OpenID, the open decentralized user centric digital identity platform is getting big awfully fast. A few days after AOL announced its support for the system, Digg, the San Francisco-based social news website is looking to jump on the bandwagon, and start supporting OpenID.
While OpenID got a big boost from AOL, the identity system has benefited from early support by small Web 2.0 start-ups. Six Apart, Technorati, Magnolia
Kevin Rose, co-founder of Digg, is about to make this announcement at The Future of Apps conference sometime later today and will be giving out more details. The support is likely to be in place later this year, Rose said. We did not talk long enough to fill in the gaps but will update the story in a few hours. Those pesky intercontinental roaming charges are not good for a long telephone interview.
We’ve followed the layoffs, rumored Facebook deal, and venture funding of Seattle’s well-funded (some would say over-funded) online job search startup Jobster. Now Jobster CEO Jason Goldberg says the 3-year-old company is launching a new site on Thursday, which will start offering free, unlimited job postings. At the same time Jobster is officially announcing its deal with Facebook.
The free posting offer is significant as the company made much of its revenue off of selling premium web-based tools to companies to help them manage the process of finding workers. Now the company will depend on getting its free users to upgrade to its premium services, and will focus on building up the audience for the Jobster.com site — Goldberg says the site brought in 1 million unique visitors in January.
Goldberg says the free posting plan makes Craigslist a near-term competitive target and places CareerBuilder and Monster as longer term targets. Good luck with those competitors.
Earlier this year the company cut its staff down to 85 employees from a staff of 145. Goldberg says those jobs were part of the divisions that the company is no longer concentrating on, like recruitment consulting and phone sales support.
The plan all sounds a little too easy - make it free and you’ll make more money? Though Facebook for one, seems to believe in the direction. Goldberg says Jobster will be the exclusive job site to work with Facebook, and the service is tentatively being called ‘Career Center.’ While most of the Jobster/Facebook deal will happen in the Spring, Jobster is adding a ’share on Facebook’ button on Thursday that will pull in aspects of the Jobster profile onto your Facebook page.
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.
Metacafe, the online video startup that was rumored to be close to an acquisition deal for $200 million or so last December, is getting a new CEO. Co-founder Arik Czerniak tells us that he is stepping down as CEO and will remain at the company focusing on products and strategy. Erick Hachenburg, previously of Electronic Arts, will be taking over as CEO of the company that has offices in Palo Alto and Tel-Aviv Israel.
Czerniak tells us that the guard change “is great news for the company,” and Hachenburg “is a guy who is going to lead us to the next level.”
Metacafe has been adding other new executives recently. In January the company said it had hired Mort Greenberg, VP Sales, Allyson Campa, VP Marketing, and added Bud Colligan as its Executive Chairman. Metacafe, also opened a New York office “to better serve its advertisers and media partners.” The company has raised at least $19 million from investors, including Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners.
In December TechCrunch reported that Metacafe’s acquisition deal might had fallen through because of traffic concerns, and cited Comscore numbers that showed the startup had a 25% traffic drop in monthly unique vistors — from a high of 4.2 million in September, to 3.1 million in November.
Numbers compiled on NewTeeVee from Comscore for the month of December, show that Metacafe had 2.95 million total unique visitors for that month (U.S. audience). Numbers from Compete compiled on NewTeeVee say that Metacafe is ranked #14 with a 1.3% market share and 1.57 million unique monthly visitors, also based on a U.S. audience.
Hitwise data says comparing Jan-07 versus Dec-06, the market share of visits to the site among all U.S. web sites increased 1% — that’s in contrast to the company’s growth between Jan-06 and Jan-07 where Hitwise says its market share of visits to the site increased 912% among all US websites. That year over year traffic boost came as a result of the company sharing the advertising revenues with video creators — an advantage now blunted by YouTube’s recent announcement.
It seems like the traffic concerns are real, and the company is looking for ways to turn around revive a traffic decline. Investors, for one, are always eager to press for the symbolic change of the guard when things go south. The new ceo will have his work cut out for him, trying to revive the company and beat its competitors
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?
Jason Goldberg can now party with Mark Zuckerberg - their respective companies are rumored to be working together. Goldberg’s Jobster is said to have teamed up with Zuckerberg’s Facebook, and will be the “career partner” for Facebook.
Apparently, Careerbuilder and Monster were also in the running for this deal, but did not make it to the finish line. Is this combined force a competitor to LinkedIn? Our sources say the deal is almost done, but Jobster’s Goldberg isn’t talking. We are still waiting to hear back from Facebook as well. This deal could prove to be a shot in the arm for Jobster, which has been trying to realign itself, and has laid off employees in recent times.
Update: The service is still not publicly available and is protected right now. Don’t try your Gizmo username or password - this is a seperate combo, which only company officials are privy to. More updates to follow.
SIPphone, the company behind Gizmo Project has introduced a new product, Gizmo Call that make is fairly simple to make VoIP calls from any browser that can support Adobe’s Flash.
From a usability standpoint, this one gets a big thumbs up from me. After installing this tiny plugin, you are given a screen that is pretty much a Flash-based replica of the Gizmo Project soft client. (More on Flash & VoIP.)
The client auto configures your system, and uses the built in audio and video hardware of a computer to make phones calls. It easily found my Plantronics bluetooth headset, and used the MacBook Pro’s internal video camera for video calling.
You can call anyone who has either a Google Talk client or a Gizmo ID. Of course you can connect to PSTN numbers as well, by typing in the number you wish to connect to. Gizmo has also created a little embeddeable link which you can copy and paste in your blog, or on your MySpace page. People can call you by clicking on that button. You can embed the link in your emails as well. Its like SkypeMe, except you don’t need to launch a new application, but instead you use the web browser.
By launching this new browser based calling service, SIPphone is ensuring that it is staying current with newer rivals such as Jajah, Jaxtr, Wengo(Disclosure: Wengo is an advertiser on GigaOM Network) who are using widgets to popularize their services.
With no desktop client software to download, Gizmo & SIPphone are betting that there will be further interest in their low cost phone service. While my mother is grateful for these low cost services, I still remain skeptical of a business model that is reliant on low price as a business tool.
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.
LinkedIn … now here is a company, that came to the social networking trend early, stayed focused on the business market, and now is well on its way to clock $100 million in revenues. It has just crossed the profitability threshold and is making money pretty much every which way it can.
A valuation of $250 million is being put on the company … and yet it goes ahead and raises almost $13 million in fresh venture funding, and no one asks the question: why? Why does it need fresh capital from Bessemer Ventures and European Founders Fund?
Somehow I don’t buy the “new product experiment” argument made by Keith Rabois, LinkedIn’s VP for corporate and business development. Time to give Reid Hoffman a call, and ask for myself.
Update: Reid Hoffman has left a long response to what LinkedIn is going to do with the money in the comments. Here is a quick link, if you want to understand where LI is going.
Perseverance is one quality Steve Case has in abundance. When almost everyone had given up on America Online, he plowed ahead, somehow managing to keep going.
It took over a decade, but eventually America Online soared. He will need the same steadfastness and patience for his latest project, Revolution Health, which he started in July 2005.
Case, the former CEO of America Online and chairman of AOL Time Warner, launched Revolution LLC with $500 million of his own fortune, according to BusinessWeek. The Revolution Health Group is one of its projects. Revolution Living is the other. Since its launch, RHG has acquired six start-ups and invested in another (InterFit Health) to form the core of RevolutionHealth.com, launched Monday.
“It took a long time before people believed in AOL,” Case said in an interview. “I feel the same way about health care.” He did acknowledge that the current task was tougher, but added that the opportunity was larger.
No one can deny the fact that navigating the health care system, or simply finding relevant medical information can be a migraine-inducing exercise. A simple trip to the eye doctor can often result in a hernia-inducing paper trail. “There is a lot of frustration with the whole system on all sides,” Case says, and often “[the] consumer is on the fringes. We want to put them in charge.
“Most people when they look for health care or medical information, they go to a search engine, and are served up links,” says Case. Not an ideal scenario, especially if you as a consumer are searching for information relating to a particular ailment.
Case wants to offer an easy to use, well-organized health information portal populated with professional data from institutions such as the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and Harvard, with of course social networking built in.
The service also includes interesting medical tools, such as Symptom Checker. “I am a father of five and when one of the kids falls sick on Sunday morning, it’s straight to the emergency room because you just don’t know what’s wrong, and that’s quite frustrating,” he says.
There are some feedback mechanisms that can help patients make informed decisions. Visitors can rate their doctors and healthcare providers, helping share their experiences with others. “We want people to come here to stay healthy,” Case says.
Good point! Suffering from a bad case of lingering flu (thus explaining my prolonged absence from the blog) today seemed like a good time to figure out ways to quit smoking. At Revolution Health, it took less than five minutes to find the discussion forum where I should ideally be able to interact with others who have kicked the habit. The forum was devoid of messages, but I am quite likely to return.
Nevertheless, it also represents one of the many challenges facing Revolution Health. It faces competition from established players like WebMD. Then there is the little issue of company charging fees from customers. There are a growing number of start-ups who are chasing similar opportunities, by focusing on lucrative vertical opportunities. Some wonder if Revolution Health is trying to do too much?
Case explained that what RH is trying to do is what online brokerages did for personal finance. What’s the point of a personal portfolio if you can’t manage your stocks, mutual funds and other investment vehicles? And what good are they without solid research and data? “What we need is a simplistic approach,” he says. Everything neatly packaged - the kind of packaging that helped millions ease onto the Internet!
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.
In this morning’s stories on NewTeeVee I mention no less than five companies whose name started with “pod”: PodShow, Podtrac, Podbridge, Podscope, and Podzinger. Seriously, they should just put smush those three letters onto one key on my keyboard! The funny thing is, the two companies I was writing about are named Kiptronic and Nexidia.
The stories: Kiptronic, a video and audio podcast advertising platform, has raised $4 million in Series A funding. And Nexidia, a speech recognition vendor, has what looks like a working model of the technology you’d need to do “AdSense for video.” So, while these companies’ names may not overlap, they have pretty complimentary technology, both taking smart and unobtrusive approaches to online video advertising. We’ll be watching that space closely.
Update #2 at 12.35pm, Friday: A Fox Interactive spokesperson just emailed us this statement: “The toll booth rumor is categorically untrue. We have no plans, current or future, to charge people for widgets. We are working on a filter for security reasons – so there may have been a bug due to that…if so, it’s fixed now and working – no more quicktime worm or flash probs from here on out.”
Updated at 4.22 pm, Thursday:A couple of days ago Robert Young hinted that MySpace might be looking to block-and-tackle-and squeeze some of the widget makers in an effort to bolster its bottom line. Well, looks like the day has arrived sooner that we thought. A senior executive from a very prominent widget maker just emailed us and pointed out that:
So as of this morning, new embed tags to MySpace do not work. Photobucket, Youtube, etc… Their site might be broken, but there have been rumors for weeks that they are thinking of blocking everyone. This might be it, or just a test.. “
Our instinct on this one is that it is a test, and FIM is testing how far they can push the widget makers. Saber rattling is the word, but we would appreciate your feedback in realtime. If FIM does decide to erect a toll booth, well the widget economy is going to have its first fiscal crisis. We will follow-up with FIM and find out.
Update: We emailed FIM but have not heard back from them as yet. Mashable reported that there were some problems with the Flash-based widgets, but they have resumed working. Brad Greenspan, one of the original founders of MySpace is speaking out this very public muscle flexing. He is involved in a legal tangle with FIM. Here is what Greenspan had to say:
Anyone that understands MySpace and the internet space in general realizes MySpace is a monopoly. A great article identifying this came out this week by John Barrett a director of research at Park Associates. The media needs to wake up, shake off the spell of News Corp and realize that if we don’t educate the public on the abusive practices of News Corp and MySpace, then everyone who uses sites and services online can be considerably harmed.
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.)
It all began with an anonymous tip, about a new service called Shadow Number that allows you to make private calls from your mobile phone, while still retaining your privacy. Their sales pitch: ShadowNumber keeps your play life private.
Their flyer led to their Web site, and a click later it revealed that the Menlo Ventures-backed TalkPlus, a VoIP start-up was powering this new service. Their tag line: Calling for a Playdate!
… Instantly alter your caller ID, Shadow Number keeps your play life private.…
While the company made a couple of announcements at CES, there was no mention of Shadow Number. The company domain name is registered to a Toronto-based Canadian company called Contact Privacy, though it shared the name servers with TalkPlus. So we decided to check in with Jeff Black, CEO of the company.
“Shadow number is our brand for the alternative market,” Black explained it to us. “We are uncomfortable with putting our TalkPlus name, and are using the Shadow Number.” Black describes the “alternative market” as the adult market and that is on the fringe of that adult market.
Despite their self-claimed value propositions, most if not all VoIP start-ups face an uphill battle in terms of mass scale adoption. The desire for anonymity, especially when indulging in naughty activities, might be actually be their savior.
There are many reasons why people might want to keep romantic liaisons anonymous, from the simple (you’re just flirting) to the more complex (use your imagination). There is also a measure of safety in anonyminity, and the desire to keep potential stalkers at a hidden-number distance might well be an attractive service.
TalkPlus is just the latest amongst the VoIP start-ups to use the anonymity sales pitch. Jangl has signed a deal with Match.com, while Vivox has signed a deal with the WorldFriends’ Networks.
Some of us (including yours truly) may find Shadownumber’s pitch a tad distasteful, but it is an ingenious way for a fledgling start-up to popularize its offering. “There are certain markets that we think will have higher adoption,” Black said. It is a time-tested model for new technologies – go adult and go big.
Many new technologies — like VHS and DVDs, and more recently Video over the Internet — owe no small part of their early success to adult entertainment, which spurred people to jump through technological hoops they might not have otherwise. As long as no laws are broken, why shouldn’t VoIP benefit from satisfying the same desires?
If the popular memes are to be believed then The Founders Fund has the midas touch, thanks to some savvy investing by Peter Thiel and the bad boy Sean Parker. The latest buzz is around David “Smoking” Sacks’ new company, Geni. Given their track record it is kinda hard not to be impressed with this investing team, but there is one little investment that stands out in garish constrast.
Remember Engage.com, that got funded a while ago. If Alexa trends (I know they are as reliable as a dating profile) don’t portend good things for a company that launched with much fanfare back in July 2005. We checked it on Compete.com, and things don’t look much different either. Everything has pretty much flatlined. This is in sharp contrast to Thiel and Parker’s track record of investing/starting hypergrowth companies.
What got me interested in them was this recent funding announcement by OkCupid, another dating site which is offering listings for free. I am most curious to see what the future holds for many of these start-ups that are competing with leviathans like Yahoo and Match.com. It be interesting to see what comes out of iDate 2007, an Internet dating conference that kicks off in Miami tomorrow.
It is a damn shame that Findory.com is riding into the sunset. Greg Linden fought the good fight, but decided that it was time to move on. In his sayonara he writes:
“I built Findory around the idea of applying Amazon.com-style personalization and recommendations to information. Search only helps if you can say what you want. Personalization helps you discover things that you could not have found on your own.”
Despite being drop dead simple, Findory never realized its true potential as an information discovery engine. It has all the makings of being a personal memetracker, something a lot of folks have been clamoring for. In contrast the general purpose memetrackers that follow conversations, like Techmeme and Tailrank keep growing. Any thoughts?
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.
The trials and tribulations of the competitive voice service provides such as Vonage, have forced venture investors to look at startups that marry VoIP to mobile phones. Any application that can lower the high mobile phone tariffs can quickly gain traction. And that is enough for investors, who ready to put down mega dollars.
You might have heard of names like Jajah, iSkoot, Mobiboo and Fring, with some of them getting big cash infusions from the likes of Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures. Add Truphone to this list. The UK-based mobile VoIP startup has raised £12.5 million ($24.5 million) in Series A funding from Wellington Partners, Independent News & Media, Burda Digital Ventures and existing investors Eden Ventures and angel investors.
The company plans to set up what it describes as a global Mobile Internet Network Operator. The company has signed up deals with Wi-Fi network operator The Cloud, which lends some credence to its claim.
Much as I like Truphone the application, I find the company has an uphill climb. The fancy MINO acronym might sound impressive but in reality Truphone will be fighting the battle for cheap minutes, which is great in early days but then it quickly gets old.
The only reason I use them is because the calls are cheap, cheap enough to make me wonder what really is the margin for Truphone after it has paid off the incumbent who terminates my call in India.
With multiple phones to support, one cannot overlook the problems and costs involved with developing and deploying software to many different mobile platforms. This at a time where there are competitors popping up all around them. Of course, what is to prevent the Vonages of the world to play the same game?
Here is the twister: if Truphone becomes really popular and is embedded in all phones, then you can make free calls to other Truphone-enabled phones. In other words no revenue opportunity, just like Skype. Forgive me for thinking, that this investment is laced with a dash of irrationality.
Updated: 8.58 pm: A few minutes after we had ordered our dinner at Mehfil Restaurant in San Francisco’s SOMA district, Scott Rafer, chairman of Orlando, Florida-based MyBlogLog, checked his Blackberry Pearl, and broke into a smile.
An unusually intense man, it was an unusual sight to see him smile. He typed out his response, and asked his lady friend to press the little Pearl to send the email. “It’s done,” he said, referring to the sale of MyBlogLog to Yahoo.
Though we have reported on the deal in the past, including this morning, when Marketing Shift reported that the deal was done, only to pull out the story a few hours later. I refrained from asking Rafer, who is a close friend. We normally don’t discuss business, the only reason our friendship has survived the trials of time. But this was special, and he shared his big news, though we had planned to have dinner almost a month ago.
Rafer declined to comment on the rumors about the price, and I didn’t press him for the details. Whatever the amount might be, it is clear that five-employee company (including Rafer) have done well, primarily because the company was completely boot strapped and raised zero dollars in angel or venture capital investment.
The team is going to join Yahoo and will be based in Berkeley and San Francisco and will be part of the Yahoo Developer Network. Most will report to Chad Dickerson, Sr. Director, Yahoo! Developer Network. This is part of Yahoo’s efforts to become increasingly social. Given how much effort Yahoo is putting on their Panama advertising platform, there must be some publisher-advertising angle to this deal, something we will discuss with Yahoo executives at the next opportunity.
More than the actual deal, it is the company’s past that makes it an interesting story. It was nearly eight months ago when I met Eric Marcoullier at yet another dinner with Rafer.
Marcoullier, who is based in Orlando, Florida had started the company with Todd Sampson in 2005. The two are fifth grade buddies. Eric had been trying to get bloggers to use his traffic measurement tool, though for some odd reason I did not bite. Rafer had contacted him via LinkedIn, and convinced them that they were sitting on a bigger opportunity than plain traffic measurement business.
Rafer suggested the company become a distributed social network, an idea that has been championed by Josh “Da Konnector” Kopelman of First Round Capital. Kopelman was one of the investors in Feedster, Rafer’s previous start-up, that is apparently limping along despite numerous setbacks. Soon there after, the MyBlogLog widgets started to show up on blogs, and a certain buzz started to form around the company. Since then 45,000 folks have signed up for the service, which is described as a blog-based social network.
In Fall 2006, at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Josh Kopelman hosted many start-ups in his private suite, and it was here he introduced MyBlogLog to some of the Yahoo folks, and soon the rumors of a pending deal started to fly. However, it was only this evening that the deal closed.
Footnote: This just might be one of the first few virtual company acquisition. One of the founders lived in Massachusetts, while another called Orlando his home, along with two other developers. Rafer lives in San Francisco. And they met on LinkedIn. Yup, something for our friends on Web Worker Daily to chew on!
Seldom has a company gotten more ink for delivering so little as OQO, a San Francisco start-up that is building an ultra-ultra portable PC that is increasingly becoming pointless. “Our main goal is to reinvent the PC in a pocketable form,” Jory Bell, Oqo co-founder tells the New York Times.
Oops, someone already did that! HTC and their Qwerty-keyboard capable Windows Mobile smart phone devices are cheaper and have longer battery life than OQO. Their future models are getting even more powerful. Windows Mobile is slowly overcoming most of its shortcomings and is becoming a stable-and-viable mobile OS option. OQO might have missed their window of utility.
“OQO Delivers World’s First Ultra Mobile PC With Integrated Mobile Broadband Service Powered by Sprint,” their press release screams. Scroll down and you find out a brand new meaning for delivers:
The soon [WHEN] to be released OQO model 02 will be available at http://www.oqo.com/store, through OQO’s enterprise sales team, and through channel partners. To be notified of product availability, please sign up at http://www.oqo.com/.
Between “delivers” and actual “delivery” lies the window of missed opportunity.
Okay my VoIP start up friends! If you got something exciting and new - product, service or even a feature - you are eligible to enter the ETel Launch Pad, which is going to be held as part of ETel, the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference. The event will be part of ETel’s opening ceremony on Tuesday evening, February 27, 2007.
ETel Launch Pad is co-organized with yours truly and co-produced by GigaOm. Entries will be accepted through Monday, January 22, 2007. You can submit your entry here. You want to get more details about the event, you can go here, or read all about it on the ETel Blog.
With GUBA facing an upheaval in the boardroom, the company has put itself for sale. The San Francisco-based online video startup has hired a high powered banker to shop it around. Our investment banking sources say that Blake Warner of Thomas Weisel Partners is the man looking to find a new home for the company. Warner was one of the main bankers who helped shop MySpace to News Corp., and is described as someone with considerable connections in the media and technology community. Our sources close to GUBA were able to confirm that GUBA indeed is for sale.
Our sources say that there is considerable interest from a few tech companies and a handful of media companies, primarily because of Johnny, a digital fingerprinting developed by GUBA. For that reason alone, the company could fetch between $25 to $30 million, our sources say.
Johnny allows the company to spot and stop illegal content from cropping up amongst uploaded videos. It is one of the main reasons why GUBA has been able to convince large media companies to partner with them and sell television and movie downloads.
Digital video fingerprinting is an area of intense interest. Yesterday, YouTube got into a fracas over a sex video of a Brazilian soccer player’s wife. Earlier this week, Macrovision bought Mediabolic for about $43 million, hoping to extend its copyright protection and digital rights business into new digital devices such as PVRs and set-top boxes. For GUBA, interest in this space could offer a timely parachute.
There’s no denying that the San Francisco-based company is facing a crisis, as more executives have followed co-founder and chief executive officer Tom McInerney out of the door. Roman Arzhintar, vice president of strategy at GUBA and Bart Myers, senior vice president of product development, soon followed, citing their desire to start yet another Internet video company.
GUBA’s current crisis is also a reflection of company’s confused business model. The company could not shake off its adult content roots, never raised venture capital and could not leverage its business partnerships with large media companies into a meaningful position in the hyper competitive online video market. Straddling two distinct businesses - user generated videos and premium video downloads - GUBA could not decide on one.
The user-generated video-sharing business move was prompted by the growing popularity of YouTube, and GUBA betting that it could leverage its high Alexa ranking (mostly because of a profitable adult content business) into becoming a rival to Chad-and-Steve’s baby. The high Alexa ranking was also a justification for the company to stick to the GUBA name, a move that can be deemed a strategic blunder. GUBA, like a reformed bent nose, hasn’t been able to shake off its questionable past.
The recent changes have come as a result of disagreement over the direction of the company should take. While McInerney was in favor of selling the company, the engineering side of the house wants to soldier on. “I think we can all acknowledge that YouTube has won the big prize,” McInerney bluntly told News.com. He is said to have argued that in the post Google-YouTube world, small companies need a big brother, someone with deep pockets and major media company connections.
The pragmatic McInerney wanted to cash in the chips before the music stopped, which might have been logic too cold for others. But with Warner in charge of selling the company, McInerney might get his wish after all.
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.
Cisco has started off 2007 with a bang: buying Ironport Systems for a whopping $830 million in stock and cash. Ironport makes appliances for enterprises and helps them tackle the spyware problems and email spam amongst other things. The deal is an effort by Cisco to beef up Cisco Security Technology Group. Is this deal a sign that Cisco has its big “check book” out again?
As a backstory, the company raised over $100 million in venture funding. The buyout today is still more cash in the pockets of Peter Thiel and Max Levchin and ex Hotmail-ers Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith who were amongst the individual investors who participated in the initial round of funding.
Sean Uberoi Kelly, CTO, founder and principal inventor of Wallop has left the San Francisco-based social networking start-up.
We were able to confirm this information with Karl Jacobs, CEO of Wallop. According to him, Kelly has no plans to work on any other project.
Kelly led the development of the Wallop prototype as a research software developer in the Social Computing Group at Microsoft. Jacobs says Kelly is going to back to New York, and described the departure as part of natural progression in the life of a start-up. “He has built the product and he has family in New York,” says Jacobs.
Nevertheless, when inventor/co-founder leaves a company it certainly raises eyebrows. With an impending launch of the final product, raises doubts, whether true or unfounded. We are still trying to reach Kelly and will update the story accordingly with his statements.
Jacobs says the company is going to come out of beta in the first quarter of 2007. It has fallen out of the limelight in recent months. Wallop has raised $13.6 million in venture funding from angels, Norwest Venture Partners and Bay Partners.
Disclosure: Wallop was one of the exhibitors at Widgets Live conference, organized by GigaOM and Niall Kennedy.
Nevertheless, I was actually glad to read the interview - an honest and a realistic assessment of the online video space. Here is how McInerney assesses the market. (Some of the details come from previous conversations with him.)
YouTube won the big prize, everybody else is looking for a consolation prize.
No more billion dollar buyouts of video start ups.
Sell now or cry later.
Get big (media) brothers or get out of business.
More GUBA executives will leave.
As a reporter, there is nothing more frustrating that talking to a chief executive who offers you canned statements, or politically correct and bland quotes (aka PR drivel), and of course a lot of spin.
Tom has been a straight shooter, and fairly candid whenever I spoke with him - and we often did about the state of online video, Internet startup scene and why New York is more fun. When I wrote about the coming video shakeout back in July 2006, Tom said, “There’ll be a lot of casualties in the next year.” No wonder he got out when he did!
So now you know why they did the big redesign, added video and all those fancy new features. Digg has raised another $8.5 million in new funding from existing VCs, Greylock Ventures and Omidyar Network. The company, previously had raised close to $3 million from these two firms, and Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Ning and Netscape.
Hopefully this money will be spent wisely, to grow the business into a profitable entity. After all, Greylock’s David Sze, one of the backers of Digg, tells Venturebeat that Digg is not going to be sold anytime soon, and instead will partner with others who want to incorporate Digg-features in their offerings.
If not selling out the company to someone bigger, then the only other exit option for Sze and other investors is to go public. In other words, Digg will have to grow its sales rapidly, become profitable, and go public.
But then…
“Our board and investors did not want us to focus, at any time, on monetization at this stage,” said CEO Jay Adelson. “Our focus has been on user growth.”
Digg, certainly has its work cut out. There has been growing negativity enveloping the San Francisco-based start-up. There have been stories of Digg gaming, spamming, and doubts about their pageviews. As Digg grows up, both in popularity and as a company, it is becoming the focus of relentless scrutiny.
Of course with Leopard and Vista almost around the corner, it is hard not to get enthusiastic about the future of widgets. Gabe Dorfman, a Microsoft product manager is predicting a widget boom. Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, and scores of others are part of this “atomization of web” movement. “The Google personal homepage is the fastest-growing Google product,” Marissa Mayer tells Newsweek, “This market is going to be very large.”
Shenzhen Xunlei Network Technology, the Chinese P2P video software company has confirmed that Google will become an investor in the company, according to a Bloomberg news report. The confirmation from a company official comes nearly 20-days after Katie has reported on the pending investment. Bloomberg story is scant on details for now. If you want to read more about Xunlei, check out Katie’s report.
The Venice Project, the much-awaited Internet TV project from the founders of Skype, started bringing in outside beta testers today. The beta program will be viral, with each user able to distribute invites to new testers. As soon as we give it a spin we’ll do some more in depth coverage here and on NewTeeVee.
We set out to try to merge the best of TV and the best of the Internet and I think we have just taken a big step on a long journey. For a few months we have been quietly testing with a small circle of people. Now, we’re going to expand that circle – with more and more people getting invited. If you want to take it for a spin, get an invitation from an existing beta tester.
From Om: Someone who got to use the service wasn’t very kind. “To sum up, very bad interface, no text description of what the buttons mean, quality of video goes up and down very much, not really much better than a good flash file that you size up 250%.”
Exclusive screenshots beneath the fold:
You can visit Gizmocall.com, and you are prompted to download a small plugin, which is available for both Windows and Mac computers. 
It took over a decade, but eventually America Online soared. He will need the same steadfastness and patience for his latest project, 
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?
While the company made a couple of announcements at CES, there was no mention of Shadow Number. The company domain name is registered to a Toronto-based Canadian company called Contact Privacy, though it shared the name servers with TalkPlus. So we decided to check in with Jeff Black, CEO of the company.
Though we have reported on the deal 
Seldom has a company gotten more ink for delivering so little as OQO, a San Francisco start-up that is building an ultra-ultra portable PC that is increasingly becoming pointless. “Our main goal is to reinvent the PC in a pocketable form,” Jory Bell, Oqo co-founder
Oops, someone already did that! HTC and their Qwerty-keyboard capable Windows Mobile smart phone devices are cheaper and have longer battery life than OQO. Their future models are getting even more powerful. Windows Mobile is slowly overcoming most of its shortcomings and is becoming a stable-and-viable mobile OS option. OQO might have missed their window of utility.
We were able to confirm this information with Karl Jacobs, CEO of Wallop. According to him, Kelly has no plans to work on any other project.
I should be upset that 
