Ajax Girl

A new UK startup launches on Monday called BlinkBox. Users take pre-created clips from movies and television shows (the clips can be shortened by the user) and add a personalized message at the beginning. The clips can then be shared via a link, embed or mobile device. Here’s an example of (a very funny) one that was created for me.

There’s a pretty deep catalog of movies and TV shows to view. The company’s business model is to pitch buying or renting the movie or tv show after viewing the clip. They’ve built their own (heavily DRM’d) platform for delivering this content to buyers, although it only works on Windows machines at this time.

The concept is similar to Slingbox’s Clip+Sling, which allows Slingbox users to create short content clips and share it with friends.

The site is not working 100% for me - embeds don’t work and most of the clips can’t be selected when creating a blink. This may be pre-launch jitters, or licensing issues restricting me because I’m U.S. based (it’s launching only in the UK for now). We’ll have more on this at TechCrunch UK in the morning.

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AT&T have announced that their wireless customers will soon be able to download songs from Napster Mobile.

Starting mid-November, the service will allow AT&T customers to browse 5 million songs, preview samples of each song and purchase and download music from their mobile phones. Unlike a previous deal where some AT&T customers had free access to Napster, under this deal users will pay $7.49 a month for 5 songs or $1.99 per single, double the going rate on iTunes.

The deal is good news for the struggling Napster, who will gain exposure to AT&T’s 63 million customers at a time they are looking to sell the company.

AT&T also announced two new music applications: MobiVJ, a streaming video service, and VIP Access, a “mobile fan club and discovery service.” The MobiVJ music video channels cover eight genres and provide streamed video to AT&T customers for $6.99 a month. VIP Access allows customers to search artist biographies and discographies, sample new music, participate in polls and receive breaking alerts via text messaging services for only $2.99 a month.

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Technology is becoming more and more a part of mainstream life. But the journalists who have access to the 2008 presidential candidates usually aren’t prepared to talk tech, and so the candidates’ positions on digital issues are often left unexplored. We want to change that, and have been reaching out to the presidential candidates to talk one-on-one with us about the issues that are important to our readers.

Governor Mitt Romney (see his PoliticalBase profile here), a Republican candidate for president, was the first to respond, and we will be recording a podcast discussion with him in the next week. What we talk about on that podcast is largely up to TechCrunch readers.

We’re finalizing the high level questions we’ll be asking Governor Romney (and other candidates in the future). Please let us know in the comments what tech-related issues are important to you; what would you ask if you had the chance? Issues to think about:

• the role of technology in education - what role should government and technology companies have
• the growing digital divide in the U.S. and around the world
• immigration and visa issues
• the role of government in protecting personal privacy online
• Mobile spectrum allocations and ground rules
• How should the U.S. engage with China: technology, human rights and censorship issues
• the role of free markets; helping U.S. technology companies compete worldwide
  Net neutrality
• Intellectual property issues - copyright, patent and trademark policies

Please let us know which of these issues, or which other issues, are most important to you in the comments below. Please keep the political debates to a minimum - save it for the comments to the podcast itself. And any ad hominem attacks will be moderated. Things can get ugly on the political blogs, and I want to keep the level of discourse around these podcasts at a high level.

We’ll also be unofficially dedicating these podcasts to the DonorsChoose challenge. Education will be a big part of these discussions - do your part to help education by donating now (and we’re matching all donations).

One last note - we’re reaching out to candidates from all political parties in a nonpartisan manner. We want to hear from both sides of the aisle on these issues. We’ll be putting together a formal election policy in the near future with more details.

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If hype was the only indicator of marketshare in social networking, Facebook would be the winner by a mile, and yet for all the talk of Facebook’s greatness, MySpace remains the most popular social networking destination.

The social networking market so far has seen something that defies conventional economic thinking. Instead of users choosing one service or the other they often choose both. Until now.

New figures released by HitWise show that in Australia at least, MySpace is now losing market share as the Facebook juggernaut continues. Traffic to MySpace in Australia has dropped 5% as Facebook has tripled its traffic in the 10 weeks to October 13, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Some may suggest that the Facebook platform is providing a superior social networking offering that is driving a switch; this in part is valid however it ignores two other factors. First is the direction of MySpace: it’s hard to grow traffic when you’re already at the top, so traffic options are static or down. MySpace is adopting an open platform that will provide additional services for their members, but in the mean time not much new happening on MySpace; boredom with MySpace would naturally result in declining traffic. The second factor is the amazing word of mouth Facebook currently has. The platform is irrelevant when anyone and everyone is talking Facebook at the moment, and not just within tech circles. I’ve had old school friends I haven’t seen in 20 years ping me on Facebook, and a majority of my friends list would now consist of non-tech related friends. Facebook comes up in conversations all the time when I’m talking to people outside of the tech community: it has become the next YouTube in terms of popular awareness.

The switch stats are so far only applicable to Australia, but it wouldn’t be surprising if this is the start of a trend, particularly in English speaking countries. There is only so much the broader market can take in terms of multi-using social networking sites. As more people get onto Facebook it becomes more likely that people will use Facebook as their first, and perhaps only choice in online social networking.

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Tape It Off The Internet, the social-networking-around-TV startup, will announce Monday that it has secured an undisclosed “a seven-figure” Series A funding round from Europe’s largest early-stage technology venture capital fund, Pond Venture Partners. The move comes three weeks after the site opened its doors to new users and after almost a year in closed, invite-only beta.

TechCrunch UK has the exclusive on the deal, its implications, and an extensive interview with co-founder Paul Cleghorn from last year.

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A reader noticed that stealth search engine Powerset is using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to gauge user reactions to search results.

See the screen shot (click for larger view) - users are shown a query and a number of results and are asked to evaluate the relevancy of each result from five choices. In this case, the query is “revealing bikinis.” Users are asked to evaluate four sets of results within ten minutes, and are paid $0.02 for the effort.

The current batch of Powerset projects have run their course, and there are currently no other projects available on Mechanical Turk.

I spoke with Powerset CEO Barney Pell this evening who confirmed that they are using Mechanical Turk to get human feedback on search results. He says the results are not all Powerset generated - rather, they show results from Powerset, Google and others to see which users prefer for a given query. He also says this is an ongoing project, and new ones will be added soon.

Pell also said that Powerset plans to use Mechanical Turk over the long haul, even after launch. They’ll put actual user queries into Mechanical Turk in real time, add Powerset and competitor results and see which results people find more relevant. If results suggest Powerset isn’t more relevant, they’ll adjust their engine.

Powerset also uses Amazon’s EC2 computing service, another web service offered by Amazon. They recently released some of their internal growth models that allow people to compare the relative costs of EC2 to building out a real data center.

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Information R/evolution from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Kansas State University, the same chap behind the viral Web 2.0 video from February.

The perspective provided by history is always important when considering where we have been, and where we are going. There are cynics who still deride the user generated revolution, and yet it has changed everything that we once thought about information. The only question now is what next? Semantics, Web 3.0? How can we evolve from the near complete devolution of information that has taken place over the last 12 years?

(via Zoli’s Blog)

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GoodBusiness, a new hosted application package from GoodBarry is aiming to make ecommerce easier for small business owners.

There’s a lot of options in this space, everything from CMS packages through to commercial high end hosted options. GoodBusiness is aimed at small businesses who either cant afford the high end packages, or don’t have the skills available to do it themselves. The package includes website creation, lead management, email marketing, online shopping, blogging, and business analytics in the one system. GoodBusiness offers a “customer centric vision” of a website, with every feature integrated into a central customer database allowing businesses to automatically build customer profiles and track behavior across their online business.

GoodBusiness competes directly with Shopify, a product we reviewed in April 2006. GoodBarry argues that GoodBusiness offers a more customer-centric ecommerce package that provides a complete picture of customer behavior, allowing for better informed decisions; however both packages do provide a similar outcome: a simplified software-as-a-service ecommerce package.

GoodBusiness pricing starts at $39/month for the most basic plan and includes all features. Higher plans are available with more bandwidth, disk space and admin user accounts.

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