When Microsoft opened up its own online store for software downloads earlier this month, it signaled that packaged software is not long for this world. The problem is that the store offers only Microsoft products. Patrick Swieskowski, co-founder of YCombinator startup Secure by Design, points out:
You can basically only download Office or Vista. Leave it to MS to pitch an app store that sells mice and keyboards and Zunes…
Swieskowski and his co-founder Sascha Kuzins, both serious open-source hackers, had a better idea: a download app store for Windows PCs that could distribute any third-party software, just like the iTunes App Store does for the iPhone. So they created the BaseShield App Store, which launched about an hour ago. → Read More
Our weekend social experiment: Upload a picture, win a TechCrunch Tshirt. You may have noticed our post on Picwing earlier today. While we’re waiting 6-8 weeks for the damn picture frame to arrive, I’ve decided to create a new album that allows anyone to upload photos. Email an image to TCR@picwing.com and it will appear in the widget below. See the whole album here. Whoever submits the best picture, defined solely by me or more likely one of our interns that I assign this to, will win a TechCrunch tshirt in the size of their choice (we have all womens and mens sizes except, alas, men’s medium). Go for interesting or funny, that’s the best way to win. The first picture in the album is our very own Dan Kimerling holding up a tshirt that with a little effort could soon be in your hands. We’ll notify the winner by emailing whatever email you use to submit the picture. Anything disgusting or not safe for work will be removed immediately and you will be banned from TechCrunch for life. Have fun! The winner will be chosen on Sunday. I’ll be shutting down submissions overnight as I sleep, then back on in the morning – no moderation mode. http://www.picwing.com/flash/e.swf CrunchBase Information Picwing Y Combinator Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The twenty one startups from Y Combinator’s summer session are presenting their ideas and creations to investors in Boston this afternoon. Below are descriptions of the nine startups we haven’t covered and who don’t wish to remain in stealth mode any longer. See our prior coverage of Posterous, Anyvite, ididwork, Popcuts, and Slinkset – all of which are part of this batch and have launched already. TicketStumbler TicketStumbler can be described as Kayak for sports tickets. It aggregates tickets from sites like StubHub and RazorGator, making them searchable by keyword and allowing for the filtering of results by maximum price, quantity available, provider, etc. The site is live, fast, and gets extra points for not spelling “stumbler” without the “e”. CrunchBase Information TicketStumbler Information provided by CrunchBase People and Pages While yet to launch, the founders of People and Pages describe their service as “a better Google Groups”, although the screenshots show that it’s part WYSIWYG website creation tool as well, making it competitive with Google Sites, Weebly (also a Y Combinator startup), and others. Group organizers can use People and Pages to manage email lists and publish to the web in one place. CrunchBase Information People and Pages Information provided by CrunchBase MeetCast MeetCast is a WebEx and GoToMeeting competitor (yes, another one) that is marketing itself on ease of use (no downloads) and playback (all conferences are saved and indexed for later viewing). The founders draw comparisons to Tokbox for its simplicity. CrunchBase Information MeetCast Information provided by CrunchBase CO2Stats For a flat monthly fee, CO2Stats will measure the overall electricity usage of websites and then automatically buy renewable energy certificates for them to offset their effective emissions. Founded by academics from Harvard and Yale, CO2Stats has already turned a profit by signing up 2,500+ sites in over 25 countries. See our review from earlier today. CrunchBase Information CO2Stats Information provided by CrunchBase Youlicit Youlicit is a service prepping for relaunch that will generate Mahalo-like search guides by scouring the web for user generated content and compiling it into topics algorithmically instead of relying on human editors. These search guides themselves are intended to show up highly in the results of more traditional search engines like Google. CrunchBase Information Youlicit Information provided by CrunchBase Job Alchemist Job Alchemist is the parent company of two online services: Startuply, a job site for tech startups that we covered last month, → Read More
Hacker News, a small but influential digg/reddit-like tech news site hosted at Y Combinator, is asking its users if stories from Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag should be banned from the service. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote “Several users have suggested we ban Valleywag, not for anything in particular that they write about, but because their articles are always such deliberate linkbait. I personally agree. In 99% of Valleywag articles, the most interesting thing is the title. But I don’t want to be accused of censorship, so I thought I’d ask for opinions first.” After 20 hours of voting, 60% of the 400+ people who voted said yes to the ban. One commenter writes “Don’t rely on the tyranny of the democracy. Use this as an opportunity to build a framework based on principle and apply it across the board. When you build constitutions, you have to do it in private, with great minds and based on timeless principles… and weight in fact the true nature of man.” Based on the voting, Hacker News then banned them from the site. Hacker News is still in the honeymoon period – it hasn’t yet attracted such a large readership that the trolls have taken up permanent residence. After mentioning them a couple of times and seeing comments asking me to please stop writing about them, I asked the community if they’d prefer I didn’t mention them. The responses were mixed. It’s clear that the site is aiming for intelligent and thoughtful discussion, so it’s no surprise that they are thinking of banning the toxic wasteland known as Valleywag. The question is, will larger sites, hoping to avoid the Valleywag trolls, begin to ban them, too? CrunchBase Information Hacker News Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Even though video has become a popular internet pastime over the past few years, there’s still a very little that average people can do with it. They can watch it, comment on it, and embed it on social networks and blogs if it tickles their fancies. Oh, and they can create it…but the majority of them won’t bother. Omnisio wants to provide more options for us less creative types. Since most people don’t have enough time, patience or skill to record their own original content, Omnisio is giving them the tools needed to create mashups of other people’s original content. As with Hulu, Omnisio users can extract sections of clips they find on the web (currently only those on YouTube, Google Video, or Blip.tv). They can then take those clips and stitch them together to form new, embeddable compilations. The process from start to finish is easy enough; just copy and paste the URLs of the videos you want, and drag a few sliders to indicate where each should begin and end. The only real beef I have with the tool is that (oddly) you can’t move the “start” slider to exactly where you want it; it only moves in 8-second increments. The “end” slider doesn’t have this problem. http://omnisio.com/bin/Embed.swf?embedID=atgGx–8ir3iR4adbiFy2w The second innovation Omnisio brings to online video is a new commenting system that places comments within videos as popup bubbles. To be fair, these aren’t entirely new to the web; iminlikewithyou users are altogether too familiar with them. But they’re fun nonetheless, and it’s nice that you can use them to annotate videos with friends without interference from the mob that overruns YouTube. Finally, the guys behind Omnisio are developing technology for combining slides with videos and tagging interesting people and highlights. The presentation functionality will essentially sync slides with various points within a video and show those slides in a dock below the video where you can click on them to skip around. Omnisio is a Y Combinator company founded by Ryan Junee, Julian Frumar, and Simon Ratner. Expect even more capabilities from them down the line intended to put a “spine” into online video. CrunchBase Information Omnisio Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
London based Songkick, a Y Combinator startup that launched in October 2007, aims to help music artists pack fans into concerts. They’ve been developing a number of new products that are slated for launch soon. But one that they quietly launched last week without much fanfare is something they refer to simply as “Battle of the Bands.” It’s a sort of Alexa or Compete comparison engine, but instead of comparing websites it compares bands and artists. They track any band that has 50 or more followers on MySpace – about 1 million bands currently. They then scour the Amazon sales rank for their music, mentions in 1,500 popular music blogs, total MySpace friends and plays, and other stats to determine the overall excitement for a band at any given time. Type in one or more bands and see how they compare over time. Who’s the hottest band right now, according to Songkick? Vampire Weekend, who are currently on tour and had 30 blog mentions this week. Hear their music here. Soon, Hogarth says, they’ll add permanent links for battles and give users the ability to embed graphs into websites. CrunchBase Information Songkick Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Dropbox was one of the most impressive startups I saw at Y Combinator’s demo day this past August, not because they’ve built anything terribly prescient or awe-inspiring, but because they’ve come up with an online storage product that I might actually use regularly. The idea behind Dropbox, which officially enters into private beta today (with 200 invitations available for TechCrunch readers, each of which provides a free 5GB of storage), is that little to no effort should be put into keeping your desktop files synced with “the cloud”. So the three founders have built a Python-based desktop client (available for both PCs and Macs) that acts like a regular folder on your machine. You can manage files within this folder just like elsewhere on your machine (add, edit, copy, and delete them) and changes will be automatically synced to Dropbox’s Amazon S3-backed storage, and very quickly at that. See a screencast here. At the very least, you can use Dropbox to automatically backup a subset of your files, and to access them when traveling. You can also use the service to easily share files with friends and coworkers. Just right click on a folder and select “Share”. You’ll be taken to a webpage where you can enter the email addresses of who you want to share the folder with. When your friends add files to that shared folder, they will automatically get downloaded to your machine in addition to getting backed up online. If you have Growl installed on the Mac, it’s quite impressive to see your friends’ files magically show up. This should sound a lot like Microsoft FolderShare, which had it own set of minor announcements yesterday. That’s because FolderShare has been providing a desktop client that syncs local folders to online storage across computers for years now. But it’s a bit like comparing Vista to MacOS; both get the job done but only the latter is actually pleasurable to use and appears designed for maximum customer satisfaction. (Update: As a commenter points out, FolderShare doesn’t actually back up your files online, just facilitates syncing between computers, so this is a big difference too). Dropbox tops FolderShare in a number of ways beyond simple ease of use matters. You can access your files through the web browser in addition to the desktop client. All files are version controlled so you can revert to an earlier version of a → Read More
OpenID, a way to sign on to multiple web sites with a single set of credentials, has incredible promise. Large companies have signed up. Thousands of website take OpenID sign-ins. All is good, right? Well, not exactly. First, those big companies only issue IDs, they don’t accept them yet. And the user experience with OpenID is just plain bad. Users have to remember their OpenID URL, and are redirected to a sign in page. And it’s worse for people who already have an account at a website but want to start using their OpenID instead. Linking those two accounts isn’t easy. That’s where new startup Clickpass comes in, which launches today. We first heard of them last year at a Y Combinator demo day, but the founders, Peter Nixey and Immad Akhund weren’t saying much at the time. They are an OpenID issuer first. But they are also trying to make using OpenID much simpler for the user. First, they are partnering with sites like Plaxo, GetSatisfaction, Pownce and many of the Y Combinator startups. Those sites will show the ClickPass button, and users can sign in via OpenID with a single click (and they don’t need to remember their OpenID URL). If it’s your first time with OpenID, Clickpass will ask you if you have an existing account at the service you are trying to log into, and pass that information back to the site to join the accounts. As you add sites to your ClickPass OpenID, you’ll see them listed on the Clickpass site. You are given a distinct OpenID URL for each site that you can use to manage multiple identities, all tied together on ClickPass. And if you choose to fill out profile information on ClickPass, they’ll autofill that information on new sites you join. Clickpass also ensures privacy controls by letting you choose what kind of information you want to share with the site. Conceivably the service could serve as a node for your personal data, connecting it between different website accounts. In short, ClickPass takes the technical transparency and openness of OpenID and adds a layer of simplicity and familiarity. Vidoop is approaching OpenID in a similar way, and PassPack is a non-OpenID solution. For launch they’ll be active on hacker news, Plaxo, Disqus, and through a WordPress plugin. The user experience is clean. After you sign in to Clickpass, you can sign in → Read More
Hacker News is a Digg/Reddit-like site that I am visiting more and more often. It’s my first stop in the morning, and I check it out a few times during the day as well. Why? Because it’s focused mostly on startup and hacking news, which is what we cover. It’s one of the best places to find information on startups we haven’t heard about yet. And, better, the community is jerk-free. Comments are mostly helpful, thoughtful and interesting. Like Digg and Reddit, users submit stories to the site, and others can comment and vote on them. But Hacker News is also a forum of sorts, where users can simply post questions for others to answer – see this one asking for advice on creating a demo video for a new startup. Popular stories and questions move to the home page over time. Hacker News used to be called Startup News and was launched in February 2007 by Y Combinator. They say “the most important goal of news.ycombinator was to create a place where founders and would-be founders can meet and talk.” Hopefully as the site continues to attract new users, the magic won’t be lost. CrunchBase Information Hacker News Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Having a page put up about you in Wikipedia is difficult, mostly because of the Notability requirement for inclusion – and you aren’t “notable” unless you’ve received significant media coverage elsewhere. Other services have filled in the gap for the billion or so people online who can’t get onto Wikipedia – sites like LinkedIn, Wink and Spock (as well as most social networks, for the less professional profiles). New Y Combinator startup Biographicon, founded by CEO Ethan Herdrick and CTO Daniel Terhorst, aims to fit itself somewhere in between Wikipedia and LinkedIn. Anyone can be included. And anyone can edit any page, like on Wikipedia. For now, that’s it. The founders say they’ll add more structure over time, and give dedicated places to add bio information (schools, work, etc). Here’s my page. Biographicon will have a significant hurdle to overcome – until it gets traction people won’t for the most part bother entering in their information. But like all Y Combinator startups it’s used just a tiny amount of capital to get to launch. We’ll check back in in a couple of months and see how they’re doing. CrunchBase Information Biographicon Ethan Herdrick Daniel Terhorst Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
New Y Combinator startup 8aweek aims to help you stop wasting all that time on random Internet sites. They offer a Firefox plugin that monitors the web sites you visit and how long you spend on each site. If you are on a user-defined “restricted site,” the plugin will tell you when you’ve spent too much time there. Or alternatively, it will block sites if you tell it to be a little more aggressive about time management. Some users may not be all that Interested in having the plugin try to change their surfing habits. But the service also provides an interesting chart showing all the sites you visited the previous 24 hours and how much total time was spent there. Some users may be surprised to see, for example, just how much of their life is spent on Facebook. The product includes a privacy option that allows users to turn off monitoring, or have the data stored only on their PC, not the Internet. The company is offering the plugin for free; they want to make money by selling the service to businesses who want to limit the amount of time their employees waste on the Internet. Today businesses can buy a web filter to block access to known time wasting sites. But filters don’t catch everything, and some companies may want to take a softer stance by simply monitoring time on these sites rather than blocking them outright. 8aweek is very similar to RescueTime, another Y Combinator startup that launched last November. RescueTime montiors usage of both websites as well as desktop applications, so the products are not identical. But the products seem too close for comfort – I’m surprised Y Combinator is backing both of them. CrunchBase Information 8aweek RescueTime Y Combinator Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
http://addher.com/battle.swf?profileId=110 Anyone who’s ever visited HotOrNot and clicked on pictures for hours will be a perfect user for AddHer. Users (women only at this point, look for AddHim soon, say the founders) upload a photo of themselves and create a widget that can be embedded on MySpace or another website. The widget shows the user plus another randomly selected woman and asks readers to select who they like better based on a variety of questions. If this doesn’t make sense, just see the embedded widget above and keep clicking on my face (the founders decided to allow me to join even though I’m not a woman – I didn’t pick that picture though). Readers can visit the MySpace page of the person they clicked on, and users who’ve created a widget can see their ratings and the total number of times people have seen their image. See their tour and the AddHer blog for for more details. This is the first product of Addmired, Inc., which is a Y Combinator startup. More on the Addmired CrunchBase page. CrunchBase Information Addmired, Inc. Y Combinator Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The idea of a “tip jar” on blogs and other content sites to help bring in a few extra dollars has been around for years. Donations and payouts are generally made through PayPal, and there are a number of plugins for various blogging platforms to make the process easier. New Y Combinator startup TipJoy is designed to make it even easier to get people to click that tip button. Readers are not required to create an account or have a PayPal account to leave a tip, so there is little friction to them getting started. If they want to leave a tip they just click the button and type in their email address. I’ve added a tip button below to show how it works – any money we receive we’ll be distributing back to other bloggers who add the button, and/or donating to charity. If you leave a tip as a new user, you start to build up an account debit. You can eventually pay that off via PayPal (TipJoy keeps 2% 3%), although no one comes after you if you choose to skip out on the bill. You can also start to ask for tips on your own site, and anything people leave for you offsets what you’ve given to others. The TipJoy site shows popular sites that have received a lot of tips, and you can also send any URL or email a tip directly as well. As a tipper, you can choose the amount you’d like to tip by default (starting at ten cents). Then, every time you click the tip button on a participating site, that amount is added to your bill. If you want to cash out of your tips you can choose to either receive an Amazon gift card or donate the amount to charity. For now, you can’t receive cash since the company wants to avoid becoming a regulated money transfer service. In the FAQs they suggest they’ll be adding this functionality eventually. I like the service because it creates a network around the idea of tipping for content. Users are both tippers and tippees, keeping a balance that they pay off eventually. I also like the fact that people don’t have to pay off that bill. It creates an interesting psychology where people find it very, very easy to leave the tip, and then may feel guilted into paying off the bill. → Read More
In the old days, when people had stereos (remember those), if you wanted to listen to a friend’s music collection, you had to go to their house. Today, you check out their iLike playlists on Facebook, their Last.fm profile, or any of dozens of other social music sharing widgets and Websites. Now you can add Reble.FM to that list. Reble.FM is free software you download to your desktop that lets you stream songs from any friend’s PC that is also online and is running the Reble.FM client. It just launched in public beta today. Says founder and key-coder Nick Meyer: Playing music on my friend’s computer should feel just like playing a song on my hard-drive, and you should be able to add any of your friends’ music to playlists. That’s what we’re going for with Reble. Reble is a scrappy YCombinator startup. The software is built on the Jabber open-source instant messaging platform You are basically IMing with your friends and hooking into their iTunes or other music library. You can only see the music of friends on your contact list, and can only stream a song if no one else is listening to it at the same moment. It is a one-to-one system. But the more friends you invite, the bigger the music library that you can access. The software only works on Windows machines right now, and only streams DRM-free MP3s. Eventually, it will let you buy songs that you like from digital music stores like iTunes or Amazon. The download-only client will be a nonstarter for some users, especially since there are many other Web-based options for sharing your playlists with your friends. It does beat uploading all your songs to some Website, or only being able to listen to a random shuffle of your friends’ songs. But even the Web-based music sharing services are making on-demand music streaming possible. Last.fm, for instance, now lets you stream any song three times in full before reverting to its default random shuffle. For those of you who try out Reble, please tell us your impressions in comments. CrunchBase Information Reble Y Combinator iLike Last.fm Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
A new YCombinator startup called WebMynd launched today. It’s a Firefox add-on that records every website you visit and saves a virtual copy on your hard drive. The service doesn’t save just an image of the page or the URL, but the full text site. That means you can also search those virtual pages later when you are looking for something. Users can turn off recording at any time, and can delete saved pages that they don’t want to have around for any reason. To see saved pages, you click on an icon at the top of the browser and the local saved copies pop up, along with a search bar. The idea is that, like Gmail, good search means you don’t have to spend a lot of time bookmarking and tagging websites to find them later. WebMynd records everything in the background, and a quick search will locate the page. One thing I’d love to see added is a text box somewhere on the browser where you can type in tags to describe any page you are on, and to have that data saved along with the virtual page. The result could make searching easier down the road. The basic add-on is free and keeps pages for a week. Users pay $10 for six months of history or $20 for a full year. After testing this I can tell it’s a service I’ll continue to use to quickly find sites I visited. Simple service, basic business model, and useful. Classic YCombinator stuff. CrunchBase Information WebMynd Y Combinator Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Tony Wright has been up to a new project since selling two-month-old Jobby to Jobster last May. It’s called RescueTime and it’s meant to help manage your time and stop you from ending up like this guy. We looked at the product previously, but they’ve now come out of private beta. Wright and his team have also taken funding from Y Combinator, and stand in stark contrast to the usual twenty-something ramen-eating stereotype of YC founders. Wright and his team wanted to make their time management tool as seamless as possible. So unlike other more manual tools or logs, ResucueTime is a desktop/web-based productivity tool that automatically tracks how long and where you spend time on your computer, be it Mac or PC. All the data the program collects is sent to your online account every half hour where it can be analyzed or shared with team members through their analytics package. Their souped up stopwatch tracks what program you have in focus and for how long. It also allows for advanced features, like program tagging and grouping, and can easily be turned on and off. Currently, it doesn’t get all too specific about what you’re doing other than the program’s name or tag. But for web browsers, it will track what domain name you’re on as well (IE, FF, Safari). In part this limitation is because of RescueTime’s privacy concerns and in part because RescueTime can’t yet recognize what file is open. They don’t want to play Big Brother, so users can always delete time entries or shut off the program for some alone time. However, since they only list the domain you’re surfing, your stats will probably see a lot of time on Google and Yahoo since they don’t recognize these sub domains. Although my own particular experience of using the application wasn’t all too enlightening, project teams could find it as a useful way of collectively managing time as the product gets more nuanced in the data they collect. After a day of trying it out, I found (surprise) I spent of a lot of time on Firefox surfing TechCrunch and Techmeme, while sifting through email. CrunchBase Information RescueTime Y Combinator Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The internet is supposed to be a place of intense price competition, but you can’t always find the best deals on any one site. To solve the problem, online price comparison search engines were born. We’ve covered a few newer ones before, such as TheFind and Mpire, although these sites also include a variety of other features. Bountii is a new price search engine started by two founders from the latest Y Combinator class. They focus on the incredibly popular and competitive category of electronics, currently crawling over 30 merchants. Bountii says they differentiate themselves from other price search engines by digging deeper into the prices. Their data includes shipping and handling, and finds especially low prices normally hidden from basic searches, like the ones Costco only shows at check out. The system can add shipping and handling by zip code. But the real test is how well it finds low prices. While it’s by no means comprehensive, I ran a simple test across some pricing search engines for the term “lg 42″ plasma hdtv”. While the search experience varied greatly, the numerical results I came up with were as follows: TheFind ($962.65), MySimon ($1099.99), Mpire ($968.09 inc. S&H), Bountii ($1057.86), Google (listed $968.09 but really $1,061.95). Price Grabber was the most frustrating. The initial results listed $799 as the bottom price. However, you find out that it’s for a refurbished unit. The actual price was $983.53, which you find is $1043.43 with shipping and handling. While not the lowest in this case, Bountii was competitive. I can imagine the results would be different on another product. The sites that did the best found this deal at Ritz Camera, which has free shipping and handling. → Read More
Music lovers may be show a reluctance to pay for their tunes, but they’re turning up in droves for live shows — at least according to the latest box office numbers posted by eMarketer. Concert ticket sales are expected to $9 billion worldwide this year, up nearly 10% over 2006. Freshly launched Songkick is a startup looking to capitalize on that growing market by providing a simple way to discover live shows for artists you love along with the cheapest concert tickets. The impetus for the site grew out of the founder’s frustrations over no single concert site providing a comprehensive list of all the concerts they want to see. There would be some on Ticketmaster, others on LiveNation, and still more on resale at StubHub. So, they’ve created a comprehensive database that tracks concerts as they appear on the 14 different ticketing sites and across dozens of blogs. Currently they only cover the U.K. and U.S. You can search the database and track shows and blog posts about your favorite acts, or download SongKicker, which automatically tracks artists you listen to. SongKicker is a plug-in for that pulls artists you listen to from iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Winamp. The process takes about 3 minutes and adds the artists to the tours you’re tracking. But worry not, you can always delete the band behind that musical guilty pleasure that isn’t really your taste. Their site can also recommend new artists to you. But their recommendation engine works a bit differently than others. It’s not generated from the user base, like Last.fm, or through careful analysis like Pandora. Instead, Songkick crawls websites like Wikipedia and music blogs to pick up related artists based on positive or negative associations between the bands. But the real payoff for the site is buying tickets. Kind of like a Sidestep for tickets, Songkick lets you find the cheapest tickets for these shows. Their search engine spans a variety of sources for both the primary and secondary ticketing market. Unfortunately, Songkick doesn’t actually expose the prices for each show directly in their search engine. You have to click through the site and do the comparison yourself. Songkick gets anywhere from $0.50 to $5 for each ticket sold. Finally, they’ve packaged their ticketing search engine as a simple affiliate sales program for music bloggers. By installing a little plug-in, bloggers can automatically sell tickets related to → Read More
Y Combinator wasn’t the only incubator to demo their most recent startups today. Colorado-based TechStars also brought their startups on stage – ten of them – to give the audience a first look at what they’ve been up to all summer. Each startup gave 5% of their equity in exchange for $15,000, operational support, office space and mentoring. Most of these companies are unlaunched and seeking additional angel funding (exceptions are noted). Here are our notes on each – and see Don Dodge for his take: EventVue builds social networks around conferences (see confabb, an existing competitor). The idea is to let people connect before, during and after conferences in an online space, to add to the physical interaction at the conference itself. The company plans on generating revenue by charging an affiliate fee for each new registration. They are currently looking for $150k in funding. Intense Debate – see our previous coverage. Intense Debate is a souped-up blog commenting widget that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Currently installed on 30 blogs. Installing the plug-in on your blog (WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad) adds threading, comment analytics, bulk comment moderation across all your blogs, user reputation, and comment aggregation. They are looking for $500k in funding. socialthing! is an ambitious project that simplifies the management of digital content (blogs, photos, music, friends, social networks and links). Users can also synchronize information from and to various social networks from their profile page. Strong viral component. Revenue from advertising. Raising $500k. J-Squared Media has launched their “Sticky Notes” Facebook application. It has 1.7 million users after six weeks, who have sent over 4 million sticky notes. They are working on several other related Facebook applications and are cash flow positive with $30,000/month in revenue from cost per action advertising. Not seeking funding. More here. Search-To-Phone is a mobile search service via voice. Call and leave a voicemail asking about a product or service. The request is then routed to the appropriate business to call you back with information and/or a special offer. Built on TellMe and Gold Systems technologies for voice recognition. They’ve signed a business development deal with Excell Services to provess 10 million calls. They are looking for a small capital investment and more partners before launching. Villij is a recommendation engine that analyzes your online life (social networks, blogs, bookmarks, etc.) to find people who → Read More
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