The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Venture Exits Still Anemic In Third Quarter, Down Nearly 50 Percent (Charts)
- Six Apart Opens Up TypePad APIs, Relaunches Pownce As TypePad Motion
- New Ooma Telo Is Here, Let the Free* Calls Begin
- FOWA: The 2009 Web App Survey Results Are In
- Spotify Just Extended Playing Offline To The Desktop
- Buzzd Is An iPhone App Built For Party Crashing
- Confirmed: Delivery Agent Raises $25 Million For Entertainment Commerce Platform
- Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Lays The Smack Down On Cloud Computing (Again) – Video
- MySpace Music Launches Down Under: Now Live In Australia And New Zealand
- Twingly Channels: A Personalized, Social, Real-Time Memetracker
- Cry Us A River: Timberlake Bails On His Own SF Party To Go Dress Up As Sean Parker
- Zuckerberg Moves Up The Forbes 400 List. Net Worth Now $2 Billion
- Apple Gets A Mapmaker. Where Does That Leave Google?
- Twitter’s Geolocation API Appears To Be Live. But Most Of You Are Lost.
- OpenCandy Suggests Apps You Might Actually Want During Installs, Lands NitroPDF
- BumpTop Goes Multi-Touch. Um, Awesome.
- Bojam Launches Web-Based Collaborative Sound Studio
- Reader Survey: What Makes You Tick?
- Failblog, Engadget, and Joystiq Now Selling Video Ads Through Viddler AdWorks
- Twitter’s New ‘Lists’ Feature Finally Introduces Grouping, Offers An Alternative To The SUL
- OneRiot Believes It Has A Way To Monetize The Realtime Web With RiotWise
- Google Wave: There Will Be Backlash
- Facebook’s Plan To Trounce Orkut In India May Be Working
- Facebook Just Made It Super Easy To Put Connect On Your Site
| Venture Exits Still Anemic In Third Quarter, Down Nearly 50 Percent (Charts) Posted: 01 Oct 2009 07:32 AM PDT Despite a couple large IPOs (LogMein and A123Systems) and a steady but tempered flow of mergers and acquisitions, financial exits for venture-backed companies remained anemic in the third quarter of 2009. Data released by both Dow Jones VentureSource and the National Venture Capital Association/Thomson Reuters show declines in both M&A and IPO dollars. VentureSource counts $2.9 billion in combined M&A exits in the third quarter, 49 percent lower than a year ago. The NCVA tallies up a $1.8 billion total, which is down 46 percent. The two organizations have different sets of data, but they show similar trends. For example, VentureSource counts only the two IPOs mentioned above, whereas the NCVA also counts Cumberland Pharmaceuticals. That’s down from five venture backed IPOs in the second quarter. IPOs Down The IPO for battery-maker A123Systems last week was particularly strong, raising $380 million. LogMein’s IPO at the very beginning of the quarter raised $107 million, and Cumberland’s brought in $85 million, for a total of $572 million. That amount is down from the $720 million venture-backed IPOs brought in last quarter, but is up from the $188 million a year ago. Compared to year’s past, though, the IPO window is still fairly shut. The M&A picture wasn’t much brighter in the quarter. VentureSource tracked 71 deals worth $2.3 billion, down from $5.2 billion last year and $2.8 billion in the second quarter of this year. Some of the larger deals during the quarter were VMWare buying SpringSource for $362 million and Intuit buying Mint for $170 million. (Remember, these are only venture-backed exits. Deals for publicly traded companies like Adobe buying Omniture for $1.8 billion, Dell buying Perot Systems for $3.9 billion, or Xerox buying Affiliated Computer Services for $5.75 billion are not counted in these numbers). The NCVA’s data shows 62 M&A deals in the quarter (down from 88 a year ago), with disclosed values of $1.2 billion (down from $3.1 billion a year ago). And the returns aren’t looking so great either. VentureSource says the median acquisition price in the third quarter was $21 million, compared to a median amount of $17 million in equity funding raised prior to the acquisition. The NCVA similarly shows a decline in average deal size from $96 million a year ago, to $58 million. And the number of deals worth less than the money put into them is more than the number of deals that made money, which is normal. Average M&A Deal Size Drops Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco           |
| Six Apart Opens Up TypePad APIs, Relaunches Pownce As TypePad Motion Posted: 01 Oct 2009 07:25 AM PDT
This is an interesting move for a number of reasons. Let’s tackle TypePad Platform first and take a look at Six Apart’s forray into the community microblogging space afterwards. TypePad Platform and Developer Program The TypePad Platform will essentially enable developers to use structured social objects (think blogs, posts, comments, people, activities, groups and tags) to more easily build social applications on top of a cloud network. While this is obviously mostly a developer-oriented product, Six Apart CEO Chris Alden in a blog post wrote that this will also benefit bloggers, whether they’re part of a business or organization that uses TypePad for online publications or individual bloggers who share their life with a close circle of friends and family. For larger publishers and online businesses, Alden writes, the TypePad Platform could be another alternative for them to incorporate blogs and social networking into their websites, thus offering an alternative to local software solutions or hosted SaaS solutions. Personal bloggers will ultimately benefit from more applications that enhance TypePad’s core functionality, he expects. Starting today, interested programmers can head to the fresh TypePad Developer Program website to obtain an alpha version of the TypePad API for free, with commercial versions of the TypePad Platform set to debut later on. Time will tell if the initiative will end up creating an ecosystem of third-party developers much like rival Automattic has managed to assemble for WordPress over the years. TypePad Motion Six Apart recently added some Posterous-style microblogging flavor and real-time blogging capabilities to TypePad, but is now switching to full throttle with the launch of TypePad Motion. The new service is the inaugural open source app built by Six Apart developers for the new TypePad platform and incorporates many of the features of the late Pownce. It’s also reminiscent of Jaiku, Tumblr and the recently introduced Yahoo Meme service. The service is already live here, so I played around with it a little and found that it was far from anything remotely spectacular in terms of functionality or wealth of features. You log on with your Typepad account and add text (no character limit, links, photos, online videos and audio) to your Motion profile. Other community members can subscribe to your new blog and comment much like any other microblogging / lifestreaming service. That’s about it, although the open-source aspect is interesting for the future. Six Apart says the TypePad Motion app evolved from the Pownce codebase & community. It’s written in Python using the Django framework (GitHub). An example of a customized Motion blog is this showcase for the Future of Web Apps conference where the above announcements were made today. A leader playing a good hand by broadening and diversifying its product line, or too little, too late? What’s your take? Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| New Ooma Telo Is Here, Let the Free* Calls Begin Posted: 01 Oct 2009 07:24 AM PDT  Ooma might be onto something here. The VoIP provider is taking a different path with the Telo system: the phone calls are free. Like, you don't ever have to pay for calling your Mom. You can either use your own phones or the Ooma high-end DECT 6.0 handset. Sounds nice, eh? Too bad there's a huge admission price for the hardware.TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| FOWA: The 2009 Web App Survey Results Are In Posted: 01 Oct 2009 07:20 AM PDT
As we post this, the results are being presented to the audience at the Future Of Web Apps conference in London. You can also view the results here. Nearly one third of respondents have new applications with less than 100 users. But more than 25% of respondents have at least 10,000 users, and 12% have more than 100,000 users. Nearly half of respondents say that they’ve spent a surprising $0 on average to acquire those users, and nearly 75% have spent no more than $1 to acquire each new user. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Spotify Just Extended Playing Offline To The Desktop Posted: 01 Oct 2009 07:00 AM PDT
It also recently launched an iPhone app that only subscribers can use. But perhaps the hint of their strategy lay in the fact that on that app you could save playlists and tracks for offline playing (if, say, you were on a plane), though you can not access any kind of MP3 file for sharing of course. All that changes today because later today Spotify will extend the ‘Offline mode’ that is available on Spotify Mobile and bringing it to the desktop version of Spotify. Users will be limited to how much music they can download to offline mode – but this is surely a very interesting move which has implications for how people consume music. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Buzzd Is An iPhone App Built For Party Crashing Posted: 01 Oct 2009 06:00 AM PDT
With Buzzd, which is launching its free iPhone app today, you simply load the program and it will bring up a list of venues close to you that are currently popular based on people talking about them on Twitter and Buzzd. It also uses some location data pulled from Twitter. Right now, that data is pulled from users’s Twitter profiles, so it is imprecise, but with the Geolocation API (which may be sort of live already) that will soon change. If you click on a place, you can learn more about it, including how far away it is, its phone number, and a description of it. You can also see “buzzes” about it, meaning the things people are saying about a place on Twitter and in the Buzzd community. And you can “Buzz It,” meaning you can tell the community you are at a place and give a short description of what it is or why it’s good. And you can send that info to Twitter. To do all of that, you have to create an account on Buzzd and sign-in, but one nice thing about the service is that you can see all of this data without ever creating an account. If you really don’t care about buzzing data yourself, you can simply use it passively. There is certainly an upside to using data that is purely location-based, as it is with SocialGreat, but until location-based services truly take off, services with a lower barrier to entry, like Twitter, are going to have much more data to offer up. And you can clearly see that with Buzzd. Buzzd has actually been around for a little while, but it has mainly existed on the mobile web and as an app on the BlackBerry. There’s a good reason for this: It was one of the original BlackBerry Partners Fund receipients. But the lure of the iPhone proved too strong, and after one meek attempt at an app, this new version of Buzzd looks like the real deal. It’s not a complex app, but it’s good for what it does. Last month, the service had 500,000 active user over the web and its BlackBerry app, we’re told. Those numbers should undoubtedly jump with this new iPhone app. As it gains users, you can imagine them doing slightly more interesting things such as allowing users to say if a venue is good or bad, rather than just if they are there or not. The business model will revolve around advertising, but the company is doing some interesting things in terms of striking deals with some locations to get their places featured. You can find Buzzd here in the App Store. Again, it is a free download. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Confirmed: Delivery Agent Raises $25 Million For Entertainment Commerce Platform Posted: 01 Oct 2009 03:54 AM PDT  What recession? We’ve confirmed that startup Delivery Agent has just raised $25 million in Series D funding led by new investor Focus Ventures with T-Venture, Coral Group, Ironwood Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Worldview Technology Partners and Cardinal Venture Capital participating. This brings Delivery Agent’s total funding up to $60 million. In a nutshell, Delivery Agent helps TV networks monetize content through two distinct channels. First, the company creates online marketplaces for products and merchandise that are seen on television shows. Delivery Agent has signed on all the major networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, and MTV Networks. Similar to GumGum's ShopThisLook feature, Delivery Agent catalogues products appearing in movies and shows and then creates an e-commerce site where products can be purchases. By outsourcing all e-commerce for products seen on their networks to Delivery Agent, networks are able to monetize their content while keeping their overhead costs low. Delivery Agent’s second service is coordinating advertising from the brands that manufacture the products that are shown on a networks' TV shows. Delivery Agent will go through the index of products that will be airing on a show prior to when the episode airs, and then reach out to the brand and offer them the ability to buy an ad package for the show. Mike Fitzsimmons, Delivery Agent’s founder and CEO, tells me that the new funds will be used to develop “click-to-buy” applications for online video and mobile content. In fact, Delivery Agent will soon launch a partnership with a major cable operator that will allow consumers to click and buy a product they see on TV with their remote control. Fitzsimmons also add that Delivery Agent will be using the funds to pursue international growth, and launch their content-monetization services in markets in Europe and Asia. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Lays The Smack Down On Cloud Computing (Again) – Video Posted: 01 Oct 2009 01:43 AM PDT  According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is a paradigm of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. According to Larry Ellison, it's nonsense and water vapor. The chief executive of Oracle last week at the Churchill Club sat down with former Motorola CEO Ed Zander for a fireside chat about the future of the company he co-founded, the pending acquisition of Sun and the implications thereof, and the state of the economy in general. Most amusing however, was his ranting on cloud computing, captured on video by TechPulse360. Of course, we've heard his refreshingly critical take of the buzzword du jour before, but he continues to make it a valid point. (after the jump)TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| MySpace Music Launches Down Under: Now Live In Australia And New Zealand Posted: 30 Sep 2009 11:19 PM PDT
AU/NZ users will have access to the same features as the US site, including shareable playlists, artist activity feeds, and other social functionality. But there is at least one notable difference: while MySpace Music launched in the United States with Amazon as its partner for purchasing digital downloads, the AU/NZ version has teamed with Apple’s iTunes. MySpace wouldn’t comment on whether this is foreshadowing a larger partnership, but we may well see the Apple deal extend stateside. MySpace likely had an exclusive partnership with Amazon for the US launch, but it’s been a year (which may well have been the length of the deal), so it may soon be free to explore other options. Since launching last fall, MySpace Music has been something of a bright spot for the otherwise faltering social network. The site has seen a tenfold growth in traffic since launching, with the US portal drawing 18.95 million users (it’s also the #1 site in time spent for the all important 18-34 demographic, though some of this can be attributed to the fact that users can leave it playing in the background). MySpace Music also recently rolled out a much improved homepage and has seen a number of exclusive releases. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Twingly Channels: A Personalized, Social, Real-Time Memetracker Posted: 30 Sep 2009 10:10 PM PDT  A few weeks ago, we wrote about Swedish startup Twingly and its stealth memetracker Twingly Channels. Tonight, Twingly is launching in closed beta. In the past, Twingly has brought us a microblogging search tool, a search engine for blogs, and a global ranking system for blogs. Twingly Channels essentially lets users to create their own personalized real-time memetracker. To sign up for an invite, click here with the code “TechCrunch.” As we wrote previously, Twingly is a mix between Digg and FriendFeed. Twingly Channels lets users to create their own personalized social memetracker by collecting feeds and search terms covering any topic or event into a channel they share with others. And the site has real-time functionality. Users can post links posted by users, content from RSS feeds, and real-time search results for terms from blogs and microblogs (i.e. Twitter). The resulting stream is filtered into a Friendfeed-like channel where people can comment on, like, or dislike incoming items. Channels will be public by default, but to comment or subscribe you will need to sign up. Twingly will also employ a ranking system to filter content using a proprietary alogorithm. Every item coming into the channel is continuously ranked using links from blogs, Tweets, user comments and likes. The highest ranked items are shown in the Popular view. Twingly Channels can also be used by companies for brand tracking and social media monitoring and can be kept private for these purposes. The site could be useful for aggregating RSS feeds, tracking specific content on blogs and microblogs and then sharing that content with others, all on one site. The blog/microblog search is powered by Twingly’s search engine which tracks close to 26 million blogs around the world. It’s similar in some ways to Streamy. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Cry Us A River: Timberlake Bails On His Own SF Party To Go Dress Up As Sean Parker Posted: 30 Sep 2009 10:06 PM PDT
It appears that like most celebrities, Timberlake came down with a case of the “scheduling conflict,” and had to fly back to L.A. (or stay there, not sure if he left or not) to go be a movie star. But we’ll forgive him this time because of the reason for his conflict: He needed to be on the set of The Social Network, yes, the Facebook movie. But Paul has a brilliant back-up plan. Why doesn’t Particle get Sean Parker, the Facebook founder that Timberlake is portraying in the movie, to be Justin’s stand-in? Perfect, right? Of course, Parker may be busy, seeing as he has three or so jobs at the moment, the most recent of which is being a member of Yammer’s board. Timberlake needs to understand that the real way to get rich — and I’m talking real rich — is to be a Silicon Valley star, not a movie star portraying a Silicon Valley star. Next time, JT, next time. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Zuckerberg Moves Up The Forbes 400 List. Net Worth Now $2 Billion Posted: 30 Sep 2009 09:34 PM PDT
At 25, Zuckerberg is by far the youngest member of the Forbes 400 list. The next youngest person on the list is hedge fund operator John Arnold, who is 35. Last year, Zuckerberg debuted on the list at #321. His net worth at the time was $1.5 billion. Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, and now Facebook is the third largest site on the internet. In May, Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies invested $200 million into Facebook, setting its $10 billion valuation. Earlier this month, Facebook announced that they now have 300 million users and cash flow positive for the first time last quarter. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Apple Gets A Mapmaker. Where Does That Leave Google? Posted: 30 Sep 2009 09:03 PM PDT
Apple’s purchase of Placebase actually took place this past July, and a founder of a partner company that was using Placebase maps tweeted about it. But it slid under most people’s radars as that was the only news out there about it. But Weintraub dug up Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman’s LinkedIn profile tonight, and sure enough, he is now part of the “Geo Team” at Apple. Here’s why this is very interesting: It could well signal yet another rift in the relationship between Google and Apple. At the very least, the fact that Apple bought a Google Maps competitor, was probably yet another reason why Eric Schmidt had to step down from Apple’s board of directors (which he did in August). But the bigger picture is that such a purchase could potentially allow Apple to move away from its dependency on Google Maps, which it uses on the iPhone and also its iPhoto computer software. Obviously, much has been made about Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice app, but remember too that they also rejected (or did not approve, whatever) Google’s Latitude app, forcing Google to make a browser-based version. The reason Apple gave for not approving it was that it would confuse users with the built-in Maps application on the iPhone — the one that runs, yes Google Maps. And Google actually helped Apple build the entire Maps application, aside from just letting them use their mapping data. So this whole episode has been bizarre, to say the least. But it may be over soon with the Placebase purchase. Or maybe not. It is certainly possible that Apple simply realized the importance of geolocation, especially in the mobile space, and wanted to acquire talent in that field. While Placebase was a competitor to Google Maps, it also was slightly different, focusing on different layers and customizations. [photo: flickr/Manitoba Historical Maps] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Twitter’s Geolocation API Appears To Be Live. But Most Of You Are Lost. Posted: 30 Sep 2009 08:20 PM PDT
But there’s a slight problem. Apparently, the reason these geotags are showing up for all tweets (even those not actually geotagged) is that the documentation was a little unclear on how to handle non-geotagged tweets, Brichter says. The result is that every single tweet is tagged with a location somewhere just off the coast of Africa, south of Ghana. Either this is Atlantis, the Island from Lost, or we have a problem. [Update on the location below] Brichter is aware of the issue and has already resolved it, and has resubmitted Tweetie 2 to the App Store for approval. Since no one officially has Tweetie 2 yet, this probably doesn’t affect you at all. But you have to wonder if other Twitter app developers were confused by this as well. If so, we could see a lot of apps with some wonky geolocation data. Twitter hasn’t yet responded to my request for more information. It’s not clear if they meant to turn this on tonight. We do know that they had originally planned to launch it last week at the Twitter Conference in LA, but it wasn’t quite ready yet. Earlier today, Twitter announced the new Lists feature, which will also feature an API. And of course, everyone is waiting for the Retweet API as well. Update: As our apparently geography major readers have informed me, the area just off the coast of Ghana is lat/long 0,0. This makes sense — there is no location data attached to these tweets, so apparently they default to 0,0.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| OpenCandy Suggests Apps You Might Actually Want During Installs, Lands NitroPDF Posted: 30 Sep 2009 07:27 PM PDT
We’ve written about OpenCandy before, when it made the revolutionary decision to ban germ-spreading handshakes from company board meetings, but until now we haven’t explored the company’s product. From the user’s perspective it’s quite simple: when you go to install an application that uses OpenCandy, you’ll be presented at some point during the install flow with an option to install a sponsored application. It may sound just like those unwanted app installs that we’ve seen for years, but it has a few key differences. First, everything in OpenCandy is opt-in. While many apps default to the “install” option for these tag-along apps (which is why people accidentally install them), OpenCandy makes you click a checkbox make sure you really want the app. The company is also doing its best to only work with high quality applications — co-founder Chester Ng says that OpenCandy will only work with high quality publishers, and only suggest applications that it thinks people might want to actually use. Some apps that are currently being advertised through OpenCandy include doubleTwist, TuneUp, and Xobni — all apps we’ve covered before and don’t come with any nasty spyware. OpenCandy also brings some intelligence to the install process. Rather than bundling the same applications every time, OpenCandy rotates the applications it advertises, effectively serving as an ad network. It also tries to apply some intelligence to the process, suggesting apps that are complimentary to what the user is installing instead of choosing one at random. And unlike some of the bundles that include these tag-along apps as part of the initial download even if you don’t want them, OpenCandy only downloads one of these apps after you’ve stated that you want it. Finally, OpenCandy doesn’t collect any personally identifiable information. It does, however, collect some basic info (like whether or not the user decided to install the suggested application or if it wasn’t compatible with their computer). This helps them suggest better applications in the future, and Ng says that if an app is clearly underperforming (i.e. people don’t want it), OpenCandy will remove it from their list. This is obviously a tricky area — some people object to the idea of upselling applications during the install process at all. But provided it is consistent about advertising high quality apps, I think OpenCandy may be a good compromise: developers will still get paid for including these ads in their installers, and users may just stumble across a new application they actually want.  Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| BumpTop Goes Multi-Touch. Um, Awesome. Posted: 30 Sep 2009 07:10 PM PDT
When we think of multi-touch right now, most of us think of the iPhone. But really, with such a small screen, there are only so many gestures you can do. Multi-touch BumpTop greatly expands that roster, and includes several gestures that it claims to have patents for. Basically, they have gestures that use all of you fingers, and both hands, and even the side of hands. You can “lasso” things, “shove” them, “scrunch” them, and “crop” them. This graphic below shows a list of the gestures BumpTop offers that competitors don’t, including the ones that they apparently have patents on (labeled as “BT”). Naturally, for these multi-touch capacities to work, you’ll need a computer with a touch screen surface that supports multi-touch. Right now, those aren’t widely available. But all indications are that soon enough, there could be a range of devices on the market with such capabilities (sadly, this is Windows 7-only — so no, it won’t work on an Apple Tablet). If you don’t have one of those however, BumpTop will continue to work on a majority of Windows-based PCs just fine with more traditional input devices. The most obvious use of Mutli-touch BumpTop is with media, as you can easily manipulate images (watch the video below). But the service also works with documents (dragging them around, bunching them together, Google Gadgets, and even webpages as widgets. Also, there is social networking support, so if you edit an image in BumpTop, you can easily upload it immediately to Facebook or send it to Twitter. I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking that as soon as I have a computer that can run this, I want this. If not, you’re crazy, just watch it in action below. And below that find more examples of its multi-touch gesture support. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Bojam Launches Web-Based Collaborative Sound Studio Posted: 30 Sep 2009 06:23 PM PDT  One of last year’s TechCrunch50 startups, Bojam, is launching in public beta today and we have 500 invites. Bojam is a Web-based sound studio that lets musicians practice playing music, find other musicians around the world to jam with, and lay down tracks together on the same song. Click here to try out the service. Bojam is a fully functional music mixer. You can adjust the volume on each track or add effects like distortion and reverb. Similarly, you can solo or mute instruments, loop, cut, copy, paste and trim audio clips. Bojam also includes a plugin that allows you to record and upload directly into the mix, or you can upload tracks recorded in Garage Band or other software. One upcoming interesting feature of Bojam’s mixer is the ability to embed a mixing widget in blogs, social networks and websites where users can remix and edit audio from within the embeddable widget. The widget should be rolled out within the next few months Beyond being a collaborative tool, Bojam is also a community for musicians to find other musicians to play with anywhere in the world, asynchronously. If a song is really good, the musicians can decide to sell it on iTunes or Rhapsody for 99 cents. Music teachers can also use the service to auction off their services (as can studio musicians half-way across the world). Bojam faces competition from Indaba (covered here) JamGlue, and Minimum Noise (covered here). Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Reader Survey: What Makes You Tick? Posted: 30 Sep 2009 05:53 PM PDT Top technology advertisers are finally catching on to the fact that we are kind of obsessive here at TechCrunch in our technology coverage and so are our readers. In fact, they’re want to understand why TechCrunch is such a big deal to so many different types of people (we do too.) To help them get a better understanding of us, we’ve constructed a quick 20-question survey that will help them get a better sense of how today’s leading start-ups and enterprises use social media, business and personal technology, and how TechCrunch influences your thinking about key strategic trends. Please take 5 minutes to complete our survey. We’ll publish the results here on TechCrunch. You’ll remember that back in May, we said thank you and good bye to our third-party sales agent, Federated Media. Heather, our CEO, decided our network metrics were strong enough to stand on their own. Turns out she was right (again). Since May, the TechCrunch network has added nearly 3 million additional readers and 6 million pages views. Our September audience stats now stand at more than 10.5 million unique readers (7 million from our sites and 3.5 million from RSS) and more than 22 million page views. To handle our network growth, we’ve hired Vaughn Brown as Sales Director. He comes to us from IDG where he was most recently working on the InfoWorld and Industry Standard brands. You can reach him at vaughn [at] techcrunch dot com to discuss custom programs and sponsorship ideas. And as a reminder, you can also buy impressions direct via our self-serve platform, hosted by isocket. Thanks for reading and for keeping us growing. Please fill out the survey so that advertisers can understand us better and we can keep paying our writers to serve you better. (Photo credit: Flickr/Robbert van der Steeg). Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Failblog, Engadget, and Joystiq Now Selling Video Ads Through Viddler AdWorks Posted: 30 Sep 2009 04:16 PM PDT Did you know that FAIL Blog serves up 22 million video views per month, and Engadget gets at least 2.3 million monthly views for its gadget videos, while Joystiq gets another 2 million? All three blogs use Viddler, which is now selling ads directly for its top content providers though its just-launched Viddler AdWorks. Advertisers can see a directory of the top three dozen video producers on Viddler and buy ads on their videos (overlay, pre-roll, and post-roll). Viddler is selling ads against 30 million views a month collectively from those top producers, out of a total of 36 million views for all the videos uploaded to Viddler. FAIL Blog, which puts up videos of pratfalls and people acting stupidly, on its own accounts for 73 percent of Viddler’s video ad inventory, and is a big reason Viddler’s total views have gone from 10 million in January, 2009 to 36 million in August, 2009. After that, the most popular Viddler producers are Engadget and Joystiq, which are both owned by AOL, followed by niche video like WineLibraryTV (142,424 monthly views) and Gary Vaynerchuk’s personal marketing videos, which get only 27,070 views per month). It quickly dwindles down to very small numbers per show, but Viddler is hoping to change that with its new ad network, and get more of its partners to put more of their best videos on Viddler instead of on YouTube or Blip.tv or Brightcove. As big as FAIL Blog is for Viddler, it streams even more videos directly on YouTube, where it has the 7th-most watched channel. For ads that Viddler sells directly it is offering video partners ad rates starting at $3 per thousand views (CPMs) for overlays and $10 for pre-rolls. A video show that attracts a highly-focused, affluent niche audience like WineLibrary.TV can command a $10 CPM for overlays. These rates compare to about 80-cent CPMs that video producers currently get for the Google AdWords ads Viddler places in their videos today, and will continue to use for any inventory it can’t sell. The other attractive element of Viddler’s AdWorks is that video publishers can choose to sell their own ads if they think they can get a higher rate than Viddler. In that case, they pay Viddler a flat $2 CPM for overlays, and $4 CPMs for pre-rolls. So if AOL’s (or Engadget’s) salesforce can get better than a $5 CPM for overlay ads, it is better off selling ads itself ($5-$2=the $3 CPM they would get from Viddler selling the ads). Video partners also have the option to sign up for a business account, where they pay per gigabyte and can either opt out of ads entirely or participate in AdWorks to offset their subscription costs. So Viddler straddles the video hosting space between a free ad-supported model (like Blip.tv) and a hosted subscription model (like Brightcove). A video producer will have to weigh that flexibility and the guaranteed CPMs Viddler is offering against the broader reach of a YouTube or even Blip.tv, which is about twice the size of Viddler in terms of videos streamed and can now place ads in YouTube as well. Viddler remains a niche player in the online video hosting industry, but it’s never taken VC money and seems to be carving out a nice little business for itself. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Twitter’s New ‘Lists’ Feature Finally Introduces Grouping, Offers An Alternative To The SUL Posted: 30 Sep 2009 04:14 PM PDT  Twitter has just announced a new feature that is sure to excite anyone who has been waiting for the site to offer an alternative to its Suggested User List. Appropriately called ‘Lists’, the new feature will allow anyone to make a list of other Twitter users and label it appropriately (for example, I could make a list called ‘TC Staff’), then share that list with other members. Twitter writes that the feature is still in limited testing, but that it will eventually be rolled out to all users. By default any lists you create will be public, though you’ll also be able to hide them. If you choose to leave them publicly viewable, other Twitter users will be able to hit a button to “Follow this list” so they can add everyone at once. This is a big deal — until now the only convenient way to start mass following people on Twitter has been to use its own curated SUL. I won’t be surprised if we see some users vying to become the best ‘list makers’, offering comprehensive lists of celebrities, news portals, bloggers, and more. It will also be interesting to see if Twitter aggregates the most comprehensive Lists and includes them as part of the signup process (which would effectively just be the SUL in a different form). Twitter’s post describing the new feature isn’t particularly detailed, but it seems like this may have a larger impact than just discovery — it could also potentially be used for Grouping, a feature that some third party apps have offered but that hasn’t been officially supported by Twitter. In short, this will let you group the people you follow into different list (say, one for News, one for close friends, and so on), and then quickly jump between them. Twitter will be supporting the new listing feature through its API, so we can likely expect this functionality to be extended to most third party applications that don’t already support grouping. Also worth noting: a logical extension to grouping will be to support search within groups, which could help users weed out spam. Of course this is Twitter we’re talking about, so it could still be quite a while before we see this happen. ‘Lists’ may compete with sites like WeFollow that specialize in listing top Twitter users in various categories (on the other hand, these sites could actually become even more popular if they become the best places to find the most comprehensive Lists). It’s also likely going to replace TweepML, the open standard format for sharing groups of Twitter users. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| OneRiot Believes It Has A Way To Monetize The Realtime Web With RiotWise Posted: 30 Sep 2009 02:00 PM PDT
You see, RiotWise’s ads are only ads in the sense that someone is paying to place them in a certain highlighted position on the page. But in fact, all of these “ads” are content. And I don’t mean content like the homepage of a website, I mean stories/posts/articles about a particular topic. Just as with Google, these are served up via keywords being searched for. But unlike Google, advertisers aren’t bidding on keywords. Instead, content producers strike a deal with OneRiot to place their content in an emphasized (but clearly labeled) place in their realtime feed. The reason they would want to do this should be obvious: Clicks-throughs. Any content producer who is likely to use such a program undoubtedly already has a strategy in place to monetize their site. That is quite likely based around the traffic their site receives, and RiotWise’s goal would be to help the content producer increase that traffic. But more importantly, it would be to increase the traffic by sending highly-targeted readers whose intent is to find specific content being displayed on the page, OneRiot CEO Kimbal Musk tell us. The obvious question is: How can OneRiot be sure this is relevant content and not just a spam blog looking for clicks? As a realtime search engine, OneRiot already devotes a large percentage of its team to spam prevention, OneRiot general manager Tobias Peggs says. And OneRiot’s engine is already doing the hard work of going through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. With RiotWise, it’s just a question of taking the content from the providers who are using the service and pulling it out to highlight it. So where will it be highlighted? Initially, RiotWise will roll out on OneRiot’s main site. This sponsored content would be housed in a right-hand column, separate from the main realtime feed, as you can see in the picture above. Yes, it looks a lot like AdSense, but it’s content. This aspect of RiotWise will be launching next week. But the bigger picture for RiotWise is to include this sponsored content in the feeds that OneRiot sends to all of its partners. This means that third-party sites using OneRiot search results will eventually see RiotWise as well. Also, it means that places which pull in one OneRiot feeds, such a some Twitter feeds, will start getting these sponsored results as well. Musk realizes that it’s important to be delicate when inserting ads into streams. He notes that just as with sponsored results, sponsored items in feed streams will be clearly labeled as such. He also notes that it’s important not to overload users with too many of these sponsored results in that setting. Ideally, OneRiots algorithms would be tailored to serve up just one sponsored result a day that a user would want to click on, he says. The key to all of this is the realtime aspect of OneRiot. Because people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search, getting access to information that is going on right now, OneRiot has been seeing strong click-through rates on items and big numbers when it comes to users doing multiple searches, we’re told. And OneRiot’s RiotFeeds product, which sends OneRiot results surrounding certain topics over to Twitter has been gaining popularity, and is also seeing big-time click-throughs on its links. A solution like RiotWise seems like the perfect idea for a new or second-tier blog that feels its content is good, but isn’t getting the exposure that some of the big guys do. As long as the content is good, OneRiot is happy to accept it, and strike a deal with the producer to take some fees on a CPC-basis, the majority of which would then be handed over to OneRiot’s partners that serve up its content. “This is the way to monetize the real-time web,” Musk says. As I mentioned above, the plan is to launch RiotWise on OneRiot first as early as Monday of next week. A couple weeks after that, the company hopes to roll out the sponsored results to its partners, letting the money sharing begin. A month ago, OneRiot raised a new $7 million third round of funding. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Google Wave: There Will Be Backlash Posted: 30 Sep 2009 12:21 PM PDT
Ever since it was unveiled at Google I/O this past May, it seems that everyone wants to know everything about Wave. And yesterday, when it was revealed that a big roll-out to more than just developers was around the corner, interest spiked again. Since then, the term has not left Twitter’s Trend Topics area. But there is always a downside to so much hype, and I’m pretty certain we’re going to see it in the coming days and weeks with Google Wave too: Backlash. Actually, some amount of backlash started immediately after it was first revealed in May. While we were wowed after a hands-on demonstration we got, writing that Wave “drips with ambition,” there were plenty in the press and general public who quickly jumped on the other side of the coin. Upon seeing the public demonstation, reactions ranged from “Wow” to “I don’t get it.” But the real test will come later today when many of those people actually get to use it for the first time. We have been using Wave since Google I/O, and while it has been very buggy, the team has worked hard to iron out a lot of the kinks since then. Still, there will be plenty who begin using it today who will be disappointed. It’s a tricky situation for the Wave team. From the get go, they’ve said that the ultimate vision is for Wave to be a new communication platform for the web — meaning they hope hundreds, if not thousands, of other services are built with Wave as the backbone. But that’s a long ways out. Today, all we have to play with is Google Wave, the service, which is still very early in its lifespan. It’s really Google Wave’s ambition that is a dual-edged sword. Because the team is trying to do so much with the product, there will be plenty of people who find it confusing and cluttered. And to some extent, they’re right. But anyone who labels it a failure at this point is either a curmudgeon or an extremely shortsighted person claiming to have foresight. It’s a nice thought that every product should be a taut bundle of execution with an easy path to monetization. But the web, and really the world, would be a much more boring place if that were the case.
Wave is much more complicated than Twitter, and that could well be a downside (remember, keep it simple, stupid). But there’s a difference between clutter and ambition, especially when you have the resources of Google behind you. Shooting for the Moon is a good thing, and Wave has a unique opportunity to do that. I’m not saying Wave will be a success. Many of the most ambitious projects often crash and burn — it’s the nature of high risk/high reward. But we’re still way too early in its lifespan to make that call for Wave. I can see the backlash already, and I think we should give it a chance. The end result could well be something that greatly benefits us all, but getting to that point, if it ever does, will take time. [images: Paramount Vantage] Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Facebook’s Plan To Trounce Orkut In India May Be Working Posted: 30 Sep 2009 12:11 PM PDT  With the growing market of internet users in the country, India has become a battlefield for social networks. Google-owned Orkut has long been the most popular social network in India, with Facebook fighting to catch up. But Facebook has been upping the ante over the past few months, and according to August’s ComScore numbers, the plan may be working. In August, Orkut’s unique visitors in India dipped by 800,000 within a month, from 16 million visitors in July to 15.2 million visitors in August. On the other hand, Facebook grew its unique visitors in India by 700,000, from 7.5 million visitors in July to 8.2 million visitors in August. This the largest drop in unique visitors Orkut has seen in India over the past year, while Facebook has been steadily growing each month. In fact, Facebook’s audience in India is up 228 percent from a year ago, compared to a 35 percent annual gain for Orkut. There are a couple of key factors that could be attributed to Orkut’s recent drop in visitors. First, in India, Facebook has been pushing out an aggressive campaign on its social network to get users to import their friends from Orkut with a special Orkut import tool. It basically lets them find friends on other social networks, like Orkut, who are also on Facebook and makes it easy to send a friend requests to those contacts. The purpose of the tool is to make it easy for users to quickly find new friends and establish their social presence on Facebook. The social network offers this in the U.S. for Gmail, AIM and other contact platforms. But this new tool in India is for Orkut specifically. Facebook users are also seeing is the Orkut contact importer in Brazil, Orkut’s home base and stronghold where Facebook is clawing for market share. Another reason for Facebook’s growth in India could be the recent launch of Facebook Lite. India was one of the original target markets for the lightweight version of the social network, since it is particularly useful in developing countries where high speed Internet connections are sparse or non-existent. Facebook has been eying India’s huge market and steadily adding features that help the social network establish its reach in the growing country. For example, Facebook launched availability for several Indian languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam, in May of this year. It’s plainly obvious that Facebook is growing fast in India and could quite possibly overtake Orkut in the next few months. Meanwhile, other social networks are dropping like flies in the race; with Yahoo shutting down SpotM and MySpace considering layoffs in India because of the its lack of traction among users.  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
| Facebook Just Made It Super Easy To Put Connect On Your Site Posted: 30 Sep 2009 09:49 AM PDT
Facebook writes that “you can now incorporate Facebook Connect into your site in 3 easy steps.” The process is simple. First, you enter the name of your site and its URL. Then Facebook asks you to download and then upload a special file to your site’s main directory. And.. that’s about it. Once you’ve done that, Facebook will present you with its Playground — a list of code snippets you can embed on your site to round out the functionality, including Login buttons, profile photos, publishing items to News Feeds, and rendering photos of a user’s friends. Deciding to put their little wizard to the test, I tried to implement Connect on one of my personal sites (note that I’ve never tried to implement Connect before so I really didn’t know what I was doing). And to my surprise, it worked: I managed to have a very basic form of Connect up and running on my site within all of two minutes. It will obviously take longer to make sure the new icons and buttons play nicely with your site’s design, but it’s really surprisingly easy.  Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco   |
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