Wednesday, December 15, 2010

The Latest from TechCrunch

The Latest from TechCrunch

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Google Appoints VP Of Fiber, Delays Announcing Where It Will Roll Out

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 09:18 AM PST

When we heard about Google’s plan to deploy 1 gigabit-per-second broadband to homes across the U.S., we started drooling. But Google was quick to temper expectations, noting that their initial trial deployment would cover only around 50,000 homes (though they left the door open to the possibility of 500,000 homes). And to decide where they should first deploy it, they decided to ask communities to apply. Many did. In weird ways. Google was supposed to pick a winner by the end of the year. That isn’t going to happen.

As they’ve announced in an update on their blog this morning, “we're not quite ready to make that announcement.” The reason? Google says they want to take more time to make sure they get it right. “To be clear, we're not re-opening our selection process—we simply need more time to decide than we'd anticipated,” they note.

Keepsy: A Photo Album Made By A Friend Is Cool. One Made By All Your Friends Is Cooler

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 09:00 AM PST

Giving how the web has transformed photo sharing, it’s a little odd that it hasn’t done much to the tangible photo space. Sure, just about all of the major sites allow you to order prints, and many allow you to create fairly simple photobooks, but those are essentially the same products they’ve always been — they’re just slightly easier to make. Keepsy wants to change things up.

The new startup founded by Peter Weck and Blake Williams, focuses on creating “more than a photo album.” Essentially, they use the social dynamics of the web to crowdsource the creation of photo albums amongst friends. So instead of me making a photo album for you filled with the pictures I have with the two of us in them, a group of friends bring all their pictures together to make the book.

The first product Keepsy is focusing on is for birthdays. Up to 100 friends can collaborate on an album for a friend. This works through Facebook. Someone initiates the Keepsy book, then they invite friends to help them make it. Each person adds the pictures they think will be good for the book and contributes to the cost of the book (everyone can also chip in at this point for a gift card to something like Amazon).

Keepsy is smart enough to give you a list of all the common Facebook friends between the person who starts the present and the person who is going to receive it. And obviously, all of this is hidden from the person who will receive it, until it’s ready.

Users can also scan public photos from Facebook and Flickr to find more images to add to albums.

All of this can be made into a digital scrapbook for free, but if you want the tangible album, prices start at $30.

Keepsy, which is launching in public beta today with this birthday product, has been backed by Dave McClure, James Hong, Tim Connors, and a few other Angels. Two rounds of Angel funding have helped them raise $1.1 million so far.

Posterous Launches Posterous Groups, A Simple Discussion Tool, And Android App

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 08:58 AM PST

Simple blogging platform Posterous has always been about email and founders Rich Pearson and Sachin Agarwal have taken the idea of an email list one step further and developed Posterous Groups. Groups, an easier way to hold group discussion, hops on Mark Zuckerberg’s social bus and proves that its only a matter of time before blogging platforms become even more social. “This came out of our frustration with Yahoo Groups and Google Groups” said Pearson, explaining their attempts to develop “the best email list groups product possible.”

Like all things Posterous, the execution is simple. To set up a group simply send an email to “group@posterous.com” with the group name as the subject line and the rest is done by Posterous. To post to the group, send an email to “post@groupname.posterous.com.” The best part is you don’t actually need a Posterous account to be part of a group.

Once in a group, participants have a two column view, where they can experience threaded conversations and upload media attachments. The group moderator can choose whether people are contributors or subscribers and whether the group is public or private. Again the simplicity of Posterous is evident here, as the Groups function is filled with nifty tricks like being able to post a YouTube URL and have it turn into an inline video. Autopost social sharing on services like Facebook, Twitter, Flicker and YouTube is also available on Groups.

Pearson and Agarwal have been beta-testing the product with 1200 users for about a week and the feedback has been mostly positive, with one user calling it, “Blogging meets discussion forums meets commenting.” As Pearson points out, the ideal use case is people who are still in college (“Anyone who is in school is just a part of a ton of email lists”) so it might be prudent to have deeper email and chat integration in a further iteration.

Posterous, which is currently funded at $5.14 million, is also launching their extremely simple mobile app in the Android Marketplace today. The app includes features like social auto-posting, geo-tagging and options to take and upload video and photo. You can find the app in the Android marketplace by searching for “Posterous.”

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Posterous
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12 Days Of Christmas: Sceptre 24-inch LED PC Monitor

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 08:35 AM PST

Everyone needs a bit more workspace, right? You know Santa doesn’t slum with a 19-inch monitor anymore. That’s why we’re giving away a brand new 24-inch LED monitor from Sceptre. 2ms response time, 5,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, a 1920 x 1080 panel — yessir, this will certainly bright up your holidays. The retail sticker on this ultra-thin, ultra-fast bad boy is $269 but that doesn’t matter. It could be yours for nothing more than a price of a comment. Click through for the instructions and the rules.

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Abound Solar, Maker Of Thin Film Modules For Utilities, Raises $110 Million And Secures Huge Loan

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 08:31 AM PST

Colorado-based Abound Solar— the makers of cadmium telluride (CdTe) thin-film solar modules designed for use in large solar power installations, versus residential or small commercial systems— raised a $110 million equity round, and secured a $400 million loan guarantee from the United States Department of Energy the company announced today.

Federal and equity financing of this magnitude signals domestic support of a technology that, in the solar manufacturing industry, is viewed as having a lower cost structure than others, and therefore a potential advantage in the market. Lux Research analysts predict that pricing for CdTe thin-film solar panels will fall from $1.81 per watt in 2009 to $0.98 per watt by 2015, with cost of goods falling from $0.80 per watt in 2009 to $0.54 per watt by 2015.

Abound Solar’s existing investors Invus Group, Bohemian Companies, DCM and Technology Partners participated in the new, $110 million equity round, joined by new investors BP Alternative Energy Ventures and West Hill Companies. The company has raised approximately $260 million in equity since starting up in 2007.

One of Abound Solar’s objectives is to produce solar modules that reduce the cost of generating solar electricity within large-scale, grid-connected utility and commercial applications.

According to a company statement:

“The debt and equity financings will enable Abound Solar to expand manufacturing capacity at both its existing facility in Colorado and later at a second site in Indiana, which when completed will create 1,200 new manufacturing jobs…When both plants are complete, Abound Solar will be able to produce more than 840 megawatts of solar modules annually. The company has already begun construction of a second manufacturing line at its Longmont, Colorado facility to increase production rates in 2011.”

A report from GTM Research (The U.S. Utility PV Market: Demand…and Project Economics Through 2015) predicts that: U.S. utilities will increase their investments in solar power generation each year through 2015 to meet states’ demands for solar energy; and installations of solar projects for utility customers could reach about 3,000 megawatts annually, worth some $8 billion over the same period.

Abound Solar (formerly AVA Solar) faces multiple contenders for a piece of this market, including U.S. companies like NASDAQ-traded First Solar (FSLR) which also makes CdTe thin-film solar panels, and SunPower Corp. (SPWRB) which makes crystalline solar panels that are appropriate for use in utility-scale projects and are typically more “power dense,” or efficient than thin-film.

International solar manufacturers like Solar Frontier in Japan, Schott Solar and Sunfilm in Germany, or ENN Solar in China, are also vying to sell their technology to the same type of large-scale customers.

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Abound Solar
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First Major Google TV Update Rolls Out: Updated Netflix App, Customizable Dual View, And Voice Searches

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 08:08 AM PST

Google TV launched to a storm of piss-poor reviews and first impressions. It feels like a beta product and not something ready for living rooms. But that’s Google’s way. Two months have passed since the Logitech Revue and Sony Internet TV line launched and Google just rolled out the first major software update that at least seems to address some of the early concerns while bringing some new features to the platform like searching by voice.

Content discovery is one of Google TV’s strong points, but while the system can find just about any TV show online, big media blocked access. The updated Netflix app nearly solves this little problem by allowing access to the entire Netflix library. Now you can search, browse, and watch any of the shows in Netflix’s catalog without interaction from a PC. You can even select titles to be snail-mailed to you.


Dual-view was one of our favorite launch features. It’s basically PIP, but where one of the pictures is an internet browser. The new mode allows users to change the size and move around the smaller window. Yeah, Google TV finally has the same capability as your ’90s era Sony Trinitron.

Google TV Search is by far the most powerful TV content discovery tool available right. Google has done the same thing with movies too. Think IMDB. Search for a movie, and it will display the movie results while allowing you to navigate to the actor’s profiles and previous roles. The results even included other films associated with the original searched item and where they’re available to be watched being live TV, Netflix, or Amazon.

The Logitech Revue launched with an Android app that offers basic controls over the Revue’s functions. Now Google has one of their own that includes voice search. The demo below shows off the interface that at least makes it look better than the Logitech version. “Stay tuned for more information about the Google TV Remote for other platforms in the near future.” So yeah, that means an iPhone apps is coming too.

Expect this update to roll out to current devices throughout the week. Our testers have yet to receive the update, but I can’t wait. Hopefully there are some under-the-hood changes not mentioned that smooths out the rough interface a bit.

Mochi Media Fund Spreads $400,000 Across 20 Online Game Developers

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 08:01 AM PST

In March of this year, Mochi Media announced that it had established a $10 million game developer fund in partnership with Shanda Games, which had just acquired the company for $80 million.

The company tells us that it has invested about $400,000 in 20 developers (or rather, developers teams) so far. The first three games of some of these developers are launching today, with another one hitting some time next week.

The first fund games to hit are Planetary Conflict, Toxers and Feed the King. The fourth game, Snow Fort, will be released soon.

The games will initially live only on MochiGames.com, but Mochi Media will later use its MochiAds network to spread the game to thousands of other sites.

The Mochi GAME Developer Fund assists game development studios and independent game developers worldwide through sponsorship, licensing and publishing deals. The ones it has invested in to date are spread across South America, Europe and Southeast Asia.

In almost all cases, the investment involve an upfront payment and additional payments based on meeting certain milestones.

Mochi Media claims to operate the world’s largest browser-based games network, with more than 140 million monthly active users and 15,000 games on nearly 40,000 publisher websites.

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Mochi Media
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Mobile Gaming Startup Pocket Gems Raises $5 Million From Sequoia Capital

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 08:00 AM PST


Most of the buzz around casual gaming may be focused on Facebook, but it’s also becoming a powerful phenomenon on the iPhone, where some companies like ngmoco have managed to turn their free applications into revenue powerhouses fueled by virtual goods and in-app purchases. Another startup that’s done particularly well with this model has been Streetview Labs, the company behind hits like Tap Farm and Tap Zoo.

Today, the company is announcing that it’s closed a $5 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Michael Dearing (formerly of eBay, currently an associate at Stanford University’s Institute of Design), Jeff Fluhr (founder/CEO of StubHub), and Omar Hamoui (founder of AdMob). As part of the deal Sequoia’s Jim Goetz will be joining the startup’s board.

And, in conjunction with the funding announcement, Streetview has some other news: it’s renaming itself to Pocket Gems — a good move, given that the old name sounded like some sort of Google side-project.

Pocket Gems got its start a year ago, when it released Tap Farm — a game that shared a lot in common with FarmVille and other farming sims, but with a key difference: it was actually available on the iPhone (FarmVille didn’t launch a mobile app til June of this year). That game did very well, and since then the company’s library has grown to five games, the most recent of which is Tap Zoo (which is a bit like a zoo-themed version of Sim Theme Park).

CEO Daniel Terry says that each of the company’s games have been in Apple’s top ten charts (which is no small feat), and that it currently has two of the App Store’s top-25 grossing applications (Tap Zoo and a holiday themed version of the game called Tap Zoo: Christmas).

Between all of these games Pocket Gems has 15 million application installs, and that’s just on the iPhone. Soon, Pocket Gems will be expanding to Android and the iPad, which will increase its audience significantly.

The company currently has 11 employees — Terry says that it’s looking to hire 45 over the next year. Today’s funding will help with that, but the fact that the company is “very cashflow positive”, according to Terry, will also help .

Google Contributes Two Projects To Eclipse Foundation Valued At $5 Million

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 08:00 AM PST

Back in August, Google acquired a Java/AJAX tool-developer called Instantiations. The company made a number of popular premium applications used by developers to help streamline production of their Java apps, particularly on Google Web Toolkit. And soon after the acquisition, Google rebranded and released these applications free of charge.

Today, Google is announcing that it’s doing itself one better: it’s open-sourcing most of the assets acquired in the deal, so that third parties can continue building out their feature-sets. The two donated projects are WindowBuilder, which is a Java GUI Designer for Eclipse, and CodePro Profiler, a tool that developers can use to discover memory leaks and other performance issues. Between the IP and code from the two projects, Google and the Eclipse Project estimate that this donation is worth over $5 million.

Google will be open sourcing the WindowBuilder layers for building apps on Swing and SWT — the layer for Google Web Toolkit, which is part of the Google plugin for Eclipse, will not be open-sourced (though they aren’t ruling this out for the future).WindowBuilder code will be maintained by the existing WindowBuilder team at Google, plus additional Google developers. CodePro Profiler will be maintained by a company called OnPositive.

One positive effect of this move is that third-party companies can now offer support services around these tools (something that Google has never focused on). Which means that enterprise businesses that want to take advantage of these tools will be able to pay someone for support. One company that’s setting out to do exactly this is Genuitec, which will offer support for WindowBuilder.

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Online Video Ad Network SpotXchange Lands $12 Million

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 07:42 AM PST

Video advertising company SpotXchange has secured a whopping $12 million in its very first institutional round of financing.

The round was led by H.I.G. Growth Partners and comes, according to the company, at a time when SpotXchange has been profitable for nearly a year now.

With the fresh funding, SpotXchange aims to help expand its auction-based video advertising platform and its marketplace of integrated, in-stream video ad inventory. The company also has plans to expand internationally.

The network has consistently been ranked as a comScore top five video ad network in the U.S. and the number one video ad network in several countries outside of the U.S., including Canada and the U.K.

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Market America Acquires Bill Gates-Backed Shopping Site Shop.com

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 07:26 AM PST

Internet marketing and product brokerage company Market America has acquired Shop.com, an online comparison shopping engine provider. Financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

MarketAmerica.com and Shop.com will continue to operate as separate websites through a transition period, and the latter’s facilities in Monterey and Pasadena, CA and London, UK will continue without disruption. The combined entity will have in excess of 650 employees.

Here’s how the acquisition, which expected to be completed by year-end 2010, gets pitched:

The acquisition will combine SHOP.COM’s strength in technology and merchandising, providing customers with the latest, high-tech online shopping, with Market America’s high-touch, personal shopping experience, including the industry’s only unlimited cash back program.

It will expand the current people-powered, relationship-based shopping portal into a content rich destination that informs, entertains and guides customers in their shopping experience.

Ken Goldstein, Chairman & CEO of Shop.com and former managing director of Disney Online, will depart his current role and become a strategic advisor to Market America.

I haven’t been able to retrieve how much venture capital Shop.com has raised since its inception in the late nineties, but its investor roster includes Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon.com, Yahoo and Oak Investment Partners.

Yahoo Video No Longer Accepts Video Uploads

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 07:24 AM PST

It looks like Yahoo is making significant changes to its YouTube-like video site, Yahoo Video. According to a notice on the site, Yahoo will be removing the ability for users to upload a video to the site, and will be removing all user-generated content from the site in the Spring of 2011. The notice reads:

On December 15, 2010 the functionality to upload a video to Yahoo! Video was removed and a download utility, available through March 14, 2011, was added to users’ video profiles to allow retrieval of content. The user-generated content will be removed from Yahoo! Video on March 15, 2011. We apologize if this causes you any inconvenience.

Unable to compete with YouTube and even Facebook for traffic to its video site, it appears that Yahoo is shifting focus away from user-generated content. But it’s unclear what Yahoo Video will become. Of course, Yahoo is hoping that its photo-sharing site Flickr will become a popular destination for videos. Flickr turned on the ability to upload videos back in 2008.

Unfortunately, Yahoo has yet to update the page where it explains “What is Yahoo Video:” Yahoo! Video is a destination where you can upload, share videos, and watch millions of other videos from across Yahoo! Find videos that users have uploaded, as well as premium content from our partners and other Yahoo! properties.

Clearly, this has not been a stellar week for Yahoo, which just announced a round of layoffs at the company.

A reader sent us this email that apparently was sent to Yahoo Video users:

Dear Yahoo! Video user,

After careful consideration, we will be removing all general user-generated content upload capability and user-uploaded video from Yahoo! Video. As a result, your videos, user profiles, ratings, favorites, and playlists will no longer be available after March 14, 2011. User video content from Yahoo! Video that remains embedded on third party sites will no longer be playable after March 14, 2011.

Available on your profile page is a software utility that will allow you to download the videos you have uploaded to Yahoo! Video to your computer through March 14, 2011. You can find your profile by clicking on the \’My Video\’ tab or going to http://video.yahoo.com/mypage.

Once you download your videos, you may choose to upload them to another site such as Flickr, which now allows video uploads. You can find out more here: http://www.flickr.com/explore/video.

Thanks for your understanding and thanks for being a part of Yahoo! Video.

If you have any questions about this change, please visit our FAQ section, or contact Customer Care.

The Yahoo! Video Team

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Good News, Adblock Plus Fans – Soon, There Will Be A Google Chrome Extension

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 07:09 AM PST

Adblock Plus, easily the most popular Firefox browser extension, recently hit the 100 million downloads milestone. Soon, the developer(s) behind the add-on will be releasing a beta extension for Google Chrome.

We should note that the most popular Chrome extension today is also an ad-blocker, made by Michael Gundlach, who’s trying to turn this into a full-time job (as well).

Over the years, many have asked ABP developer Wladimir Palant if there’d be a Google Chrome extension at some point. His usual reply went something like this:

No, Adblock Plus will not be “ported” to Chrome. I have better ideas for wasting tons of time. Anyway, why do you think that I could do better than the authors of existing ad blockers for Chrome?

Or in other words, about non-Gecko browsers in general:

Forget it, I am not writing Adblock Plus from scratch just to support your favorite browser (be it Chrome or Safari or Opera or Internet Explorer). And even if somebody gives me the code — I am not going to maintain two unrelated projects.

This asks for an independent project and in fact, there are already independent projects to implement ad blocking for all of these browsers.

So what changed the man’s mind?

Palant says he wants to change the Internet as a whole, by putting users back in control.

To that end, supporting only one browser limits ABP’s options too much. While he has considered partnering with other ad blocking projects, he says they tend to have goals that could not be aligned with his mission.

The developer acknowledges that Internet Explorer is still a dominant browser, but doesn’t boast “usable extension support” and creating an ad blocker for IE would be an “ugly and very complicated business”. Google Chrome, on the other hand, supports JavaScript-only extensions, which leads Palant to hope he can reuse much of the Adblock Plus source code.

More importantly, recent Chrome versions allow extensions to block downloads, and porting a Chrome extension to Safari “seems relatively simple”.

Note that due to the way Chrome works today, the extension won’t function in the exact same way the Firefox add-on does, at least not in its early stages, but Palant hopes that there will soon be changes that will allow the team to make the extension more robust.

The ABP team will not be writing a Chrome extension from scratch. They’ve engaged in conversations with AdThwart developer Tom Joseph, who has agreed to hand over the project to ABP. That means they can go to work using an existing and relatively small codebase that already reuses several chunks of the Adblock Plus source code. Furthermore, Joseph has joined the team as a contributor.

Expect some development builds of the Chrome extension to hit the Web soon.

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TechCrunch Moscow: From Russia (With Tech) Love

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 06:49 AM PST

On Monday this week TechCrunch Europe held the first ever TechCrunch Moscow event. We expected 300 people. We attracted around 500 attendees and another 400 went on the waiting list. The whole thing was in English, and the video stream brought in 10,000 (yes, ten thousand) more people watching live. Many more are now watching the archive. which is here. There is a large archive of photos – I have never seen so many photographers at a tech event – and you can work through them by starting at the beginning here.



CES 2011: Let The Boredom Begin!

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 06:48 AM PST

It’s been a tough few years for the CE industry. GPS sales collapsed, the unfulfilled dream of 3G didn’t buoy the TV industry, and netbooks were eaten by tablets (one tablet in particular), sending manufacturers scrambling at the last minute to restart their long-dead design and assembly plans for slates. It’s hard out there for a Samsung, Sony, HP, Dell, etc.

Read more…



Car-Sharing Service Zipcar Adds $21 Million To Its Coffers

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 06:21 AM PST

Car-sharing service company Zipcar this morning announced that it has raised $21 million in Series G funding. Meritech Capital Partners led the round with a $20 million investment, while Pinnacle Ventures contributed the additional $1 million.

Zipcar didn’t detail what it plans to do with the fresh capital, other than to say it intends to use the proceeds to fund working capital needs and finance fleet growth, and to continue its geographic expansion.

In a separate release, Zipcar has revealed that Steve Case, co-founder and former CEO and chairman of AOL, and John Mahoney, vice chairman and CFO of Staples, have joined its board of directors. Miraval CEO Philippe Bourguignon has stepped down from the company’s board to make room for Case.

Zipcar boasts more than 500,000 members and 8,000 vehicles in urban areas and college campuses throughout the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom (they acquired U.K. car sharing company Streetcar for $50 million earlier this year).

We reported last June that Zipcar was pondering a $75 million IPO to pay off its debts.

Guess they opted to take a different route.

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mSpot Brings Cloud-Based Streaming Music Service To iPhones

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 05:59 AM PST

Mobile entertainment startup mSpot is bringing its free music cloud service that allows you sync your entire music collection across mobile phones and PCs/Macs to iPhones with the launch of a new app. Since the service’s public launch in June, mSpot has seen over 1 million downloads of a similar app for Android phones.

mSpot’s application allows users to upload their music to the mSpot Cloud and then listen to the music from both
desktop browsers and iPhones for free.

The application works in the background of your computer and phone managing the upload and day-to-day syncing of your music library. In addition, it can upload metadeta along with music, including playlists, coverart, ratings and song information you may have entered using iTunes. The application will also make automatic updates whenever changes occur in your library, re-sync music when new songs are added, across different connected devices.

Other features of the iPhone app include continuous playback, the ability to see lyrics of songs, and a "Streaming only" option for users who want to save all the storage on their mobiles for other media.

mSpot offers free storage for the first 2 gigabytes (approximately 1600 songs). Users can also pay around $3.99 per month for 40 GB of music in the cloud, which includes roughly 32,000 songs.

The bonus of using mSpot is the ability to access your music from a variety of devices, because it lives in the cloud (as opposed to iTunes). Of course, mSpot would face competition from Apple if the company ever decided to launch a cloud-based version of iTunes. We’ve been expecting this to happen for sometime now, but until then mSpot could be a good option. And it’s free.

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Mark Zuckerberg Named Time Magazine’s 2010 Person Of The Year

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 05:00 AM PST

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time Magazine’s person of the year. He will, of course, grace the magazine’s cover for the special edition, as the individual who has done the most to influence the events within a year.

Zuckerberg isn’t a surprising pick, considering the huge year Facebook has seen in terms of massive user growth, controversy surrounding privacy issues, and the release of new products. And The Social Network’s success also contributed to the media frenzy surrounding the company and its founder.

Here’s what the publication had to say about why they chose Zuck: “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year.

Zuck will join a host of Presidents who have received the honor including Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Other tech luminaries to have graced Time Magazine’s cover include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

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Russian Search Engine Yandex Gets A Semantic Injection

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 04:57 AM PST

Yandex, Russia's leading search engine which is thought to be mulling over an IPO for up to $1.5 billion, is rolling out a new feature today that aims to make its search experience seem a lot more intelligent. Dubbed "Spectrum" and claiming to be able to read users' minds, it uses what sounds like a combination of semantic technology and machine learning to "infer implicit queries and return matching search results." In other words, Spectrum is able to make better sense of the meaning of searches based on its own classification system. It's based on what Yandex describes as query statistics:


The Modern Version Of The Nativity Story, Featuring Facebook, Twitter And More

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 04:15 AM PST

Here’s a funny video that is bound to make the rounds in the next couple of days and weeks in many a Western country, considering the season: THE DIGITAL STORY OF THE NATIVITY (though I think this portuguese version was actually online first).

Behold, the Nativity of Jesus 2.0, featuring Internet sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay and yes, iPhone text messages.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go #worshipthebaby.

Thanks to @Orli for the tip – video made by Excentric.

Navigaya Opens Platform With Free HTML5 Channels For Content Owners

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 03:56 AM PST

Back in May, when Navigaya first debuted its ‘Ultra-Hot Content Platform‘, it was available for users to check out, but they couldn’t yet create their channels on top of the platform. That changes today. Navigaya is announcing three product versions, including an HTML5 version that is made available for free to bands, musician and video artists that want to create their very own Navigaya-powered browsing experiences.

Gal Erlich Hagoel, Navigaya’s CEO, explained to me that the launch of the platform brought inquiries from both high-end broadcasters that wanted an engaging web experience that accentuated their content, to smaller production houses and bands that wanted to ‘wow’ their audiences through a lighter version of the full-blown platform. This resulted in three tiered packages (see below for more information).

When Navigaya launched, it chose to showcase a music-centered experience. What’s interesting though is that among its first customers is a children’s site, Smartoonz.tv, the web extension of a 50-million household TV channel. A ‘brain-food’ site called Smartyu.tv is another early customer. These imply to me that Navigaya has a wider customer range than I foresaw when it debuted.

The Broadcasters package, offered in both Flash & HTML5, is chock-full of features such as 1080dp video support, drag-and-drop playlist creation, and an internal browser—a complete list of features is here. All features can be chosen ‘à la carte’, and customized down to the icons.

The Pro package is pretty much identical to the Broadcaster package, except that it’s more limited in customization options. Target customers for this version are established bands and musicians that want to provide their existing audiences a more unique and engaging content experience than currently at their disposal. First to take advantage of this package is trance DJ duo Skazi.

Pricing for both the Broadcaster and Pro packages are negotiable on a case-by-case basis.

This leads us to the free Lite version. Though slightly more limited in features and available in HTML5 only (as opposed to Flash as well), the Lite version seems like a pretty solid option for amateur, to semi-pro bands and musicians. And considering it’s being offered free of charge, there’s no reason not to give it a spin. See an example of it here.

Last but not least, Navigaya will select 10 TechCrunch readers with original content, be it a band, a musician, or a video artist, and bump them up for free from the Lite version to the Pro package, for an entire year. Pitch your hotness at techcrunch@navigaya.com

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Truphone Re-brands As Tru. Somehow Forgets To Buy The .com

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 03:45 AM PST

Without much fanfare Truphone, international mobile roaming and app company, has decided to re-brand as “Tru”. Like all re-brandings this is a path fraught with danger, as people must now be put through the pain of constantly correcting themselves when referring to the company. And it’s always fun when the re-brand is a word you might actually use generically, leading to all sorts of confusion. All very tru… I mean true.

A post on the site’s customer site says today:

Twitter Solicits Interest For The “Most Engaging Innovative Ads On The Web”

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 03:43 AM PST

As noted earlier by The Next Web and ReadWriteWeb, Twitter has just launched an updated guide for businesses for organizations interested in exploring how to make the most of the micro-sharing service.

Coincidentally, the @TwitterBusiness account hasn’t made followers aware of the changes yet – in fact, it’s been about a week since there’s been a tweet from the account.

Update: from the Twitter blog: It’s Business Time (and @TwitterBusiness is awake again!)

The expanded business guide includes a section that helps companies start advertising on Twitter, inviting advertisers on a “journey with the most engaging innovative ads on the web”.

I’m not so convinced about the innovativeness of the whole thing, but Twitter does an excellent job at explaining how they plan to make money through advertising (Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends and Promoted Accounts).

Interestingly, Twitter also touts a seemingly new product called Analytics, which lets all advertisers gain insight into both paid and unpaid activity on Twitter by offering two layers of analytics (advertising product dashboards and timeline activity).

The Start Advertising page also comes with a hard-to-miss form, inviting organizations to indicate in which advertising products they’d be interested, what kind of budget and launch date they had in mind, in which regions they operate and whether they’re for-profit or not.

It’s anything but self-serve, like Google AdWords, but it’s a start.

With the soft-launch of this form, Twitter is effectively saying that it’s now open for business, and (hopefully for them) has a sales force in place to handle all incoming requests.

Will 2011 be the year in which Twitter not only figures out how to properly make money, but also manages to scale its money-making operations in a way that can lead the company to sustainable profitability?

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Twitter
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Forget The Social Browsers, Just Install Cortex On Chrome

Posted: 15 Dec 2010 01:15 AM PST

Even though it hasn’t exactly worked out the first few times companies have attempted it, there’s another movement underway to create a social browser. Currently, RockMelt, Mozilla, and Flock are all trying to fuse social elements into the way we all surf the web. And two of those are doing it on top of Chrome (or Chromium), RockMelt and Flock. But each of those may simply be too much. Why not just go to the source and add a thin layer?

That’s exactly what Cortex, a social extension for Chrome, allows you to do. Instead of trying to rework some of the UI elements of the Chrome browser to make room for sharing and/or social elements, Cortex simply adds a sharing overlay to any site you’re on when you click and hold down your mouse button. Using this mechanism, you can share to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Instapaper (assuming you set up each of those). It’s simple and brilliant.

All you do is click and hold, the Cortex sharing wheel appears. Then you select which service you want to share an article (or image) with. And if you hover over one of those areas for a second, you’ll see an option appear for you to leave a message alongside the share. This will show up as your tweet, Facebook Wall posting, etc.

If you set it up, you can also use this wheel to share directly with certain Facebook friends.

Cortex is the work of two developers, Eric Wolf and Joey Primiani, who have managed to get their extension over 10,000 active users in just a few weeks. Primiani was previously an intern at Google where he helped design the touch interfaces for search on mobile and tablet devices. That work is clearly paying off here, and Cortex brings a touch-like approach to Chrome on the desktop.

And it’s easy to imagine a sharing mechanism like this eventually being implemented on touch devices as well.

The key to Cortex is simplicity and speed. You just hold down the mouse button and you can share. The extension picks the best title and image for you automatically. And based on my tests, it’s really good at that. There’s no need to click multiple times to share something, it’s click once, drag, and go. You can share something in 2 or 3 seconds.

I’ve written previously about the speed of sharing, and how important it is. Cortex takes it to the next level.

Find the extension here, and learn more in the video below.

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Cortex
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Connecting Facebook’s Dots

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 10:26 PM PST

We’re on to you Facebook. Sorry there is just too much going on here for it all to be a coincidence: First cult hoodiegate, then Facesquare, then the Vadar-inspired Facebook Friends icon and now this subliminal Zuckerberg-ian slip in plain sight on the Facebook homepage.

Hmmm “Connect and share”… so that’s what the kids are calling it these days.

Via: TheSneakerGuru

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Facebook
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