sent us an email telling us how much they loved a recent CrunchGear post about Ford. They offered to “link to your site on our microblogs to improve your pagerank.”
Hey, great! We love links. But this link requires a little payback. They want us to link two pages on CarAndDriver.com to the anchor text “Ford Vehicle Buying Guide and/or Ford Flex Buying Guide.” → Read More
Woot, the popular bargain site that offers one good (sometimes great) deal a day, has just launched a new portal at deals.Woot. The new site is a fairly major departure for Woot, which up until now has been driven by product selections from a team of Woot employees (aside from the main Woot.com site, which is often tech/geek focused, there are special subsites for shirts, wine, and a handful of others). Unlike these sites, Deals.Woot is run by its users — it’s essentially a Digg for bargains.
The new site features a list of top deals, as voted on by the community and chosen by the Deals.Woot algorithm. This will be going head to head against other deal sites like SlickDeals and FatWallet, which have well established communities. Woot already has plenty of fans, but it may take some time to build out a base of deal hunters. → Read More
Now this is cool. Some of the hype over Google Wave has died down over the last few weeks, in no small part because most people have absolutely no idea how to use it (no, the 80 minute long video demo doesn’t help). Now it looks like the Wave team has another idea up their sleeves to show people the power of Wave: they’re using it to recreate famous documents.
This time they’ve reconstructed the Declaration of Independence, complete with edits and comments from the founding fathers. My US History is a bit fuzzy, but there are plenty of obvious jokes nestled in here, and I’m sure the Googlers have included a few more subtle ones as well. Unfortunately, it looks like you’ll have to have a Wave account if you want to witness the creation of one of the United States’ most important documents. But we’ve tried to grab a few of the key moments in the screenshots below. → Read More
At a time when publications targeting small business owners are in decline or dying (R.I.P. Fortune Small Business), the Web is thriving with experimentation. One effort that is just getting off its feet is Bizmore, a site backed by former junk bond king Michael Milken and executive-coaching firm Vistage International. Bizmore launched last summer as a Q&A site for business advice. Today, it unveiled a new design with more magazine-like content, including a network of eight blogs, ranging from the Social Business to Workplace Trends and Creative Finance.
“I’ll have 25 blogs before the end of the year,” says editor in chief Jeffrey Davis, who used to work with me as an editor at Business 2.0 before he went on to help run Bnet. Earlier this year, Davis left Bnet to join Bizmore founder Alice Hill to try to build an online publication for small businesses from scratch. Each blog, he says, tackles “some important facet of running a small business (finance, social media, managing, etc), each written not by name journalists, but true experts who speak and consult professionally on their topic.” → Read More
In financial news, HP delivered something positive today. The fourth quarter has been a good one, with HP reporting a net income of $2.4 billion, in comparison to the $2.1 billion they reported last year. It’s nice to see some good news for a change. → Read More
World of Warcraft turns 5-years-old today. Back on November 23, 2004, a year before the current generation of video game systems even began (with the launch of the Xbox 360), Blizzard released the massively multi-player online game at a time when massively multi-player online games were still largely the haunt of hardcore gamers, people with fast Internet connections who were willing to pay $15 per month for access to a game that they already bought. Who can forget the message board threads: Why do I have to pay for a game that I already paid for at the store? How do you beat the game? What happens if and when I stop playing? → Read More
It seems that flight delays could turn into a big business. FlightCaster, the startup that helps predict flight delays long before the airlines themselves usually do, has just landed a $1.3 million funding round led by Tandem Entrepreneurs and Sherpalo Ventures. FlightCaster previously recieved money as part of the Y Combinator program. Today the company is also launching a new API, which developers can learn about here.
FlightCaster’s goal is simple: it wants to let you know when your flight is delayed as early as possible. Using a variety of data sources and complex algorithms, the service will alert you whenever it thinks one of your flights will be delayed, along with an explantation of the factors that contributed to its prediction. → Read More
[UK] Cambridge, UK-based Taptu, the mobile optimised search engine that, in particular, targets touch screen devices, has released a dedicated Android app. The service already offers a generic browser-based version for mobile phones, along with a native app for the iPhone which disappointingly for Android users, appears to be at least one generation ahead.
After playing with the Android app for a short while, I’m also struggling to see Taptu’s appeal, although admittedly I’m probably not the target user. → Read More
This photoset is a fantastic use of 10 minutes of your time. Life apparently spent some time on the scenes of Disney’s 1954 classic and the photos have just been posted for your viewing pleasure. They are fantastic. Jump over to the site to see for yourself. [Time via Boing-Boing] → Read More
Several airlines have been offering Wifi for a while now. United Airlines wants to ensure that people are actually trying it out and so through the end of the year, you can get one free session if you create a new account with Aircell’s Gogo Inflight. The offer is only good on United’s 757-200 flights between New York Kennedy and the airline’s Los Angeles and San Francisco hubs. → Read More
The second annual TechCrunch Europe ChristmasCrunch combines our annual TechCrunch Europe meetup and Festive Christmas party, in one handy package. This year we’re basing it the hot theme of realtime streams and the event in London will also feature some of the hottest realtime startups in the world today.
The event will start with registration from 14.00 on December 15 for the seminar programme consisting of keynote presentation, panel discussions and startup pitches followed by TechCrunchPitch! Once the seminar programme has come to an end, it will turn into your very own startup Christmas party, with DJs and entertainment until late.
Do you want to pitch your realtime startup at ChristmasCrunch?
To be considered for the pitch competition you need to email TechCrunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher, with a one side of A4 text-only pitch, and also include the URL of your company/project/startup etc on CrunchBase (you can add your company onto it if it is not already there). Use the subject line “TechCrunchPitch”. Note: You MUST be on CrunchBase. In your A4 pitch include: The market “problem” you are solving with your startup, your solution, your business model, your competitors, your team and what you’re looking for (Seed funding, Angel funding, Series A round, etc). There is no fee for one person from the startup to pitch, as is our policy. Deadline for entry is this Friday.
Also: On 30th November 2009, TechCrunch Europe will be hosting another free Pitch! Workshop sponsorsed by UKTI. It is only open to qualified startups to attend and if you are interested in finding out more information, please email petra(at)twistedtree.co.uk. → Read More
Creative just announced the 3rd generation of the Vado HD. If you remember correctly, Creative launched the original Vado HD back in December of last year, so it’s due for a refresh. → Read More
You’ll recall that Microsoft recently banned a bunch of people from Xbox Live because they had modded their 360s. Modding is against the rules, don’t you know? Microsoft told VentureBeat not to believe the numbers being thrown around—the number most relayed is 1 million banned 360s—because it never releases numbers to anyone. → Read More
Life360, a startup that looks to help families keep their loved ones (and their identities) safe, has closed a $750,000 funding round with investors including Seraph Group, LaunchCapital, Founders Fund (via FF Angel), the Band of Angels, and Mark Goines. The service also recently launched to the public at TechCrunch50′s DemoPit.
Life360 offers a suite of services related to safety and security, which are designed to help prevent everything from losing your phone to losing your personal identity. One example is the site’s Emergency ID service, which provides parents with cards/bracelets for their children that instructs first responders to call a designated phone number in the event of an emergency. Calling that number will activate the service and automatically blast a message to any emergency contacts. → Read More
As anticipated, Google has taken the first step to launch full extension support for its Chrome browser. Starting today, Google is allowing developers to upload the extensions they are making to the new Extensions Gallery. This gallery isn’t yet open for Chrome users to test out, but Google is saying that they will open it to “trusted testers” in the next few days.
If you are a developer working on an extension, you can simply agree to Google’s terms and upload your extension to the gallery right now. One of those terms is that Google has the right to review your extension before it’s published, but they are saying they will only do that if it includes “include an NPAPI component and all content scripts that affect “file://” URLs.” Google goes on to note that “For security reasons, developers of these types of extensions will need to provide some additional information before they can post them in the gallery.” Fair enough. → Read More
[Ireland] Ray Nolan, co-founder of Irish company Web Reservations International (WRI) — parent company to booking site Hostelworld.com and reborn travel site Boo.com — says WRI’s initial plan was for an audacious 2008 IPO at a market cap almost double the company’s final selling price of about $340 million last week. Ironically, he made almost as much money out of the Boo.com holding company as Boo lost back in the dotcom bust.
WRI was picked up by private equity firm Hellman and Friedman, to the surprise of many who assumed a travel giant such as Expedia or Priceline would make the acquisition.
“We were trying to push it out to a $600-700 million market cap. That’s a big IPO. It was so big that the market only had to cough, and we knew the IPO was off.” Obviously, the market didn’t just cough; it tanked, and the IPO was abandoned.
A three-time serial entrepreneur — he set up his first company, Raven Computing, in Dublin at age 22 — Nolan stepped down as WRI chief executive in advance of the planned IPO and was a non-executive director by the time of last week’s sale. However, with 25% of the company’s shares, he did well out of the transaction. → Read More
Remember that hubbub a few weeks back about Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy advertising Windows 7? But the show was apparently deemed to raunchy so Microsoft replaced Family Guy with Warner Bros. Well, did you catch last night’s episode? There was a Family Guy segment that certainly looked like an advertisement and was then followed by a regular Windows 7 commercial. Check out the video after the jump. It makes you wonder if there is more to come and the deal isn’t dead after all. → Read More
Though it has yet to take off in a major way, the idea behind video comments remains a potentially compelling one. And after seeing some success using its video platform to serve up videos on Twitter, Vidly thinks it can crack the case. And Grammy-winning hip-hop star Chamillionaire and the popular blog commenting system Disqus are helping them try to do that.
Launching today, Vidly Express is a way to use Vidly’s video platform on any site for visitors to add video comments or responses with the click of a button. And using celebrities like Chamillionaire is an obvious example to get the service some traction. As you can see on his own site, he’s already using it to good effect. But Chamillionaire isn’t just any celebrity endorser, as we learned first hand during this year’s TechCrunch50, he’s actually in tune with a lot of interesting things going on in tech — and uses the stuff, so his endorsement is a solid one. → Read More
As rumors continue to swirl around LinkedIn’s possible IPO, the professional social network is steadily adding useful features that help transcend the platform’s technology into other applications.
LinkedIn recently launched two-way integration with Twitter and also rolled out a plug-in to pull in your LinkedIn contacts within Microsoft Outlook. And today, LinkedIn is opening up its API to start letting developers make applications that tap into LinkedIn’s social network. → Read More
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