Ajax Girl

The Industry Standard—the once high-flying, and then hardest-falling, magazine of the dotcom era—is relaunching today in a public beta, nearly seven years after the original media outlet went bankrupt. It would be all too easy to write this off as a counter-indicator signaling that the current Web 2.0 mania has peaked. And perhaps that is exactly what it is. The brand carries with it so much baggage that it may be difficult to move beyond what it stands for in the collective consciousness: the excesses of Silicon Valley.

If its parent, IDG, had not bought the assets of the original Standard out of bankruptcy court for about $1 million half a dozen years ago, the site would have been called something completely different and the comparison would never be made. But they weighed that baggage against the potential boost they hope the site will get from the brand recognition the name still commands even after all of these years.

This time around, though, The Industry Standard is a Web-only property with decidedly less ambition and a new twist on generating content from its audience. The site will cover some of the same ground as its predecessor (Internet businesses, online media, venture capital). But it will focus more on analysis than news, and involve its audience in making collective predictions about industry and company trends through a prediction market set up as a simple betting pool.

The plan is to bring in news feeds from other sources, and build a reputation for good industry analysis from regular contributors including marketing guru Guy Kawasaki, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, and blogger Matt Marshall. The site will also contract with freelance journalists to write 300-to-500-word posts on Web companies and technology topics. Each contributor will be limited to three posts a week, to make sure no one writer dominates the conversation. “It’s like the Huffington Post,” says general manager Derek Butcher, “with the key difference that we will actually pay our contributors.” Breaking news will be included too, but mostly as feeds from other sources.

The predictions aspect of the site is probably what makes it most novel. “We want great analaysis that helps re-establish the brand,” says Butcher, “but the prediction market is the pageview driver.” On the home page, there are predictions for events such as “Yahoo will accept Microsoft’s acquisition offer” or “Q1 online ad revenues will be up from 2007.” The predictions are expressed as percentage probabilities based on how many people bet each way. When you register as a member, you receive $100,000 in pretend money to bet on questions across the site. Unlike regular voting or polling, you can make your vote count more by betting more money. The readers who end up making the best predictions will see their names pop up on a leaderboard on the site.

There are plenty of other sites that also try to generate collective wisdom using prediction markets, including HubDub, Trendio, and Yahoo’s Tech Buzz Game. The problem with most of them is getting enough smart people to participate on a regular basis. The new Industry Standard is trying to crack that nut by baking the predictive betting right into the core of the site. You read a story about Microsoft’s offer for Yahoo, and then you add your own two cents by predicting what will happen. Butcher plans to soon make it easy for people to grab any prediction as a widget and put it on their own blog or Facebook page as a syndication strategy.

Whether or not anyone will pay attention to the new Industry Standard, its expert pontificators, or its readers predictions will depend on how good the analysis and predictions will be.  Insightful commentary should result in better informed predictions.  But prediction markets work best when there is something real at stake—money or reputation, generally.  When it is play money and anonymous usernames, as is the case here, my prediction is that it will be seen as nothing more than a gimmick.  Anyone care to place a bet on that?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/228710927/

On Monday AOL will announce the acquisition of San Diego-based Goowy, a startup founded in late 2004 and which launched, incidentally, in my living room in late 2006 (we had a TechCrunch party where Goowy, Meebo, Sphere and other startups launched). The size of the deal is not being disclosed.

Their first product was a Flash-based webtop or alternative operating system. But later they went into the widget space with their YourMinis product, and that is the reason AOL has acquired them.

AOL SVP of Social Media, Messaging and Homepages David Liu said this was a deal they’ve been considering for the last nine months, and that they plan to integrate Goowy’s technology into both user-facing AOL products (to widgetize them) as well as their Platform A advertising network. Expect Platform A to launch significant new advertising products in the widget space soon, Liu says.

This is a significant win for Goowy founder and CEO Alex Bard, who has run a tight operation over the years. The company has just six employees and raised a single round of financing from Mark Cuban in April 2006 (the size of that round remains undisclosed, but it was almost certainly under $1 million). He says the Goowy team will remain in San Diego for at least the short term.

Goowy competes with a number of startups in the widget advertising space, including Widgetbox, ClearSpring and Gigya. VideoEgg, Slide and RockYou also compete in this area.

AOL has been busy acquiring promising young startups - they bought Israel-based Yedda last November as well.

Goowy

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/228704417/

Yahoo will shut its premium music service tomorrow, a move away from premium music sales we first reported on in September 2007, and instead redirect users to Real Networks’ Rhapsody service. Terms of the deal are not yet available.

According to an AP report, subscribers to Yahoo Music Unlimited will be shifted to the Rhapsody service in the first half of this year with Yahoo subscribers’ music library and payment plans remaining the same for only a limited time after the switch. Yahoo Music Unlimited plans came in at between $5.99/ month and $8.99 /month, compared to Rhapsody’s $12.99/ month charge.

The move alone is part of the further consolidation in the online music marketplace as more companies abandon standalone efforts in favor of partnerships as Apple’s iTunes continues to dominate the online music marketplace. The move itself may be short term with Yahoo users likely to be forwarded to the Zune marketplace if Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo is successful.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/228709342/

Simon found this gem. Steven Levithan wrote about optimizing a JavaScript trim.

As Simon nicely puts it: “it turns out that while regular expressions are great for removing leading whitespace you can do a lot better at trailing whitespace by manually looping backwards from the end of the string.”

Since the differences between the implementations cross-browser and when used with different data are both complex and nuanced (none of them are faster than all the others with any data you can throw at it), here are my general recommendations for a trim method:

• Use trim1 if you want a general-purpose implementation which is fast cross-browser.
• Use trim11 if you want to handle long strings exceptionally fast in all browsers.

To test all of the above implementations for yourself, try here. Note that times are logged to the Firebug console (if available), and that the benchmarking system is fairly rudimentary. Note also that background processing can cause the results to be severely skewed, so run the test a number of times (regardless of how many iterations you specify), and only consider the fastest results (since averaging the cost of background interference is not very enlightening).

Final note: Some people like to cache regular expressions using global variables, etc., so they can be used repeatedly without recompilation. This does not make much sense for a trim method, because all of the above regexes are so simple that they typically take no more than a nanosecond to compile. Additionally, some browsers automatically cache the most recently used regexes, so a typical loop which uses trim and doesn’t contain a bunch of other regexes will probably not encounter recompilation anyway.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/228684383/javascript-trim-optimizations

So apparently the Yahoo brass didn’t take Microsoft’s public offer to buy them as well as could be expected (hey, at least their shareholders finally got a break - the stock jumped nearly 1/3 on Friday). They’ve been working all weekend (I suspect they canceled their Super Bowl tickets last minute) to find someone, anyone, to make a competing offer. Barring that, they just want to try to increase the offer, from the current $31/share to at least, according to a Yahoo insider, to $35-$40/share.

But the fact is, a perfect storm of factors is going to lead to a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo in the very near future, perhaps without any price increase over the original offer. The debt crisis means raising meaningful amounts of debt to leverage the transaction is impossible (the largest debt financed transactions in the recent past were in the $4 billion range, not nearly enough to do this deal). And Yahoo continues to spiral downward financially, making potential buyers leery of buying a dog. The fact is, the deal makes sense for Microsoft. It may not make sense for anyone else.

All that realistically stands in the way are government vetoes of the deal (DOJ review under Hart-Scott-Rodino and related European Union regulations). Or, perhaps, a slim chance for a certain White Night to appear and save the day. Former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig, who left Yahoo in late 2006, is rumored to be working to put together a complicated deal that involves both NBC Universal and Facebook. More on that below.

For my thoughts on why the Microsoft deal makes sense, see my comments on Fox Business earlier last week before the deal was announced (starts about the 3:30 mark). In that segment I say Yahoo will either need to partner with Google on search advertising or get sold off to Microsoft or someone else. Looks like Yahoo is now considering that Google deal.

Here’s a list of Yahoo’s potential options. All of these are rumors, some make more sense than others.

News Corp.

News Corp. was scrambling to put together a deal on Friday and submit a competing bid. No takers, according to the private equity guys we spoke to, and it’s unclear that they’ll really want the asset after they’ve taken the weekend to consider it. For now, count News Corp. out of the race, although if Yahoo gets sold off in pieces, they’ll be likely bidders for some of the assets.

Apple

As a $118 billion company, they have the market cap to make this deal happen. But Apple hasn’t bought a company since 2002, and it’s unlikely they see Yahoo as a prize. People would love this deal, but it isn’t going to happen.

Pure Private Equity

Private equity shops are falling into two camps this weekend. A few are mulling around the idea of an offer, but the debt market keeps getting in their way. The rest are simply trying to figure out if a competing bid of any kind is likely to surface on Monday, so that they can trade the stock for a profit. A handful of them have called me out of the blue today to explore the News Corp. bid. None of them see a private equity bid as realistic.

eBay

Yahoo and eBay have been long time sweethearts - a Yahoo acquisition of the company in March 2000 was killed moments before being publicly announced over last minute details derailed it (cultural stuff, we hear). At the time, thought, eBay was worth just $20 billion or so to Yahoo’s $70 billion. Today, the companies are about the same size at just under $40 billion each. eBay has the market cap (just) to enter a bid and remain the controlling entity. But they are a company in transition, and have their own problems with growth. Their long time CEO is stepping down. It’s unlikely eBay will step into the ring.

Soverign Equity Funds

China, Norway and some Middle-Eastern nations have large enough sovereign equity funds to make an all-cash bid for Yahoo. But why would they?

Dan Rosensweig, The White Knight?

Dan Rosensweig left Yahoo as COO in late 2006, and has since joined Quadrangle Group, a large private equity shop. He has the motive to make a deal happen (to return triumphantly to Yahoo), and some of the tools (large amounts of money at his disposal). But the debt crisis affects him as much as the other private equity firms looking at the deal.

But this is where it gets interesting. From what we’re hearing, a plan is being considered that sells off Yahoo’s media assets to NBC Universal (Music, TC, Sports, Finance, Entertainment, OMG, food, health, etc. - everything except Video). What remains - Yahoo’s core search and advertising assets - would be packaged up and merged with Facebook. Yep, Facebook. That would likely result in Facebook becoming a public entity in the very near future.

The deal is creative as hell but would be difficult to sell to Yahoo shareholders, who understand the value of Microsoft stock but not Facebook’s. Breaking Yahoo up and selling it in pieces also means a non-tax-free deal, which makes it less attractive than what Microsoft is offering. I’d love to see Rosensweig try to quarterback this deal, or something similar, but there are too many hurdles.

Game Is Over

The Super Bowl isn’t the only game winding its way to an inevitable conclusion today. It’s become more and more clear that a competitive offer will be coming this week. And even if it does, Microsoft will likely just increase their bid. Yahoo’s destiny seems determined - to become an operating subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation.

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mydeco.com, a new UK-based home decor intermediary with some innovative interior decorating tools, launches today with backing from a who’s who of European investors, reports TechCrunch UK. Mydeco is the latest startup for UK founder and executive chairman Brent Hoberman since he exited from Lastminute.com via a sale to Travelocity in May 2005 for $1.1bn dollars.

Around 500 retailers are aggregated into a site offering over a one million products. Users will be able to build 3D models of their rooms and add their preferred decor as well as 3D models of 20,000 items of real furniture they can buy. The rooms themselves will form the content of a user’s profile, creating a social community around ‘rooms’. Each room design will - eventually - be shareable on Facebook, MySpace etc via widgets and applications. And mydeco has an additional Etsy-like, micro-affiliate model. Any small interior design business or an individual can upload a room design. If someone buys a sofa from that design, that designer will get a small revenue share from that sale.

SPARK Ventures are the lead investors in mydeco and have been joined by Lord Rothschild’s family interests, VC firm Arts Alliance, Marc Samwer (co-founder European Founders Fund) and Atomico Investments, co-founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, founders of Skype and Joost. More investors are listed here. mydeco has a highly experienced management and engineering team, many of whom are ex-Lastminute.

The prize is a slice of the $40 billion home decor market in the UK, and eventually the US, where the market is well past $100 billion. Through a combination of search, 3D visualization, affiliate schemes and advertising mydeo hopes to be bringing in revenues of around $1 billion in the UK alone in three years time. This is a pretty serious play. Although furniture stores are hurting in the credit crunch they are likely to put money into intermediaries like this to increase customer acquisition during tough times ahead.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/228646788/

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith has responded to today’s missive from Google on the Microsoft-Yahoo acquisition by highlighting Google’s dominance in search and advertising:

The combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will create a more competitive marketplace by establishing a compelling number two competitor for Internet search and online advertising. The alternative scenarios only lead to less competition on the Internet.

Today, Google is the dominant search engine and advertising company on the Web. Google has amassed about 75 percent of paid search revenues worldwide and its share continues to grow. According to published reports, Google currently has more than 65 percent search query share in the U.S. and more than 85 percent in Europe. Microsoft and Yahoo! on the other hand have roughly 30 percent combined in the U.S. and approximately 10 percent combined in Europe.

Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation, and the protection of privacy on the Internet. We believe that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! will advance these goals.

(That’s the entire response above, emphasis is mine).

The figures used by Smith are accurate and highlight that no matter what Google says about IM and Email, regulators will be more concerned about advertising revenue and competition in the areas that count (search) than email.

The “Microsoft is committed to openness, innovation, and the protection of privacy on the Internet” may cause some people to laugh, but if you take the desktop out of the equation Microsoft has a reasonable track record online in terms of openess and despite its small market share has innovated with some great technology such as Silverlight. Michael said he wasn’t feeling the love towards Google, and he’s not alone.

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Source: TechCrunch
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If you read our review of the Firefox based Multiplayer Online Game PMOG last night and want to start playing right away, now you can. The company is allowing every user to invite two other users to the service, which makes it perfect for our InviteShare service. If you want an invitation, go here, sign up and leave your email address. Someone will soon send you an invitation. All we ask is that you confirm the invitation, and use the two invites to get more people in on InviteShare (you can invite people from your PMOG profile page, at the bottom). That way, everyone gets to check it out.

GameLayers

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Source: TechCrunch
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Google finally went on the record today regarding the proposed Microsoft/Yahoo deal.

In short, they don’t like the idea of Microsoft and Yahoo being one company. They think it raises “troubling questions” and threatens “the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.” Microsoft is also vilified as engaging in “inappropriate and illegal influence” and having “legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses.” They mention, among other things, the overwhelming market share in instant messaging and email, and the large number of page views their respective portals generate.

But 2008 may be the year Google can no longer hide behind the “David v. Goliath” defense with Microsoft. Google is the reason that Yahoo has stumbled so badly, and may be Microsoft’s last hope to be a meaningful player on the Internet over the long run. To put it bluntly, the roles are reversed. Google is now the Goliath, and they’re public whimpering on the acquisition makes them look petty and scared.

The fact is that this deal isn’t about email, IM or even page views. In the places that matter - search share and advertising dollars, Google is slaying everyone. 2007 Google search share: 64%. Percentage of all online ad dollars going to Google in 2007: 40% and growing.

The truth is that Google has become the new Microsoft, and if we want to avoid a repeat of history, we need to allow the formation of a real competitor to keep them honest. Otherwise, all the ills perpetrated on the world by Microsoft in the nineties will likely be repeated again, this time by Google.

When it comes to Google standing up to the FCC and the incumbent wireless carriers to make our life better, I’m behind them 100%. But when the complain about the formation of a new entity that can provide them real competition in the search and online advertising space, I’m not feeling the love.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/228549305/

Google has posted a missive on Microsoft’s attempted takeover of Yahoo where it cries wolf against the deal based on (I’m serious here) competition grounds.

David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer at Google writes:

…Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft — despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses — to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors’ email, IM, and web-based services?

Google, a company with “an overwhelming share” in text ads and search who can take advantage of its dominant position in search to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to be listed fairly is concerned that Microsoft and Yahoo might do a similar thing with email and IM? cough*lol*cough.

To be fair there may be some legitimate competition concerns with the deal, but Google pointing them out will only serve to remind people (and more importantly Governmental Regulatory Authorities) that it doesn’t matter how much bigger and stronger a combined Microsoft/ Yahoo is, Google is still the 1000 pound internet Gorilla in the room.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/228523338/