Ajax Girl

What is legendary investor Peter Lynch doing involved with a sweepstakes Website that guarantees giving out $1 million a week, and offers jackpots as large as $100 million or more? Lynch is an investor in Jackpot Rewards, a site that mixes retail discounts, giveaways, and charity. The company has raised a $16.7 million series A financing from Lynch and other Boston-area captains of finance, including Chuck Clough (the former chief global investment strategist of Merrill Lynch), advertising man Jack Connors, and DST Systems CEO Tom McDonnell.

“The company grew out of a strategic planning mission for charity,” says CEO Jim Miller. It is a for-profit company that will give 50 percent of its profits to education and children’s health charities.

The site launches today. You sign up and get up to 10 percent cash back for purchases at 550 retailers, including Apple, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Land’s End and Target. The company makes money by driving sales to the retailers. It gets a commission for each sale. But instead of pocketing the commission, it passes on the savings to its members. This may sound like iWon redux, but it is really quite different. Jackpot Rewards is not ad-supported. To participate, members need to subscribe and pay $3 a week. That’s right. You’ve got to pay to play.

Is Peter Lynch crazy? Nobody subscribes to anything on the Web (except the WSJ and Consumer Reports). That is where the $1 million jackpot comes in. While you would have to spend $30 a week ($120 a month) online to break even on the rewards program, there are plenty of people who spend more than $3 a week on lottery tickets. This lottery ticket actually comes with fringe benefits like retail discounts and the knowledge that half your money is going to charity. When I spoke to Miller, he seemed sincere enough:

What goes on typically in sweepstakes is that if it is a huge prize, it is an illusory prize where nobody will win it. Even most million-dollar offers are rarely won. We are building in large jackpots we will give away in rapid succession—one million dollars a week.

Those are guaranteed, he says, every week. But there is also a bigger jackpot that keeps growing and has very miniscule odds (1 in 847 million). But when it hits $150 million, the company guarantees giving that away as well. It is all based on how many subscribers it can attract. Since the jackpots are paid out as a 40-year annuity (or a much smaller up-front cash payment of about $420,000 for each $1 million), the cash outlays could become manageable. Miller figures he needs only 150,000 subscribers ($23.4 million a year in subscription fees) to do okay. At 300,000 subscribers ($46.8 million), the business becomes a nice cash machine. And at 1 million subscribers ($156 million), it really takes off.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237979234/

Well, another news aggregator launched today. This one is called Newspond, and while they didn’t set a record for baseless hyperbole, they come close.

The site, like TechMeme and Digg, tries to determine breaking and important news - but it is a little different than both. Digg uses user voting to determine headlines. Techmeme uses linking behavior of blogs and other news sites. Both are, arguably, fairly transparent, and you can see the number of user votes or inbound links, respectively to a headline. Newspond, by contrast, has a black box algorithm that looks at number of factors and comes up with an overall score called a Buoyancy Rating. The higher the rating, the higher the headline.

So their approach is fine, although I argue that it’s filling a need that doesn’t exist. There’s just little to drive people to the site day after day. The user interaction on Digg, both from submitting and voting on stories (and getting all your friends to vote on stories) drives significant viral growth. TechMeme doesn’t have that, and has orders of magnitude less traffic. Newspond doesn’t have it either. And it’s unlikely to replace TechMeme as the blogger’s news site of choice.

But they just make ridiculous statements on the website that I can’t ignore. The home page says Newspond is “The most advanced news engine on the planet.” The about page has a huge yellow ball thingy and the same words in 40 point type. It also calls itself “the ultimate hub for the latest news.”

What’s the technology behind this stunning new startup? Well, within “the heart of Newspond lies a tireless electronic brain” with “highly-advanced machine intelligence” that analyzes news “at a faster rate of speed than any human being could ever dream of.”

Clear enough? I know I’m sold.

More and more websites are starting to make these types of ridiculous claims to get attention. It works, but only for a day. And after that, with your credibility shot, everyone is waiting for the inevitable failure. And since expectations have been set so astronomically high, even a mild success is still seen as a dismal failure.

Glam did it on a grand scale when they called themselves the “fastest growing web property in the United States” to justify a huge valuation. What they really are is a big ad network that’s currently unprofitable but is growing rapidly. But they are most certainly not the largest womens site on the Internet, or the fastest growing site in the U.S. (they count the traffic of all of the sites they sell ads for as “theirs). Glam is worthy of positive attention, but their ridiculous statements cost them credibility.

And we saw it again yesterday. New startup YouNoodle, which is currently little more than a catalog of startups, claimed that they could predict the valuation of startups five years out based on nothing more than information about the founders. The product hasn’t even launched, but the New York Times jumped on the story anyway. The only way I’ll believe it works, I said, is if they use it to predict their own failure.

I’m going to continue to call companies on unrestrained hyperbole, and hold them to the expectations they’ve set with users. Being proud of your work is one thing, but spouting random nonsense is something else entirely. Enough.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237965226/

It was only last week that the Social Gaming Network (SGN) and Zynga announced their respective developer platforms for games on Facebook and other social networks. I said the game is on between these two companies to win the hearts and minds of social gaming developers. The folks at Zynga took exception to this characterization. If you put all of its games together, Zynga is the 10th largest app company on Facebook as measured by number of installs. SGN is No. 51.

Venture capitalist and Zynga investor Fred Wilson accused me of not doing my homework in a post that set off a minor debate over the holiday weekend. After I commented on his post that the jury is still out on which of these young companies will succeed, Wilson responded:

Its not even debateable who is a real company and who is not.

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus also clearly feels that the comparison is not warranted. He told me of SGN:

It is just a thorn in my side. It is some bad ex-girlfriend who will not leave me alone. I think we are very clearly the leader in the space.

That thorn is about to get pricklier. Sources outside of SGN confirm that the company is about to raise as much as $10 million in a venture round. Multiple term sheets are on the table. None have yet been signed as the company studies its options. Says one competing VC who has done his due diligence and is eager to lead SGN’s round:

When all is said and done they will have as big a network as Zynga. Fred Wilson doesn’t understand what is going on.

Sounds like a debate to me.

If size is the determinant of a “real company” (which I don’t think it is), then SGN’s platform is already a whole lot bigger than just a week ago. In less than a week it has signed 10 Facebook games to its budding social gaming hub, including Jetman—one of the most popular games on Facebook—Pirates, and The Dot Game. It has also signed Free Gifts, a virtual gift-giving application on Facebook that includes the other seven of the ten games.

All told, the new apps will triple SGN’s daily active users from 200,000 to more than 600,000 on Facebook alone, bringing it substantially closer to Zynga’s 900,000. And in terms of the number of installs, the SGN network is getting much closer to Zynga’s 11.8 million (18.4 million including recently acquired CLZ Concepts and four other Zynga games not reflected in the stats), depending on how you count. Jetman alone has 3.8 million installs and 200,000 daily active users, SGN currently has 3.3 million installs, and Free Gifts has 10 million installs—but that is mostly for its gift giving app, which other gaming developers on the SGN gaming hub will be able to incorporate into their games.

Responding to Pincus’ quip, SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar says: “We are like an old girlfriend that got famous.” Noting that many of Zynga’s games are copycat versions of other games (Zynga’s Diveman is very similar to Jetman, for instance), he adds:

If you want to be a developer platform, you probably shouldn’t be copying developers’ games. If you want to compete with them, fine. That is why they are joining us.

So is it game over? Hardly. The games have just begun. But is SGN a real business? It is as real as any business built on Facebook.

Update: In an e-mail Pincus responds:

Wow erick.

A) you give them credit for traffic they don’t even own
And
B) you won’t give us credit for traffic (clz apps) we do actually own.

Do you even care how hypocritical sherwin is to accuse me of copycat games when he copied free gifts on bebo and risk on fb? Getting the irony? He is partnering with an app he literally copied in december while accusing me of this?

Erick, with all due respect I’m wondering if you work for sgn now?

I’ve updated the post to include the CLZ numbers, which are still counted separately by Adonomics, the data source I linked to. As for who owns what traffic, Pincus is right to point out that games Zynga owns and operates are probably worth more than games simply affiliated to any particular gaming network. But SGN’s deal with Jetman and Free Gifts is as tight as it gets without buying them outright. SGN will be hosting their apps, and Jetman’s developer will be creating more games for the SGN network. The battle here is over who will build the most powerful network and attract other developers, not who will buy up the most traffic.

Update 2: CLZ actually has 11.5 million installs, instead of the 5.3 million that Adonomics reports (it only counts 2 of CLZ’s 18 apps). But not all otehse are games (You’re Naughty, You’re a Hottie). I am beginning to really question how reliable Adonomics is. The SGN numbers are probably off as well. Also, all of these numbers come from Facebook, which currently has a bug with how it reports total installs. Daily active users is the better metric to use. Zynga has over one million daily active users, about double SGN’s (including Jetman and Free Gifts). Dead installs (i.e. inactive users) are only good for spamming.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237872856/

San Francisco based TrialPay will announce a $12.7 million second round of financing tomorrow, which brings them to $15.8 million raised in total. They tapped European money for the round, bringing in London based Atomico, as well as previous investors Index Ventures, Baseline Ventures and Battery Ventures.

The service provides users with an alternative payment method at 3,000 or so participating merchants. Instead of directly, users are offered something for free (such as free calling minutes on Skype) in return for buying a magazine subscription. Another example - “If a customer isn’t quite sold on a software title, he or she could get that software for free by sending flowers from FTD.com, signing up for Blockbuster Total Access or buying $50 worth of clothes at Gap.com. TrialPay pays for the software using revenue (CPA) from the advertiser, and the customer gets a free license.”

We first covered them at launch in October 2007. Buyers are presented with the alternative options at the time of checkout, so they can choose to just pay as normal or take one of the offers. It’s an easy option for merchants to accept, since they get paid anyway. The question is, will consumers use it enough to make a real business out of it? I’m doubtful, but that’s mostly because we’ve seen a trail of dead bodies who’ve tried to create alternative payment schemes. People seem to like their credit cards just fine, and can smell a marketing gimmick a mile away.

TrialPay says they’re adding 15,000 new registered users per day, though, with 5.2 million total. Maybe people aren’t so good at smelling those gimmicks after all.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237861803/

There are basically two ways to get your job listings highlighted on TechCrunch: shell out $200 for a listing on CrunchBoard, or write a blog post talking about how you read TechCrunch in the bathroom. Either option is fine by us.

More than twenty new jobs have been posted to Crunchboard in the last week. Here are a few highlights:

Business Development Manager, MySpace
Ruby on Rails Software Engineer, JibJab
Market Research Manager, CNET
Senior Manager, TravelPod Labs, TripAdvisor
User Experience Manager / Producer, Cars.com
CTO, Unigo
Technical Writer with JavaScript experience, Placebase
Software Integration Engineer, GoMobo
Executive Producer, LeapFrog Enterprises

And TechCrunch is hiring too (luckily, we don’t have to pay for our own job listings):

Events Expert
Spring-Term College Interns (remote work)
CrunchBase Analyst
TechCrunch Research Analyst

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237841726/

It’s always fun to get the monthly Feedburner check for advertising they insert into the RSS feed. The actual dollar amount is still next to nothing, but I love the fact that, even with nearly 800,000 publishers, 1.4 million managed feeds, and a $100 million payday from Google, they still haven’t automated the check writing process. Someone hand writes all of these checks every month.

By the way, there’s been a bit of a stir caused by reports yesterday that Feedburner turned off historical stats. CEO Dick Costolo said via email that it was just a bug caused by a code update, and it will be fixed shortly.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237807113/

Big news at CNET today - editor in chief Jai Singh is out, and Dan Farber, most recently the editor in chief of CNET-owned ZDNet, is taking over. In his new role, Dan will oversee the editorial content and user experience for CNET News. Dan has posted a brief note (and his last on that blog) about his new position on Between The Lines.

Dan has been a tech journalist since 1981, so he’s seen it all. But he’s also now a prolific blogger (and he runs the ZDNet blogging network), so he knows all about new media, too.

He takes the reigns at CNET during a troubled time for the company. Traffic, at least according to Comscore, has slumped for their news properties. Private equity firms have made an effort to take control of the board of directors, and their CFO was fired earlier this month.

It’s clear the housekeeping is ongoing, and they could not have hired a stronger editor in chief than Dan Farber (their new CFO, Zander Lurie, is also a very strong deal and finance guy). CEO Neil Ashe may finally be putting together an executive team that can turn CNET around.

I count 36 people writing content for CNET. Just for the record, they all now report to a blogger.

Dan, who describes himself as a “player/coach” says he will continue to write as well as manage the team.

Update: email to CNET staff from Joe Gillespie, EVP of CNET:

As you all saw from Jai’s email, our long-time friend and colleague is leaving CNET to focus on restoring his health and to “ponder what’s next.” It is always hard to say farewell to one person while welcoming another, so I’ll do my best here to give both our colleagues the recognition they deserve.

First of all, I’m very excited to announce that Dan Farber has been appointed the new Editor-in-chief of CNET News.com. As many of you know, with more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist, Dan is one of the most insightful and articulate observers out there today on the world of technology and new media.

I also want to recognize Jai and his countless contributions to our organization as well as CNET Networks. For 12 years, the name Jai Singh has been synonymous with CNET. His dedication to building a world-class news organization has made News.com one of the most credible and well-respected media entities today, with many of the industry’s most talented reporters and journalists under its roof. In addition, at the time of the Redball reunion, Jai took over as Editor-in-Chief of CNET Reviews. Over the past two years, his achievements have included the creation of the SLA, the launch of Crave and Webware, and improvements to the timeliness to the CNET product reviews process. Beyond CNET, Jai has been a trusted advisor and friend to many people in this company, and his leadership and integrity have contributed to CNET Networks’ growth into a leading online media company with some of the world’s most important and influential brands.

On a personal note, I want to thank Jai for his dedication, support and friendship during the past two years that he and I have worked together. I wish him all the best in his future endeavors and continued success. I also hope he’ll stop by so I can take him out for a cheeseburger every once and a while.

At the same time, I could not be more excited to have Dan at the helm of News.com. There is no one better suited to take the great news organization that Jai has built into the future. During his time as vice-president of editorial at CNET Networks and editor in chief of ZDNet, Dan has built ZDNet into the biggest voice in business technology and developed the ZDNet Blog Network. With over 30 bloggers, the ZDNET Blog Network includes some of the most authoritative and well-respected voices in the IT community.

I am also very pleased to announce some additional changes within the organization. On the editorial side, Scott Ard has been appointed editor-in-chief of CNET Reviews. Scott has held a variety of roles at CNET, including news editor for News.com and VP of content for CNET.com. Scott has also helped streamline the publishing process and instituted the SLA that has resulted in full reviews for key products being posted within a day of release. Scott’s experience on both the news and reviews side will ensure that CNET continues to produce the most timely, credible and relevant product reviews in the industry.

In addition, Erik Weigel has been named vice president of content operations and Mark Larkin has been named vice president of programming. Both of these guys have played instrumental roles in the development of CNET over the years. On the operations side, Eric and his team will continue the great work he’s already done to ensure that we are optimizing our resources for success. Over the past two years, Mark has taken CNET TV from concept to reality. As we saw today with the launch of CNET TV 2.0 and the closed captioning feature, the site continues to be an industry leader in the development of original video programming. As VP of programming, Mark will expand his responsibilities beyond CNET TV to oversee the front door as well as community features.

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/~3/237734709/

Document sharing on the Web via embeddable Flash players keeps getting better all the time. Earlier this month I wrote about Issuu, a Denmark-based startup that does a really good job with image-heavy documents like magazines and photography books. Today, Scribd released a vastly improved upgrade to its document viewer, which it is now calling iPaper. Scribd streams the converted PDF documents to the Flash player, and offers three different ways to view each document: in one long, scrollable window; as a book with page-turning effects, or as a slide show. Check out the book mode in the this document.

Pretty cool, but what’s the business? Scribd allows you to put contextual Google AdSense ads inside each document. Scribd will do a three-way rev share, giving most of its portion of the AdSense dollars to the document uploader. Now all those documents not already on the Web can generate some income.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237718336/

As someone who barely follows professional sports, it always amazes me how knowledgeable and opinionated about sports that ordinary people can be. Bleacher Report is a publishing platform formally launching this week that wants to give a voice and audience to those people who seem to always have an opinion about the current draft, drug scandal, preseason or playoffs.

Bleacher Report is essentially a centralized blogging platform for sports where anyone can sign up and begin writing stories about college and professional sports. It’s not an aggregation service that crawls the web for amateur sports news and editorial, but writers who already run their own blogs can manually choose to feed their stories into Bleacher Report in addition to writing them on-site.

While sports writers could simply sign up for accounts at WordPress or Blogger, they’d do better to publish at Bleacher Report for several reasons. The first and most compelling reason is a better audience. The site attracts sports fans and surfaces the best content to the homepage after assessing several factors such as writer rankings, editor ratings, community ratings, and hits. Readers who like your stuff can become your “fan” and track your work alongside others’ on a special “lineup” page. And articles published to Bleacher Report are categorized into sections like “New York Giants” and “MLB” so your content is found by those interested in just those topics.

Perhaps the most innovative thing about Bleacher Report is its built-in community editing system. Writers who published to Bleacher Report actually give an extensive amount of control over their articles to other members. The community serves as a collective editor that works not only to correct grammatical and spelling errors but to improve the prose more generally. Nothing is strictly out of bounds, including article headlines, but the original writers do have the power to revert changes made by the community. According to the site’s founders, this group editing system has been a very popular feature during the beta period.

Like many sites we see these days, Bleacher Report also integrates typical social networking features. Members have full-blown profiles that list their recent articles alongside bios, fans, and recent activity. And news feeds called “play-by-plays” give you a sense of the activity occurring around the site.

Bleacher Report recently secured Series A funding from Hillsven Capital, Transcoast Capital, and Jakob Lodwick (the founder of Vimeo), among others. I suspect the site will do quite well for itself given the passion of many sports fans and the quality of potential acquirers. Bleacher Report writers should do well for themselves too; we’re told that several have already used the site to launch professional writing careers.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237672337/

Creating a new search engine seems like a futile exercise. If Yahoo and Microsoft cannot compete with Google in search, what chance does a startup have? So instead of creating new search engines, we are starting to see the rise of search applications that sit on top of existing search engines.

Two recent examples are Surf Canyon, which publicly launched its browser add-on today, and ManagedQ, which launched its own site quietly a few weeks ago. I’ve been playing around with both for about a week. They both offer improvements to the pared-down search interface that we are all used to and point to areas where search can be made better. Not bad for two startups without any venture capital (Surf Canyon has raised $250,000 in angel money, and ManagedQ is run out of the founder’s basement in Palo Alto). Still, while both point in the right direction, neither one comes close to offering a better overall search experience than Google does on its own.

Surf Canyon is an application that sits on top of regular search results. The startup has its own Website where you can conduct searches, but the browser add-on makes it much more practical to use. The add-on is for either Firefox or Internet Explorer, and essentially allows you to re-order search results on Google, Yahoo, or Windows Live Search. (Google doesn’t like it when other Websites re-order its search rankings, but Surf Canyon doesn’t rely on Google’s APIs to do what it does and thus feels that it is not bound by Google’s restrictions).

Whenever you do a search, a little bullseye icon appears at the right of each result. If you click on the bullseye, Surf Canyon inserts three recommended search results that are similar to the one you clicked on. They appear indented under the result you are trying to drill down into. For instance, if you search for “techcrunch,” the three recommended results might be a link to TechCrunch UK, Crunchgear, and the TechCrunch Tech President Primaries (the recommended results change over time, even for the same search). You can drill down two more times within the recommended results to keep on refining your search. So if you click on the bullseye again next to one of the recommended links, you might get a link to TechCrunch on Amazon’s Kindle store from page 8 of the regular Google results, a mention in the NYTimes Bits blog from page 12, or a link to the TechCrunch Facebook group from page 5.

The results are hit or miss. Surf Canyon basically gets three chances per click to come up with a relevant recommendation. In general, it comes closer than if you hit the “Similar pages” link that Google provides with every search result, but it still feels pretty random. Showing more than three recommended results would help. But what I like best about Surf Canyon is the interface. It doesn’t take you to another Web page. The recommended results just appear underneath the appropriate link. It feels more like an application than a cumbersome Website where you have to click through multiple pages to find what you want. Google could take a lesson in interface design from Surf Canyon here with all of its Ajax goodness.

ManagedQ takes the more radical approach. It rethought the entire user interface to make it much more visual. Explains founder David Stat:

Search hasn’t changed in a decade. Result quality has improved, but what you see has not changed. The search interface has remained stagnant at the command level, So why not a search application, rather than create a search engine, we can sit on top of the results of any search engine. Currently we use Google.

Every time you do a search on ManagedQ, a grid appears on the right of the first six results so you can visually see what is on the other side of what is normally a blue link. If you click on one of the images, it opens up a larger, browsable window still within ManagedQ. The idea is that you can surf the Web without leaving the search application.

Presenting search results visually is nothing new. Sites like ViewFour have been doing it for years. But ManagedQ combines the visual search with a guided search experience.

On the left is a list of persons, places, and things to help you refine your search. ManagedQ uses natural language processing (NLP) to extract the main concepts from the entire search bin. And it does this very fast, in a distributed way using peer-to-peer technology. One of the drawbacks of NLP system is that they take a lot of time to parse and chunk large data sets. ManagedQ solves that problem.

When you click on a name or concept on the left, it is highlighted wherever it appears in the miniature Web pages on the right. So ManagedQ gives you a guided search experience with suggested terms that help you narrow your search. If you search for “Barack Obama,” it will suggest related people like “John Edwards,” “Hillary Clinton,” and “John McCain,” as well as other related search terms: “Harvard University,” “Keynote address,” Voting Record,” “Early life,” and “Senate career.”

The major drawback to ManagedQ is that if you want to see beyond the first result grid, you have to hit a “Next” button at the bottom. When you try to refine a search using one of the guided terms on the left, instead of bringing up the search results that contain that term, you are stuck with the existing grid half-filled with grayed-out boxes that say “No matches” on them. You have to click through the result set to find to find Web pages that match, in which case the terms are highlighted. (For more on ManagedQ, watch the tutorial).

That flaw alone makes ManagedQ not much more than an interesting experiment at this point. Searching Google is still much faster and gets you the results you want more directly. But again, Google can learn something here. Why not offer a decent-sized image of each Website next to search results to give searchers a visual cue as to what resides on the other side of that link? It is that extra little piece of information that, in some cases but not all, could help people sort through search results easier.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/237655055/