The Latest from TechCrunch

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• Delicious Freshens Up With Twitter, Which Its Founder Hates
• RealEstate.com Launches Useful Twitter Bot
• WeFi’s Directory Nearly 30 Million WiFi Hotspots Strong, Raises More Funding
• The Future of Fabrication Is Here: Shapeways Announces Stainless Steel Printing
• Ginipic: Neat Image Search App For Web And Desktop
• Spotify Closing New Financing At €200 Million Valuation; Music Labels Already Shareholders
• iLike’s Pushtastic iPhone App Lets You Know When Your Favorite Bands Are Coming To Town
• Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill & James Taylor Rip Facebook Hard In Funny People
• Social Recruiting Startup KODA Completes $3 Million Round Of Angel Funding
• Yahoo Shuts Bix Down. Did Anyone Notice?
• Bill.com Raises $8.5 Million To Streamline Business Bill Payments
• The Kevin Rose-Ashton Kutcher Bromance Is Bad For Digg
• Dreams Do Come True: JibJab Lets You Star In Weird Al’s Latest Music Video
• Google Quietly Quadruples Its Newspaper Archives
• Google Continues Losing Long-Time Employees To VMware
• Finding Family Is Big Business: Ancestry.com Files For $75 Million IPO
• Pre Philosophy: What Is Palm Thinking With These Ads?
• Mobclix Takes On AdMob By Roping Together 20 Mobile Ad Networks Into An Exchange
• Server.com Sold For A Solid $770,000
• Twitter Reaches 44.5 Million People Worldwide In June (comScore)
• Let The Google Billboard Spoof Videos Begin
• Another Startup Falls Prey To The iPhone/Google Voice Crossfire
• FTC Commends Schmidt For Stepping Down, But The Investigation Continues
• Photobucket Founders To Leave News Corp.
• PayFail: PayPal And Its APIs Go Down, Online Shopping Grinds To A Halt

Delicious Freshens Up With Twitter, Which Its Founder Hates Posted: 04 Aug 2009 07:59 AM PDT Delicious was once one of the hottest social sites on the Internet. That’s why Yahoo bought it in 2005. But it’s weird now to even think about it as a social site, I get more of the utilitarian vibe from it these days. People still use it, but it’s more of a repository. Or, to put it another way, it’s where links go to die. Contrast that with services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed where people are sharing and re-sharing links all over the place, and having conversations about the content, making it feel alive. And that’s what Yahoo wants to tap into now, with another revamping of Delicious. And not surprisingly, this revamp is very Twitter-centric. The biggest difference is that the main Delicious homepage is now an area called “Fresh Bookmarks.” Previously, the main page contained the most popular bookmarked pages on the site, but that is now relagated to the second tab. This redesign is all about freshness, which is to say real-time-ness. Delicious looks at and refreshes this list of links every minute or so based on what people are bookmarking and what they’re tweeting. This model, while flawed (I’ll get to that), does make the main page of Delicious more interesting. “Design” is the most popular tag on Delicious, according to Yahoo, and that meant a “Popular Bookmarks” area that was dominated by things like “200+ Paper Brushes For Photoshop.” For some people, that is useful, but for at least just as many, those types of links are not useful in the least bit. The redesign is an effort to move away from that. One problem I see with this Fresh Bookmarks area is that the tweets it uses in its equation, often don’t have anything to do with the content being linked to. Yahoo did this on purpose, noting that some 81% of tweets don’t contain URLs, and they still wanted to use data from the most amount of tweets to populate this area. So instead they use keywords in tweets, but this often results in tweets populated below the shared content that have absolutely nothing to do with it. And on top of this new Fresh Bookmarks area, when you bookmark things, Delicious now allows you to also tweet your links out at the same time. This should be useful to people who want to save stuff for later, but also want to let others know about it. You can also easily email links to people, and send them to your Delicious contacts. This is all done through the bookmarklet. And the search aspect of Delcious has been completely revamped as well, making it easier for power users to dig through things they’ve bookmarked in the past. The new search area also features rich content, so if someone shares a YouTube video, you can play it inline. The same is true with Flickr images. All of that is great, the problem is that it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Delicious has long just been about saving links and not about sharing them like many of the new, more versatile social sharing services out there. If Yahoo wanted to tie the product into Twitter, it should have done that months ago, to get ahead of the curve, rather than at the back of it. The problem now is that there are plenty of other services people are already using to share stuff on Twitter. Most people still just paste links right into the update box, and Twitter uses Bit.ly to shorten them. This is allowing Bit.ly to collect a huge amount of data about what people are sharing — something which it could use soon to take on Digg and Delicious. And on the bookmarking side of things, the trend seems to be towards simple. Mike likes a service called Pinboard, I’ve long been a fan of Instapaper. Both require less effort to use than Delicious, and are quicker. But you don’t have to take our word for the downsides of this new Twitterification of Delicious, just listen to its founder, Joshua Schachter (who left Yahoo last year, to go work for Google). He’s not even waiting for the embargo to lift on these new changes, he’s just ripping them left and right. First, he notes: I can’t BELIEVE delicious delicious did integration with other social networks before finishing with its own. sigh But later he completely rips the new feature: i hate the delicious twitter integration (sharing != saving) but i like the new search a great deal. Well, at least he likes the new search, I guess. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

RealEstate.com Launches Useful Twitter Bot Posted: 04 Aug 2009 07:58 AM PDT I continue to be amazed at how companies are starting to use Twitter in a professional way (see for example my profile on Best Buy’s efforts with @Twelpforce). Another case in point: RealEstate.com is today launching the beta version of @Housewatch, a Twitter bot that can instantly deliver statistics and information to home buyers, sellers and agents who use the social networking service. Here’s how it works: you follow the (protected) account, and as soon as the bot follows you back you can use a variety of commands through direct messages sent to the account. RealEstate.com’s Housewatch can respond to simple commands to automatically deliver data on everything from median home values to neighborhood crime statistics and monthly mortgage calculations. To get an overview of which commands are supported, you can DM the word ‘commands’ to the bot, but here’s the full list: Stats - median home price (by city) Value - home value (by address) Income - median, per capita and median disposable income (by city) Weather - monthly high and low temperatures (by city) Demographics - population count and density (by city) Cost - cost of living including local sales tax and a ranking of household expenses based on an average of 100 (by city) Transportation - median travel time to work in minutes, and average use of public transportation (by city) Environmental - air pollution and ozone indices based on an average of 100 (by city) Crime - total, personal and property crime rankings, based on an average of 100 (by city) Fixed - monthly loan payments including insurance and taxes Equity - amount of home equity using current value minus outstanding mortgage balances Amort - full amortization schedule including monthly payment, total interest paid and total amount paid over the lifetime of the loan Information sent in response to most of these commands will evidently include a link to more comprehensive information found on the RealEstate.com website, but the company has humans on Twitter who can guide people looking for more info as well (Dennis Kuntz aka @RealTweet). Ironically, Kuntz appears to be on holiday so the automated responses will have to do for the moment. All in all, it’s pretty cool way to get access to this type of information from RealEstate.com, even if I’m not sure how many people exactly will be using it, unless they’re die-hard Twitter fans who refuse to simply visit the website and also happen to be looking for a house while tweeting. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

WeFi’s Directory Nearly 30 Million WiFi Hotspots Strong, Raises More Funding Posted: 04 Aug 2009 07:17 AM PDT Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pitango Venture Capital are pouring more capital into WeFi, operator of a global, community-based network of WiFi hotspots, in an undisclosed Series B round of funding and following an earlier round by both investors secured back in May 2007. The follow-up financing was provided to support WeFi's business and financial needs, and according to the release is being allocated toward expanding development, marketing efforts, and strengthening unspecified partnerships. The WeFi community so far has mapped over 30 million WiFi access points, and counting. Next to this directory and the community formed around it, the startup boasts a free software program that allows users to automatically connect to WiFi locations wherever they are. The tool, which was previously only available for Windows and Mac users, is increasingly finding its way to mobile devices, which makes a lot of sense. More specifically, the company has recently introduced applications for the Windows Mobile, Android and Symbian platform. Additionally, WeFi recently announced the launch of WeROK, a mobile entertainment / communications portal as well as the opening of WeFiApps, a WiFi powered app store for mobile tools. WeFi was established in February 2006 by Yossi Vardi, Tamir Scherzer, Arnon Kohavi and Shimon Scherzer, and is incorporated in Delaware, U.S. with R&D facilities in Israel. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The Future of Fabrication Is Here: Shapeways Announces Stainless Steel Printing Posted: 04 Aug 2009 06:47 AM PDT Sure you're not going to make a Hatori Hanzo sword - yet - but Shapeways, a 3D fabrication service, has just announced stainless steel printing, allowing you to make steel objects as easily as you would made resin or plastic prototypes. That's right: something that took our ancient ancestors generations to perfect is now available to anyone with a CAD/CAM program and some Red Bull.

Ginipic: Neat Image Search App For Web And Desktop Posted: 04 Aug 2009 06:10 AM PDT Ginipic is a nice desktop application that allows you to crawl a host of photo sharing services as well as your own machine for pictures, making it a close to ideal image search tool. Can’t believe it took me so long to discover it (Orli was quicker than me). It’s basically a tool that you can dock on your desktop and use whenever you’re in need of imagery (which obviously applies to us here at TechCrunch quite often). Simply select a source (local pictures, Flickr, Photobucket, Google, Bing, etc.) and enter a search term, and the tool returns a nice canvas-view of the results. If you want, you can filter down based on file size, data, width, height, weight etc. until you find what you’re looking for. When you click through to a result, Ginipic (gotta love that name) shows you a preview of the picture. You can then favorite it, share it on your usual social networks, set it as your desktop background, save it to disk or a built-in lightbox that contains your desired selection of pictures. All your searches are saved so you can go back to your history quite easily, and I completely dig the fact that you can easily drag and drop pictures from results to the desktop or other applications. Only thing missing I can think of is a basic, built-in photo editor that would enable me to crop and resize images without leaving the app. Otherwise, it’s all good. You wouldn’t tell from the design and smoothness of the feature-packed application, but it’s the work of a startup that completely bootstrapped the whole thing. The Israeli company, currently only 3 employees strong, did inform me that they’re currently initiating talks with potential investors and hope to raise some seed funding soon. CEO Lior Weinstein tells me there’s a revenue stream they can tap into (besides offering a paid ‘pro’ version): some parties have already approached the young startup to see if they could get a company-branded version of its software. One note regarding software requirements though: Ginipic currently only works on Windows computers with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installed. A Mac version should be available ‘in the near future’. If you can, try it out and let us know what you think. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Spotify Closing New Financing At €200 Million Valuation; Music Labels Already Shareholders Posted: 04 Aug 2009 05:01 AM PDT Has European music startup Spotify finally figured out the online music business? Some big investors seem to think so. Rumors surfaced today that the company is raising a new round of financing of $50 million or so, at valuation of $250 million. We’ve confirmed those rumors from a source close to the company, and have uncovered lots more information about the secretive startup. First, we’ve confirmed that Asian investor Li Ka-Shing, who invested in Facebook in 2007, will invest in this round, as will a yet to be finalized venture firm. Also, data on previous financings was not completely accurate. Last October there were rumors that the company had raised €15.3 million from Northzone Ventures and Creandum at a €71.6 million pre-money valuation. In fact, that round was closer to €20 million, and included investments from the big music labels - Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music Group. All of the labels, says our source, paid the same price for the stock that the venture capitalists did, other than one label that got in very early. That deal valued the company at €100 million, and secured (as much as possible) the long term support of the big music labels. The new financing will bring in new “strategic” investors, which include rights holders in other geographic locations, according to our source. And while new investors are balking at the $250 million valuation, strong demand from venture capitalists is supposedly driving this deal to a close. The company has yet to launch in the U.S., but boasts 2 million UK users, its biggest market. They are also launched in Germany and Sweden. Users can listen to music for free on a downloaded application with advertising, or pay a premium fee to remove the ads. Some labels are supposedly making more money now from Spotify than iTunes in the markets the service is available. Keep an eye on this company. And let’s hope it launches in the U.S. soon. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

iLike’s Pushtastic iPhone App Lets You Know When Your Favorite Bands Are Coming To Town Posted: 04 Aug 2009 04:05 AM PDT iLike is launching a new iPhone application today that takes advantage of the iPhone 3.0 update’s new features in some of the best ways that we’ve seen yet. Dubbed “Local Concerts”, the application lets you follow any artist you’d like and receive alerts whenever they announce that they’re coming to a local venue. For anyone who has ever tried to keep tabs on their local music scene, this is going to be a must-have. You can grab the free app here. Using the app is pretty straightforward: it allows you to view all venues in your area, with concert listings for events that are going on in the near future or further down the line. But it also includes a number of nifty features that the iPhone didn’t previously support. One of these is automated personalization — the application can look at your iPhone or iPod Touch’s library, and determine which artists you should probably be following (though you’re free to adjust the list on your own). Once you’ve found a concert you’d like to attend, the app includes links to sites where you can purchase tickets. Whenever you’ve got an alert, you’ll see a message pop up on your iPhone (much like an SMS message would) regardless of if you have the application open. Now, iLike has previously offered a more basic application on the iPhone but it was much more basic — if you forgot to check the application manually, you wouldn’t know that your band was coming to town or their tickets were about to go on sale. And the old app didn’t have the automatic artist detection, either. The one thing I wish the app did have was an option to not only determine which artists you’d like to follow based on their appearance in your music library, but also to take into account the number of times you actually listen to those artists. Obviously this would make things a bit more complicated, but there are plenty of artists I have on my iPhone simply because I feel obligated to fill the device’s storage space to the brim. In any case, iLike’s current suggestion system will be plenty helpful for most people. You can see it in action in the video embed below. Alongside today’s launch, iLike is also releasing some of the initial stats for its custom iPhone app platform, which it launched in May. Over 250 artists have now used the platform to build their own applications, including Reba McEntire, Ingrid Michaelson, and Rusted Root. The applications allow artists to build rich iPhone apps — including music, video, concert listings, and Twitter feeds — with a minimum of effort It also taps into iLike’s syndication platform, which means content can be delivered to iLike’s 50 million fans easily. iLike’s Local Concert Demo iLike’s Artist Platform Demo Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill & James Taylor Rip Facebook Hard In Funny People Posted: 04 Aug 2009 03:40 AM PDT Let’s start off by saying the clip below, taken from the new Adam Sandler movie Funny People, is NSFW. So don’t click it if you don’t want to deal with a lot of swearing. About Facebook. And apologies for the atrocious quality. The studio said it would takes weeks or something to get all the signoffs for approval, so we just found the movie on the interwebs and used that. In other words, watch this ASAP before it’s taken down, because it’s highly unlikely the studio will simply put up a bunch of ads on YouTube and realize this is great viral marketing for the movie. Yesterday I showed a clip from the movie showing Seth Rogen asking "I wonder if Tom and Craig from Craigslist would ever get in a fight….Who's tougher? Tom has more friends…Craig has weirder friends though. Craig has friends that are willing to do a lot more for cash, I'll say that." But the really shocking stuff were the "f**ck Facebook, In the Face" comments. Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and, yes James Taylor all say it. Plus a lot of other quips, like MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson asking Sandler “Do you actually use MySpace?” Sandler replies “No, no no. I f*ck girls, Tom. I don’t have time for that.” In all there’s about 5 solid minutes of MySpace footage, most of which is shot in front of a big MySpace logo on the stage. Interesting use of the brand. I’m not sure I would have gone in that direction. See the movie though. Best one this summer so far after Star Trek. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Social Recruiting Startup KODA Completes $3 Million Round Of Angel Funding Posted: 04 Aug 2009 02:41 AM PDT Social recruitment service KODA.us has just raised $1 million in funding from a group of private angel investors, bringing the total of seed investment injected into the San Francisco startup to $3 million. KODA.us essentially wants to bring social networking and job recruiting together into one unified service, which it claims is “more professional than Facebook but more personal than LinkedIn”. The idea is that by broadening the resume job seekers can submit or upload with personal attributes and relevant life experience, employers could get more extensive information about potential candidates based on profiles that are more personal than those usually found on traditional recruitment sites. On the other hand, KODA wants to give employers themselves the opportunity to portray job openings within the context of organizational branding, so that potential job candidates can get a feel of the corporate culture within companies before actually applying. The site has only been in beta for two months after being in the making for the past two years. Jeff Berger, Co-Founder and CEO of KODA explains why he thinks traditional job boards are not cutting it anymore: "Using a job board is like searching for a needle in a haystack. KODA gives you more needles, less haystack, and we've developed proprietary technology that facilitates a smoother recruitment process for both candidates and employers." I’m not so sure online job boards are that unsatisfactory at all, and this isn’t the first service to try and marry social networking with online recruiting. So far, I haven’t seen too many of those ventures get any significant traction, and I honestly think LinkedIn, XING and other comparable professionally-oriented social networks do a fine job with the recruitment part of the equation, even within the target group KODA is eying (GenY’ers). That said, KODA says it’s seeing increasing traction even while it’s only been in beta for a short while, claiming it has established relationships with over 350 corporations, non-profit organizations and private businesses and already featuring thousands of job opportunities in various U.S. cities and regions. The main reason it has achieved the latter is that its crawler can pull up-to-date job listings directly from employers' websites and put them on display on KODA.us. I’m skeptical about KODA’s ability to make waves in this space. Your take? Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Yahoo Shuts Bix Down. Did Anyone Notice? Posted: 04 Aug 2009 01:57 AM PDT It must be disconcerting to a big Internet company to shut down a whole website and nobody even notices. Not even a short note on Twitter from a concerned user until now. But that’s what apparently happened. At some point Yahoo shut down Bix, a karaoke and contest website that they acquired in late 2006. Yes, at some point in 2006 someone at Yahoo said “Karaoke? Contests? We gotta own that!” Six days ago at least it was still up and running at bix.yahoo.com. Now that just redirects to m.www.yahoo.com. We first wrote about Bix in July 2006 and then again in August 2006. The company had raised $6.77 million from Sutter Hill Ventures, Trinity, and others prior to the acquisition. If anyone knows when exactly this shut down, we want to know. It at least needs a proper burial before dropping into the deadpool. We’ve also got an email in to Yahoo PR. Thanks for noticing, @charliebravo. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Bill.com Raises $8.5 Million To Streamline Business Bill Payments Posted: 03 Aug 2009 11:27 PM PDT Bill.com has closed an $8.5 million funding round led by August Capital, with previous investors DCM and Emergence Capital also participating in the round. As part of the deal, August Capital’s David Hornik will be joining Bill.com’s board. Bill.com has now raised a total of $17 million. Bill.com looks to help businesses streamline the convoluted processes that are often involved in paying bills at large companies. Unlike your typical personal bill payments, which simply require hopping onto your bank’s website and transferring funds, large busineses typically have fairly complex approval processes in place before a bill gets paid: various managers have to sign off on the bills, and then they have to get sent to the finance department that handles the actual payments. Even worse, most businesses still use inefficient paper documents throughout the process. Bill.com takes the process digital. To use it, you fax your bills to a specified phone number (any bills that come in digitally can simply be Emailed into the service). Bill.com automatically scans the document, and lets you Email it to anyone who needs to sign off on the bill before it is paid (mangers click a special link to indicate they approve). Once everyone has signed off, the finance department can use Bill.com’s payment system to make the actual transactions. The service uses OCR to archive all documents for later searching. And while the service caters in part directly to businesses, Bill.com also appeals to accounting firms, as it can streamline the way they process their clients’ bills. Bill.com charges a base fee of $24.99 a month for one user, with each additional user running $9.99 (there’s also a small fee associated with each check payment). It’s hard to gauge just how much money companies are saving in terms of time saved using the system, but VP Marketing Jeff Schultz says that companies are reporting upwards of 50% deductions in the amount of time taken to pay bills. Bill.com was founded by René Lacerte, an entrepreneur who has proven he knows what he’s doing in this space — he previously founded online payroll service PayCycle, which was just acquired last month by Intuit for $170 million. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

The Kevin Rose-Ashton Kutcher Bromance Is Bad For Digg Posted: 03 Aug 2009 10:38 PM PDT Revision3’s PR firm is urging me to write about the upcoming Diggnation episode being filmed in at the Palms Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas with Kevin Rose and Ashton Kutcher. And I aim to please. But what I can’t figure out is, how do projects with Ashton Kutcher like this and the disastrous 24HoursAtSundance earlier this year help Digg find relevance in today’s world? Sure, Kevin gets to hang out with the Hollywood crowd and become BFF with Ashton. And yes, I’m somewhat interested in hearing all about “Ashton Kutcher’s Web 2.0 Strategy,” as pitched to me in the email (in the same way that I can’t not look at accidents as I drive by). But none of the story ideas pitched to us (Ashton and Kevin: Why Traditional Hollywood cares about Unconventional Silicon Valley, How mainstream consumer products are merging with new media, Why Ashton thought it was important, in fact, critical to reach Diggnation's audience), along with “exclusive access” to Kevin and Ashton, really interest me. What I really want to know is this: Why is Kevin Rose screwing around in Las Vegas with a movie star when a fricking URL redirect service is preparing to eat their lunch? Digg isn’t the shiny new startup that it once was. Twitter has almost twice the audience that Digg has (45 million v. 24 million worldwide uniques in June according to Comscore). As recently as March Twitter was still smaller than Digg. Now, it’s not even close. Digg’s product needs serious attention from Kevin. The recent DiggBar changes that enraged users caught Kevin off guard because he was on vacation in China and didn’t know what was happening. He needs to pay attention. Or else relinquish his control of the Digg product to someone else who’ll pay attention. The next six months are critical for Digg. They are rolling out a new real time product to try to compete with Bit.ly and Twitter. It seems to me that Digg’s investors would be happier if he were working on that, instead of partying in Vegas with the guy from Dude, Where’s My Car? That being said, I still can’t wait to hear Kutcher’s Web 2.0 strategy and his advice on “merging the worlds of mainstream entertainment and new mediums like Internet Television.” Update: Kevin Rose response in comments below: Mike, I set aside two days a month to shoot episodes of diggnation (this has been the routine for the last 4yrs), and we shoot several live shows per year. Without a doubt the podcast has proven to be a great tool to spread the word. Sorry about the strange pitch from the PR agency. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Dreams Do Come True: JibJab Lets You Star In Weird Al’s Latest Music Video Posted: 03 Aug 2009 09:13 PM PDT We’re big fans of JibJab, the popular comedy site that offers an arrary of original parody videos and Ecards, most of which you can customize with goofy pictures of your friends. The site has previously Elfed the TechCrunch crew, stuck our editors into a Pepsi Ad and more. But tonight, JibJab is really outdoing itself, adding an extra boost of star power that takes its videos to the next level: it’s letting you appear in a music video with parody song legend Weird Al. Scoff all you want, but the man really is quite brilliant (for the record, I’ve had Amish Paradise memorized for the last 13 years). He’s also got quite a following, with 950,000 followers on Twitter. The JibJab video is notable for being among the first officially licensed music videos that let fans customize the action using their own photos. The official video is available for free for anyone to watch at JibJab.com (it’s also the same video that will be distributed to iTunes, MTV, etc.), but if you want to personalize using the ‘Staring You’ feature you’ll have to become a paid member. Memberships run $15.99 per year, or $7.99 per month. Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today! This kind of video has proven very popular for JibJab — since launching the Starring You feature in August 2007, the site has seen 122 million streams from its homepage (the number of streams from embed likely puts that number over 200 million). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Google Quietly Quadruples Its Newspaper Archives Posted: 03 Aug 2009 08:57 PM PDT A short post on the Google News blog today revealed a big number: Google recently quadrupled the number of newspaper articles in its News Archive Search. You may recall that at TechCrunch50 last year, Google’s Marissa Mayer demoed this powerful news tool that can search the text of publications far back in time — some over 200 years old. The recent update saw Google add a bunch of new publications, including some from different parts of the world. And it even has a newspaper in the archives from 1753 now. The fact that it’s searchable is fairly insane. Google launched with “millions” of searchable articles, so now we have to assume it has millions times four (Google didn’t give an exact number). But this along with its book scanning efforts are getting impressive in their size and scope (but the book scanning is not without controversy). Of course, why Google primarily cares about archiving these old publications is not just for information, but also for the fact that it can sell contextual AdSense ads against them. Look at this article from the Manila Standard about a volcano eruption, it features an ad to get an emergency management degree. [photo: flickr/DRB62] Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Google Continues Losing Long-Time Employees To VMware Posted: 03 Aug 2009 07:33 PM PDT Last month, we were first to report that Google Engineering Director Mark Lucovsky was leaving the company to join VMware. Lucovsky was with the company for nearly 5 years and was very instrumental in its APIs. And now they’re losing another long-time employee who worked in a similar capacity — and yes, he’s also going to VMware. Derek Collison has been with Google since 2004, most recently serving as a Technical Director working on its search APIs (specifically the AJAX ones) much like Lucovsky. Now he’s joining his once and future colleague at VMware, where he’ll apparently be working directly with him again. Collison tweeted out the news of his departure today, and engaged some of his former co-workers on FriendFeed as to what his role will be with VMware. “Joining up with Vadim and Mark Lucovsky for a bit at VMWare to do some cloud computing stuff,” he wrote. “Vadim” is Vadim Spivak, who formerly worked at Google as a Gmail engineer before, yes, leaving to go to VMware. Certainly, three people out of thousands is not a pattern, but it is interesting that all these of these guys left Google, where they had been for a long time, around the same time, to go work together at an already established company. Plenty of Googlers leave to go to startups, places like Twitter and FriendFeed, no doubt dreaming of riches and more control, but VMware IPOed in 2007. Well, at least Google got its CEO back full-time again today. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Finding Family Is Big Business: Ancestry.com Files For $75 Million IPO Posted: 03 Aug 2009 05:30 PM PDT After going a year with nary a venture-backed IPO in sight, here’s more proof that things are finally beginning to perk up: Ancestry.com, a genealogy service that allows user to map out and search for their family history, has filed for a $75 million IPO. You can see the full SEC filing here. Ancestry.com offers some basic functionality for free, but to tap into the site’s vast library of historical records, which includes billions of documents and photographs, users have to sign up for a premium subscription. The company claims nearly 1 million subscribers, with an average revenue of $16.50 per subscriber. With monthly churn of 4.1% and a acquisition cost of $67.30, the company can make its money back in four months for each subscriber. In the last six months, Ancestry has made $107 million, with profits of $8 million and a run rate of $200 million. Back in October 2007 Spectrum Equity Investors led a $300 million buyout of Ancestry.com’s parent company, The Generations Network (which now calls itself Ancestry.com Inc). But it wasn’t a complete buyout, with employees and possibly some outside investors retaining equity in the company. Ancestry has been on the web for over twelve years, but its roots extend back to 1984, when the company published family history books. The company now employs more than 600 people. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Pre Philosophy: What Is Palm Thinking With These Ads? Posted: 03 Aug 2009 05:00 PM PDT Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half. -John Wanamaker Advertising and branding are very complicated and very unpredictable fields, and success can be measured according to any number of metrics. Modernista, the ad agency behind the soft-talking-lady ads that only occasionally seem to be talking about phones, seems to be measuring success based on attention. Of course, the attention is almost entirely negative, but that doesn't faze them. In an article in Ad Age, Executive Creative Director at Modernista, Gary Koepke, discusses the oft-maligned "Ms. Hope" spots. The Pre is probably being talked about more than other phones right now because of the marketing and advertising, and that's a good thing. Could the ads work harder to show exactly how the phone works? Yes, but we knew it would be polarizing people to have a woman not shout at them and tell an interesting story. "Polarizing" is industry-standard code for "universally mocked," in case you're confused.

Mobclix Takes On AdMob By Roping Together 20 Mobile Ad Networks Into An Exchange Posted: 03 Aug 2009 04:39 PM PDT iPhone app developers who choose to go the free route typically try to make money by placing ads in their apps. But now there are so many mobile ad networks competing to serve those ads that iPhone app analytics startup Mobclix is creating a mobile ad network exchange. App developers sign up with their ad inventory and ad networks bid for the spots based on age, gender, location, and other factors. The ads being served change automatically, based on which ad network is bidding the highest to reach the users of that particular app. Mobclix wants to provide one dashboard for app developers to track and monetize their apps. It also lets advertisers buy across a variety of apps based on demographic, geo-targeting, and behavioral characteristics. The idea is to aggregate both apps and advertising to reach scale. The exchange supports 20 mobile ad networks at launch, including Google, Yahoo, Jumptap, and VideoEgg. One ad network that is missing, however, is AdMob. As perhaps the largest mobile ad network, AdMob’s absence is noticeable. But AdMob does not support the mediation layers required for Mobclix to talk to its servers. (If you are the biggest mobile ad network, it is not in your interest to make it easy for developers to switch). AdMob also offers its own quasi-exchange where app developers can swap ad inventory for traffic with each other. In the end, app developers will go to wherever they can get the highest price for their ads, while advertisers will gravitate to the ad networks or exchanges with the most inventory. At this point maybe only an exchange that ropes together multiple ad networks can compete with AdMob. Update: Despite the flame war going on in comments, I have confirmed that indeed Mobclix has signed up 20 ad networks to be part of its exchange. These include Google AdSense for iPhone (in beta), Yahoo Mobile Publishers, Jumptap, Quattro, Millennial Media, VideoEgg, Adconian, and Mojiva. Mobclix already had relationships with these ad networks as part of its existing ad yield optimization service. Moreover about half of the 3,500 iPhone app publishers who use Mobclix have already opted into the ad exchange program, making a collective ad inventory of 4 billion impressions a month available for bidding. Now it is up to the ad networks to start bidding for that inventory. At least one of Mobclix’s competitors has been floating the idea of its own ad exchange. Perhaps it did not like being upstaged. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Server.com Sold For A Solid $770,000 Posted: 03 Aug 2009 04:38 PM PDT You’d think in the midst of a recession domain name sales would become less common and be negotiated for far less than the high-priced .com acquisitions we remember from the late nineties and during the dotcom boom. The reality, however, is that we’ve been seen a remarkable amount of high-profile, generic domain names go at fairly high prices for the past 8 months or so (e.g. Toys.com, Candy.com, YP.com, Vibrators.com, etc.). Maybe professional domainers and regular companies with an attractive portfolio are more willing to sell now that cash is in shorter supply than it was before the economy collapsed, or maybe these are all calculated bets made by companies that have the capital required to purchase / invest in quality domain names. Most likely, it’s a combination of both. Either way, we haven’t seen the end of it: earlier today, server.com was sold for a healthy $770,000 by domain brokerage house Sedo, reports DomainNameWire. Currently parked, the domain name averages only about 12K unique visitors per month according to Compete. Hence why I think this is a decent deal for the owner - an individual from Boston, MA - although a lot of professionals from the sector will argue that he could have fetched a lot more for this one. No word on who actually bought it, but that information will likely surface sooner or later. More domains were auctioned off today by Sedo (listed here) but the most apparent ones were definitely server.com, jesus.net ($124,337), omg.com ($80,000) and enlargement.com ($56,000). (Picture via TFTS) Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Twitter Reaches 44.5 Million People Worldwide In June (comScore) Posted: 03 Aug 2009 04:09 PM PDT Well, Twitter didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize for its role in getting the word out about the Iran election protests earlier this summer, but it did gain about 7 million new visitors in the month of June. Twitter’s website attracted a total of 44.5 million unique visitors worldwide in June, 2009, according to comScore. Twitter’s worldwide audience grew a healthy 19 percent from May, 2009 (and an even healthier 1,460 percent from June, 2008, when its worldwide audience was just 2.9 million). With 20 million of its visitors coming from the U.S., Twitter’s audience is now 55 percent international. ComScore now counts it as the No. 52 largest site in the world (bigger than ESPN, just shy of the BBC and Craigslist). These estimates only count traffic to Twitter.com. Since more than half of Twitter users don’t even go to the Website, and instead use Twitter apps to consume and publish Tweets, Twitter’s total audience is even larger. But comScore provides a consistent measure of its growth. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Let The Google Billboard Spoof Videos Begin Posted: 03 Aug 2009 03:27 PM PDT The massive Google billboard campaign underway now to promote Google Apps is the best spoof opportunity since the comic book announcing Google Chrome last year (here was our effort). And the first ones are starting to roll in. Here’s the spoof, followed by the official version. Can you do better? We want to see it. Spoof: Official: Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Another Startup Falls Prey To The iPhone/Google Voice Crossfire Posted: 03 Aug 2009 02:50 PM PDT If you’ve been paying attention to the tech news at all over the last week, you’re already very familiar with the outrage that Apple has sparked over its rejection of Google Voice for the App Store, and its ban of all third-party applications that tap into the service. But now the fallout of the Google Voice debacle is having an impact on even more independent developers — Apple is apparently holding off on approving applications that could even be tangentially related to Google Voice. The application is question is Line2, which was built by Toktumi, a startup that specializes in helping small businesses use their mobile phones and computers to create office-grade phone systems, even when their employees are scattered across the country. Line2 would allow users to use two different numbers with their iPhones — one which they could hand out for business calls, and the other for personal. This setup would allow employees to keep their personal numbers private, and also allows businesses to set up professional features on the business line, with features like an phone directory (”Press 1 for sales…”) and a single support number that calls the mobile phones of multiple employees. Given how many businesses are adopting the virtual office approach, there’s little doubt that this technology could prove very popular (the recently-released BlackBerry version is already starting to gain traction). Unfortunately, Line2 is currently sitting in App Store limbo. The app’s developers intitally submitted it on June 5th, and it sat for weeks waiting for approval with no information other than Apple’s automated “this app is requiring unexpected additional time for review” messages. Finally, on June 23, Toktumi learned that the application had been rejected because it required people to pay through its website rather than Apple’s subscription services that are integrated with the iPhone 3.0 update. Toktumi attempted to point out that Salesforce was allowed to offer an application that conducted transactions through the web, but in the end it decided to simply modify the app to comply with Apple’s requests. The company submitted a new version of the Line2 app on July 13, at which point it was asked to submit a demo account for testing (the company had already submitted one). To no one’s surprise, they got another Email a few days later stating that the process would require additional time. And then the Google Voice bomb dropped. Apple removed every related app on the App Store, citing the rationale that they duplicated existing iPhone functionality and would confuse users. CEO Peter Sisson was understandably concerned. Line2 doesn’t have anything to do with Google Voice, but it does make use of so-called “virtual numbers”, which relay calls made to one number (like your business line) back to your iPhone number. And it also offers other telephony features that ‘duplicate’ what’s offered by the iPhone. So Sisson reached out to Philip Schiller, Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing, who has previously dealt with developers on an individual basis when application approvals have taken unusually long. Sisson sent his Email to Schiller on July 27th — nearly two months since the app was originally submitted. Schiller responded, stating that he would get back to Sisson by July 29th. That didn’t happen. Sisson sent another message to Schiller with a number of reasons why Line2 was actually good for Apple (it encourages small businesses to use the iPhone) and also pointed out why it wouldn’t cut into AT&T’s revenues (the app doesn’t offer any SMS functionality at all, and all calls are still performed using standard AT&T minutes). Schiller hasn’t responded, and Apple has gone almost totally silent on the matter with no other response than that the application is “still in process”. At this point, I doubt Sisson will be getting a response any time soon. If Apple did grant approval to the app, it would show that duplicating functionality wasn’t really Apple’s reason for banning Google Voice (of course, countless other apps mimic portions of the iPhone’s functionality). That kind of inconsistency would be nothing new to the App Store, but now that the FCC is launching an inquiry into the marketplace’s approval processes, you can be sure that Apple isn’t keep on taking any chances. The problem, of course, is that Apple has never established consistent guidelines for developers to follow. That may change soon: the FCC inquiry may force them to change their ways, especially if the process is revealed to be as chaotic as most developers suspect. Until that happens though, we’re only going to keep hearing of more casualties of the App Store’s black box. Photo by Matt Ryall. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

FTC Commends Schmidt For Stepping Down, But The Investigation Continues Posted: 03 Aug 2009 02:27 PM PDT So, by now you’ve probably heard that Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board of directors this morning. You’d think that this would be the end of the FTC investigation into the close ties between Apple and Google, right? Wrong. The FTC has released a statement commending Schmidt and Apple’s mutual decision for him to step down, but it warns that the investigation is not over yet. Here’s their exact wording: "We have been investigating the Google/Apple interlocking directorates issue for some time and commend them for recognizing that sharing directors raises competitive issues, as Google and Apple increasingly compete with each other," said Bureau of Competition Director Richard Feinstein. "We will continue to investigate remaining interlocking directorates between the companies." So what gives? Well first of all, Schmidt is hardly the only tie between the two companies. Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson remains on the board for both Apple and Google. While his conflict is obviously not as big as Schmidt’s was, it wouldn’t be all that surprising to see Levinson leave one of those board seats now that Google and Apple have businesses that are increasingly overlapping. Also interesting is the tie between former Vice President Al Gore with Apple and Google. While he resides on Apple’s board, he also serves as a senior advisor to Google. And he’s a partner at Kleiner Perkins which has ties to both Apple and Google. And that’s just the overlap in people. What this really boils down to is what, if anything, the two companies are doing with regards to their products to be anti-competitive. There has been no shortage of talk and speculation that Apple and Google have worked together behind the scenes on some key deals. One of those was multi-touch support in the Android operating system. Google has so far not included it in Android, and it was supposedly done because of an agreement with Apple. Also, Google recently revealed that it had made a Google Latitude app for Apple’s iPhone, but that it instead turned it into a web app at Apple’s behest. The reason was that Apple said it too closely resembled its own Maps application — which Google also helped create. And now we have the whole Google Voice situation. Apple rejected the Google Voice app and removed all the related apps that it had previously accepted. And things get even more complicated when you consider that while AT&T is issuing what appear to be non-denial denials. A few sites, including this one, have heard that AT&T played a role in that. The FCC is looking into the matter separately from the FTC, but obviously, it’s at least somewhat related. So what’s the fallout from this continued investigation? Probably not too much. As we said, Levinson may have to choose a side and step down from one board. But it seems like if that happens, Gore could be safe, since he’s not technically a part of the “interlocking directorates,” as the FTC puts it. And as we wrote back in May when the FTC first launched this investigation, Schmidt was probably safe at the time, and it was more of a warning shot. And given his statement about having no plans to leave Apple’s board a few days later, he clearly thought so too. But then Chrome OS happened, and that changed everything. Schmidt was already excusing himself from the part of Apple meetings where they discussed the iPhone (because of Google Android), and now he would have likely had to do the same with OS X (because of Chrome OS). That’s what Apple CEO Steve Jobs more or less said in his statement this morning. But it seems like it’s this Google Voice business that really pushed the situation over the top. Not only was the FTC looking into the relationship between the companies, but now the FCC is. The fact that the FCC investigation was launched on Friday and this news comes to following Monday, seems to say a lot. Schmidt was always going to have to leave Apple’s board because of Chrome OS, but that is still months away. The FCC investigation seems to accelerate the departure process. The main goal of the FTC investigation was obviously Schmidt, which is why it released the statement today. But unless they find evidence of collusion in continuing the investigation, its part of this should conclude. But the FCC investigation will remain a very interesting one to watch. [photo: flickr/TheAlieness GiselaGiardino] CrunchBase Information Eric Schmidt Arthur D. Levinson Al Gore Google Apple Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Photobucket Founders To Leave News Corp. Posted: 03 Aug 2009 02:00 PM PDT The founders of photo sharing site Photobucket, Alex Welch and Darren Crystal, are leaving News Corp./Fox, we’ve confirmed. The two sold Photobucket to Fox Interactive in May 2007 for around $300 million. Welch and Crystal will leave the company at the end of August. Photobucket attracted 53 million worldwide visitors in June (Comscore worldwide) and remains one of the most popular photo hosting sites on the Internet. The site first launched six years ago. The two aren’t commenting on the timing of their exit or what they plan to do next. The earnout on the acquisition ended in May 2009, and it isn’t unusual for founders to leave once the acquisition has been fully paid out. Given their history, I’m sure they’ll be starting something new shortly. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

PayFail: PayPal And Its APIs Go Down, Online Shopping Grinds To A Halt Posted: 03 Aug 2009 11:54 AM PDT There’s a mad rush of tips coming into us right now that PayPal’s online purchasing service is down for the count. While the site itself appears to be loading (though very slowly), numerous buyers and venders are reporting that sales are not going through. A quick scan of Twitter tells the same story. And it looks like it has been down for something like an hour and a half now. [Update below, it looks like after something like 2 hours of downtime, the service is starting to come back.] Here’s what PayPal is officially saying on its developer site: EVENT DETAILS ——————– Service: Live Site During the time listed below you may have or currently are experiencing the following: Buyers may experience error “Sorry - your last action could not be completed” on trying to login to www.paypal.com. Payments via API are intermittently unavailable. Affected Product(s): - Website - PayPal APIs Start Time: Aug 03, 10:15 AM PDT (Aug 03, 6:15 PM BST) End Time: On-Going Our technical teams are working diligently to resolve the issue. We will provide updates until the issue is resolved. We apologize for any impact caused by this incident. Sincerely, PayPal Merchant Technical Services So there you go, both the main site and the all-important PayPal APIs are not working. Not good. It will be interesting to see how PayPal follows this up. A lot of merchants undoubtedly lost a lot — and I mean a lot — of money today. When Rackspace had its recent failures, it noted that it would likely have to reimburse customers to the tune of millions of dollars. eBay, which owns PayPal, could be looking at a similar situation. Update: As of noon PT, things are starting to come back online. Here’s the update from PayPal: Update: This notification is to inform you that we have started recovering. Some intermittent issues remain which we are currently addressing. CrunchBase Information PayPal Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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