Ajax Girl

Keeping track of what people are reading about a company’s products on blogs is an inexact science. BuzzLogic will try to make it a little more exact with the acquisition of Activeweave, creator of a popular FireFox browser add-on called BlogRovR that recommends contextual posts from your favorite blogs as you surf the Web.

Already, BuzzLogic is used by marketers to try to figure out who is influencing the conversation about their brands and their competitors. (Much like Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Scout Labs, and Visible Technologies). The subscription service ranks the most influential blogs on any topic based on a dozen factors, such as how many other blogs link to the first blog and how popular the linking blogs are. It is like Techmeme for marketers but subscribers can actually see the rank of each blog and how they are connected to other sites. They can also purchase AdSense ads on the most influential blogs from inside BuzzLogic.

With BlogRovR, which has 180,000 registered users, Buzzlogic will now be able to fill in the other side of the equation. Not who is linking to who, but who is reading what. Consumer blog reading habits will now be layered into its algorithm. Advertisements won’t appear in BlogRoveR itself, but the aggregate reading data it collects will be used by BuzzLogic to help determine which blogs indeed are the most influential and should be targeted by advertisers.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Activeweave has raised less than $1 million from angel investors including Esther Dyson.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/275127518/

Sonific, an online music playing servuce similar to Pandora and Seeqpod, is to close May 1 as the company was unable to obtain licensed music rights in a way that made the service viable.

Gerd Leonhard, Co-Founder & CEO writes:

1) There are countless startups providing access to any and all music streams without any license whatsoever. However, when we approached the major record label decision makers in order to obtain licenses for some of the music in their catalogs we have routinely faced demands for very large cash advances and fixed per-stream minimum payments, pressure to give them ‘free’ company equity, and requirements of utterly bizarre usage restrictions. It seems that the industry’s major stakeholders still prefer this turf to remain unlicensed rather than to allow real-life, workable and market-based solutions to emerge by working with new companies such as Sonific. This is not the way forward.

2) We therefore had to realize that a company that wants to provide interactive streaming music services must either a) risk the constant complaints of their users, due to the lack of hit content b) proceed to use any and all music (this is routinely done by allowing users to upload their own MP3s) without the required licenses, and therefore be at the total mercy of the record labels at some point in time, and c) build a huge audience very quickly, based on having the content available - permission or not -, and then very quickly sell themselves to a large company that will take care of placating the labels while the money is plenty and the pockets are deep.

Unfortunately we don’t like any of these choices.

Sonific joins the TechCrunch Deadpool

thanks to Andrew Watson for the tip

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/275110654/

HiPiHi, China’s answer to Second Life has opened its doors to the public with a beta test that includes free features. We first wrote about HiPiHi in August 2007 when the company called for the establishment of virtual world standards and interoperability.

German’s are famed for their ability to clone sites, but the Chinese aren’t far behind; HiPiHi looks and feels like Second Life, at least in the demonstration video (in Mandarin above). HiPiHi is available in Chinese and English, and name registration supports both character sets. The service is free to use and register, and like Second Life users can rent land and create their own items.

According to the Second Life Herald, HiPiHi is working with Intel and IBM towards building the platform architecture so that it “is more open, highly scalable and truly inter-operable, in order to lay the groundwork for the mainstreaming of virtual worlds.”

PC only, and although the service is available in English, the download page isn’t.

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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/~3/275104793/

Shelfari, the Amazon-backed community network around books, has introduced editable author profiles in hopes that it can become a destination for not only biographical information but interactions between authors and their fans as well.

Each author’s page will feature an open wiki in addition to a message board and a list of written books. Shelfari hopes to set itself apart from other big name wikis (namely Wikipedia) by encouraging authors themselves to join the community and modify their own pages. Many sites tend to discourage this practice because of obvious bias concerns, but Shelfari believes the interaction to be seen between authors and their fans will compensate for this drawback.

With the introduction of these new profiles, Shelfari is poised to become a uniquely rich repository of literary information, and has the potential to become an IMDB for books. At the same time, the success of these wiki pages will rely heavily on author interaction, which will likely be difficult to establish. Without this interaction, users might as well head to Wikipedia to get the dish on their favorite authors.

Besides the new profiles, Shelfari offers book reviews, recommendations, and community groups. Members can browse their book collections in virtual libraries, and books can be easily purchased through links to external sites (Shelfari gets a portion of the revenue from these sales). The site was founded in October 2006, and received $1M in Series A funding from Amazon in Feburary 2007.

Competitors in this space include LibraryThing, Goodreads, and Delicious Monster”.

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/~3/275053836/

Health Plan One has taken $6.5 million Series A in a round led by Pequot Ventures that also included Greycroft Partners, Kevin Hill, Chan Wheeler and Bill Sullivan.

Shelton, CT based Health Plan One offers an online marketplace for health insurance where consumers can research and select health insurance plans from a wide range of providers.

Users enter their specific details and receive free health insurance quotes and can compare features among multiple options rather than researching individual plans from different sources. The site also provides support from licensed sales representatives.

Health Plan One will use the $6.5 million “to fuel growth in online customer acquisition and secure its place as a premier marketplace for health insurance.”

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/275040352/

Amazon loves to talk about its Web Services because it positions the company as a bold innovator bringing cloud computing to the unwashed masses and other companies still stuck in the land of legacy data centers. But it is coy when it comes to details about the actual business behind Amazon Web Services, which includes its S3 storage service, EC2 compute cloud, and SimpleDB online database.

During its fourth-quarter earnings call, Amazon offered up the tidbit that Amazon Web Services (AWS) now uses up more bandwidth than Amazon.com proper, but not much else. You could infer, however, that the business is not yet very large, accounting for less than $131 million of Amazon’s $5.7 billion in revenues that quarter. The revenues may be small, but they are no doubt growing very quickly.

So who are using these services? A high-ranking Amazon executive told me there are 60,000 different customers across the various Amazon Web Services, and most of them are not the startups that are normally associated with on-demand computing. Rather the biggest customers in both number and amount of computing resources consumed are divisions of banks, pharmaceuticals companies and other large corporations who try AWS once for a temporary project, and then get hooked.

That surprised me. These are the types of customers you wouldn’t expect to see running their data through a hosted service. But apparently the cost advantage of paying by the drink versus buying new hardware and staffing up to do a random data run is convincing them to trust more of their data with Amazon. It goes without saying that these are the types of companies who demand the highest security for their data. Banks and drug companies. And they have a lot of data to crunch.

You just hear more about the startups because many are increasingly putting their entire businesses on Amazon, and the economics of cloud computing really levels the playing field for them. They also tend to be more open about their data practices. But cloud computing is already going much deeper than the startup world, and gaining adherents in big IT organizations.

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/~3/275003100/

Facebook messaged the 4,600 fans of the FacebookPages Page with helpful hints on how to make your presence on Facebook go viral (by messaging all of your fans, for example). A key piece of advice? Use Facebook Ads:

Many businesses, from leading global brands to favorite local bands, are enjoying tremendous impact using Facebook Pages for free viral marketing. Check out some key strategies from the most successful businesses on Pages:

1) Regularly adding engaging and useful content
2) Letting fans participate in the conversation
3) Expanding their distribution with Facebook Ads

We’ve collected some of these winning strategies—along with the nuts of bolts of how to create and manage a Page—into an Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing

The pdf (embeded below) was sent to everyone via a box.net URL. Box say they were unaware Facebook would use them for distribution of the document.

Facebook Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing - Get more documents

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/274950174/

So it appears CNN is selling t-shirts with CNN headlines. Why I have no idea. Are people actually buying them? I wonder.

But what’s great is that you can fuck with the URL and generate shirts (complete with the CNN logo) like I Prefer MSNBC or Wolf Blitzer is Hairy or Fire David Payne (senior vice president and general manager of CNN.com).

[hat tip: Jeffrey]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/985-custom-cnn-t-shirts

You ask a guy for directions and, while very kind, he answers with “go down this path until you reach the perpendicular street, then…”.

Maybe there is such a thing as too much studying.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/984-you-know-youre-at-stanford-when

All engines are go for the May 1 NYC CrunchNetwork meet-up at Red Sky at 47 E. 29th Street between Park and Madison. The show starts at 7pm and we’ll have free drinks, amazing giveaways, and the entire CG team as well as Erick from TC and maybe a special MYSTERY GUEST who’s first name starts with M and rhymes with Ikele Smarrington.
(more…)

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/274848090/