Ajax Girl

Deal site Trezr is yet another eBay exit for a website (here). The site is like Digg for frugal shoppers looking for deals, coupons, and tips on how to save money. Users submit tips to the site, which other users can vote up in importance.

Trezr has a rather clever way of making money, by monetizing outbound links through affiliate programs with Commission Junction, Linkshare, Amazon, and Performics. However, the site hasn’t generated significant traffic since launch at the end of last year. The owners are claiming 4,000 visits per month and there doesn’t appear to be a solid community to grow out from as Digg did with Slashdot. The site also doesn’t offer any rewards for users like Fatwallet’s cash back rewards.

Other companies taking eBay exits were SynapseLife (now Down2Night), Kiko (now Justin.tv), and RSS Calendar.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/130965355/

Community focused citizen journalism site Backfence announced June 29 that it is closing. Perhaps demonstrating how dire their situation had become, no one noticed until today.

Backfence had been in trouble for some time; In January CEO and co-founder Susan DeFife resigned and the company reduced staff from 18 to 6.

The company took $3million in venture capital from SAS Investors and The Omidyar Network in October 2005.

BackFence joins the TechCrunch Deadpool.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/130959570/

Blog search engine Sphere has kept a relatively quiet profile recently. After a private beta launch in late 2005 and a big-press full launch in the spring of 2006, they’ve kept mostly to themselves.

Instead of focusing on building a better blog search engine (an area that Google now dominates after a recent Technorati refocus), Sphere has spent its time developing technology that automatically finds blog posts related to whatever a user is looking at currently. The product, called SphereIt, has been added to around 20,000 blogs (including TechCrunch, see the end of any blog post) and gives users additional reading material on the topic of the article or post. It is one of the top 50 plugins for Wordpress-based blogs.

But the company, led by CEO Tony Conrad, isn’t just attacking the market from a bottom up approach. They have also been closing deals with some of the biggest news sites in the U.S. Deals with The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times (Tech & Science sections), AOL News, TIME, Dow Jones Market Watch, CBS News, AOL Entertainment, NBC Access Hollywood, Media General Affiliates, AOL Sports, ZDNet Blogs, DWELL, About.com and others were all announced recently on the Sphere blog.

These news sites and 20,000 blogs all have Sphere results included on story pages - see this story on CNN for an example, or the screen shot above for the WSJ implementation. That’s well over 1 billion page views per month with Sphere links and results.

Competitor Technorati has pursued deals with these and other sites to promote their results as well. But Technorati only returns results linking to that particular story, meaning most relevant content is ignored. Sphere instead analyzes indexed blogs and performs a semantic analysis on the text to determine relevance. The results are strikingly better - and the fact that the WSJ dropped Technorati and added Sphere attests to that.

Sphere doesn’t pay any of these sites to include their results. Instead, they will serve advertising in the results and share the revenue with the partners.

The company has done a lot with just under $4 million in venture capital and 9 employees. They’re technology seems to be proving valuable to partners…which makes them perfect acquisition bait down the road. I don’t expect to see Sphere in the deadpool any time soon.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/130936241/

A court in Belgium has ruled that an Internet Service Provider bears the responsibility for stopping illegal file-sharing on its network. Although the ruling was made in Belgium, it relies on the E.U. copyright directive and may set precedent for the entire Union according to IFPI, an organization that represents the recording industry world wide.

Belgian courts have sided strongly with copyright holder in the past as well. In February, they ordered Google to stop copying Belgian newspaper headlines into their news and search indexes.

The suit was brought by a group representing Belgian authors an composers (SABAM) against ISP Scarlet, formerly Tiscali. In 2004, the SABAM received an injuction against the ISP, which assigned an expert whose investigation provided 11 ways to prevent infringement across the network. The judge agreed and Scarlet has 6 months to enact anti-piracy measure or face fines of up to $4,300 per day.

However, although the ruling means Scarlet must prevent piracy, it doesn’t require monitoring all network traffic. The Register quotes a SABAM statement saying, “The solutions identified by the expert are ‘technical instruments’ that limit themselves to blocking or filtering certain information transmitted on the network of TISCALI (SCARLET). They do not constitute a general obligation to monitor the network.”

Similar suits have traditionally not proven successful in the US, because ISPs have been seen simply as “common carriers“, not responsible for the contents of the packages they deliver. This has lead to a game of cat and mouse between pirates and copyright holders, epitomized by companies like MediaDefender continually trying to track down and catch copyright violators.

Now copyright holders are again trying to go after the bottleneck for piracy, the networks themselves. Because filtering technologies no longer place as harsh a burden on content providers, the industry is in transition and expectations are changing. After a lawsuit by Viacom, YouTube has begun scrubbing their own network for copyrighted content. Recently, AT&T announced they are making plans to track copyright infringement on their network.

Copyright protection company Media Rights Technologies has tried to push companies into implementing anti-piracy measures on their networks. They recently requested a cease and desist order against Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Real Networks alleging the companies are in violation of the DMCA because they are not implementing copyright protection on their systems, namely their own product. They’re also cheer leading their own bill, the “Perform Act”, through congress with the help of senators Feinstein (D), Graham (R), Biden (D) and Alexander.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/130906978/

If you aren’t one of the 200 companies who’ve submitted their application to launch at our upcoming TechCrunch20 conference, now’s the time to do it. The deadline is tomorrow, July 6. We will begin to announce some of the selected companies next week.

Not only will launching companies attend and present for free in front of an audience of hundreds of press, bloggers venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, we are also awarding a no-strings attached $50,000 prize to the startup judged “best in show” by our panel of experts. Some startups will find this prize a very useful way to fund further operations. Others, who are venture or angel funded, may see it as more symbolic. But our intention is to give even more of an incentive for the best startups to launch their products at the event, and give something back to the startup community.

Some of our sponsors will be donating additional goods and services to the winner. More on that on the TechCrunch20 blog later.

We are going to be making many more announcements about the conference over the next few weeks. This is going to be a very fun event. Register to attend here; the early bird discount expires on July 15.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/130858072/

Skype and Jingle Networks, operator of a free 411 service, are working together - U.S. Skype users will have access to Jingle for 411 calls. Users can also add “Free411USA” to their Skype friends list.

This news comes very quickly after Jingle announced a patent on ad-supported 411 calls. Founder Scott Kliger said the company would be using the patent to go after competitors in the next few months - those competitors include Google and AT&T.

Personally, I find this deal a little dumb. Skype users are generally on an Internet connected device, and a web search is almost always an easier way to find information on a business v. a 411 call.

I also think Jingle’s patent borders on the absurd and highlights many of the problems with our U.S. Patent system. If taking a paid service, pairing it with an advertisement and then distributing it for free is patentable, then we’re in real trouble. Jingle was the good guy when they were trying to make 411 calls cheaper for consumers. Now, they want a piece of the action every time another company tries the same thing. That leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/130805552/

The other week we sent out our email newsletter and mentioned our appearance in a recent issue of Time Magazine.

To us, this seemed almost like old news. After all, we had mentioned it weeks earlier here at Signal vs. Noise.

But the email responses came flooding in. There were lots of congratulations on the coverage and warm wishes for continued success.

It was a reminder of how much power there is in email. We forget that the RSS-centric world we live in isn’t the one many (and probably most) of our customers live in. They don’t have the time or energy to keep up with the constant stream of info at our blogs. That’s why the old-fashioned occasional email update — which gives people the juiciest bits and leaves out the rest — still has so much power.

Speaking of our email list, sign up by entering your email below:

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/483-a-reminder-about-the-power-of-email

NBBC, a video aggregation service launched by NBC last September has joined the TechCrunch Deadpool.

The remains of NBBC will be merged into the NBC/ News Corp joint venture first announced in March.

The new service, dubbed Clown Co by some has long been discussed but to date is yet to appear. Strangely, News Corp recently launched MySpace TV, a YouTube competitor in its own right that will compete directly with the NBC/ News Corp joint venture.

In an interview with MediaPost, George Kliavkoff, NBCU’s chief digital officer justified the closure of NBBC as a step towards strengthening the NBC/ News Corp joint venture : “we saw that “NewSite” could use NBBC’s resources, so last Friday afternoon we agreed to contribute it to the NewSite effort.”

The closure of NBBC and the transfer of IP and talent does not extend to existing agreements. Over 150 partners of NBBC, including Hearst, A&E Television Networks, The Horror Channel, Vibe Media Group, CNET Networks and Forbes.com will be required to negotiate new contracts with the new service.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/130745048/

Nothing drives me more batty than when I want to contact someone at a company, and it keeps sending me to some crappy set of FAQs that I know will not answer my question or concern. I am sure you have been there.

Geni has a nice solution. It appears to let you go right to a contact form that hopefully gets to a live person. However, as it watches your message it gives you pointers to potential solutions. The devil is in the details of how well it does the matches, but it is definitely a nice idea that can help you find your answer quickly, instead of focusing on how NOT to have you contact them at all costs.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/130745899/geni-smart-contact-form

UK phone operator O2 is said to be close to securing the rights to sell the iPhone in the United Kingdom.

A BBC report states that O2 is set to sign an exclusive contract shortly and should have the iPhone on sale in the UK in time for Christmas.

The iPhone is expected to retail in the UK for around £300. There was no indication as to whether the iPhone sold in the UK would be the same model as sold in the United States, or a 3G model.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/130736677/