Los Angeles based law firm Kabateck Brown Kellner, LLP has filed a class action lawsuit against Citysearch, accusing it of promoting click fraud. The suit was filed on behalf of plaintiff Tom Lambotte, who has charged that Citysearch has failed to recognize or reimburse him for the clickfraud that took place on an ad he placed between December 11 and 31, 2007. The suit also applies to anyone who has used the click-based Citysearch ad program.

The lawsuit says that Citysearch promotes click fraud by paying its salespeople a commission based on the number of clicks their customers’ ads generate. It also states the Citysearch fails to take any steps to prevent click fraud, and does nothing to help victims.

The plaintiff’s claim is as follows:

“Lambotte’s Citysearch ad received a total of 7 clicks (plus two more that he generated) between December 11 and 25, 2007. On December 26 he received a response from Citysearch to his December 22 request to cancel his ad. Suddenly, his ad began receiving 12 to 16 clicks a day, for a total of 69 clicks between December 26 and December 31, when his ad was finally canceled. He received in these five days 10 times as many clicks as he had received in the previous two weeks. Despite this, Citysearch refused his repeated requests to reverse these charges.”

Basically there was an increase from less than one click per day to around 10 per day. The increase is significant percentage-wise, but the click rate was very low to begin with - any increase would represent a huge gain.

Lambotte is taking this case seriously. His representation, Kabateck Brown Kellner, recently won multi-million dollar settlements involving advertisements on Google and Yahoo, and has recently filed a class-action lawsuit against Google’s AdWords program. With that kind of history it’s clear that the firm knows what it’s doing, but the case might be perceived as just another cash grab.

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/~3/299527947/

The Prague CrunchNetwork Meet-up was a roaring success, the kind of drunken brodeo full of tech geeks and one or two of the women who love them we in the Valley and New York take for granted. Best of all I got to see a few nascent start-ups in the Prague tech scene and even a few well-established products that we might have overlooked in our cultural myopia. That said, here’s a “best-of” rundown of some of the things I saw at our meet-up. Expect more coverage of this space as some of the sites go beta, but until then here are some of the best.

Live Concerts

Jan Horna of Live Concerts participated in our Elevator Pitch-Off and won the MacBook based on his Live Concerts web service:

Live Concerts web service helps people to enjoy live music. Based on individual preferences, the easy-to-use web widget lets users know when their favorite artist or band is coming to town. It also facilitates the interaction with user’s friends in the real world. Users can invite their friends, the same way they get valuable recommendations and reviews from their friends. Music fans can use the widget as a concert ticket search engine as well. They can buy tickets from various ticket sellers and thus get the most affordable offer. The Live Concerts widget is going to work on all major social networking site, e.g. MySpace, Facebook and other OpenSocial based social networks. It will be available as a standalone
application too.

Best of all? He equated a heroin to a web widget on his site.

LearnItLists.com

LearnItLists is a new way to learn a language. Originally from the UK, Nicola and her husband built this widget to help teach themselves Czech. The couple actually lives in and is restoring an old farmhouse outside of the city and they spend their mornings coding and their evenings digging up unexploded ordnance in the Czech country-side. They also took part in the Elevator Pitch-off.

WireNode.com

Sponsor Wirenode service allows you to build mobile versions of your site in seconds.

Wirenode is a mobile marketing platform. It contains simple-to-use tools for creating mobile websites (with multiple pages, images, colors, mobile surveys, feedback mechanism, etc), so even the non technical person can create them. Created websites can be displayed on all mobile phones. The platform optimizes the output to fit particular phone screen on the fly.
Free version of the service is used by individuals, for their personal mobile websites. Premium version is used by marketing agencies and mobile operators for creating landing pages and mobile portals for mobile marketing purposes.

Here’s an example of the product at work. This mobile site took one minute to make. We’ve been watching these guys since the last TC40 and their product makes it amazingly easy to grab mobile eyeballs.

Newstin.com

This service is particularly hard to describe but is actually quite cool. Newstin.com, another sponsor, is a news aggregator that searches for top stories in multiple languages and then offers a social aspect by allowing anyone in almost any language to comment and vote up the news. For example, news from Russian can appear in the English-language news section and comments by Russian commenters will appear in English. Most of the cool stuff happens behind the scenes, but as a news site it’s quite full-featured.

Newstin aspires to connect people through news and create global communities of interest. Newstin is a Global Social News Platform, where topics and ideas are identified within the news, acquiring a social aspect by initiating communication between people, no matter their nation or language. Newstin’s interface belies a powerful systems engine organizing news into 700,000+ categories from over 150,000+ sources. The patented Cross Language Information Retrieval technology allows readers to select from 10 foreign languages for their global news sources. Newstin is dedicated to those individuals seeking a global perspective and the ability to exchange opinions and ideas across nationalities and cultures.

Geewa.com

Then there’s Geewa. Geewa, another sponsor, showed a cross platform gaming system that can run simultaneously on a cellphone and a PC. This means you could feasibly play Mau Mau against a live player anywhere in the world. And who doesn’t love Mau Mau?

Geewa develops and operates multiplayer casual games within a unique community environment. Geewa also operates its games on social networks and start-pages such as MySpace and iGoogle. Geewa games can be played across multiple platforms including PC, mobile phones, IPTV and generally any Internet connected device. Geewa develops both original games such as Word Soccer and Climbers as well as the “usual suspects”, i.e. Poker, Pool, Sudoku, Tic-tac-toe, chess and many others. All of these games can be easily embedded into any blog or web page. Geewa has cca. 1 million unique users per month who spend an average 55 minutes per day on their sites.

Finally, we learned that Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon is alive and well and apparently living in Prague.

All told, I’d say the even was a rousing success. It’s great to get out of the old U.S. of A. and meet folks who might be making the next YouTube. Plus the beer was great.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/299096400/

Michael is at the All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, California where Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates are set to take the stage this opening night and preview the user interface of Microsoft’s next operating system, known as Windows 7 and expected to arrive in 2010.

He will be taking photos and streaming the keynote to here via Qik once it starts. Update: The bandwidth at the event was so bad, we gave up trying to stream it.

During the keynote, Corporate VP Julie Larson-Green demoed new multi-touch functionality, which Microsoft is working with OEMs to get working on new machines once Windows 7 is released - apparently 18 months from now. See a demo below and more info here.

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7

A live blog of the event can be found on the All Things D site here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/299467060/

Michael is at the All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, California where Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates are set to take the stage this opening night and preview the user interface of Microsoft’s next operating system, known as Windows 7 and expected to arrive in 2010.

He will be taking photos and streaming the keynote to here via Qik once it starts. Update: Apparently the reception isn’t good enough to stream video from the conference. We’ll be providing text and photo updates here as they come in.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/299467060/

Google’s third developer conference, and the first to be called Google I/O, kicks off on Wednesday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco with a keynote presentation by Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of Engineering.

Here’s what to expect:

• A focus on the ecosystem comprised of the browser as an operating system + ubiquitous connectivity + emerging cloud computing.
• Lifting of the restrictions around Google App Engine, their hosted computing environment.
• News about Google Gears
• Android Application Demos
• Minor news about Google Open Social

The big announcement will be around Google App Engine - expect the 160,000 or so developers on the waiting list to be let in tomorrow (75,000 have been given access already). Google will also lift the hard ceiling on resource usage. Currently applications are cut off when resource usage goes over a certain point (the cap equates to about 5 million page views per month for an average app). That cap will continue to apply until later this year, but they will announce the following usage fees tomorrow:

Free quota to get started: 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month
$0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
$0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
$0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
$0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

This pricing puts Google App Engine storage and bandwidth costs competitive with Amazon S3 (plus Google doesn’t have a per-request fee).

Google is also announcing two new tools for Google App Engine developers: an image-manipulation API and memcache. The image-manipulation API will allow developers to scale, rotate, and crop images on the server. The memcache API gives developers access to a distributed, high-performance in-memory key-value caching system. Memcache would have been useful for our own App Engine app (see it live here) to help us unload common queries from Google’s datastore. Also to note: no additional languages will be supported.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/299399342/

The National Association of Realtors has settled its antitrust case with the Department of Justice, and has given online realtors full access to the industry-standard Multiple Listing Service (MLS) Databases. The MLS is a comprehensive listing of homes that are are available on the housing market, and until this point the NAR has restricted access to online brokers.

These online brokers have been offering fees that are significantly lower than traditional realtor rates, and rather than adapt as an industry, the NAR choose a more childish route and withheld the essential data. The Department of Justice took issue with this stance, and filed suit in September 2005.

The deal is especially important for disruptive online-only companies like Redfin, which rely on being able to access current home listings. If the case had gone the other way, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman says that the company would have died a “slow, grisly death” (SeattlePI). Redfin aims to make the home-buying process more efficient, while saving consumers money in the process (it has been able to save the average home buyer $10,000, which doesn’t sit well with most traditional realtors).

Unfortunately, the settlement isn’t a complete victory for online sites, which will be subject to restrictions on the comments users can leave on each home. If a home-seller asks that a comment be taken down, websites are obligated to comply (consequently, you probably won’t be seeing many negative reviews). Instant customer feedback is one of the most valuable assets of online retailers - to deny consumers access to such information is both annoying and foolhardy on the NAR’s part. The NAR should be supporting traditional brokers by emphasizing personal interaction and service, not by handicapping the competition.

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/~3/299403552/

If you’ve been waiting to see what Windows 7 will look like then you may want to head over to CrunchGear to check out a bevy of screen shots that hit our inbox earlier today. Of course, the release is a couple years out, but we’ve confirmed that this is what the current build of Windows 7 looks like. Coincidentally, Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky was interviewed by CNET about Windows 7, but gave very little, if any, details on the subject. As the saying goes, though, a picture is worth a thousand words.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/299391404/

If you like your invite apps dead-simple, check out Mobaganda. You don’t even have to log in. Just click on start, add the name, date & time, and location, and create an event. The site, which is built on the Google App Engine, generates a Webpage that you can e-mail out to all of your friends.

Once the recipients go to the URL they can RSVP, and you can keep track via RSS or by checking back at the unique URL, which lasts for 30 days. (One downside is that no two events can share the same name during that time period).

Here’s an invite page I made in about a minute for a fake TechCrunch party:

The site generates an e-mail address that can be used to contact everyone on the RSVP list. You can also keep track of the RSVPs through Google Reader:

Or as a widget on iGoogle:

Not that we need more ways to invite friends to parties (see Pingg, Socializr, MyPunchbowl, etc.). But Mobaganda does reduce the process to its bare essentials. (The UI sensibility reminds me of Presdo). It got started as a conversation between Web developer Jason Stirman and Twitter founder Evan Williams. the question they were pondering: Would it be possible to create a better Evite, without even requiring a signup or login?”

Stirman is the creator of OhDon’tForget, a Ruby-on-Rails app that lets you send yourself pre-set reminders via text message (Time picked it as one of its 50 Best Websites last year). Stirman plans on adding text reminders to Mogabanda using OhDon’tForget (when you RSVP, you will be able to add a cell number to get a reminder the day before the event). he is also thinking of ways to add notes, maps, and other features. But he wants to keep it as simple as possible. After all, it is supposed to be the anti-Evite.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/299376692/

StartYourTube, the white label video site we covered last month that lets users create their own “branded YouTubes”, has decided to change its name. The company sent out the following email last week to its members:

Hi everyone ,

We have to choose another domain name for StartYourTube.com
Please take one minute to give us your choice

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=IKrB6jg7c3S_2fSrp3cW4DXA_3d_3d

best,
startyourtube team

Included in possible domain choices are “BoostCast.com” and “StartYours2.com”.

The wording seems to indicate that this isn’t exactly by choice (lawsuit anyone?). However, StartYourTube says that the company has decided on the name change on its own accord. Apparently users of the service want their content to stand on its own, without any kind of implied affiliation to YouTube.

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/~3/299363636/

A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed to us that the social networking company is planning to announce an open-source initiative around its platform, a story we broke yesterday. As Michael reported:

Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.

They’ll simply map their existing APIs to Facebook Platform (which isn’t trivial) and go. Expect to see the four major technical pieces of Facebook Platform - FMBL (markup language), FQL (query language), FJS (Javascript library) and the Facebook API to be open sourced and made available to anyone.

This is a nearly inevitable response to Open Social, which is backed by Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Open Social is also an open source platform, run by the Open Social Foundation

More details around the initiative will be announced in the next day or two.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/299301664/