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National Lampoon has acquired a minority stake in the get paid to use if you give them money first social networking site Capazoo.

We first wrote about Capazoo December 10, when we explained the model which Capazoo claims in its media release is a “ground-breaking business model empowering its members and partners to generate real revenues based on their content and site participation.” To quote for the earlier post:

Where Capazoo differs is its offer to compensate its users for the time spent on the site and the activities they undertake. Members can tip other members using “Zoops,” Capzoo’s points program that can be redeemed for cash. Members also receive Zoops for inviting friends and posting content. It sounds good, but there is a catch: to redeem Zoops users must join one of Capazoo’s two premium membership programs which cost $24.95 or $34.95 per year. Users can also buy additional Zoops to give to others at the rate of $10 for 10,000 Zoops.

Under the deal National Lampoon will provide online video content and “branded marketing opportunities” to Capazoo.

There has to be some irony in a company known for comedy investing in a social networking site with a Web 1.0 multi-level marketing scheme as its business model. As I said in the previous post “a model that only pays out when you pay up won’t find millions of fans. With $25 million in the bank the site certainly won’t be heading to the Deadpool anytime soon but it will struggle to succeed;” given Capazoo has just taken on a new investor maybe it’s already struggling?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/202510582/

Google has announced a flight tracking service that provides up-to-date information for those flying over the Christmas/ New Year break.

The service delivers details as to whether a flight is on time or delayed as well providing the estimated departure and arrival times. Using the service is as simple as typing in the flight number into Google, and the flight details will be delivered as the first search result (airline and flight number, or use an abbreviated version with a space between the airline code and flight number.) The service competes in part with Orbitz’s Traveler Update service, although Orbitz does offer associated airport information as well.

Data for the service is pulled from Flightstats.com.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/202504693/

Mobile 411 provider V-Enable has released a list of the top retail searches undertaken by users in 2007 using their 411 service and the results are a little interesting. The list:

1.Wal-Mart
2.Target
3.Game Stop
4.Best Buy
5.Walgreens
6.Publix
7.AutoZone
8.KMart
9. Toys R Us
10. Blockbuster Video
11. CVS
12. Circuit City
13. Home Depot
14. Radio Shack
15. Sears

Yes, apparently thousands of gigantic warehouses throughout America can’t be found.

San Diego based V-Enable offers an automated 411 product by the name of Mobile411 that comes pre-installed on mobile handsets and uses voice input and recognition through the software. The idea is that voice is a more accurate way to capture a 411 lookup on a mobile phone than text is. The results of a search are returned on the mobile phone itself, think Yellowpages online but with voice input. Notably this is a carrier based solution that competes with a raft of free ad supported players such as Google (Goog-411).

V-Enable was established in 2001 and has taken $10.1 million over three rounds. Investors include Siemens Mobile Acceleration Corporation, Sorrento Ventures, SoftBank Capital and Palisades Ventures.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/202481900/

Chictini is a social network, launched just this fall, where people can submit fashionable items (clothes, accessories, art, and even electronics) found on the websites of online retailers. Members (”chicsters”) vote submitted items up or down, causing them to rise and fall, thus making the site like Digg but for trendy merchandise.

Chictini thinks that the expression of one’s taste in music will complement the expression of one’s taste in fashion, and has therefore decided to integrate SeeqPod functionality into user profiles. SeeqPod is an MP3 search engine, reviewed along with a couple others here, that allows you to stream (mostly copyrighted) music found around the web by its crawlers.

Now, Chictini users can search for music using SeeqPod within the Chictini site itself and add one song at a time to their profiles. The song will then show up on their profiles in the form of a SeeqPod widget that allows for instant playback.

As we mentioned in our previous coverage of SeeqPod, it’s unlikely that the labels have enough legal standing to win cases against the music search engines themselves, although there is a possibility that the engines could be held liable for contributory infringement. Chictini is evidently betting that their chances for legal repercussions are similarly very low, and probably even much lower.

Seeqpod

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/202472864/

The National Venture Capital Association surveyed 170 of its members, and this is their collective wisdom for 2008:

The sectors VCs are most bullish about are Clean Tech, Media, Biotech, and the Internet, in that order:

Those also happen to be the sectors they think will become the most overvalued:

Will that stop them from investing? Nah. VCs are particularly optimistic about their own abilities to deliver superior returns:

. . . even though more than half think the overall economy is headed for a downturn:

Not to mention that the five-year rate of return for all VC funds, as measured by the NVCA, is 3 percent, which is less than that of the S&P 500.

What else do VCs know?

—On average, they think they will invest $27 billion in startups next year.

—They are bearish on semiconductors and software. A full 59 percent believe that the IPO market will continue to recover.

—More than half (55 percent) expect M&A deals to increase in volume, but only about a third (35 percent) expect those deals to increase in value.

—An overwhelming 84 percent believe that new VC funds will raise the same amount of money or more than current funds, while 59 percent expect the number of VC firms to decrease. So more money will go to fewer firms, essentially.

—And 39 percent think that Hillary Clinton will be elected president, nearly twice as many as those who predict Guiliani will win:

Ah, conventional wisdom.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/202448885/

Boston-based uTest has raised $1.7M to bring to market a crowd-sourced quality assurance (QA) marketplace and community. The service has begun recruiting testers in anticipation of its official launch, expected in early 2008.

No fuzzy logic here; uTest presents clear and communicable value propositions: For companies in need of QA, uTest is providing an on-demand environment for the management of full testing cycles. For testers, uTest is providing an oDesk-like marketplace through which they can be hired and paid on a Pay-per-Bug basis.

The company’s founders recognized that QA and usability testing solutions are inefficient. QA departments are either under-utilized when waiting for versions to test, or over-extended when a new version comes out. To most SMBs, QA outsourcing is neither cost effective nor available “on-demand”. Then, of course, there are cost-cutting measures that leave companies unable to sufficiently fund QA efforts, ultimately shipping buggy applications to users like us.

The uTest testing platform itself is entirely Web-based and provides the management of complete QA cycles, from creating/loading test scripts, to selecting the target community (profile and environment) of testers required. The platform also provides test case management tools, real-time information on bugs and defects logged, statistical information on release maturity level, as well as QA coverage and market readiness. Support for bug tracking systems includes Bugzilla, Jira, FogBugs and will be expanded over time.

In a smart business move, uTest will not charge companies to use their platform to manage testing and QA cycles—this will be entirely free of charge. uTest will only charge for the services provided by the community of testers.

The uTest offering makes a lot of sense to me and I expect it will be warmly embraced for several reasons. First, consider for a moment that for many SMBs, QA management solutions such as those offered by Mercury or IBM-Rational are beyond their reach. Speaking from personal experience, the majority of the testing cycles I’ve seen have been “managed” on Word or Excel. The “on-demand” model which has been proven time and time again on the Web from CRM to ERP, should work just as well for QA. The fact that the platform will be offered free of charge, pushes the offering to “no-brainer land”.

Second, beyond the manageability aspects of uTest’s service, companies will obviously enjoy the cost saving aspects of paying testers by the bug. It’s this aspect that in my opinion will make uTest’s offering relevant not only to SMBs but to large organizations as well. Logic would dictate that if they embraced off-shoring and near-shoring, crowd-sourced QA shouldn’t be too jagged of a pill to swallow.

Third, recruiting a userbase of testers should not be difficult. There are droves of potential testers in countries such as India, China, Russia, Bulgaria, Estonia, etc. Also, getting hired through sites like oDesk, Elance and RentACoder is becoming increasingly difficult due to the growing number of service providers. These same individuals can theoretically provide testing services instead of programming.

All-in-all uTest sounds quite promising and has earned a place on my companies to watch in 2008 list.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/202421900/

Live video streaming on the desktop may be just taking off in the U.S., but overseas this is already becoming a mobile phenomenon. Yesterday Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK posted on Qik and its live video streaming service. Well it looks like Qik will be able to enjoy few precious moments of blogosphere sunshine because a young Israeli company named FlixWagon is hot on its heals.

Let’s start with the bad… FlixWagon has a terrible name, and has an equally ineffective logo to boot. Neither name nor logo help in communicating the company’s true offering: Allowing anyone with a 3G/WiFi mobile phone to broadcast live video directly to the Web. No wagons are involved in the process.

The good news is that FlixWagon’s technology is far superior to its branding. The most important aspect of a cell-to-web offering is wide support of mobile handsets. FlixWagon supports most Nokia and Sony Ericsson handsets. The mobile client application, which users must download, is 76Kb for Symbian and 218Kb for J2ME phones. FlixWagon executives are confident this covers the gross majority of GSM handsets.

The mobile app is designed simply but effectively in order to provide users the shortest path to broadcast. It’s not mandatory, but users can edit video properties from their phone, such as title, tags, category, and access rights (public or private). The mobile app also provides live feedback from viewers (see the screenshot on the left).

Second to handset support in importance is video quality. I had a chance to see FlixWagon in action on a few occasions and was impressed by video that came out on the Web clearer than I expected. I also saw videos uploaded using the same mobile handset to both Qik and FlixWagon. Subjectively speaking, I felt that FlixWagon was superior. This was true both in video clarity and its ability to deal with movement—quality was degraded substantially on Qik when the handset was moved even slightly. FlixWagon is claiming that this is due to the emphasis it places on ensuring that a user never loses a second of broadcast, even in the most challenging conditions inherent to mobile environments. For example, if a user goes into an elevator, basement, or loses reception for any reason, the broadcast will resume when reception is back and the full video will be stored and available for later viewing.

FlixWagon.com acts as the service’s portal, allowing site visitors to browse through live and stored broadcasts. Social aspects include broadcast alerts to friends and family and auto-uploading to video and social sites like YouTube and Facebook.

FlixWagon has partnered with MTV Israel to enable reporters and subscribers to broadcast live video from their mobile phones directly into a social network to be launched within mtv.co.il. (See also what MTV Israel is doing with regular Web video). I wouldn’t be surprised to see FlixWagon integrated across MTV’s global Websites sooner rather than later.

FlixWagon will be giving TechCrunch readers priority access when it launches its Alpha in January. Sign-up here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/202416544/

Don’t expect to see natural-language search at Google anytime soon. Despite the buzz of startups like Powerset and, to a lesser degree, true knowledge, Google’s head of research Peter Norvig pooh-poohs the notion that people are clamoring to write full sentences in search boxes. In a Q&A with Technology Review, he says:

We don’t think it’s a big advance to be able to type something as a question as opposed to keywords. Typing “What is the capital of France?” won’t get you better results than typing “capital of France.”

True, true. But he does acknowledge that there is some value in the technology:

We think what’s important about natural language is the mapping of words onto the concepts that users are looking for. . . . To give some examples, “New York” is different from “York,” but “Vegas” is the same as “Las Vegas,” and “Jersey” may or may not be the same as “New Jersey.” That’s a natural-language aspect that we’re focusing on. Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we’re not concentrating on the sentence. We think it’s important to get the right results rather than change the interface.

In other words, a natural-language approach is useful on the back-end to create better results, but it does not present a better user experience. Most people are too lazy to type in more than one or two words into a search box anyway. The folks at both Google and Yahoo know that is true for the majority of searchers. The natural-language search startups are going to find out about that the hard way. If Google doesn’t trounce them first.

Powerset

Loading information about Powerset…

true knowledge

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/202378078/

Chris asks:

What is your opinion of “stories” which some web development shops write? A Ruby on Rails development shop I have worked with writes a “story” about every piece of functionality they intend to develop. They use those stories to ensure all customer objectives are met. They’re similar to use cases (maybe identical!)… functionality represented as a sequence of simple steps in writing.

We believe in interface-first driven development, but when the UI or feature needs some further explanation we write a story.

A story is usually a paragraph or two. Sometimes it’s 5 bullet points. It’s not an in depth dissection of a feature, or a technical discussion of what needs to be implemented. It’s not a functional specification. It’s simply a general idea of what the feature is about and why it’s valuable.

For example, we’re working on some stuff for Backpack right now. One of the areas we’re looking at is making it more obvious someone changed a page since your last visit to that page. The story might go like this:

Right now it’s tough to know if a Backpack page has been changed since the last time you’ve seen it. If I’m sharing a page with Bob, and Bob adds a new to-do list or a note to the page, it should be clear to me the page has changed next time I visit that page.

This story may be enough to explain why the mockup we design has a yellow strip at the top saying “Bob changed this page. See the changes.”

The story serves to add some context. It doesn’t need to say exactly how to solve the problem, it doesn’t need to refer to specific design elements, and it’s not technical. It’s just a statement of why something is a hassle (“don’t know the page changed”) and a general idea of how we can make it better (“make it clear the page changed”).

The actual solution is presented in the interface design. We may go with a yellow strip or some other notice. We don’t know yet. We just know it should be clear and obvious. The rest happens as we toss around some design ideas.

We’ve definitely found stories to be handy summaries of big picture ideas. But it’s still the interface that drives almost all of our development.

Got a question for us?

Got a question about design, business, marketing, etc? We’re happy to try to provide some insight into how we’d tackle the problem. Just email svn [at] 37signals dot com with the subject “Ask 37signals”. Thanks.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/744-ask-37signals-how-do-you-feel-about-stories

Author Nick Carr is someone I used to love to hate. He wrote blog posts that I strongly disagreed with - such as this one about the long tail of blogging, and another arguing that Web 2.0 had serious faults. We’ve had numerous direct disagreements as well - he’s called me smug and worse, and I’ve fought back.

But over time I’ve grown to respect his writing and thought process, even though he still takes the occasional mild shot at our posts. The guy just writes really, really well.

His first book, Does IT Matter?, helped change the way companies and vendors thought about technology and its place in the corporate entity. Now he’s preparing to publish his second book, The Big Switch. You can pre-order it on Amazon.

I have an early copy of the book. It’s timely and well written, arguing that computing services are turning into a utility, much as the electric grid emerged a hundred years ago. He argues that society will change drastically as a result.

I asked Carr if we could give away a dozen autographed copies of the book before it hits the market, and he agreed. If you’d like one, please leave a comment below. All you have to do is make sure to include your real email address in the comment form so that we can contact you. Tell us something interesting about yourself and why you want the book. Agree or disagree with something Nick has said on his blog (the first two links in the top paragraph above are easy targets). Or just have a good rant. The twelve most interesting responses will get the book shipped out to them asap.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/202306841/