I’ve been itching to put together a bunch of mashups, but there’s only so many lazyweb requests you’re allowed to make if you can’t grok AJAX. Yahoo’s just-launched Pipes promises to blur the lines between nerds and geeks — offering the powers of developer nerds to content geeks, and vice versa. Tim O’Reilly is nearly verklempt, and even after my friend Kevin Cheng hinted at how the transcendently awesome the project he was working on might turn out, I’m still surprised. It’s like a visual Ruby on Rails. (UPDATE: The Pipes site is not online as of Thursday morning. We’ll check with Yahoo to see what’s up.)
That said, I could be caught up in my own imagination, and nobody’s had much time to play with what Yahoo is calling “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator.” But tools you can play with are always my favorite tools.
We just noticed that Facebook is rolling out a new feature: gifts, which one member can give to another (see screenshot below). Once you receive gifts, they seem to appear on your wall and in a “Gift Box” portion of your profile. It’s unclear if gifts will cost money, but virtual icons have been a big business for social networks like HOT or NOT and Dogster.
Today Facebook also announced a partnership with Comcast that includes the site’s first foray into user video uploads. Get the rundown on NewTeeVee. It’s extremely limited — videos will be submitted as part of contests, and compiled into a half-hour “Facebook Diaries” show — but video is a new and interesting advertising stream, something our contributor Robert Young suggests Facebook desperately needs.
The first DEMO convention of the year starts Tuesday night down in the So Cali desert, where 68 startups will try to get noticed by the 700 or so expected press, VCs, and industry execs. For every Skype or Ironport that have launched products at the show, there’s hundreds of Browsters or Filmloops that make up most of the flock. We’ll try to make some educated guesses, though lively presenters and good business plans often have an inverse relationship.
A quick look at the math: say there’s 600 paying attendees at an average $2,250 per person fee, and 68 demonstrators pay $18,500 a pop, means Chris Shipley’s show could be raking in more than $2.5 million for the event before expenses. Cha-ching in Palm Desert!
According to DEMO rules what the companies will launch at the show is embargoed until tomorrow, but since the presenter list is public, we thought we’d take a quick look at some of the attendees pre-announcement day.
Personal publishing across media: Dublin, Ohio-based Nextumi will be there and one of the cofounders says the company will launch “share2me, a ubiquitous sharing product to permit crossplatform, multimedia sharing.” Redwood City, CA-based Vuvox says it enables its users to publish personal channels with digital content, with the tagline ‘your visual voice.’
Startup product I already use regularly:TeleFlip. Easiest way to send a text message from your PC to a cellphone, just send an email to ‘PHONE-NUMBER’@telefip.com. I have no idea how they’re going to make money, but I love this service.
Online video: With all the online video startups out there, there’s still even more launching or unveiling new products at DEMO, like Magnify.net, Eyejot, Blinkx, SplashCast, ClipSyndicate, Jaman, and Panjea. Details from Liz on NewTeeVee tomorrow.
Mobile: I’ve skipped DEMO the past few times as Web 2.0 washed over the place, but more and more startups are outlining mobile ambitions there. Bling Software says it has the industry’s only AJAX based client for mobile applications, Buz interactive does a mobile personalization service (more details tomorrow), and a launch from Mobio, a company we covered last year.
WiFi Aid: The WiFi at DEMO will probably be too impacted to work, but a few companies are betting on the ubiquitous WiFi trend. We’ve checked out Devicescape’s download, which helps with browserless access to WiFi networks. Spanish startup Whisher, which has the tagline ‘WiFi Reloaded’ opened and then locked its beta site already.
Established companies trying for some DEMO juice:Adobe, Alcatel-Lucent Ventures, Seagate, Symantec, Wyse - hey there old timers.
Worst named DEMO companies:Boorah — boo. Jaman, say it with a rasta accent — now it’s pretty bad right. Buz Interactive and Me.dium — maybe the lack of the domain name of choice (Buzz Interactive? Medium?) means they lose out on the moniker of choice (pure speculation). Oh well, names aren’t the end of the world.
Most of these companies, like the Kleiner Perkins Caulfied & Byers-backed content recommendation site Aggregate Knowledge have raised money in the past 18 months. Many are also using DEMO as a venue to look for another round of funding. Which ones do you think are worth investing in?
We don’t usually write about parties, but the Wellsphere launch this weekend was a fun one. Held at the Mission Cliffs climbing gym in San Francisco, the bash was lively and well-attended, as you can see in the somewhat intelligible video interview with Wellsphere CEO Ron Gutman embedded below the jump.
So what’s Wellsphere? It’s a wellness — fitness and healthy eating, mostly — -oriented social network, opening to the public today. The core idea is for it to be a resource as well as prompt for finding gyms, restaurants, and activities, focusing on positive encouragement rather than avoidance of sickness and obesity.
Wellphere’s informational index will be amplified by its members, who offer advice and connect to each other to arrange activities and help motivate each other to uphold workout resolutions. I brought along some muggle friends to the party and they actually seemed pretty excited about the idea.
I think the site could do with increased capability for users to edit its core resources rather than pushing their participation over to personal profiles and blogs. However, encouraging social activity among Wellsphere members is even more important. All Yahoo has to do is better localize a its health vertical and then what have you got.
San Francisco-based Wellsphere has raised an angel round as well as a Series A from investors including Gemini Israel Funds and healthcare management guru Woodrow Myers, but Gutman would only describe the total amount raised as “a few million dollars.” The 14-person company emerged from a multidisciplinary group at Stanford.
While low prices and huge inventory are the main attraction at Amazon.com, the site’s reviews have emerged as an essential online resource. Now, a new generation of start-ups wants to take on the shopping giant by spreading reviews across the web.
As PowerReviews CEO Andy Chen puts it, he’s building a “next-generation Epinions.” His competitors in the distributed reviews space include Bazaarvoice and European-oriented Reevoo. Today, a new start-up, Ratepoint, is throwing its hat in the ring.
Boston-based RatePoint has raised a little over $1 million from Prism VentureWorks, .406 Ventures, and its founders, who were part of the team at GeoTrust, which they sold to VeriSign in September.
The start-up has gone from concept to launch in four months, an impressive feat — but then again, that might just show how wide open this category is. RatePoint makes a toolbar (as of Sunday night, only available for Internet Explorer) that aggregates user ratings. Toolbar users will see reviews weighted to emphasize other users with similar tastes.
“A five star for me is not always a five star for you, it might be a three star,” explains founder Chris Bailey. For now, the user reviews are only of URLs, so the tool the service most closely resembles is probably StumbleUpon. Product reviews are in the works.
PowerReviews, which has $6.25 million in funding from Menlo Ventures, Draper Richards, and company founders, is taking a slightly different approach, though its earthy green and cutesy star design is pretty similar to RatePoint’s. We’re pretty sure PowerReviews came first.
The company offers review software and management for retailer web sites — for instance, Walgreens — and distributes the reviews across its 80 customer sites, taking a cut of ad and product sales. Its staff of 18 does a diligent job of quality control.
Until now, PowerReviews’ reviews have only been available on customer sites, but the company plans to launch a portal in the next few months. Since the review templates are extremely specific, the portal will provide some interesting side-by-side and tag-based comparisons. It will also expand a revenue stream of sponsored listings (though sponsorship does not affect search ranking, says Chen).
I saw an early version and liked it, though I felt like the site could really benefit from being mashed up with price comparison, local availability, and color tools. How many shopping web sites are you going to go to that don’t actually sell products?
Both companies’ ideas are interesting, but my hesitance towards installing yet another toolbar makes me prefer PowerReviews’ approach. Reevoo uses primarily email surveys (to ensure customers have actually bought a product), which also seems a little too onerous.
By staying focused on reviews, the companies are ensuring that they always stay relevant to consumers. However, they’ll only become useful — and profitable — when they elicit a whole lot of participation. Amazon may be in need of some competition on the reviews front, but it’ll be hard for any site to emerge from the pack.
Your phone buzzes, and you learn your pal Suzie is out at lunch. It buzzes again, and you find out your web calendar going through an outage. The wonders of invasive-by-choice technology!
What are we talking about? The observation that an increasing number of companies are experimenting with the free status broadcast tool Twitter. Twitter started as a casual SMS social updater from the folks at Obvious (nee Odeo), but for some, it’s getting a bit more serious. Today, the folks at calendaring startup 30 Boxes joined Technorati, Ma.gnolia, and other companies use the service to send out development and downtime updates to subscribers over SMS and IM.
30 Boxes co-founder Narendra Rocherolle previously noted in this pages his love for Twitter, calling it a tool for “capturing moods and moments during the day and sharing them with a circle of friends — a bloggy chat to go!” Today, Rocherolle cites three justifications for using Twitter as a corporate tool:
1) for some users there is no such thing as TMI,
2) Twitter is offsite, so it won’t go down when his servers do, and
3) users can message him and his team directly.
To me, only number 2 holds water, but hey…the social and the corporate are often one and the same for the startup crowd, so why should the tools be any different? The question is, would they use it if it weren’t free?
These past few days there has been an interesting conversation about web-based RSS readers, including some comments about Google Reader’s growing popularity. The meme was sparked off after Leann Prescott, an analyst with Hitwise, posted an overview of the web-based RSS readers.
Interestingly, the one RSS reader that showed a remarkable jump was Rojo, which was bought by Six Apart last year. “So Rojo use jumped like right when it was acquired by MT and development came to a close? Strange,” Marshall Kirkpatrick commented in response to Prescott’s post.
That was enough to spark my interest, especially since FeedBurner has not been reporting Rojo subscriptions due to a bug. Kirkpatrick’s comment also made me wonder how can Rojo, a discontinued product be bigger than Google Reader?
So how can there be a jump in the number of “internet visits” to Rojo, as Hitwise data shows? One possible explanation could be that since late-September, 2006, robots.txt file has been removed from Rojo.com (according to archives.org), which in turn allows Google to index Rojo hosted posts as individual pages.
The third edition of Mashup Camp was, as usual, free to attendees through the sponsorship of big and not-so-big software and web companies. Those companies don’t support Mashup Camp just because it’s a nice thing. They’re not just trying to get in good with cutting-edge developers. No they are doing it because there’s money to be made in mashups.
Let’s look at some of the most interesting ways companies are making money (or hoping to) in the mashup economy: elastic computing, aggregated data access, mashup development tools, and mashups themselves.
Elastic Computing
By providing so-called elastic data storage and virtual hardware, Amazon’s Web Services and efforts built on top of it may represent one of the best ways of making money off of people’s desire to assemble apps instead of building them from scratch. Mashup developers could always buy and administer their own hardware, but the philosophy of mashups is based on putting together apps out of pieces other people provide. Elastic computing services make storage and processing power into yet another off-the-shelf component.
Amazon’s S3 data storage service provides a cheap and scalable online hard drive. Not only does it scale up, in case your video mashup suddenly attracts a bunch of users with long videos, it also scales down, in case those video users migrate to a different service. You’re not stuck paying for hard drive space you no longer need. You pay $.15 per gigabyte per month for storage and $.20 per gigabyte of data transfer.
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers on-demand processing power. Need to transcode the videos your video mashup users upload? Again, pay for just the computing power you need by adding and subtracting virtual machine instances.
Aggregated Data Access
Companies with valuable data like Dun & Bradstreet with its comprehensive business credit information and Bloomberg with its financial data feeds have long known how to make big bucks by selling access to their data via commercial feeds, APIs, and services around them. As mashup development on the open web becomes more popular, we’ll likely see companies with valuable data charge those who access it.
But you don’t have to have your own data to make money off of data access. Right now, there’s revenue to be had in acting as a one-stop shop for mashup developers, essentially sticking yourself right between data providers and data consumers.
ProgrammableWeb, the favorite community website of mashup developers, provides comprehensive listings of APIs available on the web and includes forums where developers can discuss how to best use them. ProgrammableWeb earns money from direct sponsorships on the website.
StrikeIron aims at the enterprise and commercial software development markets by aggregating access to popular data sources and APIs in the form of a web services marketplace. Their September 2006 launch of a “super data pack” suggests how aggregating data access represents a potentially lucrative trend in the mashup economy.
Mashup Development Tools
Sophisticated developers might already have all they need to build a mashup–a hosted LAMP stack and text editor, a quick browse of APIs at ProgrammableWeb, a few thousand lines of PHP code, and voila!–the next HousingMaps. But as mashup making mojo filters out to the broader web population, there’s a need for both easier-to-use and more full-featured tools for composing applications out of little pieces found on the web.
One of my favorite demos at Mashup Camp (and the one that got my wooden nickel) was OpenKapow, a free tool that lets you make an RSS feed, HTML component, or REST-style API out of whatever website has the data or interactivity you need. Where’s the money, if it’s free?
In their enterprise software: a mashup server that a company hosts itself, and thus gives its employees the ability to integrate existing applications and new capabilities into so-called composite applications specially tuned to the needs of individual employees or small groups. It’s a great idea to offer a free version of your software to the web community, because people playing with it might just want to bring it into their employers’ IT setups.
IBM also has its sights on the mashup market, with QEDWiki, a prototype browser-based development tool that allows end users to build their own composite applications in a wiki-type environment. Proto Software offers a similar tool, but as a desktop application instead of in the browser.
You might also be familiar with some of the many do-it-yourself application development tools on the web: Coghead, Ning, and DabbleDB represent just three of the more well-known ones. All of these offerings aim at the end user programming market that may converge at some point with mashup development.
And Even Mashups Themselves
Can you make money off of mashups themselves? Sure–because in the end, a mashup is just another website or web app, so the same rules for making what you’ve built into a business mostly apply.
On the back end, you’ll need to worry about what your data and API providers think of what you’re doing so that they don’t cut you off. But on the front end, you have all the same ways available as before to make money on the web: advertising, affiliate revenue, subscription services, and so forth. The Hype Machine, the best mashup of Mashup Camp 3, for example, uses both advertising and affiliate sales revenue to make money.
But the vast majority of websites don’t turn a profit for their creators, and this may hold true for most mashups too. Looks like if you want to make money on mashups, you might want to become what the Mashup Camp folks call a “mashup enabler”–the service and tool providers that make mashups possible.
Here in Boston at Mashup Camp 3, we’ve seen an incredible range of applications mashed up from sites and services on the web. During three total hours of SpeedGeeking, Mashup Camp attendees spent five minutes a piece viewing demos and asking questions of mashup developers. Then each attendee votes for his or her favorite mashup with a wooden nickel.
We saw mashups going way beyond basic integration with Google Maps to include MySpace integration, hardware hacks, and voice-enabled applications. Early buzz focused on OpenKapow, The Hype Machine, and Gigul8tor by Eventful. And of course everybody loved GBlinker: a Google pin wired up to a serial port so it flashes when email comes in.
OpenKapow offers a platform for creating web-based APIs, feeds, and HTML snippets from any website, taking mashup possibilities way beyond the 300+ APIs offered on ProgrammableWeb.
The Hype Machine combines blog posts from a set of curated music blogs with Amazon sales data and upcoming events. It includes an amazing hacked integration with iTunes that takes you right from the web page to the track you’re interested in. If you prefer buying through Amazon, The Hype Machine figures out what CD page to display.
Gigul8tor provides a data entry page aimed at bands where they can enter information about upcoming gigs and venues. Gigul8tor displays a list of possible locations depending on the venue engine and enters event information right into Eventful in an interface designed just for bands. It shows how different user interfaces could be built in front of Eventful with mashup techniques.
And the winner of Best Mashup and a laptop donated by Intel is… The Hype Machine by Anthony Volodkin. Second place is also a music-related mashup: tourfilter. Is 2007 the year of the music mashup?
Meebo, a web based instant messaging service has raised $9 million in series B funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and existing investors Sequoia Capital. The company had previously raised $3.5 million in Series A funding, mostly from Sequoia Capital. The company released its final product in November 2006, perhaps with an eye on raising new capital.
Tim Draper is the DFJ partner who is leading the investment in the year-and-half old company started by three Standord students Elaine Wherry, Sandy Jen and Seth Sternberg. Sternberg declined to give out the terms of the financing. It is interesting to note that Sequoia Capital, typically very territorial about its investments is not leading this round of investment.
Meebo is one of the players in a hotly contested web-based IM aggregation business, competing with the likes of eBuddy. While the growth of the company has been impressive, the questions around profitability and revenues of their business are still unanswered. Those are issues, which are of little concern to DFJ or for that matter any other VC these days.
DFJ was attracted to the investment, according to sources close to the company because it mirrors the growth curve of two of their previous successful deals — Hotmail and Skype. Meebo is said to have more than a million “Meebo” users and is a favorite amongst the high school kids, who often have their IM access blocked during the school hours.
(Disclosure note: Blacksmith Capital, a precursor to True Ventures, a VC firm that has backed GigaOmniMedia is an investor in Meebo.)
Earlier today Jackson West, one of our writers was bemoaning the flakiness he was encountering today with his Google Mail (GMail) account. A few others said that they were having some problems, though I personally did not have any issues with the account. Nevertheless it is starting to look like an epidemic. Sarah in Tampa is reporting some problems as well. Here is a screen shot a good buddy of ours emailed us. Are you experiencing problems with GMail? There has been an increased incidence of downtimes at Google’s suite of web services.
Things have not been going too well lately for auction giant, eBay. A near-botched Skype acquisition, a stinging (and rather expensive $100 million plus) failure in China and Google’s willingness to sacrifice any semblance of profits are just some of the things that have have taken the air out of eBay’s stock.
The San Jose-based company has been getting-by via squeezing (and antagonizing) its merchants and end users. Against such a dismal backdrop, one has to applaud company’s decision to buy e-scalper, StubHub for around $310 million.
This is a deal that makes a lot of sense for eBay since it is a business that is parallel to its core auction business. It is also buying a start-up that is rumored to be doing about $100 million in sales.
The event ticket scalping (that’s exactly what it really is) is a business that is thriving on eBay as well as StubHub. And if you are a sports fanatic like yours truly, you are not going to give up StubHub anytime soon. Good call eBay.
Ben Schachter, Internet Analyst at UBS Investment Research in a note to his clients outlined the prospects for Yahoo and Google in the coming year. The divergent fortunes of two web giants are aptly reflected in their hiring (and firing) forecasts.
We believe there is a good chance of headcount reductions for Yahoo in 2007, or at least slowed hiring.
While Google has more than doubled its headcount in the last year, we still expect very significant hiring in 2007. The company currently has almost 1,300 openings on its website for the U.S. alone.
Looks like Google is planning on making (and spending) a lot of money in 2007, though these kind of hiring numbers remind of another fast growing company…
Google confirmed its investment in Chinese P2P startup Xunlei according to various reports. We wrote about the investment in early December. The New York Times reports that Google invested $5 million for a 4% stake, which means Xunlei is valued at $125 million — we were pretty close when we put the pre-money valuation at $100 million. The NYT also says that Xunlei.com will use Google’s search capabilities.
According to an unnamed insider, Xunlei recently received US$20 million in investment, in which Google invested US$5 million. Ceyuan Ventures, Morningside Ventures, IDGVC and Fidelity Asia Ventures invested the remaining US$15 million.
Daylife, a stylized news aggregator that is the closest thing we’ve seen to a webified newspaper, beta-launched this morning. Daylife is a meatier version of aggregators such as Google News, Topix.net, and Techmeme, offering tools for pivoting around information by story, characters, time, popularity, photos, and quotes, in a wide range of news categories.
Funded by old media and new media alike — “roughly twice as many investors as it has employees,” says paidContent — the company is perhaps best known for the involvement of media guru Jeff Jarvis and media bogeyman Craig Newmark.
While Daylife is engagingly pretty, it’s hard to comprehend as a whole, and it’ll take some learning to figure out how to use it. The company seems to understand this and has sent its data elsewhere to power the Huffington Post’s News Ranker and Treehugger’s grndx. This seems like a good direction, but the indexes have inadequate explanation of what makes something more newsworthy or more green, so they’re pretty much useless.
Daylife’s goals overpower what it’s doing, at least with the beta. It aims to “Make the news ecosystem more transparent and self-correcting, for the benefit of all involved,” “Develop new models for funding journalism,” and “Enable a civil discourse that is pragmatic, solutions-oriented, and doesn’t exaggerate divisions in favor of celebrating what unites us,” among other things.
Sounds great, but we don’t see any progress on these fronts so far. There’s not even any way for readers to comment on stories!
Update: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, an investor in Daylife, pans it in a review on his site. He writes,
What makes Daylife stand out is not so much what it does well, but what’s been left out. There are no RSS feeds, even for your bookmarked stuff. Even worse, there’s no ability for users to leave comments on articles, a feature that has been wildly successful at NewsVine and Topix. And the fact that the news is gathered by humans, instead of the algorithmically determined news at Digg, means the company will always have a higher cost of doing business.
If you have been around long enough in Silicon Valley, you see this story play out again – a start-up rises out of nowhere, is championed by the technology elite, becomes a successful company, and one day becomes a market leader, a dominant force. The market reality runs smack into idealism, and what follows is disillusionment.
In large part, the current problems, and this scrutiny stems from their idealistic corporate motto, Don’t be evil. As a publicly traded company, they are right to promote their own products. Yahoo, Ask, Comcast and AT&T – all promote their services, they just don’t hide behind an idealistic motto.
Idealism is often sacrificed at the altar of capitalism, and Google is at that fork in the road. It is time to drop that idealistic motto. When it comes to trust, in these cynical times, do we really trust anything, anyone or any corporation? I don’t… do you?
Wolfgang Luenenbuerger-Reidenbach, the head of online conversations at Edelman Germany (and a blogger himself), confirmed my information that both companies won’t renew their partnership which is about to run out at year end anyway.
Steve Rubel from Edelman adds: “The European sites developed in French, German and Italian are operational through the end of January. Work on the Asian language sites - Korean and Chinese - has ceased. The partnership was never set to renew.”
Google posted to its official blog to better explain its year-end Zeitgest search list. The description originally given when the list was released last week was irresponsibly sloppy, leading many to label it as the search engine’s most popular searches of the year.
The ranking was actually compiled using a combination of growth and traffic, and edited to remove common and offensive search terms. So basically, it meant next to nothing, especially while it was lacking an explanation of the methodology.
[W]e do not simply retrieve the most frequently-searched terms for the period — the truth is, they don’t change that much from year to year. This list would be predominated by very generic searches, such as “ebay”, “dictionary”, “yellow pages,” “games,” “maps” — and of course, a number of X-rated keywords. These are constants, and although unquestionably popular, we don’t think they actually define the Zeitgeist.
That lead to the list being topped by Bebo, a rising social networking star that — despite its popularity — many people don’t seem to know how to spell. Sure, it’s mighty popular, but it “leading all search terms” is somewhat fishy. C’mon, Google, people would be better served by accuracy and transparency.
If you are ready to give up your desktop clients and are considering switching to all-Google all-the-time, as one of us has done, be warned that the future is not simple and fraught with risk. An increasing number of GMail subscribers are complaining that their emails, accounts and archives are simply vanishing.
For nearly 10 days, a strange sort of bug is simply cleaning out the GMail inboxes. An afflicted soul wrote to us this morning, warning about this bug. Just when we were saying GMail is getting better and better. (If you are you one of the victims, please leave a comment and we will try and get to Google people and see what is going on.) On the GMail thread on (what else) Google Threads, a user writes:
Not only we are surprised that these sorts of issues happens to a company like Google but we are pissed off because e-mail is the core of our internet life.
A Gmail Guide responded to complaints on December 22nd, saying that they were looking into it. As of December 28, people were still waiting for the GSanta to show up. Anyway, hate to say this, Google is the new Microsoft. It is pounding start-ups with its traffic might, and is being afflicted by bugs.
Seriously guys, if you are a GMail user, perhaps it is time to download the GMail via POP3 access. Don’t wait, do it now! And Liz, add reliability and 100% uptime to your GMail wishlist.
Blog search leader Technorati was beaten by Google Blog Search for the first time last week, according to Hitwise. Late December statistics seem even less reliable than regular statistics, but it’s worth a mention.
Hitwise Research Director LeeAnn Prescott attributes most of Google Blog Search’s growth to a link to the service on the Google News homepage. After the link was added in October, Google Blog Search reportedly saw a 168 percent surge in market share of visits (Hitwise’s way of measuring relative traffic to websites) over the next two weeks. Google News now accounts for 60 percent of traffic to Google Blog Search.
I still find myself scratching my head when I have to remember the URL for Google Blog Search, so I’m not surprised to see direct links having such an impact. The service itself it is pretty good these days, often much fresher than Technorati.
For some odd reason I have never gotten around to writing about Sharpcast, a company that has gotten rave reviews from the traditional guys and the new new media barons. What Sharpcast does is sync all sorts of files between your phone and computers. Its like Sync-4-everything and doesn’t take much effort. Its like Blackberry for all your digital files. Anyway today I got my reason why I have not written about Sharpcast: lack of mac support for its brilliant photo syncing service. Well, that excuse is out of the window.
Sharpcast just launched an iPhoto uploader for Mac, which allows the click crazy to export iPhoto albums directly from their Macs into their Sharpcast Photos Web albums and are automatically synced all the way down to the person’s mobile phone and PC desktop. While you are at it, check out their Hummingbird technology.
MingleNow, a web platform for planning social outings, is formally launching Tuesday. The site, made by marketing company Blue Lithium, has been open for a while, and we’ve taken it for a spin or two. We like the hook, which is to connect people around the real-world places they hang out, but we’re wondering how the product will possibly cut through the clutter.
MingleNow project lead Krishna Subramanian tried to allay our concerns in an email exchange Monday night. “MingleNow helps you [figure out where all your groups of friends are hanging out] by helping you plan your offline social life with your friends online – similar to creating a MyYahoo for your social calendar,” he said. “It’s like MingleNow is like a CitySearch meets eVite meets true.com.” Subramanian promises extensive mobile integration in upcoming releases.
We have to say we’re not blown away by the brilliance of his explanation, but we still hope one of these social planning sites takes off. If it’s MingleNow, great. We recently wrote about the debut of event search on Google Calendar, noting this posed an additional challenge for the many startups in the space. Well, the situation has only gotten more extreme since then.
Here’s a list of all of the new event-oriented startups we’ve taken note of in the last few weeks.
ILCU: based in Israel; comes highly recommended; site marketing copy tries way too hard
PlanJam: focused on date planning; primarily in Los Angeles area
Vibely: find venues and events; see writeup on Mashable
BusyTonight: event listings; boasts “proprietary crawling and extraction technology” that has turned up more than 500,000 events
Zoodango: plan and attend events with other professionals; teaming up with The Apprentice
With such a bountiful variety of choices… I think I’ll stay home and watch a DVD.
Google is likely to announce a facelift to its Google Finance service soon, according to informed sources. The upgrade could come as soon as Monday, though as we all know product upgrades can get pushed out due to unforeseen reasons.
Google Finance debuted to much fanfare back in March 2006, but the service hasn’t made much headway against Yahoo’s still dominant Finance portal. We were not very impessed by Google Finance when it launched. Despite making some progress, the service lags Yahoo’s offering.
It has failed to crack the top twenty financial destinations, as calculated by both Comscore and Nielsen Net Ratings. Its contribution to the overall Google traffic is minuscule, as data from HitWise reveals. Interestingly the shuttering Google Answers and Google Finance are still in the same ballpark, which makes us feel that the next upgrade is critical.
Yahoo Finance, despite recent neglect, is still a superior user experience. If Yahoo added blog and other related content to its curated content and stock market data, it would do well to hold onto its position as world’s premier finance destination. Many Yahoo Finance visitors use its portfolio features, and thus are reticent to switch away from Yahoo.
That alone makes Google’s task harder. Like you, we are going to be waiting and watching for this upgrade.
There is no doubting the fact that we love the spam catching abilities of GMail and thanks to some help from our very smart friends and few tips and tricks, we have been using it to clean our massive email inflow. However, GMail’s UI is an acquired taste - some like it. Others don’t. Liz, for instance, likes it, and I don’t.
Still, it is a product that enjoys a passionate user-base. Mike Arrington, ebullient over the new Mail Fetcher feature, had a near religious moment, which he shared with all of us, in his post, Gmail Just Got Perfect.
Perfect, as I have argued before, is a very subjective word; one I am loathe to use, unless of course when describing Frank Sinatra’s classics. But then it is subjective
Nevertheless, Mail Fetcher is a way for GMail users to read their messages from their non-Google POP3 mail accounts within the Gmail reader interface. Now Yahoo, Mac and several other web based mail systems have had this feature for a while now.
Google is now introducing this? What took Google so long? Isn’t that the big question? And even now Mail Fetcher is available to a limited number of users. These two-penny features that don’t dazzle me at all. How about making GMail available over IMAP? Oh wait, that is going to cut into the money Google makes from advertising … never mind.
Anne Zelenka is not that impressed by Mail Fetcher as well. She gives her reasons over on Web Worker Daily. Liz has a list of things Google can do to make it nearly perfect. But then she is a passionate user!
Zooming around Google Earth is always mesmerizing, but it just got a little more informative. The product added user descriptions and photos, pushing a “Geographic Web” layer on top of the landscape. Many such mashups are currently available, but community-powered markups previously required downloading a separate file.
Little icons now indicate selected entries from Wikipedia, geo-tagged photos from Panoramio, and posts by the Google Earth Community. All of this is very sparingly done, but it’s great to see Google incorporating community content into the default version of one of its product.
We didn’t recall hearing of Panoramio before, so we looked it up. Turns out it’s a small Spanish photo-sharing startup with just two developers and 50,000 total photos (as of the end of October). Google Earth had previously hyped the Panoramio feed on its download page. The 3D animated photo mashup is similar to what we’ve seen of Microsoft’s Photosynth experiment. Where Photosynth is more elaborate, having pictures rooted to a map and all this surrounding context is the cheapest form of tourism we know of.
Now that Yahoo has announced its reorg, many are wondering and speculating as to what the ailing Internet giant might do in terms of M&A. Put another way, will Yahoo rely on acquisitions to fix its problems and plug up its holes? Or will it depend on its internal resources, now that they have streamlined for improved execution, to strengthen its strategic weaknesses. Given the company’s weak stock price, itís much more likely that they will opt for the latter path if at all possible.
Take Facebook as an example. Rumors of on-again, off-again acquisition talks notwithstanding, Yahoo must take steps to gain a leadership position in social networking. As the Internet’s largest community and communications company, the fact that Yahoo is not a leader in social networking represents one of the biggest missed opportunities in our industry’s history.
Just as Viacom’s Tom Freston got fired by Sumner Redstone for losing the MySpace deal to Rupert Murdoch, someone’s head should roll at Yahoo for the fact that they have virtually no meaningful presence in social networking.
But what to do? Should Yahoo take the highly dilutive plunge and buy Facebook for $1 Billion-plus? In my opinion, no, they should not — there is an alternative that is better, and a lot cheaper.
Yahoo should immediately clone Facebook. But as not Facebook is today; rather, as Facebook was before they opened up. In other words, Yahoo should develop and launch a social network designed exclusively for college and high school students. This market opportunity, which is the exact same opportunity that Facebook exploited several years ago, is now available once again. It’s a low-hanging fruit in the social networking space, one that would be very easy for Yahoo to pluck off. Cloning the original Facebook would also shore up one of Yahoo’s most glaring weaknesses it would bring back the 14-22 student demo.
For a company like Yahoo, social networking is not a market that they should buy into. Yes, Murdoch needed to, being a traditional media company with no real Internet competency. Even Google’s acquisition of YouTube made sense from the perspective of core competency since Google is notoriously bad when it comes to anything “social.”
But for Yahoo, social media is as natural a market as they come. It already possesses everything it needs to lead and succeed in that space. But they got lost during the last few years. Bringing in someone like Lloyd Braun to head up their Media Group was indicative of how misguided they were. Don’t get me wrong.
Braun is a tremendous TV executive. After all, he’s the one at ABC that green-lighted “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives”. But inside Yahoo, when the big opportunity in the market was clearly social media, it was inevitable that someone like Braun would himself become lost and desperate.
There’s a rumor going around that Google is investing a major stake in a Chinese P2P startup called Xunlei (or Thunder). Xunlei is reported to have between 75 million to 100 million downloads of its software, and has raised previous funding from Morningside and IDG Ventures. The rumor is that Google, along with Ceyuan Ventures, is participating in Xunlei’s next round of funding, and a source says that the pre-money valuation is around $100 million.
We haven’t been able to confirm this planned investment with the companies, but have heard this from three different sources in China and recently read the rumor here, too. We contacted Google and they naturally said “we don’t comment on speculation or rumors.” Ceyuan Ventures and Xunlei didn’t get back to us.
A source tells us that Xunlei’s software is getting an average of 140,000 downloads per day and the company has around 200 employees. The source also says that the company is working with television stations to do P2P downloads of television content that they attach ads to, and content partners include Phoenix TV and Hunan Satellite TV. There’s even a rumor from site ChinaByte that the company plans to partner with Horizon Media Group’s mobile community website 139.com to release an IM service soon.
Last week we emailed the guys at Pacific Epoch, a research company that looks at all things related to China and the Internet, to learn more about the startup. General Manager at Pacific Epoch Sage Brennan said:
Xunlei (”Thunder,” in English) has long been a popular download accelerator, for pulling in large files like video and e-magazines. Xunlei has recently leveraged Thunder (the application) to build a content-based platform, which offers and promotes video, audio, magazines, applications and other content categories. They are basically gunning for mop.com, toodou.com and all of China’s other big content players. I suppose the advantage is in Thunder’s background in serving up large files, as opposed to the UGC-built sites that have limited technology support for serving up, say, a feature-length film.
Brennan says about the Chinese Internet content market:
The portal business appears to be healthy and growing: Chinese Internet users are pounding away at anything that resembles entertainment, and all of the content sites are seeing tremendous growth as a result. This is still an ad-supported content play, which carries risk in China, where the online ads market is still approaching adolescence.
If anyone has any more details about Xunlei or the rumor that Google is planning to invest in them, contact us, or leave comments.
The widespread criticism of the Yahoo reorganization announced on Tuesday has been a one sided affair - outsiders looking in. Much of the criticism while warranted, has become to personal. Was getting rid of CEO Terry Semel, the quick fix the erstwhile Internet leader needs? Nearly 36% of our readers didn’t think it was the going to help, versus 27% who thought it would help turn the ship around.
What do the Yahoos think? We did not hear much from inside of the company, up until last night when we came across a post on Jonathan Strauss’ blog. It is perchance that we stumbled upon this post. Strauss, who has a little transcript of the webcast, defends the company’s recent actions, and feels optimistic about the future.
At the next all-hands. Just as a reminder. I’m sorry I didn’t do it today. I’m gonna put up there all of the press reports on how Yahoo! was going out of business 5 years ago. And of how we were gonna be swallowed up by AOL, owned by Time-Warner, and by Microsoft, and by everybody else. And Yahoo! looked like it had a dim future. Well those headlines, of course, were used to wrap a lot of fish in a lot of people’s houses, as the expression goes. And they were all full of shit, and they had no idea what we had planned for them. And they do not now as well!
“So, we could read about how I’m gonna join some retirement home. And we could read about how the company doesn’t have a vision. And we could read about how we can’t do this and we can’t do that. Trust me, they will be as full of shit this time as they were last time.” (Terry Semel, Yahoo CEO on the webcast.)
There is a tiny little paragraph at the end of Strauss’ post which tells you that there is a pocket of resistance (so to speak) inside Yahoo, which sees the big picture clearly.
I hate to break it to all of you, but the Internet isn’t about technology. Cisco is a technology company, Yahoo! is a consumer services company — the fact that those services are delivered via IP is just a detail. The people who fault Terry for not knowing how IP switching works might as well have criticized Ted Turner for not knowing how to install a cable head-end.
Thank you! No all Yahoo has to do is stop obsessing with Google. Just focus on five things: make email the best experience in the world, make Yahoo finance better, use blogs and social media and build great media destinations, and of course, make My.Yahoo.com better.
I personally think of Yahoo as a consumer brand, not a technology company. Yahoo is a media company. It knows how to aggregate content pretty well, and it has the audience & has the ability to monetize it well. (My post from yesterday)
PS: We met Strauss before at the Widgets Live conference, and as a result we have him in our feed reader. If there are other Yahoo employees who would like to send me their blog links, please email me, so I can stay in touch with you.
Well-funded startup Zillow is evolving beyond providing real estate trivia to reconstituting the definition of what makes a home for sale. The company’s challenge is to disrupt the high-strung real estate industry without making so many enemies it gets driven out of business. With $57 million in the bank, lately it’s been a guessing game of just how Zillow would go about thinking big.
Tonight, the company is announcing it will provide real estate agents and individuals tools to advertise a home for sale within the excellent Zillow map and home price estimator web interface. And, in a twist, home owners will also be able to attach a “Make Me Move” price to their homes as a casual way to explore putting their houses on the market. Everything continues to be free to users and supported by ads.
Zillow’s move will combine ads for-sale-by-owner properties and properties represented by agents, something competitors like Trulia are not doing in order to abide by the requirements of multiple listings services. Zillow, on the other hand, is electing to enlist individual agents and home sellers on a house-by-house basis. The company is not providing tools for structured uploading, said Zillow CEO Rich Barton in an interview this week.
Zillow currently has 3.5 million visitors per month, about 250,000 of them realtors. Since introducing a “claim your house” tool about two months ago, 250,000 people have registered with the site, according to Barton. The company, which is less than a year old, employs 130 people.
Zillow is now trying to expand its audience to include more casual users. Currently, half of Zillow users say they plan to buy a house in the next two years. Of the properties, “what’s on the web now is a small subset, only what’s for sale now,” said Barton. “That’s two to three million homes out of 85 million in the United States.
“Whether or not a home is for sale is not binary,” he continued — saying of Make Me Move, “it’s not like it’s a commitment; it’s kind of a flirtation.”
Barton continually has to defend himself against fears that he will replace real estate agents the same way he replaced travel agents with his last big startup, Expedia. His reply: since the web ad model has now become viable, Zillow doesn’t have to get in the middle of any transactions. Rather, it is getting into the content business, offering trivia, listings, as well as a new real estate wiki project (also launching today) combining expert and visitor knowledge about all things real estate.
“Zillow is making conversations with real estate agents better,” contended Barton, comparing it to online diagnosis providers like WebMD. “People are sitting down with printouts of Zestimates [Zillow’s term for home price estimates] and comparables. It’s more like an expert consultation.”
Pinger, a San Jose, Calif.-based voice messaging start-up, has received a fresh cash infusion to the tune of $8 million dollars, sources say. The latest round of funding includes previous backer Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. DAG Ventures is the new investor in this round, and perhaps the lead investor. John Cadeddu from DAG led the investment. Company officials declined to comment.
Pinger launched at DEMO earlier this year, and is essentially the next generation voice messaging service. Instead of leaving someone a voice mail, you ping them, and that results in a text message being sent to them, which can be clicked to listen to that voice mail. Check out this DEMO video to get a better idea on how it works. Though quite simple, Pinger has a bit of latency in its user experience.
Last time we met with co-founder Joe Sipher, we chatted about that, and were encouraged that they were working hard to make the experience better. One suggestion we had for them: a Pinger widget that can also be put into our Netvibes page, or on our Vista desktop. Of course, a tiny Pinger widget for OS X: priceless.
Wikiasaid today it took a second round of funding provided entirely by Amazon (amount undisclosed). It also acquired online sports community ArmchairGM in a deal worth $2 million.
Wikia, founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales and led by Gil Penchina (formerly of eBay), provides a place for wikis on things that aren’t appropriate for an encyclopedia — most often fan pages for things like a team, product, or TV show. It had raised $4 million earlier this year. Developing product-oriented content makes a lot of sense for Amazon. The sports stuff? Not so much.
Update: Penchina gave us a call to offer more detail.
The funding and the acquisition “were frankly very separate events; they just happened to come together at the same time,” said Penchina. However, he added, it would have been hard to pay for the ArmchairGM deal without Amazon coming in.
The ArmchairGM purchase is not just about sports, but about the collaborative blogging platform ArmchairGM had built on top of MediaWiki (the platform Wikia uses that was developed for Wales’ Wikimedia Foundation). ArmchairGM had created “a level of richness in terms of interface that we aspire to but hadn’t gotten to yet,” said Penchina.
The idea is to use the ArmchairGM technology to power time-sensitive vertical topics like sports, but also news and coupon deals. “We see Wikia as the library and ArmchairGM as the magazine rack,” said Penchina.
Techcrunch first reported that COO Dan Rosensweig is going to leave the company by end of March, and Sue Decker will run finance and sales. There was a lot of chatter around a senior executive level meeting at Yahoo, that had been webcast. It was attended only by C-level and top VPs.
Wall Street Journal reports that media-group head Lloyd Braun might be gone as well. WSJ says Decker is likely being groomed to take over from Semel when he retires. Yahoo has issued a press release confirming the shake-up.
Many Silicon Valley insiders in the know have questioned future of Yahoo CEO Terrey Semel, and we have heard that there is some discord with the board members. Given the poor performance of Yahoo stock, and other problems have put Semel, once regarded the sage who saved Yahoo on a weaker footing. Braun’s exit shows that the erstwhile savior might have lost some of his political capital. Braun was one of the executives Yahoo hired at the behest of Yahoo.
With the leaking of the Peanut Butter Manifesto to the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo’s dirty laundry started coming out. What we are seeing is the fallout of that. We had pointed out the exodus of Yahoo managers was a sign of a growing internal malaise.
Will Google be the winner in the $31 billion local search and online classified advertising market, asks Donna Bogatin over at the ZD Net’s Digital Micro Markets blog. Perhaps, but it is not going to have it easy, if Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com has anything to do with it.
The Emeryville Oakland, Calif.-based search division of IAC Corp., has just announced AskCity, its foray into local search market. The company has partnered with the likes of Yelp, JudysBook, and scores of others to come up with what Lanzone describes as a comprehensive offering.
We caught up with him, and asked him about the plans for this offering, and what it means to Ask.com. He talks smack about Google, makes fun of Matt Cutts and of course, dances around the revenue question. Excerpts from an interview.
OM: What is AskCity, and how long has it been in development.
Jim Lanzone: AskCity is a new local search application from Ask.com. It has been under development for the better part of 2006. AskCity is available for all US cities, though the content is deepest in the top 50 markets. We plan to take the product international in 2007.
OM: So why should I care about this launch. I can find a lot of information from other sites.
JL: You should care because search engines are the #1 online most-used resource for local information, ahead of yellow pages and local newspaper sites, and local searches account for about 10% of all searches on major search engines. Yet local is the category with the lowest user satisfaction in search. So there is this gaping need for better local search. We think we’ve got it.
OM: From an outsider standpoint, isn’t this competitive with other IAC properties such as CitySearch?
JL: No, exactly the opposite. Ask.com is a search engine, and search is the doorway, not the destination. The rest of IAC is comprised of some of the top destinations in many major vertical categories, from Citysearch in local content, to Ticketmaster in ticketing and events, to ServiceMagic in local services.
So we are a natural, complimentary partner with the other IAC properties including Citysearch (despite their name).
Being on the same team as the other IAC companies allowed us to work together in an unfiltered fashion. We got their raw data, and were able to build our own Ask.com search product on top of it. We were like kids with a new toy getting to play with that data and weave all of it into one, synthesized product.
OM: What is the impetus behind this product, and what kind of revenues do you expect from the local efforts.
JL: As I said above, local is very important in search. It’s a top five category for us. If we do a better job for users of our local search, hopefully they’ll use us more often, and some of them will shift over to Ask as their primary search engine as we accumulate more and more best-in-class products.
Revenue within the AskCity vertical is not a primary concern at launch. We make plenty of money on our standard search page, and many users will access AskCity via the shortcuts at the top of that page (called Smart Answers). Down the line there are obviously plenty of opportunities to make money in local, but we’re focused on user adoption of this new service first.
OM: This seems less competitive with Google that it does with Microsoft and Yahoo. Is that a fair assessment?
JL: Heck no, we’ve got Google in the crosshairs too. You think Cutts snoops around our offices in his spare time and dresses up as Dead Jeeves for Halloween because he thinks we’re focusing on Redmond? He is obsessed with us. It’s unhealthy, actually. I’m kind of worried about him (and not just because UCLA beat Kentucky last week). (Apparently Jim went to UCLA and they beat Kentucky, where Cutts went to school. Its not search, but basketball. )
In reality, AskCity was created solely to meet the needs of our 29 million monthly US users better. We weren’t doing a great job in local before, and I’m sure that drove some people to use other engines. But those sites aren’t doing a great job either. Our research showed that they rely too much on maps and gimmicks like fly-overs, have limited content, require too many steps to transact, and have a lack of coherence between various the local products they’ve all created. AskCity tries to address much of this dissatisfaction, both on our site and in the category overall.
OM: Are there plans to bring this to the mobile world as well? After all this information is much more relevant if one is on the move?JL: Yes, there is definitely a plan to bring AskCity to mobile, but we weren’t able to swing it on this go-around. We need to move quickly, however, because Ask Mobile, wihch launched in October, is getting way more traffic than we ever anticipated.
OM: Are there plans to incorporate user generated information and blog posts into this offering.
JL: User reviews are already incorporated into AskCity via Citysearch, Yelp, JudysBook, InsiderPages, OpenTable, ServiceMagic and others. There are photos for some businesses. Getting more info from blogs is something for the future roadmap. Definitely a good idea.
It’s hard to escape hearing about the launch of Microsoft’s Vista operating system for business customers today — especially with Steve Ballmer calling it “the biggest launch in our company’s history.” The consumer version won’t be widely available until January. With all the delays in the Vista launch, what’s a little more wait?
That was enough to spark my interest, especially since FeedBurner has not been reporting Rojo subscriptions due to a bug. Kirkpatrick’s comment also made me wonder how can Rojo, a discontinued product be bigger than Google Reader?
By providing so-called elastic data storage and virtual hardware, 
StrikeIron
One of my favorite demos at Mashup Camp (and the one that got my wooden nickel) was 
Nevertheless it is starting to look like an epidemic. Sarah in Tampa 
For nearly 10 days, a strange sort of bug is simply cleaning out the GMail inboxes. An afflicted soul wrote to us this morning, warning about this bug. 
Pinger launched at DEMO earlier this year, and is essentially the next generation voice messaging service. Instead of leaving someone a voice mail, you ping them, and that results in a text message being sent to them, which can be clicked to listen to that voice mail. 
The 