The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- FreeAllMusic Strikes Deal With EMI For Ad-Supported Downloads
- CareCloud Raises $2.3 Million For Web-Based Physician Practice Software Suite
- Report: 44% Of Google News Visitors Scan Headlines, Don’t Click Through
- Atlas Venture Shrinks Back To Boston
- Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy And Why Lala Is Critical
- TechCrunch Europe Events In 2010
- WatchMouse Monitors 26 Popular APIs So You Don’t Have To
- More Versions Of the “Get a Mac” Campaign Ad Than You Require
- BrightScope Launches Personal 401K Fee Report
- Motoroi: Motorola To Release Another Android Phone In March (Video)
- Confirmed: Time Inc. Buys Personal Shopping Engine StyleFeeder
- Alice.com Launches iPhone App To Shop For Household Goods On The Go
- State Of The #Twittersphere: User Growth Slows Down To 3.5% Per Month
- Mobile Payments Startup Boku Lands $25 Million In Funding; Rebrands Service As Paymo
- Report: Skype Now Accounts For 12% Of All International Calling Minutes
- Will Next Week’s Apple Event Finally Bring Background Apps To The iPhone?
- Vanilla Forums Raises $500,000 For Open-Source Forum Software
- Yelp Taking Big Investment From Elevation Partners
- Jivox Makes Video Ad Technology More Interactive
- Yammer Founder David Sacks Joins Scribd Board Of Directors
- TokBox Rolls Out Paid Features
- YC-Funded MeetingMix Gets Your Co-Workers To Cut To The Chase
- With Mobile Giving To Haiti Passing $20 Million, Text Fundraising Comes Of Age
- Everything You Need to Know About Windows Mobile 7
- Hearst’s Social Shopping Site Kaboodle Gets A Realtime Makeover
| FreeAllMusic Strikes Deal With EMI For Ad-Supported Downloads Posted: 19 Jan 2010 08:29 AM PST
We recently wrote about ad-sponsored digital music download service FreeAllMusic.com’s deal with Universal Music to let anyone download music from the record label’s artists, which include Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Jay Sean. Today, the startup is announcing its another deal with a major record label: EMI Music. Via FreeAllMusic’s platform, thousands of tracks will be offered at a rate of 20 free downloads per month, five per week, starting every Tuesday. The recently launched FreeAllMusic.com, which is in private beta, lets users access downloadable, high-quality, iPod-compatible MP3s of advertiser-paid, free, legal, and unrestricted song. The catch: users watch a video commercial per download on the site and users’ music selections and sponsoring brands are then promoted externally through an opt-in, digital advertising network. To download a free track, users can select a participating brand and then need to watch a video advertisement from that brand. Brands who are participating in the initial launch are Coca-Cola, Warner Bros, Zappos, Lionsgate, LG, and others. Similar to Universal Music, EMI Music has been a little lawsuit-happy when it comes to the dissemination of its content, which makes these deals surprising. But with the ad-supported downloads, FreeAllMusic may have found a way around music labels’ onerous fees. And the record labels get paid, which makes them happy with the deal. Music startup Groovershark also managed to slip past EMI’s lawyers to strike a deal last fall. According to a New York Times article from December, FreeAllMusic had already signed on another record label but declined to name the new label.
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| CareCloud Raises $2.3 Million For Web-Based Physician Practice Software Suite Posted: 19 Jan 2010 08:28 AM PST
CareCloud's proprietary SaaS solution connects physicians to their patients through a social networking-based practice management system. By joining the CareCloud community, physicians can simplify the process of getting paid for their services while streamlining their clinical operations. CareCloud's system also comes with a revenue cycle management back-office service that aims to liberate practices from initiating expensive insurance claim follow-up efforts, posting of remittance and other functions. The company is currently servicing a limited number of clients on its software and revenue cycle management service as it prepares for full product launch in Q2 2010. CareCloud will use the capital for the development of its electronic medical records product and sales and marketing efforts.
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| Report: 44% Of Google News Visitors Scan Headlines, Don’t Click Through Posted: 19 Jan 2010 07:43 AM PST
The Outsell report unsurprisingly predicts ongoing, steep drops in US newspapers' print circulation as consumers continue to head online for news consumption and sharing, forecasting 3.5 percent annual declines in both daily and Sunday circulation by 2012. Interestingly enough, the research also talks of what is referred to as the “dramatic effect” aggregators like Google and Yahoo have had on print and online readership. Says analyst Ken Doctor: "Though Google is driving some traffic to newspapers, it's also taking a significant share away. A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers' individual sites." Outsell says that for "news right now", which I’m presuming are the most current news items, 57 percent of users now go to digital sources, up from 33 percent a few years ago. They're also likelier to turn to an aggregator (31 percent) than a newspaper site (8 percent) or other site (18 percent). This is in line with what Erick Schonfeld recently wrote about media bundles dying at the expense of smart aggregators. That the Internet is eating away newspapers’ readership bit by bit rings true to me, but frankly I have a hard time believing that close to half of all Google News visitors never click through to a newspaper site. In my own experience, I find the summary that gets posted on Google News or other aggregators too short when a news item truly interests me, and I always end up clicking through. How many of you treat Google News like a destination for online news consumption rather than a starting point? Other findings from the report: - Only 10 percent of news users are willing to pay for a print newspaper subscription to gain online access
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| Atlas Venture Shrinks Back To Boston Posted: 19 Jan 2010 07:42 AM PST
Atlas says its fundamental international early stage investment strategy “will not change” nor will its plans to “add new European investments” to its international portfolio. However, being based in Boston – with the normally European-based partner Fred Destin moving there as well – still deals a blow to the European startup eco-system and potentially calls into question Atlas’ position in the longer term. It is however, a boost for the U.S. East Coast system.
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| Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy And Why Lala Is Critical Posted: 19 Jan 2010 06:47 AM PST
For years there’s been speculation that Apple would supplement their $1/song (now $1.29) iTunes business with a monthly subscription service, but their upcoming plans are quite different and once again are positioning them to lead the digital music industry into a new era. Leveraging their ubiquitous iTunes software Apple plans to upgrade their users almost over night to a cloud music service in an ambitious move to beat Amazon and others to a cloud music service. Record labels are wary to give Apple even greater dominance which is why Apple’s new strategy is designed to sidestep new licenses from the major labels. Apple’s recent acquisition of digital music startup Lala rekindled speculation of an iTunes subscription service. There’s no shortage of subscription offerings (Napster, Rhapsody, Spotify, Pandora, etc), but none have attracted the millions of subscribers necessary to make the high royalty structures work. Experts have pondered that Apple’s design expertise and hardware integration could make subscription work. And leveraging Lala’s digital library, licenses from the major labels, and a management team who cycled through several business models including the ten cent web song rental could make it a reality. It’s a logical assumption, but after talking to a wide variety of insider sources it’s clear there is no upcoming Apple subscription service and Apple has far different plans.
An upcoming major revision of iTunes will copy each user’s catalog to the net making it available from any browser or net connected ipod/touch/tablet. The Lala upload technology will be bundled into a future iTunes upgrade which will automatically be installed for the 100+ million itunes users with a simple "An upgrade is available…" notification dialog box. After installation iTunes will push in the background their entire media library to their personal mobile iTunes area. Once loaded, users will be able to navigate and play their music, videos and playlists from their personal URL using a browser based iTunes experience. Apple will link the tens of millions of previously sold iPods, Touches, AppleTV and iTablets to mobile iTunes giving users seamless playback of their media from a wide range of Apple branded devices. Since media will be supplied from the user’s personal collection, Apple is freed from the hassles of device and region limitations. iTunes shoppers will be able to continue to buy music and movies as they can now with purchases still being downloaded, but once downloaded they will be automatically loaded to their mobile iTunes area for anywhere access. Again because users are in possession of the materials no new licenses are required from the record labels or publishers. Some are curious why Apple with thousands of engineers would need Lala talent and technology. For sure Apple could copy Lala technology, but time is of the essence and Lala lets Apple move faster in transitioning from their PC software business to a cloud service. They get a knowledgeable digital music engineering team, plus a code base to build upon which already does uploading and web playback. There’s precedence for this strategy. The iTunes software did not originate within in Apple but came via an acquisition. Finally, Apple gets the quick witted, brilliant, but occasionally loony Lala CEO Bill Nguyen who will play a future role in Apple. (Although one wonders how Jobs and lime light relishing Nguyen can co-exist.) It’s critically important that technology companies build and maintain a core strength. This cornerstone allows them to command a significant portion of the profit stream and is a beachhead to launch other initiatives. Think Amazon/e-commerce, Microsoft/OS, Google/search, Apple/media. Jobs is keenly aware of the digital transition from PC to cloud centric programs and services. It’s imperative Apple lead in this transition or risk ceding leadership in media to others such as Amazon, Real, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. Lala will help Apple protect their media franchise from encroachment by accelerating their cloud efforts. iTunes users can expect mobile iTunes in 2010.
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| TechCrunch Europe Events In 2010 Posted: 19 Jan 2010 06:34 AM PST
From now on, each month we’ll be doing an ‘Upcoming Event’ post covering our own upcoming events, those we’re partnering with and those we think are of particular, special interest to the tech community. To enquire about formal media partnership with TechCrunch Europe please contact our commercial partnerships and event sponsorship manager Petra(@)TwistedTree.co.uk in the first instance. To keep TechCrunch Europe informed of your upcoming event, get in touch with editorial. Also see our RSS and Twitter feed to keep up to date.
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| WatchMouse Monitors 26 Popular APIs So You Don’t Have To Posted: 19 Jan 2010 06:18 AM PST
The lists of monitored APIs consists of 26 of the most heavily trafficked Web services, including Google Search, Google Maps, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, SalesForce, YouTube, Amazon, eBay and others. API-status.com calls and checks for a valid result on each of the APIs every five minutes from 42 locations across the globe. If the system detects an anomaly or delay of more than four seconds on any of them, the result is registered as an error and the status of the API will get indicated on the website as unavailable. These errors are used to count towards the percentage of availability or uptime for each of the sites. Details on API-status.com include a seven-day history, along with a 24-hour glance and performance indication by country for each API. WatchMouse closely monitored the availability of all 26 Web services between December 16th 2009 and January 16th 2010. For the sake of the survey, the startup only selected a single function per API; the most simple one that requires authentication. This means that their survey does not cover an in-depth test of the full APIs, but provides an estimate of the availability and working functionality of each API. As said, the methodology for testing the sites includes one simple API call and check for a valid result. This typically meant an authentication action, including a login, followed by a search or listing action, plus a check of the expected result action. Each site was checked in real time using the WatchMouse Public Status Pages tool. WatchMouse found that Yammer’s API had the lowest availability of the bunch (with 96.09 percent uptime) while Amazon, Google Maps, Google Search, Last.fm and Yahoo Maps recorded the highest availability with 100 percent uptime. More results here.
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| More Versions Of the “Get a Mac” Campaign Ad Than You Require Posted: 19 Jan 2010 06:13 AM PST  Poor ol' John Hodgman. He's always been beleaguered and sad-looking - from his first appearance in the Get a Mac ads back in ought-six to his most recent in October 2009. He always looks like he needs a hug, a nice pair of comfortable jeans, and a low-fat, no sugar coffee drink.
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| BrightScope Launches Personal 401K Fee Report Posted: 19 Jan 2010 05:58 AM PST
Drawing from a database of more than 30,000 401k plans, BrightScope helps users get a clear picture of the breakdown of their contributions to their plans, including information on the amount of fees users are paying to providers. The company has also raised a $2 million second round of financing, led by Steelpoint Capital Partners, to continue to build out the service. BrightScope’s service is needed to help 401k participants gain visibility into the their financial plans.The startup claims that 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’s 401k fee report is one of the first tools to be rolled out to users; more products are in the pipeline.
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| Motoroi: Motorola To Release Another Android Phone In March (Video) Posted: 19 Jan 2010 05:28 AM PST  Motorola held a press conference in Seoul yesterday to announce a partnership with SK Telecom, a major Korean telecommunications company. The occasion: SK Telecom will be the first company to distribute an Android phone in that country, the so-called Motorola Motoroi. It's not a rebranded Droid, but a completely new phone (in Europe, the Droid was named "Milestone" but remained largely unchanged technically). SK Telecom customers will be able to lay their hands on the Motoroi in early February. But Motorola Korea and SK Telekom representatives are quoted as saying that Motorola is ready to roll out the Motoroi in the US in March, too. And apparently it will be available in a number of other countries as well.
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| Confirmed: Time Inc. Buys Personal Shopping Engine StyleFeeder Posted: 19 Jan 2010 05:08 AM PST
Cambridge, MA-based StyleFeeder raised $3.5 million in financing from Highland Capital Partners and investment firm Schooner Capital. Time is reportedly looking to integrate StyleFeeder throughout its Web properties, in order to complement the declining advertising revenue with e-commerce income. StyleFeeder is expected to be interwoven with fashion magazine InStyle's website, and eventually also be closely aligned with other titles like Essence and People en Español. The WSJ said an official announcement of the acquisition could come Tuesday. Update: the official word just came in:
A couple of interesting nuggets in the press release as well: StyleFeeder apparently attracted more than 1 million registered members over the past few years and gets visited by over 600,000 unique visitors per month according to comScore. InStyle.com has 1.5 million monthly unique visitors, still according to comScore, and over 1.5 million followers on Twitter. Finally, StyleFeeder aggregates content from a catalog of over 14 million products today, from thousands of retail partners across the web.
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| Alice.com Launches iPhone App To Shop For Household Goods On The Go Posted: 19 Jan 2010 04:54 AM PST
We’re big fans of Alice.com, the retail platform for household goods, because it simple to use and offers significant discounts on everything from toilet paper to toothpaste. Today, Alice.com is becoming even more compelling with the launch of a free iPhone app. You can download it here Alice.com customers can shop from the app, and use their mobile device to make ongoing lists of products they need. Via the app, users can also access price comparisons, ingredients of products, customer reviews, and other data. And the app lets users find coupons and daily deals on the products they desire. Launched in June, Alice.com’s retail platform allows consumer packaged goods manufacturers, like Procter & Gamble, to sell directly to consumers instead of going through retail channels like Target or Wal-Mart. On the consumer side, Alice.com lets users create a profile of their household (i.e. how many adults, kids, babies) and then the site will keep track of items and reminds users with emails when they are running low and need to reorder. Each shipment is bundled together in a single 'Alice' box, delivered directly to the consumer's door, with no shipping costs. The startup recently received a $6 million infusion from private investors, adding to the $4.3 million Alice.com previously raised in a Series A round. Co-founders and serial entrepreneurs Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire have managed to sell three companies in the past +10 years, most recently flipping social shopping service Jellyfish to Microsoft (which it later used to create Live Search Cashback).
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| State Of The #Twittersphere: User Growth Slows Down To 3.5% Per Month Posted: 19 Jan 2010 04:29 AM PST
Marketing software startup HubSpot has put together its third ‘State of the Twittersphere’ report, which is based on an analysis of more than 5 million Twitter accounts and 6 million tweets, collected by the company’s free Twitter Grader tool. The main take-away from the report (PDF): peaking at around 13% in March 2009, growth in new Twitter users has recently slowed down significantly, dropping to a mere 3.5% in October 2009. That’s still growth, but a mind-blowing growth rate it is no longer. And as we’ve reported before, visits to Twitter.com have declined in number too, dropping 8% in October 2009. Also, Erick yesterday posted a must-read analysis of how the realtime web (and Twitter specifically) can be measured, if you’re interested. We should also note Twitter CEO Evan Williams recently tweeted that they had their single biggest usage day on Jan 12, and that they were expecting to break that record again the day after. That is well possible, and consistent with HubSpot’s findings: In the seven months since HubSpot last examined the ‘twittersphere’, the average Twitter user has become less of a newbie, claims the company in the report. The average user is not only following more people, he or she also gets followed by more people and posts more updates. To sum up: - Today the average Twitter account has 300 followers; in July 2009, it had 70 Also worth noting: HubSpot says the average Twitter account became better implemented during the period from July 2009 to January 2010, as more users have taken the time to complete their profiles, adding bios, locations and web addresses. HubSpot’s report paints a picture of Twitter slowly but surely increasing its international footprint: locations listed in Twitter profiles (and thus self-reported by users) were much more spread across the globe than before: - 15% of the top 20 Twitter locations were outside North America in July 2009 Looking at user patterns, HubSpot found that Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter, each accounting for 16% of total tweets in the analysis, while 10-11 pm appears to be the most active hour on Twitter, accounting for 4.8% of the tweets in an average day. Finally, HubSpot claims the vast majority of Twitter users have networks under 100 people: 82% of users have less than 100 followers while 81% are following less than 100 people. Does the above ring true for you? (Via HubSpot blog)
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| Mobile Payments Startup Boku Lands $25 Million In Funding; Rebrands Service As Paymo Posted: 19 Jan 2010 03:55 AM PST
Mobile payments for micro-transactions on the web are steadily gaining traction. This morning, the space received more validation as several prominent venture capital firms made a significant a investment in recently launched mobile payments startup, Boku. Boku has raised $25 million in Series C funding led by DAG Ventures with previous investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, and Khosla Ventures participating in the round. This brings Boku’s total funding to $38 million since the startup’s launch in June. Boku’s marketing chief Ron Hirson tells me that the startup is also rebranding its consumer platform as Paymo, but will retain the name Boku on the merchant and publisher side. Boku, which acquired competitors Paymo and Mobillcash in June, doesn't require users to have a credit card or bank account to make a micropayment. Users enter their cell phone number on the site, reply to a text message and then all virtual charges are automatically charged to the user's monthly cell phone bill. As we've said in the past, it's ridiculously easy. Because of its acquisition of Paymo and Mobillcash, systems that had significant international reach, Boku gained a strong base of users around the world. Today, Boku’s reach extends to 58 countries and 190 carriers, with two more countries (Latvia and Lithuania) being added by the end of the week. Carriers in Brazil and Argentina will also be added shortly and is expected to bring a large amount of users because of the high mobile phone usage stats in South America. Hirson says the new cash will be used to further the companies international growth and expand product offerings. The startup is also seeing success on the publisher side, announcing 12 new partnerships with online game developers in the past month. In fact, since June, the company has developed mobile payment relationships with over 1,000 game and app developers to help power payments for virtual goods and currencies on many of the top social networks, including Facebook and MySpace. The startup currently powers mobile micropayments for both Playdom and Playfish, which was acquired by Electronic Arts. One potential obstacle to mobile payments platforms is the high fees that mobile carriers charge to the payment systems (which are then passed on to the publisher). Boku told us last June that different cell phone carriers charge varying fees that range between 10% to 50% of the purchase price, which is a hefty amount in transaction fees. But it looks like Boku is on its way to remedying this problem. Hirson indicated to me that the company is in negotiations with carriers to bring fees. He said that carrier fees in parts of Europe will come down first and hopefully roll out to the Americas and remaining parts of the world. Of course, its worth mentioning Boku’s main rival in the mobile payments space, Zong, which struck a large deal last year with Facebook to pay for the social network’s virtual currency. Zong also recently launched an alternative payments system, called Zong+, which lets users bill microtransactions to credit, debit and prepaid cards. With $25 million in the bank, its hard not to imagine that Boku could snap up a few smaller players in the mobile payments and microtransaction space. When asked about the possibility of further buyouts down the line, Hirson said that while acquisitions aren’t currently part of Boku’s immediate strategy, he couldn’t rule out the possibility in the future. 
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| Report: Skype Now Accounts For 12% Of All International Calling Minutes Posted: 19 Jan 2010 03:28 AM PST
VoIP services juggernaut Skype has seen its share of international calling minutes jump to 12% in 2009, a 50% increase compared to the year before. And as you can tell from the pie chart below, 54 billion minutes out of 406 billion in total were accumulated by users calling each other Skype-to-Skype last year. Are you listening, carriers? The numbers hail from a report published by TeleGeography, a benchmark research service for the international long-distance telephony industry. TeleGeography says international call volume from telephones has grown at an annual rate of 15 percent over the past 25 years, but that growth has been slowing for the past few years. In the past two years, specifically, international telephone traffic annual growth has reportedly slowed to a mere 8 percent, growing from 376 billion minutes in 2008 to an estimated 406 billion minutes last year. Skype's traffic, however, has soared. The service’s on-net international traffic (between Skype users) grew 51 percent in 2008, and is projected to grow 63 percent in 2009, to 54 billion minutes.
TeleGeography analyst Stephan Beckert refers to Skype’s estimated volume of traffic as “tremendous” and goes on to say that Skype is now by far the largest provider of cross-border communications in the world. Just yesterday, Skype Journal reported that the service has seen an all-time record number of concurrent logged on users: 22 million people signed in to Skype at the same time. Or what the disruption of an industry looks like in figures and charts. Tomorrow, eBay is set to release its latest quarter earnings, which means we’ll be able to match these traffic growth numbers with reported revenue figures. In October 2009, we reported on Skype hitting 521 million users and $185 million in quarterly revenue. (Via Skype blog)
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| Will Next Week’s Apple Event Finally Bring Background Apps To The iPhone? Posted: 19 Jan 2010 01:40 AM PST
First things first. While the title of the Fox News article is “Apple Tablet, iPhone 4 Launch Confirmed for January 27″, the body of the article later says that it’s “likely” that Apple will unveil those two products (along with an updated iLife suite), and also notes that Apple is known for suddenly removing features or products from their announcements at the last second — none of which makes the news sound totally concrete. That said, there are plenty of reasons why iPhone 4.0 could be making an appearance alongside the Tablet, and why it will bring background apps with it. We’ve discussed the probable connection between the Tablet and the iPhone OS since as early as last May. With iPhone OS, Apple took Mac OS X and stripped it down to the basics to turn it into a compact and powerful mobile operating system. The tablet will almost certainly have more horsepower than the iPhone, but it would still stand to gain from the power and space saving attributes of the mobile OS (albeit a modified version). Our suspicions got further support less than a week ago, when we saw reports that the newest releases of the iPhone OS was actually being held back because some of its code alluded to the unannounced tablet device. Given these ties, it would be logical for the iPhone 4.0 OS to make its debut alongside the tablet. But the Tablet OS will need to bring some new features with it. For one, it will probably need to allow users to run multiple apps at the same time. Most people don’t particularly care (yet) that they can’t do this with their iPhones, because the screen real estate is so limited and they don’t view the device as a handheld computer (even though it is one). But that won’t be true with the tablet — in light of its larger screen, users will expect more functionality, and the inability to run multiple apps would grow frustrating quickly. With that in mind, if Apple has already established a paradigm for running background apps on the tablet, it would make sense to finally bring it over to the iPhone too. The iPhone’s current lack of background applications is one of its most glaring weaknesses compared to other mobile operating systems, most notably Android and Palm’s WebOS. Apple’s reasons for withholding the functionality before now were obvious: running multiple applications can drain the device’s already-strained battery more quickly, and forcing users to manage which apps are open adds an extra layer of complexity. It was the right choice then, but it’s time for things to change.  Plenty of developers have already had their applications hampered by their inability to run in the background. Messaging clients have to rely on the iPhone’s Push notifications, which can only display a single alert at a time. Music players (other than the built-in iPod app) close down as soon as you try to do anything else on the phone. And location based apps have to rely almost exclusively on the “check-in” model popularized by Foursquare, because they have no way to passively monitor your location. Consumers may not be frustrated by these restrictions yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they look enviously at their Android-toting friends streaming Pandora and running Skype or Meebo in the background. And Apple knows it. As far back as last May we were hearing that Apple was having serious discussions about how to implement background applications. As it did with copy and paste (which iPhone users had to wait years for), Apple is clearly taking its time to get it right the first time. Now, with the imminent release of the tablet, Apple may have finally settled on a solution. If the Fox News report is correct, that could be revealed as soon as next week. But even if iPhone 4.0 isn’t announced for a few more months, it seems highly likely that background apps will come with it. Image via Gizmodo. And no, it isn’t real.
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| Vanilla Forums Raises $500,000 For Open-Source Forum Software Posted: 19 Jan 2010 01:18 AM PST
Vanilla Forums, an open source community forum software technology, has raised a $500,000 (CAD) Series A funding. Vanilla Forums was a Techstars summer 2009 company. The round was led by Montreal Startup, with participation by eonBusiness, Norseman Capital and Klein Venture Partners. Vanilla Forums, a Montreal-based startup, will use the funds to expand its marketing, development, and sales efforts. Vanilla has also released its forum hosting platform and additional premium features. According to Vanilla Forums, their hosting platform enables customers to quickly and easily deploy a community forum solution without having to write a single line of code. Vanilla also released two new premium features, custom domains and ad-removal, with plans to release additional premium features including custom CSS, single sign-on, and forum analytics in the future. The company already has over 300,000 users, including companies like O’Reilly Media, Rackspace, Mozilla, and more.
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| Yelp Taking Big Investment From Elevation Partners Posted: 18 Jan 2010 11:52 PM PST
The size of the rounds is in the $50 million range, but includes both a primary investment component as well as a secondary offering for long time employees. These deals are now being referred to as “DST deals,” since DST first invested in Facebook in May 2009 at a $10 billion valuation and later funded employee buyouts at a $6.5 billion valuation. They did a similar deal with Zynga. Here’s a kicker – there may have been a point in the negotiations where Bono, an Elevation Partners partner, was to be the board representative for Yelp. What we’re hearing now, though, is that it will be one of the other Elevation partners to take the board seat. The valuation is lower than the $550+ million that Yelp turned down from Google, say our sources. It will likely be closed and announced in February.
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| Jivox Makes Video Ad Technology More Interactive Posted: 18 Jan 2010 11:46 PM PST
Online video advertising startup Jivox is upgrading its technology to become more interactive and social. Jivox’s online self-serve platform provides video advertising opportunities to clients that allow them create and embed advertisements within their videos. Advertisers can now add custom interactions to their in-stream and in-banner video ads to try to boost user engagement and response rates. Using Jivox, creative agencies and advertisers can now add their own custom Flash or HTML applets to video ads so that users can interact with the ad without ever leaving the player. Users will now be able to embed Jivox’s “in-stream ad plug-in" into a content player to serve a video ad in-stream, with full interactive and analytic capabilities. Jivox is also making it easier to embed interactive video ads on social networks. Currently more than thirty media groups, including Gannett, Media News Group, McClatchy and E.W. Scripps are using the Jivox’s online video ad platform. Jivox’s ads get average click through rates that range from .2 percent to .8 percent. This seems low, but we know from Brightroll that click through rates for video ads have decreased. The upside is that total advertising spend is up and Jivox is seeing the results, with the startup’s revenue growing by 600 percent in 2009 and added 3000 more advertisers as well. The startup delivers ad campaigns for a host of big-name companies including General Motors, Nokia, Microsoft, HP, Sony and Samsung. Jivox, which launched in 2007, faces competition from Mixpo and Spotmixer.
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| Yammer Founder David Sacks Joins Scribd Board Of Directors Posted: 18 Jan 2010 08:39 PM PST
Scribd had 8.1 million unique worldwide visitors in November 2009 (Comscore). They’ve raised $12.8 million in three funding rounds. Sacks is already an investor in the company.
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| TokBox Rolls Out Paid Features Posted: 18 Jan 2010 07:25 PM PST  TokBox, the web-based video chat application, appears to be testing new paid features on its platform. Although the startup creates a great product that allows for multi-user video chat from the browser, TokBox faced hardships last year and was forced to fire 30% of the company's total staff and shuffled the executive lineup. TokBox is obviously looking to create a revenue stream with the paid features, allowing users to pay $9.99 per month to add moderation functionality for chats. So with the paid features, you can choose who can join your call, remove people from your call, silence the audio of participants, control who shares media on the chat, and distribute moderator controls to other members of a chat. It also appears that the startup will charge users if they want to add more than 20 people to an individual chat. The startup recently added document collaboration powered by EtherPad, which was acquired by Google late last year. It looks like TokBox is formulating a business plan; which should make its investors happy. And this monetization comes at a time when the online video chat application space is heating up, with TinyChat (which offers all of TokBox’s paid features for free) and others gaining popularity. We’ve contacted TokBox for comment and will update with a response. UPDATE: TokBox has confirmed that it rolled out its first set of paid features today.
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| YC-Funded MeetingMix Gets Your Co-Workers To Cut To The Chase Posted: 18 Jan 2010 07:15 PM PST
MeetingMix’s core functionality is to help you create and distribute an agenda for your meeting. First, you name a meeting and add a few bullet points outlining which topics you’d like to cover. Then you send your meeting outline to your coworkers, inviting them to tack on any topics they think need to be covered. The logic behind this is simple: everyone knows ahead of time what you’re going to talk about, so there’s less of a chance of off-topic tangents. You can also assign each meeting point to an employee, so everyone should know going in what they’re going to be responsible for. MeetingMix also has a set of features you can use during and after the meeting. During the meeting, you can use a tool that helps you transcribe notes about each item on the agenda, which are later compiled into the meeting’s minutes and can be sent to all the attendees. You can project an agenda page in front of everyone, so your co-workers know exactly what topic you’re currently supposed to be talking about. This mode also includes a timer at the top of the screen that helps you keep track of how long you’ve spent on a given topic so that you don’t run over time.  MeetingMix charges meeting creators $4.95 a month, which allows you to make as many meetings as you’d like, each of which can have an unlimited number of attendees. Co-founder Shawn Gupta likens the model to 37Signals’ products, explaining that it’s a straightforward tool that anyone in a company can start using without any involvement from management or IT. To help build the product, he says that company consulted former SalesForce VP Todd McKinnon (who has played a part in plenty of meetings) and now serves as a MeetingMix advisor.  MeetingMix is intuitive and should be easy to pick up for just about anyone. But as with many services that offer simplicity as a core feature, I wonder if the product might be a little too basic. Given that the service revolves around collaboration, it would be nice if there was a way to collaboratively build a PowerPoint presentation to be shown during the meeting. I’d also like to see an easy way to make an audio recording of a meeting that’s synced up with the meeting minutes as you typed them. MeetingMix was built by the founders behind IDidWork, a service for helping employees track their productivity. The Y Combinator-funded company is maintaining IDidWork, but they’ve switched to working full time on MeetingMix.
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| With Mobile Giving To Haiti Passing $20 Million, Text Fundraising Comes Of Age Posted: 18 Jan 2010 06:53 PM PST
As the tragedy from last week’s earthquake in Haiti continues to unfold, the Red Cross and other relief organizations have now raised more than $20 million via text message donations, which is about 10 percent of the $210 million total raised so far. The text donations have been doubling at a rapid pace, from $5 million last week to $10 million to more than $20 million today. As more and more people pick up their phones and text “HAITI” to the number 90999, not only is a $10 donation to the Red Cross be added to their phone bill, but many of them are also experiencing mobile SMS payments for the first time. James Eberhard is the CEO of Mobile Accord, the company behind the mGive Foundation which is coordinating the text fundraising efforts for the Red Cross. Mobile Accord has been running cause marketing campaigns for non-profits since the 2008 SuperBowl. He’s never seen mobile giving at this scale. “It is the biggest,” he says “Previously the largest was during American Idol when Alicia keys made a call to action that raised $450,000 through two calls to action over the course of three minutes.” There are many advantages to mobile giving. It’s probably the fastest way to make a donation. You don’t have to write a check. You don’t even have to turn on your computer. It lowers the barrier to giving and opens the door to w whole new class of donors. When someone decides they want to give, they can do it immediately and get billed later. (The carriers, for their part, are trying to release the money as quickly as possible to the relief organizations). Eberhard notes that there are 270 million cell phones in the U.S., and they all can send text messages. For the non-profits, they end up getting funds faster and can begin to establish a direct relationship with the people who give. As text donations become more common, they may also pave the way for regular mobile commerce payments. It’s like Paypal: sending money via text message might seem unnatural at first, but once you do it, the next time the option comes up it won’t seem so strange. The people texting money to the Red Cross this week will be more likely to text money to a business down the road. But for now, keep texting “HAITI.” Here’s a list of different ways to text to help Haiti: ext HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross * Text HAITI to 25383 to donate $5 to International Rescue Committee * Text HAITI to 45678 to donate $5 to the Salvation Army in Canada * Text YELE to 501501 to donation $5 to Yele * Text RELIEF to 30644 to get automatically connected to Catholic Relief Services and donate money with your credit card * Text HAITI to 864833 to donate $5 to The United Way * Text CERF to 90999 to donate $5 to The United Nations Foundation * Text DISASTER to 90999 to donate $10 to Compassion International
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| Everything You Need to Know About Windows Mobile 7 Posted: 18 Jan 2010 06:19 PM PST  MWC is a few weeks away - it starts on February 15 - and we're expecting to see a new version of Windows Mobile, version 7, to be launched with hardware soon to follow. We've heard some rumors about potential improvements over the current 6.x codebase, but a developer has told us that this new version is so distant from the old WinMo that it is almost unrecognizable. The worst part? It is completely non-backwards compatible, meaning all WinMo apps are about go extinct.
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| Hearst’s Social Shopping Site Kaboodle Gets A Realtime Makeover Posted: 18 Jan 2010 06:00 PM PST  Social shopping site Kaboodle, which was acquired by Hearst Interactive Group in 2007 for $30 million or so, is re-launching its site to upgrade its product-discovery engine that allows online shoppers to discover, search for, browse, and interact with the more than six million products. Kaboodle is a free social bookmarking service and search product that allows you to discover and share e-commerce content. With the re-launch and re-design of the site, Kaboodle is becoming less content centric and more realtime and product and people centric. The new version of the product-discovery engine allows online shoppers to search and discover products according to normal search terms, but also according to popularity amongst other shoppers in the Kaboodle community and consumers. The platform has upgraded search to be realtime and lets users see products that are most popular right now based on specific filters, such as items from a specific store, within a specific category, related items, and more. For example, a user can see what are the most popular items being searched on Nordstrom.com. Kaboodle’s bookmarklet functionality which allows users to add products from anywhere on the Web is staying the same, but the site has made it easier for retailers to incorporate the bookmarklet on their own sites. Manish Chandra, co-founder of Kaboodle, says that the site will continue to make realtime improvements in the coming year, hoping to become the go-to destination for product discovery and sharing. Chandra says the site has over 1 million registered users and is seeing 8 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore. Launched in 2005, Kaboodle faces competition from ThisNext, Like.com and Sugar’s ShopStyle.
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Research firm 
We all know the crisis in the venture capital community is starting to have real word effects, but for some it means totally changing how they run. Today 
This is a guest post from 
Lala will play a critical role in Apple’s music future, but not for the reasons cited above. Lala’s licenses with major labels are non-transferable, so they’re not usable for any new iTunes service. The 10 cent song rental model never gained traction and does not cover mobile devices thus is of little value to Apple. What is of value is the personal music storage service which was an often overlooked component of Lala’s business. As Apple did with the original iPods, Lala realized that any music solution must include music already possessed by the user. The Lala setup process provides software to store a personal music library online and then play it from any web browser alongside web songs they vend. This technology plus the engineering and management team is the true value of Lala to Apple.
Website monitoring startup 
San Diego based 
This morning, after many months of rampant speculation over the enigmatic Tablet, Apple officially 
If you were to ask an employee of any company for a list of their biggest gripes, there’s a good chance “Meetings” would be near the top of the list. There are plenty of reasons why people don’t like meetings, but there’s usually one overarching theme: they’re inefficient. From longwinded tangents to ill-prepared presenters, many meetings could probably be held in a fraction of the time if everyone just got their act together. Cue 
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