Ajax Girl

Loopt has the most tightly integrated and feature rich mobile social networking service we’ve seen, and we’ve seen a bunch.

Loopt’s mobile application lets you broadcast your location even while your phone is closed and send messages or photos between you and your friends. It can do this to a greater degree because of their deal with Sprint/Nextel, which recently went un-exclusive. But a social application isn’t all that useful unless your friends are using it too, and so far Loopt has been limited to the Sprint network. That is, until now.

Loopt is launching a beta program for developers on a new mobile social networking platform. The platform will free user’s data from the network and let developers incorporate it into new SMS, WAP, or mobile location based applications using Loopt’s APIs. Loopt’s API’s will feed geographical data from users who opt into the applications to a developers program. Yahoo’s Brickhouse has been working on a similar GPS platform as well (Fire Eagle), but relies on the programmer to feed the location data into the service. Another location based service, Plazes, doesn’t use GPS, but solves the problem by letting users “bookmark” their location to make broadcasting their movements easier. Loopt says their API will solve the compatibility problems between phones and networks for developers so they only have to worry about building the application.

To participate in the beta, go here and tell them how you’d use the service. They’re working with a group of 15 to 20 developers on designing the first applications already and will be supporting some more carriers as well, although the details hush hush.

However, you can imagine what kinds of services will develop. With location data, you could make smarter search queries, trigger location related messages, or more easily post photos or messages related to your location.

Loopt says their deal with Sprint and related carriers gives them potential exposure to over 50 million users, although they haven’t released any user numbers. Boost, which they originally launched with, has last reported they had 100,000 users and not updated that number in some time.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/218042668/

Conduit, a service that enables web publishers to easily create their own toolbars for Internet Explorer and Firefox, has raised $8M in a Series B round with Benchmark Capital.

We covered Conduit a couple of times early last year when the company had 25,000 partners and 5M toolbar installs. The company now has 140,000 partners with 12M+ installs. The company is cash-flow positive and describes its “web community toolbar” offering as a superior alternative to personalized homepages like Netvibes or Pageflakes, which it says require too much time to set up.

I’m not a big fan of browser toolbars myself; all the major browsers have search functionality and pop-up blockers built into them these days, bookmarks work just fine for me, and RSS readers do a better job aggregating the content I want to read anyway. But I can see publishers loving toolbars since they effectively market their brands by showing their logos to users every time they surf the net. And they are probably quite appealing to users who are loyal fans of very few sites, and who don’t care about giving up a little browser real estate space.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/218029034/

CRM and SaaS provider Salesforce.com have announced that there Force.com Cloud Computing Architecture (our review here) is to now offer Development-as-a-Service (DaaS), a new pricing structure and a developer competition.

The DaaS service consists of a new set of development tools and APIs that allow enterprise developers to harness cloud computing. The tools offer full access to the database, logic and user interface capabilities of the Force.com Platform, unifying development and IT collaboration tools with Force.com Platform-as-a-Service. The new service includes a Metadata API, Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the Sandbox, and Code Share that all developers to build enterprise Software-as-a-Service applications.

The new pricing model includes a pay-per-login utility pricing model for the Force.com Platform and Development-as-a-Service. The model offers a cheaper alternative to companies that may use applications in the cloud less often, in theory making the service more affordable to use. Force.com cloud (per login) has a list price is $5.00 per login with a maximum of 5 logins per user per month, and will be offered at $0.99 per login to the end 2008. For more frequent users (more then 5 logins per month) must sign up to Force.com’s unlimited pricing plan of $50 per user per month.

Salesforce.com and Emergence Capital Partners have also announced a new competition, the Force.com $1 Million Challenge – a venture competition for entrepreneurs and companies building on the Force.com platform. Winners will receive a $1 million investment from Emergence Capital as well as space in Salesforce.com’s AppExchange Incubator facility for one year. The winner will be announced in November at Dreamforce 2008.

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/~3/218031698/

The newly formed Velocity Interactive Group (Jonathan Miller’s and Ross Levinsohn’s vehicle for investing in digital media) is making its first investment: $10 million in video ad network Broadband Enterprises. Already one of the largest video ad networks and producers of video commercials for the Web, its video ads reach about 45 million people a month through 1,800 affiliate sites. In comparison, video ad network Tremor Media, which raised $11 million on Monday, reaches twice as many people. But video is hot, and whoever can scale the fastest will be sitting pretty. As Miller (the former CEO of AOL) tells me:

The agencies want to deal with a handful of people. They can deal with a dozen sites—the Security Council. They can’t deal with the General Assembly. So the game is really about can we be one of the 10 or 12 that they deal with. Scale matters.

Broadband Enterprises CEO Matt Wasserlauf estimates that his company streams 200 to 300 million video ads per month. He says that advertisers like American Express, AT&T, Honda, McDonald’s and Proctor & Gamble like his Vindico video ad software because it reports back metrics immediately in terms of time spent watching the ads and click-throughs. (With some other competing video ad platforms there is still a delay in when advertisers get that feedback).

Even though the New York City startup was formed four years ago, this is the first outside money it is taking. Velocity is putting up the entire A round itself. “They are cash-flow positive and making money today,” says Miller, on tens of millions of dollars in revenues.  That’s an easy investment decision.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/218029035/

Twitter is to launch a dedicated version of their growingly popular messing service for Japan.

The new site is will be developed in partnership with Digital Garage, who as part of the deal has also made an investment in Twitter, “and will commit engineering and other development resources to help bring Twitter to Japan.”

The announcement follows a week where Twitter failed under the strain of users using the service to Twitter the Steve Jobs keynote at the Macworld Expo, part of a pattern of ongoing issues relating to the increasingly popular service going back over 12 months.

The amount of the investment was not disclosed, however here’s hoping that they’ll use the money to focus on service stability.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/218021770/

Here’s a little anti-spin on the Hitwise numbers that just came out showing that MySpace still rules social networking in the U.S. (See Duncan’s earlier post). Hitwise says that MySpace commands a 72 percent market share of visits to the top ten social networking sites, while Facebook has only gained a 16 percent market share. I find the way Hitwise discloses its data to be confusing—72 percent of what exactly? Why don’t they just tell us how many people they think visited the site? We can do our own math.

Any way you slice it, the numbers are surprising. Isn’t Facebook supposed to be on a rocket ride? So I decided to look at what comScore has to say on the matter of MySpace versus Facebook (not that they are perfect, but at least they give an actual estimate of how many people they think visited a particular site).

The numbers on comScore corroborate that Facebook is still lagging MySpace, but not by as much as Hitwise would have you think. In December, comScore reports that MySpace had 69 million unique visitors compared to 35 million for Facebook. That would give Facebook about half the market share of Facebook, not one fifth.

Maybe by”visits,” Hitwise means page views. Again, the comScore numbers confirm that MySpace is trouncing Facebook in the U.S. with 38 billion page views in December 2007, versus 13 billion for Facebook. Even so, that gives Facebook a third as much “market share” as MySpace. Of course, Hitwise data and comScore data are apples and oranges because they’ve been collected using different methods and different sources. I offer this more as a gut check.

Regardless of what data better reflects who is winning the social-networking race in the U.S., the real story is happening elsewhere. A peak at the global comScore numbers (as of November 2007) produces this doozy: Facebook has nearly caught up to MySpace with 93 million unique visitors worldwide versus MySpace’s 105 million. And in minutes spent on the site, it has actually surpassed MySpace with 21 billion minutes for Facebook versus 17 billion minutes for MySpace. (Although, it is still lagging in page views, 42 billion to 48 billion). The Web is a global game, and MySpace might be about to lose it.

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Source: TechCrunch
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New figures release by Hitwise show that despite Facebook’s rising traffic, MySpace still dominates US social networking traffic.

Facebook’s traffic grew 51% from December 2006 to December 2007, taking its share of social networking traffic to 16.03%. MySpace’s traffic declined 8% over the same period, to 72.32%, down from 78.89% in December 2006.

To have a little fun with these figures, if Facebook is worth $15 billion, on traffic ratios alone MySpace would be worth $67.67 billion, a nice earn on the $580 million News Corp acquired the site for. Of course it doesn’t work like that, but given the gap in traffic between MySpace and Facebook, and more recently the $15 billion valuation for Facebook, MySpace would likely be worth more today that the $12 billion figure floated in June 2007.

The other notable feature from the figures is that there would appear to be causality between MySpace traffic dropping and Facebook traffic growing indicating that at least some users are switching to Facebook exclusively. Having said that though it’s not at any rate that will see Facebook become the dominant social networking site (traffic wise) in the market any time soon.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/217965495/

Last night we gave an overview of our thought process for coming up with the award that will be given to each category winner for the Crunchies event on Friday night in San Francisco.

The award itself, created by Clockwork Apple, is 14 inches tall and created in a very hard, very heavy cast plastic. The inspiration comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie a tribe of prehistoric ape-men interact with a black monolith that appears near them. The monolith inspires one of them to create the first use of technology - a bone used as a tool and a weapon. The video clip of the segment is in our original post on the award.

We are honoring startups that have innovated in technology; thus, we feel the award is symbolic culturally and appropriate. The additional flourishes, such as the baseball cap and jersey, were the idea of the artist to modernize the setting. And the ape is beating on old technology with his bone - a symbol of the disruptive nature of the technology world, where young startups often feast on their older, slower siblings.

One of these awards will be given to the winner of each of the twenty categories for the Crunchies (21 categories actually, we have an additional surprise award). The winners’ logos will be added to the award.

Very last tickets just became available

We are down to the last few available seats for the awards. We held a few hundred in reserve for sponsors, nominees and press. The ones not taken (about 60) have been put into the general queue and can be purchased here. The event starts at 7:30 and should end by 9. We’ll then have a party until about midnight. Everything is taking place at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco.

Thank you to the sponsors of the 2007 Crunchies who are underwriting the event and making it possible to recognize outstanding contributions in our industry. Award Benefactors: Adobe, Charles River Ventures, The Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, Our Stage and Sun Microsystems. Thank you also to our Program Sponsors, including Ask, Intel Capital, Lehman Brothers, Meevee, RealTimeMatrix’s Vortex, our official ticketing sponsor amiando, WeBreakStuff for design and MediaTemple for hosting.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/217950083/

While Justin.TV’s live video site first broke on the scene with its fair share of scandal and gimmicks, not too many people realized they were doing anything more than programming a website to broadcast video from off the shelf web cams. However, Justin.TV has actually been developing some actual technology, too. Since the start they’ve been building their own content distribution network (CDN) to stream video to all the site’s viewers. And according to them, it just happens to be saving them a bundle of cash.

When they first launched, they considered existing using existing CDNs to run their network. Rates from one large CDN cost as much as $0.36 for every hour of video run. Justin.TV developed a system that does it for 3/4 of a penny. Their most recent iteration of the network does it for 1/4 of a penny. All those pennies add up, especially for a startup that broadcasts 24 hours a day.

But saving money by building your own network is not for everyone. Their current system has been over a year in the making and fairly elaborate. It consists of a load balancing system that can start streaming content over their own network of servers and push peak traffic to Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services. It’s taken so long because they’ve essentially had to pick apart and rebuild a flash server from the ground up to make this possible without using Adobe’s software.

And they expect all this hard work to pay off. Having control over the entire pipeline means they can add on new features, such as more easily archiving recorded videos or trans-coding them into other formats. No word on whether they’ll be lending the CND out to third parties any time soon, though.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/217950084/

We’ve called the new slew of social video sites (YouTube) and services (MySpace) a “fame machine” in the past, now some new sites are starting to take it a bit more literally.

Big Shot Live is a new gimmick website that promises to fly a new person to Hollywood each day of the week for the chance at hitting it big. It’s similar to other online reality shows like “You Be The VC” or Crackle.

Daily winners are picked through voting on a variety of user submitted audition tapes. The person with the most votes gets flown out, hooked up with one of the co-hosts, and prepped for a real audition with TBA tinsel town “Big Wig”. The show will aired five days a week, once for each of the different talent categories (modeling, singing, dancing, acting, TV host, comedy, sports). Todd Glass - you may recognize him from some VH1 shows - outlines the process in a video on the site.

Obviously the show and contest are a way to push visitors to the site. Fame-hungry viewers will post videos and their friends and family promote them. FunnyOrDie leveraged Will Ferrell’s fame to create a self sustaining community around comedy videos and I expect these VH1 alum expect the same. However, five days of watching aspiring talent struggle through an audition isn’t enough to keep me clicking back every day. The site will have to grow to sustain itself off of quality user generated audition videos, and I have my reservations over whether thousands of videos in that format will be compelling enough.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/217938560/