Ajax Girl

MySpace is now providing an easier way for publishers to help users spread their content virally.

They’ve set up a “Post to MySpace” button that essentially just runs a snippet of JavaScript that sends some content to a user’s MySpace profile page. The snippet takes four parameters: a title, some content, a URL, and the location in the user’s profile page to post the content (in their “about me” section or on their bulletin board, for example).

We’ve set up a button below with which you can send a TechCrunch link to your MySpace profile page.

This button is similar to the Flux fshare button that we previously wrote about.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/234779702/

Plaxo finally got bought, say valley whispers, and blog after blog have speculated incorrectly about who the buyer might be (first Facebook, then Google). Finally, someone may have gotten it right - Valleywag is saying that Comcast is the buyer, for $175m. That makes sense based on what we heard earlier today, too: that one of the cable players bought them, for something just under the $200 million previously rumored. Comcast is the most active buyer in the bunch. In fact, they’re getting a bit of a reputation as the guys who’ll look at any deal, and don’t quibble much on price. If no one else will take you, there’s always Comcast.

To be fair, some of my disdain for Comcast exists solely because they supply my cable and Internet at home, and really really suck at it. I believe I’ve spoken to every customer service rep they employ.

Plaxo did around $5 million in 2006 revenue, doubling that to $10-$12 million in 2007. 2008 projections are $20-$25 million. The company has 1.8 million worldwide visitors per month (Comscore).

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/234776778/

Yahoo has just released the following letter to shareholders outlining its reasoning for rejecting Microsoft’s offer to buy the company. In it, CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang emphasizes Yahoo’s strengths as both an online destination and an advertising network, and argues that Yahoo is better off going it alone than combining with Microsoft. He states: “The global online advertising market is projected to grow from $45 billion in 2007 to $75 billion in 2010. And we are moving quickly to take advantage of what we see as a unique window of time in the growth - and evolution - of this market to build market share and to create value for stockholders.”

He says that even though Yahoo is the No. 1 Web destination, his goal is to increase visits by 15 percent annually. Re-emphasizing his strategy of being the key starting point on the Web, he adds, “we are particularly excited about our growth prospects in mobile, the biggest emerging starting point in the world.” (We could have told you that). All in all, the letter is pretty much a formality without any major new arguments, but it does put Yahoo’s best face forward to its shareholders. We’re No. 1, Yang is saying, and we don’t need Microsoft. What he doesn’t explain is how Yahoo got into this pickle in the first place.

Here is the full text of the letter:

Dear Stockholders,

On February 1, 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited proposal to acquire your company. As much has been reported in the press recently, I wanted to reach out to you personally to let you know why your Board of Directors, after a careful review by Yahoo!’s management along with our financial and legal advisors, believes that Microsoft’s proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo! and is not in the best interests of our stockholders.

Most importantly, I want you to know that your Board is continuously evaluating all of Yahoo!’s strategic options in the context of the rapidly evolving industry environment, and we remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all our stockholders.

We have a unique combination of strengths

– Yahoo! is one of the most recognizable and admired brands in the world. We have over 500 million users (nearly 1 out of every 2 internet users worldwide). In the U.S., we are # 1 in many of the most used online services including personalized home pages, mail, news, music, shopping and travel. Because we have leadership positions in so many indispensable online services, users spend more time on Yahoo! sites than anywhere else online.

– Yahoo! is an attractive partner for marketers. Yahoo! is #1 in online display advertising, which represents 90% of the advertising inventory on the web, and we are also a leader in search marketing and a pioneer in the growing fields of mobile advertising and online video advertising. Through Yahoo!, advertisers can now connect with consumers on our owned sites as well as those of our growing network of partners including eBay, Comcast, AT&T, a consortium of over 600 newspapers, Forbes.com, Cars.com, WebMD and more.

– Yahoo! has the financial flexibility to execute our plans, thanks to our healthy cash balance, which exceeded $2 billion as of December 31, 2007, and our substantial operating cash flow, which we expect to grow double digits in 2009.

– Yahoo! has made important investments in our core computing infrastructure enabling us to dramatically increase the speed of our search engine updates even while handling vast and growing quantities of data.

– In addition, we have the added value of our substantial, unconsolidated investments in Japan and China. We have substantial positions in Yahoo! Japan, the leader in its market, and Alibaba, which is strongly positioned in China, a market with enormous growth potential.

(more…)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/234736813/

Personal content aggregators are nothing new. We recently covered the latest of many services that consolidate your social networking activity into one place. But PageOnce, a company that was on this year’s Israel Web Tour, wants to become the one stop shop for all your web-accessible accounts.

The site is still in private beta and working to expand the number of account types that it supports (TC readers can sign up here). However, you can already use the service to retrieve information from many banking, social networking, airline, email, and shopping accounts such as Citibank, Facebook, American Airlines, Gmail, and Amazon. PageOnce takes the information appropriate to each account (once you give it your username and password, of course) and displays it in a Netvibes/PageFlakes-like layout. If you have lots of accounts to manage, you can choose to view them according to type (finance, shopping, utilities, etc.).

Despite the fact that PageOnce needs to build relationships with many of the account providers in order to retrieve information from them (not everyone has an API like Facebook after all), the company has done a good job digesting information for at-a-glance presentations from a fairly wide range of providers. The “fetch once” technology behind the site, however, only pulls information from elsewhere; it doesn’t push information back, so you can’t actually make changes to your bank account while on PageOnce; you’ll need to follow links to the bank’s website itself.

PageOnce is definitely onto a good idea here, and I particularly like being able to check all my accounts without having to reenter usernames and passwords for each. However, I wonder whether a more established personalized homepage provider like Netvibes won’t swoop in and steal PageOnce’s thunder. Netvibes is already a great place to retrieve information from various web services and RSS feeds. It wouldn’t be a huge leap for them to provide widgets that could display information from a much wider range of personal accounts as well. And in fact, when I asked Netvibe’s founder Tariq Krim whether they planned to provide this functionality, he said that Netvibes is already discussing the possibility with several account providers supported by PageOnce.

PageOnce seems to have the leg up since they’ve already proven that they can aggregate this sort of information. But since they rely on their own efforts to expand support for an inexhaustible number of accounts, a more decentralized approach with Netvibes as the focal point and account providers as the widget developers themselves could win out in the long run.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/234692119/

Peer-to-peer lending is coming to China. This morning I interviewed a Chinese-American entrepreneur living in Shanghai named Calvin Chin working on a stealth P2P lending site for Chinese student loans called Qifang. (The name, which translates to “bloom,” comes from the Chairman Mao quote, “Bai Hua Qi Fang”—”Let a hundred flowers bloom.”) Consumer lending is just getting off the ground in China. Most college education is financed by group borrowing associations rather than bank loans. Chin wants to bring that group lending dynamic online with Qifang. In fact, P2P lending might have a greater impact in China and other developing countries than the U.S. because of the absence of other consumer banking alternatives.

Chin was born in Michigan, went to Yale, and worked in banking and a few tech startups before moving to China. He founded Qifang in August, 2007. He is aiming to a launch the site in China in the spring. So far it is a real bootstrap operation. He has raised $200,000 in angel money from investors in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, and is in the process of raising a series A financing. Qifang was inspired by existing P2P lending startups like Prosper and Zopa, but Chin is developing it with a Chinese twist. He says:

We feel strongly about China’s Internet being pretty embarrassingly all about copies. And while we were inspired by other models, we feel like we need to challenge ourselves to be different and better and fit the market. We think of it as innovation leveraging—take a good idea and make it work for China by making it different.

Simply porting over Prosper’s business model won’t work, given the lack of credit history, the lack of a large student loan market, the still-young Internet culture, and the severe regulatory environment. As with Prosper, individuals with money to invest can come on the site and register as lenders. They can browse through the profiles of the different borrowers to decide who to loan their money out to. Unlike Prosper, Qifang is starting out only with student loans.

And it is not the fist P2P lending site in China. A broader one called PPDai offers P2P loans across many categories (see this write-up in English). But Chin thinks that starting with student loans is the better strategy in China because of the need to stay in the good graces of the government. Anything that helps promote education is popular with government bureaucrats.

It is also a big market. Chin estimates there are 25 million students in China, who pay an average tuition of $700 a year. That is $17.5 billion in potential loans.

Chin expects the interest rate on most loans on Qifang to be between 8 to 12 percent, a decent return. The interest rate will be based on how many lenders bid on each loan. The site will recommend that lenders invest in a portfolio of loans to reduce their risk, but if they choose, each one can put all their money in a single loan. Since there is very little credit history on individuals in China, the site will use other proxies to calculate risk. Each borrower must scan in their national ID cards to verify who they are, and list their school, major, grades, hometown, parents ID cards and income. Chin is creating partnerships with the schools directly, so that the information students supply can be verified and so that loan payments can be made directly to educational institutions. “We don’t want students running off to Macao,” he jokes.

There will also be an interesting social calculus that takes place on the site. Since each borrower’s parents will be named on the loan, failure to pay it back would result in a shameful losing of face for the parents. “Social pressure is very powerful here,” notes Chin. Default and delinquency rates will also be visible by hometowns, school, and even major. Banks don’t benefit from that sort of social pressure. Whether it will have any effect on default rates will be worth watching.

As growing economies like China develop their banking infrastructure, P2P lending has a shot of growing up with it rather than fighting against an already-entrenched way of doing things. In that sense, P2P lending might have a better shot in China than it does here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/234679332/

GumGum launches an ambitious new project today - a new platform and business model for licensing content on the Internet, beginning with images.

Image piracy runs rampant on the Internet, of course. Blogger Perez Hilton was sued for stealing images of celebrities, and we’ve had (ridiculous) charges leveled at us as well. And don’t forget the recent Lane Hartwell debacle.

Attributor, a Silicon Valley startup, helps content owners track their intellectual property to find examples of infringement. But until now, no one has really thought about a better way to license content on the Internet, so that both large and tiny publishers have an incentive to avoid simply stealing stuff.

That’s where GumGum comes in. Images today are generally licensed for a flat fee, exclusively or non-exclusively. GumGum founders Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir think a better way is to charge for impressions, or on an advertising-supported basis. But tracking image impressions isn’t trivial, so they first had to build a platform to do that.

GumGum allows any publisher to search for images (there are thousands available now via a number of photography agencies) - here’s an example search for “Britney.” Images can be licensed on a CPM basis (generally $0.20 or so, but determined by content owner), or for free with an advertisement.

GumGum requires images be published via a Flash object so that impressions can be tracked and billed properly. Flash also allows them to serve interactive advertisements, served via VideoEgg (we wrote about their Flash ad product here).

Here are two images, one based on CPM licensing, one based on advertising:

Any photographer can now upload images and sell them. And any publisher can create an account to license images. Down the road, GumGum says, they’ll be adding video, audio and text content for licensing as well.

Will This Work?

It’s certainly a pain for publishers to have to embed a Flash object to publish an image, but it is the only reasonable way that GumGum can track impressions and serve ads. Many small publishers will of course simply continue to steal images, or look for freely usable stuff on Flickr. But if there is a killer image that a lot of people will want to publish, GumGum is a great way to easily license it to an unlimited number of people. At the very least, it’s an interesting experiment.

GumGum raised $125k in a December seed round from friends and family. The founders, who sold a previous startup Mojungle to Shozu in 2007, also put $125k of their own capital into GumGum.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/234554785/

Israeli startup KnockaTV looks to be in serious trouble. If this article in the Globes is correct, 21 employees went without salaries in January and the company is ₪1.2 million in debt (about $300,000).

We first wrote about KnockaTV, which was founded by the same team who founded Mirabilis (ICQ), in August 2007 (Mirabilis was sold to AOL in 1998 for $407 million). They went into private beta in December 2007. The company raised at least $1 million in seed funding (the Globes article says they’ve raised $3.6 million in total).

The founders have a lot of personal capital at their disposal, and it seems unlikely they’d let employees go unpaid. Still, the unpaid employees have supposedly petitioned the Tel Aviv District Court to appoint a provisional liquidator to the company.

I’ve emailed the company for a comment. For now, KnockaTV goes into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/234622944/

The inevitable shareholder lawsuits have started to be filed against Yahoo for not accepting Microsoft’s bid. Yesterday, the Wayne County Employee’s Retirement System of Michigan, was the first to file suit. The retirement fund owns 13,600 shares. You can expect more shareholders to pile on board, especially if this thing drags out.

In fact, that is not the only shareholder suit Yahoo is facing. On February 1, the day Microsoft made its recent offer, another shareholder lawsuit was filed against Yahoo in California for failing to accept Microsoft’s bid from the year before. They might want to amend that lawsuit to include Yahoo’s most recent rejection as well.

The more that Yahoo fights the merger, the more shareholder lawsuits will pop up. The reports in the media typically note how this is increasing the pressure on Yahoo. Nothing against Wayne County, but 13,600 shares is a tiny stake for an institutional investor. If bigger investors started suing, then the pressure would be noticeable. But big investors don’t sue, they vote their shares.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/234574867/

If you ever considered yourself a Marv Albert or John Madden in training, YouCastr is the place for you. The site just launched out of a quiet beta. It’s kind of like Ustream or Justin.tv for sports commentary. The site lets anyone stream live broadcasts of game commentary or cut random rants in archived podcasts. Listeners can tune into commentary covering the latest sports games and chat live or leave comments. Here’s an example of a good podcast.

While I’m not quite ready to turn down the volume on my TV to hear Joe Schmo’s coverage of the Superbowl, a place for sports fans to post sports rants for later listening has promise. There’s already a vibrant community of sports bloggers covering news and even live blogging games. These same bloggers would probably love to easily make audio broadcasts like the best of them. YouCastr makes that easy.

With the entry of Yahoo into the live video category and Ustream acquisition rumors, there’s a lot of interest in the live format. YouCastr’s focus on sports strikes me as a good way to inject a sense of purpose and consistency missing from some lifecasting sites. When you go on Justin.tv, you don’t always know what you’re going to get, but YouCastr will always give you something sports related.

YouCastr was built over the past year by a team of four and is funded in the mid six figures by a team of angels.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/234568833/

Digital music wholesaler Snocap, long searching for a buyer, is being acquired by music streaming site Imeem. The price will likely not be disclosed.

Snocap was founded in 2002 by Napster creator Shawn Fanning, Jordan Mendelson and Ron Conway. The company raised $10 million from Conway, Morgenthaler Ventures and WaldenVC and did high profile distibution deals with MySpace and others, but the business failed to scale (since people don’t really pay for music any more). Last year they also partnered with Imeem, who may see an acquisition as a better end result than Snocap simply shutting down. Imeem uses Snocap’s digital fingerprinting technology to track how many times any particular song is streamed on its site so that it can allocate a portion of its advertising dollars to the major music labels. Without Snocap’s technology, Imeem would have to find a replacement quickly, or find a new business model.

The deal is just being closed this week, we hear from a source. It’s a good outcome for Snocap, which has gone through significant layoffs and was on deadpool watch.

This is the second acquisition for Imeem in as many months - in January they acquired Anywhere.FM. Imeem has raised two rounds of capital, although the size of the second round was not disclosed.

Fanning, meanwhile, has largely moved on to his new startup, Rupture.

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