Ajax Girl

GizMoz, provider of fun technology that can turn your 2D image and recorded voice into a talking 3D character, is growing up and moving into the Asian market. The Israeli company, which we first covered in December 2006, has raised $6.5M in Series B financing from a round led by DoCoMo Capital, a subsidiary of the largest cell phone operator in Japan.

The money and its budding relationship with DoCoMo should help the company provide mobile offerings for consumers in Japan, a country that CEO Eyal Gever calls “a world-leader in mobile adoption.” Gever says that the company plans to provide mobile offerings for both businesses and end users. These will include web-to-mobile messaging, mobile-to-mobile messaging, and a variety of consumer applications like animated talking greetings, video tones, wallpapers, and screensavers. The company will not yet discuss the details of its expansion plans, but we can expect Gizmoz to partner with media companies and mobile content aggregators in addition to mobile operators.

Apart from its Asian strategy, Gizmoz has also integrated its 3D avatars into AIM with something called Gizmoz Expressions. AIM users can now upload their photos, create a 3D avatar with them, and assign different animations and behaviors for when certain things are said in chat. The avatars will then sit inside IM windows and add a bit of amusement to conversations. Characters can also be picked from a large collection of celebrities, political figures, etc. for those who don’t want to use their own portraits.

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Community coupon site RetailMeNot has today launched a social network on top of their coupon portal.

RetailMeNot comes from Melbourne, Australia based Stateless Systems, who would be best known to TechCrunch readers as being the company behind bypass registrations page BugMeNot. I sat down with Guy King from Stateless Systems on Friday for a demo, video above.

RetailMeNot is pushing through some amazing figures for a bootstrapped (non-funded) startup with three employees. The site averages $4 million a month in sales that are accurately recorded through affiliate channels, with only 40% of codes on the site having a direct benefit for RetailMeNot. Estimated total sales through the site are $10 million a month or approx $100 million a year. 600,000 non-affiliate clickthrus were recorded in February 2007 and 440,000 affiliate clickthrus. The site offers 71,000 coupons from 13,000 merchants and is adding 200-300 new coupons a day, 300-400 new comments per day and 9000 votes per day. Traffic and revenue grew at 20% per month through 2007. King wouldn’t tell me how much the site was making, but told me that it was profitable in seven figures.

King sees the social networking side of RetailMeNot as an extension on their core shopping community that will provide hard core bargain hunters a space to talk shopping.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Yahoo Buzz, a Digg-like service that launched on February 25, is now nearly three weeks old. We asked Yahoo to share some of the data from those first two weeks.

The big benefit for publishers is that top Buzz stories are linked from the Yahoo home page, which turns a firehose of traffic onto a story. When those stories hit the home page there’s a good chance that the linked site will have a record day in traffic. Yahoo says they’ve sent 16 million visitors to outside sites in those first two weeks, and they’ve gathered data from some of the linked partners:

• Salon got so excited about a February 28 link from the Yahoo home page to this story that they issued a press release - they had 1 million unique visitors that day, the most ever to the 12 year old site.
• US Magazine was linked from Yahoo on February 27, and had the second highest traffic day ever. 32% of visits that day came from the Yahoo home page.
• Huffington Post reported 800,000 unique visitors from a Yahoo-linked story
• Smoking Gun, Portfolio.com, Dallas Morning News and Imaginova all reported significant traffic increases after links from the Yahoo home page.

Yesterday we were linked from the Yahoo home page as well, for this story by Duncan Riley on Japanese ISPs blocking file sharers (see image above, click for larger view of how the links look). The link went live at 5:45 PM PST as one of the bottom four links in the news box (these send less traffic) and was up through the day. Despite the fact that yesterday was a Saturday (slowest traffic day of the week) and that it was up only 1/4 of the day, we had our highest traffic day ever and over 1,000 comments were left on the post. The traffic almost brought our site down, but the guys at Media Temple kept it alive.

Yahoo is still ramping up the number of links it puts on the home page from Buzz, and is being careful about the potential to flat out nuke websites with all the traffic they can send. But it’s clear that a link from Yahoo.com blows away anything Digg or any other competitor can offer. That will keep the Buzz publishers, who must be invited into the service, paying attention.

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There’s some chatter today on Hacker News and Profy about a new site called Numbrosia. Unlike Digg, stories are not ranked via user voting.

Instead, users solve math puzzles that get progressively harder. The higher their score, the higher their submitted news items appear. The exact number of points for an item is the recent score divided by the number of submitted links, so it makes sense for users to submit just a single story.

There’s no business here, and we’ll likely never touch on Numbrosia again. But I like the creativity, and sometimes seeing something like this creates the seed of a new idea in others. Plus, puzzle addicts will likely waste an afternoon on the site.

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In mid 2005 I profiled YouTube for the first time. As Steve Rubel noted, the best way to describe it was “like Flickr, but for videos.” At the time few people saw the massive upside for YouTube, which was built completely on freely available Flash technology from Adobe. Flickr seemed like the far more interesting product.

Just a few months earlier Flickr had been acquired by Yahoo. And given how slow things were moving in 2005, few people thought YouTube would have the kind of success that Flickr had seen. But just a year later YouTube was suddenly worth $1.65 billion, and users were frustrated that they could upload their vacation photos to Flickr, but not the videos.

Yahoo has long promised to bring video to Flickr. In May 2007 co-founder Stewart Butterfield told us that users would be able to upload videos “soon.” This was reconfirmed in August 2007. But now, nearly three years after Yahoo bought them, and on their fourth birthday as a company, users are not able to upload videos to their Flickr accounts.

But rumors are flying that Yahoo intends to integrate video into Flickr very soon, perhaps in the next three weeks. Part of the delay may have been a long internal debate about how to make Flickr Video special and distinct from what YouTube already offers. They apparently have come to some product decisions, and will be making an announcement soon.

Yahoo PR and other employees are still dead quiet on the subject (I asked every one of them at the party tonight), but the buzz is growing and the leaks haven’t been totally contained. Get ready for Flickr Video. It’s coming. Really.

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I was at Flickr’s fourth birthday party tonight in San Francisco with a few hundred Flickr fans, tech geeks, press and Yahoo/Flickr employees.

At some time around 8 pm Dan Farber, the new Editor in Chief of CNET, says, “huh, I just got an email that says, according to [blogger] Robert Scoble, we bought Revision3 for $58 million.” Uh-oh, I thought. I’m in San Francisco, an hour away from my computer. We’re going to be very late to this story.

I asked Farber if it was true. He said if it was this was the first he’d heard of it. A few moments later, after a couple of phone messages back and forth with his team, he said CNET had posted on the rumor (he was joking with me, but I couldn’t read him and thought he was serious). I emailed our team to look into it and cover the story, pulling Mark Hendrickson away from dinner and back to his computer.

I then called Kevin Rose, who answered and said something along the lines of “it’s complete bullshit.” After that call I did two things. I told our team to back off the story, and then promptly lied to Farber and said that Kevin confirmed the rumor - Revision3 had definitely sold to CNET. Farber (damn him) didn’t bite - he typed a message or two on his phone, then looked at me and said “no, we didn’t.” At that point I laughed and told him what Kevin really said.

Scoble, meanwhile, sheepishly retracted his original Twitter message and the whole ordeal came to a end.

My guess is that 7 or 8 people between CNET and TechCrunch had their evenings at least partially throw into chaos over this. But my only disappointment was that I couldn’t trick Farber into writing a post on CNET that they had acquired Revision3, when it was nothing more than a figment of Robert Scoble’s imagination.

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