The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Mystery Buyer Coughs Up $1.5 Million For Russia.com
- Corel Buys Out Corel
- DFJ-Backed Clixtr Marries Photos With Location, Launches Website
- Microsoft’s Dance With Newspapers Continues
- What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?
- Investimonials Wants To Be Your Guide To Quality Financial Products
- SupportSpace Raises $10 Million Series B
- Aviary’s Chrome Extension Proves That These Add-Ons Are Going To Be Awesome
- Google Turning Times Square Into A Giant Voice Search Experiment On Black Friday
- Thumbtack Takes On RedBeacon As It Looks To Bring Local Service Providers Online
- Yahoo Loses The Brains Behind Boss
- Google Profiles Turn Into OpenIDs
- The 5 Rules of Black Friday
- Snapture iPhone App Adds Twitter And Facebook Sharing
| Mystery Buyer Coughs Up $1.5 Million For Russia.com Posted: 26 Nov 2009 08:19 AM PST
Currently an online guide for travelers who would like to visit the country, Russia.com is an operation of Paley Media, a Seattle, WA-based consultancy firm that runs the show for many a country domain name, including Algeria.com, Scotland.com, Nepal.com and Ukraine.com. The domain names are themselves owned by NewMedia Holdings, a company that registered the domain name russia.com back in 1995. It’s unclear why NewMedia / Paley Media decided to offload the high-value domain name, but I reckon one million and a half dollars is a fair price for a website that currently attracts a mere 9,000 unique visitors per month according to Compete. On the other hand, Korea.com was sold earlier this year for a reported $5 million. We recently wrote about dominance of number of .com domains and also noted that .com domain registrations were starting to turn around again after a poor 2008. It looks like values of .com domains may be rising again: insurance broker Insure.com just sold its name and corresponding website for a whopping $16 million last month. Other large domain purchases this year include the sale of Candy.com for $3 million, Toys-R-Us’ acquisition of Toys.com for $5.1 million, the sale of Fly.com to Travelzoo for $1.8 million, and the sale of Ad.com for $1.4 million. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors  |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2009 07:18 AM PST
This morning, long-time software maker Corel Corporation turned over full ownership to Corel Holdings, a limited partnership controlled by an affiliate of Vector Capital, majority investor of the company behind many familiar software programs like WordPerfect, CorelDRAW, WinZip, Paint Shop Pro and WinDVD (most of them obtained through acquisition of smaller software firms). The LP of the private equity investment firm, which already owned approximately 68% of the Corel Corporation, announced this morning that it has successfully completed its tender offer to purchase all outstanding common shares of the company, evidently not including those owned by Corel Holdings and its affiliates. The shares were purchased, in cash, at a unit price of $4.00, excluding interest and less applicable withholding taxes. Painful, because Vector had already offered to buy the company for $11 per share in March 2008. With benefit of hindsight, Corel should have probably accepted that offer, of course. Corel Holdings is now commencing an offering period of its tender offer to acquire all remaining common shares of Corel Corporation, which will expire at December 4, 2009. Vector Capital assumed control over Corel Corp for a reported $133 million in 2003. The VC firm subsequently moved to take the company public in 2006, but retained majority ownership. The partial spin-off wasn’t much of a hit: Corel initially priced its IPO at $18 to $20 and later revised that to $16. But the company saw shares open at $15.36, and it has never once traded above that price (as is often the case when stocks open at a lower price point than initially set). Shares currently change hands for about one quarter of the opening price. Corel Corp earlier this week justified the offer to take the company private, saying that complete ownership is necessary to inject capital quickly and avert a default on its loans. The company, once a fierce rival to Microsoft on the productivity software playing field, had been on the ropes for quite some time now. Corel was required to keep its total debt level below 2.75 times its trailing 12-month EBITDA, but on Monday indicated that it expected to fail that test this month. The economic downturn sure rocked this company, established in 1985, very hard. Let’s see how it will fare now that it’s under Vector’s wings in its entirety again. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| DFJ-Backed Clixtr Marries Photos With Location, Launches Website Posted: 26 Nov 2009 06:21 AM PST
Clixtr, a startup that first presented itself to a wide audience at this year’s TechCrunch50 Conference (our take), kicked off things with a relatively limited offering – a paid iPhone app – but is now upping its game with the launch of an accompanying location-aware photo sharing website. It’s also dropping the price of its iPhone application to zero, so if you and the rest of the family will be taking pictures today over Thanksgiving dinner, take notice. The fledgling company, founded by MIT and Stanford grads, aims to turn smartphones into what they refer to as ’smartcameras’ or ’social cameras’. The basic idea behind the service is that when you’re at an event, be it a birthday party at your home or at a massive rock concert, photos from multiple people attending could be turned into one single, centralized photo album for all to enjoy. To make this work, even when pictures are taken by people you do not know, Clixtr uses location as the tying factor. The app essentially combines the capabilities of the iPhone’s camera and built-in GPS to geo-tag photos and determine when photos are being taken at the same location. Clixtr thus enables users to automagically create instant, location-aware, group photo albums in real-time (lots of buzzwords there, but that’s the way it works). Before, Clixtr users could only add photos to albums using the now free iPhone application (which cost $2.99 at launch), but with the launch of the corresponding website at Clixtr.com anyone can now contribute to the group albums. Since the application can also detect which other events are happening around you based on where you’re taking photos, Clixtr can double as a discovery engine for other happenings going on around you. No word on if and when the company plans to extend its service to include other smartphone platforms. Clixtr founder and CEO Fergus Hurley waved goodbye to his PhD program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT to incorporate the startup back in 2008, and went on to raise an undisclosed amount of seed financing from Silicon Valley VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in March 2009. What’s your take?
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| Microsoft’s Dance With Newspapers Continues Posted: 26 Nov 2009 06:06 AM PST
Since then there have been some follow-up by various media outlets, notably the Financial Times this week which confirmed that Microsoft had had discussions with News Corp to "de-index" its news websites from Google. Who approached who first? The FT said the impetus came from News Corp, although our information is that Microsoft is also talking to a range of newspaper publishers in Europe as well, such as German publishers like Axel Springer. So here is what our sources are coming up with. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997? Posted: 26 Nov 2009 04:36 AM PST
It was late December 1996. I was an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the largest and most well known law firm in Silicon Valley. I’d fought for my job there, and I was lucky to be in a small group of lawyers that worked on some of the hottest deals at the firm – Netscape public financings and acquisitions, Pixar’s corporate deals with Disney, and NeXT Software, among others. Steve Jobs ran Pixar and NeXT, and whenever he did something that needed a law firm, he called my boss. Well, my boss’ boss – Larry Sonsini. That month Larry got a call. Steve was going to try to sell NeXT Software to Apple. He’d presented to the Apple board of directors, and his characteristic anti-charm won them over. They’d shortly pay about $400 million to get NeXT, with Steve Jobs returning to Apple as an advisor. It wasn’t long before he took the CEO job and started a more than decade-long run of hit products that have disrupted the computer, music, television, movie and telecommunication industries. We worked night and day on that deal for six straight days, barely leaving the office and usually sleeping on the floor under our desks. When we were done, one of the partners drove me over to Steve’s house to get his final signature on the documents I remember stuttering in his presence about my first computer, an Apple II+. A few days later Steve left me a voicemail about an administrative issue. I saved that voicemail for years, until I left the firm. It was, all in all, a formative moment for me. And even today, not that many people fully realize how unlikely it was that the deal would ever happen. Apple was also negotiating with Jean-Louis Gassée to acquire his company, Be Inc. Be’s operating system BeOS was probably a better product fit with Apple than NeXT. Apple offered a rumored $200 million for Be, but Gassée held out for far more. And so Apple went with Jobs at the last minute. Here’s what the NeXT Software website showed immediately after the announcement:
What if Apple had bought Be, and Steve never returned to Apple? What would the company, and our world, look like today? Apple Then, Apple Now
Today Apple is worth a staggering $184 billion on revenues of $36.5 billion and net income of $8 billion. The company is now worth far more than HP and Dell combined. Hewlett Packard is worth just $119 billion, and Dell is worth $28 billion. You could throw another Dell in there and Apple would still be worth more. In 1997 Apple had a snoozy product line that included the ill-fated Newton, the Performa, the Power Macintosh, the PowerBook a bunch of printers and a few servers. User dependence on desktop software meant that only the very loyal or the very strange used Apple’s products. Everyone else wanted a common desktop platform.
In the last three months of this last year alone, Apple sold 3 million Macs, 10 million iPods and 7.4 million iPhones. But the hardware isn’t even the start of what Apple has done in the last 12 years. They’ve accelerated the pace of change in the music, film and television industries as well with the iPod and iTunes. And they’ve redefined the mobile phone with the iPhone. If Gassée, or anyone else, had become the CEO of Apple back in 1997, how many of these products would exist today? Would Apple have ever made the first iPod, entering into an already saturated MP3 player market in the beginning of this decade? How likely would the iPhone have been? And next year we’ll see an Apple Tablet computer. Does anyone think anyone but Steve Jobs would have pushed that product to market? I don’t think any of those products would have launched. Or if they did they would have been as notable as the MP3 players and phones launched by competitors like Dell and HP. Quick, who can name any of those products? Who’s owned one? Our World Without Steve Jobs At Apple Fortune recently named Steve Jobs the CEO of the Decade, and with good reason. Not only has Apple performed financially – it’s worth about as much as Google, and has a larger market cap than AT&T, HP, Intel, Dell and countless other huge tech companies. But forget all that. What would our world look like without him? We’d likely still be in mobile phone hell. Chances are we still wouldn’t have a decent browsing experience on the phone, and we certainly wouldn’t be enjoying third party apps like Pandora or Skype on whatever clunker the carriers handed us. Even if you use an Android, Palm Pre or newer Blackberry today, you must thank Apple for pushing open the doors to mobile freedom. Think back to the phone you had in 2006, and then tell me you don’t love Apple for the iPhone alone (yes, I’ve moved on, but the iPhone was the genesis). Steve Jobs was also the man who talked the major music labels into dropping DRM. He nearly single-handedly disrupted the entire industry. And it’s amazing how many laptops and desktops today mimic the look and feel of Macbooks and iMacs. Apple certainly hasn’t done everything right (MobileMe comes to mind, and I have had nothing but trouble with the Macbook Air). And their stance on the iPhone is irritating and, well, sorta evil. But all of that’s ok. Because without Steve Jobs’ Apple the world would be a less colorful place. The man is a living legend and deserves his place in history. This Thanksgiving, Steve Jobs is one of the things that I’m thankful for. And I bet you are too. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Investimonials Wants To Be Your Guide To Quality Financial Products Posted: 25 Nov 2009 08:05 PM PST
The new site was founded by Timothy Sykes, a controversial financial expert who was named to Trader Monthly’s 2006 “Top 30 under 30″ and had a once-successful hedge fund that shut down in 2007 after taking heavy losses. Since then, though, he’s mounted a comeback and is now one of Covestor’s top ranked traders (though some people aren’t fans of his tactics). Sykes says that his goal with Investimonials is to help users cut through the spammy and scammy financial sites that litter the web, by offering a comprehensive hub of user reviews for each product. Investimonials will be launching with eight categories, including the top rated Brokers, Newsletters, DVDs, Books, and websites, with plans to have “dozens” over the next few years. At launch the site has 3,000 products ready to review, though the vast majority of them haven’t been reviewed by anyone yet. Sykes says the primary competitor in this area is EliteTrader, which has been around for a decade and has around one thousand total reviews (the site also looks pretty dated). Investimonials incentivizes users to write reviews and share their personal contact information by offering ‘iv bucks’, which can be traded in for prizes. Many of these are Sykes’s own products, though there are a variety of prizes from others as well. Investimonials seems like a good idea, though it’s going to have to be very transparent if it wants to avoid constant accusations of bias. And as with all review sites, it’s going to suffer from the chicken-and-the-egg problem – until it has a lot of reviews about products, few people will have a good reason to use it.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| SupportSpace Raises $10 Million Series B Posted: 25 Nov 2009 07:49 PM PST
SupportSpace, a company that provides on-demand remote tech support solutions, announced today that it has raised $10 million in funding. The round was led by Emergence Capital Partners and also included previous investors BRM Group and Gemini Israel. SupportSpace has raised $24.25M in total funding so far. Kevin Spain of Emergence Capital Partners has also taken a board seat as part of the funding. SupportSpace, founded in 2006, aims to help expand their remote tech service by offering a SaaS (software as a service) platform for the management, marketing and delivery of remote services and a network of virtual experts. To get tech support using SupportSpace, you choose a service or an online expert, then connect to the expert and watch your problem being resolved on your screen in real-time. According to SupportSpace Co-Founder and CEO Yair Grindlinger, SupportSpace will use the funds to enhance its infrastructure, expand its team, and acquire new partners. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors |
| Aviary’s Chrome Extension Proves That These Add-Ons Are Going To Be Awesome Posted: 25 Nov 2009 07:07 PM PST
While people have been developing extensions for Chrome for a little while now, none were officially supported. But now that Google is reaching out to developers to start making these for real, we’re already hearing about some good ones. One such one was sent to us tonight by Aviary, makers of browser-based creativity tools. Aviary’s new Chrome extension is simple, but very useful. Once you install it, it adds a little icon to the right side of the URL bar. Clicking on this icon gives you a drop down menu of options. Most give you easy access to Aviary’s suite of tools, but the first option is key. It’s the one that allows you to capture the visible portion of any web page you are on with one click. From there, the image is loaded into whichever Aviary tool you set as the default editor. So, for example, if I use the Aviary Image Markup tool as my editor, I’ll capture the web page, and be moved into the editor in seconds. From here I can manipulate the screenshot and easily save it to Aviary. More importantly, I can save it to my desktop without having to save it to Aviary at all. This makes for one extremely fast and easy screen capture tool.
A few notes about Aviary’s plug-in: First, it’s not available yet only because Google has yet to launch its Extension Gallery. Supposedly, that’s coming soon for end-users but for now extension support is limited to developers being able to upload their creations. Second, the extension works fine in Chrome for Windows (and I believe Linux), but to use it on the Mac you have to be using the latest build of Chromium (the newest dev build of Chrome for Mac doesn’t support it yet). Aviary also makes a similar extension for Firefox, that has seen over 100,000 installs, we’re told. That version also features two features the Chrome extension doesn’t yet: Full page captures (not just the visible part of the page) and Flash capture support. We’re told both will be coming in an update to the extension. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Google Turning Times Square Into A Giant Voice Search Experiment On Black Friday Posted: 25 Nov 2009 03:45 PM PST
What does this mean? On Black Friday, anyone who calls 888-376-4336 and does a Google Search by voice, will see their results displayed on either the Reuters sign or the NASDAQ sign in Times Square. So, if you say something like “new Jonas Brothers CD,” the display will come up with a giant Google Map complete with signs showing you where you can find that. Also included is the embarrassment that everyone in Times Square has just seen what ridiculous thing you are searching for. This is all a big promotion for Droid, the new Android phone built by Verizon and being heavily pushed by Google. And the promotion has actually been going on for the past couple of weeks in New York, but it previously has only run during 90 minutes timeslots in the afternoon or night. On Black Friday, it will be running for 20 hours straight. I would love to know how much that advertisement cost. Here’s a site with the countdown to the event complete with the message: “Droid will do Times Square for 20 hours…” Minds out of the gutter, folks. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. |
| Thumbtack Takes On RedBeacon As It Looks To Bring Local Service Providers Online Posted: 25 Nov 2009 02:25 PM PST
Featurewise, Thumbtack is a mix between RedBeacon, Yelp, and OpenTable. Like RedBeacon, it lets you sign onto the site and issue a request for a service, which service providers can then bid on. CEO Marco Zappacosta says this portion of the service is nearly identical to RedBeacon, complete with a bidding engine for providers to set pricing. But Thumbtack also offers provider profiles, where these providers can list some of their specialties and price points. There’s also a section where you can book a service directly from a profile page as you would on OpenTable, complete with an availability calendar. One of the biggest issues with local services like Thumbtack is the chicken-and-the-egg problem. These sites generally launch with a relatively small number of services, which means that users can have a hard time finding what they need (and without users, providers have little incentive to join the site). Thumbtack has tried to address this by spending the last year recruiting providers – at launch, the startup says it already has 10,000 of them, ranging from tutors and handymen to rap teachers and henna artists. Thumbtack is also using some clever incentives to get companies to sign up, like offering discounted business cards and other marketing materials. Zappacosta explains that Thumbtack can order these goods in bulk because they work with so many companies, and then pass the savings on to businesses that sign up.
Thumbtack plans to make money by building a payment system off of PayPayl’s adaptive payments API. They’ll take a cut out of each transaction that occurs on the site, and for services that require in-person estimates (like plumbing) they’ll take a lead-gen payment. They’ll also be taking a cut every time a provider elects to get verified through one of the third party background check services. Thumbtack is offering its service nationwide beginning today, but as with RedBeacon their primary focus is the Bay Area, with plans to expand down the road. Thumbtack is doing a lot of things right with its site – I particularly like the idea of having providers verified through background checks, which helps differentiate it from sites like Angie’s List, Craigslist, and RedBeacon (which lets providers display their licenses but doesn’t do background checks). That said, Thumbtack faces the same challenges that RedBeacon will have. For one, it’s going to have to train users to turn to their computers rather than their yellow pages for these local services. And while 10,000 businesses is a good start, it’s going to take a long time for the service to build up a robust community of users and reviews. The background checks are a nice touch, but they don’t do much for helping users discern which providers offer a high quality service. For another service that’s taking a different approach to matching users with trustworthy service providers, check out Workstir, which provides suggestions based on your social graph. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
| Yahoo Loses The Brains Behind Boss Posted: 25 Nov 2009 01:09 PM PST
The brains behind Yahoo Boss, a young engineer named Vik Singh, is leaving Yahoo to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at Sutter Hill Ventures. Earlier this year, Singh was named to Technology Review’s 35 Under 35 list at the age of 24. Singh is exactly the kind of talent Yahoo should be trying to hold onto, but that is hard to do now that it is ceding search to Microsoft. Singh is more diplomatic. Contacted for comment he confirms, “I'll be starting next week actually. I'm really pumped but I'm going to definitely miss Yahoo! It's been such a great company to work at but I just got this really bad case of the entrepreneurial bug.” Yahoo Boss, which was largely Singh’s idea, is one of Yahoo’s most successful projects among developers. It “>opens up the power of Yahoo’s search index and algorithms to other sites. Yahoo Boss is a set of APIs and Web services which let people build their own customized search engines. (We use it for our search engine here at TechCrunch). Since it launched a year and a half ago, upwards of one billion search queries a month are powered through the service. Prior to Yahoo, Singh cut his teeth at Microsoft Research in the lab of computer scientist Jim Gray, who was tragically lost at sea two years ago. Singh already has some ideas about what he wants to work on at Sutter Hill, but he is keeping them close to his vest at this point. He does offer this: “There's a line my mentor Jim Gray used to say to me all the time: ‘We gotta party on the data!’ I know it's vague, but that's exactly what I'm going to do.” Party on, dude. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Google Profiles Turn Into OpenIDs Posted: 25 Nov 2009 12:24 PM PST
What this means is that you can sign into any site that accepts OpenID simply by using your Google Profile domain. Luckily, a few months ago Google started allowing these profiles to have vanity URLs, like /mgsiegler, instead of the previous /32090329039402903. Chris Messina, a huge proponent of the open web movement, has just sent out a picture of what signing in with OpenID via your Google Profile looks like (below). Despite its good intentions, OpenID has yet to take off in mainstream usage. The problem, it seems, is largely about presentation. Most people have no idea which of their various accounts can be used as OpenIDs, or really even what OpenID is. Google backing it a bit more with these profiles obviously helps, but will it take OpenID mainstream? Probably not. More interesting may be the second part of Fitzpatrick’s tweet. “Also, gmail webfinger declares that now too.” It’s not entirely clear what he means by that, but it would seem to suggest that we’re getting closer to being able to use our Gmail addresses as a web ID. WebFinger is a protocol being worked on by Fitzpatrick to allow you to attach information to your email address (in this case, you Gmail address), so it can be used as a solid means of identification.
Update: Kevin Marks (former Googler, now with BT) has pointed me to webfinger.org an example site built by Blaine Cook (formerly of Twitter). The site allows you to easily set up your Gmail account with Webfinger right now. As you can see in the example below from Cook’s account, many of the social networks Cook is a part of are pinned to his email address.
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| Posted: 25 Nov 2009 11:09 AM PST  Black Friday is almost here. It's a great time to score some deals, but don't go at it willy-nilly. Follow these 5 simple Black Friday rules to avoid the scams and wasting time. |
| Snapture iPhone App Adds Twitter And Facebook Sharing Posted: 25 Nov 2009 10:25 AM PST
One of the most popular paid photo apps for the iPhone, Snapture (iTunes link) just got a few upgrades. The new features include the ability to share photos on either Twitter or Facebook, a new tap-to-focus capability, and different color modes (black & white, sepia, negative). Posting to Facebook or Twitter should be standard for any photo app. It instantly makes the photo app social. The Snapture app, which costs $1.99, shows you the picture you just took in a small picture-in-picture window so that you don’t have to go to the camera roll to see if it’s any good. It also offers multi-shot mode and pinch-to-zoom. And you can share by email as well. Snapture has already been downloaded more than 700,000 times (much of that from when it was a free jailbroken app), which is not bad for a slightly better mousetrap. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
The domain name russia.com has been purchased by an undisclosed buyer for $1.5 million through marketplace 
Apologies for the confusing headline, but I couldn’t resist.
We’ve been doing some more digging on the definitive moves by Microsoft to woo newspapers over to Bing and away from Google, a story 
Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S. Traditionally we take stock of the things that we’re thankful for on this day each year. And I realized that one of those things is 
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple the company had just completed a fiscal year where they lost about $1 billion on $7 billion in revenue. The company was worth about $4 billion. Rivals like HP and Dell were worth about $62 billion and $8 billion, respectively.
Fast Forward to today. Apple has the sexiest products in the business: iMacs, Macbooks, iPhones, iPods and more. Even the Mac Mini has a place in my home, powering my television. 
I have something to admit: I’ve never been a big extension guy. When I was still using Firefox, I liked them, but the downside, browser bloat, turned me away. But now that we’re starting to see the first steps of true extension support in Chrome, I think I could be swayed.
But the best part of Aviary’s extension is that it doesn’t slow down Chrome. While the actual Aviary editor takes up some of your CPU, the extension itself ads no bloat to the regular browsing experience. I actually have three extension installed right now and none are slowing Chrome (Chromium) at all. This gives me great hope.
There are few things more terrifying to me than the idea of going anywhere near a shopping establishment on Black Friday. But if I lived in New York City, I think I would this year because Google, Verizon, Reuters, and R/GA are 
As part of its push to go more social, Google has been attempting to unify its various account profiles into one Google Profile. And now it’s more useful. Google’s 
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