Ajax Girl

I was surprised this evening to receive an email from the ChaCha communications team about a new feature they’ve just launched. I say surprised because we have not been kind to the service in our three posts on them so far. In the most recent post, I called them “a bad idea, poorly executed.”

The new feature is a mobile interface to the search engine - try it virtually here. Users can text a search query to 242242 and receive text results back on their phone. Like the main ChaCha service, the answers are sent by a live search guide. For now, it’s free.

Example searches given by the company include “I’m at the corner of 42nd & Broadway in New York City. Where can I get a cup of coffee?” or even “Where can I get some great sushi in Palo Alto, CA?” ChaCha also says that shortcuts and misspellings are not a problem, since a real human is reading and responding to the message.

I texted “What is the temperature in New York City?” to the service (I’m flying there tomorrow). Within moments I received a text message back welcoming me to the service:

Welcome to ChaCha’s FREE txt trial! Your phone just got smarter. Ask away. Your first answer will come shortly. Std txt charges apply. Send HELP for help.

Four minutes later I got the following reply:

Current temperature is 17 degrees F, Clear, Wind: W at 10 mph, Humidity: 45%. Thursday 24 degrees F 16 degrees F. http://www.chacha.com/u/a6xii7j9

Useful? Definitely. Scalable? Not a chance. But the upside is that if you are ever lonely and have no one to text with, ChaCha guides are there for you. You’ll never be lonely again.

The company has raised $16 million in funding, including an investment from Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions. Look for them to hit the deadpool by end of year 2008.

Just kidding, ChaCha. Keep me on the PR distribution list. I promise to be fair and balanced.

ChaCha

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/210309945/

A reader of ours tipped us off today about the recent demise of a highly-regarded music service called YottaMusic that was shut down on December 30th after Rhapsody had given the service a December 31st deadline for ceasing use of its non-public APIs and data.

YottaMusic was a music web application started in 2006 that primarily afforded a superior interface to Rhapsody’s streaming music collection, although it also sported social networking features and playlist integration with Sonos and Last.fm. Back in 2006, YottaMusic was permitted access to a set of non-public Rhapsody APIs that allowed it to build its own player and interface for the music service instead of using Rhapsody’s own popup player.

This past May, however, Rhapsody contacted YottaMusic and asked them to start using its public APIs exclusively or shut down the service entirely. Since YottaMusic depended on the non-public API for its Rhapsody interface, and since adopting the standard Rhapsody player would have erased most of the application’s value, the startup ultimately felt forced to fold and shut down operations.

While founder Luke Matkins says that he understands Rhapsody was perfectly within its rights to take such actions, it’s obviously an unfortunate turn of events for YottaMusic’s 10,000 visitors per day. And it’s unclear why Rhapsody was so concerned about YottaMusic providing its own player for streaming music from them. In May, YottaMusic even offered to completely reskin its player, thereby removing all signs of YottaMusic branding. Users playing songs through YottaMusic also had to be paying Rhapsody members, so it wasn’t as though anyone was stealing music. Nevertheless, some undisclosed reason compelled Rhapsody to effectively squash a popular point of access to its service, a move that seems quite rash on the surface of things.

I suspect that a considerable amount of politics are at play here, although I don’t profess to have particularly acute insight into the online music industry. MOG, another web destination for music lovers, recently integrated Rhapsody into its service and now uses Rhapsody’s own popup player to stream songs. So it’s not as though Rhapsody is failing to allow third party applications to spread its service; rather, the player itself seems to be a major sticking point.

YottaMusic is now in the TechCrunch DeadPool.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/210290189/

Nearly missed new years day was an announcement from Yahoo that Yahoo Picks service was to shut after 12 years.

Launched in August 1995, Yahoo Picks highlighted the best of the web in a weekly, then later daily update service in an era prior to blogging. The site eventually evolved to a full blown blog in 2004.

Many new internet users in the mid 90s started on the web in roughly this order: Yahoo’s Front Page, Yahoo’s Directory , then for cool sites they’d head to Yahoo Picks. I can still remember using Yahoo Picks in late 95; there wasn’t an awful lot else around and the sites Yahoo picked at that stage were often amazing, particularly for a new internet user like myself at that time.

Yahoo did not post the reasons for shutting the service, but in an age of mass produced and often automated link swapping and recommendations, the service is by comparison archaic, and probably not seeing an awful lot of traffic. Many of the original pages are still up, complete with their mid 90s livery. One shot below, and a direct link here for those wanting to go for a walk down memory lane.

Sadly Yahoo Picks joins the TechCrunch Deadpool.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/210274324/

Rich Skrenta, who created the first computer virus (Elk Cloner), co-founded the Open Directory Project, and co-founded online news site Topix, may have bitten off the biggest challenge of his career - taking on Google. In search.

Skrenta left Topix last June. He started his new company, Blekko, almost immediately, along with five others from the Topix core team. They raised $2 million in seed funding in September from Baseline Ventures, two early Googlers (David DesJardin and Jeremy Wenokur), and the founding team.

The company is still deep in stealth. The Blekko website, which today has nothing on it except a picture of a puppet created by Skrenta’s daughter, isn’t even close to having a landing page up, let alone the final product. But eventually Skrenta says they’ll launch a full scale search engine to compete with the big guys.

Skrenta, who’s very media savvy, won’t say much about how he’s going to tackle search. He says they are looking at improvements on the back end (indexing and query serving) as well as the user search experience itself. Beyond that, he says we have to wait. And it might be a long wait at that. The company, Skrenta says, may not have a public prototype available until 2009.

Normally an entrepreneur announcing they’re taking on Google with a six person team and just $2 million in funding would either be laughed at or ignored. In Skrenta’s case, he has proven himself more than once as capable of taking on big challenges and winning. This will be a company to watch, and speculate on, in 2008.

There are other promising search startups out there. Powerset, Cuill and the upcoming Wikia Search Engine are all yet to launch. Mahalo is growing fast (but still tiny). Can anyone unseat Google? Perhaps not any time soon. But you don’t have to get much market share to be a huge winner in this space - every 1%, they say, is worth a cool billion dollars.

Blekko

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/210235160/

I’m not sure what the bad guys want with a bunch of Facebook user account credentials, but phishing scams seem to be hitting the site. Scott Fish notes that some users are seeing Wall posts that contain links to phishing sites to gather Facebook credentials.

An example message is:

lol i cant believe these pics got posted….its going to be BADDDD when her boyfriend sees these- http://www.facebook.com.profile.php.id.371233.cn

Note that the URL in the quote above, which leads to what looks like a Facebook sign in page, is not Facebook. So if you visit the site (don’t), DO NOT enter your Facebook credentials or any other personal information.

Only your friends can add Wall posts on Facebook, so any posts linking to phishing sites are either from hacked accounts or else people have added the phishing guys as a friend.

This is a good candidate for PhishTank, an anti-phishing service created by OpenDNS.

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/~3/210220163/

Breakups are always tough, but when you are a small tech company which depends on a single partner for survival, they can be literally devastating. That looks to be what happened to Boston-based startup N2N Commerce, an e-commerce software company that was building a modern e-commerce platform for Victoria’s Secret, and had at least 70 employees. Boston is a small town. Two separate entrepreneurs there tell us that N2N Commerce is shutting down. Says one via e-mail: “Rumor has it that the product they delivered for Victoria’s Secret/Limited Brands was a total dud and VS dropped them. Almost everyone was let go late last week.”

Calls to multiple people at N2N Commerce earlier today, including CEO Ruben Pinchanski, went unanswered. But a spokesperson for Limited Brands confirms that the startup is ceasing operations and that Victoria’s Secret will not be using its technology. Victoria’s Secret CEO Sharen Jester Turney is an N2N Commerce board member. And N2N Commerce CEO Pinchanski used to be an executive vice president at Limited Brands Direct (Limited Brands owns Victoria’s Secret). Pinchanski convinced Limited Brands and General Catalyst Partners to sink $30 million into N2N Commerce back in 2006. He was going to create a multi-channel e-commerce platform to replace Victoria’s Secret’s IBM-mainframe, silo-like infrastructure.  He even ramped up hiring last summer. But now it looks like the geek-meets-model dalliance is over, and the rejection was too much for N2N Commerce.

In retrospect, the warning signs were everywhere: 1) big company spin-off; 2) raised way too much money for a series A round; 3) reliance on that same big company as its main customer (and as an investor).  N2N Commerce can now be found in the deadpool.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/210156799/

Plaxo, the Sequoia-backed start that transformed itself from a hated spam monster into a mild mannered and interesting business social network, has started a sale process according to a source. They’ve hired an investment bank, Revolution Partners, who are spearheading the sale effort.

We do not know what price Plaxo is looking for. The company has raised $28.3 million to date over four rounds, including $9 million last February. The company had over 15 million users as of September 2006, and their recent integration into Google Open Social has led to a further growth spike.

There were rumors in mid 2007 that Plaxo was being acquired by European competitor Xing. Those rumors were either inaccurate or the deal was never completed.

I have an email in to Plaxo CEO Ben Golub for comment. If I were him, I wouldn’t respond.

Update: User data from John McCrea, VP Marketing at Plaxo:

For our networked address book service, we’re right around 20 million users, plus another 15 million address book accounts hosted through partnerships.

Increasingly, though, we are focused on Pulse as the key driver of active users (and pageviews), and although we are still in beta (and haven’t yet broadly promoted to the address book user base), we’re seeing good month-over-month growth in all the key indicators. With Pulse, we’re at 1 million unique monthly users, up from 250K at the beginning of November. In terms of page views and time spent on the
site, our per-visit numbers appear to be comparable to Facebook (based on data from Compete.com), even though our demographic is much more like LinkedIn’s (professional, 25-50 y/o).

Plaxo

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/210108593/

We’re not exactly sure how long it’s been around (it appears to have launched late this Fall), but we recently came across a simple widget service with no press coverage to date called Hyplet that helps you create digital business cards and flyers. You can spread them around the web by embedding in blogs, social networks, websites, and emails.

Hyplet’s end product is nothing fancy, just a simple HTML snippet that references an image hosted on the company’s servers. Most of the service’s value comes from its user-friendly image creation tool that lets you arrange text and images, pick styles, and add links from within the browser. It’s obviously targeted at people with little or no knowledge of Photoshop or similar graphics programs. While Hyplet has templates for both business cards and flyers, you can modify them and add your own images to create widgets for any purpose.

I can see individual MySpace users taking advantage of Hyplet to put flyers on each other’s profiles, but I can’t see the service being used for serious viral campaigns. The themes are too limited and the publishing options require you to manually add your widgets in one place at a time (there’s no help from widget distribution services like Gigaya or ClearSpring here). There’s also the issue of monetization; Hyplet doesn’t appear to have any source of revenue yet so I’d be concerned that my hosted images wouldn’t be around in the future.

It’s also really easy to take out the part of the HTML that promotes Hyplet itself, which I did to the business card above so it could be floated to the left (and no, that’s not my real contact information).

Get your own Hyplet!

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/210092442/

Freemusiczilla is desktop based software that basically lets you download any song you can stream on the Internet. There are lots of services like it, but none are as easy to use, or work as well, as Freemusiczilla did in my testing.

The software is Windows only. One you’ve downloaded it, any song that plays on a site (MySpace, imeem, Pandora, Last.fm, Skreemr, Seeqpod, etc.) is noted by the program. Click a button and the song is downloaded to your hard drive.

In our tests it worked flawlessly, picking up on songs played via a flash widget without any problems. And it also broke through imeem’s anti-leech technology which tries to block downloads.

The software is free but limits downloads to ten per day. A plus version, presumably for a fee, will be released shortly.

Clearly Freemusiczilla can be used for the improper downloading of copyrighted materials. We don’t recommend or condone its usage that involves copyright infringement, of course.

Found via Go2Web2.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/210077804/

JPMorgan’s Internet analyst Imran Khan and his team released a massive 312-page report this morning titled Nothing But Net that paints a bullish picture for the major Internet stocks (Google, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Expedia, Salesforce.com, Ominiture, ValueClick, Monster.com, Orbitz, Priceline, CNET, etc.). Some key takeaways:

—Noting that, in 2007, Internet stocks delivered a 14 percent return versus 5 percent for the S&P 500, JPMorgan expects 34 percent earnings growth in 2008 for the Internet stocks it covers versus 8 percent earnings growth for the S&P 500.

—In general, as broadband penetration continues to rise, so do e-commerce revenues:

—But advertising revenues actually outpace the adoption of broadband:

—Free cash flow at large Internet companies will keep going up, fueling M&A and share buybacks. JPMorgan estimates that free cash flow among just five of the top Internet companies (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and Expedia) will rise from $8.8 billion last year to $12.5 billion in 2008. That is a lot of money for Web 2.0 acquisitions. Top acquirers Yahoo and Google, for instance, each spend about a third of their free cash flow on acquisitions.

—Search advertising will continue to dominate, rising from $22 billion globally last year to $50 billion in 2010. Here is JPMorgan’s forecast for the U.S. search advertising market (it expects global search revenues to rise 38 percent in 2008 to $30.5 billion):

—And here is its forecast for the U.S. graphical advertising market. Average CPMs for online ads, which bottomed in 2007 at $3.31, will start to rise again (see table below):

—As global GDP continues to grow faster than U.S. GDP (3.9 percent versus 2.2 percent in 2007), Internet companies with global reach will benefit. Amazon, eBay, and Google all get about half their revenues from international markets. Yahoo gets only a quarter of its revenues from abroad.

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/~3/210030157/