Ajax Girl

A tiny 14-man startup in Munich called Proximic wants to give Google a run for its money. But it is not going after search. It is coming from behind with an attack on AdSense. Proximic has signed deals to syndicate product listings from both eBay’s Shopping.com and Yahoo’s Shopping Network as contextual ads on other Websites.

This is the first time that either Yahoo or eBay has syndicated these listings. In one fell swoop, Proximic will gain an ad inventory of 50 million ads (20 million from each eBay and Yahoo, and 10 million from other sources). Proximic estimates that Google, in contrast, has an inventory of about one million unique ads. Proximic’s ad network based on this massive inventory will launch at the end of January.

Prospective advertisers will be able to place an ad widget on their sites. Proximic will index the sites and serve up contextually matching products as text ads along with contextually relevant content links (see demo screen shots below). The ads and contextual Web links will also appear in a sidebar for anyone who has downloaded the Proximic Firefox add-on.

So if you are reading about Mideast peace efforts, books about the Mideast might appear in the ad widget. If you are reading about the Mozilla Foundation, you might get an ad for Firefox track jackets from the Mozilla store, along with a link to Twitter message about Mozilla hiring the guys from Humanized. (This is what actually came up in the Firefox sidebar when I tried it. Proximic also populates its widget results with the content links from 900,000 RSS feeds it has indexed and the top 500 or so Websites.)

What makes Proximic different is that it does not come up with contextual matches based on keyword search like Google or Yahoo would. It doesn’t use semantic or statistical methods either to figure out what a page is about. “Semantic systems are not able to scale,” sniffs Proximic co-founder and CTO Thomas Nitsche, a former computer chess champion. “If you hold more than one million documents, you run into a problem,” he concludes. Semantic search, he thinks, is too slow at this point for ad serving.

Instead of keyword, semantic, or statistical approaches, Proximic uses proximity analysis. Nitsche is vague about exactly how it works, but it boils down Proximic’s algorithm translating each body of text into a pattern of characters that then becomes represented by a mathematical vector. Matches are done through traditional vector analysis. Or, as Nitsche explains:

We look at patterns of letters. We get a profile. The profile is a vector. We compare two vectors, and compute proximity by pattern distance. We can generate proximity between texts. The text can be one word, two words, 15 words, or a complete page.

Using this method, Proximic can also create matches between product listings and Web pages, thus opening up what is now an inventory of product search results to the world of contextual advertising. In tests, Nitsche says Proximic is seeing click-through rates as high as 1.5 percent, which is much greater than the 0.25 percent or less that is typical for an AdSense campaign. Of course, Proximic has to split any ad revenues it makes with Yahoo and eBay on one side and the Web publishers on the other. Proximic plans on giving participating Websites 70 percent of any revenues after eBay and Yahoo take their cut, leaving it with a very small piece of the pie. The only way to make up for it is by generating much higher click-through rates (by improving the relevance of the ads).

It is an ambitious undertaking for a German startup which has raised only 3 million Euros from Wellington Partners in 2006. But what Proximic is trying to do is combine contextual search advertising with affiliate marketing. By analyzing the patterns of characters on a page, it is creating a machine intelligence of sorts. The nice thing is that Proximic does not need to leave cookies on anyone’s browser or track you across the Web. It makes its own judgements about what is contextually relevant based on what you are reading.

If Proximic is successful in matching relevant products, imagine what it could do as a general-purpose search engine? But Nitsche knows better than to try to take Google head-on in search. He is happy, for now, focusing on the advertising end.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/217434436/

Musana, a digital music locker service based in France, has offered to allow the first 100 of our readers who email this address into its private beta.

I’ve tried Musana out and it’s quite bare-boned. Upload MP3s from your computer and you can listen to them through the service’s simple browser-based player wherever you go. Musana is free, storage is unlimited and there are no advertisements. Both French and English versions are available.

Other French music startups include Deezer and RadioblogClub. Music locker competitors include Anywhere.fm, MP3tunes, Ezmo, Maestro, and MediaMaster.

Anywhere.FM

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Deezer

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/217399813/

Steve Jobs announced Apple’s entry into the ultra-mobile laptop market, the Macbook Air during his keynote at the Macworld Expo today.

It’s an amazing machine that I got to play with this afternoon (photos below) so I’ll get the fanboy stuff out of the way. Air is an apt name, because its 3 pounds (1.36kg) and thinner than my iPhone in its (somewhat bulky) case. The tech specs are solid, but like any good Apple product it’s the form factor that makes the difference. Full keyboard, 13.4″ screen and a tactile trackpad brings iPhone style touch functionality to a laptop.

Now here’s the downside. The price. $1799.

We’ve covered the move towards cloud computing recently with the gPC; the same company now offers a ultra-mobile laptop for $299. Asus offers the eeePC, another ultra-mobile laptop that runs linux and is focused on the cloud for between $299-$499. The move away from computers that rely on desktop apps to the cloud (internet apps) is on. The Macbook Air fits the criteria with its lack of optical drive, relatively small storage options and emphasis on wireless/ WiFi internet. But here’s the thing: it’s too much money. Sure, it’s superb engineering and a full powered machine, but $1799 US and probably a lot more by the time its offered internationally is beyond what many will pay for an ultra-mobile.

The Macbook Air will also likely cannibalize Macbook sales, after all for not much more you can own an amazing machine, but perhaps that’s the whole point. Perhaps the Macbook Air is Apple’s outreach to the premium end of the Ultra-mobile market and longer term a replacement for the Macbook? Either way Apple has not launched a mass market computer, but they probably know that already, oh, and I still want one.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/217360030/

There’s a fine line between humor and condescension; more than a few customers felt that hosting provider Dreamhost crossed that line today.

The company overbilled nearly every customer, by a total $7.5 million dollars. The mea culpa came in the form of a blog post that featured Homer Simpson and featured such quips as “The joke is on you!” along with an apology and explanation. Basically, their billing system added a year’s worth of extra hosting charges to every single account (meaning, by the way, that Dreamhost is doing around $7.5 million in annual revenue). Many accounts were also shut down due to non-payment.

The apology was clearly heart-felt and genuine, but emails to us along with many of the 250 comments to the blog post suggest that a more straightforward apology may have been in order. Examples:

it is time you realized when the light jokey style in which you run this business is NOT the appropriate tone. Any of us involved in running a business knows when you approach your customers with a serious tone. Your customers are taking that tone with you; Time to step up and be serious and act like your company depends on it. I think it does.

Thanks for the jokes. I’m out of here.

Please, show some genuine concern for your customers. Sure, you screwed up, but I don’t see any sort of genuine concern other than the $7,500,000 in credit card debt you accidentally set off.

Jokes are NOT APPROPRIATE in this situation….Do you realize that for some credit cards, you have just pushed them over their max, meaning some people will pay fees, overage charges, higher rates PERMANENTLY, and their credit scores could be affected? Will you be reimbursing those charges?

Coincidentally, in Dreamhost’s last monthly newsletter they talked about their new offices and joked “If your next web hosting bill from us is mysteriously tripled, now you
know why.”

Indeed.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/217341253/

Web-based IM service Meebo is a text-book case of how to build a brand (and traffic) with widgets on other sites. As we’ve noted in the past, the bulk of Meebo’s traffic comes from Meebo Rooms and other widgets embedded on other sites, including Facebook. Some new comScore Widget Metrix numbers pan this theory out.

In October 2007, the most recent period available, comScore measured 6.3 million people in the U.S. who actively engaged with a Meebo widget, compared to 1.2 million who visited Meebo.com. Worldwide, Meebo widgets engaged 19.8 million people, compared to 4.3 million for the site. So in the U.S., Meebo is getting 84 percent of its traffic through its widgets, and 82 percent worldwide. Yet the site still gets higher levels of active engagement than the widgets. All told, Meebo transfers 150 million IMs a day, and only about 20 million of those are generated in Meebo Rooms.

Here is a chart that shows total growth of both site and widget visitors combined (based on internal company data):

Meebo

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/217320245/

Wow, John Lilly is shaking things up as CEO! Mozilla has managed to hire the guys behind Humanized:

Mozilla has hired 3 of the principals from Humanized. They will be joining the Mozilla Labs team on January 16, 2008. We expect a lot of innovation work from them, some Firefox-related, some broader, just like everything else in Mozilla Labs. This was not an acquisition. No premium was paid and no intellectual property was acquired by Mozilla.

The work done by the Humanized principals speaks for itself — there are lots of great, web-relevant ideas in their work and we’re excited to have them join Mozilla.

This is great news. We know about Enso and Songza but what is really interesting here is that they have ideas for next gen browsing.

I really hope to see a prototype of the zoomable UI browser with vertical tabs so you infinitely scroll around. Congrats to the guys, especially Aza, who I know is a great guy and always enjoy his talks at The Ajax Experience. Are you guys moving to the bay or staying in Chicago?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/217276661/mozilla-hires-aza-raskin-and-humanized

French startup Criteo just raised $10.4 million (7 million Euros) in a B round from Index Ventures, reports TechCrunch France. This is on top of a 3-million-Euro round in April 2006 led by AGF Private Equity and Elaia Partners.

Criteo sells recommendation-engine software to e-commerce and content sites. Competitors include Aggregate Knowledge, CleverSet, and ChoiceStream. Discovery is hot right now. For instance, Kleiner-backed Aggregate Knowledge has raised $25 million. It is good to see some competition stirring across from across the pond.

Incidentally, Criteo is probably best known among bloggers in the U.S for its AutoRoll widget that generates a linkroll based on the reading habits of a blog’s readers. Any blog that has the AutoRoll widget on it will show the other top AutoRoll blogs that its readers have also visited. There are 12,000 blogs with the AutoRoll widget (I used to have one on my old blog, the Next Net). It is an interesting idea, but hasn’t quite reached critical mass yet. Good thing the AutoRoll is not Criteo’s main business driver.

Aggregate Knowledge

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Source: TechCrunch
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Google’s Picasa photo management software is often regarded by many (particularly Windows users) to be the best basic image editing and management software on the market. Although a desktop app it’s crucially a conduit to Picasa Web Album’s, Google’s challenger to the Yahoo owned Flickr.

I was struck this morning as to how prominent the Picasa logo on Google banners and employee T-Shirts was at Macworld, particularly given that there’s no Mac version of Picasa, although there is a stand alone image uploader.

Naturally I had to asked, and as luck would have it I managed to pick the Google employee with the least amount of Google training and immediately put her on the spot. Her response: Picasa for Mac is under-development and will be launched later this year.

She then tried back tracking and pointed me to the people who were suppose to answer these queries. After explaining that I’d been told by their colleague that Picasa for Mac was coming and all I wanted now was the release date, they said that they wouldn’t confirm or deny the fact, saying that the use of the logo was part of a promotion for Picasa Web Albums, but said all of this whilst smiling like Cheshire cats. They then told me (and I did chuckle) that they had more media training than their colleague and that had taught them that there is alway no comment. They then put me in front of a camera and made me tell them how much I liked Google as punishment (after I told them I was writing the story anyway) then gave me a free pair of thongs (flip-flops). Sorry guys, the bribery needs to be better than that

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/217239773/

I haven’t been able to test it myself, since visitors from within the United States are redirected to Pandora itself. But a new site called Global Pandora (recently written up by TechCrunch France) apparently allows you to access Pandora from anywhere in the world.

As we covered last May, Pandora was forced to block international users from its streaming music service because there are no international laws equivalent to Section 114 of the DMCA that allow Pandora to pay rights holders for the usage of their content without signing deals with them first. Listeners in the UK were the latest to have the Pandora plug pulled on them, just after Duncan was compelled to write a how-to guide for accessing Pandora and other blocked sites internationally.

While international users can set up proxy servers or VPN connections to listen to Pandora, many less technical users will find a simple website like Global Pandora much more accessible. If you’re a reader from outside the US, give it a try and let us know how it works for you in the comments.

Pandora

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/217224217/

We didn’t have live audio but we did get the full Stevenote video stream, available for your edification over on CrunchGear. Now you too can play the Macworld 2008 Keynote Drinking Game (TM)!

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/217221789/