The Latest from TechCrunch

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• More People Around The World Get Their News Online From Google News Than CNN
• Qik Live Recording Finally Makes It To The iPhone (Legally)
• CauseWorld Launches: Do Good Deeds Simply By Walking Into A Store
• Play And Share Your Music Collection In The Cloud With tunesBag
• Buzzd Brings Its Social City Guide To Android
• Canadian Communication Services Provider Mitel Files For $230 Million IPO
• Cc:Betty Launches iPhone App To Make Sense Of Your Email
• The Rumors Are True: We Spend More And More Time Online
• Story Something Quietly Opens Up, Turns Your Kids Into Heroes
• Curse Raises $6 Million As It Looks To Become The Ultimate Gaming Resource
• CrunchBase Funding Digest: Portable Zoo, Dreamscape Blue, ShopVisible, Readeo
• Whrrl, Still Trying To Find Its Way In Location, Focuses On “Footstreams”
• Zynga Starts Testing SMS Notifications As It Tries To Kick Its Facebook Dependence
• Yahoo’s New Recruitment Effort: Google Ads On Ex-Employee Name Queries
• Mozzler Comes Full Circle And Turns Its Realtime News Stream Into A Reader (Private Beta Invites)
• Background Checks For All With BeenVerified’s iPhone App
• Sphere Team Raises Money From Aol Ventures, True Ventures And Others For New Stealth Startup
• A Peek At ReachLocal’s $100 Million IPO Filing: It’s All About Building A Local Ad Sales Army
• Cc:Betty Raises $500K For Email Organization Assistant
• Google, Rome, and Empire
• Announcing the 2009 Crunchies Finalists.
• The Twitter/FriendFeed Connection Goes Realtime Once Again
• iSpy, With My Little Eye, A Children’s Game Re-Imagined For The iPhone
• BitGravity Co-Founder Announces 3Crowd, Funded By Jay Adelson And Kevin Rose
• The World Is Flat For Twitter, As In Global Growth Has Stalled

More People Around The World Get Their News Online From Google News Than CNN Posted: 23 Dec 2009 08:40 AM PST Well, Rupert Murdoch is going to love this. More people around the world get their news online from Google News than from CNN or the news properties of the New York Times. In November, 2009, according to comScore, Google News attracted 100 million unique visitors worldwide, making it a larger news site than CNN (66 million) or the combined properties of the New York Times (92 million). But do you know who is even larger? Yahoo News, with 138 million unique visitors worldwide. Funny how you never hear Murdoch complaining about Yahoo News. Still, the top two sources of news online are Yahoo News and Google News, followed by the New York Times sites and CNN (China’s QQ.com News would come in fifth with 53 million visitors a month, followed by the BBC and MSN News with about 48 million each—the Wall Street Journal Online is way down the list with only 6.8 million).  Google News is the orange line in the chart above. These numbers do not include general search for Yahoo or Google, where even more people find their news. For instance, WSJ.com gets about a quarter of its traffic from Google, all told, and former BusinessWeek.com editor John Byrne pegs Google’s traffic contribution to BW.com at 45 percent, “up from less than 20% in 2006.” Do these numbers mean that traditional news sites should lay down and die or whine about how unfair life is when reader loyalty can no longer be taken for granted? No. As Byrne himself points out: Instead of complaining about this and threatening to block Google from crawling a site, media companies would do well to step back and more fully understand what they really need to do: rebuild the relationships they have with their readers, He suggests that people trust Google more for unbiased information than news brands. The value of news brands are diminishing and being replaced by more straightforward search. Brands are about relationships, whereas search is about transactions. A deeper look at the data bears this out. While Google News has more visitors on a global basis than CNN.com, people spend a lot less time there. In November, visitors spent nearly 2 billion minutes at CNN.com versus 840 million minutes on Google News. CNN generated 1.8 billion pageviews, while Google News produced 656 million. Another thing to keep in mind is that Google News and Yahoo News both have many more individual country sites than CNN or the New York Times. So they have an advantage when comparing global visitors. In the U.S., Google News is still smaller than both, with about 24 million monthly unique visitors compared to 50 million for both CNN and the New York Times sites. (See chart below). Yahoo News has 44 million, so there is still hope left for traditional news sites. As I’ve argued in the past, Google doesn’t control the news, it exposes it. What news sites decide to do with that exposure and use it to build longer-lasting relationships is up to them. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Qik Live Recording Finally Makes It To The iPhone (Legally) Posted: 23 Dec 2009 08:37 AM PST The live video streaming application Qik has just been approved in the App Store and should be available shortly, we’ve learned. The company submitted the app a couple weeks ago following the approval of UStream’s live streaming application, and as expected, Apple also had no problem with it now. This marks a change from Apple, which previously was blocking all apps that did live video (recording) streaming. Apparently, the way these streaming apps work is using a restricted API (a screen capture API) to get around the fact that Apple doesn’t grant them access to the video APIs for live capture and streaming. But Apple has suggested that it will no longer enforce protecting this API and in the future should open more that allow for live video streaming. Also interesting will be AT&T’s reaction to this and other apps like it. Though they’re unlikely to say anything in defiance of Apple, they can’t like the idea of live streaming video apps being approved en masse. AT&T has indicated in recent weeks that that massive use of data on the iPhone was an issue that was leading to data degradation. Note: While Qik has had an iPhone app available in the App Store for a while, it previously did not allow you to live stream from your phone. This new version will. There was also previously an ad-hoc version of the app, but that method of distribution was very limited. Again, look for the new version shortly it will be labeled version 4.40. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

CauseWorld Launches: Do Good Deeds Simply By Walking Into A Store Posted: 23 Dec 2009 08:00 AM PST Six months ago I wrote about a startup called Shopkick (it was then called MOBshop). The company won’t disclose much of what their eventual product will be, but they’ve attracted some of the most high profile investors in Silicon Valley: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Reid Hoffman. Here’s what CEO Cyriac Roeding will say about Shopkick which is scheduled to launch in 2010: they aim to bridge the gap between the mobile phone and the physical shopping worlds. In the meantime they are launching CauseWorld, “the first mobile application that let’s you do good deeds simply for walking into a store.” The application should be available on the iPhone appstore later today. ndroid is coming soon, along with more mobile platforms. CauseWorld app users earn "karma points" when they walk into stores and check in with their cell phone. No purchase is required at any store, and karma points can be redeemed nine predefined good causes. Big brands like Kraft Foods and Citi (both are on board) then turn the karmas into real dollar donations to those causes. Food for poor families, water in Sudan, trees in the Amazon, etc. are examples of the causes. Here’s how it works: Like foursquare and gowalla, you open the application on your phone and see local businesses (instead of showing everything around you, CauseWorld only shows businesses that you can check into for karmas). Enter the store, check in, and get the karma points offered to you. Once you’ve collected enough karmas you can donate them to a variety of causes. And, of course, you get badges for various activities. Kraft and Citi are donating $500,000 during the initial test of CauseWorld, and the company says it’s likely that more donors will come on board soon. For now businesses that get the extra foot traffic are paying nothing at all. Although I’m sure Shopkick will be sending reports to those businesses letting them know how many people they brought into their stores. In the retail world, people mean conversions, usually 25% – 90%, depending on the type of store (nobody walks into 7-11 or a supermarket without buying something, but less people buy something at Best Buy). I applaud the charitable aim of CauseWorld, but I also note a brilliant business plan – finding ways to get people to step foot inside a physical store. If I was Gap or Nordstroms I’d pay right now to distribute karmas to users of the app for coming into the store. Heck, I’d love to buy a big pile of virtual karmas and include them at our events for people to grab and distribute. The wonderful thing about the service is that big corporations have an incentive to donate more to charity. They get regular people to choose where that money goes, and lots of brand impressions along the way. The folks at Citi and Kraft are brilliant for jumping on this early. Here’s an interview I recorded with Cyriac last week about the company: Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Play And Share Your Music Collection In The Cloud With tunesBag Posted: 23 Dec 2009 07:37 AM PST Vienna, Austria-based tunesBag is opening up the public beta version of its social music service today, after allowing access by invitation only for the past year or so. The launch has been a long time coming, considering the fact that the startup has already produced a fully functional web client, and Adobe-AIR powered desktop client and applications for iPhone, Facebook and Boxee since its founding in late 2008. Like Lala, imeem (which both recently got acquired, by Apple and MySpace, respectively) and other competitors like MP3tunes and Deezer, tunesBag allows registered users to upload their entire music collection to the cloud. This enables them to play tracks from anywhere as long as they have a working Internet connection and a browser. There’s also a social layer wrapped around the music streaming and backup service, which makes it easy for users to share individual songs and playlists with others by e-mail or via social networks, as well as rate and recommend them publicly. What about copyright, you ask? tunesBag claims it has all of that covered, as it will only make sharing features visible to people who are located in countries where sharing of tracks is legally covered by licensing agreements, as determined by their IP addresses. As a substitute, the service will attempt to fetch the music from other sources (e.g. YouTube to let other people stream songs you wish to share with them). This isn’t fail-proof, of course, which tunesBag acknowledges. As an example, I uploaded Depeche Mode’s Enjoy The Silence to my tunesBag account, and the public link to it will not effectively give you access to the track I uploaded, but to a video that features the song as the audio layer. I hardly think this approach is going to stop the record industry from taking a very critical look at the fledgling company’s offering, although they appear to be serious about closing deals for more countries in 2010 (the service is already available in multiple languages, by the way). TunesBag has adopted the standard business model of most digital music startups: advertising, selling premium services and affiliate revenue. The startup offers a basic, advertising-supported version of the product for free with 1GB of space, or an ad-free version with more storage space for your music (up to 200GB), higher streaming bitrates and a desktop uploader. The company also hopes to generate revenue from referrals for music purchases, event tickets, etc. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Buzzd Brings Its Social City Guide To Android Posted: 23 Dec 2009 06:35 AM PST We’ve written about the social city and nightlife mobile app, buzzd, which pulls its data from Twitter and other buzzd users, for a bigger picture of the places that are hot in a given location. The mobile app, which has been available for iPhone and BlackBerry users, is launching an Android app as well as rolling out new versions of its existing smartphone apps. The buzzd network compiles information from its base of over a half-million users, Twitter, and other real-time sources to provide users with activity updates for almost half a million venues across the United States and Canada. You download the app and it will bring up a list of venues close to you that are currently popular based on people talking about them on Twitter and Buzzd. Using Twitter’s new Geolocation API, the app can even pull the exact locations of your friends on Twitter. The app’s "buzzdmeter" gives you a real-time measure of activity at popular bars, restaurants and nightclubs in your city, users can see the places with the most real-time activity (the buzz) in their city, neighborhood, and even activity within walking distance or the block they're standing on. If you click on a place, you can learn more details about it, including how far away it is, its phone number, and a description of it. You can also see “buzzes” about it, meaning the things people are saying about a place on Twitter and in the buzzd community. And you can “Buzz It,” meaning you can tell the community you are at a place and give a short description of what it is or why it’s good. And you can send that info to Twitter and Facebook. In addition to buzzd Android, the startup has launched new versions of its iPhone, Blackberry, mobile and PC web versions, which now integrate both Facebook and Twitter, which allows you to send your updates to both social networks at once. You can also now rate venues with a thumbs up or down. Currently the app covers over a half a million venues in thirty cities. Buzzd originally launched an app on the BlackBerry as one of the original BlackBerry Partners Fund recipients. As the service steadily expands, it continues to add compelling feature such as Facebook integration and in-depth location information. Of course, as a social network, the app will face competition from other apps like Loopt, Foursquare and others. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Canadian Communication Services Provider Mitel Files For $230 Million IPO Posted: 23 Dec 2009 05:48 AM PST Canadian telecom company Mitel Networks Corporation yesterday filed for an IPO of up to $230 million. The company, which provides integrated communication services primarily to SMBs, said it plans to use proceeds from the offering to reduce debts by repaying its revolving credit and loans, and for working capital and general corporate purposes, including potential acquisitions. Mitel’s IPO would be the largest ever initial public offering by an Ottawa-based company, according to Ottawa Citizen. No pricing terms were disclosed. Mitel Networks reported revenue of $735.1 million in the 2009 fiscal year ended April 30, up 6.2 percent from $692 million from the same period a year ago. It reported a net loss of $193.5 million, compared with a net income of $12.6 million in the same period a year earlier. Apart from 2008, Mitel Networks has recorded net losses every year since it was incorporated in 2001, according to regulatory filings. According to Ottawa Citizen, Mitel had 2,408 employees in October, down 500 in the past two years. This is Mitel’s second attempt to offer shares to the public since 2006, when efforts were put on hold due to the company’s acquisition of business communications company Inter-Tel (August 2007). BofA Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, and UBS Investment Bank are the lead underwriters of this second attempt. Yesterday, we took a deep look at ReachLocal’s plans to go for a $100 million IPO in 2010. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Cc:Betty Launches iPhone App To Make Sense Of Your Email Posted: 23 Dec 2009 04:00 AM PST Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has rolled out an iPhone app to help declutter your email on your mobile device. Cc:Betty’s app is a group-based email application that breaks email conversations into collated, threaded discussions. An account can be created right from the app, and new group discussions can be created, using the iPhone address book to access your contacts. Photos can be easily attached as well and new contacts can be added to discussions via your address book. Any discussions, or other content such as attachments a person has in their Cc:Betty.com account are automatically synced to their iPhone. When one of your discussions is updated, you’ll get a push-notification to your iPhone so you can access important information on the go. Founded in 2008 by Michael Cerda, Cc:Betty began as a web application that routes, parses, and organizes email conversations in a simple at-a-glance dashboard so you never have to scour your inbox to find the bits and pieces of a long thread. If you cc “betty@ccbetty.com” on any email, "she" will create a mailspace, which is a webpage, for your entire email thread and will divide important things such as dates, times, people, places, and files and will format them all in one place. Cc:Betty will track messages with up to 100 recipients and can organize emails with up to 20 MB in size, including attachments. Cc:Betty recently integrated with Twitter, so that users of the service can tweet in and out of a of the collaboration platform, as well as see each other's latest tweets. The startup also upgraded its service with several new features, including the ability to see maps, images and documents as large thumbnails in email threads, and a list of people in an email conversation. You can also filter content of the thread by participant. The startup’s founder Michael Cerda tells me that the company is also rolling out a stealth SMB centric offering in the near future called Threadbox. The startup also just raised $500,000 in funding from Western Technology Investment. The startup previously raised $1.5 million in seed funding in June led by Venrock with investors Seraph Group and Hillsven participating. The company was incubated in Venrock’s offices and officially launched at DEMO in March. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The Rumors Are True: We Spend More And More Time Online Posted: 23 Dec 2009 03:34 AM PST Survey results published by Harris Interactive suggest that adult Internet users are now spending an average of 13 hours a week online. About 14% spends 24 or more hours a week online, while 20% of adult Internet users are online for only two hours or less a week. To put things in perspective: Harris surveyed 2,029 adults by telephone for an entire week in July and October 2009, and has been doing these types of polls since 1995. Harris concludes that the average hours spent online have increased from 7 hours from 1999 to 2002, to between 8 and 9 hours in 2003 to 2006, and surged after that. There was a sudden spike in time spent online in 2007 when the average hours spent on the Web increased to 11 hours. Last year, Internet users were online for 14 hours a week, double what it was from 1999 to 2002, although Harris says this could have something to do with the outbreak of the financial crisis and the lead-up to the presidential election in October 2008. The age groups that spend the most time online are those aged 30-39 (18 hours) and those aged 25-29 (17 hours) and 40-49 (17 hours). Harris Interactive also polled people for their ecommerce behavior, and found that half of all those online bought something on the Internet in the last month. This includes 62% of those aged 30-39 and 56% of those aged 40-49. How about you: how much time do you spend online (excluding e-mail) a week on average? (Image credit: dalbera / Flickr) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Story Something Quietly Opens Up, Turns Your Kids Into Heroes Posted: 23 Dec 2009 02:54 AM PST I don’t have kids (yet), but I’d be all over this if I did … and if I were a native English speaker: TC50 finalist Story Something is cautiously opening up to the masses during the holidays – intentionally. While the service is still ‘most definitely in beta’ according to co-founder and CEO Jim Rose, it gives you a pretty good idea of what the startup’s building. As our initial review of Story Something lays out in detail, the service generates personalized stories for children that make them the heroes by putting them at the center of the narrative. The hero takes on the child's name, and a story is generated which can be viewed on the Web or e-mailed to the parent. The startup is launching in open beta with 55 stories, some of which get featured on the homepage. Stories come in two flavors: ones that are not interactive and fairly short, and ones that are a bit longer and allow the parent or child to have some control over the storyline by giving options that effect the narrative. Rose tells us they decided to launch close to the holidays because of the fact that many parents will be travelling with their children, and their stories can help in keeping them entertained in the car, on the plane, and so on. Story Something also published a special holiday-themed story (of the kind that lets you choose your own adventure) for the occasion. If you have kids, you’ll want to check this out. Story Something will focus much of their attention to increasing the available library size and soliciting feedback from parents and authors in the coming weeks and months. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Curse Raises $6 Million As It Looks To Become The Ultimate Gaming Resource Posted: 22 Dec 2009 06:38 PM PST Most people would probably view a hardcore, 16 hour-a-day addiction to World of Warcraft as a bad thing. That was certainly the case for Hubert Thieblot a few years ago, when he dropped out of school and his parents decided to kick him out of the house because he was playing so much. Flash forward five years. Thieblot has managed to turn his addiction into a thriving company called Curse that generated over $3 million in revenue this year. Today, the company is disclosing a $6 million Series B round it closed in early 2009 with participation from Ventech Capital, AGF Private Equity, and SoftTech VC (Jeff Clavier). The round brings Curse’s total funding to $11 million, after a $5 million Series A round in 2007 led by AGF Private Equity. In some senses, Curse is akin to a SourceForge for computer games, in that it offers a directory of plugins that players can use to customize and enhance their PC games. Many of the site’s users are World of Warcraft fans, who have made Curse.com the definitive site for WoW add-ons. Alongside its directory, Curse also makes a native client players can use to manage their plugins that currently has over 1.6 million active users But Curse isn’t just about World of Warcraft. The company owns blogs, wikis, community sites, and download hubs for a number of other popular games. Curse has built out about half of the communities itself, and it also actively acquires leading websites related to gaming (sometimes these sites are run by one guy in his garage, other times they’re more substantial). For example, Curse acquired DiabloFans.com, which is currently the second ranked Google match for “Diablo 3″. Diablo 3 isn’t actually out yet, but you can be sure this will be prime real estate as soon as it launches (and its community is already growing). This forward thinking is a big part of the company’s strategy: Thieblot says that Curse tries to stay ahead of the curve, strategically trying to figure out which games are going to be hits and then positioning themselves accordingly. He’s very optimistic about MMOs on the PC, and also anticipates some major massively multiplayer hits on consoles games soon. The Curse client is free, as is most of the site, but there’s a premium offering available for $30 a year. This includes the ability to update all of your plugins simultaneously (you have to update one by one in the free version). The premium version also allows users to save their UI setup to the server, allowing them to restore it should they start playing from a friend’s house or during a break at school. This may not sound like a big deal, but gamers can spend a very long time mapping out exactly where each of their UI elements and shortcuts appear on the screen. Thieblot says that Curse currently has over 34,000 paid subscriptions since launching the premium option eight months ago. The site shares a chunk of this revenue back to the plugin developers. Things are looking bright for Curse. The company has “a bunch” of money in the bank, is profitable, draws 7.4 million uniques monthly, and has plans to expand internationally in the near future. Oh, and Thieblot says that he’s back on good terms with his parents. Also see Raptr a gaming social network that offers its own downloadable client. CrunchBase Information Curse Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

CrunchBase Funding Digest: Portable Zoo, Dreamscape Blue, ShopVisible, Readeo Posted: 22 Dec 2009 05:45 PM PST Everyday I troll SEC Form D Filings to discover new startups, fundings and investments. I put everything I find into CrunchBase. For everyone else I give you the daily digest, a quick hit of the latest and greatest SEC Form D filings in the TechCrunch sphere:

Whrrl, Still Trying To Find Its Way In Location, Focuses On “Footstreams” Posted: 22 Dec 2009 05:06 PM PST Much of the web is based around clickstreams. The latest version of Whrrl, a location-based application by Pelago, wants to take that concept into the real world, with “footstreams.” Up until this point, since the launch of version 2 of its iPhone app earlier this year, Whrrl’s focus has been on storytelling. That is, allowing users to tag places they’re at with stories and pictures. But the latest version shifts the focus towards creating a digital record of all the places you go in the real world, Pelago CEO Jeff Holden tells us. “It’s about places, not location,” he says. While the distinction between the two may not be that obvious at first, it becomes more clear when Holden continues to talk about how the core idea of Whrrl is discovery. That is to say, it’s not about playing a game, or knowing where your friends are at any given time (which rivals Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt are all about), instead it’s about building up communities and location data surrounding places. And that leads to another major addition for the site, with “Societies.” Basically, this is a feature that looks at where you go in the real world and serves up other places you might like to “discover” based on other Whrrl users who are members of similar Societies as you. For example, maybe you’re an indie music lover. Checking into different record shops around a city would make you a member of this society, and this opens other social discovery pathways, Holden says. And when you keep going to the same place, you become a “regular,” a concept that should be familiar to users of Foursquare with “mayors” — only there can be many regulars. The new Whrrl also features fun facts about each place you visit. You can see, for example, how many times you’ve been there, and how many times your friends have been there. “An important part of who you are is expressed in the places you visit,” Holden says. And all of this information will reside on a completely revamped website launching today as well. Pelago was actually one of the first companies funded by Kleiner Perkin’s iFund just prior to the launch of Apple’s App Store in 2008. But despite the big time deal, the service has seen rivals, first Loopt, then Foursquare and Gowalla, steal much of the spotlight. And that’s why Holden is trying to position themselves a bit differently. Whether that will work or not, remains to be seen. The company also has plans to make money. Naturally, with all this footstreaming data, they can do things with local advertising — “pay-per-visit” advertising, as Holden calls it. There are also opportunities within individual places. Holden notes that they already have one deal to allow a shopping marketer to tailor an experience for someone inside of a store from within Whrrl. And despite the iFund investment, Pelago plans to expand Whrrl beyond the iPhone. Already, there is a mobile web version that works on many phones, like the BlackBerry. And eventually the plan to build native apps for other mobile platforms as well. Looking ahead, Holden thinks the next major release of Whrrl is already just a few months away. At that time, “the full iceberg will be revealed.” By that he means the full discovery experience for users. If they can get enough people using their new iPhone app — which looks quite nice and is fast — perhaps they can deliver on that. CrunchBase Information Whrrl Pelago iPhone Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Zynga Starts Testing SMS Notifications As It Tries To Kick Its Facebook Dependence Posted: 22 Dec 2009 04:52 PM PST Zynga’s massively successful moneymaking machine is about to get another way to reach its millions of avid users. Today, the company is starting to test SMS notifications, allowing a small number of users to receive updates directly to their mobile phones. The first 50 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will be able to try it out for themselves, though it’s limited to Mafia Wars only for now. It’s a feature that’s going to be good news to the game’s millions of addicts and also represents a very important strategic move for the company. Because it’s one more thing that Zynga won’t have to rely on Facebook for. Zynga’s ties with Facebook run deep. They now share some of the same investors, including Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies which has poured as much as $400 million into Facebook and just led a $180 million round in Zynga. Zynga is rumored to be Facebook’s largest advertiser. And Facebook’s viral features have played a huge role in helping Zynga rise to prominence. But despite all of this, it’s in Zynga’s best interest to keep as much control over its own games as possible. The reason why became very obvious last October, when Facebook announced it would soon no longer let developers push updates to a user’s Facebook Notifications. This is a big blow to all developers, as the notification channel is one of the best ways to keep users engaged over a long stretch of time. Zynga in particular has become particularly adept at using the channel to keep users coming back for more. Their tactics haven’t always been Kosher and are sometimes downright spammy, but they work. Now that Facebook is killing off this channel, Zynga needs to find another way to connect with its users. Developers are going to start getting access to Facebook users’ Email boxes, so that’s a start. But Emails don’t generally instill the urgency as a Facebook Notification. SMS messages do, and then some. Zynga will have to convince users to hand over their phone numbers of course, but they’ll get a strong hold on anyone that does. For now messages will only be able to provide notifications, but in the future users will actually be able to respond to them to execute in-game actions while they’re away from their computer. Zynga Product Manager Curtis Lee says that Mafia Wars makes a good testbed for the notifications because it’s text based (Farmville and some others are in Flash) and because it has a stable, established user base. The feature will be going live for around 10% of Mafia Wars players initially. Lee also notes that Zynga actually started working on the SMS notifications prior to Facebook’s decision to kill off access to its Notifications streams. One obvious concern with the new feature is spam — Zynga has made a habit of exploiting any way they can find to grow its userbase and increase revenue. Lee acknowledges that Zynga hasn’t always been perfect on this front, but says that the company is implementing a set of controls so you can disable messages during certain time frames and adjust message frequency. He also says that they’re starting conservatively, throttling back the number of messages that come from frequent events, like in-game attacks. And if you ever get sick of the messages, you can just reply to Zynga’s messages with ‘STOP’, and the feature will be disabled. SMS alerts aren’t the first step Zynga has taken to wean itself off of Facebook Platform. Last month, it launched Farmville.com, a standalone site dedicated to the company’s massively succesful game. Farmville.com is still reliant on Facebook Connect, but it gives Zynga more control over the user experience. I suspect we’ll continue to see more moves like this in the near future. CrunchBase Information Zynga Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Yahoo’s New Recruitment Effort: Google Ads On Ex-Employee Name Queries Posted: 22 Dec 2009 04:27 PM PST When Delicious founder Joshua Schachter left Yahoo in June of last year, he probably thought he was done with the place. Apparently, he’s not. As he noticed today, Yahoo is apparently buying ad space from Schachter’s current employer, Google, to promote its own jobs when you do a search for “Joshua Schacter.” As he puts it in the tweet, “yahoo’s running recruiting ads against my name. classy.” And he’s apparently not the only one. Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP who left Yahoo last month, noticed the same thing. Classy indeed, Yahoo. Or maybe Yahoo is just trying to woo these guys (who clearly do regular vanity searches like the rest of us) back, just like they did with Daniel Raffel earlier this year. Regardless, Yahoo might also consider placing some ads there to beef up its latest business plan: A cycling team. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Mozzler Comes Full Circle And Turns Its Realtime News Stream Into A Reader (Private Beta Invites) Posted: 22 Dec 2009 04:19 PM PST Realtime news stream startup Mozzler, which launched at our November Realtime CrunchUp, is bringing more of a news reader feel to its stream search. Mozzler lets you search Twitter, Facebook, and Digg for breaking news. Today it is launching a new way to consume realtime news in private beta which brings the experience back full circle to the look and feel of a typical RSS reader—except that you are not reading RSS feeds directly, you are reading your Twitter and Facebook streams. The new private beta takes any stories Tweeted out by the people or Lists you follow and expands the into headlines with inline photos and descriptions, much like Brizzly does. It lets you sign in with both your Twitter and Facebook accounts, and merges the two streams. Mozzler founder Chris Were will send invites for the private beta to first 50 people who retweet this post and include the hashtag “#mozzlerbeta.” You can also watch this video demo to find out more. Mozzler is moving from a realtime news search to more of a stream reader, and enhancing that news stream with photos, headlines and other details it can pull from the underlying links being passed around. When there is no link, the micro-message remains on its own. While this is a better experience for reading news without having to click all over the Web, it does reduce the scanability of just having a list of short Tweets to go through. Stream readers such as Mozzler’s and Brizzly’s are a twist on the traditional RSS readers in that they borrow from their UI, but instead of subscribing to publications, you generally subscribe to people instead and let them share what they are reading no matter what the source. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Background Checks For All With BeenVerified’s iPhone App Posted: 22 Dec 2009 04:04 PM PST Back in September, we wrote about a new iPhone app that would allow you to run a background check on a new lover. It’s mildly creepy, but also kind of interesting. Unfortunately, that app, DateCheck, also charged an arm and a leg to run the checks. A new one gives you some background checking ability for free. The aptly named Background Check App does exactly what it says: Using data from the site BeenVerified, it allows you to do background checks on people via name queries or their email addresses. And it even allows you to check your contacts on your iPhone with just one click. Just imagine the fun that will bring. But it’s not all free fun. Unfortunately, you only get three free queries a week. After that, you’re prompted to sign up for a BeenVerified account and pay to get unlimited access. Currently, that will cost you $8-a-month. Beyond looking up things such as age, address history, and relatives, Background Check App gives you access to criminal records, the properties associated with a person (and their values), and even scans the social networks to find data about the person there, such as pictures of them. Background Check App is a free download in the App Store. Find it here. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Sphere Team Raises Money From Aol Ventures, True Ventures And Others For New Stealth Startup Posted: 22 Dec 2009 03:35 PM PST One of the founders, Tony Conrad, and several of the investors behind Aol-acquired Sphere are starting their next company. Conrad is joined by Co-Founder Tim Young who is also the CEO/ Founder of Socialcast. The angel round includes Aol Ventures, True Ventures (Conrad is a partner there), Ron Conway, Scott Kurnit, Founders Collective, Radar Partners (Doug Mackenzie & Kevin Compton) and David Mahoney. There isn’t much more to say for now until at least some details leak about what the project is about. Sphere, now called Surphace, was bought by Aol in 2008 for around $25 million. Since there’s no logo, we’re grabbing one from the popular horror movie of the same name. I hope the startup has a happier ending than the movie. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

A Peek At ReachLocal’s $100 Million IPO Filing: It’s All About Building A Local Ad Sales Army Posted: 22 Dec 2009 03:21 PM PST In the wake of Google’s dalliance with Yelp, another online local advertising company, ReachLocal, filed for an IPO today to raise $100 million. In a guest post yesterday, Paul Kedrosky suggested that startups like Yelp and others may opt to try their luck with IPOs instead of trying to be acquired. It looks like ReachLocal is ready to get the IPO ball rolling again. ReachLocal provides a one-stop online advertising shop for about 15,000 small local businesses. A peek at its IPO filing reveals its revenues, profits, and financial condition (see tables below). But the one figure which really stands out is how many sales people it is hiring. The company employs 525 sales people who hock local ads around the world, up from 28 in 2006. Those sales people generated $143 million in revenues the first three quarters of 2009, up 38 percent from the same period in 2008. The company is obviously hiring like crazy to grab as much market share as possible. While it lists net income of $2.2 million for the first three quarters of the year, that is only because of an accounting gain on the acquisition of an Australian subsidiary. ReachLocal isn’t even producing operating profits, showing a $4.4 million operating loss the first nine months of the year. Although at least it is cashflow positive, producing $12 million in net cash over that period. Local businesses tend to need a lot of handholding when it comes to advertising online. ReachLocal has a “feet on the street” model, with sales people going door to door to gain business. It adds a personal touch, but that doesn’t seem like it would scale too well. Yelp, in contrast, has about 300 employees total, with 200 of those in sales. And TC50 startup Yext, which sells pay-per-call ads to local businesses, already has 50 sales folks and plans to hire 100 more next year. But Yelp and Yext don’t go knocking door-to-door, so theoretically they should be able to sell more ads with fewer sales people. Nevertheless, there is obviously a battle brewing over who will dominate the online local advertising market and the size of the sales armies will be a key determinant of who ends up winning. It is a safe bet that ReachLocal will use a big chunk of the $100 million in proceeds it hopes to raise at the IPO on hiring yet more sales people. ReachLocal previously raised about $68 million in venture capital since it was founded in 2004. Investors include VantagePoint Ventures, Rho Capital, and Opportunities Partners. (Click on the tables below to view larger images). Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Cc:Betty Raises $500K For Email Organization Assistant Posted: 22 Dec 2009 03:15 PM PST Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has secured $500,000 in funding from Western Technology Investment. The startup previously raised $1.5 million in seed funding in June led by Venrock with investors Seraph Group and Hillsven participating. The company was incubated in Venrock’s offices and officially launched at DEMO in March. Founded in 2008 by Michael Cerda, Cc:Betty is a service that routes, parses, and organizes email conversations in a simple at-a-glance dashboard so you never have to scour your inbox to find the bits and pieces of a long thread. If you cc “betty@ccbetty.com” on any email, "she" will create a mailspace, which is a webpage, for your entire email thread and will divide important things such as dates, times, people, places, and files and will format them all in one place. Cc:Betty will track messages with up to 100 recipients and can organize emails with up to 20 MB in size, including attachments. Cc:Betty recently integrated with Twitter, so that users of the service can tweet in and out of a of the collaboration platform, as well as see each other's latest tweets. The startup also upgraded its service with several new features, including the ability to see maps, images and documents as large thumbnails in email threads, and a list of people in an email conversation. You can also filter content of the thread by participant. The startup’s founder Michael Cerda tells me that the company is also rolling out a stealth SMB centric offering in the near future called Threadbox. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/08/ccbetty-shows-some-twitter-love-integrates-twitter-into-email-organization-platform/ Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Google, Rome, and Empire Posted: 22 Dec 2009 02:00 PM PST 2500 years ago, Europe was a filthy mess of dirt roads, battered and cracked by hooves in the summer and rutted by rude wheels in the winter. To travel from the British isles to the tip of the Apennine peninsula would have been the work of months — and messy and rough work at that. Around 450 BC, the Roman Twelve Tables specified (among many other things) the dimensions of roads, and methods borrowed from the Carthaginians standardized their construction to some extent. Mere centuries later, an unprecedented network of trade and communication had been established, some parts of which are still in use today. The Roman roads improved the entire world, and the fact that they were built, managed, and maintained by the Romans was as effective a weapon for Rome as the gladii wielded by the legions who patrolled them. In the year MMIX Google revealed Chrome OS to the world. It was no more remarkable to onlookers than a single stone-paved road might have been to a Roman citizen in 400 BC. A decade or two from now, an historian might look back on the first few years of Google's expansion and think: how similar was that Roman's limited scope of observation to our own! For he saw a road, not the beginnings of an infrastructure which would span continents. And we see a suite of products, vessels for selling ads, not the start of a greater endeavor: a blueprint for connecting humanity in the 21st century. I don't mean to overstate Google's importance. Just as the world was awaiting a Rome to civilize its mountains and valleys and connect their denizens, so now the world has been preparing for a Google to lay down the flagstones of a modern Appian Way.

Announcing the 2009 Crunchies Finalists. Posted: 22 Dec 2009 12:16 PM PST Voting is now open for the third annual 2009 Crunchies Awards to celebrate the best technology accomplishments of 2009. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote once per day per award category through Wednesday, January 6 at midnight pst. There are 18 award categories to recognize accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles. Finalists, grab a badge to get your community to vote for you as a winner. And please email us, so we can get you prepared for the ceremony. Finalists were chosen by GigaOm, VentureBeat and us based on your popular nominations (over 141,000 actually) and our critical eye for the major accomplishments of companies, products and people in 2009. The fine print rules are here. Wednesday at noon PST, we will release the first batch of 150 tickets to the Friday, January 8 awards ceremony to be held at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco, starting at 7:30 pm. Orchestra seats are $75 and balcony tickets are $45. Both tickets get you into the after-party across the street in City Hall’s Grand Rotunda through midnight. We have fewer than 450 total tickets to publicly release to the ceremony, so these may go nearly as fast as our Avatar screening. Based on popular demand, we’re bringing the game room back to the after-party. We’ll have a mix of traditional and online games to play. And there are plenty of ways to sponsor and support the after-party energy. Contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde if you’d like to sponsor: card-game tables, demo tables, photo booths or walls, drinks or food, giveaways and prizes and the like. We have creative packages available in all shapes and sizes. Room for award benefactors and entertainment sponsors for the ceremony too. The Crunchies Awards would not be possible without the support of amazing sponsors. Big applause to: Ceremony and after-party co-host: Microsoft BizSpark Award benefactors: Founders Fund Streaming partner: Ustream Game Room Demo Sponsors: Subvert&Profit Beverage Sponsor: Lewis PR Ticket Partner: Eventbrite Design Partner: Design About Town Game Table Sponsors: Kosmix and Zannel Remember to vote and vote often. We hope to see you at the ceremony on Friday, January 8 to celebrate the best of 2009 and usher in a brand new 2010 full of opportunity. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The Twitter/FriendFeed Connection Goes Realtime Once Again Posted: 22 Dec 2009 12:10 PM PST It has been a sad few months on FriendFeed following their acquisition by Facebook. Despite assurances that FriendFeed would not die, activity has dwindled and many users have moved on. While the service was still working, there was a fairly major glitch that made it much less compelling: Tweets, the main source of content for FriendFeed, stopped coming in at realtime speeds, and instead were delayed by up to an hour. But today, finally, realtime tweets have been restored. If you visit FriendFeed right now, you’ll notice that many tweets are coming in with about an 8 second delay. Some are delayed a little bit longer, but it’s infinitely better than the delay we’ve all endured for months now. And many of us have been complaining for months, wondering if the Facebook deal caused Twitter to pull FriendFeed’s firehose. What actually happened is that FriendFeed was apparently transitioning over to one of the newer Twitter data streams. At our Realtime CrunchUp last month, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit indicated that they were close to implementing this new stream, but wouldn’t say what the hold up was. But now Buchheit is telling our own Steve Gillmor that several days ago the two sides reached an oral agreement on the new stream. And today, he confirmed over Twitter that it is in place. Specifically, they are using the new “Birddog” stream API, Buchheit says. You can learn more about it here. “I hope to have it down to 1 sec sometime next month,” Buchheit says of the delay. This is great news. I personally had all but stopped using FriendFeed because of this delay. While the service remains one of the best ways to filter and search tweets and other content in realtime, the delay rendered all that moot. Now it’s back, and so I’ll go back to using it. Hopefully others will follow. CrunchBase Information FriendFeed Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

iSpy, With My Little Eye, A Children’s Game Re-Imagined For The iPhone Posted: 22 Dec 2009 12:10 PM PST Two features make the iPhone great for social games: its GPS chip and its camera. An app called iSpy which was released on the iPhone last week (iTunes link) uses both geolocation and mobile snapshots to re-imagine the children’s game of the same name. Players create iSpy games by taking pictures of objects in public view, which get geo-tagged and placed within a radius of their actual location on a map in the game. Other players can see which objects are nearby and try to find them. When do find an object, they snap their own picture, which is then verified by the community as either matching the original picture or not. You can also play along on the Web. The more objects you find, the more points you get. The person with the most points becomes the top spy in their city. What I like about iSpy is that the iPhone game expands the playing area of the original game beyond your line of sight. You can play anywhere within a few blocks, with people you don’t know, and you don’t even have to be playing at the same time. It is an asynchronous game. It does require a certain critical mass of players creating games in your vicinity for it to be interesting. But iSpy an app that could build a loyal following. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

BitGravity Co-Founder Announces 3Crowd, Funded By Jay Adelson And Kevin Rose Posted: 22 Dec 2009 12:04 PM PST 3Crowd Technologies, Barrett Lyon’s new stealth startup, has announced that the company has received funding from Storm Ventures, Greenwich Technology Associates and angels Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson participating as well. Lyon didn’t disclose the amount of funding, but characterizes it as a convertible note. 3Crowd is currently in stealth right now, but will be launching mid to late next month. Lyon didn’t go too much into detail on what 3Crowd is going to be, but he mentioned that it has to do with crowd sourcing as applied to the underlying technology of the Internet, and he claims it will change crowdsourcing. Lyon has had quite the technology career. He was previsouly the Co-Founder and CTO of BitGravity, a content delivery network that worked with sites like Revision3, which is how Rose and Adelson know him (both are co-founders of Revsion3, and Digg). Lyon is also the creator of the Opte Project, which is one of the first Internet mapping projects. The Opte Project was featured at the Boston Museum of Science and The Museum of Modern Art, among others. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The World Is Flat For Twitter, As In Global Growth Has Stalled Posted: 22 Dec 2009 11:57 AM PST Twitter’s international traffic continues to flatten as the microblogging site’s number of unique visitors flattened in November. Twitter saw 60.3 million unique visitors in November compared to 58.3 million unique visitors in October. Though the site saw a rise of 2 million visits globally, this slight uptick in visitors only represents a 3.5 percent increase in traffic. Twitter’s November U.S. traffic has stalled as well; U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors after seeing a 8 percent decline in traffic in October. Over the past few months, Twitter has rolled out versions in Spanish, German, French and Italian which could help boost the international use of its site. But as traffic stalls on Twitter’s homepage, third party Twitter clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck are growing like gangbusters. CEO Evan Williams acknowledged Twitter’s stall in growth but said that new features of the site could jumpstart growth in traffic, including the Retweet button, Lists, and Geolocation features. Of course, many of these features have been added to the third-party Twitter clients, which easily account for half of all Twitter usage. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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