Ajax Girl

Bloglines has added three new features to its RSS reading service.

First up is the ability to save posts including text and graphics from within Bloglines to a “Saved” folder. This allows users to have quick access to previously read posts at a later date.

“Photo Widget” provides large thumbnails of images from Flickr feeds; previously only a text description was available.

Last, but certainly not least is the blog view function. The allows users to switch into a 3-pane view that shows the full post on the actual blog, as opposed to just a feed only version of it. What this means is that you can now view a full post within Bloglines where only a part-text feed is offered, but perhaps more impressively users will be able to interact with the blog as well, for example read comments and see other elements of the site, including ads.

The new Bloglines was launched in August and since that time Bloglines has continued to roll out improvements and new features, including support for OpenID (with APML and oAuth support coming). Bloglines has lost its once dominant lead in the RSS Reader market, mostly to Google, but with continuing feature additions such as these it offers an appealing product that may well be worth another look for those who have left, or for those who have never tried Bloglines before.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/202023486/

Ross Levinsohn (former President of Fox Interactive) and Jonathan Miller (former Chairman and CEO of America Online) launched Velocity Investment Group earlier this year with the goal of acquiring and investing in digital media startups. Today they are announcing a merger with ComVentures, a venture fund with around $1 billion under management.

This sounds like a bit of a coup. The new entity is taking Velocity’s name and will be called Velocity Interactive Group. Two ComVentures partners - Michael Rolnick and Jeb Miller, will be “pursing other interests,” which is probably just a nice way of saying they were booted from the fund.

This is a rare move for a venture fund, and from what we hear ComVentures has been doing well in its investments. But a series of events, such as the FilmLoop debacle, may have left the brand somewhat tarnished. The fund was also ridiculed for stealing Sequoia’s web site look and feel.

A fresh start for ComVentures isn’t a bad idea, and getting talent like Levinsohn and Miller doesn’t hurt, either. The fund will be opening new offices in Santa Monica and New York, adding to existing offices in Palo Alto, India and China.

The fund is also announcing a few investments, including NDTV Networks, IndiaTV, Fabrik, Doppelganger and Mixercast.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/202017653/

San Francisco based Founders Fund launched in 2005 with a $50 million venture fund. They’ve had two liquidity events since then, and a handful of other very high profile investments (Facebook, Powerset, Ooma, Quantcast, Slide, Geni, Causes, etc.).

Today they will announce a second fund, Founders Fund II. It’s much larger - $220 million. And unlike the first fund, the money comes mostly from outside investors. The new fund will allow Founders Fund to make 15-20 new investments, including pro-rata investments in follow on rounds.

A couple of investments have been made out of the new fund, they say, but have not yet been disclosed.

Founders Fund partners have deep connections in Silicon Valley, which help with deal flow (Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of Paypal, Ken Howery, founder and former CFO of PayPal, Luke Nosek, founder and former Vice President of PayPal and Sean Parker, founder and former CEO or President of Napster, Plaxo and Facebook). But they also approach deals differently than most other funds.

Sean Parker said today in a phone interview that a glut in venture capital, combined with reduced capital needs of most startups, has led to a shift in balance of power between entrepreneurs and VCs. Founders Fund recognizes that shift and has evolved does deals a little differently because of it. For example, they invented and promote the issuance of a special class of stock, called Series FF, which allows entrepreneurs to take money off the table much earlier in their company’s lifecycle. They also allow significantly more liberal voting rights to founder board members than many other funds. See this article in the SF Chronicle earlier this year for more on how they do business.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/201960481/

Sometimes reading online product reviews can be a real time sink. There are so many opinions out there—from CNet to Amazon to blogs. It can take a long time and a lot of sifting to figure out what people really think. But now there is another way. If you want a snap shot of popular sentiment about a book, movie, CD, or gadget, type its name into Summize.

Started by two AOL expats a year ago, and launched in a public beta last month, Summize does sentiment analysis across dozens of review sites and more than half-a-million blogs—what CEO Ajaipal Virdy calls the “reviewosphere.” These include review-heavy sites with ratings, reviews, and other structutred data like Amazon, CNet, IMDB, and Epinions, as well as active blogs filled with unstructured, unfiltered opinion. In that sense, it is a cross between CNet’s Metacritic and Blogcritics. Explains Virdy:

We algorithmically analyze the review text to learn the polarizing words that correlate with user-assigned star ratings. We use our knowledge of polarizing words to extract the opinions from unstructured blog posts, and algorithmically assign them ratings.

Summize harvests all of this opinion and boils it down to a single heat map that it calls a “snip.” This is a horizontal bar with colors ranging from red (wretched) to yellow (so-so) to green (great). It attempts to capture the collective sentiment about any given product at a glance. For instance, out of 21,021 opinions about the band Radiohead, 67 percent are “great,”, and only 10 percent are “bad” or “wretched.” The band’s most reviewed album is Kid A, the most liked is OK Computer, and the most buzzed about is their recent online pay-what-you-want freebie In Rainbows. There are links and excerpts from recent blog posts about Radiohead. And, in a nice twist on Amazon-like collaborative filtering, every product has a list of related products. In this case, “bloggers who discuss Radiohead also discuss” Band of Horse, The Pixies, and Idelwild.

The site feels a little thin for some products, especially newer ones. But the approach is promising. Summize plans on adding other categories such as travel and restaurants in the future.

Summize

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Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/201925797/

It seems like every other month rumors of Digg either being acquired or being shopped come up (see our November summary here). VentureBeat has word that Digg is getting serious about a sale and has hired Allen & Company to shop the site for $300 million.

Investment bank Allen & Company has been involved in a number of high profile acquisitions and mergers previously, including Seagram and Universal Studios, Hasbro and Galoob Toys, and Disney and Capital Cities/ABC. An interesting tidbit on the company: it apparently doesn’t like publicity to the point that it doesn’t even maintain a website.

The obvious question is will Digg sell with a $300 million valuation given that it has been on the market (quietly) for months with no interest to date?

If anybody has a spare $300 million and would like to buy Digg, Allen & Company’s contact details can be found here.

Digg

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Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/201915743/

Two decent-sized fundings were announced today. Paris-based Streamezzo raised $22 million in a C round led by a Kuwaiti investment group, NTEC. That brings the total capital put into the firm, which sells technology for mobile-TV and rich-media streaming applications, to $48 million. Other investors include Sofinnova Partners, AXA Private Equity, and Qualcomm.

Live Gamer came out of stealth today with a $24 million A round from Charles River Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners, and Pequot Ventures. Live Gamer wants to create an eBay for virtual goods used in online worlds and videogames. It faces fierce competition from 6th grader Arjun Mehta, who raised $6.5 million in September for MMOG marketplace PlaySpan.

Streamezzo

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PlaySpan

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/201882488/

Now programming your iPhone is even easier thanks to Jiggy. Jiggy is a mini IDE that runs right on the iPhone, making it essentially OS agnostic. You do all the programming via a Web interface and you code in Javascript with a few Jiggy/iPhone native calls. The code is fairly straightforward (here’s ‘Hello World’) and you can even add your own icons to the iPhone UI. This of course assumes you’ve already jailbroken your phone and can run Installer.app, but it’s a pretty cool proof-of-concept that will definitely grow into a good prototyping and mini-app programming system.

Read more at Crunchgear…

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/201860333/

For anyone who thinks that full-length movies on the Web are for downloading only should check out the Watch Now section on BitTorrent (you will need Flash Player 9 installed). Launched quietly on December 5 using its BitTorrent DNA streaming technology, Watch Now offers a few hundred full-length movies and TV shows that you can watch in full-screen that start a few seconds after clicking play. The quality varies based on the original video, but check out The Ring (original Japanese version) to see what is possible. It is not HD. But it is very watchable.

A clickable pop-up toast ad for Take TV appears at the beginning. The company is experimenting with the frequency of the ads. One pops up between every 5 and 10 minutes. The controls are limited. There is pause/play, restart, volume, and full-screen. No fast-forward or rewind.

The technology works. Unfortunately, the pickings are slim. Other than The Ring, there is not much worth watching. They do have Fight Club, but it’s the Bollywood version. (BitTorrent’s such a tease). The TV shows are even more obscure. Wooden Clogs anyone? Deep South Wrestling? I didn’t think so. You are better off sticking to BitTorrent downloads for now.

The Watch Now section is really meant to be a showcase for BitTorrent’s DNA technology. “This is a demonstration for us at this point,” says BitTorrent President Ashwin Navin. He is convinced that ad-supported peer-to-peer streaming is the how video will be delivered in the near future across the Web. ABC or Warner Brothers, for instance, could use it to stream long-form videos from their own sites. (NBC is planning on using P2P software from competitor Pando Networks to stream its video). Navin predicts:

The browser-based video environment is going to get a whole lot better. It makes a closed-off client experience a lot less appealing to the consumer. All of our customers are embracing the browser to deliver videos.

Hmm, a closed-off client experience. Who could that be? Maybe it is time for Joost to finally embrace the browser as well.

BitTorrent

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Pando

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/201847879/

Pretty funny Facebook video by Wallstrip’s Lindsay Campbell

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/201843973/

Why should Facebook, its advertising partners, and application developers be the only ones to be able to make money from spamming your friends with ads and come-ons? Today, Ads-Click launched a private beta called MicroSocialAds that will let you get in on the advertising frenzy by inserting targeted, contextual text ads into your Facebook page. (As if Beacon wasn’t bad enough). Every time your friends click through to that Dell laptop or natural Viagra ad, you will get paid 80 percent of the ad! You may also find yourself without any friends. But, hey, at least you will be richer for it. Marginally. (Disclosure: Ads-Click is a TechCrunch sponsor and our TechCrunch France editor, Ouriel Ohayon, sits on its board).

The ads on Facebook will appear as a line of text no more than 35 characters long. They are designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, are highly targetable by interest, and allow people to opt out of them. Ads-Click will match each ad from its network of more than 200,000 advertisers. The MicroSocialAds will be added to people’s profile pages just like any other Facebook application. (Again, the private beta just launched, so you won’t find this by searching Facebook’s application directory just yet). Explains Ads-Click CEO Pascal Rossini

We take the same approach as a company like AdBrite who already does this on Facebook, or any other app that uses AdSense. The only difference is that we remunerate the users and not the app owner.

Fair enough. But this is sure to be controversial on many levels. First and foremost, anyone who adds such an app to their Facebook page would appear to be in direct violation of Facebook’s terms of use, which unequivocally state:

In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to . . . upload, post, transmit, share or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, solicitations, promotional materials, “junk mail,” “spam,” “chain letters,” “pyramid schemes,” or any other form of solicitation;

On the other hand, Facebook is built on the backs of its users. They supply most of the content and activity. Why shouldn’t they get a cut of the advertising generated from their personal Facebook page—or MySpace or Bebo page, for that matter?

In fact, MicroSocialAds are not limited to Facebook. The personal ads also work with MSN Messenger, and will soon be available on Twitter, Yahoo IM, Skype, and OpenSocial. If you have no problem spamming your friends, or if the ads could be micro-targeted by you to the point where they don’t feel like ads, but more like personal product suggestions, then they might actually work out. The concept, though, certainly blurs the line between the social and the commercial. They need to be social enough so that they are palatable to the people expected to add them to their social communications, but commercial enough that they offer a return for advertisers.

What do you think? Does this represent the next stage in personalized advertising, or is it offensive?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/201750824/