One of the ways people use Twitter is to ask a question to a large group of people at once: “Does anyone know a good recipe for Lobster Bisque?” “What are the best games for a four-year-old’s pirate birthday party?” “What is the best tech conference to attend this year?”
Whether or not you get a good answer depends on how many people are following you and how smart they are. It’s not like Yahoo Answers where there are millions of people coming to look for and answer each other’s questions. But what if you could combine the two: ask questions via Twitter and find answers via a dedicated Website?
That’s what ToAnswer is. It’s the project of Chuck Harmston, a lone Web designer in Mesa, Arizona. (So try not to pound on it too much). You ask questions by sending a Tweet to @toask, and then anyone can answer the questions on the site. Now, if only the service would Twitter you back every time somebody offers an answer, then I’d be impressed.
Google now counts 20,000 enterprise search customers, about a little more than half of whom use its search appliance and the rest of whom use its hosted site search and other enterprise products. To extend it search into the enterprise, Google is launching the fifth generation of its search appliance. Each yellow box, which is based on a standard Dell server, will be able to index 10 million documents, compared to 3 million in the last generation. And it will serve up results two to five times as fast as before, due to both hardware and software improvements.
The Google Search appliance can index pretty much any enterprise data generated by Oracle databases, SAP systems, Documentum, SharePoint, Salesforce.com, HR systems, intranets, wikis, and more, and presents it to employees in a familiar Google-like interface. Two of the new features of the appliance will be:
—Personalization: Different employees can see different results based on their role, business or position. For instance, engineers can get design drawings more highly weighted in internal search results than marketing materials. This can be set by both the IT administrator or the employee.
—Alerts: Just like Google Alerts, but tied to enterprise data. Triggered by keywords whenever new matches are made and pushed to your e-mail. If you subscribe to “downsizing,” will your boss find out?
Back when Facebook was a social network only for college students, one of the most popular features was the ability to see not only who was in your class, but who else was taking the same courses as you. (It must have been great for coming up with insightful pick-up lines). Facebook did away with that feature as it broadened beyond the college market. But now another startup is looking to fill the void that Facebook left behind. It is called Inigral and it is backed by the Founders Fund, the same group of angel investors who first invested in Facebook (Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund is still on Facebook’s board).
Rather than reinvent the wheel, Inigral is building its applications on top of Facebook. Its first Facebook app was called Courses, which basically aped the canceled feature that students loved (along with other, more popular apps by other companies, such as Cramster’s Courses 2.0). But that was just a placeeholder. The app it is putting all of its efforts into is called Schools. It too runs on Facebook, but it is much more fully-featured.
In fact, it has so many features that Inigral is planning on charging for it. Who would pay for a Facebook app? Not students, that’s for sure. Instead, Inigral plans on charging universities. It is, in that sense, one of the first enterprise apps on Facebook. Co-Founder Michael Staton says:
The whole model of spam and advertise to try to get as many users and clicks in the least time possible isn’t the only way to build a company [on Facebook]. It is a saturated way to build a company.
Universities are asking, “Why are all the students using Facebook?” They want to plug into Facebook to enhance their own mission.
Staton is selling his app to universities as a social utility that lets students show each other not only what courses they are taking, but other campus affiliations such as student organizations, athletic teams, majors, and residence halls. Once it knows all of this about a student, it lets her sort friends and classmates by who shares the most things in common with her.
Schools knows all of this information because it taps directly into a university’s student information system. So that when a participating student changes a course with the registrar, it automatically shows up on Facebook. (With the student’s consent and appropriate privacy controls). Students can only download the app if their university agrees to license it. Currently it is in a limited private beta with Abilene Christian University in Texas, but it is about to roll it out to to other other select partner colleges. A more public release won’t be available until the spring semester.
Inigral will charge a few dollars per student, and in return schools get a way to interact with their students on Facebook in a way that they can control. It is really a group management app for instructors, athletic teams, and student organizations to contact their members and manage events through a forum students are already using anyway.
Get ready to start hearing a lot about MySpace Music, a huge joint venture project between MySpace and the big music labels. One big question about the project remains: who will be the CEO of the new company. We’ve gathered a shortlist of candidates that MySpace has interviewed.
The project is on pace to launch in September, and MySpace is finalizing third party relationships. Amazon, for example, is likely to handle music download sales and fulfillment. Music download sales are just one revenue stream for the property. In addition to sales of DRM-free music (singles, albums, playlists), MySpace Music will likely also offer ring tones, concert tickets, merchandise (tshirts, etc.) and branded advertising campaigns.
Most aspects of the project are reportedly on pace for the launch, but MySpace has failed to find a CEO for the project. CEO Chris DeWolfe and COO Amit Kapur have been interviewing people since late 2007. Their top candidates (Ian Rogers and David Goldberg) bowed out early, and we’ve heard from sources close to MySpace that they’ve been unable to find the perfect candidate since then.
Here’s who we’ve confirmed MySpace has interviewed for the top job at MySpace Music:
Jim Bankoff
Jim Bankoff is a Senior Advisor with Providence Equity Partners, the leading Private Equity firm focused on media and telecommunications. Prior to joining Providence in 2008, Bankoff served as Executive Vice President of programming and products at AOL. He presided over consumer web sites such as Moviefone, MapQuest, BloggingStocks, AOL Music and Engadget.
Michael Bloom
Michael Bloom is currently SVP & GM, Digital Media at MTV. He moved to run the Joint Venture between MTV and RealNetworks’ Rhapsody September 2007, but he has since returned to his previous position. We hear he never seriously considered the position.
David Goldberg
David Goldberg was the General Manager of Music at Yahoo until February 2007 before becoming an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital. Like Ian Rogers, below, he was one of MySpace’s top candidates for the job. He’s married to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, which would create a bit of competitive stress around the dinner table.
Jim Pitaro
Jim Pitaro is currently the Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo Sports but was previously with the Launch music team. Pitaro was Vice President of Business Affairs for LAUNCH Media prior to the 2001 acquisition. After the acquisition, he transitioned to Vice President and Head of Business Affairs for Yahoo! Music until his transition to the sports team.
Ian Rogers
Ian Rogers was the general manager of Yahoo Music before heading to Topspin Media in April 2008 as CEO. He has all the attributes MySpace was looking for - proven leadership, deep knowledge of and ties to the music industry, and a willingness to shake things up. Along with Goldberg, above, Rogers was the guy MySpace wanted to run the new company.
TechCrunch50 is now just a month away, and we are very busy here reviewing the nearly 900 start-ups from 49 different countries that have applied. The ideas and innovations that have been brought to our attention are mind blowing. You will not want to miss out on this year’s conference as the next generation of technology, Web applications and products will be revealed to the world on September 8, 9 and 10 in San Francisco.
Today, we are announcing that Niklas Zennstrom the co-founder of Joost, Skype and Kazaa, Evan Williams the co-founder of Twitter, and Ash Patel the Executive Vice President of Yahoo!’s Audience Product Division will be at TechCrunch50. Niklas, Evan and Ash join a growing and extraordinary group of experts who are teaming with us to mentor and evaluate our 50 finalists. Bios for our newly announced experts are referenced below.
We, also, are pleased to announce today that we have 3 new partners joining us: The Founder Fund, Salesforce and MySpace. The Founders Fund is a non-traditional investment group led by a team of four managing partners, who themselves are founders and entrepreneurs. Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). MySpace.com is a leading online lifestyle portal. We’re lucky to have executives from all three companies joining us as expert panelists - Sean Parker (Partner, Founders Fund), Marc Benioff (Chairman & CEO, Salesforce) and Chris DeWolfe (CEO, MySpace).
As we closer to the conference, we are encouraging everyone to book their hotel reservations (many hotels are already sold out) and register for the conference before we sell out. For companies seeking to launch and showcase products at TechCrunch50, please take a look at our Exhibitor Packages. If you have questions about sponsorships, please reach out to Heather Harde or Dan Kimerling. All media inquiries should be sent to Sarah Ross.
We can’t wait to see you in San Francisco!
Niklas Zennstrom Niklas is an Internet entrepreneur, who co-founded, Joost, Atomico, Skype and Kazaa among other companies. He is currently a partner of Atomico. In addition to this, he is also the co-chairman of Joost. Niklas co-founded Skype in 2002 with Janus Friis with the vision of liberating consumers and businesses from the need to pay for talking to each other across the globe. Skype has become the global leader in Internet voice communications, attracting more than 276 million registered users within less than four years of its launch. Skype’s continuing success was officially recognized in September 2005 when eBay Inc acquired the company for $3.1 billion US Dollars. Niklas had the position as CEO from its inception until September 2007.
Evan Williams Evan Williams founded his first Internet company in 1994 and has been doing the same ever since. He is currently chairman and chief product officer of Twitter. In 1999, he co-founded Pyra Labs and led the team that created Blogger, which was sold to Google in early 2003. Williams worked at Google until late 2004, after which, he helped form Odeo, an early podcasting company. In 1996, he formed Obvious, LLC, a web-product development company in San Francisco, which spun out Twitter, Inc. in 2007.
Ash Patel Ash Patel is currently the Head of Yahoo’s Audience Products Division. Previously he was the Executive Vice President of the Platforms and Infrastructure Division where he was responsible for global technology investments and platform initiatives both on and off the Yahoo network. Under his previous title he also led an increased focus on innovating and developing next-generation services for Yahoo customers, and oversaw divisions including Product Platform Engineering, Platform Strategy & Architecture, and the Advanced Development Division. Since starting at Yahoo in 1996, Patel has played a key role in architecting and enhancing MyYahoo, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Chat and many other products that continue to impact millions of Yahoo users.
Medialets has posted the results of a recent Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research report that details the breakdown of the first 1 million iPhone 3Gs sold worldwide.
Earlier this month Apple announced that it had reached the milestone in only three days, compared to 74 days for the original iPhone. Of course, the two figures are hardly comparable, as the the 3G version launched simultaneously worldwide in 21 countries - the original iPhone was exclusive to the US for months after its release.
Unsurprisingly, the report says the United States accounts for 60% of all units sold during the three day period, with a total of 600,000. Trailing by a factor of nearly ten fold is Japan, with 70,000 units sold. Japan’s finish in second place may well be a result of pent up demand, as the original iPhone was never officially sold there (even unlocked phones wouldn’t work, as the original iPhone doesn’t support UMTS).
The results for carrier distribution aren’t particularly surprising, either. AT&T leads by a wide margin because of its US sales. Despite selling the second highest number of phones, Japan’s carrier Softbank ranks behind T-Mobile and Orange, which both have customers in multiple European countries.
Above all, the figures reflect the explosive demand for the iPhone seen worldwide, and are especially impressive given the difficulties Apple had with activation in a number of countries. In the United States, the iPhone is still selling out at many stores in a manner of minutes. What remains to be seen is how long the public’s obsession with the iPhone will hold, and if Apple can reach its goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008.
What does $25,000 and 12 weeks get you? If you are a startup funded by LaunchBoxDigital, it gets you a working alpha or beta site. Based in Washington, D.C., LaunchBox is the latest seed-fund incubator to take the “Build ‘em cheap and build ‘em fast” approach to startup creation. (In the same vein as Y Combinator, SeedCamp and TechStars). LaunchBox gives small teams of two to four developers $25,000 to $40,000 each—just enough to get a functioning demo site up and running. In return it takes a six to eight percent stake in each startup and an option to invest in subsequent rounds.
After calling on developers to apply for funding last February, it is now ready to debut its first class of Web startups. Here they are below, with screencasts and notes from LaunchBox founder John McKinley on why the group invested in each one. Our favorites are Heekya, JamLegend, and ShareMeme. Stay tuned for invites.
McKinley’s Notes: Most people think the college communications market is saturated, but with 75% of Facebook users dissatisfied with their feed experience, and Twitter only in use by 7% of students in a poll we ran on several campuses, that is hardly the case.
BuzzHubb is best summarized as bringing the utility of next-gen Yahoo Groups to the mobile college student, but done in a creative, lightweight manner. The first fundamental element of BuzzHubb is that it establishes boundaries around the university campus - you can only join a school’s BuzzHubb community if you are part of the school (a great concept that Facebook championed). Once you have joined, you can join existing Hubbs, or quickly establish your own.
College students have complex, sometimes overlapping social group relationships. BuzzHubb makes communicating with those groups simple and engaging. A Hubb is a group of individuals who can share group messages quickly and easily from their phone, the web, or their social network. There are several types of Hubbs: Broadcast Hubbs, where you join, but there is a single author (e.g, the campus sports blog), Invitation-only Hubbs, where an existing member needs to invite you to join (a study group, a team, a special interest group) and all can contribute, and Open Hubbs, where anyone on campus can join and contribute (e.g., Obama 2008).
The UI allows you to quickly navigate all the Hubbs you are part of - a failing of the Facebook feeds metaphor. The mobile experience lets you opt to be alerted to new posts on a Hubb-by-Hubb basis, as well as share thoughts with friends or Hubbs via SMS or BuzzHubb’s WAP experience. The plan is to get it on 7 campuses in the Fall, learn, refine the experience, and then blow it out in the Spring.
Heekya: The Wikipedia For Stories
Founders: David Adewumi, Kwasi Nti, Rasvan Orendovici and Avner Levit www.heekya.com
McKinley’s Notes: The current model of story telling on the web is pretty fragmented. There are really good individual repositories out there (YouTube, Flickr, and Photobucket are a few), but they focus primarily on a given category (photos, video), and have limited ability to address linear story telling. Blogging is a potential answer, but while there are close to 200 million blogs, only 600,000 posts occur each day - too many blogs die the slow death of neglect.
Heekya wants to encourage social story telling. They do this through several approaches.
First, they have a simple to use multi-media story builder that allows a story author to tap into their existing base of digital assets on Flickr, YouTube, PhotoBucket and Facebook. They also let the author use compelling public/shared content from those same sources. Good commenting and annotation tools help enhance the story, and simple sharing tools allow you to both share the story and post/embed it.
Second, they encourage alternate perspectives, allowing someone to clone a story and add or enhance it to create a linked, but unique story reflecting their own point of view.
Finally, they have a variety of browsing and discovery tools to let people see stories (and their related threads) along a variety of dimensions, including topic, geography, social connection, etc.
McKinley’s Notes: JamLegend is a new online music gaming experience, competing with the likes of Rock Band and Guitar Hero with a disruptive offering. The experience is fun and engaging. It’s free, involves no client code, and has a very compelling social gaming experience at its core. The problems with the incumbents are:
• High price points. (Several hundred dollars to purchase the game, an instrument, and a library of music tracks)
• “Tethered” experiences - what I mean here is that they are console based games, which means you are effectively tethered to the living room, basement, or dorm room where your console lives
• Limited catalogs - the two incumbents focus on the major labels and English-language rock music. Rock Music is 34% of tracks sold on music sites. Other genres, artists (independents) and language groups are way under-represented
• Limited social gaming experiences, and infrequent releases to get new functionality into user’s hands.
JamLegend attacks these limitations head on. It’s free. It can be played whenever and wherever you are (using a full game guitar if you want, but it’s just as fun on keyboards or laptops)—play it on the road, at work, at a coffee shop. Its catalog will serve the indies, just as MySpace and Bebo have done, and include other genres like Country and Jazz. It also is built to allow artists to upload their work directly to the JamLegend community. And finally, it really has a compelling social experience that is much better than that of the incumbents, through fun head-to-head challenges as well as simulcast tournaments.
Over a year since launching its music licensing marketplace into beta, Israeli startup YouLicense has raised $1 million in funding from the Logia Group and Ofer Media.
YouLicense is positioning itself as a marketplace for low cost music licensing, similar to what iStockPhoto did for stock photography. YouLicense’s system lets music sellers (licensors) and buyers (licensees) communicate, negotiate, contract, and transact directly. Licenses are typically in the $20-150 range with a 9% commission charged to the licensor upon the completion of a transaction.
Since launch, the company has amassed a repository of 50,000 songs licensed by independent labels and artists. YouLicense has chosen to be “licensee-friendly” and not require song exclusivity, meaning that licensors are free to monetize their music anywhere else in addition to YouLicense.
While YouLicense expected to license most of its music for use in advertising, film and television, the bulk of its licenses have been in the long tail - specifically, for slideshow and website background music, corporate presentations, online and mobile videos, and indie film making.
Prior to this round, YouLicense operated on a mere $100,000 in pre-seed funding. CEO Maor Ezer says the company plans to roll out a white labeled marketplace in addition to storefront applications for Facebook, MySpace and Bebo in the next few months.
Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Comcast has bought newsletter service DailyCandy for an unconfirmed $125 million. The site caters to women interested in fashion, food, travel and other cosmopolitan topics.
Comcast apparently beat out Viacom with its willingness to pay $5 million more than Viacom’s offer of $120 million. Bob Pittman of Pilot Group Ventures, the holding company of DailyCandy, says the service was expected to hit $25 million in revenue this year with an EBITDA of over $10 million.
DailyCandy is understood to have been on the block for years, with speculation from just last month that it would sell for $75 million.
Qik has released its mobile video streaming application for jailbroken iPhones to the public. The service allows users to broadcast video live from their phones using Wi-Fi or the EDGE network which can be viewed on Qik’s site or through its embeddable player. Unfortunately, the application is only compatible with phones running the 1.1.4 firmware, which has been obsolete for nearly a month since the introduction of the Apple App Store. If you’ve got a phone running the old version, you can download the app after signing up here.
Users running the 2.0 version of the software will need to wait for Qik to release a compatible version, which the company expects to do in the near future. Unfortunately, it’s likely that the application won’t be available through the official App Store, as Apple still hasn’t enabled video capture using the phone’s integrated camera. Until Apple changes its mind, you’ll need to jailbreak your phone - something that the vast majority of iPhone users are reluctant to do.
If you’re feeling really adventurous, you can try downgrading your phone to the 1.1.4 firmware using the instructions here, but we haven’t tested them and there’s a good chance that you’ll fail miserably (don’t try this if you have an iPhone 3G).
Qik has offered a private beta service for months, but only recently launched to the public. Besides the iPhone, the service supports a number of other phones, including models offered by Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung (you can see the full list here).
Niklas is an Internet entrepreneur, who co-founded, Joost, Atomico, Skype and Kazaa among other companies. He is currently a partner of 
Evan Williams founded his first Internet company in 1994 and has been doing the same ever since. He is currently chairman and chief product officer of 
Ash Patel is currently the Head of 
