Ajax Girl

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will rule in favor of Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, possibly as soon as this week, according to sources quoted by Bloomberg.

The FTC has been investigating the acquisition on competition grounds since it was first announced in April. A number of high profile respondents argued against the acquisition, including AT&T and Microsoft, and in July Scott Cleland of telecom research group Prescursor presented a strong case arguing against the merger.

At the time we noted:

The FTC has acted against anti-competitive behavior in the tech industry before (most notably with Microsoft), however the FTC under the Bush Administration has become far more laissez faire towards business practices than it was in the past. It won’t be all clear sailing for Google, but given recent history it would be surprising if the FTC did block Google’s DoubleClick acquisition.

The acquisition has already been cleared by authorities in Australia, but still faces regulatory review in Europe.

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/~3/203208710/

Ning (and now flux) commoditized social networking and allow anyone who can click a mouse to have their own network. The same thing is now happening with social bookmarking sites that allow people to vote bookmarks up to a top list (better known as Digg).

There are scores of Digg clones already, of course. The most well known is Reddit, which was acquired by Condé Nast a little over a year ago. But there are also emerging platforms that allow anyone to create their own Digg-like site.

We’ve covered these as they launch. Our favorite is coRank, which recently relaunched and has a lot of loyal users.

Pligg is another - it’s a well known open source project that allows people to create Digg-like sites. Pligg was recently put up for sale, but as far as I can tell it was never sold.

Today Pligg announced (buried in a blog post) that the upcoming launch of Fraxi

Soon we will be launching a new service called “Fraxi” which will allow anyone to create their own free Pligg powered niche community with just a few clicks of a mouse button. For example if someone living in Miami wanted to create a social network for the citizens of their community, they will be able to create Miami.Fraxi.com in a matter of seconds. No hosting fees, no installation process and no time wasted. They can then concentrate on growing their social network instead of needing to learn the ropes of FTPing, monkeying with server configurations, setting up domains, etc. More information about this service and website will be unveiled soon.

Not much in the way of details, but the Fraxi site is up with a landing page. See this blog for more editorial.

Digg itself will likely enter this market in 2008, we hear. This could possibly be through an acquisition, although a source tells us this would be for customers, not technology.

Digg

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coRank

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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/~3/203195181/

2007 may well be remembered as a year that tech and automative interests came together. Driven by the convergence of tech with automotive features such as iPod docks and GPS units, tech companies wanted a slice of the car market. Apple signed a deal with Mercedes Benz and closer to home Ford started offering cars the included onboard features that were “powered by Microsoft.”

An example of an actual commercial can be found here, but the following comes courtesy of regular TechCrunch commenter Fake Steve Ballmer. Why they’re driving an old LamboFerrari in the clip isn’t made clear, perhaps it was a test unit

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/~3/203195818/

Yesterday Meebo and SpeedDate teamed up with a number of bloggers to have a public speed dating session. The results speak for themselves - solid gold content. Somebody give the marketing team a big year end bonus.

In my opinion, Wired’s Aaron Rowe stole the show.

Meebo

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SpeedDate

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/203148630/

So NetSuite’s IPO process is basically complete. They priced the stock today at $26, and barring any major market disruptions the company will begin trading Thursday morning under the symbol “N” on the New York Stock Exchange. A total of 6.2 - 7.1 million shares will be sold, raising the company around $165 million. And if the stock price holds, they’ll be worth well over $1 billion in the public markets.

Rumors first came up that the company was going public a year ago. In July 2007 the company made their first filings with the SEC.

Revenue to date this year is nearly $77 million, with losses of around $20 million.

Netsuite

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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/~3/203144843/

Think that user generated content is still only the domain of a relatively small few? Well a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that the next generation at least is switched on and producing content.

According to the study, 59% of all American teenagers engage in at least one form of online content creation. Of those 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys however like their video, with 19% of boys posting video online vs. 10% of girls.

Other figures from the study:

• 39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos
• 33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments
• 28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004.
• 27% maintain their own personal webpage
• 26% remix content they find online into their own creations

Interestingly the presumed dominance of social networking sites (such as Facebook and MySpace) amongst teens was not reflected in the study, which found that only 55% of teens online use a social networking site. The flip side to that is that the presumption that sites such as MySpace may have peaked may be untrue if 45% of teens aren’t using one of these sites already.

The full study is available here (pdf).

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/203122970/

Treemo is a site where you can upload all types of media (photos, videos, audio clips, and text) from your mobile phone or desktop computer and share them with either the general public or just your friends. Until now, the only way to get your Treemo-hosted content distributed elsewhere on the Internet was to use RSS feeds, but the company has just released a set of embeddable widgets and a Facebook application that should help to spread this content much more effectively.

Of the three types of widgets, the first provides a channel of the last 24 media items you have uploaded to Treemo (we’ve embedded an example below), the second highlights just one media item, and the third allows anybody with a cell phone to subscribe to your content and consequently receive notices via SMS when you upload new stuff. The Facebook application will display your most recent Treemo uploads in your mini-feed and embed a channel player into your profile as well.

In addition to this widgetization strategy, Treemo is developing an API that will allow developers to integrate Treemo functionality into their websites. A Chinese website called 3GDODO has already soft launched with the API as a pre-release partner, and the API should be available to the public in the first quarter of 2008. Another partner focusing on citizen journalism will also leverage the API to solicit the distribution of niche content.

Other smaller upgrades include new language support for Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and German, as well as a new homepage that does more to highlight the contributions of your friends on Treemo.

Treemo’s mobile social media competitors include JuiceCaster, Zannel (recently reviewed here), and Kyte. Whereas JuiceCaster requires users to download a client to their phones, Treemo is based completely in mobile web browsers using XHTML and WAP. JuiceCaster announced just this week that it raised $6M more in Series C, bringing its total to $15.3M. This past October, Treemo raised $2.55M in its first round, which was led by JK&B Capital of Chicago.

Treemo

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Juice Wireless

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Zannel

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Kyte

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/203077592/

Online video service Kyte has taken $15 million Series B in a round that included Telefonica, Nokia, DoCoMo, Swisscom, Holtzbrinck and DFJ. The new round brings total funding for Kyte to $17.25 million.

According to Kyte’s unofficial evangelist Robert Scoble, the announcement was streamed live on Kyte itself, which while demonstrating the product works perhaps compensates for the fact that no where on their site (at the time of writing) is there a written statement about the funding.

Kyte launched in April this year with a product that falls somewhere between Ustream and Twitter. Unlike many of its live streaming competitors Kyte offers a much richer two way experience, including support for text chat from within each video embed and the ability for users to drag drag photos, video and text into Kyte channels while interacting with others.

The investment will expose Kyte to a much broader audience with the raft of telco investors having hundreds of millions of users between them; Kyte could soon be coming to a mobile phone near you.

Kyte

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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/~3/203091251/

In a rather sad end to 2007, the venture firm behind mobile media startup 3 Guppies, VantagePoint, has closed down the company. This is despite still having $8 million of an original $20 million (raised in April 2006) left to burn in the bank. VentureBeat reports that the company’s 40 employees were sent home last week, but will be paid through the end of the month.

3 Guppies was started after VantagePoint spent $20 million acquiring two companies: MoPhone, a mobile social networking company, and 3Guploads, a mobile content company (ringtones). However, the mobile ringtone market has been drying up over the last year as margins tighten and mobile phones become more open. One of the largest ringtone distributors sold to Bellrock Media last year under competitive pressure.

The two companies struggled to find a way forward under the leadership of MoPhone’s former CEO Bill Bryant. The combined company’s new offering was a simple addition of the two original startups. 3 Guppies allowed users to share and store pictures in a free mobile locker as well as create your own MP3 ringtones and download video to any cell phone. The offering is similar to those of Juicecaster and Treemo. However, evolving the company beyond this combined service proved too difficult. Within a year Bryant was removed from his position, taking along money made from the original merger. Bryant said, “We couldn’t build other services on top of the technology, so we were stuck in the ringtone business.”

VantagePoint then realized the combination would pay off to be the big hit they were looking for and pulled the plug on the operation. Seattle PI is reporting that VantagePoint is instead negotiating to sell its majority interest back to the management team. For now we’re putting it in the deadpool.

Treemo

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Juice Wireless

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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/~3/203084261/

Intel Capital has taken a stake in San Diego based online storage provider and Amazon S3 competitor Nirvanix.

Nirvanix’s selling points are a claim that its service is easier to integrate than S3 and they offer a service level agreement that guarantees 99.9% uptime compared to Amazon who don’t offer a SLA (see our previous coverage here.)

Nirvanix said the investment will be used to provide the company with “additional opportunities to further technology advancements of its Storage Delivery Network optimized for media applications”, and “to further accelerate its global build-out of storage nodes to meet swelling demand for its online storage service.”

The size of Intel’s investment was not available, although we did ask and were told that they were not willing to share it. Nirvanix closed a $12 million round earlier in the year that included Mission Ventures, Valhalla Partners and Windward Ventures.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/203076407/