Ajax Girl

LinkedIn, the boring social network that won’t find you a date but may land you a job, is expanding beyond people profiles.

On Friday morning they will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve to reveal the connections that members have with them.

These private pages (you have to be signed in to see them) pull in some information from Capital IQ, a sister company to BusinessWeek, such as company descriptions, industries, types, statuses, headquarter addresses, sizes, founding dates, and websites. Many of the companies to which people belong on LinkedIn, however, aren’t big enough for Capital IQ to recognize them. So the bulk of the data shown on these company pages comes from LinkedIn’s own knowledge of people’s careers.

LinkedIn uses this knowledge to display recent hires, related companies, recent promotions, top locations for employees, and so-called “headliners” (people who get lots of profile views and mentions in the press). The data has also been used for company comparison purposes. You can see which companies employees usually come from and leave for, as well as which companies the current employees are most connected to.

Additional features include relevant news articles to a company (first discovered on LinkedIn last December) and personalized job listings.

The company says that it plans to wiki-fy these company profile pages in the next few months, allowing employees to edit company overviews, upload logos, and add other custom modules. Some of the information on these pages will also be distributable via widget.

The addition of company profile pages (which, dare I say, remind me of Facebook network pages) and the plans for more user generated content are good moves for LinkedIn, since the company needs to give users better reasons to return and use the site on a regular basis.

LinkedIn says it attracts one million new users each month and plans to have company profiles for a million companies. The social network has raised $27.5M so far.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/255316906/

BlogCatalog, one of the oldest operating blog directories is expanding with a with the beta launch of Social Search, a cross-network aggregation search engine that searches multiple social networks.

The Social Search feature is built on top on BlogCatalog’s Social Dashboard, which (like many services lately) aggregates member activity across other popular networks. The search feature allows users to search by single user, friends, or by anyone who has opted in to use the Social Dashboard feature.

I haven’t visited BlogCatalog in a long time, so I was surprised by some of the other features they are also offering. Personal news feed widget SocialStream allows members to broadcast their personal aggregated social network activity, wherever they place it, a similar function also available from Plaxo Pulse. This on top of a decent enough social networking platform that is built around a members blog listing and includes friends a topical group discussion.

Ultimately any site is only as good as the number of users it is attracting, and BlogCatalog is pumping through some great numbers, with comScore reporting just over 2 million unique visitors a month for the site on 6 million page views for both January and February. As the chart shows, this is significantly more than Plaxo, who offer some similar services. Newer aggregation services (including Friendfeed) were either not available or too small to be recorded by comScore so could not be directly compared. Alexa does provide some size and influence comparison here for those interested.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/255316907/

eBay has fired 125 workers as part of a restructure of its US and European Operations.

The 125 were located in the U.S, Belgium, Spain and Austria and “were part of an effort to centralize some customer support, finance and legal functions and were not aimed at cutting costs” reports CNN, quoting the company saying that it is actually looking to expand on its 15,000 strong workforce going forward.

The changes are designed “to make the company’s services easier to use” and is part of a push to “reinvigorate a company that remains the dominant online auction site.”

eBay has come under increasing pressure from competitors, including Amazon who surpassed eBay in traffic last Christmas. The company launched a fee restructure in January resulting in a seller boycott.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/255316905/

Ning certainly continues to rock and roll, at least according to data released by the company and reported by Comscore. The company, which allows users to easily create social networks, now has over 200,000 social networks on the platform and is adding another 1,000 or so per day. And Comscore-reported traffic is spiking up nicely: 3.1 million unique visitors/month, generating 71 million page views (February 2008). Ning, in short, looks like it might be a real business. Meanwhile, Ning competitor Flux, which is backed by Viacom, seems to have fallen off a cliff (we’re checking with Comscore on that data - see our earlier post on Flux growth here, including the update).

More Bells, More Whistles

Tonight at 10 pm California time Ning will launch a redesign (screencast here) that includes a updates to the photos, videos, groups, members, profile, forum and blog features (see here and here)

Ning is certainly feature rich, and users are flocking to it (a little porn never hurts, either). What I’d really like to know is how revenue growth is coming along. The company generates fees from advertising and users who want premium features. They’ve raised more than $44 million to date.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/255267711/

Venture Hacks, a blog dedicated to helping entrepreneurs navigate the world of venture capital, has launched a new social network of sorts around the idea of professional recommendations.

Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists can use the sub-site, simply called Recommended, to track who and what others think highly of, and to indicate their own affinities as well.

It’s structured much like Twitter - users set up profiles and subscribe to each other, then review recommendations made by others and make recommendations of their own.

Recommendations can be made for both companies and people themselves (entrepreneurs or venture capitalists). Membership is currently by invitation only, although you can request an account if you think you travel in the right circles. Companies, venture capital firms, and people all have profiles where you can find information about track records, teams, outside resources, and more.

The overall idea behind Recommended is to lubricate the process by which members of the startup community network and determine who and what is popular.

While the current set of features is fairly limited, co-founder Babak Nivi says that Venture Hacks has plans to create a more sophisticated online ecosystem for the venture capital community. His co-founder is Naval Ravikant, who runs The Hit Forge and co-founded Epinions.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/255233280/

I enjoy watching how a midnight rant has generated countless people-hours of feedback and analysis.

What’s my secret master plan around developing our business? The secret is I tend to speak plainly and I already said exactly what I wanted to say. I believe bloggers should be careful about raising too much money and thereby killing opportunities to work with others. I believe the politics of linking is at times distasteful, but necessary for any blog to thrive (that is something I’ll write more about later). And I believe the rollup of big blogs is about to begin.

Are we thinking about how all this affects our business and making plans of our own? Sure we are. Are others helping us think through this? Of course they are. Was any of the speculation about our exact plans, based on “sources close to the situation” accurate?

Mostly, not. One thing that’s pretty easy to do, once you know how rumors are circulated, is throw off others trying to figure out what you are up to. The truth is far less entertaining than people have imagined.

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/~3/255211724/

The big winner of the FCC’s $19.6 billion auction of wireless spectrum that ended yesterday is Verizon. That was pretty much everyone’s guess.

At a press conference today, the chairman of the FCC announced that Verizon won six large regional licenses for the most sought-after C-Block of spectrum that will give it a national footprint. It also won 77 smaller licenses in the B-Block. Google did not win any licenses. And AT&T won 227 small licenses, which might be good to fill in areas of coverage where it is currently weak. Satellite TV provider Echostar also won enough licenses to put together a national service,which could expand its ability to offer two-way broadband services. Also, the D-Block reserved for emergency services will be re-auctioned (it didn’t attract the minimum bid).

So it looks like my Mississippi Valley Sneak Attack theory might have been right and it was Verizon that won individual regional licenses instead of taking Google head-on in a bid for the national license (I am still speculating what Google did, but that is what it looks like).

The real winner here is Google precisely because it lost. Google committed to bidding the minimum $4.6 billion that would trigger open device and open application rules that it had lobbied for, but nobody seriously thought it actually wanted to win the auction. Building out and operating a wireless network is a much lower-margin business than search advertising, and even leasing out the spectrum would have been a distraction. But by putting its $4.6 billion on the table early, it was able to dictate the new rules of the game. Rules that Verizon is now stuck with. All Google really wants are broadband wireless networks that cannot discriminate against Google mobile apps or Android phones no matter who operates them.

And what if Google had won? It was never really that risky a move. There are worse places to park your cash than in wireless spectrum, something for which demand is always going up and supply is always going down.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/255120793/

David Pogue pens a piece on The Flip — an ultra-simple point-and-shoot camcorder that’s taken 13% of the market (according to the manufacturer).

Somebody at Pure Digital must have sat through countless meetings, steadfastly refusing to cede any ground to the forces of feature creep.

And here’s all the stuff it can’t do:

The screen is tiny (1.5 inches) and doesn’t swing out for self-portraits. You can’t snap still photos. There are no tapes or discs, so you must offload the videos to a computer when the memory is full (30 or 60 minutes of footage, depending on whether you buy the $150 or $180 model). There are no menus, no settings, no video light, no optical viewfinder, no special effects, no headphone jack, no high definition, no lens cap, no memory card. And there’s no optical zoom — only a 2X digital zoom that blows up and degrades the picture. Ouch.

And the stuff it can:

Instead, the Flip has been reduced to the purest essence of video capture. You turn it on, and it’s ready to start filming in two seconds. You press the red button once to record (press hard — it’s a little balky) and once to stop. You press Play to review the video, and the Trash button to delete a clip.

Pogue says the secret is that it just simply works. It’s always ready, it’s always trustworthy, it’s always with you. The quality isn’t the sell, the convenience and foolproofery is. You can’t make a mistake, you can’t do anything wrong. It’s purpose is pure to the core: Shoot quick videos without thinking about it.

I love it. Kudos to Pure Digital for having the discipline to make a camcorder for the rest of us.

[Hat tip to Chris for the link]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/923-the-flip-takes-13-of-the-camcorder-market-by-doing-less

Voice-to-text technology is finally getting some respect. Goldman Sachs is investing in a $100 million private financing round for SpinVox, a London-based technology startup that transcribes voicemails to text so that they can be more easily digitized, searched, and manipulated. Other investors in the round included GLG Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management and Toscafund Asset Management. This brings the total invested so far to $200 million, reports Reuters. The 31-year-old CEO, Christina Domecq (a member of the liquor family of the same name) says this latest round values the company at $500 million. There were rumors previously that SpinVox was pursuing an IPO, but with the markets in a tizzy the company found more private money instead.

SpinVox has some interesting Web apps, including Spin-My-Blog and Facebook and Twitter integration, but it is really a mobile play. People actually pay extra for this type of service on mobile phones. SpinVox has partnerships with twelve mobile carriers, mostly in Europe, including O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, 3, and Virgin Mobile. They still have limited availability in the U.S. for any of their services. But if people like visual voicemail on the iPhone—which simply lists voicemails like e-mails but still makes you listen to them—imagine if they could translate all of those voicemails to e-mail and simply read them.

When it comes to mobile, voice is still the best way to input information but it is not the best way to extract it. SpinVox lets you have the best of both worlds. This voice thing is gonna be big.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/255101898/

Amazon keeps adding to its Web services. Today, it is opening up an API for its Fulfillment by Amazon service, which allows online merchants to outsource their shipping to Amazon’s fulfillment centers. Up until now, the service still required a lot of manual steps on the parts of companies or entrepreneurs using it—they had to pre-label each box before sending it to Amazon and manage their inventory manually through software.

Now, with the new Amazon Fulfillment Web Service, an entrepreneur’s computers can talk directly to Amazon’s computers. Requesting orders to be shipped, tracking orders, and even printing branded labels at Amazon can now be done automatically. Frankly, I am surprised this was a manual process to begin with.

By tying directly into other companies’ inventory and ordering systems, which are in turn tied to their Websites, Amazon is in effect creating a Web version of EDI (electronic data interchange). EDI, which was the standard way for big manufacturers to gain visibility into their suppliers inventory, was expensive and only available to really big corporations. Web services like this one are bringing those information efficiencies across the entire economy to small and medium sized businesses as well. It is yet one more way that small companies loosely joined can enjoy the benefits that were once only available to large corporations. More Web services, please.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/255072453/