Ajax Girl

The big guys are really starting to focus on personalized home pages, where Yahoo dominates and Google is coming on strong (by adding a link from the Google.com home page). Google says their personalized home page has been their fastest growing product over the last few fiscal quarters. Pageflakes and Netvibes are two notable startups in this space.

Tonight Yahoo is announcing a few enhancements to the recently relaunched My Yahoo: a new calendar module, a My Netflix module that uses the Netflix API and an update to the Yahoo Bookmarks module.

The calendar module has read/write functionality (as it should). My Netflix lets users see what movies have recently been released on DVD, the movies in your queue and movies you have at home. The main addition to the bookmarks module is the ability to add new bookmarks directly from the module.

The new features will be rolled out on Thursday. Screen shots are below. The first one shows the calendar and netflix modules.

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We announced two new experts today for the TechCrunch20 conference in September: Google’s Marissa Mayer (VP Search Products & User Experience) and Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse (SVP Communications & Communities). We announced Caterina Fake, MC Hammer and Rajeev Motwani last week. The complete Panel of Experts is here, and we will announce more in the coming weeks.

The format of TechCrunch20 is simple: Twenty of the hottest new startups will announce and demo their products over a two day period in front of an audience of hundreds and a panel of twenty experts. And they don’t pay a cent to do this. They will be selected to participate based on merit alone. We are taking submissions now and will begin announcing selected companies in about a month. Submit your startup here.

Brad Garlinghouse

Brad Garlinghouse is SVP, Communications & Communities at Yahoo, which includes Yahoo Mail, Messenger and Groups. During his tenure, Brad has also overseen the primary starting points to the Yahoo! network, including Yahoo.com and My Yahoo. Brad is the author of the infamous Peanut Butter Manifesto, which received significant press for his vision for Yahoo! to realize its full potential. Prior to joining Yahoo, Brad served as CEO of Dialpad Communications. Earlier in his career, Brad led VC investments in software, communications and Internet businesses at @Ventures. He also spent time in product and marketing leadership roles at @Home Network and SBC Communications.

Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer is VP, Search Products & User Experience at Google. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to 100+ languages and launching numerous features and products. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. Before Google, she worked at UBS research lab (Ubilab) and SRI International. Marissa has been featured in various publications, including Newsweek (”10 Tech Leaders of the Future”), Red Herring (”15 Women to Watch”), Business 2.0, BusinessWeek, Fortune and Fast Company.

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What a day for Apple investors. The stock started off strong today on a lot of pre-market buying, despite news that Amazon will finally start competing on sales of DRM-free music.

Then, whoops, at 11:49 AM EST Engadget posted saying that the iPhone and Leopard operating system launches would be seriously delayed. They based the story on an internal Apple email that was forwarded to them. The original post:

This one doesn’t bode well for Mac fans and the iPhone-hopeful: we have it on authority that as of today, the iPhone launch is being pushed back from June to… October (!), and Leopard is again seeing a delay, this time being pushed all the way back to January. Of 2008. The latest WWDC Leopard beta will still be handed out, but it looks like Apple-quality takes time, and we’re sure Jobs would remind everyone that it’s not always about “writing a check”, but just how much time are these two products really going to take?

Apple’s stock promptly tanked on massive selling, going from $107.89 to $103.42 in six minutes (11:56 - 12:02). This wiped just over $4 billion off of Apple’s market capitalization. A lot of people lost a lot of money very quickly.

Well, it turns out that the email was a hoax. In an update, Engadget said that the email was in fact sent from Apple’s internal email system, but that it was not accurate. Apple quickly notified Engadget of the error. They said “This communication is fake and did not come from Apple. Apple is on track to ship iPhone in late June and Mac OS X Leopard in October.”

By 12:22 Apple stock had mostly recovered and it ended the day down just $1.40/share, or $1.25 billion in market cap.

Let the lawsuits and criminal investigations commence (although to be clear, I do not believe Engadget will have any liability here. Apple may).

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Veotagveo just got an angel investment of $750K. As we’ve covered before, deep tagging is an important feature in lengthier online media. Who hasn’t wanted to skip the boring parts of a keynote address. A host of startups are incorporating deep tagging into their services, such as Pluggd, Viddler, Motionbox, JumpCut, and even Google Video.

Veotag allows you to add this functionality to any of your video or audio from within their embeddable player. You can upload content (WMV, FLV, mp3) from your computer or via URL. Anyone can sign up for an account, upload content, publish, and start tagging points in the programming. The Veotag player wraps around the content, displaying time stamped comments along the right hand side that link to interesting segments, as chosen by the publisher. You can see an example of the player on a speech by Guy Kawasaki here.

Veotag has a search engine for the tags, which is also indexed by the major search engines. This index can then be transmitted to an ad serving engine for targeted advertising around the audio or video.

Readers interested in incorporating deep tagging into their own media should also check out Click.tv’s video deep tagging widget with comments.

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Lots of announcements today at Google during their Searchology event. My live blogging notes are here and I’ve posted on their pre-announcement of a cross-language search engine coming soon. See SearchEngineLand as well. It’s going to take some time to organize all of my notes, and I’ll be updating this post.

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Udi Manber, VP Engineering at Google (and former CEO of Amazon’s A9) just announced at the Searchology event that Google will “soon” announce a cross-language search engine. Screen shot of the user interface is above.

To return more results, queries will be auto translated into other languages to retrieve more results, and all results will then be translated back into the original query language. The goal is to return many more results for queries, particularly queries done in less popular languages.

The screen shot is extremely poor quality (I apologize), but it shows arabic results on the left, translated from English results on the right.

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It’s been rumored for a while that Montgomery Securities is representing virtual world Club Penguin in a sale transaction. It looks like the company is locked in talks, possibly exclusive, with Sony, and the price is “at least half a billion” says a source close to the deal.

We mentioned Club Penguin last month when a competitor launched from IAC called Zwinktopia. The company is killing it - projected revenues of $65 million in 2007 with $35 million in profit. Having nearly 50% bottom line margin is exceptional.

[updating]

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At least half of silicon valley’s tech writers and major bloggers are at Google HQ today at the invite-only Searchology, where we are watching a series of presentations by Google executives.

There may or may not be announcements of note - Google is only promising to “highlight the latest news on search innovations.” Speakers will include Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience; Udi Manber, VP of Engineering; and Craig Silverstein, Technology Director.

The Agenda:

• Welcome
• Search of Days Past (Craig Silverstein)
• Search as We Know it Today (Kerry Rodden and Ben Gomes)
• Next Step in Evolution of Search (Udi Manber, Marissa Mayer)
• Q&A (Udi Manber, Marissa Mayer, Alan Eustace)

What I didn’t know is that I could be attending this from the comfort of my bed - the whole thing is being streamed and is available here.

I’ll update this post with any interesting announcements, until it’s over or my battery runs out.

Notes (chronological order):

(more…)

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On the frevvo blog, I posted several interesting articles about combining Ajax-based RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) with REST web services. It seems to me that Ajax+REST could be the next killer application.

Users interact with these RESTful applications using the familiar browser. In practice, most real applications boil down to manipulating documents (resources) which maps perfectly to REST. What’s missing is an easy way to interact with these documents using Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). That’s where Ajax comes in – it puts a “face” on REST and makes it possible to create complex, visual, browser-based applications without compromising any of the principles of REST.

Just imagine replicating the mashup phenomenon within your company – even just within the IT department. That’s where frevvo comes in. Suddenly, it’s really easy to create a Web 2.0, Ajax-based RIA that mashes up all these RESTful services and to do so at lightning speed and very low cost. REST web applications can finally be paired up with a rich, Ajax-based client to create Rich Internet Applications.

Amazon.com have announced that they will be launching a digital music store later this year with one particular feature that is sure to bring a smile to many: the store will only sell DRM-free MP3 music files.

As with Apple in April, EMI Music’s digital catalog will be key to the new Amazon DRM-Free offering.

It’s a great step forward for consumers. Having every song and album available exclusively in the MP3 format and DRM-free will mean no more hassles with compatibility and ownership. Buyers will know that once they buy the music, they own the music and are free to use it on anything, anywhere for personal use.

The decision is also another step in bringing down the DRM wall. There may have been a lot of interest and discussion in relation to Apple’s announcement in April, but it’s easily forgotten that as the most popular destination for legal digital music, Apple is also the biggest seller of DRM infected music. Amazon selling only DRM-free music sends a message that a leading retailer is willing to back consumers over big business and that a digital music business can be built and continued using only DRM-free products.

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