Ajax Girl

On first look, Phreadz does appear to be aping Seesmic. Threaded video conversations and an invite-only Alpha are just two of the similarities. But you won’t find any of Seesmic’s code in this new UK-based “social multimedia conversation network,” reports TechCrunch UK.

Firstly, it is going further than Seesmic by pushing the envelope on the concept by interweaving video, images, text, audio and links all into these video conversations. Secondly Phreadz was built in entirety by “Kosso”, a British developer/entrepreneur who - as many players in the UK scene know - has been gestating the concept for some time. Phreadz is also sending media outwards. It’s capable of cross-posting your content to Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Livejournal, Flickr account, Blip.tv and links via Twitter. It will also automatically encode recorded Flash to MPEG4 (and other formats). And you can also send it photos, audio or video via email from you mobile phone (Nokia N95 or iPhone) or embed widgets of threaded conversations, as below.

Whether all of these extra features means Phreadz moves away from the pure video experience offered by Seesmic, and therefore loses focus, remains to be seen. For now its early closed Alpha status means many of its features have been tested by only a small audience. Meantime, it’s one of the more originally-backed startups - being bootstrapped with the proceeds from a blogging system Kosso built for Second Life users. As an ex-BBC Online guy, Kosso previously built a mobile blogging system for the BBC News site’s coverage of CeBit in 2004, later leaving the BBC to become CTO/sole-lead architect at Podcast.com which he recently left.

There’s a longer review of Phreadz on TechCrunch UK.

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/~3/296927625/

Akimbo, the online video provider that never seemed to establish an identity, has closed its doors. The sudden move is surprising, given that the site raised $4 million in funding less than three months ago.

Akimbo launched in 2002 as a hardware-based VOD company. Using a hard-drive equipped settop box, users could download a variety of shows from 200 content partners. In October 2005 the company shifted directions and introduced Akimbo for Media Center, which did away with the hardware and allowed users to use Akimbo through a plugin on compatible computers. Finally, last February, the company reinvented itself once more, and became a whitelabel video service provider.

Given Akimbo’s multiple personalities, it’s not surprising that it has run into trouble - but why give up after only three months in a new space? The company has seen management issues (the former CEO left, and disagreements apparently arose after his replacement with Thomas Frank). But that still doesn’t explain why the company would give the whitelabel space such a half-hearted effort.

According to VentureBeat, the entire staff has been laid off, save for three members who are staying on to facilitate the company’s shutdown. The company had raised $56 million over multiple rounds of funding, with investors including AT&T and Cisco. Akimbo has been added to the Deadpool.

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/~3/296885248/

Thank you to our great group of sponsors who make reading TechCrunch possible.

ScribeFire, Firefox extension for integrated blogging in your broswer

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Also, following is a list of upcoming conferences that may be of interest:

OReilly’s Graphing Social Patterns, June 9-10 in Washington, DC. Use “gspe08tech” for a 15% registration discount. OReilly wants to give away two free tickets to the conference to TechCrunch readers. Email freeticket [at] techcrunch [dot com] if you’re interested in securing a free ticket. OReilly will select two names at random next Wednesday, May 28 at 5 pm pst.

Supernova, June 16-18 in San Francisco, CA. TechCrunch readers automatically receive a $200 discount here. Come join TechCrunch as we co-host the Mobile Connections forum with Kevin Werbach Monday night at the conference.

OReilly’s Velocity Conference, June 23-24 in Burlingame, CA. Use “vel08tech” for a 15% registration discount.

Run to your checkbook. TechCrunch has new advertising sponsorship packages available:

• 50% sponsorship rotations on TechCrunch, an affordable new way to gain visibility with TechCrunch readers.
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Learn more here or contact Heather Harde.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/296877516/

Yesterday at the Mesh conference in Toronto I met Noah Godfrey, one of the founders of GigPark. A social recommendation Website that launched last February, the site recently pushed out a major redesign. It’s like Yelp, but only with recommendations from people you know.

The point of GigPark is to collect and share recommendations of local services with your friends. You import your contact list from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, or Hotmail. Or add it as a Facebook application. Then you can start asking questions. Does anyone know a good doctor, lawyer, plumber? What’s the best Thai restaurant in town? And you can start giving your own recommendations. All of these questions and answers appears as a consolidated feed from you, your friends, and the friends of your friends.

It only works with friends who have joined GigPark or added the Facebook app, but you can make your page public to share it with friends who are not members. Here’s Godfrey’s public page.

The site also lets you search for specific services, like restaurants or dog walker. And you can see who recommended what.

For each recommendation there is a page with the original recommendation and contact information. Comments can be made on any recommendation, and they can be added to your favorites as well. Most of the features work within Facebook as well. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather get recommendations from people I know or who I can ask about than from anonymous strangers.

GigPark has been bootsrapped so far with $200,000 from Godfrey and his co-founder Pema Hegan. It competes with Trusted Opinion, which has raised $3.6 million.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/296872266/

Connecticut startup Kayak has raised $223 million in venture capital and employs 58 people to build and grow its travel search site. Its chief competitor, San Francisco based Mobissimo, has raised $1 million and has just 15 employees. Mobissimo also became profitable last year, and the company doesn’t have to raise more money unless it’s to fuel faster growth or acquisitions.

It’s also clear even from a cursory comparison of the two sites that Mobissimo is trying harder than Kayak to help you find exactly the flight and hotel you are looking for. Kayak is largely similar to other travel search sites - enter where you want to go and get back results from a number of providers, sort by price, etc.

But Mobissimo has implemented a number of just plain smart features that provide the kind of travel options that you usually need a human operator or travel agent to get to. In addition to normal search results, for example, users also see options for the lowest priced non-stop fares, the lowest priced alternative dates, and the lowest priced business class fares (without doing new searches). And if there’s a train between the two destinations, Mobissimo will show those results along with the flights - you may get there faster and cheaper that way, and you’d never think to search for train schedules separately.

And even better, the service will look for related destinations and show you the lowest fares there, too. For example, a search for flights to Poland may show other Eastern European destinations if the prices are a lot lower. Or if you are looking for flights to an airport near a beach, Mobissimo will show you other flights to other beach destinations, perhaps thousands of miles away (and skiing, and wine regions, etc.). It’s very hard to find these kinds of travel options with online searches. If you are flying to Warsaw, you just don’t think to do a search to Prague, too, to see if it’s vastly cheaper.

And if all you want to do is find a quick getaway to gamble, play golf, drink wine, go to a beach or just about anything else, you can search primarily by activity, too. Mobissimo also has widgets on the site that pull in third party information about the destination. Weather, Flickr photos and (soon) travel guides are included in the left sidebar.

All of this isn’t to say that Mobissimo has more traffic or sales than Kayak - see the Comscore chart here for their relative sizes. But Mobissimo is a solid, profitable startup with a great user experience. And they’ve done it with next to no financial resources.

The company was founded by Beatrice Tarka in October 2003.

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/~3/296865347/

It’s become a common trope to say that Facebook and Google are vying to become the operating system of the Internet. But there are some very clear hints of that in Facebook’s upcoming new design, which it just opened up to today in a developer sandbox. (You can see it at http://www.new.facebook.com, although you’ll need to download some libraries to start testing apps with it).

It appears that Facebook is moving closer to becoming a Webtop application, fusing elements of the desktop into the Web experience.

Eagle-eyed TechCrunch reader Ryan Merket (above) noticed something vaguely familiar about the new design. See the menu bar above his profile? Look closely. Its got some handy menus on the left that take him to his profile, his friends, applications, and inbox.

And on the right of the menu bar is a search box. That is the same visual metaphor you find in the menu bar on desktop operating systems.

The menu choices are different than on you desktop, because these tap into Web applications and resources. But the navigation is the same.

Menus on the left.

Search on the right.

And don’t forget the chat bar on the very bottom that, like a status bar, shows you how many of your friends are online and lets you chat with them.

Could this be the work of Facebook’s Parakey acquisition from last July finally bearing fruit? Parakey was the pre-launch startup from Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt that was working on a “web operating system.” Facebook was rumored to have beaten Google on the deal.

Facebook is already well on its way to becoming an operating system of sorts for the Web. (This time around there will be room for more than one OS). It is the application platform of choice for many Web developers. (Tomorrow, it turns one year old). But why reinvent the wheel on the user interface side when everybody is already trained how to use a menu bar? The aha moment will be when people click on those menus and a whole new world opens up to them.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/296813185/

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is in Silicon Valley today talking about his American Solutions organization, which recently opened an office in Palo Alto. I spent about thirty minutes on the phone with him talking about a wide range of issues: the upcoming elections, tech issues in general and his own presidential aspirations.

The podcast and transcript is below. Last night I asked Twitter users what questions they’d like me to ask, and I added a few of the good ones to the interview.

I asked about his thoughts on the upcoming presidential elections. He clearly supports Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal as McCain’s running mate, and also says there’s a good chance that Hillary Clinton will end up teaming with Obama on the Democrat side of things. How will those two teams stack up? He gives the Democrats a 60% chance of winning.

I also asked Gingrich about his own presidential aspirations: “The other twitter question is, When are you going to run for president? Please run for president.” Gingrich responds that he’s looking at a 2012 or 2016 run: “All I can say is that if they look at American Solutions and they look for the senate transformation, they will see the early stages of how you would write a second contract with America. If you get to the point it is clear enough and powerful enough, and if that point there is a big enough demand whether it is in 2012 or 2016, I will get to the point where I would run. If my mission in life is to be the teacher for the next generation of politicians, then I am pretty happy doing that too. I am going to wait and let the American people sort that out.”

Listen to the podcast here.

Transcript:

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/296776047/

Say hello to your Czech counterparts in sunny, beautiful Prague courtesy of Nokia and Qik.

Check out CrunchGear for the full program.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/296732344/

A mysterious yet intriguing project from Russia has come across our inbox. It is a search-engine optimization analysis tool for Websites called TheRarestWords. For any given URL, like Microsoft’s or Techcrunch’s, it shows you the rarest keywords on the homepage (i.e., the ones most likely to give your site some search-engine juice), other sites with related keywords, and a list of categories the site would fit under based on those keywords. For Microsoft, some the rare keywords it identifies are “silverlight,” “biztalk,” “onecare,” “skydrive, “popfly,” “ballmer,” and “ozzie.” You can try your site by going to http://therarestwords.com/YOURSITE.com.

TheRarestWords then tries to tap into crowd intelligence by letting anyone add a 100-character definition for each keyword, which could give it a semantic edge in trying to categorize each site. This could also be gamed pretty easily, but this looks to be just a Web project at this point. It could also be used to create a Wiki dictionary like Lingoz or Wiktionary, but that does not seem to be the focus of the project.

The developer is a mysterious Russian who does not want to give out his name. You can find more info on his blog and on this forum post. Mircea Goia from MyTestBox dug into it for us and reports:

The author and the sole founder – who is from Russia and wants to have a low profile for now - says it is just a hobby that was started in December 2007 and he calls it a “linguistic experiment”.

Their spider (called TheRarestParser/0.2a) started scouting the internet in May and extracted words from many websites. It looked at which one are used most often on those websites and which ones are rarely used, or not at all. For now it extracts only the words from the first page of a domain. It doesn’t go deeper than that, however the spider managed to index 20 million words from many domains.

The author wants to implement new options like:

* Trend spotting (which of the words are gaining popularity - like “django” is becoming more popular, “python” is still strong, and which are losing it like “perl”)
* Help with SEO for mom-and-dad kinds of business sites (it could be useful from this stand point, the author says)
* Auto-categorization of your sites against a big list of categories (actually, at this time it has already been implemented, but the algorithm still needs to be perfected)

The interface is confusing the first time you go there, but there is some interesting data you can pull from it. For instance, you can have an SEO fight between any two sites by typing in the address: http://therarestwords.com/vs/your-site.com/competitors-site.com. This feature shows which rare words your site has that your competitor doesn’t and vice versa.

For example, here’s TechCrunch Vs. GigaOm. This is only a snapshot of what is on each frontpage, but we are more likely to get search traffic right now for terms like “friendfeed,” “gamestop,” and “blogosphere.” While they are kicking our butts on “qualcomm,” “powerset,” and “sarcasm.” (At least that was the case before I put up this post. I really can’t let Om beat us on sarcasm).

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/~3/296721831/

We will shortly be releasing a new version of CrunchBase, the company and people database wiki that you often see linked to here on TechCrunch.

In the meantime, though, we’ve added a few new features to the product, including integration with LinkedIn via their API. You can now click a button and see if you are linked to any of the employees at any particular startup. The image to the left shows Google, but you may be surprised to find a connection to someone at even the smaller new companies we cover. The integration is identical to what Business Week announced last December.

More news from CrunchBase coming soon. And if you haven’t put in your own bio and picture yet, or information about your startup, please add it. We’re now tracking 4,460 startups and over 10,000 people.

If you want to add the LinkedIn widget to your own site, there’s more information here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/296715253/