Saturday, May 23, 2009

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The Latest from TechCrunch

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How Facebook, MySpace and YouTube Killed eBay

Posted: 23 May 2009 07:40 AM PDT

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Keith Rabois, vice president of strategy and business development for Slide, the social entertainment company. Prior to Slide, Keith was a VP at LinkedIn and an EVP at PayPal in charge of among other things, competitive strategy vis-à-vis eBay. He also worked at eBay for three weeks following its acquisition of PayPal. Keith currently serves on the Board of Directors of Yelp, Vendio, Xoom and FanIQ.

On Monday afternoon, I was speaking on a panel at the Social Graph Symposium when the moderator asked me what eBay could do to revitalize its marketplace by leveraging the social graph. Dave McClure, like many pundits, presumes the social graph could be a great boost for eBay, if not an outright panacea. I replied, "nothing."

It's actually the social graph and similar products that have placed a stake in eBay.com. Most often, people blame eBay's decay on factors like the weakening economy, the rise of Amazon, as well as eBay's own inefficient search functionality. But the real and simple reason is eBay is no longer fun. Over the years, it has lost online ground and eyeballs to pure entertainment destinations such as YouTube and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Do It eBay

Although it was always classified as an e-commerce destination, the quirkiness of the eBay marketplace was once a major source of entertainment on the Web. It was where people sought and bought everything from the first broken laser pointer to Beanie Babies to Bob Dylan's boyhood home. While the catch—anything from an antique clock to a Gulfstream II—was rewarding for the buyer, it was generally the entertainment and excitement of the chase that brought a buyer to eBay in the first place.

When eBay launched its first U.S. advertising campaign in 2000, eBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove stated, "We hope they [the ads] reflect the fun that people have when they come to our site." According to USA Today, "the fun aspect of eBay seems to have struck a chord with consumers." At that time, eBay was downright addictive and when you won an auction, it was thrilling. That delight kept people coming back for more, whether or not they actually prevailed with their bids.


Almost half the U.S. Internet population

Let's rewind to 2004, just a short five years ago. In January 2004, almost 50 percent of the entire U.S. Internet population visited eBay each month. If people were bored at work, chances are they were surfing the pages of eBay and unearthing eccentric auction items they never even knew existed. This was the height of the eBay heyday.


So what happened?

With the fun factor driving eBay usage, what really stole eBay's limelight was the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook and the likes of YouTube. In December 2006, almost half of the U.S. Internet population was still visiting eBay. But when you examine the total amount of time spent online, 11.9 percent was spent on MySpace versus 3.7 percent on eBay (according to Compete.com). By then, people were already devoting more of their online time to pimping out their MySpace profiles or snacking on YouTube's videos.

To add further insult to injury, in early 2007, Facebook opened up its platform and ushered in a flood of new applications. The result was the introduction of even more entertainment options to consume your online hours. People began to swap the enjoyment of serendipitously discovering knick-knacks on eBay for watching people run into trees on YouTube or SuperPoking friends on Facebook. The eBay addiction was replaced with other, more entertaining addictions.

eBay strips out the fun

This was not lost on all of eBay. As early as 2006, several executives championed an internal effort dubbed "eBay 3.0." The new vision for eBay was to resurrect the "fun" of auctions. An ad campaign labeled "Windorphins" was meant to remind consumers of the endorphin rush experienced when winning an auction. The purchase of StumbleUpon even had a rationale in this model. The ideals fueling eBay 3.0 eventually fizzled.

By the time John Donahoe took the helm of eBay in Q1 2008, he opted to "aggressively change our product, our customer approach and our business model." In a futile effort to compete with Amazon and Google, eBay leadership essentially stripped whatever remaining fun existed out of its marketplace. In December 2008, eBay's visitors accounted for only 1.5 percent of total minutes spent online (according to comScore Media Metrix). The leader board for top online properties showed Google, home of YouTube.com, and Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace.com, in the top five. EBay ranked sixth in total unique visitors, but was also the only property on the top 10 list to see a decline from 2007.


Where did all the fun go?

Ironically, at one point right after it bought PayPal, eBay had the leading actors of most of this entertainment revolution sitting in its offices. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube fame, Peter Thiel (Facebook), Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp), Max Levchin (Slide), David Sacks (Geni and Yammer), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn, board member of Zynga) and others, myself included, were all too alienated by eBay's bureaucratic and political MBA culture. So we decided to create our own fun elsewhere instead.

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Deny This, Last.fm

Posted: 22 May 2009 07:53 PM PDT

A couple of months ago Erick Schonfeld wrote a post titled “Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?” based on a source that has proved to be very reliable in the past. All hell broke loose shortly thereafter.

Before posting Erick reached out to the RIAA, Last.fm and parent company CBS for comments. The only response was from CBS - "To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA." The CBS spokesperson, Katie Gunion, subsequently emailed us to say “would you please attribute the statement to Last.fm, it is currently reading as though CBS issued the statement” Gunion’s email lists her title as Public Relations, CBS Interactive, and her first statement did not name Last.fm (this is important, see below). A subsequent statement by Shannon Jacobs, VP of Communications at CBS: “this is a last.fm issue, as far as I am concerned. It is not a corporate issue. This is a last.fm issue, not a corporate issue. The posting represents last.fm's response.”

After the story broke all concerned parties had no problem commenting publicly.

Last.fm cofounder Richard Jones said "I'm rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue.” He followed up with a blog post “Techcrunch are full of shit, “I denied it vehemently on the Techcrunch article, as did several other Last.fm staffers. We denied it in the Last.fm forums, on twitter, via email – basically we denied it to anyone that would listen, and now we're denying it on our blog.” One blog called us a “tabloid masquerading as a legitimate news outlet.” Lots of others piled on.

Apart from updating the original post we’ve been quiet on this story. The person who first leaked the news was terminated from CBS for the leak, says our original source, and threatened with legal action. He understandably went very quiet. But the outrageously shrill denials by Last.fm just didn’t ring true. Once you got past the personal attacks, the denial language itself was too carefully worded.

Now we’ve located another source for the story, someone who’s very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth, sorta, when they said Erick’s story wasn’t correct.

Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. That corresponds to what our original source said in conversations we had after our initial post and before CBS lawyers became involved. But we didn’t want to update until we had an independent source for that information, too.

Here’s what we believe happened: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for “internal use only.” It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA.

Here’s an email from the original source, partially redacted. A screenshot of this email is here.

Re: touching base

From: [redacted, a CBS employee]
Sent: [redacted]
To: [redacted]

[ _____] We provided the data to the RIAA yesterday because we know from experience that they can negatively impact our streaming rates with publishers. Based on the urgency of the request they probably just wanted to learn more about the leak but who knows. Seriously, can you blame them? [______] Our ops team provided the usual reports along with additional log data including user IP addresses. The GM who told them to do it said the data was for internal use only. Well, that was the big mistake. The team in the UK became irate because they had to do it a second time since we were told some of the data was corrupted. This time they transferred the data directly to them and in doing so they discovered who really made the request. Shit really hit the fan, I even got a call [______] Obviously, I can see their POV but what they don't understand over there is that we are in the analytics business and it's not like this is the first time we've provided this data to a third party. Someone over there should be more forthright with users about the data policy instead of complaining about BD to upper management like I'm here trying to destroy the business. We're just trying to help them stay afloat here it's not like Pro memberships are earning any revenue! [______________] So if you hear of anything, I'm even open to possibly moving West now for the right opportunity, let me know.

Our new source, which hasn’t seen this email, says much the same: that Last.fm didn’t know the nature of the CBS request until after the data was sent and that the data was in fact subsequently sent by CBS to the RIAA. This source’s information comes directly from Last.fm employees who he has spoken with.

It’s important to note that while sources are in agreement that it was the RIAA that made the request, it may have been one or more music labels acting independently. The suggestion in the email above that the compliance was made because of the ability for the requester to negatively impact streaming rates suggests it was a label request. But the end result is the same.

We believe CBS lied to us when they denied sending the data to the RIAA, and that they subsequently asked us to attribute the quote to Last.fm to make the statement defensible. Last.fm’s denials were strictly speaking correct, but they ignored the underlying truth of the situation, that their parent company supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users. We believe that the outrage they aimed at us for reporting the story, which was materially correct, should have been aimed at CBS instead. But Last.fm never spoke publicly of the real facts of the story.

We believe Last.fm and CBS violated their own privacy policy in the transmission of this data. We also believe CBS and Last.fm may have violated EU privacy laws, including the Data Protection Directive, and should be investigated by the appropriate authorities.

And to the CBS employee who was fired and threatened based on this story - we believe certain U.S. Whistle Blower laws may protect you from retaliation from CBS in this matter. We’d like to provide you with legal counsel at our cost.

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Tap Tap Revenge 2.5 Hits Tonight, Takes Steps To Consolidate Popularity

Posted: 22 May 2009 06:00 PM PDT

If you’ve got an iPhone, there’s a good chance you’ve got Tapulous’s Tap Tap Revenge installed - the game is ranked as the iPhone’s most popular game of all time. Tonight the latest update to the game lands, adding a handful of new features including themes, “battles”, and a new song import feature. The features are part of the latest update of Tap Tap Revenge 2, which you can download for free here (if you already have the app you can just update it).

One of the most notable additions to the game is the introduction of themes. While the premium versions of TTR have featured a variety of color palettes and effects, the main version of the game has maintained the same color scheme for every song. Now Tapulous will be able to embed new themes with each new song that is downloaded, and songs that are imported from the premium games will retain their themes as well. This may not sound like a big deal, but as anyone who has played Guitar Hero or Rock Band can attest to, variation in the game’s appearance can really add to its replay value.

The other major addition to the game is the ability to import songs purchased through the premium editions of Tap Tap Revenge. Since late last year, Tapulous has been regularly releasing premium custom editions of TTR with music licensed from major artists, including Coldplay, NIN, and most recently, Dave Matthews Band. Before now if you wanted to play these songs, you’d have to boot into each game. Now Tapulous’s server can detect which songs your device should have access to, and will allow you to download them for play through the main application.

Tapulous is clearly looking to channel its popularity into a single application rather than have it scattered across multiple premium apps, and these new features are the latest steps in that direction. TTR is quickly gaining steam with major artists - last week it featured the hit single “Gives You Hell” by the All American Rejects as a free song, which was downloaded over 500,000 times. And once the iPhone 3.0 software update is released this summer, users will be able to buy premium songs directly through the flagship TTR app instead of having to download them as their own applications. Labels are taking notice, and they’re sure to become even more interested when they can sell their songs on an integrated TTR music store.

But Tapulous is going to face one major obstacle along the way: microtransactions are only going to be supported for paid applications on the App Store, and the flagship TTR games have always been free. Which means Tapulous will have to find a way to convince its millions of users to cough up 99 cents for TTR3.

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Facebook’s Valuation Heading North Again. Up To $10 Billion Now.

Posted: 22 May 2009 05:22 PM PDT

piles_moneyA few days ago, we reported that Facebook turned down an investment term sheet that placed their value at $8 billion. But it was apparently the board seat the investors wanted and not the valuation that was the hold up. Now that valuation number has jumped to $10 billion thanks to an offer from some new investors, sources tell The Wall Street Journal.

Specifically, Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian tech investment company wants to invest $200 million in the social network, according to the report. That would place its preferred stock value at $10 billion. The company would also buy between $100 million and $150 million in common stock at a $6.5 billion valuation. It’s not clear if Facebook has responded in any way.

Also not clear is if DST would want a board seat with the investment. But one could imagine that would be a sticking point once again. Though perhaps Facebook will like the $10 billion number — which is closer to the $15 billion valuation it got from Microsoft’s investment in 2007. If Facebook were to accept these terms, and give away a board seat, at least we know what one is worth: About $2 billion.

Facebook’s revenue is the key point in all of these investments/valuations. Internally, the company believes it will make $400 million this year, but it has been telling investors that the number will be closer to $550 million. Perhaps the Russians are biting at that.

Here’s Facebook’s canned response on the matter: "Facebook is a private company, so as a matter of policy, we don't typically share details about our financial plans or comment on rumor and speculation."

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Video: Fred Wilson Talks To Google About Disruption

Posted: 22 May 2009 04:50 PM PDT

picture-171Venture Capitalist (Union Square Ventures) and blogger Fred Wilson gave a talk a few days ago at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View. The key point of his talk was about disruption — what companies are doing out there to change the technology space. Nothing Earth-shatteringly new, but interesting insights from a smart guy.

The talk includes his six words to live by on the Internet: Global, social, open, mobile, playful, intelligent — and a bonus seventh one: instantaneous. As an investor in Twitter, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Wilson included this last one.

Google has just posted the video of the talk on YouTube, find it below.

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NileGuide Unveils iPhone App For Customized Travel Guides

Posted: 22 May 2009 04:45 PM PDT

NileGuide, one-stop travel planning site, has launched an iPhone app for its travel guide and planning portal. The startup, which lets you create a customized trip itinerary, will now let users view the customized guides they create on Nile’s site on their iPhones.

Users can browse all the descriptions and map locations of events, restaurants, hotels, bars and landmarks that are scheduled in their trips and see their day by day itinerary. The app also lets any user, regardless of whether they have made a NileGuide itinerary, see suggested trip itineraries near their current location for any of Nile's destinations around the world. The guides are displayed in order of user rating and are also classified by type of trip, such as first-time, kid-friendly, off the beaten path, etc.

NileGuide’s website has more functionality, including the ability to see CitySearch reviews of restaurants and to book flights and car rentals from Expedia, Priceline and other sites, but have not added this to the app. This is understandable, considering the popularity of CitySearch and Yelp’s apps, which NileGuide couldn’t compete with. Expedia has a similar iPhone app that lets you access your trip itinerary but doesn’t let you access event or restaurant listings. Travel Tracker is another useful itinerary iPhone app that’s built off of TripIt’s itinerary platform.

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Make Your Google Analytics Data Public

Posted: 22 May 2009 04:42 PM PDT

Last year we called on Google to let users have the option of making Google Analytics data public. Today they’ve done that, in a fashion. They aren’t aggregating the data into a public site (although adding it to Google Trends over time would make sense). But they are allowing websites to access the data via an API and publish it to the web or in applications.

From the blog post:

Many users are clamoring for a simpler way to share their Analytics traffic data with their external stakeholders. These stakeholders, such as investors and advertisers, typically use data reported by other services to evaluate the performance of a company. Many times these estimates are significantly different than that from Google Analytics.

One way to share your Analytics data with everyone is to use our recent integration with Google Ad Planner. With this, you can replace Ad Planner traffic estimates with actual data collected by Google Analytics.

Now you can use the Google Analytics Data Export API to create your own integrations to share Google Analytics data with everyone. For example, if you use WordPress blogging software, you can display Google Analytics traffic data directly on your website using the new Analyticator plugin by Sprial Web Consulting.

Wordpress users can download a plugin here.

Transparency is good. This is going to be a popular way to share metrics with advertisers and users.

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Google Maps Now Suggests Alternate Routes

Posted: 22 May 2009 03:09 PM PDT

Sometimes there are many ways to get from point A to point B, whether you are walking or driving. Until now, Google Maps’ directions feature has given you the route they consider the best and allows you to drag and drop the route to change your path. Today, Google Maps is adding functionality that suggests additional routes so that you can see all of them on the map for comparison.

Under a “Suggested Routes” heading, you will now be able to access other routes to the same destination. This is a feature that GPS systems in car, like a Garmin device, have been offering for quite some time so it makes sense that Google would want to catch up. Google says that they choose alternative routes bases on many factors, including distance, travel time, and number of turns. Google Maps boils this data down to what is the lowest “cost” and ranks the routes based upon the “cost.”

MapQuest doesn’t suggest alternate routes but the site does let you choose alternate routes by filtering directions by no toll roads, highways, and distance, which is a function Google Maps has as well.

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Cryin’: Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler Fails To Sue Anonymous Bloggers

Posted: 22 May 2009 02:56 PM PDT

steventylerpicCelebrities get impersonated on the web. They’re famous — everyone is anonymous — it happens. Most celebrities just ignore it; but some get pissed off. Kanye West got mad as hell about Twitter users pretending to be him last week. This week it’s Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler who is up in arms — to the point of actually taking anonymous bloggers to court.

Tyler attempted to sue a group of bloggers that he says were impersonating him, sharing private facts, making false statements even using his likeness on the web, NBC Los Angeles reports. The only problem? The whole “anonymous” thing. Seeing as no one really knows who these bloggers are, they naturally didn’t bother showing up to court. Hell, I’m quite certain they didn’t even know they were supposed to be in court. So the judge dismissed the case.

Tyler is apparently most upset about these anonymous bloggers posting some comments about his mother who passed away last year. I wasn’t able to find those, but I did find a robust web community around “Fake Steven Tyler.” There’s a popular one in the Rock Band Forums, a group on Facebook (also based around his Rock Band avatar), there’s even a Wikipedia page and an odd YouTube video (embedded below).

Twitter took down the fake Kanye West accounts at his request, but it’s hard to see what Tyler or a court could do in this case. A good first step would be to figure out who you’re actually suing though.

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McMaster’s Final Humiliation: Federal Smack Down (Restraining Order Below)

Posted: 22 May 2009 02:17 PM PDT

South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster gets served his final humiliation: a federal judge, U.S. District Judge Weston Houck, blocked him from prosecuting Craigslist management, at least until he’s made a final decision on the case. From the order: “Until the Court rules on the merits of craigslist’s claims, Defendants and their attorneys and staffs shall refrain from initiating or pursuing any prosecution against craigslist or its officers and employees in relation to content posted by third parties on craigslist’s website.”

The consent order granting the restraining order is embedded below.

McMaster started the war earlier this month by threatening criminal prosecution against Craigslist and Craigslist management for allowing pornographic images and ads for prostitution on the South Carolina Craigslist site. Craigslist took extraordinary steps to comply with McMaster’s demands, despite the fact that legal experts questioned if McMaster even had a case.

Craigslist stood firm and filed suit against McMaster in federal court. McMaster, now facing charges of his own, declared victory and ran away.

This final humiliation just makes it clear that no one on the planet with a shred of common sense seems to side with McMaster. The man is running for governor of South Carolina and is using Craigslist to make headlines. The evidence of his douchery is overwhelming:

I’d say we’re done here, although I still think Craigslist should permanently shut down the South Carolina site and ban South Carolina IP addresses just out of spite. But the good guys won one today, which is increasingly infrequent. Time to celebrate.

Update: In other South Carolina news, they found that missing 555 pound teenager. Sigh.


052209Order -

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CrunchBoard Jobs: Calling all Job Hunters

Posted: 22 May 2009 02:15 PM PDT

With the apparent ease in layoffs, things might be looking up. This week we saw quite a few new jobs on CrunchBoard as companies are still looking for some tech savvy employees. But then again, according to analyst Christa Quarles, we might all be in the wrong industry. For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

Don’t forget we’re looking for a few good hackers here at TechCrunch.

New jobs on CrunchBoard:

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Find The Good, The Bad And The Spammy Twitter Users With Chirpio

Posted: 22 May 2009 12:48 PM PDT

goodbadugly1Perhaps the biggest problem facing Twitter these days is the influx of users who just wish to use it for spamming purposes. When someone follows you, it’s hard to know their intentions at first and you may follow them back. If they’re a spammer, your stream will be bombarded with junk. A new startup, Chirpio, wants to solve this problem and offer better user recommendations with a Twitter rating system.

While there have been plenty of other service that you can use fo find Twitter users you should follow, notably Mr. Tweet and WeFollow, Chirpio offers a very simple solution that everyone will be able to understand. When you sign in to your Twitter account on Chirpio via their OAuth support, you will see your tweet stream as you would on Twitter. But below each tweet you will see a way to rate the user up or down. More importantly, you can mark them as “Spam” and easily unfollow them. Below each user’s icon, you will see their composite rating score.

Along the top of your stream there are filters that you can use once you have rated users. For example, if I only want to see the ones that I rated as “good” (the up vote), I can do that. Likewise for “bad” — why you would be following “bad” users, I don’t know, perhaps just to drive your hatred of them. It’s important to note that a down rating is not the same as a “Spam” mark, so it is actually a useful rating for people who you follow on purpose but don’t really like.

In the right side column of Chirpio, you can find your own profile to see how users are rating you (you cannot see who voted what way). Below that is a “Top Rated” area showing the top rated users across the network. Obviously, the concern here is about people gaming the system, but co-founder Gee Chuang tells us they are developing an algorithm that would give different weight to different votes based on certain activity. He says this is similar to the way Digg weights diggs differently based on activity.

picture-142

You can also rate users on Chirpio right on Twitter itself. Simply use the syntax “@chirpio @parislemon +” if you like me or “”@chirpio @parislemon -” if you dislike me. The same works with “spam” and you can also substitute “good” and “bad” for plus and minus, as well bulk rate people by including multiple names in these tweets.

It’ll take a lot of users using the system and rating people to see how well this will actually work as a recommendation system for Twitter. But I like how easy this is to use, and the simple idea behind it.

Founders James Fong, Daniel Khamsing and the aforementioned Gee Chuang built the service on Google’s App Engine, and have self-funded the project. Chuang says that an API is coming soon which will allow for Chirpio integration with other Twitter-based services.

picture-152

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Twine Is Taking Off, Now Bigger Than FriendFeed

Posted: 22 May 2009 12:38 PM PDT

It turns out that people are following more than just their friends online. Look at the comScore chart above comparing unique visitors in the U.S. to FriendFeed versus Twine. Yeah, I was shocked to see that Twine has more than three times as many unique monthly visitors as FriendFeed (714,000 vs. 188,000). On a worldwide basis, comScore shows FriendFeed still slightly ahead of Twine. ComScore doesn’t always do a great job with small sites, so I checked Compete, which shows Twine with 2.25 million monthly visitors in April versus 998,000 for FriendFeed (see embed below). Different numbers, same story.

While FriendFeed is organized around following feeds of your friends’ activities across the Web, Twine is organized around interest feeds. Essentially, Twine members create topic pages that others can follow. It requires more work than FriendFeed. You have to add items such as links,articles, videos, and notes. But once you do, Twine organizes them for you using an underlying semantic index and tagging technology combined with social inputs from the community. So in a sense it competes more with Mahalo or Squidoo in that it creates authoritative pages around topics, except that these pages are really constantly updated topic or interest feeds that anyone can add to. You can read more about the original concept here, which relaunched publicly in October, 2008. All the growth is from October.

I pinged Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, the company behind Twine, to ask what’s up. He says that both the Compete and comScore numbers are off, but the trend is right. The initial growth came simply from letting people in who had been on the waiting list. But even he is surprised by the growth rate. So far five million items have been bookmarked in Twine. There are now 200,000 registered users who have created Twines (its name for interest feeds) across 30,000 different interest groups. The rest of the traffic comes from people visiting those topic pages.

And it is not all SEO traffic. Spivack provides the following breakdown of traffic by source: 59 percent comes from people coming directly to Twine, 20 percent comes from search engines, and most of the rest comes from people who receive email notifications and daily digests tracking the interest feeds they’ve signed up for. About 2 percent of traffic comes from twitter, but that portion is “rising fast.”

Following interesting people is just a proxy for following your interests, and Twine lets you connect with like-minded people as well. It is the combination that is killer.

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Petrofix Promises To Cure Summer Woes At The Gas Pump

Posted: 22 May 2009 11:00 AM PDT

Most Americans felt the burn of volatile gas prices over the past year, especially last summer. For those people who use their car frequently for work or vacation, spikes in the cost of gas can be frustrating and costly. And as more people forgo expensive vacations for budget-friendly road trips this summer, gas prices will once again come into focus, especially considering the predictable rise of gas prices during the summer.

Ever wish you could hedge gas prices like big companies do? Startup Petrofix will let you do just that. It just launched an online service that aims to control gas prices for individuals and small businesses, by locking in a fixed price for gas so drivers don’t have to incur the extra costs when the price at the pump goes up.

Here’s how it works. Consumers can sign up for a plan ranging from 3 months to 2 years. To enroll in a plan, you pay a fee, which is based on where you live and your personal gas consumption. Petrofix provides you with online tools to help estimate how much gas you use in a given month. So for the West Coast, where gas is more expensive, you pay $42 for 3 months if you use about 50 gallons per month, which comes out to be around $0.28 per gallon. If gas prices go up, the company will cut you a check or refund at the end of each month for the increase in price from the time you locked in the gas price. In this scenario, you only come out ahead after the fee if gas prices rise more than $0.84 per gallon. But if gas prices keep going up, you save more (see this hypothetical example).

The other catch is that if gas prices go down (which they often do) then you are locked into a plan that requires you to pay for something you don’t necessarily need. But for those individuals and small businesses who are constantly on the road and rack up the miles, the service may not be such a bad investment considering the volatility of the market. And if you can lock in prices when they are still low, the hedge should work. Just don’t wait until July when gas prices are above $4.00 a gallon.

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RidetheCity.com Gets An Update In Time for Biking Season

Posted: 22 May 2009 10:09 AM PDT

routing2-2_jpg

RidetheCity.com is a service that maps the best bike routes in New York. You add a starting point and an end point and the service finds dedicated bike lanes, greenways, and other “safe” routes for you to take on your two-wheeler through the mean streets of the city.

We’ve just been given permission to let you folks beat up their latest incarnation, RidetheCity 2.0 with a few interesting updates. Co-creator Jordan Anderson reports:

- Much faster routing and overall performance
- Better looking maps
- SMS support
- Sort of wonky, but workable multi-language support
- Better info. about bike shops and rentals


The new service uses CloudMade Web Maps Lite tiles for a far prettier interface and it seems snappy as heck. The map is considerably nicer to look at and the sharing system is great - you can send an SMS message with your directions to your phone for orienteering on the go.

routing-2_jpg

There’s even a bonus for Brooklyn-based readers: RidetheCity is having a launch party on Saturday at Radegast at 113 N 3rd Street in Wiliamsburg, Brooklyn from 2pm until 6pm. They’ll be giving out RidetheCity schwag and one lucky person will win a Bicycle Habitat gift card.

The new site will go live tonight but feel free to test it on their sexy beta server until then. They even have a widget for those so inclined.

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Photo Scoop: Fotolia Takes A Massive $50 Million To $100 Million Round From TA Associates

Posted: 22 May 2009 09:47 AM PDT

Microstock photography site Fotolia has taken its first outside round of investment since it was founded in 2005 and it is a doozy. The company isn’t talking about it, but an exceptionally good source with knowledge of the deal confirms that private equity firm TA Associates has invested between $50 million and $100 million in Fotolia. In comparison, rival iStockPhoto was acquired for $50 million by Getty Images three years ago. There are some rumors going around in venture circles that Fotolia got sold outright for $150 million. Our source, however, emphasizes that the company was not sold. Instead, after competitive bidding from more traditional venture firms, TA Associates came in with a massive injection of capital.

Up until now, Fotolia has been self-funded by French entrepreneurs Oleg Tscheltzoff, Thibaud Elziere, and some silent partners. The company is officially headquartered in New York City, but everyone still works from home. The company has been on a roll lately. It reached one million registered users and five million images for sale in February, introduced microstock video in April, hired an iStockPhoto co-founder in May, and just yesterday launched a royalty-free photo site called PhotoXpress.

Fotolia is smaller than iStockPhoto, but it has been going through a recent spurt of growth, while iStockPhoto seems to be stagnating. For example, unique visitors to Fotolia have tripled in the last twelve months to 3.4 million worldwide, according to comScore. Meanwhile, iStockphoto’s uniques are down 14 percent to 5.9 million (see chart below).

Fotolia is being pretty aggressive in undercutting iStockPhoto’s already low microstock prices, and the new PhotoXpress site is even more disruptive. Forget about selling images and illustrations for $1 to $10 a pop. It offers 10 free images a day. It is hard to see how this translates into huge revenues for Fotolia, but obviously it has big ambitions. Now it has the cash to really shake up the market.

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TechCrunch Meetup At Mobile 2.0 Europe, Barcelona, June 19

Posted: 22 May 2009 08:00 AM PDT

The Mobile 2.0 Europe conference is coming up in June and it’s shaping up to be pretty cool. Experts and thought leaders from all aspects of the mobile ecosystem will be descending on Barcelona, and TechCrunch will be descending on it too in the shape of myself and Robin Wauters. Having been last year I can attest that this event is one of the few to really bring together some of the best mobile startups in Europe. The Mobile 2.0 Europe conference will be on Friday, June 19, 2009 at the Espacio Esade Forum, with the Mobile 2.0 Europe Developer Day the day before. There is also a Startup Demo Launch pad.

So it’s our pleasure to also be hosting the official TechCrunch Mobile 2.0 party after the event on Friday and after the speaker’s dinner. We are pre-releasing the first 100 tickets here (there is a small ticket fee to prevent no-shows). We are also looking for sponsors of the party, who will obviously be branded at the event and in posts about it. Please email our events organiser petra(at)twistedtree.co.uk.

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