The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Founder Institute’s San Diego Outpost Graduates 12 Startups
- An Interview With the Cartoonists Who Draw Toothpaste for Dinner
- In The End, The Apple Anti-Porn Crusade Is About Image, Not Money Or ‘Offended Ladies’
- Hulu Investor Injects $50 Million Into Baidu’s Online Video Venture, Qiyi
- Ron Conway Raising $10 Million Angel Fund To Expand SV Angel
- FriendFeed Goes Down Hard. Both Remaining Users Pissed.
- Location Will Be This Year’s Twitter At SXSW
- How Does Compete Get Its Web Traffic Data? At Least One Way Sounds Very Sketchy.
- MySpace DMCAs The Leaked Product Document We Posted
- Google News Tries Sharing With Facebook, But Where’s The Buzz Button?
- I Will Honor The Embargo
- Memo to CEOs And Founders: Share The Love
- YC-Funded Crocodoc Makes It A Snap To Share And Mark Up Documents
- Stealthy Knowmore Loads Up On Talent To Silence The Social Noise Problem
- MobileCrunch Reviews the Fashion-Forward Motorola Devour
- Gmail Acting Up? It’s Not Just You
- When It Comes To iPhone Games, What Sells Is Action, Adventure, and Arcade
- Yammer Communities Open The Door To B2B Microblog Collaboration And Much More
- Trackur Launches Free Version Of Its Social Media Monitoring Tool
- Confirmed: Match.com Acquires Singlesnet
- CitySearch Is Building Out The Definitive Directory Of Local Business Tweets
| Founder Institute’s San Diego Outpost Graduates 12 Startups Posted: 26 Feb 2010 07:25 AM PST
The Fall 2009 San Diego semester has just graduated 12 startups. Mentors for the semester included Trip Adler, CEO, Scribd; Philip Kaplan, Cofounder, Blippy; and Peter Pham, CEO, BillShrink. The new startups include: CloudCanvas: an online image editing suite built in HTML 5 that was previewed in the TechCrunch50 Demo Pit. Live On Campus: an interactive publishing platform for college and university students to share campus information. XBand Technologies: a consumer electronics device for cyclists to do advanced performance, nutrition and hydration motoring. The Institute is currently taking applications for Founders in Paris, Singapore (http://www.founderinstitute.com/apply/11), Los Angeles, and Denver.      
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| An Interview With the Cartoonists Who Draw Toothpaste for Dinner Posted: 26 Feb 2010 06:34 AM PST  Idling in the CrunchGear chatroom the other day, John says to me, that's John Biggs, he says, "Why don't you interview that guy from Toothpaste for Dinner?" I says to John "Why?" and John says "He seems like a nice guy." Who am I to argue with John? Plus, the guy from Toothpaste for Dinner lives in Columbus, which is where I live, so I sent the guy an email. We had a little back and forth, and he introduced me to his wife, Natalie Dee, so I interviewed her, too. They are, in fact, nice people, and I really enjoyed interviewing them. I hope you enjoy reading my interview.
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| In The End, The Apple Anti-Porn Crusade Is About Image, Not Money Or ‘Offended Ladies’ Posted: 26 Feb 2010 06:12 AM PST  Remember that whole porn crackdown that nobody cares about anymore? Wonder why it happened? It wasn't the money. It wasn't hypocritical. It wasn't about defending the rights of women to browse the app store unflustered. It was about image. Here's Gruber's cogent and true argument: I think what Apple was getting squeamish about wasn't the sexy apps themselves, but the cheesiness that the sexy apps (and their prominence in best selling lists) was bestowing upon the general feel and vibe of the App Store. One thing I wasn't aware of before the recent crackdown was the degree to which these apps were seeping into various non-entertainment categories. E.g., like half the "new" apps in the "productivity" category featured imagery of large-breasted bikini-clad women.These apps were shut down temporarily. They will be back, and the ban wasn't about not offending our sainted mothers. It was about making a retail experience that people want to visit and, like Chef Ramsay shutting down Casa Roma rather than serve the rest of the night's meals in a haphazard, sloppy way, Apple decided to shut things down and make their decisions. This, in turn, forces Apple management to make a decision. 
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| Hulu Investor Injects $50 Million Into Baidu’s Online Video Venture, Qiyi Posted: 26 Feb 2010 03:21 AM PST
The news comes roughly 7 weeks after Baidu confirmed plans to established a new independent company to provide licensed, advertising-supported online video content to Chinese Internet users. Although it isn’t yet explicitly confirming that the name of the new company will be Qiyi in the press release about the investment, Baidu says it has registered the domain name qiyi.com for the venture. Reuters broke the news about a possible forthcoming investment by Providence Equity Partners in the new venture on January 5, citing local news sources who reported that the new joint venture company had received about $60 million in private equity funds, with Baidu investing about $10 million into the firm. If those reports were accurate, that means Qiyi only has Baidu and Providence as its backers for now. Baidu has also said that it will continue to maintain majority ownership in Qiyi. According to eMarketer, China will have 518 million Internet users in 2010. The size of the country’s online video market was approximately 162 million yuan ($23.73 million) in Q3 2009, according to data from research firm Analysys International, and analysts expect sales to triple in the coming years. Update: more context on the space is available here (via comments). Baidu stresses that it will work with regulators to ensure the “lawful distribution” of professionally produced media and entertainment content on the Internet. From the About page:
It’s just like Hulu, only with governmental censorship! (Via press release)      
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| Ron Conway Raising $10 Million Angel Fund To Expand SV Angel Posted: 26 Feb 2010 02:16 AM PST
Conway, who was called the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” in a book by Gary Rivlin, is considered by many to be the most important angel investor in technology. He sees most new startups before anyone else, and an investment by his firm is a serious milestone. His deep ties to most top tier venture capital firms also ensure quick introductions and a long look when the time comes to raise a second and larger round of capital. He was one of the first investors in Google, and has, he says, invested in hundreds of startups over the last twenty years. His current investments include Facebook, Twitter, Digg and just about every other startup of note you’ve heard about. In other words, he isn’t going to have any trouble finding takers for this $10 million fund. Until mid-2009 Conway made most of his investments through Baseline Ventures, a fund run by Steve Anderson. Conway moved to direct investing as he began to focus his time on real-time startups, which he is still bullish on. In June 2009, he promised 40-50 new investments over the following 18 months. Since that time, he’s averaged about 4 investments per month, so he’s well on track to keep that promise.      
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| FriendFeed Goes Down Hard. Both Remaining Users Pissed. Posted: 25 Feb 2010 10:29 PM PST
That means that of all the tens of millions of people around the world on Twitter, a full 50 of them care enough to tweet when FriendFeed is down. It’s hard to imagine any other service that got to the size FriendFeed did (which, granted, wasn’t huge), only getting 50 tweets if it goes down. It’s sad, really. FriendFeed was easily one of my favorite services (so much so that I’m still waiting for another service to replace it). But since the acquisition by Facebook, it has been a ghost town. And now, with its 500 Internal Server Error, it’s really a ghost town. The impressive team behind FriendFeed (most are still with Facebook now) have indicated they wouldn’t let the service wither, but that seems to be exactly what is happening. If it comes back up, I wonder how many of these remaining few dozen passionate FriendFeed users that are tweeting will even notice. Maybe they’ll just give up too. Update: FriendFeed is still down over an hour later. Their official Twitter account blames a “major power outage.”      
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| Location Will Be This Year’s Twitter At SXSW Posted: 25 Feb 2010 10:10 PM PST
Three years ago, Twitter famously was the talk of the conference (it won the web award that year). While sure, it didn’t explode into mainstream popularity until sometime later, the writing was on the wall for the early-adopters who started using it there or shortly thereafter. Two years ago, it was arguably Twitter again that was the must-use service throughout the conference as it continued to mature. But last year saw some new entries rise. Both Foursquare and Gowalla launched at the conference, with Foursquare gaining much of the momentum coming out of the conference (as some of us predicted). And this year, I suspect it will be largely an extension of that, with location services in general being the talk of the show. Based on what I’ve been hearing, basically at the major players in the location-based space have big things planned for this year’s SXSW. Foursquare hopes to have a new, completely overhauled version of its iPhone app ready for the event this year. They are also likely to have a huge batch of new badges for people to collect throughout the week. Meanwhile, Gowalla has a large event of its own, complete with special VIP access if you use the service throughout the conference. The SXSW conference is also highlighting the Austin-based Gowalla as a key tool on its own pages. A newer startup, Plancast (started by TechCrunch alum Mark Hendrickson — think “Foursquare For The Future“), has already put together a helpful unofficial SXSW guide surrounding events during the conference (and actually events for those who aren’t attending too). They also hope to have their iPhone app ready in time for the conference. Meanwhile, both Twitter’s and SimpleGeo’s plans are still largely unknown at this point, but both are planning big things, we hear. Twitter could use the event to launch its ad platform, and CEO Evan Williams is giving the keynote on Monday. And then, of course, there is Facebook. While they’re sniffing around Loopt right now, could they use the conference to talk a bit more about their location plans? If all these other services start getting a ton of buzz during the conference, they might have to. Of course, all of this is assuming that AT&T supplies any service whatsoever this year. Last year, the network was completely overloaded until the final two days after the telecom giant scrambled to up their bandwidth (and even then it was only marginally better). They promised that failure would never happen again (people in San Francisco in New York City may have something to say about that), so we’ll see this year. If AT&T fails again, it could really hurt a lot of these location-based services, many of which are heavily predicated around the iPhone. Otherwise, this is going to be location’s year at SXSW.      
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| How Does Compete Get Its Web Traffic Data? At Least One Way Sounds Very Sketchy. Posted: 25 Feb 2010 05:18 PM PST
We were recently pointed to this post from last month by Ben Edelman, a Harvard privacy advocate. In it, he details the data the Upromise toolbar collects and sends out. This toolbar is used by college students looking for savings on various items across the web, and can be quite useful. But until a few weeks ago, it appears they were also sending web browsing (and more personal) data to Compete without anyone’s knowledge. Writes Edelman:
He continues:
Shortly after Edelman’s post (and a follow-up PCMag.com post), Upromise changed their privacy policy to alert their users that this data is being sent out. But the company declined to state how long the issue had been going on. Privacy implications aside, it’s interesting that this is one of the ways Compete was gathering data. And it would be good to know where else they get it from. On their site, they only vaguely note that they have “developed a unique methodology created by experts in the fields of mathematics, statistics and the data sciences to aggregate, transform, enhance and normalize data in order to estimate U.S. Internet traffic.” They also claim to have over two million members — but apparently, at least some of them (such as the Upromise toolbar users), don’t know they’re members. I’ve sent a message to Compete asking them what other means (other toolbars, etc) they use to gather their data. In light of this Upromise fiasco, it seems wise that they should disclose that kind of information. I’ll update if and when I hear back.      
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| MySpace DMCAs The Leaked Product Document We Posted Posted: 25 Feb 2010 05:02 PM PST
So we’re putting it on our own servers. You can download it in all its glory here. If you want to fight this, MySpace, you have to come through our lawyers. Now I’m all riled up.
     
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| Google News Tries Sharing With Facebook, But Where’s The Buzz Button? Posted: 25 Feb 2010 03:27 PM PST
Google News is testing out a new design, as I reported earlier this month. It includes trending topics on the left and new personalization options. But today someone in the bucket test noticed something different. The sharing options changed. Each story can be shared via email, Google Reader, or Facebook. Most people won’t see this. It is just in a limited test. But it does suggest that Google is starting to seriously think about ways to drive more sharing of content across the Web. But why push content to Facebook and not to Twitter? And for that matter where is the Google Buzz button? Of course, sharing to Google Reader is the same as sharing to Buzz (that’s how sharing works on Buzz), but Google should push the Buzz brand here if this feature ever becomes widespread. Google Reader itself has long had many sharing options, including the ability to send posts to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Blogger, and StumbleUpon. It’s about time Google News got better sharing options as well. Currently, the only sharing option is via email. The fact that Google is testing with Facebook is also interesting, and shows a growing embrace of its social rival. Some Facebook updates are now appearing in Google’s realtime search results. In which Google product will Facebook turn up next? (Hat tip to @JoeHobot).
     
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| Posted: 25 Feb 2010 03:03 PM PST
First, the job description. Even a decade ago everyone thought PR was just about the worst job around. Forbes did a roundup called “Five Crappiest Tech Jobs,” and “PR account executive for a dot com startup” was on the list. Other winners included “porn sifter for filtering company” and “packer for dogdoo.com” (a site that actually sold dog excrement online):
Second, this video (in fact created by TechCrunch Europe Contributing Editor Steve O’Hear) which recreates a conversation between a PR professional and a blogger or journalists. We have this same conversation oh, five or more times per day:
Transcript: PR Pro: Hi I'm just checking you got the email I sent. Blogger: When did you send it? PR Pro: Five minutes ago. Blogger: Oh. I get a lot of email. PR Pro: Shall I send it again? Blogger: No. What did it say? PR Pro: I'd love to tell you, but you'll have to agree to the embargo first. Blogger: Ok whatever, I agree, now tell me more. PR Pro: Can you email back first saying you agree to the embargo? Blogger: I get a lot of email. PR Pro: Please. Blogger: Look, I honor the fucking embargo. Now tell me more. PR Pro: A Silicon Valley based startup is going to announce a new revolutionary software as a service for social media companies targeting B2B. It will change the way social media marketing is done forever. Are you interested in a briefing with the company's CEO. Blogger: No, I don't cover B2B. PR Pro: But I thought you wrote about social media. Blogger: I do, but not B2B. PR Pro: But it is revolutionary. Blogger: So are all the others. PR Pro: Really? Blogger: Yes. Look, when every new social media service is revolutionary it is no longer news. PR Pro: I didn't know that, but we are working on an API. Blogger: I'm not interested. PR Pro: Oh. Blogger: Sorry. PR Pro: Can I still email you the details? Blogger: If you must. PR Pro: And you'll honor the embargo? Blogger: Yes, I'll honor the embargo. In fact I'll make you a better offer. PR Pro: Oh. Blogger: I will honor the embargo for the rest of my working life. As I have no intention of writing about your new revolutionary software as a service for social media companies that will change the way social media marketing is done forever. So, yes, I'll honor the fucking embargo. PR Pro: I can't thank you enough. Blogger: It's nothing. Really. Our past rants: The PR Roadblock On The Road To Blissful Blogging      
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| Memo to CEOs And Founders: Share The Love Posted: 25 Feb 2010 02:09 PM PST
When we split the atom, Einstein remarked that everything changed but our way of thinking. You could make the same argument about acquisitions and option pools. As Mark Suster recently noted, employees will never see a big payday at most startups unless the company shoots for the moon. This is probably why investors' case for a company to sell early focuses exclusively on the founder: in most early-stage acquisitions, the liquidation preferences and deal-sweeteners only work for investors and founders. Back when some companies sold at $50 million and others went public at $250 million, we could all agree that this was just how the cookie crumbled. But now that we live in a world where early-stage acquisitions are the only outcome to which most startups aspire, we have to re-allocate this smaller cookie. The elephant in the room is that that founders and CEOs take almost all of it for themselves. I've looked at three or four deals recently as an adviser; in every case, the founder or CEO was taking more than half the company for himself, and leaving 10% for everyone else. Why aren't we surprised when three months later that company can't hire enough engineers? Even when the company succeeds, the big-shot with the big payday may regret it. The difference between $10 million and $20 million in practical terms — whom you can date, where you can go, what you drive — is zero. But if you give an extra $10 million to the folks who fought shoulder to shoulder with you, everyone will feel better about what you accomplished together. You want your startup to end like Trading Places, with Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd and their butler sipping drinks on the beach. This has always been true, but now that more startups are being bought, it has become less common. Consider the proceeds of a $50-million acquisition for a 100-person company that has raised $14 million with a typical liquidation preference:
Now consider what would happen if the same company raises another $10 million, expands the employee option pool to hire more executives and to support 300 people. It is worth $250 million at the time of a public offering.
The point is not that this is a better outcome for all. Any fool would take the higher price if he knew he could get it, but you don't know when or whether you ever will. The point is that employees at least stand a chance at a nice gain when a company is built to last, whereas founders benefit disproportionately from a quick flip. So in a world of more quick flips, we need to increase the size of options pools, eliminate liquidation preferences – which just get picked up in subsequent rounds of financing by new investors, who screw the old ones — and provide better acceleration for everyone. Otherwise, nobody will want to work for a startup. But the reverse is happening. VCs want their pound of flesh, and entrepreneurs do too. In fact, the 20% of company ownership that was once considered the standard allocation for executives and other employees is now more likely to be at 10%. If we're all a little less greedy now, we'll build bigger companies later and everyone will make more money, and feel better about it too.      
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| YC-Funded Crocodoc Makes It A Snap To Share And Mark Up Documents Posted: 25 Feb 2010 02:05 PM PST
Crocodoc is an extremely straightforward service, and you don’t even need to sign up for an account to use it — just upload a document, and a second later you’ll be in the Crocodoc editor. Markup tools include Sticky Notes, a highligher, text strikeout, and the ability to leave your own comments (a ‘pen’ tool is on the way). Editing a document should be very familiar to anyone who has used Adobe Acrobat or Apple’s Preview. If you’d like to try marking up a sample document, you can use this demo. By default, the service assigns each uploaded a document a unique, “unguessable” URL, which you can use to share the document with friends, who can mark it up and add their own comments. But there’s one catch to the free version of the service: if you lose the document URL, that marked up document is lost for good (remember, you didn’t create an account to sign up). Fortunately Crocodoc also offers a ‘Pro’ version, which lets you create an account that includes an archive of your previously uploaded documents. It also allows you to password protect your uploaded docs (as opposed to just relying on the hard-to-guess URL for security), and to use SSL encryption. Pro Accounts cost $8/month or $36/year. And for companies that are wary of uploading sensitive files, Crocodoc offers intranet deployments, which means that these customers can run it inside their firewalls on their own servers. My only gripe about Crocodoc is the limited number of collaboration options — you can share your documents with as many people as you want, but everyone will be editing the same one, which seems like it would get messy fast. This will be fixed in the near future, when Crocodoc starts allowing you to review edits on a per-user basis. Crocodoc’s still quite basic, but that might be exactly what its customers are looking for. And they may well be willing to spend $36 a year if it means they’ll have to print out fewer stacks of paper.      
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| Stealthy Knowmore Loads Up On Talent To Silence The Social Noise Problem Posted: 25 Feb 2010 01:03 PM PST
Knowmore, is a New York City-based startup founded by Julian Gutman (ex-Google) and Joseph West (ex-Akamai). They’ve already assembled a team that includes Jeremie Miller, the inventor of XMPP/Jabber, Wilson Bilkovich one of the core developers of Rubinius (a Ruby implementation), and Wes Augur, a former principal R&D engineer at Digg. It’s a wide range of talent across a bunch of different fields. The total team is already up to 20 people, according to their jobs page. Talent aside, what sounds interesting about Knowmore is their approach to the social noise problem. Rather than focusing on complex technologies that only seems to make social data more complicated (“why is this being shown,” etc…), Knowmore is building its product around user experience and human-centric design. The person who helped steer the early design of the product itself was Chad Pugh, the visual designer of Vimeo (though he’s not full time with the team). As you can see on their splash page, Knowmore’s slogan is the “dashboard for the social web.” As you might expect, the idea is to port in your data from a variety of social networks, and let Knowmore serve it up to you in a way that cuts through the noise. As Mike wrote earlier this month, “social today feels like search a decade ago: lots of noise and lots of spam.” That’s exactly the problem Knowmore is going after. They believe Facebook and Twitter cannot tackle these problems because they are communication pipes at their core. Knowmore is aiming to be a consumption platform instead. So will it work? That’s impossible to know without seeing the product in action (the tentative launch date is Q2 2010). But the pedigree of the talent behind this startup and a simple execution of the core idea certainly makes it one worth watching.
     
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| MobileCrunch Reviews the Fashion-Forward Motorola Devour Posted: 25 Feb 2010 12:44 PM PST  Short Version: Hey ladies! Your Droid is here. The Motorola Devour (it's actually DEVOUR but I refuse to shout at you) is a social media Android phone with enough style to beat down a million Droids. But is it just one more brick in the Android wall? 
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| Gmail Acting Up? It’s Not Just You Posted: 25 Feb 2010 12:34 PM PST
Update: supposed to be all fine now, no further explanation given. At 11:34 PM, Google posted an update, saying that Google Mail service had been restored for some users, and that it expected a resolution for all users “within the next 4 hours” (estimate). This is the first status update that was posted:
And the second:
It’s rare that Google speaks of a significant number of users when problems arise – usually they say a ’small subset’ – but a Twitter search actually shows a surprisingly low number of tweets about any issues people are having with their Gmail accounts. We should note this isn’t the first time Google has had issues with Gmail, and just yesterday Google App Engine went down for an extended period of time. Are you noticing anything out of the ordinary with the popular cloud service?      
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| When It Comes To iPhone Games, What Sells Is Action, Adventure, and Arcade Posted: 25 Feb 2010 11:42 AM PST
At recent the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, mobile app analytics startup Distimo gave a presentation with some other interesting comparisons, such the relative size of the iPhone App Store (150,000 total apps at the time) compared to the Android Market (20,000) and Blackberry (5,000) others. It showed that in January alone, the Apple App store grew by 13,865 apps versus 3,005 new Android apps, 734 new Nokia Ovia apps, and 501 new Blackberry apps. Android was the fastest growing App store and the Android market has more free apps (57 percent) than Apple (25%) or any other mobile app store (full slide deck embedded below).
By far the most popular category in the iPhone app store is games. Distimo reported that 58 percent of all apps in the App Store are games. And in a new report that just came out today (download it here), Distimo breaks down the game apps further by price, category, and which ones sell the most.
While the biggest category is Puzzles (15 percent), Action and Arcade both come in second with 11 percent each. The average price of a paid game in Apple’s App Store is $2.24, much cheaper than Blackberry games ($4.60) or Windows Mobile games ($4.90), and a little bit above Android games (2.08). Breaking down further by category in the Apple App store, the most expensive games are in the Role Playing category, with an average price of $7.96. Action and Arcade games are cheaper with average prices of $1.68 and $1.39 respectively. Adventure games are in the middle with an average price of $4.43. But when you look the top grossing games, 22 percent are in the Action category, 12 percent are in Arcade, and 9 percent are Adventure. Those are the top three grossing categories. Only 5 percent of the top grossing games are role playing games. (Click on charts at right to enlarge).
So the top-grossing games are not necessarily the ones with the highest price points, especially as game developers switch to free or 99-cent games with in-app purchases. According to Distimo, Tap Tap Revenge 3, which became free and upsells songs via in-app purchases grossed more in January than the FIFA 2010 soccer game, which sells for $6.99. Quality games can still command higher prices, but getting players to pay more over time seems to be the strategy many top mobile game developers are pursuing.      
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| Yammer Communities Open The Door To B2B Microblog Collaboration And Much More Posted: 25 Feb 2010 11:10 AM PST
This is a big move for the company. On a conference call this morning, Yammer CEO David Sacks said that one of the problems with Yammer so far has been that communication on the service has been restricted to internal use within a company. The issue many people ran into was that they’d want to collaborate with their clients or business partners as well, but didn’t have a way to do that without inviting them to their company’s internal network (which often wasn’t an option). Now they’ll be able to build networks around each of their partnerships, upcoming events, and clients, while still keeping their internal networks private. Communities appear to function a lot like Yammer’s existing Groups, but now they can include people who aren’t in your company network. The site now features a ‘Communities’ tab at the top of the screen, which allows users to jump between a number of linked networks. There’s also a new tab called ‘Networks’ that allows you to see how many unread messages are available in each of the networks you’re linked to. Communities will include the same administration tools as company networks (and will offer more control than Groups do). Yammer Communities will follow Yammer’s pricing model — it’s free to use, with premium pricing for more advanced features. Sacks says that the company’s iPhone application will support Communities from day one, as will the AIR-based Yammer desktop client. We’ve been using Yammer internally at TechCrunch since it launched (and won) TechCrunch50 2008, and have found it to be a great way to coordinate our team.
     
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| Trackur Launches Free Version Of Its Social Media Monitoring Tool Posted: 25 Feb 2010 10:28 AM PST
Today, the fledgling company is introducing an entirely gratis version of the Web-based software suite, giving marketers and small business owners a compelling reason to want to check it out and see why basic Google Alerts simply may not be cutting it anymore. When you enter a keyword in Trackur’s search system, the service will look for mentions in both ‘mainstream’ and social media, tweets, videos, images, tags and so on. You’ll get a nice overview of where that keyword – which would generally be a company, brand or product name – has been mentioned along with some graphs tracking such mentions over time. You can save a search, which means Trackur will run it automatically every 30 minutes and notify you of new mentions across all of the media it tracks. With any of the paid versions of Trackur, you can save multiple search keywords to your personal dashboard, but the free version will only allow you to do that for one. For a lot of small business owners or marketers, that will actually be sufficient, although the startup evidently hopes they’ll be tempted to pay for an upgrade at some point. Alternatives to Trackur are plenty and include services offered by companies like Radian6, Visible Technologies and Attentio. Trackur is self-funded by Beal, who says he currently serves about 15,000+ users, a mixture of people benefiting from free trials and those who are effectively paying for the product. Beal declined to break down those numbers, but says his 3-person startup, which was founded early 2008, has been operating profitably since day one. He also told me he’s been approached by venture capitalists in the past who’ve offered to invest, but that he told most of them that he wouldn’t even know what to do with $100,000 if it were given to him. God, I love bootstrapped ventures.
     
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| Confirmed: Match.com Acquires Singlesnet Posted: 25 Feb 2010 09:48 AM PST
We called it. IAC’s Match.com is acquiring fellow dating site Singlesnet. We originally reported on the deal last week. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Match.com said the acquisition is more of a “value acquisition than a strategic one” and Singlesnet will continue to be run as an independent business. Singlesnet’s traffic, says Match,com, is declining but could present new monetization opportunities for “Match.com’s collective portfolio of domestic online dating brands.” Adrian Ong, who joined Match.com from Soulmates Technology, will lead Singlesnet. The acquisition isn’t surprising. Match is in the habit of buying up potential competitors. The dating giant scooped up highly-targeted dating site network People Media last year for a whopping $80 million. Although traffic is declining, Singlesnet’s traffic is fairly significant for a dating site that doesn’t have the resources of IAC-backed Match. According to comScore stats for January, Singlesnet saw 3 million unique visitors worldwide, which was half of Match.com’s 6.1 million unique visitors for the same period.      
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| CitySearch Is Building Out The Definitive Directory Of Local Business Tweets Posted: 25 Feb 2010 09:33 AM PST
Twitter is becoming a serious marketing vehicle for local businesses. Everyone from your local baker to your favorite restaurant is getting on Twitter to talk to customers and draw in new ones. Just last weekend when I was driving to Vermont with my family, I sent out a Tweet asking for a good place to eat lunch. I got more than five responses, including one from a local innkeeper couple recommending two spots in town (not owned by them). That was in Brattleboro, Vermont. But that was so random. How do you even find out which of your favorite local businesses have Twitter accounts or what their Twitter handles are? Well, CitySearch is doing it for you. The local business guide is starting to build out a definitive directory of Twitter accounts and Tweets about local restaurants, hotels, spas and stores. It is starting small, with about 5,000 business listings currently tied to their Twitter accounts (which businesses can add themselves when they claim their CitySearch page), but its aim is to add Tweets by and about any of the 15 million businesses in its listings. Every page on CitySerach now prominently highlights a Twitter Buzz widget on the upper right hand corner of the page showing recent Tweets about businesses in your city. If the business has a known Twitter handle, recent Tweets with their @handle (their Twitter name) will show up above the user reviews. These include both Tweets from the business and Tweets that mention the business. For instance, apparently people love @artichokepizza and the “calzones are off the chain too!” Chelsea Piers also gets a lot of Tweets. “It really lowers the threshold for reviews,” CitySearch senior VP Kara Nortman tells me. It also makes the reviews more immediate, and therefore relevant. I’d much rather know how a chef’s Mahi-Mahi is going over with diners today than last week when a different chef might have ben on duty. Since it started rolling out the local Tweets a couple of weeks ago, engagement metrics are noticeably higher across the site: session durations are up 10 percent, pageviews per visit are up 7 percent, and exit rates are down about 3 percent.
In addition to being able to look up businesses by name, CitySearch has Twitter directories of local businesses by city. So far there are only 820 in New York City and 281 in San Francisco , but CitySearch is just getting going. Any business with a Twitter account can add their account to their CitySearch page. In fact, they can sign up for a Twitter account while they are at it right from within CitySearch and use CitySearch as a Twitter client. Also, right now CitySearch is only showing Tweets that explicitly mention the @handle a business uses on Twitter. Over the next few weeks, CitySearch will start to surface Tweets that mention the business whether or not the @handle is used. So those 5,000 listings should expand quickly. Nortman says that the Twitter business directory was inspired by CrunchBase, our own directory of startups, people, and venture capital firms. She wants it to become the definitive directory of Twitter business accounts. CitySearch is in a unique position to build this because it already has millions of local businesses in its database. All it needs to do is associate Twitter accounts and related Tweets to each business, and it can slice and dice them by city, neighborhood, or type of business. An update of its iPhone app which is making its way through the App Store approval process right now will double as a Twitter client and let you Tweet out your reviews from the app. It will even have a social tab showing all the Tweets about a business (see leaked screenshot at right). Sentiment analysis is also on its way, which will let consumers see which restaurants and stores are trending with positive or negative vibes lately. Once the Twitter directory is built out, it and the resulting Tweet stream will become available to developers through its new CityGrid APIs. It could also make it easy for consumers to create Twitter lists of their favorite local shops and restaurants, or curate their own lists and maybe even charge on a clickthrough basis. But maybe it should wait for Twitter to define its advertising rules before committing to any one model.
     
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