Wednesday, August 26, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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What Is Going On In Facebook’s “Outside World”?

Posted: 26 Aug 2009 08:56 AM PDT

When we wrote about Facebook’s minor design changes earlier today, we didn’t take an extremely close look at the screenshots that were embedded in the accompanying blog post the company’s design team published about the tweaks. If we had, we may or may not have noticed that they featured two nuggets that most definitely deserve a second glance, but FBhive most certainly took notice.

What did they see?

Well for starters, Facebook Product Designer Alexandre Roche's profile appears to have an extra filter for his news feed, labeled ‘Outside World’ and accompanied by an icon that represents a laboratory beaker (likely because it concerns an experimental feature).

Additionally, FBhive has spotted what appears to be a new ‘plus’ icon and number next to the Comment and Like numbers for a Video in the Highlights section of Roche’s profile page.

This calls for speculation!

FBhive - assuming it’s not a third-party application - believes ‘Outside World’ is a filter that would display content from other websites and applications you’ve subscribed to inside Facebook. This would extend the social network into a giant web-based RSS reader that could integrate seamlessly with the sharing features offered by Facebook. Makes sense to us, and we can imagine this would make waves in Webland if true. That is, if it ever sees the light of day.

The second thing FBhive spotted in my opinion is far more intriguing. As reported by the Facebook-centric blog, the (+) sign that appears next to the number of comments and likes of a highlighted video - uploaded by Facebook employee Helen Min - looks like the icon that is used for Facebook Credits (check for yourself here). These can be used by members of the social network to purchase virtual gifts in Facebook’s Gift Shop or to interact with a select number of third-party applications such as GroupCard and SocialCalendar.

Unless of course it isn’t a plus sign at all and we’re looking at it the wrong way (Erick says it looks more like a diamond). Question remains then what it represents, possibly the number of shares or reposts, or a shortcut to bookmarking content?

If it is in fact the Credits icon, the question is why this virtual currency could in the future possibly be assigned by users to content like videos and possibly other multimedia. FBhive thinks it could be a way for publishers, amateurs and professionals alike, to monetize material uploaded to the social networking service by directly getting tipped by viewers and fans through micro-payments. Again, this is a plausible explanation, and an exciting one to think over considering Facebook’s highly anticipated payment platform (which is currently being tested).

Care to speculate a little more?

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Branchr Advertising Acquires Online Collaboration Software Maker Atomplan

Posted: 26 Aug 2009 08:55 AM PDT

atomplanbranchrBranchr Advertising, the CPC (cost per click) based internet advertising company that allows fair ad distribution without contracts or setup fees, has acquired small business project and contact management application Atomplan (formerly Avecora OnDemand), we’ve learned this morning.

Financial details were not disclosed, but Branchr Advertising Director/Founder Christian Owens mentioned that the deal was a cash and equity acquisition.

Atomplan is a small business organization and team collaboration suite, delivered on the web, on-demand. Among Atomplan features are task and deadline management, group messaging, calendar, contact management and allocation, wiki pages, and Twitter-style status updates. The service was formally run by startup Avecora, which is now moving its focus from web applications to consumer electronics, we’re told by the company’s 17-year old CEO Mark Bao.

Branchr self-reports currently serving 100 million ads per month, across more than 2,300 websites. Its competitors include Fusion Ads, which claims to have served nearly 18 million ad impressions last July, and The Deck.

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Better Contact Management For Gmail

Posted: 26 Aug 2009 07:13 AM PDT

Gmail made a tweak last night that brings better contact management to the service. When you click the “To:” or “CC:” links in front of each address field, a box pops up with your contact list. (See example at right). It is a simple change, but it saves you from having to go to another page to find a contact.

Most of the time, Gmail users probably won’t use this feature because Gmail already gives you a list of auto-complete suggestions as you begin typing in a name into the “To:” field. These are based on people you’ve communicated with recently, and usually does the trick. But if you haven’t emailed someone for a long time, their name doesn’t pop up. It also doesn’t help if you can’t remember their name.

Anything that reduces the amount of steps it takes to complete an email is a plus in my book. However, this feature is a bit hidden. You have to click on the “To” or “CC” links to expose it, something many people might only do by mistake the first time (which is why I’m telling you).

The contact chooser also works for groups.

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Facebook Tweaks Design, Drops Rounded Corners

Posted: 26 Aug 2009 06:39 AM PDT

Facebook has made a few subtle changes to its design, which a lot of users have been noticing for the past couple of hours (thanks for telling us, y’all) and tweeting about. The two most apparent tweaks: the blue header bar now covers the entire width of the screen and rounded corners have been dropped from the social network’s web pages.

In addition, feedback on display ads has been changed from "Thumbs up/Thumbs down" to "Like/X."

Here’s how the decision to drop the rounded corners, which were apparently subject to debate at Facebook ever since they were introduced a few years ago, gets explained by the company’s design team:

Since we introduced rounded corners to Facebook, their consistent use has been spotty at best. The corner radii vary, and it sometimes feels arbitrary which corners are rounded and which are not. Additionally, they add an extra layer of complexity to the code (note: IE, please add support for border-radius).

As part of the effort to simplify our visual style, the design team recently decided to go back to our square corner roots. In doing so, we hope to champion cleanliness and the razor cut look that Facebook is known for.

Had you spotted the design tweaks or did it take us to tell you?

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Amazon Eyes Big Enterprise Budgets With Virtual Private Cloud Service

Posted: 26 Aug 2009 06:18 AM PDT

Wanna extend your existing IT infrastructure to the cloud? Amazon can help.

Amazon Web Services is today announcing the limited public beta of Virtual Private Cloud (aka Amazon VPC), a service that essentially makes it possible for customers to create their own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances to connect to their existing network over a secured VPN connection. That means Amazon Web Services is taking a major step in making its cloud computing services even more enterprise-friendly than they already were.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has published a lengthy but read-worthy blog post for the occasion, in which he acknowledges that enterprises tend to find it challenging to transition applications and services to the cloud when they have often invested years of resources and tons of money setting up their own IT infrastructure (datacenters, networks, etc.). He also says ‘private clouds’, which are basically emulations of cloud computing inside private networks, are not true clouds as far as he’s concerned and that Amazon VPC adequately fills the void.

To further his point, he lists what you can do with Amazon VPC:

- Create a Virtual Private Cloud and assign an IP address block to the VPC. The address block needs to be CIDR block such that it will be easy for your internal networking to route traffic to and from the VPC instance. These are addresses you own and control, most likely as part of your current datacenter addressing practice.
- Divide the VPC addressing up into subnets in a manner that is convenient for managing the applications and services you want run in the VPC.
- Create a VPN connection between the VPN Gateway that is part of the VPC instance and an IPSec-based VPN router on your own premises. Configure your internal routers such that traffic for the VPC address block will flow over the VPN.
- Start adding AWS cloud resources to your VPC. These resources are fully isolated and can only communicate to other resources in the same VPC and with those resources accessible via the VPN router. Accessibility of other resources, including those on the public internet, is subject to the standard enterprise routing and firewall policies.

A more detailed, technical outline of the offering can be found on the Amazon developer blog.

The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud is currently limited to the EC2 cloud compute service, though Amazon said it will include other web services (e.g. S3) in the future. Pricing, as usual, is based on usage.

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Massive Twitter Security Problem Not Resolved Just Yet

Posted: 26 Aug 2009 04:20 AM PDT

Yesterday UK-based SEO specialist Dave Naylor made headlines by detailing a significant Twitter cross-site scripting vulnerability, which allowed him to insert JavaScript code into tweets simply by adding some code to the field where an application developer would normally link to a product website. There are all sorts of malicious things people could have done to exploit the bug, like steal session cookies, create a Twitter worm or even infect unaware visitors with malware, so it’s safe to say this was a massive security threat.

Sure enough, when word got out Twitter moved to patch the bug to prevent such bad stuff from happening. John Adams from Twitter Operations even commented on Naylor’s blog to point out the hole had been closed shortly after he published his post.

Well, not quite.

Naylor today followed up on yesterday’s blog post with another one correctly claiming that the exploit still very much works. He proved as much by creating another dummy account on Twitter, which pops up a (harmless) dialog box when you visit the link through the website. Twitter may suspend this account soon, much like they did with the first dummy account Naylor created to make his point, so I included a screenshot of what happens when you visit that profile on top of this post.

Naylor writes:

With a few minutes work, someone with a bit of technical expertise could make a Twitter 'application' and start sending tweets with it. Using the simple instructions below, it can be arranged so that if another Twitter user so much as sees one of these tweets - and they are logged in to Twitter - their account could be taken over.

Imagine that for a moment. Simply by seeing one of these tweets, code can be run inside your browser impersonating you and doing anything that your browser can do. Perhaps it may simply redirect you to a pornographic website? Or maybe delete all of your tweets? Send a message to all of your friends? Maybe it would delete all of your followers, or worse still, just send the details needed to log in to your account off to another website for someone to use at their leisure.

In my opinion, it’s completely unacceptable that Twitter engineers never got in touch with Naylor to learn more about the exploit and adequately fix the problem, which the SEO consultant correctly marks a shame. Instead, the startup’s tech team apparently tried fixing it without really looking at the potential security issues:

Their idea of fixing it is to stop you putting spaces in the address box. Spaces. Other than that, everything else is fair game.

It’s important to note that you’re probably safe when you use any third-party client for your Twitter needs, although I’d recommend you make use of the more popular ones and stop visiting the Twitter website for the next couple of days. Whatever you do, be careful when you click links to Twitter profiles you don’t know, even when they are linked to by people you know and trust, and be on the lookout for suspicious-looking applications used to send out tweets.

We’ve contacted Twitter to let them know the security threat is still very much present. Hopefully, we’ll see an adequate fix and a statement from the startup soon.

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Germany’s Version Of LastFM To Shut Shop

Posted: 26 Aug 2009 04:03 AM PDT

German free music streaming service Roccatune has officially filed for insolvency.

After weeks of silence on their situation, Roccatune CEO Constantin Thyssen has now announced the news on their company blog. He puts the blame for the insolvency on a failed round of financing.

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Zoho Launches Sign-In Integration With Google Apps

Posted: 26 Aug 2009 04:02 AM PDT

Last summer, Zoho, a web-based software suite that includes document, project and invoicing management tools, integrated Google and Yahoo sign-ins, allowing users to sign into Zoho using a Google or Yahoo account. Today, Zoho is launching sign-in integration with Google Apps, letting users login to Zoho using their Google Apps credentials.

When Zoho users try to login to Zoho, they’ll be given a ‘Google Apps’ option in the sign-in box. Users can input their Google Apps domain name, and will be redirected to Google to sign-in using their Google Apps credentials. They will be given the option of authorizing “accounts.zoho.com” and will then be logged in to Zoho directly.

Google Apps is actually a serious competitor to Zoho, so the integration isn’t surprising. But Zoho says that many of its business applications, including Zoho CRM, Invoice, Meeting, and others, actually complement Google Apps and makes the transition between the two product suites seamless.

Despite facing competition from Microsoft and Google, Zoho continues to remain as a player in the document management space thanks to continuous innovations in its product. In fact, because of this competitive atmosphere that’s chock full of big-name companies, integrations are vital to the software's success as an application suite. Recently, Zoho launched integration with Microsoft Sharepoint as well as with Microsoft Access. Zoho's project management application, Zoho Projects 2.0, also added the capability to import existing projects from MS Project, Microsoft's project management desktop software.

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Twitter’s Golden Ratio (That No One Likes To Talk About)

Posted: 26 Aug 2009 01:36 AM PDT

golden-ratio-livioIf you’re new to Twitter, life is easy. A notification comes in that someone is following you, and you probably follow them back. After all, you’re going to want some tweets in your stream. After a couple dozen of those, you may start using more discretion, looking over the person’s profile and their most recent tweets. But that gets old quickly as well, and inevitably you turn to using the secret ratio that nearly everyone knows (whether they realize it or not) to determine who is worth following back: “Followers” versus “following”.

If a person has more followers than they are following, they’re probably a good person to at least consider following. If they are following more than they have more followers, the opposite may be true. The greater the discrepancy between the two numbers, the more likely each of those is true — to a certain point, since celebrities like Oprah throw this system out of whack. But for regular, non-Hollywood celebrities, the system works remarkably well as a filter.

One reason why this works so well is that the email notifications you receive now every time you get a new follower put this information front and center. Next to their profile image, these emails list:

1 - number of followers the user has

2 - number of tweets they’ve made

3 - the number of people that user is following

If 1 is greater than 3 (let’s call it a “positive ratio”), it could be worth clicking through to that person’s profile. If 1 is much greater than 3, they most certainly are at least worth looking at. If 3 is greater than 1 (the “negative ratio”) by a large margin, the likelihood that they’re a spammer or marketer is pretty good (and as such, probably someone you don’t want to follow). If they’re ratio is close to even, they may be worth looking at on a case-by-case basis.

screen-shot-2009-08-26-at-12608-amObviously, there are always exceptions. On a user-by-user basis, people will have friends that have negative ratios, but they’ll obviously follow them regardless of the ratio. But on a large scale, when you’re getting multiple requests that you need to filter through, the system works pretty well.

That said, this post will undoubtedly piss a lot of people off.

The fact is that while most people do on some level realize this ratio is true, a lot of people don’t like talking about it. The reason is that it goes up against a fundamental belief of social networking: The idea that if you follow someone, whether you admit it or not, you want them to follow you back. But the reality is that on Twitter, thanks to its asymmetric social graph, that quite often doesn’t happen.

And so we have a Twitter ecosystem that has more negative ratio users than the other way around. And no one likes being told that they’re not a beautiful and unique snowflake, so I’ll understand if this upsets some of you. But it doesn’t make it any less true.

screen-shot-2009-08-26-at-12801-amSince the beginning of Twitter, people have been complaining about hugely positive ratios: “He only follows 10 people,” and the like. The implication being made is that if a lot of people follow you, but you don’t follow a lot of people, you aren’t a “true” Twitter user. That talk has lessened a bit with some of the celebrities now on Twitter who can’t possibly be expected to follow millions of people, but plenty of users still bitch about followers/following inequalities.

But the fact of the matter is that a person can only follow so many people on Twitter before the idea of following starts to become meaningless. Because Twitter doesn’t have built-in relationship filters or the ability to search only those people you are following (both of which FriendFeed and some other services with Twitter-functionality offer), if you are following thousands of people, the likelihood that you’re going to get a meaningful experience from any single follower is pretty small.

But if you’re only following say 20 people, and you’re active on Twitter, you probably see just about everything each of those 20 people say. That’s the reason people have started setting up separate accounts just to follow the people they really want to follow. It’s a filter work-around, of sorts.

The idea of following thousands of people is just ridiculous. From what I’ve seen, as I mention above, the people who do this most often are either spammers or it’s someone trying to promote something. The idea is that the more people you follow, the more are likely to follow you back, the more reach you get for whatever it is you’re promoting (even if that’s yourself).

Now, again, before everyone starts screaming in the comments, I know there are exceptions to this rule. Certainly for newer users trying to get a sense of using Twitter and build up their followers, the ratio won’t apply. But when we start getting into the hundreds and thousands of followers, the ratio starts to work.

And besides, I’m just pointing out a system you probably already use whether you realize it (or will admit to) or not.

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

It’s A Meme! Get Photoshop Warmed Up And Win A Bing Tshirt

Posted: 26 Aug 2009 01:31 AM PDT

It started off as an innocent marketing mistake: Microsoft photoshopped a black man out of a picture for their Polish website and replaced it with a white guy. They left the black guy’s hand in the photo, but whatever. and that monitor still isn’t plugged in to anything at all.

Microsoft apologized and changed the Polish site to the original image.

But it’s too late. We’re already getting comments from users who are doing a little photoshopping of their own. This first one, which was submitted anonymously, shows a famous shot of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

We like it. But we think you can do better. So get Photoshop fired up and make your funniest (and yet not in any way offensive) version of the Polish Microsoft head replacement. No rules. Replace all the heads if you want to. Add costumes and props. And text bubbles. Whatever. Winner (chosen by our interns at the end of the day on Wednesday) gets a Bing Tshirt. You can have any size you like, as long as it’s XL. And we’ll even mail it to you for free. Just post your image online somewhere and add a link in the comments. Make sure to use a real email address so we can contact you.

We declare this a meme. Compete, and win.

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

New myTouch Android Commercial Stars Whoopi Goldberg, Phil Jackson & Jessie James

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 11:58 PM PDT

T-Mobile will unveil “the largest product launch advertising campaign in T-Mobile history” for the Android myTouch tomorrow with a television, online, cinema, print and search advertising campaign. The stars? Whoopi Goldberg, Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson and TV personality/motorcycle maven Jessie James.

Shocked? Me too. I can’t believe they didn’t ask me to participate. I mean, I’m actually using the phone. And like Phil Jackson, I’m a huge Lakers fan. Ridiculous. I’m firing my agent.

You can see the TV commercial below, which I’ve uploaded to YouTube without any permission whatsoever. I like the Cat Stevens song. More celebritastic endorsements on the official myTouch site.

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Gruml: A Google Reader App For Your Mac Desktop

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 11:30 PM PDT

logo2Google Reader is a very useful service for consuming your news feeds (assuming you still use RSS), but it lives in the browser, which means it doesn’t the responsiveness and polish of a desktop app. For all those Mac users out there looking for the best of both worlds, I present to you Gruml, a new desktop Google Reader application.

Gruml is a lightweight application that sits in your dock and menu bar, and gives you all of your RSS goodness. What’s great about Gruml is that it brings a lot of the features in Google Reader that we’ve come to know and love and brings them into the desktop client, including features like starring, “liking,” and sharing posts (with notes and tags), and reading headlines that friends share with you.

And for those Twitterholics out there who need to tweet their news, Gruml comes with Twitter support, allowing you to tweet articles (converted to short URLs) directly from the app.

It’s important to note that Gruml is still in beta, and has its faults, like running slowly on startup, and missing some settings in the preferences menu. But overall, it’s a great application that runs well and shows promise.

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

What Michael Birch Did after Selling Bebo and How He Thinks You Should Celebrate Your Birthday

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 10:51 PM PDT

5829624-face90655f61c6e92fc45438760b3cc74a010488-scaledFor all the billions of dollars created here, Silicon Valley is remarkably stingy when it comes to giving. I first wrote about this when I moved here in the great Web 1.0 Internet bubble. Back then, as companies went public all around us, one-third of households earning $100,000 or more gave $1,000 or less to charity—roughly half what the rest of the U.S. gave per dollar earned. And those were the fat times.

I don't have comparable data to back it up, but anecdotally it seems the Web 2.0 generation is doing a better job at giving. Or at least Bebo founder Michael Birch is.

Birch has spent the last six months working with a team of two other people to build a social giving site for the popular organization, Charity:Water. It launched its beta site today, and with just a Tweet announcing it nearly 400 members have already raised some $3,000.

Charity:Water's accountability and simplicity of purpose has made it a popular charity in New York, Hollywood and increasingly the Valley.  Here’s the value proposition: One-out-of-six-people on the planet doesn't have access to clean drinking water. $5,000 buys an African village a well. Every dime you donate, goes to these wells. You can even watch the wells being tapped for the first time via Web video. The non-profit is turning three in a few weeks, and it's raised more than $10 million over that time—much of it in $20 increments from a base of some 60,000 donors. It was Obama-fundraising-math before that was invented. As a result some 700,000 people in the world now have access to clean drinking water.

It was all started three years ago when Scott Harrison, reformed bad boy and Charity:Water founder, asked people to come to a huge New York party for his September birthday and donate $20 at the door instead of giving him a gift. He raised $15,000 and built six wells in Uganda. Like any great accidental entrepreneur, Harrison knew he was on to something.

In addition to all kinds of creative fund raising, detailed in the video below, the following year, Harrison opened his birthday to everyone via the Web, asking them to donate $32 dollars, since it was his 32 birthday. That year, he raised $59,000 and other September birthday babies brought the total to $150,000, which went to wells in Kenya. Not bad. The next year he got more September babies to “give up” their birthdays, and Charity:Water built them individual donation pages online. Unfortunately, it meant hand HTML-coding everyone's donation pages—pretty laborious work for such a small nonprofit. Still 800 people "gave up" their birthdays and raised some $965,000 dollars to bring some 50,000 people clean water in Ethiopia.

But Harrison knew that the value of a lot of micro-giving campaigns like Kiva and the popular Facebook application, Causes, is rooted in the ability to make small donations super-easy to solicit and to make via existing online social graphs. He was trying to figure out sites that knew when a huge number of people's birthdays were and after MySpace and Facebook, he came across Bebo. Early last year, he cold-emailed Bebo founder Michael Birch to ask if he'd be willing to send a note out to his September born users and Birch wrote back that it was "a bad time." It was actually a great time for Birch—he was selling the company to AOL for $850 million.

Once the deal was done, Birch called Harrison and suggested he build him a site that could help people born in any month instantly "give up their birthdays" for Charity:Water's mission. It was fitting since Birch’s next project was his pre-Bebo project, a site called Birthday Alarm. Nine months later, Harrison is about to turn 34, Charity:Water is turning three, and Birch has finished the site. For a free project, it’s a pretty nice looking site.

The recession makes this perfect timing. If you’re panicked about money and job loss, giving up your birthday is an easy way to give to those less-fortunate without having to spend a dime yourself. My husband has a September birthday and has already signed up. I plan to sign up for my birthday in December. You can create your own campaign in a matter of moments and with a few clicks, share it via all your existing social networks.

I’m sure the coders who were up until 4 a.m. last night will have mixed feelings about this, but this is one time I really want to see TechCrunch users break a beta site.

[Photo credit: Scott Harrison]

The story of charity: water - The 2009 September Campaign Trailer from charity: water on Vimeo.

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Salesforce Opens Up Force.com Platform To Outside Partners

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 08:54 PM PDT

Salesforce.com has continued to expand the capabilities of Force.com, its platform to build and deploy enterprise applications. The company recently rolled out Force.com Sites, which lets companies build and run their applications for internal use as well as for public use on Salesforce.com cloud computing platform. Today, Salesforce will be opening up an additional distribution channel off of Force.com: the Value-Added Reseller (VAR) program.

The VAR program lets partners, which are primarily IT consultants to large companies, resell Force.com and applications built off of Force.com to other companies. So for example, a VAR partner could create a recruiting app to manage HR processes for a company off of the Force.com platform and charge the company for the application and requisite services. VARs can resell the Force.com cloud computing platform, as well as additional services such as mobile capabilities, storage, sites, and development sandboxes.

The possibilities for enterprise applications built off the Force.com platform are endless. Currently, there are more than 120,000 custom applications built off of Force.com to run businesses that perform a variety of functions, including supply chain management, compliance tracking, brand management, accounts receivable, claims processing, time-off applications and more.

Salesforce will charge VARs $7.50 per user per month, but VARs can determine the pricing model they implement to outside companies. The program also includes sales resources, technical training for partners as well as support for issues with the Force.com platform. VARs are responsible for supporting their own customizations and applications. Initial partners that have joined the program include Appiphony, American Data Company, EDL Consulting, Lexnet Consulting Group, MK Partners, Reside, Silver Tree Systems, and Sundog.

The fact that Salesforce is opening up its enterprise cloud computing platform to outside partners for reselling purposes is strong move towards expanding its play in the cloud computing space. Plus, the program is a new business channel that could recruit more companies to adopt both its Force.com platform and its CRM. The company seems to be going vertical in its model in an effort to head off competition from Microsoft Azure and and Google App Engine.

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Skygrid Furthers Partnerships For Real-Time News Widgets

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 08:15 PM PDT

SkyGrid is slowly expanding its real-time financial news empire. The powerful business news aggregator, recently struck a deal with StockTwits, a popular site that lets you track real-time discussions about stock information on Twitter, to feature a live feed of real-time news. Tomorrow, SkyGrid will launch its real-time financial news widget on Zacks, an investment research site that’s popular in the financial industry.

Similar to the deal with StockTwits, SkyGrid will embed a widget into Zacks pages of financial information for companies, showing a stream of incoming, real-time news for the company on the page. You can also filter news by sentiment: SkyGrid uses semantic text analysis to determine if each incoming article is deemed positive, negative, or neutral about a given company.

SkyGrid’s founder Kevin Pomplun told us the the integration of SkyGrid’s widget with StockTwits was so successful that StockTwit’s homepage will now feature a real-time general financial news widget. Considering the success of the StockTwits partnership, I’m betting that we’ll see many more publishers who want the real-time news widget.

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

I Like The Way You Move: Animoto’s Custom Movie Montages Can Now Include Video

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 07:59 PM PDT

Animoto, the startup that lets you automatically build custom music videos starring your own media, just got even more awesome. Tonight the site is launching support for video, which means you’ll be able to generate customized music videos featuring your home movies, along with photos and music, with almost no effort required. We first previewed the new feature last month, and now the company is opening it to everyone.

The results are impressive, with videos that sport professional transitions that match whatever backing music you’ve chosen. For proof, check out the video below showing off a typical day at the TechCrunch office — it looks great, but it only took around five minutes of work.



Video editing can get tricky fast, but Animoto makes it easy by retaining the same kind of simple interface that’s made the site such a breeze to use with images. Here’s how it works: you upload the images and videos that you’d like to include in your movie, and the site displays a grid of thumbnails that you can drag and drop to determine the order they’ll be displayed in the final cut. You can select which portion of each video clip you’d like to include (up to ten seconds per clip) using an intuitive slider interface on the right hand side of the screen. You can also add text during this portion of the process, and choose if you’d like the audio of your video files to be muted or played over your movie’s background music. Choose a song from the site’s library, or upload one of your own, and you’re done. The entire process only takes a couple of minutes from start to finish, though it can take a bit longer if you decide to do a lot of tweaking. You can watch a video showing the process from start to finish below.




Once you’ve finished the layout of the video, Animoto processes it, using technology like beat detection to match your image and video content to the music that’s playing in the background. The rendering process takes around five minutes for every 30 seconds of content that has to be rendered, so this can take a little while depending how long your video is, but it’s hardly unreasonable.

The new feature is great, but there are a few things that might frustrate new users at first, like the limit of ten seconds (five for the free version) that can be shown from an individual clip before Animoto inserts a transition — you can include as many clips as you want, but they have to be short. CEO Brad Jefferson says that Animoto does this because TV broadcasts rarely include more than ten seconds of uncut footage unless they’re of an interview, so the limitation helps ensure that the videos retain a professional feel. That may be true, but I won’t be surprised if some people grow frustrated about it anyway. There is a roundabout way to include longer chunks of footage that involves duplicating one clip and placing it side by side with the original, but the process isn’t very intuitive.

Animoto is making the new feature available for free to new users, but only for videos a maximum of 30 seconds in length. If you want to make anything longer (and you will), you can pay $3 for a full-length music video, which can be up to 10 minutes long, or become a member for $30 per year, which lets you make as many videos as you want. If you’d like to get a high-res version of one of your videos it will cost $5 for a download, or you can pay $20 to get it shipped on a DVD. Note that all of these prices are consistent with what Animoto offered for its image-based videos — there’s no additional charge for video-enabled movies.

Aside from the new video feature, Animoto has been doing very well. We recently learned that the company has been cash-flow positive since late last year and just raised a $4.4 million funding round. Jefferson also hints we will be seeing some of these features make it to the company’s iPhone app, though he declined to share any details.

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myYearbook Finds Profitability In Hyper-Competitive Social Networking World

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 06:42 PM PDT

At best people consider myYearbook an afterthought in the social networking world - they weren’t even included in our 2009 Social Network valuation model because of a lack of available traffic data.

And yet…the company has managed to achieve profitability, a goal some of its huge competitors are still struggling to reach. CEO Geoff Cook told me today that the company is generating over $1 million/month in revenue, and became profitable in Q1 2009 (they’ve been ebitda profitable since last year).

1/3 of that revenue comes from virtual gifts, a product that only first launched in late 2008. The remainder, about 2/3 of revenue, is from advertising.

The site, which is aimed at teenagers, was first launched in 2005 by Geoff Cook and his siblings, Catherine and David. It now attracts nearly 6 million monthly unique visitors (Comscore worldwide, July 2009) and just over 1 billion monthly page views. 20 million users have registered.

As you might expect, myYearbook users overlap a lot with Facebook (60%) and MySpace (90%), so they have to be creative in offering something different to those users. As Cook explains in the video below, they are focusing on offering users a variety of games and activities to keep them engaged on the site, as well as facilitating the discovery of new people.

Cook also says that his team is focused more on monetization than growth at this point, and it’s important for them to build a sustainable business. They have no plans to raise more capital, he says. To date, they’ve raised just over $17 million.

Our video interview with Cook is below:

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First Twitter, Now The Web Starts To Embrace Bit.ly: Google, TypePad, CBS and yfrog

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 04:50 PM PDT

screen-shot-2009-08-25-at-44946-pmWhen Twitter decided to start using Bit.ly as its default URL-shortener, usage exploded. But the service was able to handle the rise in usage, and has been steadily adding new features. And now other major players on the web are rewarding that reliability by also embracing it. Today on its blog, Bit.ly details a few of the new API uses and partnerships that they’ve been cooking up.

The biggest is probably Google Reader, which now makes use of Bit.ly shortened links for its new ability to send stories to Twitter. Another big one is CBS, which not uses Bit.ly to share much of its content and keeps a running list of stats here. SixApart has also added a new feature to its TypePad beta test which allows any post to also generate a Bit.ly URL. This will apparently become a part of the full product in the fall. And John Resig of Mozilla used the Bit.ly API to build a new retweet button, similar to the ones you see all over the web powered by TweetMeme, but this is independent.

Another big partnership for Bit.ly is yfrog, one of the leading Twitter picture and video services. The two are “joining forces to streamline link and media sharing on social media sites,” we’re told. Over the next few weeks, Bit.ly will apparently be adding a media upload feature on its main site using yfrog, while all media uploaded to yfrog will have Bit.ly links for sharing. This partnership should make both services even more popular on Twitter.

Bit.ly says that other new features are on the way as well in the coming weeks. We’re still waiting on its big link data aggregator to take on services like Digg.

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Twitter Flew Above The 50 Million Uniques Mark For the First Time in July

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 04:42 PM PDT

July was a pretty monumental month for Twitter in terms of news and events. The microblogging site got a homepage redesign, officially adopted the word Tweet on its site, launched Twitter 101 and had a pretty serious document leak fiasco. And all of that took place in the only half of the month!

Which is why it may be unsurprising that Twitter passed a fairly big milestone sometime in July: Twitter passed 50 million unique visitors worldwide, according to comScore, reaching 51.6 million unique visits worldwide at the end of the month. Twitter added 7.1 unique visitors from June to July. Growth dipped slightly, with visits increasing by 16 percent from June. Twitter’s visits grew 19 percent from May to June, and saw 16 percent growth from April to May. But Twitter’s highest rate of worldwide growth may have been in the month of March, when the site grew by 95 percent, from 9.8 million to 19.1 million visits, according to comScore. June’s number may have been buoyed by the Iran election protests.

Twitter saw a slight boost in U.S. visitors, growing to 21.2 million visitors from 20 million in June, representing 41 percent of traffic. International visits now represents 59 percent of traffic, increasing from 55 percent in June. ComScore now counts it as the No. 47 largest site in the world, increasing from the No.52 spot in June and (surpassing the BBC and Craigslist).

As we’ve said in the past, these estimates only count traffic to Twitter.com. Its important to note that since more than half of Twitter users don't even go to the Website and use Twitter apps to consume and publish Tweets, Twitter's total audience is even larger. But clearly Twitter is still growing.

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Right Before Facebook Bought It, FriendFeed’s Real-Time Stream Saw A Flood Of Usage

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 04:19 PM PDT

ff_july_ww

Some people still aren’t sure why Facebook would buy FriendFeed. While few would question the talent of FriendFeed’s team, many still considered it to be a product going nowhere. Think again.

The new July comScore numbers are out, and they’re impressive to say the least for FriendFeed. First of all, its last full independent month saw an all-time high in unique visitors. But the stat that really will blow you away is the average time spent on the site. FriendFeed’s choice to move to a live, constantly updating stream of data was a very good choice, it seems.

At the end of April, FriendFeed turned on the live-stream that it had been testing on its beta site, for all users. At first, a lot of users didn’t seem to like it, but many quickly realized its power. From May on, usage of FriendFeed starting going up in terms of unique visitors to the site, after a small dip the month prior. Meanwhile, the average amount of time spent on the site went from just a few minutes in April, all the way up to 6.2 minutes in June. But the most impressive jump was yet to come: July saw users spending 31.2 minutes on the site. Just look at the chart below, the jump is pretty incredible.

ff_time_spent_

Assuming FriendFeed’s internal metrics are close to comScore’s, it looks like a case of where FriendFeed sold high. And it may have been a very smart time for Facebook to buy FriendFeed as the trend was clearly that the site was gaining momentum, and more importantly, that what they had done with the live-updating stream was working. Facebook is of course also working on its own version of a similar stream, but it has so far paled in comparison to FriendFeed’s. Undoubtedly, the FriendFeed team will help change that over the next several months.

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Twitter Wants To Track Your Clicks

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 02:34 PM PDT

Just before Twitter went down today (yup, it was down again), I noticed something strange. Whenever I clicked on any shortened link in my Twitter stream and look at the address bar of my browser, I saw a fleeting click tracker before it redirected to the final site. It looked something like this: “http://twitter.com/link_click_count . . .” For instance, here is the full URL redirect for one link I managed to capture:

http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F3omd6p&linkType=web&tweetId=3541772256&userId=12798452.

Others noticed this as well. When Twitter came back up, the redirects were gone. Maybe too many people were clicking on them.

Whether this was just a test or a preview of what’s to come, it suggests that Twitter wants to track all the links people click on the site, which is something you’d think it was doing already. The way that Twitter was doing the redirects was a bit clumsy. You actually ended up being redirected twice. First by the original URL shortener like bit.ly or ow.ly, and then by Twitter itself. While it only seemed to be happening on Twitter.com itself, the redirects worked for any short link including bit.ly, Tinyurl, ow.ly, and so on.

Why would Twitter be tracking links all of a sudden? It’s all about the passed links. First of all, those links are a treasure trove of data. By seeing which links get shared and clicked on the most, Twitter can tell where it is sending the most traffic, who is sending the most traffic, the most popular tweets, the most influential users, and more. All of this data would come in handy for Twitter’s planned analytics service it wants to roll out to business customers.

They can do a whole lot more too. First of all, they won’t be relying so much on bit.ly for click data on short links, even though bit.ly remains the default URL shortener on Twitter, and thus the biggest one, for now. With it’s own data, Twitter can move into bit.ly’s backyard and start showing the most popular links and what is being shared right across Twitter. In addition to ternding topics, it coudl also show trending links.

(Flickr photo by Gerlos).

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Marketing Decapitation In Poland: Asians Ok, Blacks Maybe Not

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 02:33 PM PDT


A reader sent in links to two identical Microsoft marketing sites. One is a standard U.S./English version, the other in Polish.

The image is identical, except Microsoft has removed the head of the black man in the U.S. version and photoshopped in a white guy’s head instead. The Asian man and white woman made the cut to the Polish site unscathed. Clicking back and forth between the two pages is actually kind of creepy.

The original model’s hand was left in the Polish version of the ad.

Photoshop Disasters, which also wrote about this, has some great comments:

“I like how that computer monitor isn’t plugged into anything.”

“Leave the white Macbook front and center in a MicroSoft Ad? You’d have thought that was the first thing they’d Photoshop out…”

“It’s okay if he has a black hand.”

Update: We’re taking this completely off the rails. Read, photoshop, and win a free Bing Tshirt.

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TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Mag.ma Unleashes Its Directory Of Hot Video Content To The Masses

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 01:42 PM PDT

Last May, we got our first taste of Mag.ma, the new video portal to come from Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron. We’ve been tracking the site since then, and it appeared at our Real-Time Crunchup last month, but it’s remained in private beta. Today, Mag.ma finally opens up to the public.

As we’ve noted before, most people will use Mag.ma as a great place to kill time. The site presents users with around one hundred video thumbnails on a single page, with hot videos from Twitter, YouTube, Digg, a variety of other services and the web at large. But despite a wide selection of content, the site manages not to overwhelm users. Mag.ma also has a heavy emphasis on stat tracking (you can watch a ticker count up as more people watch a certain video). There’s also a strong discovery component that lets you see videos other members on the site are recommending.

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Former Facebook CFO Gideon Yu Joins Khosla Ventures

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 01:06 PM PDT

Gideon Yu, the former Facebook CFO unceremoniously shown the door in late March, has joined Khosla Ventures as a General Partner, we’ve heard from multiple sources.

Prior to Facebook, Yu has held positions at Yahoo (SVP Finance), YouTube (CFO) and, most recently, a short stint as a partner at Sequoia Capital. He is credited with being one of the main architects of the landmark $1.65 billion Google acquisition of YouTube in 2006.

Khosla Ventures has been in the news recently - they are raising another $1 billion to fund investments in a wide variety of startups (Internet, cleantech, mobile, fundamental science, etc.). A list of their investments is on their Crunchbase profile.

This is the second former Sequoia partner to join Khosla Ventures. Pierre Lamond joined the firm in March 2009.

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The Case Of The Missing Burrito Comes To A Close As Chipotle Returns To The iPhone

Posted: 25 Aug 2009 01:03 PM PDT

Last January, the iPhone was graced with one of its greatest applications yet (at least, for burrito lovers): a native Chipotle app, allowing users to order their meals online for easy pickup. But the joy was to be shortlived — within hours after appearing on the App Store, the Chipotle application was pulled, sparking The Case Of The Missing Burrito. Given the TechCrunch office’s love for Chipotle’s cheesy bundles of awesome, we followed the case closely, tracking down the developers of the app to learn what had caused its early demise only to be told we could expect it to return in around two weeks. Today, over seven months after vanishing without warning, Chipotle has finally made its way back to the iPhone. You can download it here.

The application works beautifully, allowing you to craft your burrito, tacos, and salad bowl with whatever toppings you want, which include four kinds of salsa, sour cream, cheese, and basically everything else you can get inside the restaurant. Adding a certain topping simply requires hitting a plus sign — I managed to build my favorite custom burrito in about 30 seconds. Once you’ve finished your order, you can pay for it using a Chipotle account that’s linked to your credit card. The system will also save your orders so you can quickly place them again in the future. Also notable is the app’s speed. Even on an iPhone 3G, the app is quite fast, without the noticeable lag times you’ll often find in other applications.

So what was the cause of the delay? A Chipotle spokesperson says that the original app was not working up to Chipotle’s satisfaction, and they decided not to re-launch the app until it was, also noting that there was “no concrete timeline for re-launch” (though the design firm behind the app previously told me they were hoping for a mere two week delay, which stretched to seven months). My guess is that while the app itself was ready, Chipotle’s backend was unable to cope with the large influx of incoming orders.



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