Wednesday, September 2, 2009

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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idthis Photo With A Little Help From Your Friends

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 08:56 AM PDT

Sometimes you come across something and don’t know exactly what it is. What if you could snap a photo on your iPhone, upload it to a site where people can submit answers and vote on the best ones, and send out a link to everyone you know on Twitter to get them to weigh in? That basically describes idthis, a simple site developed by Billy Chasen, who previously created chartbeat (which I covered here) and firef.ly for betaworks.

With idthis, which is both a Website and an iPhone app (iTunes link), the concept is pretty simple, but I can see it going in different directions. One is a simple utility. You see an old BMW convertible on the street and want to know what year it is. Send a photo to idthis. It could also be a way to play visual games. Take a closeup of an object or make it slightly blurry and see who can guess what it is first. (Obscene photos will be taken down and can be flagged by the community).

The instructions on the site state:

Just snap a photo of something you’d like identified (like a breed of dog, a type of car, that weird gelatinous blob sitting on your plate, or even that celebrity sitting next to you that you can’t remember their name, etc…) and then send it to be identified.

Anyone can submit an answer. Once an answer gets five votes, the picture becomes officially identified (you can change the number of votes required to identify a picture when you submit it). Here’s one I put up. See if you guys can guess what it is.

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

Vonage Goes Where Google Voice Can’t: the App Store

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 07:39 AM PDT

Talk about strange - while Google Voice can't get so much as their foot in the App Store's door, Vonage has just done a pirouette and waltzed right through. According to a recent release from the Jersey-based VOIP giant, their new Vonage mobile application has been approved for inclusion into Apple's App Store as soon as it comes out of beta. Details at this point are still lacking: we have no idea when it will actually release, nor do we know how much it'll cost for all you Vonage-faithful out there. The press release doesn't even go into what kind of services the app will provide, but we can certainly hazard a few guesses.
TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Panorama Capital Pours $4.5 Million Into Online Wine Outlet Vinfolio

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 07:24 AM PDT

Online wine store and community site Vinfolio has raised $4.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Panorama Capital after receiving an undisclosed amount of angel investment earlier. San Francisco-based Vinfolio offers a set of integrated services and resources to basically help wine enthusiasts and collectors buy, sell, manage and enjoy wine.

Vinfolio CEO Stephen J. Bachmann said the investment will mostly be used to accelerate the growth of its Vinfolio Marketplace, an online platform for buying and selling wine that currently boasts over 250,000 wines up for bidding, and the startup’s expansion in Asia.

There’s no shortage of wine-related websites and services out there. From the top of my head: review sites Snooth and Corkd, Vinogusto, good old Wine.com and wine ‘discovery’ service Adegga, although I’m sure there are many more.

Curious to see if Vinfolio will manage to gain mind and market share in this corked crowded space.

Cheers!

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

Dimdim Launches Webinar Service, Teams Up With Eventbrite

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 06:44 AM PDT

Dimdim, the open source web conferencing software company backed by $8.4 million in venture capital, today launched Dimdim Webinar, which allows SMBs and individuals to host an unlimited amount of completely web-based webinars with up to 1,000 people using nothing but a web browser.

Dimdim has arranged to provide free Dimdim Webinar accounts to up to 300 TechCrunch readers by signing up right here. The winners will be notified by e-mail.

In addition to its new product, the startup announced a partnership with Eventbrite, a provider of online event management and ticketing services, to enable webinars organizers to make money with web-based meeting and events.

Dimdim Webinar builds on the Dimdim 5.1 platform, which is said to be used by more than three million people and businesses today, and doesn’t require users to install any software whether they want to watch or participate in webinars, presentations, etc. The company is also debuting a customizable widget today that allows for webinar organizers to easier distribute one-click registration forms and links to detailed information web pages.

Dimdim Webinar is accompanied by a couple of helpful resources that guide organizers through the necessary steps to monetize and analyze the performance of their webinars, including an affiliate program that pays up to $150 for each webinar signup, help videos and guides and this dedicated microsite, a free eBook and the ability to schedule and provide tickets to webinars for free or for a fee through its exclusive partnership with Eventbrite.

Pricing for Dimdim Webinar starts at $75 per month, but there’s a free 30-day trial available and if the number of attendees you want to accommodate doesn’t exceed 20 than you can use the limited, free version. Or you could go back to the top of this post and see if you can get that free premium account.

Similar offerings include GoToMeeting and WebEx, which both offer more features at higher prices.

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

MindMeister Releases iPhone App For Those Eureka Moments

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 04:55 AM PDT

Mind mapping application builder MeisterLabs, the startup behind brainstorm & planning tool MindMeister, acquired the MindMaker, iPhone app in January and now it’s available in the app store as a full-blown MindMeister app.

MindMeister is an online mind mapping tool that allows you to create, share and collaborate on mind maps. The new re-jiged iPhone app has some key differences. Namely it supports sharing mind maps and also supports MindMeister’s “geistesblitz” or “brainwave” feature which allows you to insert those brilliant eureka ideas that you get when you’re in the bathroom into your default mind map on the mindmeister site. Perfect for the iPhone.

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

HealthBase Is The Ultimate Medical Content Search Engine

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 04:35 AM PDT

There are so many information portals on the web for health information, it can be tough to decipher which one is the best resource to answer a medical question. NetBase Solutions has launched healthBase, a powerful semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of authoritative health sites including WebMD, Wikipedia, PubMed, and the Mayo Clinic’s health site.

HealthBase uses NetBase’s proprietary search intelligence technology to read sentences inside documents and linguistically understand the meaning of the content. Thus, healthBase’s search engine can automatically find treatments for any health condition or disease; the pros and cons of any treatment, medication and food, and more.

The search engine’s results are impressive. When you type in a search for the available treatments for diabetes, you are given results that are broken down by 63 drugs and medications used to treat the disease, 70 common treatments for diabetes, and 20 appropriate food and plants for the treatment of diabetes. You can also see the pros and cons of certain treatments. Search results appear disarmingly fast and will take you to the appropriate site where the content and information is hosted.

There’s no doubt that this is a useful site to tap into the vast variety of health information there is on the web, but I find the site to be slightly impersonal. Medical information, which can be daunting and sterile, is sometimes best served with a human touch on the web, especially when it comes to consumer knowledge. Medpedia is a good example of a site that contains a large amount of content that also has a social element.

But healthBase serves a valid purpose as an aggregator of medical content and will surely help those looking for a comprehensive research tool. Parent company NetBase won’t serve advertising on the site but monetizes its technology by powering internal search engines for companies that have large databases of content. Healthbase is a public demonstration of its technology.

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

Mobile Ad Network Greystripe Gets A $2 Million Infusion From NBC Universal

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 04:10 AM PDT

Greystripe, the mobile brand and game advertising network has secured $2 million in an extended series C funding round from General Electric and NBC Universal’s Peacock Equity Fund. The startup originally raised $5.5 million in the series C round in March from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, Incubic Venture Capital and Monitor Ventures.

Greystripe has raised a total of $17.6 million in funding since the company’s launch in 2006. Greystripe’s Founder and CEO Michael Chang tells us that the most recent funding will be used to expand the company’s sales team and efforts to work with publishers. Greystripe capitalized on strong growth in its mobile content distribution and monetization business, particularly with the iPhone.

Greystripe recently started to integrate mobile-centric ad campaigns with industry-accepted online media buying software. This integration allows for ad agencies to easily add mobile ads with one click and also allows for Flash advertisements to appear on the iPhone (a proprietary technology that Greystripe developed). Ads can be used for both online and mobile purposes.

Greystripe is trying to integrate mobile ad campaigns into online ad budgets as part of a greater brand strategy. Greystripe has partnered with several brands and companies, including Kia, Axe Unilever, Jeep, Paramount Pictures, and JC Penney to leverage the mobile ad market. According to Greystripe, Unilever Axe saw a 15% brand lift. Greystripe also partnered with Universal Pictures (owned by NBC Universal) for an iPhone ad campaign the movie, "A Perfect Getaway," which was distributed by studio. Greystripe says that 8% of users who viewed the entire ad experience clicking through to view the trailer. Competitors to Greystripe include VideoEgg and AdMob, which recently acquired AdWhirl.

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

Popjam Suffers While We Share Jokes On Twitter — Not Popjam

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 04:09 AM PDT

Back in February we were excited to see a sort of “Humorous Twitter” appear in the form of Popjam. Ok, so it was more a microblogging-meets-Digg-meets-CollegeHumour, but as we said at the time, getting Twitter integration fast would really help.

Aiming at College Humour and eBaumsworld or Icanhascheezburger with something Twitter-like seemed like a no-brainer. However, although they used the Twitter mechanic of ‘follow’, they didn’t integrate with Twitter at launch and therefore didn’t get on the back of Twitter’s recent massive growth. That looks to have been a costly mistake.

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

Google Broadens Attack On Amazon Kindle, Partners With COOLERBOOKS

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 04:05 AM PDT

Google is clearly moving fast in setting up partnerships with ebook reader manufacturers and store operators to give some weight to its threat to Amazon and the latter’s Kindle product line.

First, the company teamed up with Sony, adding about 1 million public domain books to the technology giant’s eBook Store.

Now Mountain View has sealed a deal with British Interead, bringing the same amount of ebooks to an online store outside the U.S. for the first time (where close to half a million of them are available for free).

Reading-based Interead is the company behind ebook store COOLERBOOKS. The company also manufactures COOL-ER eReaders, small, elegant ebook readers that kinda look like giant iPods and cost $249 in the United States.

COOLERBOOKS.com accommodates 19 document formats, including EPUB and PDF, and MP3 for audio books, giving the ebookstore the broadest range of formats available on the web.

Enough to pose a threat to Amazon, just the beginning, or a venture destined for failure? Time will tell, but it’s always good to have alternative free ebook stores, even if you won’t be finding the bestsellers over there.

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

Nokia Beta Labs Introduces New Apps: Ovi Lifecasting, Social Messaging

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 02:17 AM PDT

At the Nokia World 2009 event in Stuttgart, Nokia Beta Labs has announced a number of new services ready for testing right now. The most interesting one is Ovi Lifecasting, an application we caught wind of yesterday but is now ready for limited early bird beta-testing.

The beta tool, which requires a Nokia N97 device, taps into Facebook to enable you to share status updates and photos with your Facebook friends and also lets you share your location through Ovi Maps (also in beta). Here’s an introduction video featuring two polished young men using the application to hook up with each other in some city:

Also new is an extension of Nokia Messaging called Social Messaging, which interestingly Nokia calls the groundwork for an impending proprietary multi-community social networking client. The company insists this is an early look, and currently only supports Facebook:

In other news, Nokia Beta Labs is discontinuing Nokia Friend View, which was an experimental research project from Nokia Research Center. We covered the app, which was basically a location-aware microblogging tool when it was introduced in November 2008.

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

401k Plans Are Hard To Understand. BrightScope Raises $2 Million To Fix That.

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 01:35 AM PDT

San Diego based BrightScope, which launched earlier this year, helps people understand their 401k retirement plans and how to maximize the benefits.

That’s a much needed service: the company says 30% of workers don’t participate at all in their company 401k programs. 22% don’t contribute enough to maximize matching benefits from companies, and 80% of workers have no idea how much they’re paying in 401k administrative and other fees. BrightScope shines a light on all that and helps people take better advantage of these programs.

The company has raised a $2 million second round of financing, led by Steelpoint Capital Partners, to continue to build out the service.

Jim Cacavo from Steelpoint and Tim Tokarsky are joining the company’s board of directors.

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

WTF, Google Sells Company Merchandise Online?

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 01:31 AM PDT

Color me surprised to discover Google operates an online merchandise store aptly named Google Store, courtesy of @newsycombinator. Google-centric blogs like Google Blogoscoped have understandably been aware of this for quite some time, but I had no idea. There’s no mention of it on the Google corporate website (although it’s linked at the bottom here), and even the Wikipedia entry simply redirects to a list of all its products. They’re apparently even running ad units for it on their network (see below).

Apparently, created back in 2006 several years ago, the online store features a big inventory of items featuring Google brands for sale, ranging from adult and kids clothing to accessories like lava lamps, mugs, Yo-Yos and lip balm. There’s even a recently launched section reserved exclusively for YouTube-branded stuff, and I’m definitely tempted to purchase one of those exquisite YouTube Snap Bibs for the next newborn in the family.

Two questions pop into my head: when’s the Bing Store coming (the domain name has already been secured by Microsoft), and how much revenue is Google getting out of this well-hidden Google Store?

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

MySQL Founders Back Mobile Sorcery For Cross-Platform Development Technology

Posted: 02 Sep 2009 12:42 AM PDT

Many entrepreneurs who muzzle through a successful exit use some of the proceeds to become an angel investor and help other startups get, well, started. And that's not exclusively a Silicon Valley thing. Stockholm, Sweden-based Mobile Sorcery has just raised an early-stage investment round amounting up to 1.5 million Swedish Kronor (approximately €145k or $206k USD), for the most part coming from MySQL founders David Axmark and Michael Widenius. You may remember MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems back in January 2008 for approximately $1 billion after raising only $39 million in venture capital. It's safe to say both co-founders walked away with enough cash to use some of it for angel investment in promising companies.
TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Salesforce Launches Lightweight Contact Manager For Small Businesses

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 08:55 PM PDT

One of the advantages of using a CRM is the ability to easily manage and organize contacts to maximize leads. Salesforce.com and the many other companies that offer CRMs have well-established contact management systems within their products that can be incredibly useful to businesses both big and small. But what if you want a easy-to-use, but comprehensive contact management system without the bells and whistles of a CRM? Salesforce.com now has the answer: a Contact Manager Edition of its CRM that doesn't include all the more complicated features of Salesforce's conventional product. For $9 per user per month, Contact Manager Edition will store and manage all contacts and accounts in the cloud. The product will integrate with any email system, including Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo. The system will track all emails, keeping a record of customer interactions and will run pre-configured and customized reports on contacts and accounts. Of course, this tracking system can be customized to track data that is most important to an user's needs.
TechCrunch50 Conference 2009: September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco

Why Gmail Failed Today

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 07:59 PM PDT

When Gmail went down today, it caused more than a minor panic. People, like me, who use Gmail as their primary email couldn’t get much work done. There’s nothing like an outage to make you realize how much you rely on something.

So what happened exactly? Isn’t Gmail supposed to have multiple points of failure? Well yes, Gmail has thousands and thousands of overlapping mail servers which can pic up the slack if any one fails because the data is replicated and spread all around. But there are also request servers which do nothing but route the requests for email to whichever server (with the right emails on it) happens to be available.

It tuns out that Google took down some regular email servers for routine maintenance, and because of some recent changes, that overloaded the request servers. Google engineering VP Ben Treynor explains on the Gmail Blog:

At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.

So much for redundancy.

Gmail, which recently passed AOL to become the third largest Web mail service in the U.S., is obviously having some growing pains. A few hours of downtime is not the end of the world, although it might seem like it at the time. It just better not make this a new habit.

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

Brilliant: Advertisers Pay To Drive Traffic From One Place On Facebook To Another Place On Facebook

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 07:14 PM PDT

So I was reading this Comscore report about the massive number of ads that are being served on social networks. 8.2% of all display ads on the Internet today in the U.S. are being served on Facebook. Wow. MySpace still has a small lead there, with 9.2%. Overall, social networks are serving up 21% of all U.S. display ads, and that’s with Twitter basically still on the sidelines.

Anyhow, as soon as I finish reading the report and some of the associated coverage, I see an email from Facebook in my inbox. It says:

Hi there,

My name is Melissa and I work in advertising at Facebook. Could you forward this along to the appropriate person who does your online media buying?

I am a huge TechCrunch fan, and I think TechCrunch has one of the best Pages on Facebook. It has seen a sizeable amount of organic fan growth, and the Page content does a great job keeping users engaged. Now that we have "Become a Fan" cost-per-click ads, it’s easier than ever to expand your fan base to a much greater size. With over 250MM users, we can target by various parameters to reach the right people that would want to fan the TechCrunch Page. Having 9,000 fans is a great start, but with the potential for 50,000 or even 500,000 fans, you can make your updates that much more effective.

Running through our online tool, you can control your daily budget, ad creatives, and target audience so your ads are as effective as possible. We can also have a dedicated account manager work with you to make sure the ads are being optimized for the best performance. I am more than happy to help with this fan-growth effort and tap into the potential that TechCrunch’s Page has on Facebook. Feel free to reach out to me by phone at 650-xxx-xxxx or via email at xxxxxx@facebook.com, and I can set you up with a business account and some free ad credits to get started. Look forward to hearing from you!

And all I can think is, how did these guys manage to set up a system where people pay to drive traffic from one place on Facebook to another place on Facebook? Even Google hasn’t managed to figure that one out yet. I’ve known they (and MySpace) have done this since launching their ad platforms, but it never really hit home until today how brilliant this all is.

They even have a nice pre-created ad to show me when I visit our fan page on Facebook, and offer to let me pay via cost per impression or cost per click. It’s all so easy. All I have to do is pull out my credit card and push Facebook a little bit closer to that looming IPO.

I love the Internet.

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

Yahoo Launches Microblogging Platform Yahoo Meme In English

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 03:46 PM PDT

A few weeks ago , we reported that Yahoo quietly launched its microblogging product Yahoo Meme, in Spanish. Yahoo had previously launched a Portuguese language micro-blogging product, Yahoo Meme, that drew similarities to Twitter and Tumblr. And on second glance, it seemed to be a mediocre competitor to Twitter, Tumblr and other micro-sharing services in terms of its offerings and features.

It looks like Yahoo definitely has lofty ambitions for Yahoo Meme, as it has stealthily rolled the micro-blogging service out in Spanish and now in English to appeal to the masses. Here's how Yahoo Meme works: you create an account and it starts you off with an empty blog that you can fill with text, images, videos, music or a mixture of those things. All you can add to your blog - apart from the content - is a title, a 100-character description and an avatar. You can also create a comment thread underneath the content you post, which was a feature that was missing when we reviewed Yahoo Meme previously.

Like Twitter and Tumblr, you can search other people's public accounts and follow them, with updates from these users appearing in your stream. You can also 'Repost' anyone’s entry, similar to the 'Reblog' feature that's integrated into Tumblr. But the micro-blogging service seems lacking in its features and its potential to surpass its competitors.

Yahoo also recently launched Yahoo Know Your Mojo, a site that claims to tell you what kind of "social mojo" you possess by analyzing your Tweets, but actually appears to do basically nothing. Yahoo hasn’t had the greatest luck with social networks recently, with its Indian social network, SpotM, shutting its doors less than a year after its launch.

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

Brizzly Adds Photo Uploads. 500 Invites For TC Readers.

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 03:45 PM PDT

screen-shot-2009-09-01-at-34350-pmBrizzly, the new web-based Twitter client that was first unveiled at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp in July, has today added a new feature: photo uploads. Users can now upload images to Brizzly’s servers and they will tweet out along with any message you enter. This is a nice addition for Brizzly because one of its key features is the inline display of images.

Alongside the new feature, Brizzly is also announcing a wider roll-out of its beta today. As such, they’re giving us 500 invites to hand out to TechCrunch readers. Simply go to brizzly.com and use the code: ‘multiplylibrary‘ to sign up.

Aside from in-stream images, Brizzly also shows videos right from users’ tweet streams. While co-founder Jason Shellen tells us that they have nothing to announce for video today, it is in the works. Right now, the images will be hosted on the Amazon servers Brizzly users, we’re told.

When they are sent out to other Twitter services, the photos use brizzly.com URLs, and direct users to a special Brizzly photo page. On this page you can see how many time the photo has been viewed, when it was upload, and who uploaded it, pretty standard stuff, but it has a nicer interface than some of the other Twitter photo-sharing services.

There is also a new area in the left-side menu of Brizzly just to view photos that have been uploaded through the service.

We’ve been trying out Brizzly for a few weeks now, it’s a really nice interface to interact with Twitter from. On top of inline images and videos, it also offers a nice way to see and reply to Direct Messages as they come in, and explains to you why certain items on Twitter are trending topics. Most importantly, you can group the people you follow together to cut through a lot of Twitter clutter if you follow a lot of people. There is also support for multiple Twitter accounts.

Brizzly has put together a reviewer’s guide for how to use it here. You can also learn more in the video below (note that the interface has been updated slightly since this video).

screen-shot-2009-09-01-at-35335-pm

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

Alright, Who Broke The Internet? Dell.com Also Knocked Out. (Updated)

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 02:29 PM PDT

Of course Gmail being down is not good news for Google’s business (directly nor indirectly), but if you’re a giant computer manufacturer directly retailing products online across the globe, I’d wager you’re a bit worse off when your website is completely unavailable.

At least for the past half hour (since 5 PM EST), Dell.com has been suffering from a serious outage. Just for your reference, the company saw sales of $12.76 billion last quarter, and that was down 22% from $16.43 billion a year ago. Rest assured every minute of downtime is costing the computer manufacturer serious money.

Update: site is back up as from 5:40 PM EST

Are the two events related and are we experiencing yet another massive DDoS attack, or is this merely coincidental?

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

TheFind Acquires iStorez.com To Help Consumers Find Deals While Shopping

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 02:15 PM PDT

TheFind, a technology-heavy shopping search engine, has acquired the deal-driven shopping site iStorez.com. iStorez aggregates the latest coupons, sales and deals from retailers across a variety of categories. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed, but we are hearing it was less than $500,000.

TheFind, which is a search engine geared more towards finding new products than locating a price for a particular item, will use its latest acquisition to attract consumers who are looking for promotions, deals and sales from online retailers. This is probably a wise move given the current economic climate. Everyone is looking for a deal and its helpful to have information about sales and promotions side by side in your shopping portal.

TheFind is hoping to be a one-stop shopping destination for consumers where they can search for a varied list of items from multiple sources. The site currently indexes 350 million products from over 500,000 stores. Last year, TheFind launched an iPhone app that allows users to search for stores in a region that are selling a particular product. The app will also compare prices of products from stores in your location and even calculates the cost to drive from your location to a particular store. In 2007, TheFind acquired Glimpse, a womens' shopping destination.

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

SkyFire Raises $5 Million More For Rich Mobile Browser

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 01:26 PM PDT

SkyFire is getting ready to roll with its rich mobile browser. Last May, the company (finally) released its Symbian program after a long beta trial and announced that a BlackBerry version was in the works.

Earlier this Summer they hired former Travelocity executive Jeffrey Glueck to lead the company into the next phase. Now a regulatory filing reveals the startup has raised a Series C closed off its earlier Series B round of funding with an extra $5 million, reports peHUB.

There were no new investors cited in the filing, so it’s safe to assume this was a follow-up round from SkyFire’s existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures, who had previously invested $17.8 million in the mobile browser maker. The total amount of funding raised by the company now reaches a healthy $22.8 million.

Skyfire is free and the only mobile browser that currently supports Flash, Silverlight, and a number of other technologies generally reserved for desktop browsers. The software runs on Windows Mobile (smartphones and PPC) and Nokia N and E Series (Symbian S60, 3rd Edition) phones.

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

Live From fbFund REV’s Demo Day

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 01:15 PM PDT

I’m here at the demo day for fbFund REV, Facebook’s new incubator program that’s jointly put on by Accel Partners and Founders Fund. We’ve embedded a live stream of the event below, and I’ll be updating with notes on each company that presents. Also be sure to check out our post from last night, when we took a look at fbFund’s first session as an incubator (versus just a distributor of cash grants), as well as some of the talks given by fbFund’s mentors.

Thread.com — Thread.com helps users on Facebook meet possible matches for dating using Facebook. Rather than revolving around meeting strangers, the site allows you to browse through singles who are friends with your friends. You can see our full introduction to the site here.

Funji —  A community for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The company is targeting “Generation ME” age 13-21 with a virtual world that allows users to customize their own virtual room and avatars. Users can interact in a forum and check out their friends’ rooms. Everything looks very colorful and playful, which could help it catch on with the youth audience.

Sociable says that retailers are not driving significant sales from social media (e.g. from Facebook and Twitter). The company says brands need to evolve from B2C communication, to word of mouth, C2C conversations. Sociable tries to optimize the retailer’s “viral loop” through a variety of ways, including syndicating events published to Facebook to other Facebook Connect-enabeld sites. The service is currently live on every concert page on LiveNation and plans to expand to other verticals. Projects to break even by the end of the year.

Geckogo brings user generated content from social travel sites and brings them to more traditional travel portals. The service can take content from services like Facebook and Twitter, and then bring them to sites like Travelocity or Expedia in embeddable widgets.

FriendRadio brings an integrated music player to Facebook in a interesting way. Rather than just embed music players into the site, users can use FriendRadio to create a nifty music player that resides tucked at the side of the screen as you browse Facebook. The company is building a browser plugin to bring music to Facebook profile pages as well (you’ll see your friends’ music when you visit their profile).

photosilove is a media sharing app that users use to send bite-sized media to show their friends that they care about each other — things like small images of teddy bears, or a frog holding a sign that says “I care”. The app didn’t originally plan to focus on this kind of friendly sharing, but it’s what their users tended to use it for. At this point the startup hasn’t done much in terms of monetization, but the company points out how many large companies are successfully tapping into this market.

Vittana.org is “Kiva for student loans”. One of two non-profits in this round of fbFund. Loans are 6-24 months in length, $500-1500 in total amounts. Bank teller is currently the top profession. The company says that until the student loan model is proven, other organizations are hesitant to do it. Says that for every $800 loan, the student will earn $20k more in incremental income over their lifetime.

Workstir is “yellow pages, plus your social graph”. It helps connect you with service professionals (say, a painter) and see what your friends, or friends of friends think of them by tapping into your social graph. It uses a similar connection to model to what you’ll see on LinkedIn. To generate revenue, the company will allow service professionals to advertise on their key pages. It will also allow service professionals to join the site and answer questions posted by other users — the more questions the professionals answer, the higher their rank on Workstir.

Backlight — Everything has a backstory, but where can you share that online? The company says that there’s an opportunity for “Inspirational content”. Points out success of brands like Chicken Soup for the Soul and Causes. Says Twitter is great for sharing, identity creation, but they don’t offer a platform for inspiration/meaning. Backlight allows you to upload any piece of media and provide a backstory, including ability to take photos on Facebook and add another layer of meaning to it. Working with Stanford, Cal, Santa Clara University to help showcase student work.

NetworkedBlogs — Connect bloggers with readers who are on social networks. “On average, your blog sucks” — the bottom 98% of blogs have average of 3 page views a day. But when you build a blog, it’s what people find when they Google your name, so you need to make it look like someone is reading it. The service lets you syndicate your blog to Facebook, to embed social widgets into your blog, and more. The service already has 1.5 million installs, 650k monthly actives, and is the largest news community on Facebook. The site aggregates 100,000 blog posts a day. On Facebook, you can see which of your friends are following certain blogs, which of your friends are writing blogs, and so on. The company is profitable, grew revenue by 50% in the last two months. Today the company is announcing a partnership with Webs.com.

Wildfire is a powerful self-service platform that allows companies to create social marketing campaigns for Facebook, Twitter, and their company websites. The company left private beta last month, and is profitable. Clients have included 3M, Facebook, and Pepsi. The platform helps companies who are looking to engage social network users using proven campaign formats (the service offers wizards that companies can use to create their campaigns). Companies can get the campaign started though advertising, and they generally continue to grow through viral channels.

NutshellMail is a service that compiles your social networking activity into a single digest it and sends it to your Email inbox. The service also allows you to interact with Facebook and Twitter through your Email. NutshellMail lets you monitor what people are saying about you on Twitter and see your new friend requests, messages, and birthdays from Facebook, among other things. To respond to one of these messages or tweets, you just reply to the message and Nutshellmail will put an update on your behalf. Most people get 3 digests per day, and it has 60% engagement. 70% of the people who sign up are using it 30 days later. In the future, the company plans to offer social groups so you can specify certain groups of friends and keep track of them using your Email.

GroupCard and Cash.io. GroupCard is the largest platform for collaborative gifts and cards, and is profitable and used in thousands of offices. Today they’re launching Cash.io. The company says it costs money for businesses to send consumers rebates. Cash.io is a platform that lets businesses issue codes that consumers redeem however they want. It uses PayPal, Amazon, and Facebook Payments in the future (maybe). Customers can fulfill rebates on services like Facebook. Businesses will be able to issue payment codes over Twitter.

Gameyola is looking to help monetize and distribute Flash games over social networks. It’s looking to help social distribution on Facebook, and monetization through virtual goods. The company offers a unified payment currency called Gameyola coins. Has 180,000 players, and has started selling virtual goods on its site.

RunMyErrand is a service that lets you outsource everyday tasks that you don’t have time for (shop at target, return Cable box, and more). The company is working with Coldstone creamery in Boston, giving them a way to outsource delivery in Boston. Once you post an errand, a trusted runner network is alerted. Have retirees, stay-at-home-moms, dog walkers, young professionals running these errands to supplement income. So how does RunMyErrand establish trust? They have user ratings, and 100% background checked. Everything is social-graph aware. Trust is obviously going to be hard to establish with users, but if they can get over that hurdle I could see this becoming quite useful. Revenue model is to take cut of reimbursements and fees charged by runners.

samasource is a non-profit service that allows you to outsource microwork tasks like data, testing, transcription and research to poor, but educated, workers abroad — it’s a Kiva for small work tasks. Clients so far include Google, YPO, Benetech, and Dolores Labs. For example, a young man (one of the Lost Boys of Sudan) was denied formal employment in Kenya, but was able to earn money by working for US company Dolores Labs through samasource. There is a screening process to ensure that workers will be able to handle the work you have to offer. Because you’re doing this through Facebook, you can more personally connect with the people you hire..

MyChurch is a service that helps churches build their own social networks, and lets them connect via Facebook. The site has 30,000 churches signed up (out of around 300,000) in the US. If they can map out everyone’s church social network, they become the de facto church social network. Previously monetized through ads, now they’re trying to sell subscriptions to churches with higher quotas, no ads, and new features (custom URL for MyChurch page). Lots of churches are using myChurch page for official website. Close to break even under freemium model. But the site also hopes to make money though online donations to church.

RunThere is a social community for runners and bikers. You can map out your run, look at routes that other users have created, and embed maps of these on your blog. You can also track your route using Google Earth. The site can also help build a blog with meta data about your runs. The site plans to make money by offering a tool for personal trainers. Trainers can use the app to help keep clients motivated, keep track of their progress.

Zimride is a service that helps companies and universities create communities for carpooling. Users log in (you can use Facebook Connect to verify that you belong to a certain company or University), then indicate where they’re loking to go and the date. The service then matches users so that they can share the cost of the drive. The company has a partnership with Zipcar, has $180k in recurring revenue and will be break-even by the end of the quarter. For more, check out our post on the startup here, when it described it as a “carpooling startup that actually makes money”.

Sortuv helps you find things that are “sort of” like something else. Enter a restaurant and the site will present other restaurants that are similar. The company isn’t just about local search — if you like a kind of char, you can search for places with a similar kind of design. The startup has an iPhone app that lets you rate what you like, and it will suggest similar matches. Can analyze your status updates, use the things you talk about (like bands, video games, and movies) to help build your Sortuv profile.

Life360 is looking to become a place for you to manage family safety and security. The company previously won 300k from Google in Android developer challenge and will be launching soon. The site allows you to track family and pets on a map, recover lost items like phones, and help protect your identity. It can help streamline signup for security services in a matter of seconds (services that had previously been standalone). The company integrates multiple third party services into a single control panel.

RentMineOnline is a service that helps property managers handle churn and the associated costs. The company has been profitable for five months. The company works with individual property managers, messaging residents once per quarter with an Email that lets them refer the property they’re currently living at to friends. Traditionally property managers have paid residents for referrals, often posting physical notes on their door handles — now RentMineOnline will be able to step in and streamline the process while taking in some of this money.


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Talk Of Gmail Being Down Is Trying Like Hell To Bring Down Twitter

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 01:12 PM PDT

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So, as the entire web seems to be talking about at the moment, Gmail is down. But what’s amazing is the volume of people talking about it. When I first noticed it being down, I did a Twitter search and just minutes later there were over 10,000 new results. A couple minutes later, there were over 20,000.

It took a few minutes for it to show up on Trending Topics, but now it’s there, but it was giving Twitter Search fits. For a while, if you clicked on “Gmail” in Trending Topics, you would have seen “No results for [blank]” returned. If you hit it again, it kept stacking the messages on top of one another (pictured below).

It looks like Twitter has resolved the issue, and made a strong comeback, but the influx of tweets continues to be amazing. This could be a good test for Twitter to see if it can stay up and everyone bitches about one of the most popular web services on the planet being down. And remember, this test comes before that new datacenter is in operation.

screen-shot-2009-09-01-at-10616-pm

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Thread.com Raises $1.2 Million For Facebook-Powered Matchmaking Service

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 01:09 PM PDT

If you’ve ever tried an online dating site like Match.com, there’s a good chance that you found your first few interactions with other members to be unnatural — from the awkward initial messages to the fact that you probably don’t have a single friend in common, the whole process can feel a bit forced. Thread.com, a startup formerly known as Frintro that’s launching today out of fbFund REV’s incubator program, is looking to offer the ideal middle ground between these online dating sites and the social connections that helped spark relationships in the days before the web.

In conjunction with today’s launch, Thread.com is also announcing that it has closed a $1.2 million funding round led by some of Silicon Valley’s most well known investors. Included in the round are First Round Capital, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, fbFund, and a number of independent investors, including Ron Conway, David Sacks, Auren Hoffman, Pedro Miguel Martins, Reid Hoffman, Joe Greenstein, Saran Chari, and Shervin Pishevar.

So how exactly is Thread.com different from these other dating sites? The startup is heavily reliant on Facebook Connect, which is no surprise given the company’s participation in this summer’s round in fbFund. Here’s how it works: you log in to Thread.com using your Facebook credentials, at which point the site asks some basic additional information like your age and location. From there, it asks you what gender(s) you’re interested in searching through for possible matches, and also if you’d like to only see people who are single (home-wreckers can also choose to only browse users who are in relationships).

Thread.com then uses Facebook Connect to look up some basic information about your friends and friends of your friends. It shows each match in a grid, much like what you’d see on most other dating sites. Depending on your connection to each match you’ll be able to see things like their current relationship status, their location, interests, profile photos, and even photo albums (though depending on each user’s privacy settings you may not be able to see all of these).

Once you’ve found a match, it’s up to you how you want to initiate contact. Thread.com makes it easy to simply message a member through Facebook, but CEO Brian Phillips says that the best way to spark a relationship — and this is what makes Thread.com unique — is that you can ask your friends to introduce you. Because everyone you see on Thread.com is connected to you through a friend, you have the option of asking this shared connection to set you up, or to coordinate a party or event where both you and your potential match are invited.

It’s a great idea, and the site’s extremely solid roster of investors seems like a testament that. Also worth noting: Phillips has actually been dating a woman he recently met through Thread.com.

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Gmail Now Really Down - Can I Get My Email Back Please (Update: Its Back)

Posted: 01 Sep 2009 12:55 PM PDT

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We wrote this morning about Gmail suffering some turbulence, but it appears now that it has completely crashed and disappeared. Both Apps For Domain and the usual consumer Gmail service are down completely. Google seem to be going backwards on fixing the problem, this morning they sent out an alert saying:

September 1, 2009 8:18:00 AM PDT
Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

I use Apps For Domain for everything - my contacts, my email, my todo list, my chat, my documents and more recently, my phone. As soon as it went down, I noticed in less than a second. I am now completely stuck, after a few months of being impressed by how I was able to run my entire life on Google.

It is not just the frontend that is down, but also the backend IMAP and POP servers (Update: they are up, but slow). This is a huge fail for Google, considering how admired they are for all the technology they have built internally to scale out their applications.

Update: The Google App Status dashboard says that there is currently a ’service disruption’ with email.

Update: The outage immediately became a trending topic on Twitter, with thousands of tweets from users noticing and complaining about the outage. The outage that we reported this morning was not as widespread, but could point to a potential originating cause.

Update: Still down. I wonder if the paid Apps for Domain users, who have an SLA, are also down?

Update: New status message:

September 1, 2009 12:53:00 PM PDT
We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 1:53:00 PM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

They will be back in an hour (the engineers must have been out at lunch).

Update: Apparently IMAP/POP are up for some. Setting up IMAP …

Update: New message from the Google Twitter account:

We’re aware that people are having trouble accessing Gmail. We’re working on fixing it. Apologies for the inconvenience

Update: For those of you who use the web interface who want to also grab their email with IMAP or POP, instructions courtesy or Rajeev. Only works if you had IMAP/POP enabled before this downtime.

SMTP: smtp.google.com
(TLS, port 557, enable authentication)

IMAP: imap.gmail.com
(Enable SSL, port 993)

login: user@domain.com

Update: Downloading my mail now with IMAP. Slow, but sorta working.

Update (2:06PM PST): New update message. Still down, and now no ETA on being back up:

September 1, 2009 1:02:00 PM PDT
We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 2:16:00 PM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.

Update: Google has posted to their blog:

We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now — we are too, and we definitely feel your pain. We don’t usually post about minor issues here (the Apps status dashboard and the Gmail Help Center are usually where this kind of information goes). Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we’re currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly. If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime. We’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible.

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