Ajax Girl

Most people have thousands of digital photos sitting on their hard drive. And the vast majority of those photos aren’t tagged or searchable. Want to find the 300 pictures of your youngest son amongst 10,000 others? It’s not going to happen. Unless you’ve been diligently tagging and categorizing those photos over the years, and who does that?

The problem is obvious. The solution, not so much. A trail of failed startups have tried to tackle the problem, including: Riya (now focused on ecommerce via Like.com), Ookles (never launched), and Polar Rose (in private beta for nearly a year), among others.

And now suddenly TagCow appears, which allows users to upload photos and have them tagged within a few minutes. The technology appears to be “magic,” meaning there’s no explanation of it.

If there’s a mountain in the photo, it’s tagged. A dog? yep. A yellow cup? Absolutely. It does people, too. Upload an image of a person and say who it is, and all other images you upload will be tagged with that person, too. The service also integrates with Flickr and will auto tag the photos you have on the service.

Thomas Hawk, the CEO of photo site Zooomr, tried the service and declared it “really, really cool,” although he wonders how it works.

The answer is, humans do it. I note that the TagCow site is careful not to say anything about the tagging process, and never use the word “automated” or anything else that would suggests computers are doing the work. Munjal Shah, the founder of Riya/Like, agreed, noting that it recognized a witch in Thomas’ photo - he says this just isn’t something a computer can do today.

I haven’t confirmed this yet. I’ve emailed the company for a description of how the service works but have yet to hear back. Until we do, I’m betting that humans are the taggers. Note that Google has effectively thrown in the towel and uses humans for this kind of work, too.

TagCow appears to be offering the service for free, so the cost side of the business may be a problem for them down the road. And the business is definitely a little sketchy. Worried about the privacy of your data? Just don’t click on their Privacy Policy or Terms of Use: “Privacy policy is TBD.” and “Legal stuff TBD.” Not exactly a way to build confidence.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/260494928/

WordPress 2.5 has been released with a major overhaul to the interface and a range of new features.

The biggest change is in the appearance of the administration backend, which is described as being a “Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard.” The WordPress dashboard is now widget friendly, and users can include items such as stats, offering similar functionality to MovableType.

Other new features include multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, code friendly WYSIWYG, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and improved search.

A demo video from Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg above, and further details on the WordPress blog here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/260451633/

Yahoo, in the midst of a fight to remain independent, is granting “golden handcuff” stock options to key employees. The stock options are given to “key contributors” among the rank and file - senior executives are not eligible.

These stock option grants are on top of the previously announced changes to Yahoo’s severance plans. That provided for accelerated vesting of employee stock options and severance pay following a change in control (an acquisition by Microsoft, for example) and a termination of employment, and it applied to all Yahoo employees.

The new plan applies only to a select group of key Yahoo employees - the “rock stars,” as one source put it. They are being given special (and large) stock grants over and above their normal allotment. The size of the option grants is discretionary, but may be almost as large as their existing grants. One in twenty or so Yahoo employees will be getting these grants, says one source.

The options are also on an accelerated vesting schedule. Normal options are granted with a four year vesting schedule. If you leave earlier, those stock options disappear. The Rock Star options, though, vest over just 18 months. And they are also subject to the same acceleration provisions that Yahoo announced in February, so if the company is acquired and the employee terminated (or quits under certain conditions), they get all the stock.

It is apparently fairly well known within Yahoo that some key employees are being given these special stock options, although we haven’t heard much grumbling from the vast majority that didn’t get them. Perhaps they’re too busy worrying about job security to spend much time on envy.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/260414399/

Advertising network Glam is putting an end to at least some of its guaranteed payments to publishers, just a month after raising an $85 million round of financing.

Scott Swanson, Glam’s GM and Vice President, told publishers in an email (full text below) that “house ads” that were served for unsold inventory were being discontinued as of March 25, except to fulfill “minimum commitments that Glam has contractually agreed to.”

The email says the change was made to give publishers “more choice when it comes to how you use your unsold inventory.” But according to one large publisher partner to Glam, this is actually nothing more than a way for Glam to dramatically cut payments to partners. He said “While they’re spinning this as positive news, it sucks for publishers. Publishers were previously guaranteed $3 - $5 CPMs for house ads. By no longer running any house ads, that revenue dies. And, given Glam’s fill rates retwork wide are only 30%, that’s 70% of traffic (for most publishers) that’s no longer earning revenue from Glam…It’ll basically cause a 30 - 80% drop in revenue for publishers”

Glam’s business model is to guarantee minimum flat payments to publishers. A medium sized blog will receive, say, a guaranteed payment of $10,000 monthly. Glam then sells ads into those blogs, and placed house ads with a high CPM for any unsold inventory. If the blog’s page views grew, those additional payments over the guarantee could really add up. Some publishers, with 3 or more ad units on a page, could guarantee a $15 or higher RPM (revenue per thousand page views). That’s an awesome advertising income for blogs, particularly blogs targeting women generally (highly specific niche blogs can command higher rates, but usually only at scale).

So why is Glam doing this? Three reasons, probably.

First, they need to get costs down. Last year the company lost $3.7 million on $21 million in revenue. They’ve promised investors that 2008 would bring in $150 million in revenue with $40 million in profit. The only way to get there is bring in a lot more publishers, sell a lot more ads, and keep a larger share for themselves.

Second, Glam really needed to keep all those bloggers happy last year while they were raising capital. There’s no better way to do that than to send them big checks every month. Now that Glam has raised the big round, they don’t need the small bloggers at all, and they certainly aren’t going to be losing money on them.

Third, Glam is actively acquiring many of the blogs that they currently sell ads for, and they want them cheap. By cutting their revenue dramatically and quickly, many of those blogs will immediately be in a very tight cash position. They may be forced to sell. And with revenues down, Glam can pick them up for a song.

What does all this mean? It means if you are a Glam publisher, you’ve served your purpose and the good times are over. Move along, please. They have a company to build. And if you’re counting on those guaranteed payments after the termination date on your contract, well, you’re as dumb as Glam hopes you are.

I’ve emailed Glam for a comment, but haven’t heard back from them yet. The company has raised a total of $114 million.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/260363623/

As we noted two days ago, Google is taking its home page black in support of Earth Hour.

We criticized Google when we first posted about this because, it turns out, black web pages actually may use more power than white ones (based on a study that Google itself cited last year). So Google is, ironically, causing people who visit their site to use more power to celebrate Earth Hour than they would on a normal day.

Google changed its message to users to note the disparity (compare to what they said to Israeli users two days ago), but I still find this all very funny.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/260303075/

FriendFeed released their API just a few days ago, but third party developers are already scrambling to build on top of the service.

We just heard that Howard Baines will be releasing an Adobe AIR application for FriendFeed in the next week or so. So far all we have is the screen shot and a confirmation from Baines that his team is working on it. The application will be called Alert Thingy (I assume the site will be here).

If this is anything like Twhirl, an AIR application for Twitter, it’s likely to be a hit. Since it’s AIR it will work on both Windows and Macs right from the start. If the application also allows users to comment on items, post directly to FriendFeed, flag items as “liked,” etc., users will have little need to visit the FriendFeed site directly. And that should be fine with FriendFeed, since users will have persistent interaction with the service on the desktop.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/260234805/