Ajax Girl

Last Spring we quietly launched a new website in our network called CrunchBase. It’s a front end for our database of company information (address, executives/founders, funding info, etc.). We accumulate all this data about startups, but much of it doesn’t make it into actual posts on TechCrunch or the other blogs. And even when it does, it isn’t structured properly. So we thought we’d just put it up in a structured format for people to use when researching these startups.

We started linking to CrunchBase often in our posts. This tends to drive some readers absolutely nuts because they want to go to the company, not CrunchBase, when they click a link. As of today that policy is being discontinued.

Instead, we’ve created a small widget that pulls in some of the important data points about a startup, and we’ll include that widget in posts about startups. To see an example, see this and this post. I’ve also put the widget in this post for the startup PoliticalBase, since I mention them in the next paragraph.

This is just the beginning. The next step is to turn the site into a wiki in exactly the same way that PoliticalBase has done (try clicking on “edit” on any of their pages). They maintain data structure but allow users to create and edit all content as well. It will also allow people to add other relevant links about the startup to the page. We’ll either build this ourselves or partner with someone. For fun, I’ve added Facebook and Digg, too.

We’ll also be allowing everyone to embed the widgets into their blogs, and anyone who does so will be automatically linked to from the CrunchBase page as well, if their content is non-spammy and relevant. We’ll create other tools (RSS in particular) that allow people to easily export the data and use it however they please.

Since all this data is structured, we’ll be able to do some interesting things with it. Like create a venture capital index showing how much money is going into startups each month. Or show a map that includes geographical info about startups. And so on.

There are a number of companies that gather this information and sell it to people for thousands of dollars per year. Our intention is to disrupt those businesses by giving all of this data away for free.

This is a work in progress, and will be for some time. Please bear with us as we make mistakes, and keep giving us your feedback. We’re listening. And if your startup isn’t yet included in CrunchBase, you can submit the data directly here.

Political Base

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Facebook

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Digg

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cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1193271984″,”politicalbase”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_1_1193271984″,”facebook”); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_2_1193271984″,”digg”);

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/174586064/

Microsoft just bought 1.6% of cool glow for 240 million dollars from the current darling of social networks, Facebook. That priced the latter at $15,000,000,000 or five hundred times expected earnings for 2007!

Now I actually really like Facebook. It’s clean, the guys running it are smart, and tons of people I know are really into it. They got a great audience, growing fast, and all that jazz. But an evaluation of five hundred times earnings?! If that doesn’t taste like bubble gum, I don’t know what does.

Facebook is certainly to be commended for getting as high an evaluation as they can. Bravo to them. They look like masterminds here. But what does Microsoft look like?

A 500x evaluation doesn’t exactly position them as financially shrewd. No, it feels like they’re trying to make a statement that they too can hang with the cool kids regardless of the cost. Regardless of even an obscene cost.

I think Microsoft would be wise to remember that trying to buy cool has a tendency of making you look even more like a dork. I guess they have to try something — anything — to improve their image to investors, entrepreneurs, future employees, and the media.

Maybe that’s also what’s behind the previous hoopla about Microsoft looking at companies heavily involved with open source software. CNet even pitched that we’d make the perfect candidate for that run. Heh.

In any case, you’d think that there’d be more critical coverage of this transaction in light of eBay’s write-down of the Skype purchase. In comparison, eBay’s buy looked like a steal. They got a cool media darling with current revenues of $400 million/year for just $2.6 billion a few years ago.

But that’s exactly the opposite of the story being played in some quarters. Reuters frames it as Microsoft beats Google. No they didn’t. Google beat Microsoft with a goading stick and got them to buy-in at bubble gum numbers. It’s Google and Facebook laughing all the way to the bank, not Microsoft.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/670-can-microsoft-buy-cool-from-facebook

Facebook is holding a press conference at 2 pm PST to discuss and presumably confirm the Microsoft investment. We’ll be liveblogging the event here. Stay tuned.

Call Notes

Call is beginning at 2:07 pm

(more…)

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/~3/174502251/

While the storyline would have been more dramatic if Facebook had spurned its current ad-serving partner Microsoft for Google, it is confirmed that Microsoft has won the deal. It will invest $240 million in Facebook and expand its existing relationship to international markets, according to the WSJ. (The previous advertising relationship was only for the U.S., now Microsoft is Facebook’s exclusive advertising partner both in the U.S. and abroad until 2011) The $240 million is a minority stake that values the company at $15 billion. So that comes out to less than a 2 percent stake for Microsoft, which is much smaller than 5 percent stake that was bandied about earlier. (Update: During the conference call, Facebook left open the possibility that more investors may be included in this round of financing, though it declined to disclose who those investors may or may not be. But that does open the door to Facebook raising more than the $240 million).

While Google would have been a closer fit in terms of it overall philosophy (more open than not), it may have just been too expensive to buy out Microsoft from its current deal to supply ads for Facebook in the U.S. Given its deep ties with Microsoft, sticking with them was always the path of least resistance. And one could argue that Google has never felt comfortable targeting ads based on private user profile data, which seems to be the great promise of Facebook, ad-wise. Microsoft doesn’t share those qualms.

We are liveblogging the conference call here.

Facebook

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/174494044/

Okay, I’ve been sitting on these too long. At the Web 2.0 conference, I met a young Swiss entrepreneur named Dominik Grolimund, who is the CEO of a peer-to-peer storage application called Wuala. TechCrunch UK covered it here. The first 1,000 TechCrunch readers who sign up will get into the alpha. (Enter code “techcrunch”).

Wuala is a P2P competitor to Xdrive, MediaMax or Box.net.. You start off with 1GB of free storage, and then if you want more, you need to make more space available on your own hard drive for other Wuala members. (The amount of extra storage you get also depends on what percentage of time your computer is online). The files you want to store get broken up into 500 encrypted fragments, each of which get stored on another Wuala member’s computer. In this respect, it works a lot like a RAID storage system with redundancy built in. But instead of being stored on a central server, all your files are distributed across other peer computers. You drag and drop files into folders just like on your desktop. You can also stream videos or music to a computer with Wuala installed on it. But, unlike BitTorrent, the service is more about storing your own files than sharing them with a massive amount of other people. Although, I’m sure people will figure out how to use it as darknet service. Thankfully, none of the files stored on your computer are executable.

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/~3/174474952/

Facebook has announced their Facebook mobile platform at CTIA. While Facebook has always included mobile applications, todays additions allow for deeper integration with the between mobile phones and the website.

The platform is being improved through two key additions, the ability to show content exclusively to mobile phones, and integrate SMS. Mobile specific content will be controlled by a new FBML tag, “fb:mobile”. Any content between the tags will be rendered exclusively on the mobile site. The other, and more significant addition, is the opening of Facebook’s SMS platform, which will let applications and users interact with each other on Facebook over SMS. SMS integration is key as Facebook takes on international aspirations. The SMS market has been expected to grow to over $67 billion annually by 2012. More details on the platform are available here.

Perhaps feeling a bit left out after the iPhone integration, Blackberry has been announced as one of the first applications to take advantage of the new platform. To sign up, you just direct your Blackberry to their Facebook application page to install.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/174516729/

The Web is getting more visually immersive all the time. For a peak at what a gigapixel pannoramic image looks like on the Web check out Gigapan, a project at Carnegie Mellon University. Using a rotating stand that it sells for $279, anyone can use their digital camera to take panoramic pictures stitched together from multiple shots. You can zoom in and zoom out with amazing clarity, and really dive deep into the pictures.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/174453075/

Today is the official start of the Ajax Experience East, but we did something a bit different this time around. Some people asked us to level set a little, so we put out some tutorial sessions a day before.

Marc Grabanski was at the tutorial sessions and he wrote up a nice synopsis of the talks given by Ben Galbraith, John Resig, and David Verba.

Marc finishes up posting the sessions that he think will be going too:

We have kicked into gear on day one, and I am having a great time mingling with the community as usual!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/174432849/ajax-experience-tutorial-sessions

After a two-year investigation the torrent directory site Oink has been taken down in a series of raids and arrests in both The Netherlands and England. OiNK was an invitation-only private tracker that mostly dealt with members trading new release or pre-release albums, and primarily in FLAC (lossless) format. The administrator of the site was a 24-year old from the UK employed in the IT field, and it seems that finding and arresting the man was achieved by simply looking up the whois records from the site’s domain, and from information found on the confiscated servers.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) along with INTERPOL were responsible for the investigation and subsequent raids and arrests. A spokesperson for the authorities claimed that “OiNK was central to the illegal distribution of pre-release music online”, and that OiNK was very profitable for the administrators: “This extremely lucrative and creative scheme consisted of a private file-sharing website being set up.” The only source of revenue for OiNK were donations from members, and this may now compound problems for administrators of the site as charges in addition to the copyright infringement charges have been filed as the site is being portrayed as a for-profit criminal enterprise.

While links to pre-release albums and other releases certainly appeared on OiNK early, the authorities have claimed that the site and its members were actually responsible for these releases, showing that they still don’t understand how the scene works. While OiNK may have been popular (180,000 members), it certainly was not a central hub of online music releases. No such central hub exists, which is why the release groups are all still alive and no matter how many sites are taken down, online file trading will continue. The members of OiNK mainly consisted of music fans yearning for high-quality releases of albums, and each one of them would certainly have access to other sources for the same releases.

There is much disinformation amongst much of the media about this case, with claims that the administrators posted the music to the site directly, that they were selling music illegally, and much more. This representation of what OiNK was/is couldn’t be further from the truth and will only further alienate online file traders from the anti-piracy movement.

In related news, a few days ago the online video site Tv-Links.co.uk (archive) was also taken down and the administrator was arrested. Tv-links began as a site that linked to TV show episodes that were hosted on other hosted video sites (commonly Google Video, Dailymotion, YouTube, Stage6 and others). The site quickly became popular and later added an index of movies and other content. The files were hosted on flash-based video sites, so the quality was far inferior to DVDs and even TV broadcasts.

As with the OiNK case, the administrator was arrested in the UK, and the site itself was hosted on a UK domain name (OiNK was previously hosted on a UK domain name, but they switched over to their .cd address some months ago after having the .me.uk domain suspended). As with the OiNK case, the authorities responsible for the Tv-links takedown and arrest are also claiming that the administrator had a for-profit motive and was profiting heavily from the copyrighted works of others. One of the lead investigators in the Tv-links case had this to say:

“Sites such as TV Links contribute to and profit from copyright infringement by identifying, posting, organising, and indexing links to infringing content found on the internet that users can then view on demand by visiting these illegal sites”

While Tv-links was organizing and indexing links, it certainly was not posting content. With both OiNK and Tv-links, the directories of links were maintained and moderated by community members. Sites such as Pirate Bay have successfully argued in jurisdictions such as Sweden that by hosting torrent seed files that they themselves are not responsible for copyright infringement. In the case of TV-links, this is even more true, as the function it performs is that of a meta directory or search engine.

A recent review of IP law in the UK has clarified that the “facilitation” of copyright infringement is a crime, meaning a link to a copyrighted video on Google or Stage6 can be infringing, while the actual host of the video may not be responsible. Since the early days of FTP sites, bulletin boards and IRC, file traders have had to adjust their methods and develop technologies that decentralize responsibility - and the law in many jurisdictions has been quickly catching up. While linking may now be a crime in the UK, the law is obviously applied selectively so that various trade groups are able to target and take-down sites that they do not find kosher.

Another commonality in recent take-downs is that the authorities attempt to portray the administrators of these sites as having profited heavily from their actions. All of the admins that were recently arrested held full-time employment, and most struggled to keep their communities alive because of hosting costs and had to solicit donations. One lesson for other communities would be that even taking donations for the upkeep and maintenance of sites will be construed by authorities as selling copyrighted content for profit, which leads to additional and more serious charges.

In other related news, the world’s biggest private torrent tracker, Demonoid is back up and running after a period of downtime. We reported previously that the downtime may have been related to a takedown by authorities, and while the administrators of the site did receive a take-down notice from CRIA in Canada, they were back up and running within days with a new host.

Along with The Pirate Bay, Demonoid has managed to skirt efforts to kill its community while two other popular sites where the administrators were both based in the UK have been shutdown. In the online copyright fight, there is no uniform global law, and some countries are much safer for file traders than others. With the takedown of both OiNK and Tv-links, the authorities in the UK have expressed their intention to aggressively pursue those sites that are deemed illegal or unfavorable.

Because there are other countries where laws are not being bent and constantly shaped to appease some who want to broaden the scope of copyright infringement, the effects of these sites being taken down will be very minor. Expect to see mirrors of both OiNK and Tv-links appear very quickly hosted on non-UK domains, in non-UK or Dutch data centers, and run by non-British citizens.

Nik is a sporadic and infrequent Techcrunch contributor. He is the CEO of Omnidrive and blogs at New Web Order

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/174432941/

Did you know that Imeem is the fastest-growing social site in the U.S (up 1,590 percent in monthly uniques). And that AIM Pages is growing slightly faster than Digg (345 percent growth versus 323 percent)? Well, at least according to comScore. I asked comScore to do a ranking of social sites in the U.S. and then I reordered the list by growth rate. Here it is:

Here are my takeaways. MySpace is still growing at a healthy 23 percent, despite its size. But Facebook is coming on fast, with 129 percent growth. Notice also the strong showing by Bebo (growing 83 percent) versus the lackluster U.S. growth of Hi5 (3 percent) and the decline of Xanga (negative 55 percent).

In blogging platforms, Blogger is beating Six Apart on both absolute numbers (32 million visitors versus 13 million) and growth (55 percent versus 44 percent). In the doldrums territory, you’ve got Windows Live Spaces (with a one percent decline) and Yahoo Groups (four percent decline). And in the you-ought-to-seriously-think-of-shutting-this-down territory, there is Lycos Tripod (23 percent decline), MSN Groups (36 percent decline), and Yahoo 360 (’nuff said).

Here is a more comprehensive list of social sites ranked by total number of visitors. It includes sites where comScore could not calculate a growth rate because it did not have enough data for September, 2006. Some sites that stand out on this list, having come out of nowhere in the past year, include Wordpress.com (with 11.9 million monthly visitors), Freewebs (with 6.6 million), BuzzNet (with 4.4 million),and Kaboodle (with 2.5 million).

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/~3/174406777/