Ajax Girl

Pay-Per-Play Media is offering a new style of advertising that most people won’t like: audio (only) ads that play immediately when you visit a site.

Publishers insert the code on the website they want the audio ad to play on, and every time someone visits the page a 5 second audio ad is played, seemingly without any ability to turn the ad off. Pay-Per-Play claims that the ads are contextually delivered. Visitors only hear one audio ad for every three minutes on each site, meaning that if you’re on a website long enough, you’ll get to hear regular audio ads.

Pay-Per-Play claims there is now “huge demand by major branding advertisers all over the world” for the service, and that they have a network of over 6 million websites playing these ads. The sample audio played on the site was an ad for Tacobell.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/222677072/

SpiralFrog has just announced the site is up to over 1 million uniques each month and expected to end this month with over 1.2 million uniques. SpiralFrog, for those of you who don’t remember, is the free (as in ad supported, not P2P) legal music service that unlocks over 1 million songs to their users as long as they log back in to their site at least once every month (an easy task if you update your library frequently). The songs are downloads and played as WMA files under DRM controls.

While you’d think the main advantage of a download is portability, most people won’t be able to take songs off their computer because they use iPods that can’t play the WMA files. See more details in our earlier coverage.

The songs come from some pretty unique deals with the big labels UMG, EMI, and BMI. In exchange, labels get a share of the ad revenue and affiliate song sales on the site and the comfort of control through the service’s DRM.

However, SpiralFrog was over a year in the making and only officially launched last September. A lot has changed since then. Music prices have dropped, DRM is dead (for paid tracks at least), and new legal/questionably legal sites have popped up to serve up free tunes. Competition includes HypeMachine, RadioBlogClub, Deezer, InTune.fm, Mog, Last.fm, Imeem, and a bunch of other sites. One key difference is that users on these sites stream music instead of downloading it, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing down their growth rates. Imeem, which follows an ad splitting model similar to SpiralFrog, did over 3 million monthly uniques around the time SpiralFrog launched last year. Lets not forget that Yahoo may be treading in this territory as well.

HypeMachine

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Deezer

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Last.fm

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Imeem

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SpiralFrog

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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/~3/222671705/

Xing has acquired leading Turkish business networking site Cember.net.

Cember.net is said to be the biggest business networking site in Turkey with over 280,000 members. The site is ranked at 117 in Turkey according to Alexa.

Xing said it would use the acquisition to strength its penetration into Turkey, “one of Europe’s fastest growing economies.” Çağlar Erol and Nihan Colak Erol, the founders of Cember.net, will stay on with Xing to support the Turkish-speaking Xing community with a small team based in Istanbul.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/222656495/

Grouply is a startup trying to improve the online “groups” systems (Yahoo/Google Groups) currently used by over 100 million registered users. Their first goal was to create a simple management tool for easily tracking updates across your groups on the two networks. You give Grouply your account credentials and they organize your accounts in a more convenient manner (see our earlier review). Their second goal, has been to bring those systems up to speed with the latest social networking enhancements.

The newly launched features are collectively called “Grouply Social” and include all the social networking features you’d expect. User profile pages show your interests, personal history, and contact information. The pages also support multimedia like most social networks, allowing users to share photos, videos, and “widgets” from sites like YouTube and Slide. Members can also befriend each other, with full privacy controls. You can decide who has access to your profile and what portions they can see, similar to Facebook.

The rest of the internet is clearly blowing past these older “groups” services when it comes to usability and engagement. Sites like Tangler, Wetpaint, and Klostu are creating whole new systems to bring online forums up to speed. As we’ve said before, Grouply is taking an evolutionary approach by absorbing users and data from existing systems and enhancing their functionality. Grouply recently raised over $1.3 million.

Grouply

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Tangler

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Wetpaint

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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/~3/222642734/

San Francisco based Mochi Media is a company we first wrote about in November 2006 and more recently in October as they release their 2.0 platform. The company offers flash based embedded advertising for some of the biggest games in the fast growing Flash online casual gaming segment, such as for Kongregate.

I caught up with the company yesterday for a chat, and to learn more about what they provided and how it worked. Above is the shrunk to no more than 10 minute version of the interview, including a walk through of their offices at the end if you’ve ever wondered what a startups office looks like.

Mochi Media has also announced a new $25,000 competition in conjunction with Gaia online for game developers. Some details in the video, or more on the Mochi Media site here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/222642735/

We are nearing the end of our TechCrunch Tech President Primary that we rolled out last month. Next week we’ll announce the results from the primary, and also endorse the candidate from each party that has the most favorable overall policies on ten key technology issues.

We’ve had great blogger and mainstream press coverage (see video clips on the primaries site), including SF Chronicle coverage this week.

If you haven’t voted yet, review the candidates positions on the issues and place your vote.

We’ve talked directly with many of the leading candidates - Barack Obama, John McCain, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich. Notably absent are Hillary Clinton and Ron Paul - we’re still hoping to record podcasts with them before the endorsements are made.

For additional information resources, check out Yahoo’s Election Dashboard, Political Base and TechPresident (unaffiliated with us).

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/222575250/

I had the chance yesterday to sit down with Eric Feng, the CTO of Hulu, to discuss how things have gone during its private beta and where the service is heading in 2008. Here are some of the things I learned:

• The first line of code was written on August 6th, less than 3 months before Hulu debuted in private beta, and almost five months after the joint venture was first announced.
• Eric joined Hulu only a few weeks earlier on July 15th, bringing with him the entire engineering team from Chinese video startup Mojiti (turns out the rumor we reported was correct).
• Hulu has about 30 developers, half of which are based in Beijing and focus on the site’s design and functionality, the other half of which are based in Southern California and deal with operations, advertising, etc.
• Hulu currently has “several hundred thousand users” who have submitted “tens of thousands” of feedback messages.
• The public launch should come in the next couple of months, probably around the end of March.
• Hulu’s private beta has been a technical one, as the developer team has had to work on stabilizing the service while sorting through feedback from testers and improving the user interface (search has been enhanced in particular).
• Hulu is built on Ruby on Rails.
• High definition video will be rolled out gradually over the coming year with more and more content; the company believes that 2008 will be a year when online video companies start focusing less on convenience and more on quality.
• Hulu has tripled its amount of content since private beta launch, with many episodes of shows going back to the first seasons, not just the last five that have aired on TV.
• Hulu is not only a place to view Hulu-hosted video but one to find video hosted elsewhere on the net; the service actually scrapes ABC’s websites so that it can provide deep links to that network’s content.
• RSS feeds have been added so users can keep track of new content added to the site.
• The company is experimenting with different forms of advertising, including overlay ads and trailers for movies.
• As far as sites like OPENhulu go, Hulu will address them on a case-by-case basis. The company seems most concerned about protecting its brand (the use of the name “hulu” in “OPENhulu” is problematic) and protecting the brands of its content providers. In regards to the latter point, Hulu actually has a blacklist of sites where people can’t embed videos. These are mainly sites that host content, such as pornography, that content providers don’t want their content displayed alongside. In general, Hulu can monitor where people embed its videos, and it withholds the right to deactivate any embeds. That said, it strongly supports the syndication of its content across the web.
• Nearly 85% of Hulu’s library is viewed everyday at least once.
• Hulu is working on providing its videos internationally but content rights issues will take time to work through. Eric couldn’t provide any time table for when we might see Hulu available internationally (if you don’t want to wait, see Duncan’s post).
• Downloads might come in the long term, but they are not something that Hulu is focusing on currently.
• And finally, “Hulu” actually comes from either of two Chinese interpretations. It could mean “interactive recording” (Hu + Lu), or it could mean a Chinese gourd that holds precious things. That company prefers the latter (they certainly don’t prefer our Swahili interpretation).

Our initial review of Hulu can be found here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/222521757/

The concept that online you own your own data and you should be able to take it with you from one social network or Website to another is gaining a lot of traction these days. Yahoo, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google, Plaxo, , and even Facebook have joined the Dataportability Work Group to figure out standards. Now, Microsoft is joining as well. With 420 million Windows Live IDs tied to user profiles, Microsoft’s involvement is encouraging. Are the days of data lock-in really behind us?

Don’t count on it.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/222486407/

Over lunch we were discussing how embarrassing it must be for people to document their college years in such detail in on Youtube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, etc. What looks fun today likely won’t be tomorrow — especially when looking for work.

So we wondered… Wouldn’t it be cool if you could attach expiration dates to images, blog entries, or anything you put on the web? You could say “in 18 months this picture should be deleted” or “3 years from now delete this blog post.”

I know the Wayback Machine keeps archives of just about everything online, but what if expiration dates were a universal truth? So Wayback, or anything else that records the net, would also obey the expiration date rules. It’s your content—why do we assume it has to live forever?

Anyway, just an idea. We liked it at lunch so I figured we’d put it out there on the blog.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/810-images-and-words-that-self-destruct

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch has said that the Wall Street Journal online will retain a paid subscription model, despite months of speculation that the site would go completely free.

Although the full details of the plan are not clear, Murdoch said that much more of the site would be offered for free, however “the really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive.”

The decision bucks the recent trend of other subscription services being dropped as online advertising revenue offered a viable economic alternative to paid subscriptions, the biggest switcher being the New York Times in September 2007.

(via WSJ)

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/~3/222469114/