Ajax Girl

You may have noticed a few posts today written by retired TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick, who recently left us to become Director of Content at Portland startup SplashCast. Marshall graciously agreed to come back and write for TechCrunch for the next week or so while I’m away in London to speak at the Future of Web Apps conference.

It’s good to see him back in the TechCrunch saddle. I miss his writing and look forward to reading his stuff.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/90074245/

Distributed call-center outsourcing service LiveOps has announced the closure of a Series C round of funding for $28 Million.  The round was lead by Benchmark Capital, a new investor in the company and a fund that rarely makes later stage investments.  Benchmark’s investments in the consumer space, which more readers here may be familiar with, include Pageflakes, Bebo and Yelp among others.

Palo Alto based LiveOps offers web based management of more than 10,000 home based telephone workers.  Here’s what makes them interesting: their service operates as a performance based auction, routing incoming calls to the best performing worker available.  Top workers participate in IM communities to discuss methods of increasing productivity and solving problems. I like seeing the web make work more interesting and perhaps services like this will help decrease the drudgery of call-center work. At the very least, it will likely make the business more efficient. Unlike previously profiled Sky-Click, an all Skype powered call center solution, LiveOps doesn’t use VOIP at its core.

Prior to today, the company raised a $1 million A round and a $10 million B round from CMEA Ventures and Menlo Ventures.  

Former eBay COO Maynard Webb became the LiveOps CEO in December after being introduced to the company by Benchmark’s Bill Gurley.  Gurley says Webb’s background, LiveOps’ early success and the company’s strong use of the web all made the investment compelling.

Benchmark is also an investor in ODesk, another distributed workforce service for software developers.

A big part of the belief behind LiveOps is that home based workers are happier, more productive and less subject to turnover than workers in traditional brick and mortar call centers. That industry is plagued by turn over, Gurley says, including churn experienced when one company finds a good city to place a call center and competitors all rush in. The combination of self-scheduling and the comforts of home with the management of competition made possible by the web and telephony’s evolution sounds like a strong approach to business to me.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/90039281/

P2P and web video sharing service Veoh will relaunch Tuesday with some important new features and a new look.  Cynics looking for interesting video sites post-GooTube will find Veoh of real interest.  The company has Michael Eisner on its Board, content deals with companies like Us Magazine and United Talent Agency and most important - some very good looking technology.  

Starting this week, all users of Veoh will be offered video recommendations using an algorithm developed by Ted Dunning, developer of MusicMatch (now Yahoo!Music).  Pro users can charge viewers to rent or own DVD quality videos downloaded through the P2P Veoh player.  Pro users can have their videos automatically cross-posted to YouTube, Google Video and MySpace Video and automatically transcoded to QuickTime for iPod viewing.  

Pro users will receive reports on the number of views and comments their videos have recieved across YouTube, Google Video and MySpace Video.  This is likely to become a popular service; the viral video trackers at VidMeter will launch a similar service across 13 sites next week.

Other new features will include a very nice multi-video embeddable player.  The functionality isn’t as flexible as a number of other companies’ offerings but it looks great.  Users can display their favorites or other channels they’ve subscribed to.

Perhaps the biggest part of the relaunch will be the P2P Veoh Player.  It will support full length downloads from Veoh, torrents, video sites around the web and any RSS feeds.  A new browser bookmarklet will let you download videos from any site.  The company highlights YouTube, Metacafe and others - presumably there’s some transcoding going on.  The Veoh player can also be connected to your TV and controlled by remote.  It’s like Joost for User Generated Content as well as select content partners.

All in all, it’s a very impressive relaunch.  Presuming that users are willing to download the P2P application to their desktops, Veoh could end up seeing very wide use.  If it does well in ease of use (and it looks like it does) it could fit the bill as a top-notch one-stop video service.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/90026534/

Electronic Arts announced today that it has acquired San Francisco based online karaoke site SingShot for an undisclosed sum.  Kareoke sites are real crowd pleasers and this is the third in a year to be acquired.  Fox Interactive Media acquired kSolo in April, then Yahoo! scooped up Bix in November.  

All three acquisitions brought experienced social media executives into the fold of larger companies - Nimrod Lev from kSolo, Mike Speiser from Bix and now SingShot CEO Ranah Edelin and CTO Niranjan Nagar who previously helped build Rhapsody Digital Music before it was acquired by Real Networks.

The SingShot team will join the EA Sims Division, but EA says the technology “can be applied to several different community projects within EA.”  That’s similar to what Yahoo! said when it acquired Bix. Speiser went from head of Bix to product management for Yahoo! Groups, 360, and Photos under the title VP of Community

As a large company, it doesn’t hurt to have a nice, small, successful karaoke site in your portfolio - but what’s probably most important is the infusion of executives who have built successful social media sites before.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/89994269/

Neat video by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University. [See embedded player at end of post.]

The video presents a broad overview of the difference between 10+ years ago on the web and the social web of today (”Web 2.0″) — focusing on how HTML was used for defining structure and stylistic characteristics (”form”), whereas XML has separated form and content, facilitating data exchange for all kinds of mash-ups.

We’re seeing today with the “widgetizing” of the web that all kinds of content is being made available to be plugged-in to webpages — allowing for wider distribution of content.

Michael’s video asks the question of who will organize all this data — and tells us that we will. He brings to light that with every link we click and webpage we visit — we are teaching the machine.

It makes me think of the movie “I, Robot” or “The Matrix” — humans not working for “the man,” but rather working for “the machine.” In the movie “I, Robot,” robots eventually start learning how to feel, react, and eventually take us over.

I don’t know the current status of artificial intelligence (AI), but I do know that there are over 2mm blogs created every month — most of which are people spewing about life in a wide-open journal format. Eventually, I would think AI will be able to sift through all this information and methodically sort it, understand it, learn from it, and possess their own thoughts and feelings — possibly even take us over!

I’m sure there’s data to back me up on this, but today compared to 10 years ago — people are way more comfortable with the Internet and have less privacy concerns. Or at least the younger generations that have grown up with the Internet aren’t as concerned with privacy — and spew what’s on their mind to the entire world via the web.

Maybe someone will be smart enough to learn / organize people’s thoughts / ideas / feelings and search will revolutionize from the poor “search results” experience we are complacent with (and have come to expect) — and instead we will each be empowered with the exact answers / information we are seeking at any given moment (using the collective information mass on the web).

RSS readers can click here.

Editor’s Note: This post was written by guest contributor Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/89966256/

Enterprise RSS vendor Attensa released a new iteration of its attention-data focused RSS service this morning.  The race to see which enterprise RSS vendor can figure out how to drag the business world kicking and screaming into using a technology (RSS) that seems undeniably good for it continues.  

New in version 1.1 of Attensa’s enterprise feed server are the following capabilities, all of which are logical, smart additions to an RSS suite.  Whereas the product previously shipped as a server with software already installed, the company now offers a full installation pack that can be installed on hardware purchased otherwise - as well as a fully hosted solution.  The “virtual server” is intended to alleviate security concerns and the hosted solution is aimed at small businesses.

Also new is the ability for department or project heads to determine their own teams’ selection of subscribed feeds.  This was previously administered on one level, from the top down.  A body of persistent search options has also been added to the feed server product.  Both of these steps might seem strange to consumer level RSS users, but in some highly controlled enterprises, a free hand at subscribing to any and every feed they find is not what many companies seek for their employees.  Attensa told me that one customer, a large bank, has bank tellers using their product just to receive promotional updates - whereas another customer, a pharmaceutical company, wants their research librarians to be able to subscribe to anything.

Other changes to the service include increased sophistication in reporting, with reading habits reported and searchable down to the level of the individual, and a new administrative capability to allow or block particular kinds of RSS enclosures.

Attensa faces competition in the enterprise RSS market from Newsgator and KnowNow.  All three are very different services; Attensa focuses on automatic customization of reading lists and reporting attention data or user behavior.

Any of these three companies’ products have the capability to revolutionize an organization’s relationship with information, yet it seems that none of them are selling a whole lot of product.    Older companies are either going to start using RSS or they will soon have their lunch eaten by upstarts for whom feed reading is an important part of the work flow.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/89926507/

A few months ago I was asked by Tom Markiewicz, CEO of EvolvePoint, to be on a panel about “Using RSS for Marketing” for the SXSW Interactive Conference coming up March 9-13 and I gladly accepted.

The other panelists include Bill Flitter of Pheedo, Greg Reinacker of NewsGator, and John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing. All of them are with RSS and marketing companies, which should make for good conversation. 

Last week saw the launch of Yahoo! Pipes, an “interactive feed aggregator and manipulator,” followed by lots of enthusiasm from the tech community.  The reality of mashing up, mixing, filtering, sorting and combining data sources into a unique output has just been made easier.  See Tim O’Reilly’s post, Pipes and Filters for the Internet.

In preparation for the panel, I’m soliciting your feedback and insights on topics related to RSS to help shape our discussion.  A quick scan of the current eHub entries in the RSS category shows 109 services.  I’ll be pulling these out and paring them down into logical groupings.

Of course, the technology is only part of the equation.  As I brainstorm the myriad of other issues related to RSS, I’ve started making a general list.  It’s by no means comprehensive.  I hope you’ll provide other topics in the comments below or through my contact form.  Once I’ve gathered enough ideas and resources, I’ll document the feedback in some form online (wiki perhaps) and continue discussing with the panelists.

Technology

- RSS readers

- Aggregators

- Microformats

- XML

- OPML

- Browsers and RSS

- Mobile

Concepts

- Adoption of RSS by mainstream

- Data remixing with new apps (Pipes and Plagger)

- Multimedia RSS trends (podcasts, vidcasts)

- RSS as direct broadcast

- Placelessness of data

I’m also looking for case studies or research around:

- Feed traffic vs site traffic trends

- Benchmarks and best practices

I’m curious, what have you done with your site or company to advantage RSS?  What RSS services are you currently using and how has it benefitted you?  What trends in RSS are you noticing?

I haven’t been to SXSW in a few years.  The last time I was there, I was lucky to have my artcodes/ADD project as a finalist in the weblog category.  This time, I’m really looking forward to being more involved and interactive.  I posted over at Ideacodes that Max and I will both be at SXSW.  Please send us a note if you’d like to meet up as we hope to plan a social get together while we’re in Austin.  Lots of our friends and clients from SF will be there as well so it should be a good time.

Look forward to your thoughts.

[Technorati tags: sxsw, rss, pipes, web+2.0, ehub, emily+chang, max+kiesler, ideacodes]

Source: Emily Chang
Original Article: http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/sxsw-interactive-panel/

I was glad to see two interesting initiatives this week related to women and girls in technology.  The first was Entrepreneurial Night by Girls’ Middle School in Mountain View and held at Google.  Ten groups of seventh grade girls made their pitches to a room full of venture capitalists. 

In his post at BusinessWeek, Rob Hof writes:

It was pretty amazing to see these young entrepreneurs slinging PowerPoint slides in front of a huge conference room screen in front of more than 400 people–including the VCs from whom they were asking for real investments of $100 and up. I’d be scared to death, but they all had their pitches down cold. They had been working on their businesses for months as part of the school’s Entrepreneurial Education program, now in its 10th year. And they had rather precise projections of their profits and the amount they’d return to their prospective investors. Judging from sales at the booths they had set up before their presentations, they were going to beat those projections handily.

Vivian Wu, a judge at the Girls’ Middle School (GMS) Entrepreneurial Night for the past three years writes about the experience at Techcrunch.  She explains that the program is a full year course at GMS with volunteer business coaches helping the girls conceive of ideas, write a business plan, and prepare to present on the actual night.  This level of commitment to teaching is really key to change: both encouraging and teaching applicable skills to kids.  The other part of the project that resonated with me is the philanthropic angle. 

Worth noting is the fact that the girls are all taught to develop profitable and philanthropic businesses. In May, they liquidate the businesses, return capital (and more) to investors, and each donate 5-20% of profits to charities like Greenpeace, SPCA, CARE and the school library! Several of the teams focused on recycled products as well, which Trae Vassalo from Kleiner particularly applauded when she funded Reuse, Recycle and Relax.

Concepts of social entrepreneurship and sustainability aren’t limited to any industry.  Instead, they benefit the business, the world, and each of us in this connected ecosystem. 

Women 2.0 Business Idea Competition

The second event is the Women 2.0 “Submit your business idea… on a paper napkin” contest.  Women 2.0 is a branch of Entrepreneur27, and “connects like-minded, motivated young women in the Silicon Valley to swap energy, ideas, and experiences with each other.”

The competition requires that you submit a business idea on a paper napkin for a chance to pitch your plan to a judging panel of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.  I love the minimalism of condensing your idea to a 5 inch square napkin. It’s not just entrepreneurs that might sketch their most brilliant thought in a few line graphs or words, it’s also engineers, artists and writers who have revered paper napkins as medium for inspiration

Women 2.0 is accepting business ideas that are in concept stage or in beta launch only.  The deadline to submit ideas is Thursday, March 15.  Afterwards, semi-finalists will be notified by March 20th and then need to email a 10 slide presentation by April 15th.  Finalists will notified by April 20th with the presentations taking place at 7 pm at CNET in SF on April 25th.  You can have a team of up to four individuals.  At least half of the team must be female and at least half of the team must be under 27.  Get all the details and requirements at the Women 2.0 site. 

[Technorati tags: entrepeneurship, women+20, business+idea]

Source: Emily Chang
Original Article: http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/women-20-entrepreneurship/

MySpace announced this morning that it is offering free indexing to any content producers who want to block users from uploading their copyrighted videos.  The site has been offering audio filtering and limited video filtering since late last year.  The biggest question on the table is whether and when YouTube will do the same, as it promised to do when it was acquired by Google. Other questions include those around fair use of content.

MySpace has licenced the filtering technology from Audible Magic, an acoustic fingerprinting company that acquired a video filtering technology called Motional Media ID™ in November.  Motional Media was invented by David W. Stebbings, a Senior VP for Technology at the RIAA from 1995 through 2000.

The company’s technology is said to recognize unique signature vectors in seconds. Sources close to another company, MotionDSP (our coverage) tell us that company will soon announce a similar product that track unique patterns of motion in video footage.

The primary technical challenges faced by these companies are scaling and variable video formats and qualities.  Audible Magic’s audio filtering is said to be remarkably effective - post-lawsuit implementation at P2P network iMesh, for example is reportedly free of false positives. “We haven’t seen any false positives, and we’re seeing a recognition rate of over 99 percent,” iMesh’s founder told MSNBC last year. That was the audio program, though, not the video filter.

The political cost of trying to tame the wild west, though, is still unclear. The debate over what constitutes fair use, for example, could become largely moot if one side of the debate can lock its position down with a technology filter.  Critique, satire and sampling could someday survive only with the permission of the party being satirized.  That would not be good.  

Ultimately though it’s unsurprising that big content owners want to control their content and existing business model instead of exploring models that are radical, new and in theory less profitable.  I find it unfortunate that the enforcement of a false scarcity of content is the direction things are moving. The theory is that law and order yields investment and will ultimately mean more available content.

How popular is copyrighted content online? Conventional wisdom is that it’s what drove YouTube’s growth - but a quick look at the viral videos with the most views (via Vidmeter) and the most inbound blog links (via Viral Video Chart) shows that original content is getting plenty of attention. That’s good to see.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the Director of Content at SplashCast and will be assisting with TechCrunch while Michael Arrington travels.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/89840663/

The time has come. Today we begin to open the kimono on Highrise (formerly known as Sunrise).

The name is Highrise
The first order of business is the name. We were advised against using Sunrise because of potential trademark conflicts. Highrise was actually the name we came up with before Sunrise so we’re going back to the original. Now on to more exciting things…

The schedule
Over the next few weeks we’ll be revealing screenshots, descriptions, concepts, stories, videos, design decisions, and more. Then we’ll launch. We’ve been using Highrise internally for the past couple of months. We’re very happy with it and excited to let you use it too.

So what is Highrise?
Highrise is a shared contact manager that helps you keep track of who you talk to, what was said, and what to do next. Like Basecamp helps you collaborate on projects, Highrise helps you collaborate on people. You can use it alone or with your co-workers. You can think of it as a company-wide, web-based, shared address book with a few twists.

Why did we build it?
We talk with a lot of people. Vendors, lawyers, accountants, journalists, customers, etc. Keeping track of who said what, when they said it, and what needs to be done next is complicated. A jumble of notes on paper, in email drafts folders, and post-it notes is a surefire way to miss this and forget that. Further, we wanted to build a shared tool so I could read up on conversations David had with John Doe before I called John Doe. Knowing the history of a company’s past interaction with people is a great way to save time and make future conversations more valuable.

Scenarios
Highrise was built to satisfy common scenarios like:

• See all follow-ups scheduled for this week
• Review Susan’s notes before calling her contact at the printer
• Set a reminder to write Steve a thank-you note next Friday
• Review all conversations I’ve had with Chris from Apple
• Organize interview responses for potential candidates online
• See a list of all the designers your company has hired in the past
• Enter notes from a call with a potential client
• See all the people your company knows at The New York Times
• Schedule a follow-up sales call with Jim in 3 months
• Review all the people tagged “Leads 2006”

Highrise helps you keep track of people and related actions. Almost everything we do in business revolves around people. At the other end of every phone call or email or letter is a person. Highrise helps you keep track of these people, these conversations, these interactions, and what needs to be done next.

Stay tuned for the next preview of Highrise. If you want to be notified when we launch, please enter your email address on the Highrise mailing list signup form.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/265-preview-1-an-introduction-to-highrise-the-product-previously-known-as-sunrise