Tuesday, November 16, 2010

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Yahoo Begins To Integrate Zynga Games, Launches Mafia Wars & FishVille

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 09:03 AM PST

Back in May we reported on a partnership that social gaming giant Zynga had forged with Yahoo that would integrate some of Zynga’s games throughout the Yahoo network. At the time both companies were a bit vague when it came to discussing what the integration would look like (the details were still being worked out).

Today, we’re seeing the first fruits of the partnership: Yahoo has just launched Mafia Wars and FishVille. The games will appear as part of Yahoo’s Messenger, its Games portal, ‘My Yahoo’, its browser Toolbar, and Pulse. Which means more eyeballs for Zynga that are located away from Facebook.

Obviously Zynga has a close relationship with Facebook (after heated negotiations, the two reached an agreement over the use of Facebook Credits earlier this year). But it has a strong incentive to ensure that it is not totally reliant on the social network, because Facebook has been known to change the rules on the fly (see their changes to the notifications viral channel, for example). So Zynga is expanding to Yahoo, and it will be coming to Google as well. Earlier this year Zynga also attempted an integration of Farmville with MSN, but that’s since been canceled.

This is also only the first part of the Zynga’s Yahoo integration — I suspect it’s a trial run of sorts, in preparation for launching Zynga’s flagship titles like FarmVille, Poker, and FrontierVille.

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Adobe CEO On Apple: “Let The Games Begin”

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 09:00 AM PST

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen sat down for talk with host John Battelle. With his first question, Battelle didn’t beat around the bush: Apple.

Narayen noted that it’s appropriate that the theme of his conference is “points of control” because that’s what this standoff between Apple and Adobe is all about. “There’s a war happening for developers,” Narayen said.

Narayen continued to say that Adobe and Apple are on different sides of these points of control. But at the same time, he said that a large part of the battle with Apple is simply that the press won’t let it go.

Of course, he then went right back into why Adobe is opposed to Apple. “Apple would like to keep things closed and proprietary,” he said. On the flip-side, Narayen said that his customers are people trying to create content for multiple platforms. “We want to help them express their creativity.“

“Let the games begin, I guess,” he said.

The discussion then turned to Flash. Narayen said that while people make it out to be HTML5 versus Flash, it’s not. He said that Adobe is about helping their customers regardless of the platform. They like HTML5 too.

Battelle pressed on the Flash issue. Narayen conceded that HTML5 is starting to encroach on some of Flash’s strongholds. But he said that they would keep pushing the envelope with the technology.

With regard to poor Flash performance, Narayen said that they’re trying to cram 20 years worth of technology into increasingly small devices. He said that while it would have been easier to throw all that out the window and start from scratch, but they didn’t want to do that to developers.

“Flash has changed the world,” Narayen said. And thanks to that, the technology has both supporters and detractors, he said.

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Google Goggles Tests Ads Triggered By Your Mobile Camera

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 08:46 AM PST

Google Goggles, the search giant’s mobile visual search technology, is getting a new test case: advertisements. Google is working with a number of high-profile brands, including Buick, Disney, Diageo, T-Mobile and Delta Airlines to offer "Goggles-enabled" print ads.

When users take pictures of these individual ads with Google Goggles on their Android or iPhone, they will be able to click to a mobile web ad from the brand.

The advertisements are similar to scanning a QR Code and receiving further information about a product. I wonder how many people will actually be interested in unlocking the information via Goggles without an incentive like a deal or coupon associated with the ad.

Of course, there are a number or interesting use cases Google could turn on for Goggles that involve advertisements or discounts. For example, Google could allow users to take pictures of products in stores to access a coupon.

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GE Invests In Makers Of Solar-Powered Air Conditioners, And Eleven Others

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 08:26 AM PST

At a conference held by General Electric (GE) this morning in New York, chief executive Jeff Immelt revealed his company’s plans to invest $45 million in twelve digital energy, or smart-grid related companies— the first of several investments planned through the company’s Ecomagination business competition.

The newly funded entities include: ClimateWell, Consert, FMC-Tech, Ltd., The Fu Foundation School for Engineering And Applied Science at Columbia University, Joulex, OPOWER, Scientific Conservation, SecureRF Corp., Sentient Energy, Soladigm, SustainX and SynapSense Corp. Venture capital partners working with GE on this competition— Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Rockport Capital Partners— will invest $10 million into these first twelve winners, as well.

Five of the funded startups are involved in grid management, five in energy efficiency for data centers, commercial buildings or homes, another is working to connect a New York City utility to the smart grid, and one has desigend a solar-powered air conditioning system.

Beyond the $200 million of investments in clean tech businesses through its competition, GE also revealed today that it will give out five $100,000 cash grants to support companies with earlier-stage ideas to: CapStone, ElectricRoute, GridOn, IceCode and WinFlex. GE is also planning to spend $12 million on scholarships and university programs to develop clean tech talent domestically, over the next few years Immelt revealed.


Company Bios Below From GE Press Release


First Twelve Innovation Funding Recipients From GE Ecomagination Challenge

ClimateWell, Stockholm, Sweden (Efficient Appliances)

ClimateWell’s energy-efficient cooling and heating systems run on solar-powered hot water rather than electricity, maximizing energy efficiency. This technology translates into a significant reduction of power consumption and carbon emissions. While initially targeting operations like hospitals or commercial buildings, GE is working with ClimateWell on deploying this technology in additional markets already served through GE’s appliances business.

Consert, Raleigh, NC (Energy Management Systems and Software)

Consert’s demand side energy management solution empowers utilities, municipalities and co-ops to manage load curtailment, increase operations efficiency and act as a virtual power plant. Consert’s technology complements GE Digital Energy’s existing solutions to meet the unique needs of these market segments.

FMC-Tech, Ltd., Shannon, Ireland (Intelligent Sensor Technologies)

The power line monitoring system for medium voltage networks serves as a nervous system for the smart grid and has applications for GE’s Smart Grid Delivery Optimization. It integrates overhead line sensing, data storage, and wireless communication to a local controller to detect and locate faults in the smart grid and manage distribution communications, providing a platform for the present and future needs of the network.

The Fu Foundation School for Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia University, New York, NY (EV Charging Stations)

A new collaboration with GE, Columbia Engineering, FedEx Express, and Con Edison to enable the conversion from hydrocarbon to electric delivery vehicles in New York City. Columbia Engineering’s technology, developed by its Center for Computational Learning Systems, manages load and delivery and links electrical vehicle charging stations to the utility’s electric distribution management system in real-time. FedEx is providing and operating the all-electric vehicles that the collaborative team will study. In addition to providing funding, GE will supply expertise from its Digital Energy division and GE’s Global Research Center to support this program.

JouleX, Atlanta, GA (Energy Management Systems and Software)

JouleX provides a single, network-based, energy-management solution. The JouleX Energy Manager monitors, analyzes and automatically adjusts the energy usage of a network’s connected devices and systems. It has the potential to reduce energy consumption by 30-60 percent. It will enhance GE’s data center solutions to help customers reduce energy consumption in the data center. In addition, the technology will enhance Demand Response Management System capabilities in GE’s Digital Energy business.

OPOWER, Arlington, VA (Energy Management Systems and Software)

OPOWER integrates consumer demographics, energy consumption data and behavioral analytics to encourage households to make intelligent choices around power consumption in their homes. The average user reduces consumption by about 2.5 percent per month, helping to deliver savings. With GE’s global work in Smart Metering and Automatic Metering Infrastructures, OPOWER can help utilities secure buy-in from consumers and public utility commissions.

Scientific Conservation, San Francisco, CA (Energy Management Systems and Software)

This platform monitors and manages energy drift in commercial buildings through predictive maintenance of core energy systems: heating, ventilation, air conditioning, refrigeration, lighting, controls and renewable sources. Using its patent pending diagnostics, it typically improves efficiency covering the cost of installation in less than two years. The technology has applications for GE’s Intelligent Platforms building management software business and provides conservation opportunities for GE’s real estate portfolio and GE buildings.

SecureRF Corporation, Westport, CT (Utility Security)

SecureRF provides security solutions that address lower-powered embedded devices that will be used throughout the Smart Grid. Its Algebraic Eraser(TM) is a public-key cryptography method designed for resource-constrained devices like meters and sensors. GE’s Digital Energy business can draw on this security technology for the smart grid to help utility customers alleviate consumer privacy and data security concerns.

Sentient Energy, Burlingame, CA (Intelligent Sensor Technologies)

Sentient develops advanced grid monitoring solutions that consist of modular intelligent monitoring devices and software applications, enabling cost-effective distribution automation. It improves fault location, cause analysis and remediation, grid capacity management, and utility workforce utilization, presenting integration and partnership opportunities for GE Energy’s Digital Energy offerings.

Soladigm, Milpitas, CA (Building Efficiency)

This window technology electronically switches glass from clear to tinted, enabling control of heat and glare. It can reduce energy usage for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems by 25 percent and reduce the HVAC peak load by 30 percent, an important tool to level demand for the future smart grid infrastructure. With GE’s green homes and green hospitals ecomagination programs, its zero energy home program and other energy efficiency initiatives, there are multiple paths for commercial relationships with the technology.

SustainX, West Lebanon, NH (Energy Storage)

This technology provides isothermal, compressed-air energy storage technology to enable cost effective, grid-scale energy storage. SustainX’s approach has the potential to be less than half the cost of traditional compressed-air energy storage. The technology presents opportunities for collaboration with GE’s Global Research Center and commercial partnership opportunities with GE Energy to commercialize energy storage applications and to enable a higher percentage of renewable power generation in markets like Europe.

SynapSense Corporation, Folsom, CA (Data Center Services)

Using a robust wireless sensor network, SynapSense’s solutions measure and manage the environmental conditions and power usage throughout data centers, resulting in a 10 percent reduction in overall energy consumption for typical, enterprise-class data centers. The technology offers commercial relationship opportunities with GE’s Digital Energy business and its Intelligent Platforms business with its visualization and energy management offerings.


First Five Innovation Grant Recipients From GE Ecomagination Challenge

Capstone Metering applies remote communications technology to the century-old water meter. The company's intelliH2O is self-powered and delivers real-time water system management, which helps conserve water and eliminates the need for manual meter-readings. Recognizing the substation’s unique location in the electric grid, ElectricRoute created a communications gateway point for transmission and distribution systems. Its low-latency, communications network infrastructure eliminates duplicate sensors and thousands of copper lines running inside the substation.

GridON created a fault-current-limiter to protect the electric grid from disruptions and power outages, increasing the grid's reliability and enabling load growth and expansion. This technology was developed in collaboration with Bar-Ilan University and Ricor Ltd.

IceCode's technology removes ice by using high-power pulses to apply heat from the inside out. Employing this technology for wind turbines substantially reduces the amount of energy used for de-icing and eliminates downtime for ice removal and inspection. First developed at Dartmouth.

WinFlex produces rotors for wind turbines from light, flexible and inexpensive cloth sheets made out of composite materials. This flexible rotor design reduces installation costs by fifty percent and shortens the return on investment to three-four years, without subsidies.

“

Watch The Livestream Of The Web 2.0 Summit Here (Day 2)

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 08:20 AM PST

Watch live streaming video from web20tv at livestream.com

Today is Day 2 of the 2010 Web 2.0 Summit. We will be livestreaming the event all day right here for those who couldn’t make it out to San Francisco (thank you, John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly).  The event should  start in about ten minutes at 8:30 AM PT.  Speakers today include Mary Meeker, Vinod Khosla, John Doerr, Fred Wilson, Yuri Milner, Ron Conway, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Here is the full speaker schedule for today all times are Pacific Time.

8:30am A Conversation with Shantanu Narayen, CEO, Adobe John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing), Shantanu Narayen (Adobe Systems Incorporated)

8:55am Internet Trends Mary Meeker (Morgan Stanley)

9:10am A Conversation with HP John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing), Todd Bradley (HP), Jon Rubinstein (Palm Global Business Unit, HP)

9:50am Point of Control: The New Geography of Gaming Bing Gordon (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), Don Mattrick (Microsoft), Robert Kotick (Activision Blizzard, Inc.)

10:20am Ignite: How Crowdsourcing Changed Disaster Relief Forever Schuyler Erle (SimpleGeo)

10:25am Morning Break

11:00am Managing Hypergrowth Adam Lashinsky (Fortune Magazine), Susan Lyne (Gilt Groupe), Tony Hsieh (Zappos.com)

11:40am A Conversation with Jim Balsillie, CEO, Research In Motion John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing), Jim Balsillie (Research In Motion)

12:05pm A Conversation with Yuri Milner, CEO, Digital Sky Technologies John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing), Yuri Milner (Digital Sky Technologies (DST))

2:00pm A Conversation with Carol Bartz, CEO, Yahoo! John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing), Carol Bartz (Yahoo!)

2:25pm Innovation vs Punditry Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures)

2:40pm Mobile Networks, A Discussion with AT&T Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media, Inc.), John Donovan (AT&T)

3:00pm Afternoon Break

3:30pm Ignite: Crowdsourced Jobs for Haiti Leila Chirayath Janah (Samasource)

3:35pm The Crystal Ball Ron Conway (SV Angel)

3:45pm Five surprise guests with five special announcements.
Radar

4:15pm Point of Control: Finance John Heilemann (New York Magazine), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures ), John Doerr (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers)

4:50pm A Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

5:20pm Plenary
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Gogobot: Travel Discovery Goes Social And Visual; SEO-Gaming Link Farms Weep

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 08:00 AM PST

The state of online travel exploration and discovery is very, very poor. Most sites seem to be either a link farm or a black hole of useful, but impenetrable links. I don’t know about you, but to me, researching potential trips seems like it should be a visual experience as much as anything else. And the best recommendations often come from people you trust — your friends. So why doesn’t the online process of preparing to travel incorporate these elements? Travis Katz wondered the same thing.

That’s exactly why Katz (a former MySpace executive) started Gogobot, a service launching today in closed beta. “I love traveling, I’m passionate about it,” Katz tells us. “But I would sit down to research a trip and eight hours later, an entire Saturday is gone. You can’t find anything,” he says.

And he’s right. We live in an age where everything online is going social. Yet travel sites really haven’t. People want advice from their friends, but the most popular sites instead focus on the all-important SEO tactics to make sure that their results rank highly on Google search. That leads to nonsense like this. It leads to sites that couldn’t be any less useful if they tried.

Gogobot is all about big visuals and a social component thanks to tight Facebook integration. Know someplace you’re thinking about going? Just enter a question about it on Gogobot and then send it to Facebook. The answers will quickly flow back to you complete with links to all of the places mentioned. Or, at least, that’s Katz’s hope.

Obviously, Gogobot is going to suffer from a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem. They need to get people using the site first for the social element to work. But that’s where the big beautiful pictures come in. Gogobot crawls Flickr’s creative commons sections to get images for just about every place you can imagine. Katz says that there are already 1.5 million places in their database. That alone could pull people in.

So, a friend asks for advice about a certain place and you decide to help them. But instead of sending them a one-time email, why not just fill out a Gogobot review that you can refer others to as well? On services like Yelp, people often write reviews when they’re pissed off about poor service they’ve received. But the Gogobot type of review system — writing reviews because your friends want recommendations — seems to make a lot more sense.

And once you figure out the place that you want to go to, adding it to an itinerary is as easy as one click. Katz thinks of Gogobot as sort of a Pandora for travel. With it, you can see all the cool things in a city, but filtered through a lens — in this case, your friends. Most importantly, “it should be fun and it should be fast,” Katz says. And the service allows you to show off where you’ve been around the world with your own digital passport.

The other curious thing about a lack of a killer product in the travel discovery space is just how much money there is here. This is a $100 billion a year industry in the U.S. alone. It’s something like $350 billion worldwide. And again, it’s dominated by a bunch of SEO players.

Eventually, Gogobot will make money from online bookings and advertisements. But for right now, they’re just focused on user experience and gaining users. They hope to stay in closed beta for about a month, then they’ll roll out more widely.

The service raised $4 million in funding back in June. And while it wasn’t disclosed at the time, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is one of the investors through his private Innovation Endeavors fund.

The service was kind enough to give us 5,000 invites to give away to TechCrunch readers. So if you’re interested, sign-up at this link.

Below, find an interview I did with Katz about the new product:

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The Beatles Invade Apple. Take Over Website, iTunes, TV Ads, And Yes, Even Ping.

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 07:14 AM PST

“I am particularly glad to no longer be asked when the Beatles are coming to iTunes,” says Beatles drummer Ringo Starr in the official release announcing the band has finally come to iTunes.

Yes, well over 7 years after Apple’s online music store launched and completely changed the industry, The Beatles have landed. And they’ve landed in a major way. If you go to Apple.com you’ll be greeted by a huge picture of the band with the words, “The Beatles. Now On iTunes.” Clicking on this takes you to a landing page with more. “In 1964 the band that changed everything came to America. Now they’re on iTunes,” another picture reads. Below that are links to videos that Apple is making available about the band.

That includes a few ads, which Apple will apparently be running on TV to let the world know that they’ve finally landed the big fish.

If you load up iTunes this morning, you’ll also see that The Beatles have basically completely taken over the store as well. The front page has a giant banner for the band, and under that are the individual albums, all of which you can buy for $12.99 each (or $19.99 for double albums). Individual songs are the high-end $1.29 a piece. Or you can buy the entire box set of Beatles albums for $149. That includes their Past Masters collection and a live concert film from 1964 — the band’s first U.S. concert.

Apple notes that the latter is an iTunes exclusive, which seems to suggest the rest of The Beatles catalog isn’t. No big surprise there, but I wonder how long it will be until the band shows up on other rival MP3 services? The catalog currently isn’t on Amazon MP3, for example.

And yes, The Beatles are now on Ping.

Sadly, there’s no streaming concert this morning from remaining Beatles Starr and Paul McCartney. Instead they just have the statements from them in the release.

"We're really excited to bring the Beatles' music to iTunes. It's fantastic to see the songs we originally released on vinyl receive as much love in the digital world as they did the first time around," writes McCartney.

Yoko Ono, the widow of John Lennon writes, “In the joyful spirit of Give Peace A Chance, I think it is so appropriate that we are doing this on John's 70th birthday year.”

Meanwhile, Olivia Harrison, the wife of George Harrison simply writes, “The Beatles on iTunes—Bravo!“

All four estates undoubtedly had to agree to seal this deal. And you can be sure it’s a lucrative one.

Says Apple CEO and well-known Beatles fanatic Steve Jobs, "We love the Beatles and are honored and thrilled to welcome them to iTunes. It has been a long and winding road to get here. Thanks to the Beatles and EMI, we are now realizing a dream we've had since we launched iTunes ten years ago." See what he did there?

Sometimes, it seems, you should read too much into images.

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Presenting The Beatles On iTunes

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 06:45 AM PST

Yup, the rumors were true. The Beatles are finally on iTunes. Apple is going to announce it this morning, but the albums are already live in iTunes. Here is the preview link.

There are 16 albums available, starting with Please, Please Me (1963) and going to The Beatles, 1967-1970 (1973). Most of them albums $12.99. Individual songs are available for $1.29 each. There is also a box set for $149, and video footage, including a concert from 1964. The Beatles were one of the last major holdouts not to go digital. Now a lot of people are going to be re-buying the Beatles albums they already own because it is much easier than ripping a CD or, worse, converting from tape or vinyl.

Now, where is that Yellow Submarine iPod?

More: The Beatles Invade Apple. Take Over Website, iTunes, TV Ads, And Yes, Even Ping.

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Target Rolls Out Shopkick’s Geo-Coupon System To 242 Stores

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 06:43 AM PST

After announcing a partnership with Best Buy a few months ago, Shopkick is debuting a new implementation of its geo-coupon system at Target today. Users can now unlock coupons via Shopkick’s app in 242 stores in the Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City, and San Francisco/Silicon Valley markets.

Instead of checking in, as you would with a geo app like Foursquare or Gowalla, shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the free shopkick app on their phone walks into a store. When guests enter a participating Target store, they will receive points, called “kickbucks.” Guests also can scan select product barcodes in-store to earn additional “kickbucks.”

You can then use “kickbucks” to redeem Target GiftCards. Users of the app will also receive instant scannable mobile coupons just for entering Target (the coupons can be scanned and redeemed at checkout). The retailers says that offers will be extended to a variety of products, including food, cleaning supplies, electronics and toys.

Target operates 1,752 stores across the U.S., so this is definitely a smaller implementation. Regardless, it’s a big win for the startup in advance of the holiday shopping season. The company also has partnerships with Macy’s and American Eagle. Shopkick faces competition from Stickybits, Facebook Places and a host of others.

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“New TV” Advertising Platform BlackArrow Raises Funding From Motorola Ventures

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 06:23 AM PST

BlackArrow, an a company that provides advertising products for “new TV” platforms, has raised funding from Motorola through its investment arm, Motorola Ventures. The company says that the investment is an extension of BlackArrow’s previously announced $20 million Series C funding round earlier this year. Terms of Motorola’s investment were not disclosed. To date BlackArrow has raised a total of $73 million.

BlackArrown creates advertising for new TV platforms, such as video-on-demand, DVR, mobile devices and broadband. For example, the company’s technology allows networks to place advertisements in TV programming, and will show the ads even if people try to skip over ads with their DVRs.

As part of the announcement, the two companies will develop integrated advertising offerings for set-top boxes, mobile devices, and cloud-based, hosted video services and IP video delivery. BlackArrow says that it will use Motorola’s funding for new product development and global deployment of their advertising offerings to content distributors and networks.

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CrunchGear Reviews the NookColor, Barnes & Noble’s Ultrasmall Reading Tablet

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 05:30 AM PST


The Barnes & Noble Nook looked like an also-ran until they came out with the first mass-market color e-reader, the NookColor, one of the first LCD e-readers worth considering. Although the price says “Why not just buy an iPad?” the features and design say “Let’s give this thing a second look.”

Read more…



PayNearMe Rings Up $16M From Khosla And Others For Cash Payments Product

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 05:00 AM PST

PayNearMe, an alternative payments product from the company formerly known as Kwedit, has just raised $16 million in funding led by Khosla Ventures, with new investor August Capital and current investors True Ventures and Maveron also participating in the round. This brings the company’s total funding to $23.3 million. In conjunction with the funding announcement, Mark Britto, CEO of BOKU will join the company's board of directors.

PayNearMe is capitalizing on the wave of services that are emerging for the unbanked, a group that includes 60 million individuals in the U.S. The “unbanked” refers to consumers who don't have traditional bank accounts or cannot qualify for credit cards. PayNearMe allows people who don’t have or don’t want to use credit or debit cards to purchase products with cash at more than 6,000 7-Eleven stores in the continental U.S.

On participating e-commerce or merchant sites, consumers can use the PayNearMe option to pay for e-commerce purchases, telephone orders, loan repayments, money transfers and more. You simply place your order with PayNearMe and print out the given receipt. You then take that receipt into a 7-Eleven and they scan it and you pay in cash. Once you pay, your order with the retailer or merchant will be fulfilled.

Today, PayNearMe is launching a paperless and mobile method of paying; with a PayNearMe branded card. So on participating merchant sites, users provide their mobile number if they want to use the payments option. They can then get a free PayNearMe card from their local 7-Eleven store and reply to a text message from PayNearMe with the Card's unique number. And they hand the card and the cash for the payment to the 7-Eleven store associate to process the transaction. As with all PayNearMe transactions, the payee is notified immediately that payment has been received.

The company began testing its form of payment for Facebook credits in August, but is now integrating with Amazon.com, Progreso Financiero, MOL AccessPortal (MOL), m-Via, Lexicon Marketing, LLC, Adknowledge's Super Rewards, Money to Go and SteelSeries. For example, you can use PayNearMe on Amazon.com to buy Gift Cards online.

For background, Kwedit launched another payment product earlier this year, to much controversy. But PayNearMe has been able to sign up a number of high-profile merchants and is steadily gaining traction, according to founder and CEO Danny Shader (he declined to give us an exact number of how many consumers are using the payments platform).

Shader says he plans to use the new funding to expand its network of retailer payment locations (i.e. 7-Eleven) as well as add new merchants and companies who accept PayNearMe. The funding will also be used towards product development.

While the process of making a trip to a store to pay for an item you ordered online may seem convoluted, it is a viable payments option to those who don’t have access to credit. If PayNearMe continues to partner with well-known, popular merchants and payments locations, its product could take off. Green Dot made a viable business out of its pre-paid credit card business for the underbanked, recently filing for a $2 billion IPO.

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Barilliance: Dead-Simple eCommerce Site Personalization

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 04:03 AM PST

It’s never been easier for non-programmers to launch and manage eCommerce sites. For most, the basic feature-set is well and plenty. But for those who want to push the envelope slightly with more sophisticated features like product recommendation, the daunting challenge of acquiring custom development is a deal-breaking deterrent.

Barilliance wants to change that with a suite of eCommerce personalization features which are as simple as things can get in terms of integration: Copy/Paste a snippet of JavaScript.

Barilliance offers four products that are designed to help sites increase sales and conversion rates through a personalized shopping experience for visitors:

  • Product recommendations – Similar in concept and styling to Amazon’s personalized product recommendations. These display cross-sells and up-sells.
  • Email personalization – Personalized product offers designed for integration within email marketing. Recommendations are based on the visitor’s activity on the e-commerce site.
  • Onsite behavioral targeting – Site owners can determine website content based on pre-defined visitor segments like traffic source, search terms, time of day, and loyalty.
  • Cart abandonment – Automated email campaigns for visitors who started but abandoned the checkout process.

The personalization can be enhanced for sites that implemented Facebook Connect. In such sites, Barilliance can target visitors based on profile data, for example, showing a customized ad for visitors that have a birthday soon. There’s also the ability to show a “Friends also liked…” indicator that trumps the generalized “People also liked…” indicator.

Obviously, these features require configuration and ongoing management, but the integration part—the copying and pasting of JS code—couldn’t be easier.

If the integration is that easy, how then does Barilliance integrate with the site’s product catalog? Well, they scrape. That’s right, they put scraping to good use and build a product catalog without requiring the site owner’s intervention.

Once the data is scarped and cookies are placed and analyzed, Barilliance starts fine tuning its product recommendation for the site in question—a process that takes 3-7 days. Barilliance co-founder, Ido Ariel, explained that’s typically when most sites notice an increase in conversion.

Pricing is tailored to each customer but generally involves a monthly fee that correlates to sales volume and page views.



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Optimizely A/B Tests Its Way To $1.2 Million In Funding From A Roster Of Top Angels

Posted: 16 Nov 2010 04:00 AM PST

Optimizely, a startup that makes it easy to run A/B tests on your website, has closed a $1.2 million funding round, with an impressive (and remarkably long) list of angel investors. The full list: Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Steve Chen, Paul Buchheit, Ashton Kutcher, Mitch Kapor, Chris Dixon, Joshua Schachter, Naval Ravikant, Ram Shriram, Ariel Poler, Aydin Senkut, Brian Sugar, Deep Nishar, Sam Altman, Steve Huffman, Nils Johnson, Jonathan Heiliger, Keval Desai, Elad Gil, Avichal Garg.

Whew.

Optimizely, for those who haven’t tried it, lets you run A/B tests on your site by simply adding a JavaScript snippet (you configure the A/B tests themselves and can analyze the results from the service’s dashboard). The service launched in July and has since added a handful of key new features, including integration with Google Analytics (you can track your metrics from within the Analytics dashboard instead of Optimizely’s, if you prefer).

The company says it’s currently tracking around 250 million ‘events’ per month, but it isn’t sharing how many unique users it has signed up so far. It does, however, have some big customers, including the Democratic National Committee, which used it to help optimize its ‘Commit to Vote’ Facebook application.

Optimizely is also using today’s funding announcement to share some older (but cool) news: following the Haiti earthquake earlier this year, Optimizely helped the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund optimize its site — and it wound up driving an additional $1 million in contributions.

Another player in this space is Visual Website Optimizer, which we wrote about here.

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Inside The War Room: Answering The Questions Behind Facebook Messages

Posted: 15 Nov 2010 08:29 PM PST


Earlier today, we got a chance to talk to Joel Seligstein, the Engineering Manager in charge of Facebook’s new Messages product. Messages, as you’ve probably heard by now, is Facebook’s new email/SMS/chat hybrid — a system where Facebook lets you interact with your friends without putting much thought into which technology you want to use to reach them. And while the new product clearly has quite a bit of potential, there are still plenty of questions: Who is this for? And is there still a place for the old-school email systems we’ve all come to know and love (and hate)?

Check out the video above for Seligstein’s answers (some of which we’ve transcribed below). Oh, and take a look at the background — we conducted the interview in the Facebook Messages ‘war room’, so you can see are over a dozen engineers cranking away as they launch the product.

Seligstein says that Facebook began the project, codenamed Titan, before Google launched Wave, which was its take on the messaging platform of the future. So what drove Facebook to begin working on its own messaging platform?

“One main thing that we noticed was that lots of communication was happening both in Facebook and outside Facebook. I’d send emails to people all the time — that means I have to check my email address many times a day. I’d really rather have that personal, people-to-people communication along with my other Facebook messages. Same thing over SMS — as I moved to an iPhone, for example, I was kind of obsessed with how those messages came in through that channel. So really what we’re trying to do is figure how to bring all personal communication together.”

On whether this will be used primarily by teenagers and twenty-somethings, who seem to favor SMS and chat over email:

“I think those will be the first early adopters — I think they’ll grab on really easily. They won’t even notice that they’re using some different newfangled messaging system. It’ll just work the way they want, the way they’ve been wishing it would work.

I think we will have a little bit of an adoption problem — not a problem, but it will take a little longer for the rest to hop on board. We’ve noticed even for us, it takes a week or two before you really grab on and get this system. I think they’ll slowly come on board but I think the younger guys will grab it really quickly.”

And is Facebook Messages a ‘Gmail Killer’? Seligstein says no, but it sounds like he thinks traditional email will be relegated to non-social messages like bank statements, with communication between friends occurring on Facebook. In other words, Email wouldn’t be dead — it would just be on life support.

We all still use email on our team. [Messages] is really focused on the people and personal communication. We’ve noticed very quickly that our email boxes become high signal for bank statements and things along those lines, and then our Facebook inbox has become very high signal for people. We found there is kind of a duality there, and they’re both extremely useful so we don’t see them going away any time soon.

Deals, newsletters, all those kinds of things are very important, it just becomes how to surface those correctly. I don’t know what the future is for email. I think we’re trying to capture the personal communication of email. We’re almost not interested in the rest..”

During our interview, we also touch on Facebook’s decision to build the new Messages product using HBase instead of Cassandra, MySQL, or another solution — you can find the company’s full blog post on the underlying technology here.

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Schmidt: Gingerbread Sooner, Chrome OS Later

Posted: 15 Nov 2010 07:01 PM PST


Google CEO Eric Schmidt, talking at the Web 2.0 conference today, made a couple announcements regarding devices that you, reader, may be interested in hearing. After all, with Android poised to become the most populous mobile OS in the world, any major update is worth discussing.

Gingerbread, as they are calling Android version 2.3 (apparently not 3.0, said to be Honeycomb), was shown off on what appeared to be a Nexus S, which would make sense as the first phone to roll out with the update. New features include near-field communication and potentially face recognition, in addition to the resolution compatibility improvements and other under-the-hood changes.

As for Chrome OS, well, it’s not the news we wanted to hear.

Continue reading…

Why We Care About Apple And The Beatles

Posted: 15 Nov 2010 06:31 PM PST


So chances are (though I don’t buy the semaphore thing) that tomorrow will bring an announcement from Apple that they’ve finally reached an agreement with Apple Records, or EMI, or Apple Corps, or somebody, and will now be offering the Beatles catalogue on iTunes. That’s nice, but why should we care?

Being that the Beatles MP3 holdout is emblematic of the recording industry’s resistance against modern distribution methods, the way in which the Beatles discography will be made available should be telling. Here was a situation in which the labels and distributors have millions of sales at stake, and though to be fair Beatles records have been selling just fine without the benefit of legal downloads over the last decade. The powers that be must know that by agreeing to MP3 distribution, they are shifting the fulcrum. But how far?

Continue reading…

420M People In China Have Internet Access, 99% Use Baidu For Search

Posted: 15 Nov 2010 05:41 PM PST


Baidu CEO Robin Li made a rare appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit this afternoon and revealed some interesting information on the extent of his company’s reach. “Baidu answers more search queries in China than any other search engine in any other market, including Google in the US.”

This might be one of the many data points supporting why the Baidu stock has more than doubled since January, now at a market cap of 40 billion. That is roughly the size of eBay’s.

“We have a lot of room for growth,” Li said, as 1/3 of China currently has Internet access which boils down to about 420 million people. According to Li 99% of those people use Baidu as their search engine and that number can more than double with growing popularity of mobile phones.

So why Google was not as successful in China? “China is a very different market and Google was not close enough to feel the market.” Li also blames Silicon Valley. The proliferation of VC money poured into the local search market was one of the reasons Google failed to reach market share. Before it redirected its Chinese site to Google Hong Kong, that is.

Interestingly enough, Li himself said he thought about moving Baidu to Hong Kong a year after starting Baidu because of Chinese censorship. Li’s decision to stay has been somewhat vindicated by the fact that Baidu’s revenue has grown by 30 times over the last 5 yrs.

Li also does not regret having turned down offers in the $1.5 to $2 billion range from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. “I knew Baidu had more potential than 1-2 billion,” Li said.

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Google Exec: In 5 To 8 Years, Everyone Will Have An IPTV

Posted: 15 Nov 2010 05:03 PM PST

Listening to key executives talk at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, Google is clearly very bullish about two key things: Google TV and display/video advertising.

Earlier in the day, Google CEO Eric Schmidt went to bat for Google TV. Later, Google Global Sales Operations and Business Development, Nikesh Arora, said that in 5 to 8 years everyone will have an IP television, like Google TV.

So why is Google gaga over this space? Well, advertising, of course. Arora noted that the moment you stick a broadband cable behind your TV, you can create brand engagement rather than just the standard old brand awareness. That’s what Google does. But they’ve only been able to do it mainly with text-based ads up until now.

But Schmidt noted that display is Google’s fastest growing business now. He also believes it’s going to be Google’s next big multi-billion dollar business.

Arora noted that the display advertising business is actually older than the search advertising business — it is what the Internet was built on — but then it stagnated. Now it’s time to jump start things.

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Keith Rabois: I Was Excited About Fraud At Square

Posted: 15 Nov 2010 04:38 PM PST

Paypal’s Scott Thompson, Square’s Keith Rabois and GSI’s Michael Rubin took the stage at Web 2.0 Summit today to talk about the future of digital commerce.

As a continuation of John Battelle’s argument that a credit/debit card payment counts as a “check-in,” Rabois explained that there is data other than what we historically use to prevent fraud that can be used to protect users, including social data from Facebook and Twitter that can be used to verify purchases.

Rabois started to get into an anecdote (which he never finished) about the first fraud attempt at Square, revealing that he was excited about the unique milestone. Why? Well, apparently fraud attempts in the mobile payments world mean that you’re succeeding as a company.

Congrats Keith, we’re so proud.

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Mark Pincus On Zynga Stats, “Dog Activated”, And Frontierville Same-Sex Marriages

Posted: 15 Nov 2010 04:14 PM PST

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus took the stage for about 10 minutes to talk about his fast-rising company. First he quickly rattled off some stats:

  • 10 major games
  • 1,300 employees
  • 13 studios across 6 countries
  • 6 acquisitions in the last 6 months
  • 320,000,000 million people have engaged with a Zynga game
  • 400 people focused on new IP

Pincus also noted that one game, Frontierville, has 650,000 same-sex marriages. “That’s amazing, that’s probably more than any country in the whole world,” he quipped.

Pincus said that his company’s main goal is to convince you that it’s worth it to take a 10 minute break. We don’t have time for full TV shows anymore, but we have time for short, fun games, is his belief.

So what’s next for the company? Pincus talked about something called “Dog Activated” — a more social experience across the entire Zynga network. The core idea is that if you see the Zynga dog (their logo), you know someone is playing a Zynga game.

“We have more than 3 million peak concurrent users,” Pincus said. He also said that at any given point, 4 people you know are playing a Zynga game. Yes, they’re everywhere. Zynga wants to make it easier for all those people to connect both in games and out of games. Expect to hear a lot more about this in the coming months.

Pincus also talked a little bit more about his “dial tone” idea. Facebook is the social dial tone, for example. They’re the underlying current for everything social on the web. Pincus wants Zynga to be the social gaming dial tone.

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Want To Watch The Web 2.0 Summit From Home? Here’s The Livestream

Posted: 15 Nov 2010 03:47 PM PST

Watch live streaming video from web20tv at livestream.com

For the next three days the entire Internet will descend upon San Francisco’s Palace Hotel for the 2o10 Web 2.0 Summit. In case you’re not already here, you can watch all the action from the Livestream above, which notably is the first time the elite event will be shown for free on the small screen. For those that have their passes (or their boss’ passes) and still need to get over here, here’s the speaker schedule .

Today’s highlights have included Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Square’s Keith Rabois. Coming up on deck are such luminaries as Zynga’s Marc Pincus, author Steven Berlin Johnson and Icanhascheezburger’s Ben Huh.

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Schmidt On Google TV Network Backlash: We’re Taking Dumb TV And Making It Smart

Posted: 15 Nov 2010 03:40 PM PST

Today at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage for a Q&A with hosts John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly. One topic: Google TV.

Specifically, the hosts asked about the backlash Google TV is now seeing from some of the major U.S. television networks. While saying he didn’t want to speak for them, Schmidt noted that this is the first time someone has tried to do this merging of Internet at television at a huge scale. Obviously, he said, some of them are going to initially be hesitant about such a transition.

As he hears it, some of the arguments are “you’re taking a dumb television and making it smart”. “Yes, we’re guilty of that,” Schmidt said. He said that the networks seem to be concerned that the enormous revenue streams targeted at these dumb televisions will go away if they change the model. Schmidt disagrees. He thinks people will watch even more television if it’s augmented with the Internet.

Schmidt said that the press has done a good job of adding drama to the situation, but he believes that Google and the networks will smooth all this over in relatively short order. “The ones that have reservations we’re trying to address that with data,” he said.

And Schmidt said not to discount the role apps will play on this platform. This hasn’t been seen yet, but the platform is the powerful thing here. Games, new emergence technologies, and more. It’s all coming to the living room thanks to Android and the Google TV, according to Schmidt.

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Eric Schmidt: “It Is A War For Talent”

Posted: 15 Nov 2010 03:07 PM PST

During Eric Schmidt’s talk on stage here at Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle asked the Google CEO about the origin of the 10% raise leak that eventually led to the firing of a Google employee last week.

Schmidt explained that the decision to give a raise was made in the spring, and that the company is still carrying residue of the recession, “We wanted to share our success and knew even upper-level workers are struggling with real estate costs.” Along with the increase in employee salary, Google made the commitment to focus on further acquisitions that lead to core products like Android and Maps.

While Schmidt chalked rumors of Google’s brain drain to “poor story writing” by the media, he did say that “It is a war for talent” and that the company is now hiring hundreds of people a week. Said Schmidt, “Any company of scale is subject to the following narrative, ‘Big fat dumb and happy,’” implying that this is not the case with Google.

When asked about Google’s M&A failures, Schmidt granted that Google’s had both successes and failures in terms of acquisitions. “People are ecstatic to work for Google, and people are dying to work for Google,” he insisted.

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WITN: Phototour’s Vineet Devaiah (Featuring the Voice of Mike Arrington)

Posted: 15 Nov 2010 02:52 PM PST

An even weirder than usual episode of Why Is This News this week ending up with Mike Arrington heckling us through the wall of the studio. But before he did, we sat down with Vineet Devaiah from “social streetview” startup, Phototour.in.

Vineet hails from India but, having come to the Valley to collect an “Emerging company” award from Nvidia, he decided to stick around for a while to meet with VCs and other investors in the valley. We were hoping to ask him for his take-away advice for other entrepreneurs, particularly from India, visiting the valley – but circumstances (Mike) got in the way. Instead Vineet was kind enough to email us his top ten tips. Here they are (and video below).

1) Refine your pitch. what this means is that there are certain terminologies and buzzwords that VC’s here like to listen to and understand. Try to get your pitch deck/pitch refined multiple times from someone in the Valley before you can go raise any capital.

2) Angels will not invest in a foreign entity however good you are.

3) Select your top 10 firms and network like crazy to get introductions into these places. No VC will give you too much importance if you don’t come with a strong reference. Till then try to get meetings with non-top tier firms to get some practice in the pitch and possible questions you may get.

4) At the risk of contradicting my previous statement, the first term sheet I got was from a top VC firm that I cold called- make sure your cold call is appealing enough that they take the meeting.

5) Traction is king, until you are someone they recognize or have a decent track record.

6) Be prepared to create a US corporation – i.e a US entity – if you do get any interest. Most VC’s will not invest in non-US focused products, mostly because they cannot see the need for such a service/product.

7) Drop names: dropping names doesn’t come naturally for someone from India but its ok to drop names if you have talked to them or if you have got some good mentors and what they have done. Be careful not to lie because this is a very small and tight knit community you WILL get caught. eg. If you have met KPCB you should say it, the whole point is that KPCB gave you a chance to pitch to them is compelling enough for a VC to listen to you for another 5 minutes. Then it is upto you to make it worth their 5 minutes to a 30 minute pitch.

8) Dont shop your IP/company too much. Its good to meet a LOT of VC’s but you must only go into detail of your IP and business plan to the people who you want to invest in your company. Most VC’s are not going to invest in your company and its very evident in the first 2-3 minutes of the conversation. At that time just ask for feedback from them on your product and business plan.

9) Stay somewhere in the Stanford/Palo alto area. If you are an entrepreneur you will know someone from your country in this region who can hook you up. This is important from a travel perspective, you can end up spending close to $30 every trip you make to SandHill road which otherwise is a free ride from stanford. That will save you at least $500.

10) Know what kind of VC you want to take your money from. Some VC’s invest in teams, some invest in markets. If you are a company that has a good idea of where you are heading from a business plan perspective try to seek VC’s that invest in those particular markets.

Vineet is also happy to give advice directly – @VineetDevaiah

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