The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- OneRiot Rolls Out Realtime Ad Unit That Refreshes To Match Trending Topics
- Google’s Need For Speed Is About Making You Search More
- New Media Infrastructure Company Ankeena Networks Raises $16 Million
- Interview: Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie on Silverlight and Windows Phone
- SeeWhy Aims To Optimize Website Conversions Through Email, Social Media
- CloudCrowd Takes On CrowdFlower To Outsource Labor To The Cloud
- Looks Like 123people Has Been Acquired By France’s Yellow Pages
- DIY Social Network Platform GROU.PS Now Syncs With Yahoo Groups
- Siri Hires Mobile Expert Gummi Hafsteinsson Away From Google
- Those Facebook QR Codes Are Part Of Their Location Plans
- Google May Slay Your First Born Child, According To This Video
- Yahoo Launches Plaxo Feature Eight Years Later, And It’s Still A Good Idea
- Viacom Seems To Be Misrepresenting YouTube Founder’s Call To “Steal It!”
- An Experiment: Putting The Audience On Stage (For Real) At TechCrunch Disrupt
- Notifo Is A Simple Mobile Notifications Platform For Anything
- Plastic Jungle Raises $7.4 Million for Gift Card Marketplace
- More News about Omidyar’s Peer News
- YC-Funded Data Marketplace Is An Amazon For Structured Information
- Google Will Soon Offer A Way For Users To Opt-Out Of Google Analytics Tracking
- Google Denied “Nexus One” Trademark
- Undisputed Fiction Or Viacom’s Smoking Gun? Early Emails Between YouTube’s Founders
- August Capital Bets Big On Blippy
- With A New Widget, Google Further Turns Android Phones Into Buzz Machines
- Labotec Raises Funding For Crowd-Sourced Mobile App Development Venture
- Google Calendar’s Smart Rescheduler Searches For The Best Meeting Times
| OneRiot Rolls Out Realtime Ad Unit That Refreshes To Match Trending Topics Posted: 19 Mar 2010 08:55 AM PDT
Last year, OneRiot ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. The search engine also launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, that has since been integrated into the search engine’s API. Today, the realtime search startup is improving upon its advertising product by offering Trending Ad unit that automatically updates in realtime corresponding to the the most popular trending topics at the time. The ability to update in realtime allows OneRiot to show advertiser content that is relevant to trending topics as they emerge on networks like Twitter, Facebook and the web. The ads are available via standard-size IAB Ad Units and is enabled by OneRiot's realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm. And previously, OneRiot's "Trending Ads" were available only via OneRiot's API. This meant that developers had to integrate the raw feed into their applications, and create their own UI. The new ad unit allows any website currently monetizing with standard static ad units to display RiotWise Trending Ads. In order to implement he new ad unit, publishers need to integrate Trending Ad Units in the same way they would call standard ad units. The ads will then link to realtime and relevant content from OneRiot's network of media partners. One Riot claims that the realtime relevance of the ads leads to click through rates at four times the average rates. Currently OneRiot's trending ads have been used on Twitter apps (ÜberTwitter) and desktop clients (Digsby). OneRiot shares revenue with the application developer. As we’ve written in the past, OneRiot runs the risk of surfacing irrelevant or spammy content with realtime ads, especially is the ads are refreshing constantly to match trending topics. But as a realtime search engine, OneRiot has invested heavily in spam prevention and is constantly sorting through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn't. Regardless, it seems like a viable monetization tool for developers. The startup, which just raised $7 million in funding, has been steadily innovating its product and is gathering up partners quickly. The realtime stream ramped up this year with all the big players adding functionality to their search offerings and OneRiot was smart to get in the game early.      
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| Google’s Need For Speed Is About Making You Search More Posted: 19 Mar 2010 08:52 AM PDT
Google’s obsession with speed is well-documented. One of the primary design principles behind its search engine is to return results as fast as possible and strip away anything extra. But its need for speed goes well beyond search. All of Google’s apps are optimized for speed (well, except Gmail lately, but they promise to fix that). The Chrome browser is extremely fast, and the upcoming Chrome OS is also expected to make Web browsing and other computing tasks zippier. It almost doesn’t matter if Google’s Chrome browser and OS gain significant market share or not, as long as they push other browsers and operating systems to keep up in the speed race. Google’s need for speed boils down to one very simple thing: money. It realized long ago that every millisecond improvement in pageload times on its search engine resulted in more searches, and thus more search ads served and clicked on. The opposite is also true. Google once did a study showing that delays of 100 to 400 millisecond in showing search results translated into up to 0.6 percent searches. Multiply that across the billions of searches done on Google and it starts to add up to real money, perhaps tens of millions of dollars per quarter. Google can keep trying to make search faster because that is under its control. But what about the rest of the Web? The faster pages load, the more Web pages people will visit overall (this is why broadband adoption is the single biggest driver of Internet traffic and e-commerce). And it stands to reason that the more Web pages you visit, the more searches you will perform in any given day. Because searches are driven by the other things you do on the Web. You go look for information, surf around, and then go back to search when you want to find something new (at least Google hopes you do). By helping to speed up the Web, Google can speed up that information loop so that instead of waiting for Web pages to load you can get what you need and start another search instead. No wonder Google tries to do everything it can to make the Web faster. For instance, it is supporting emerging standards such as HTML5 and SPDY, and sharing its best practices and speed-monitoring tools with developers. It is also baking the PuSH protocol into Google Reader and other apps. In doing so, Google is helping to deliver news feeds faster (PuSH, aka Pubsubhubbub, was created by two Google engineers, of course, and released as an open-source project). The list goes on and on. It is all about trying to get people to achieve a “flow state” where they are just clicking from one link to the next and it all happens instantaneously. In order for humans not to notice electronic delays, new information needs to appear in a matter of milliseconds. Get the whole Web humming like that and we may never leave our monitors. Photo credit: Flickr/ Ana Patricia Almelda      
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| New Media Infrastructure Company Ankeena Networks Raises $16 Million Posted: 19 Mar 2010 08:00 AM PDT
No word about who backed the company with this third round of financing, but Ankeena Networks was listed by one of its main business partners, Juniper Networks as one of their investments when they announced their $50 million fund recently, so that’s one name at least. Ankeena had previously raised $15.2 million from Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures, so this brings its total to a healthy $31.2 million. Ankeena Networks' flagship product is a content delivery platform dubbed Media Flow Director, which enables mobile operators and other service providers to take advantage of rising consumer demand for mobile content and other rich media content across mobile devices, PCs and televisions. MFD aims to ensure users receive a smooth viewing experience without buffering or stuttering despite of varying network conditions, regardless of the viewing device, over mobile as well as wire-line broadband networks. Ankeena does this by dynamically detecting the available bandwidth and varying the delivery bit-rate. Ankeena Networks was born under another name, Nokeena, back in 2008. The company was co-founded by CEO Rajan Raghavan, chief strategy and technology officer Prabakar Sundarrajan, chief strategy and technology officer, VP of Engineering Kumar Narayanan and Jaspal Kohli, chief architect, along with Deepak Srinivasan, VP of Business Development. Collectively, this team brings leadership expertise from companies like Akamai/Speedera, Cisco, Citrix/NetScaler, Exodus Communications, HP, IBM, InSilicon/Virtual Chips, Intel, Level 3 Communications, Mirapoint and Yahoo. One to watch closely.      
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| Interview: Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie on Silverlight and Windows Phone Posted: 19 Mar 2010 07:40 AM PDT  This year's MIX 2010 was led by Scott Guthrie, who has emerged from Microsoft's rank and file to own just about everything developer-related. Where last year's MIX and PDC conferences were spearheaded by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, Guthrie's keynote appearances focused on the progress Silverlight has made in driving the company's 3 Screens and the Cloud approach to the disruptions going on in mobile, television, and the Web OS desktop. I spoke with Scott after his opening day keynote in Las Vegas: 
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| SeeWhy Aims To Optimize Website Conversions Through Email, Social Media Posted: 19 Mar 2010 06:42 AM PDT
The company claims that their solution can recover up to 50 percent of website abandoners (i.e. people who start but never complete a sign-up or payment process) by triggering automated campaigns using email and social media. The company fences with study results that highlight the importance of real-time follow up with website abandoners, citing research from MIT that says 90 percent of e-commerce leads go cold within the first hour. SeeWhy CEO Scott G. Silk compares such leads with fine wine, stating that unlike the latter e-commerce leads don’t get better with age. Cute. SeeWhy’s new product builds upon the functionalities of its predecessor, Abandonment Tracker Pro, which we wrote about earlier. With added support for Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, Conversion Manager is able to track individual visitors' behavior on e-commerce and other websites and trigger automated, real-time messages to shopping cart, online form, and other abandoners by email and social media the moment abandoners leave the site. Conversion Manager is available now at an annual fee of $15,000. SeeWhy has so far raised $6.5 million in venture capital: $4.5 million in May 2009 and another $2 million from the same investors in December 2009. SeeWhy’s CrunchBase profile doesn’t list any competitors and a Web search doesn’t immediately turn up potential rivals – if you know alternative services feel free to share their names in comments.      
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| CloudCrowd Takes On CrowdFlower To Outsource Labor To The Cloud Posted: 19 Mar 2010 05:30 AM PDT
Once a client assigns a task to CloudCrowd, the company will distribute tasks its work force of more than 100,000 workers. With each task completed, a worker earn a credibility rating that determines the types of tasks they are offered. Workers who don’t have a rating yet are assigned basic tasks until they develop a reputation. Workers are able to see how much each separate task pays, and earnings are distributed through PayPal. Tasks range from content moderation, internet research, audio and video transcription to data entry. Since the company’s launch a few months ago, CloudCrowd has completed over 500,000 tasks for a variety of clients, including USC and RentCycle. As I wrote above CloudCrowd will face competition from CrowdFlower, but it seems that the model is attracting the attention of businesses to perform mundane tasks, so there should be room fr several players in the space.      
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| Looks Like 123people Has Been Acquired By France’s Yellow Pages Posted: 19 Mar 2010 05:17 AM PDT  According to investir.fi and various other sources, the world's leading people search engine 123people, which strives from Austria, has been acquired by the leading french yellow pages company PagesJaunes. The company was incubated by i5invest and received VC money from Austrian Gamma Capital Partners. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. 
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| DIY Social Network Platform GROU.PS Now Syncs With Yahoo Groups Posted: 19 Mar 2010 05:01 AM PDT
GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration has unveiled a synchronization tool that allows the group administrators on Yahoo Groups to sync with GROU.PS. So Yahoo Groups admins can incorporate functionality such as, location-based services and chat, into their platforms from GROU.PS. The new tool doesn’t require the Yahoo Group owners to shut down their existing group. They can still continue using their email list. Instead, a GROU.PS group surrounds their old Yahoo Group list and will add additional functionality such as collaboration, deep customization tools and integration with Facebook. GROU.PS will essentially create a whole new social network tailored particularly to that specific list, and augments its functionality with typical social networking features that can be found on any GROU.PS group. And GROU.PS has amped up its offering for publishers by launching Elastic Modules, which gives publishers the ability to change the way the data is displayed to their visitors. To date, the highest reach of look and feel customization was at the template level; the The startup’s networks are attractive to users because it lets you run all of your group's collaboration tools from one GROU.PS domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups – each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc). The startup, which has over 40,000 networks on its platform and 2.5 million users, also added ActivityRank Pipelines, a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network measure and rank members' content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to members based on these rankings. And the social network is launching a subscription model that will allow moderators to charge subscription fees to members (GROU.PS gets a 50% cut on any fees charges). GROU.PS raised $1 million in funding, bringing the startup’s total funding up to over $2 million. But while the social network is growing, it is still faces major competition form the leader in the space, Ning, which hit 37 million users with 1.6 million social networks in November.
     
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| Siri Hires Mobile Expert Gummi Hafsteinsson Away From Google Posted: 19 Mar 2010 04:27 AM PDT
We haven’t heard all that much from Siri, the venture-backed startup that is working on virtual assistant applications for smartphones. Still well below most people’s radar, the company raised $24 million in venture capital and recently released its first app for the iPhone after nearly a year of development. But that doesn’t mean the startup has a lack of ambition: they’ve just hired Gummi Hafsteinsson, who has led several of Google’s most successful mobile product initiatives as Senior Product Manager for the past 5 years, as their new VP of Product. Hafsteinsson originally joined Google’s mobile group in July 2005 and first managed the Google Maps for Mobile product. More recently, he led development of Google's voice-powered search app for all the major mobile platforms – iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Symbian. He reported directly to Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of Engineering. Prior to joining Google, Gummi founded and ran a company called Dimon Software that produced mobile enterprise connectivity software designed to enable enterprises to access corporate IT systems from any mobile device. His experience in developing scalable applications for multiple platforms tells us Siri is working on making its virtual personal assistant product cross-platform. Its proposition was compelling enough to bring home the award for most innovative Web service at the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, by the way. In other news, Siri is now available for iPod touch devices, integrated Twitter into the service last week and is closing in on a quarter million early users. (Photo by Peter DaSilva for the New York Times)      
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| Those Facebook QR Codes Are Part Of Their Location Plans Posted: 19 Mar 2010 02:45 AM PDT
A source with knowledge of Facebook’s plans tells us that the QR codes will be used with an upcoming version of Facebook’s mobile app. More specifically, businesses could potentially print out a QR code and put it on a wall or a counter in their venue to allow users to scan it to check-in at that store, we’re told. Facebook is expected to unveil its location plans at its f8 conference in late April. For those unfamiliar, a QR code (short for “quick response”) is a sort of barcode that stores information which can be captured and interpreted by a mobile device by way of the camera on the device. Google, Microsoft, and others have been experimenting with their usage recently, and now Facebook is hopping on board. But Facebook’s idea is particularly interesting because it’s based around the hot check-in space right now. While services such as Foursquare and Gowalla are quickly gaining popularity, both still have under 1 million users, while Facebook has over 400 million users. Recently, the social network has been testing out pulling in data from both of those networks, rather than trying to build its own location network from scratch. That said, with a feature like this, it appears that you could use Facebook to check-in, then perhaps send it back out to someplace like Foursquare. The problem with Gowalla is that their API is currently read-only, so checking-in would have to be done through their own app, and not Facbeook. While the QR code links spotted the other day didn’t work yet, it was clear that one would link to the actual profile page, while the other would link to a particular status update. It seems that Page owners will get the option to view them soon as well. Facebook’s location plans continue to unfold.      
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| Google May Slay Your First Born Child, According To This Video Posted: 19 Mar 2010 01:45 AM PDT
The video even delves into Google Buzz and its privacy debacle. But it implies that the issue stems from Google’s desire to control you. Really, it’s just that Google can’t seem to comprehend social, and was rushed into rolling out Buzz, and handled it very poorly. The bottom line is that if you really think Google is out to get you, you shouldn’t be using it — at all. In fact, they have a new analytics opt-out feature that is probably right up your alley. But you also probably shouldn’t be using the Internet at all, because all of these companies are doing basically the same thing to varying degrees. Maybe Google wants to murder you, but I don’t know, I’d bet that they’re not going to.
     
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| Yahoo Launches Plaxo Feature Eight Years Later, And It’s Still A Good Idea Posted: 19 Mar 2010 01:27 AM PDT
Instead of updating your friends’ contact information when it changes, your friends just do it for themselves and then everyone with permission to get that information automatically has their address book updated. It saves a lot of hassle and it was brilliant when Plaxo launched it in 2002. But it never really caught on with the masses and most people today are stuck with address books that are little better than they had a decade ago. Plaxo’s spamming problem probably didn’t help gain user trust, which was part of the problem. But Plaxo also lacked other features like email to make it a really useful place hold your address book. Syncing products bring the promise of contacts Shangri La, but they never quite seem to work. I still maintain a desktop address book synced with Mobile Me as well as Google Contacts synced with my phone, and it’s a huge mess of duplicate contacts and outdated information. There’s also a bunch of independent contact information for some of my friends over on Facebook. And in fact that’s often the most reliable data for older contacts because they keep it updated themselves. It’s very similar, in fact, to the Plaxo model. I’m “subscribed” to them via mutual friendship and it can be turned off at any time. I hope Google starts doing this soon as well, simply because that’s the closest thing to a master contact list that I have in the cloud. And at some point someone has to solve the problem of syncing contact information and other data across company platforms. Yes, I know a ton of startups have tried this, but no one has quite gotten it dead simple and right.      
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| Viacom Seems To Be Misrepresenting YouTube Founder’s Call To “Steal It!” Posted: 18 Mar 2010 08:16 PM PDT
The quote seems to be referring to full-length movies, though viral videos are mentioned (it’s unclear in this context whether they’re saying movies will go viral, or if they’re talking about traditionally more viral video clips). As it turns out, it’s the latter. And they were probably joking about it. Here’s the actual Email thread, in chronological order:
It’s worth pointing out that the subject of the Email thread was ‘http://www.filecabi.net’, and that big-boys.com is now Break.com — it’s pretty clear that Chen and Hurley are referring to the brief, dumb sort of videos that often go viral as opposed to full length movies. And, based on the ‘haha’ comment (which is ommitted from Viacom’s document), Chen and Hurley may have just been joking about stealing any content at all. This doesn’t clear YouTube by any means (there are still plenty of other suspect quotes). But it casts some doubt on the rest of Viacom’s ‘undisputed facts’.      
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| An Experiment: Putting The Audience On Stage (For Real) At TechCrunch Disrupt Posted: 18 Mar 2010 05:48 PM PDT
That’s partially a good thing, of course. A room full of 2,000 people all shouting their opinions on a topic isn’t much of anything except chaos. But sometimes there are people in the audience who have a really interesting perspective on a topic, or even know more about the topic than the people on stage. The idea of an unconference has evolved over the years with Foo Camp and BAR Camp (and others) where the audience and the speakers are one. Those types of events are really rewarding, but they don’t work on a large scale single track event. Again, it would just be chaos. A couple of years ago Dave Winer had the idea of putting people from the audience, literally, on stage (there’s a link out there somewhere but I can’t find it). As far as I know no one has ever really experimented with this yet. But we’re going to try it out at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York on May 24-26. We’re going to leave an empty seat on stage for many of the group panels at TechCrunch Disrupt and invite someone from the audience to come up and participate. I’m not sure how exactly we’re going to do this yet. We could just ask for a volunteer from the audience right before the panel, for example. But a better way might be to take volunteers for the panels early on in the event and pre-screen them for interestingness, passion for the topic, knowledge, etc. I particularly like the idea of including audience members in the group of experts who judge and comment on new startups launching. I’m guessing some of the smartest things on stage will be said by these audience members. And it will certainly freshen the format. And I really like the idea of a panel of top experts in a field along with someone who may not have the resume, but certainly has the knowledge and opinions, to be up there too. We’ll expand the discussion of this on the Disrupt blog over the coming weeks, and announce firmer plans closer to the event.      
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| Notifo Is A Simple Mobile Notifications Platform For Anything Posted: 18 Mar 2010 05:09 PM PDT
Notifo is a Y Combinator-backed company launching today. While it’s currently only available as an iPhone app, the plan is to eventually roll out to all the major mobile platforms, starting with Android and BlackBerry soon. And while the current app may seem pretty barebones, the power resides underneath; it’s a platform. Notifo’s API makes it very, very simple for any site to insert a few lines of code in their site and offer Push Notifications very quickly. There is no approval process, you simply insert the code and you’re good to go; your site is now notification-ready. What’s great about this solution is that it’s creating a way to get all the notifications in one place, rather than having to manage a dozen (or in my case, more) apps all with their own notifications. This way, when you load up the Notifo app, you get a stream of all the notifications you’ve chosen to subscribe to. You could get notifications about new TechCrunch posts, or even when someone responds to a comment you made on TechCrunch, for example. The idea is similar to one of my favorite iPhone apps, Boxcar, but again, this is more about the underlying idea of notification syndication. Boxcar is more about setting up and managing notifications across a range of services they choose — and it’s iPhone-only. Notifo should let you fairly easily set up notifications for just about anything, on any device. While they wait for others to adopt the idea (so far, Listia has), Notifo set up a few services so people can use it with the iPhone right now. For example, Push.ly allows you to get notifications for all Twitter mentions of your name. And there is a simple March Madness final score notifier that has been giving me updates all day as tournament games end, with their final scores. You can also set alerts for when individual stocks hit certain prices. And the service also allows you to send yourself timed alerts, which are easily set up from the Notifo website. Notifo is the work of Chad Etzel, a developer who was formerly doing some work for Twitter. You can find the free app in the App Store here.
     
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| Plastic Jungle Raises $7.4 Million for Gift Card Marketplace Posted: 18 Mar 2010 05:07 PM PDT
Plastic Jungle, a marketplace for gift cards, has secured $7.4 million in Series B funding, led by Redpoint Ventures with Shasta Ventures Bay Partners, First Round Capital and other investors participating. This brings the company’s total funding to $13.4 million. Plastic Jungle lets you buy, sell and exchange gift cards online. Instead of receiving cash for your gift card, Plastic Jungle also lets you trade the value in for an Amazon gift card or give your money to charity. Users can receive cash for unwanted gift cards for up to 92% of the unused balance and buy gift cards at up to a 30% discount. The company says that it will use the funds to accelerate product development and work on other ways to create supply and demand for gift cards on the site. While Plastic Jungle didn’t reveal revenue numbers, the company’s CEO Garry Briggs says that its revenue is eight times more that what it was a year ago. Briggs also said that “millions” of dollars have flown through the marketplace since the company’s launch two years ago. Plastic Jungle faces competition from CardPool and others.      
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| More News about Omidyar’s Peer News Posted: 18 Mar 2010 04:27 PM PDT
So it’s fitting that the conference ended with a talk by John Temple, the editor of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s new Peer News site, a test case in how the future of local news could work. And thankfully, we finally got a few more details on the site and the approach. Temple was clear to say “there is no silver bullet” when it comes to fixing the media business, but also sees a great deal of hope in the volatility– this from the guy who was head of the now shuttered Rocky Mountain News, a paper that’s already gone through what so many dailies are dreading. “We’re not trying to reinvent a local newspaper and put it on the Web,” he said. Indeed, the mission of Peer News doesn’t even contain the words “news” or “media” or “paper.” It’s simply “to create a new civic square.” Core to the development of Peer were three questions: -What is the role of a free press in a democracy? -How would you best fulfill that on a local level using all the tools available today? -How do you do that in a sustainable way? On content, the most interesting thing Temple talked about was doing away with “articles” as we know them. He criticized the static, episodic nature by which journalists have traditional covered news, challenging readers to hunt through archives for the information they want. Instead, Peer’s “building block” will be a page that’s always updated almost like Wikipedia, or as he put it, “something closer to a living history on a topic that changes as it develops.” There will no longer be a sense of “missing” an article, because the “articles” will be living things. That also addresses the critique that local news swarms around one issue, then moves on. “We’re not going to be hot topic driven,” Temple says. Going back to those questions, Temple says the role of a free press is to inform citizens so they can make intelligent decisions. “Let’s stop making it so difficult,” he said. The other hallmark of Peer’s approach is what has made blogs popular– a sense of community. But it’s certainly a different approach. For one thing, Peer won’t have “reporters” in the classical sense, it will have “hosts” who help facilitate this civic square answering questions for the community. “In this era, the fact that newspapers still rewrite press releases is an embarrassment,” Temple said. “We’re not going to be stenographers. I think that’s a downfall of journalism.” But for a site that intends to be very community oriented, there was one big shocker: Peer will not have comments. “(Comments) descend into racism, hate, ugliness and reflect badly on news organizations that have them,” said Temple. Why? Because people do not have to show their faces when they comment so there’s no sense of responsibility, he argued. “We think anonymity is a huge problem when it comes to comments,” he said. Temple also emphasized that the coverage would not pull punches: “We’re going to call things like we see them. We think there’s real value in taking a stand.” So what about that business model? As Temple noted, there aren’t that many business models out there to chose from. Unlike most media sites, this will be a member site that people “value and will pay for.” He added “advertising would not be a key focus for us.” Peer should be launching early next quarter, so we’ll be able to see more of these ideas in action soon. But it’s clear that the site– or “news service” as it prefers to call itself– is taking a markedly different approach from old and what we consider “new” media right now. And with the benefit of some of these details, it seems less out of step for Omidyar to be starting this company. EBay, after all, was one of the first sites to powerfully leverage community on the Web, pioneering a lot of the systems of trust and reputation we still use today. (More on Temple’s blog here.)      
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| YC-Funded Data Marketplace Is An Amazon For Structured Information Posted: 18 Mar 2010 03:00 PM PDT
Founded by two former analysts at investment banks, Data Marketplace is essentially the middleman in helping financial organizations find quality data on the web. Users can submit requests to Data Marketplace, and the site will send those requests to its database of 200,000 data aggregators, programmers, and consultants who specialize in finding financial data and essentially transferring it into a readable format. Providers then post data resources to Data Marketplace, provide descriptive metadata, and also set a price. The stored metadata is used to help consumers find relevant data through traditional search engines and when browsing Data Marketplace. Data can also be posted on the site without a request, that users can search for. For example, here’s a data set of a complete list of Wal-Mart Store Locations, which is priced at $30. Prices range for data, and can be anywhere from $5 to several thousand dollars. Data Marketplace co-founder Matt Hodan tells me he spent $10,000 in on year on data at one of the financial organizations he worked for. Data Marketplace takes a 14% cut of each transaction on the site, from the provider. Data Marketplace handles all of the payment processing and allows users to directly purchase and download resources in an accessible format online. Hodan says that current models for selling and distributing data online are inefficient and expensive for financial organizations. Users only pay for what they need as opposed to plans or buying bundles of information. And providers don’t have many platforms where they can sell their data in a marketplace. Data Marketplace is similar in some ways to Factual, which is a Wikipedia-like site for open data, and InfoChimps, which takes a more collaborative approach to open data.      
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| Google Will Soon Offer A Way For Users To Opt-Out Of Google Analytics Tracking Posted: 18 Mar 2010 02:44 PM PDT
Google is testing a browser-based opt-out solution for Google Analytics, they briefly note today on the Google Analytics blog. Specifically, this would be a “global browser based plug-in to allow users to opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics.” They note that engineers are finalizing and testing the funtionality. How exactly this will work globally across all browsers remains to be seen. While Firefox and Chrome allow for easy use of plug-ins, Internet Exploerer and Safari are a bit more complicated. Still, if you’re a user who really cares about Google not tracking this information about you, it will probably be worth it to you to install this thing. Of course, the other question is what this means for site owners. While it’s unlikely that a lot of users would install something like this, what if they did? That could drastically cripple the entire point of Google Analytics. [image: Paramount Pictures] [thanks Michael]      
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| Google Denied “Nexus One” Trademark Posted: 18 Mar 2010 02:20 PM PDT
     
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| Undisputed Fiction Or Viacom’s Smoking Gun? Early Emails Between YouTube’s Founders Posted: 18 Mar 2010 02:14 PM PDT
One of YouTube’s defenses in this case is that it has virtually no way to tell if a piece of content has been uploaded with the authorization of its owner. Which is true — Viacom has even admitted that it requested that YouTube remove many of the videos that its own personnel had uploaded. Because of the DMCA, YouTube was allowed to keep this potentially infringing content online provided it responded in a timely manner to takedown requests. But these Emails, at least as presented by Viacom, don’t make it sound like YouTube’s founders and employees were necessarily worried about depriving content owners of videos they may have rightfully uploaded. Sometimes, it sounds like they’re pretty sure that they weren’t authorized, and were just relying on the fact that they didn’t have to do anything until they received a takedown notice. Instead, they were worried about prematurely cutting off the bulk of their traffic. There’s some talk of creating the perception that YouTube was concerned with patrolling such content. In one memorandum, Jawed Karim told YouTube’s Board of Directors that the 10-minute length restriction the site was imposing would “reinforce the official line that YouTube is not in the business of hosting full-length television shows”, but that it “probably won’t cut down the actual amount of illegal content uploaded” because users could easily split shows in half or upload the “Juiciest bits of television shows”. Which begs the question, what was the point? Also, note that he refers to it as “the official line”. Of course, YouTube says this is all “undisputed fiction”, and they’ll probably argue that the quotes were taken out of context (and they may well have been). If YouTube did follow the DMCA to the letter of the law (regardless of their underlying motivation), they may not have much bearing on the case. And there’s also the fact that Viacom is being hypocritical with all of this, because it too offered user-generated video sites that relied on the DMCA, and it uploaded many videos to YouTube itself. But it makes for some very interesting reading. Here are from some of those early Emails and IM conversations (you can find the full document here:
     
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| August Capital Bets Big On Blippy Posted: 18 Mar 2010 01:52 PM PDT
August Capital partner David Hornik is leading the round. And the valuation is “totally absurd” says one source. Another puts it at $50 million, although that may be a little on the high side. Regardless, that’s not bad for a site which only launched publicly two months ago. Update: Yet another source says “high 30s” on valuation, and we think that’s about right. Blippy wouldn’t comment on this story. I reached David Hornik (he seemed to regret having answered the phone). All that he’d say is that he loves Blippy, but he would neither confirm nor deny an investment. If you’re not already familiar with it, Blippy is a Twitter-like service where users post everything they purchase. You can hook up your credit cards and various online services (Amazon, iTunes, Zappos, etc.), and details about everything you buy are posted. You can see my account here – I’ve linked it to my iTunes. See our Blippy launch post for more details. Lots of people love posting and discussing their purchases on Blippy. But lots of other people just hate the idea of the service as an insane invasion of privacy (albeit one that people voluntarily enter into). Read the comments on any of our Blippy posts to see examples of that indignation. Putting all that aside, though, if enough people start using Blippy they are going to be able to monetize the heck out of it. Advertisers will see exactly what users are buying and be able to target them with ridiculous precision. In fact, the data is so deep and rich that Amazon is already threatened by the young startup.      
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| With A New Widget, Google Further Turns Android Phones Into Buzz Machines Posted: 18 Mar 2010 01:01 PM PDT
The new Google Buzz widget for Android allows you to post text or photos to the service without having to launch any app on the device. And, if you choose, you can easily tag your location to your buzz, as well as determine if it should be public or private. This widgets extends the already solid support the Android platform is offering the young service. For example, Buzz is built into Google Maps on Android, as well. This new widget looks very slick — easily one of the best widgets for Android yet. And it furthers my opinion that Buzz should have been launched as a location-based service first. Of course, this simple functionality wouldn’t be possible on the iPhone, which doesn’t allow for widgets (and who knows if they’d even accept a Buzz native app at this point — or if Google would even create one for them). Google talked about Buzz quite a bit this past week during a panel at SXSW. They apparently are thinking about letting users pre-test new features now. This new widget works on Android 1.6 and later. To find it, search for “Google Buzz Widget” in the Android Market.
     
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| Labotec Raises Funding For Crowd-Sourced Mobile App Development Venture Posted: 18 Mar 2010 12:27 PM PDT
Miami, Florida-based Labotec has landed a round of funding from Kima Ventures, a European early-stage investment fund founded by entrepreneurs and angel investors Jeremie Berrebi (Zlio, Net2One) and Square backer Xavier Niel (Free, Iliad). The VC firm thus joins Kipost and FS Ventures as investors of the crowd-sourced mobile app development venture. The size of the round remains undisclosed, but we hear the amount of financing totaled just south of a seven-figure sum, so we’ll peg it at in between $800,000 and $999,999. Labotec offers a relatively unique way of mobile app publishing, based on crowd-sourcing ideas from third parties. Basically, people who have ideas for mobile applications on any of the major platforms but lack the time, development skills or resources to actually build them can submit their ideas through the Labotec website. The ideas are subsequently evaluated by Labotec, and if one gets thumbs up from a committee of unnamed field experts associated with the company, Labotec funds the entire development, distribution and marketing of the app. The IP is co-owned by whoever submitted the idea – targeted are carriers and handset manufacturers – and Labotec. The ‘Inspirer’ (the person or organization that brought forward the idea for the app) doesn’t pay a cent, but if the app ends up generating revenue, the first $25,000 that it makes goes to Labotec – no matter how long it took to get to that point. After that, the Inspirer gets 50% of any revenue that may follow. Labotec notes that they’re still testing this model and that it is subject to change in the future. Labotec says that it has received hundreds of new project ideas from 27 countries since its inception in May 2009. A total of 3 applications out of those ideas have launched (iSOS for Android, iMove2Music and FakeSMS for iPhone) and 20 are slated for release by the end of this year – which basically means a lot of the submitted ideas are junk. The company says it plans to use part of the just-raised capital to hire 10 more developers of mobile apps for platforms such as iPhone, Android, iPad and BlackBerry.      
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| Google Calendar’s Smart Rescheduler Searches For The Best Meeting Times Posted: 18 Mar 2010 11:55 AM PDT
The only thing worse than company meetings is trying to schedule one. The more people who need to be at that meeting, the harder it is to find a time slot that works with everyone's schedule. A new Google Calendar Labs feature called the Smart Rescheduler brings some search smarts to the problem. "Overnight, all the Google apps customers will get this," says Google Calendar product manager Cyrus Mistry. "It is like we are giving every employee their own administrative assistant." The person scheduling the meeting enters the names of the participants, how long the meeting will be, and a date by when the meeting must take place. The Smart Rescheduler then goes out and looks at everyone's calendar to see when everyone is free, taking into account different time zones and other commitments on their calendars (in order for this to work, all the meeting attendees must share their calendars with Google Calendar). All too often at this point in the process, someone has a conflict. What the Rescheduler does is look at all the soft constraints and actually ranks the best meeting times. Different attendees can be prioritized so the meeting is set around their schedule. Soft constraints are taken into account like partial schedule overlaps, times blocked with no other attendees, meetings where someone's been invited but hasn't yet accepted, or meetings organized by that person. These factors often indicate a schedule that can be altered. Google Calendar throws all of these factors together and comes up with a ranking for the best possible meeting time. "We did look at algorithms for search to see how they solved which doc should come to the top," says Mistry. "We discover what meeting should come out on top." The Rescheduler can even book new conference rooms based on which one is closest to the original one and the same size.      
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Andover, MA-based website conversion company 
TechCrunch50 startup 
A few days ago, we noted that Facebook was 
Look, I’m all for privacy, liberty, rights, etc. But this video (embedded below) is pretty ridiculous. Listening to this, you’d think Google was born of a desire to trick everyone on the planet. Does Google make almost all of its money off of ad revenues? Yes. But does that mean they’re out to 
Google may have hired Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer 
We’re still going through these recently released YouTube/Viacom litigation 
There are good things about conferences and there are bad things about conferences. One of the bad things is how little the audience gets to participate directly in the content being created. Sometimes there’s a question and answer period at the end of a panel where people line up at a microphone to ask questions. But that’s usually it. Other than booing and applause, and of course the back channel on Twitter, there’s not much of a feedback loop.
I’m hopelessly addicted to Push Notifications on the iPhone. Unfortunately, 
There has always been a vibrant ecosystem around financial data. Financial institutions, such as hedge funds and investment banks, pay thousands of dollars for quantitative tabular data (financial data in spreadsheets). But now, the web has provided a mechanism to distribute and publish large amounts of data, but much of this data is raw (meaning, it’s not built into a spreadsheet format) and hard to find in a Google search. An finding the data, and then putting the data into a format that is easy to digest can be a laborious task. 
Some people don’t like the idea of Google having any data about them. Unfortunately, if you visit a site tracked by Google Analytics (and chances are you hit several each day), you have no choice. But soon, you might.
So in 2008, a company called Integra Communications filed for a “Nexus” trademark having something to do with voice and data telecommunications. Along comes Google a year later and files for “Nexus One.” Trademark office says 
We’re still poring over the hundreds of pages of 
no really, I guess we’ll just see what happens.”
Despite 
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