Ajax Girl

UK based MyFootballClub is aiming to take the power of collaborative social membership to the world of English soccer by purchasing a professional English soccer team using user contributions.

The site launched in April and had over $500,000 in contributions within its first 24 hours.

The legal side is fairly simple. Contributors become members of the MyFootballClub Trust for £35 ($69). £27.50 goes towards purchasing a soccer club, buying new players and other club expenditure with the remaining £7.50 going towards administration. The Trust will acquire a soccer club only on the basis that the purchase provides a controlling stake (51%+) of the club and where the club is either debt free or has a manageable level of debt.

Members are then said to have “an equal say in team selection, player transfers and the running of the club.”

MyFootballClub aims to buy a mid-tier English soccer club with an aim of building the club into a future Premier Division side.

At the time of writing MyFootballClub had over 53,000 members and had taken more than £1.375 million ($2.73 million) in member subscriptions. The site is currently in negotiations with four prospective acquisition targets.

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It’s time to say a quick “thank you” to the sponsors of our party at August capital last month:

Tune in to learn more about Real Time Matrix’s Vortxex, DOmedia’s platform for alternative media buying and Profile Builder’s profile mangement platform. Michael Arrington and Steve Gillmor from Podtech.net and Bad Sinatra interview Jeff Whitehead, Todd Cameron and Boyan Josic. Watch closely for a quick guest appearance from another famous blogger… or was that really Yahoo’s Salim Ismail? Interviews were shot live at the TechCrunch 9 Meet Up at August Capital. Thank you again to all the sponsors who helped make the Meet Up a success.

iJ.am - The Real Time Matrix’s iJ.am lets you create a personalized RSS feed widgets of the news you care about the most. Check out the iJ.am Vortex headlines widget that Real Time Matrix developed for TechCrunch.

Wallhogs - Wallhogs makes semi-adhesive vinyl posters of whatever images you’d like, ranging from your own family photos to cutouts of full-sized football players. If you came to TechCrunch 9, you would have seen WallHogs’ stickers denoting the spots for each of the presenting companies. They have a wide variety of existing posters in different sizes for about $20 to $50.

Template Monster - They have oodles of website templates, flash templates, flash intros, WordPress themes, and corporate designs. As a celebration of Template Monster’s birthday TechCrunch readers get a 15% discount.

Text Link Ads - If you’re looking to monetize your site, or for new advertising opportunities, check out Text Link Ads. TLA helps improve your site’s ranking and target 10,000+ niche communities, all at a flat rate.

Lewis PR - A multinational public relations firm representing clients like Second Life, Citrix Systems, and St. Bernard Software. Check out their blog for a more in depth view of the company.

Ads-Click - One of the most popular features on blogs is a tag cloud, which gives and idea of the main key

Adicate - Time is money and Adicate has applied that to advertising by allowing advertisers to buy time slots on a publisher’s page. They manage all the headache and provide the backend support to sell the ads.

Edgeio - Classified listings have always followed the eyeballs in print. Edgeio takes the same principle to the web, letting you monetize your site by tying in relevant listings. Edgeio Marketplaces currently powers TechCrunch’s job board and have several affiliate programs that publishers can use to boost their revenues.

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Following the decision in January by Wikipedia to strip SEO benefits from outgoing links by adding the link-nofollow tag (see our coverage of how the rule doesn’t apply to certain third party wiki links) the once rampant gaming of Wikipedia has all but disappeared. SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin posted during the week on a new technique being used that instead of building Google juice to a particular site, aims to knock others off the top positions on Google by promoting the position of Wikipedia pages to the top of each specific Google search query. I’m not quite sure exactly what color hat the method may be (and Rand asks the same question), but it is clever.

(via Graywolf)

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/145500316/

ICCARUS is a new service created by social music and video recommendations startup Scouta. It creates a three dimensional visualization of the data behind a social networking or related website. ICCARUS also shows the social network between members, the memberships of groups, and the links between members and the content they enjoy. Navigate by clicking on points of interest, or searched using commands. Results are dynamic and are delivered in real time, providing an instant visual representation of the given network

The data is fetched via TurboGears and uses the GFX library to create the visual effects.

ICCARUS was launched Wednesday at Webjam Perth and won first place from a field of around 15 demonstrating startups. I spoke with Scouta CEO Richard Giles at the WA Web Awards Friday and he told me that the feedback on ICCARUS had been strong. Scouta plans on further refining ICCARUS with a possibility of providing the service to a public either later this year or early 2008.

The screencast above doesn’t do the service full justice, but it’s enough to give some idea of what it is capable of.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/145421071/

Hispanic social network TierraNatal launched in July with a model that seeks to reunite Mexicans where ever they live.

The bilingual site focuses on location based networking with users being asked to specify their place of birth (or hometown) in Mexico. Users are encouraged to use the service as a way of keeping in contact with friends and relatives who might have moved elsewhere, such as the United States. Over 300,000 Mexican towns and cities are listed.

Design wise it’s one of the better social networking sites I’ve seen in recent times. The usual array of social networking features (profiles, pics, blogs etc) are combined with some decent looking graphics and a functional layout that works well.

The site competes with Spanish language/ Mexican focused version of MySpace and LatinoAIM Pages.

TierraNatal was founded by Liliana Townshend and was developed by San Diego based Digital Telepathy.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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