Ajax Girl

San Francisco based WeGame, a “YouTube for gamers” (although it is much more than that) seems to be off to a solid start. Since launching last month, founder Jared Kim says 7,000 videos have been uploaded to the site, and 13% of users are uploading videos. The other 87% are there to watch game videos like this one from Guitar Hero:

The company will announce they’ve closed a $3 million second round of financing, adding to the $500,000 they raised previously. True Ventures led the round, with participation from HitForge, SoftTechVC and a number of individuals.

Kim, who’s 19, dropped out of Berkeley last year to launch WeGame. This is his third startup.

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/~3/250512733/

Amazon has now officially joined the Facebook craze. It has launched two of its own Facebook applications: Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine.

Amazon Giver shows your Amazon wishlist on your Facebook page. Of course, there are more than a dozen apps on Facebook that already let you do that, but only Amazon Giver lets your friends actually buy those gifts for you without leaving Facebook. Ah, distributed commerce. Your friends can also click on a recommendations tab that creates Amazon product recommendations based on interests reflected in your Facebook profile. So if you are “fan” of The Killers, it might recommend one of the band’s CDs. If you are a “fan” of a soccer page, it might recommend a soccer ball. It also provides recommendations for your friends, conveniently listed by closest birthday.

Amazon Grapevine creates an activity stream based on your actions on Amazon. Every time you update your wishlist, write a review, or rate a product on Amazon, it shows up in your friends’ Facebook news feed. Although this sounds almost exactly like Facebook’s Beacon program, Amazon is not part of Beacon (which went through a lot of privacy issues). Amazon Grapevine is completely opt-in. None of your activities are shown automatically just because you are a Facebook member. And none of your purchases are shown. In a way, it is too bad that is not an option. What a person buys says a lot about who they are.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/250454486/

Another Y Combinator startup launches today, this one with the intent of making online job listings more effective.

Snaptalent is essentially an advertising network for jobs (currently, jobs for developers in particular). Employers add their job listings and the service displays them on the sites of participating publishers. Sixteen programming blogs have signed up so far, bringing their 4.5M+ monthly unique visitors with them.

Here’s an example of what two Snaptalent job ads looks like:

snaptalent_run();

The system was designed to make it easy both for publishers to load the ad widget (a simple JavaScript snippet) and for employers to set up attractive advertisements, ones that perform better than the typical Adsense unit. Snaptalent has provided point-and-click tools that not only help employers design their banner-sized ads; they also allow employers to upload photos and embed videos that complement the text descriptions shown when users click on the ads.

But here’s the really interesting twist to Snaptalent’s strategy for getting job listings in front of the best candidates: in addition to placing ads on the blogs and websites trafficked by the target demographic, Snaptalent actively detects the IP addresses of all those websites’ visitors. It then uses the IP information to determine whether particular visitors work for companies like Google - or are enrolled at universities like Carnegie Mellon - where the best talent can be found. When employers set up their job ads, they can indicate a preference for particular organizations and their ads will be shown to those organizations’ members.

So how much does this cost advertisers? $250 for every 500 people who click on their ads, regardless of whether those people have been targeted by IP address or not. These pre-paid (and therefore guaranteed) clicks can be purchased in 500 unit increments up to 2,500 people per posting. Publishers who display the widget on their sites will get an undisclosed share of the revenue they generate.

The founders of Snaptalent say there’s nothing else available that competes directly with their offering (although deadpooled Edgeio came the closest). Of course there’s a variety of companies approaching the online job listings market in their own way. Broadly speaking, Snaptalent should be grouped with the aggregators (Indeed, Simply Hired, ZamZim, etc.) rather than the destinations (Monster, HotJobs, Jobster, etc) because they most clearly recognize the importance of distributed listings.

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/~3/250416459/

San Francisco based Mochi Media has taken $4 million Series A in a round led by Accel Partners.

Mochi Media offers flash based embedded advertising for the fast growing Flash online casual gaming market.

For more company background see the highlights from a sit down interview I did with the company in January above.

(Venturewire via PEHub)

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/250401277/

As we reported yesterday, Google has now successfully acquired DoubleClick after receiving EU approval for the deal. While the focus has been rightly on display advertising, many have missed one part of the deal that will raise eyebrows: Google now owns SEO service Performics.

DoubleClick’s Performics offers search engine services that include “natural search solutions” such as “link building.” Some highlights from the Performics service

Our experts methodically optimize copy and content for each page to boost page rankings…

Addresses external ranking factors and new business opportunities

Now there is nothing wrong with what Performics offers; SEO and SEM are legitimate businesses. The catch is that Google is now offering paid services that promise improved search engine listings in Google itself, a 100% conflict of interest. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land calls for Google to divest itself of Performics, and it’s a call that should be supported.

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/~3/250378537/

Programmers often have difficulty going back to older code bases because they don’t reflect the latest, greatest idioms. It can be hard to work with constructs that you know could be better, written with less code, stripped of even more duplication, beautified. But it’s important to realize that all code will eventually feel like this.

Even if you take that project from three years ago and scrub it clean as can be today, it’s still going to drift from the best practices of two years from now. That’s normal, it’s natural. You continue to get better, to learn, and the technology you’re using is hopefully progressing as well. Yet it can still seem like a hard hill to climb to get back in to yesterday.

Suck It Up
Here’s something I don’t say often: Suck It Up. If you work on more than a few projects, they can’t all smell like today’s fresh linens. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad programmer. It simply means that you’re prioritizing.

Yes, yes, you should clean up around you when you dive in to those older applications, but beware the lure of a full Spring cleaning. You’ll get pulled in and before you know it you’ve broken half the application and won’t know how to get back out with your ego or tests intact. Add your feature, fix your bug, and leave everything you touch in better condition than you found it, but that’s it. Move on from there.

This is not a license to be a slob. Whenever you’re starting something new, you should always try your best to infuse it with the top of your game. That way you can hopefully drown the feelings of disappointment with at least a dash of nostalgia: “Hey, when I worked on this I did the very best I could. How great to see the progress of my skills and sensibilities since then. Good job, me!”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/909-all-code-will-eventually-go-stale

What can I say? I’m a music video genius. Check out my latest MTV-worthy video above. It took me, oh, about five minutes to slap together.

Actually, it was all done for me by a startup that is getting a lot of buzz called Animoto. The New York City startup recently won an award at the South by Southwest conference, just launched a great Facebook app, and is one of the partners using YouTube’s new platform APIs.

Animoto lets you grab photos from Flickr, Facebook, Picassa, Smugmug, Photobucket, or your desktop. You can then upload a DRM-free song or choose from about a hundred licensed tracks on the site. It then does its magic and matches the photos to the music, “mimicking the post-production done by professional video editors,” says CEO Brad Jefferson. I mashed together some old Fllckr photos from a trip to Korea and a visit to HP Labs, added an Electronica beat, and the video above is what came out.

The site is built on top of Amazon’s Web services, but many customers wanted a post-to-YouTube option. So using the new APIs, Animoto now offers a button that does just that. “We view that as marketing tool,” says Jefferson. (It makes no money from videos shown on YouTube). Animoto also has a Facebook app that lets people create videos inside Facebook made from their Facebook photos. Since many of the photos are tagged with the names of the friends who appear in them, everyone in the video gets an alert in their News feed telling them that they are in a video.

The site’s been out of private beta since August, 2007 and has gathered 100,000 registered users. Unlike many other video startups, this one is not basing its business on advertising. Creating a 30-second video is free, but longer ones cost $3 each (or $30 for an unlimited annual subscription). CEO Jefferson says he’s been pleasantly surprised by the conversion rate of non-paying to paying customers. Instead of the one to two percent conversion rate he had expected, it is in the “high single digits.” If he can get up to a few million active users, and keep the conversion rate up, he might have a business.

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/~3/250313456/

Following previous reports that Yahoo is talking to Google about joining OpenSocial, we are now hearing that the decision has been made and that it will be announced in April. OpenSocial is Google’s social-networking platform that is a response to Facebook. Yahoo has been sitting on the sidelines of the fight between Google and Facebook for the hearts and minds of developers, and with this move it will place itself firmly in the anti-Facebook camp.

Becoming part of OpenSocial is in keeping with Yahoo’s stated commitment to open itself up more to third-party developers. (As I’ve noted before, it can always do better on the openness front). There is already a lot of support for OpenSocial, from MySpace to Bebo to Hi5. If developers are going to start creating amazing social applications for OpenSocial, Yahoo should welcome those applications on its site as well.

But given Microsoft’s takeover bid for Yahoo, which seems more likely every day to succeed, joining with Google appears to also be an attempt to further complicate any such deal. Microsoft, of course, is a big investor in Facebook and handles a large chunk of its advertising. If it ends up buying Yahoo, OpenSocial may be a deal Microsoft finds it needs to unwind. Although, there is nothing stopping big Websites from supporting both OpenSocial and the Facebook platform (see Bebo).

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/~3/250281781/

In case there was still any doubt that Google wants to use YouTube to host all the video on the Web, it’s announcement earlier today to broaden its APIs makes it clear that is its goal. Once again, instead of making it easier to search videos elsewhere, Google is making it easier to host videos on YouTube. Except that the new APis allow people to upload, watch, search, and comment on the videos on other Websites. The key here is that the videos themselves are hosted on Youtube’s servers. This brings Google back full circle to the initial strategy for Google Video, which originally required videos to be uploaded directly to Google in order to become indexed. YouTube is gradually replacing Google Video—that is where most people upload videos anyway—but getting as much video from the rest of the Web onto its servers allows it to do many more things with it than if it simply indexed the videos elsewhere. It can search them better and throw up ads against them.

Specifically, the new APIs allow Web developers to:

* Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
* Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
* Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
* Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
* Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

YouTube is not just white-labeling its video-hosting infrastructure for other sites, devices, and desktop applications. It is offering video-hosting for free. This could prove highly disruptive to other video-hosting platforms such as Brightcove, Maven Networks (now part of YouTube), and Move Networks. Partners already using the APIs include Animoto, Casio, Electronic Arts, Helio, KickApps, Slide, and TiVo. Yes, you can now watch YouTube on TiVo.

Of course, it is not exactly free. The videos will also be available on YouTube, where Google will make money from any associated ads. It is not clear how the ad revenue will be split, or even if it will be. There is nothing in the API that allows for a Website to insert their own ads. So that is a big question mark. (More on that after I speak with a YouTube exec later in today).

Yesterday, I put up a post asking readers to guess what YouTube’s announcement was going to be and offered a free iPod Shuffle to the first person to guess correctly. Although a lot of people were hoping for an announcement of better-quality video or a partnership with Hulu (that was my guess), only a handful got it right. Only the 237 comments submitted before YouTube made its announcement public at midnight PT were eligible for the prize.

Dan Frommer of Silicon Alley Insider pointed to a post of his last week that hinted at the white-labeling deal. But he wasn’t the first one with the right answer to comment on my post. (Sorry, Dan. No iPod for you, but you do get a link). Other commenters got parts of the announcement right—API for third-party uploads, partnership with TiVo, incorporating an upload-to-Youtube button on a a digital camera (Casio), integration with a video game platform (Spore)—but not the whole thing. The first commenter to really nail it, and the winner of the iPod Shuffle is Blake Machado (aka Balke Macho), No. 57, whose comment was:

YouTube as a platform. More developer tools/better APIs to power video on other sites (channels). Upload from third-party sites, search within the site, some kind of monetization model to go with it that will be announced but not yet released.

We are still waiting to learn about that monetization part, but everything else is spot on, and Macho was the first to really spell out the platform ambitions behind this announcement.

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/~3/250193775/

Goldman Sachs and Velocity Interactive Group have put another $15 million into the online TV site Next New Networks, the company will announce shortly. The company, which launched in January 2007, had previously raised $8 million from Spark Capital, Saban Media Group, Pilot Group, and Bob Pittman. All teh previous investors put more money in Jonathan Miller from Velocity Capital was already on the board of the company.

The company says it has had 33 million video views so far in March across its 12 video networks, which include Barely Political (home of Obama Girl), Channel Frederator (cartoons), ThreadBanger (DIY fashion), and Veracifier (daily news). Next New Networks also announced a deal with AOL today to distribute its videos.

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/~3/250198875/