Ajax Girl

Causes, a Facebook-only application that promotes viral donations of time and money to charities and nonprofits, launched a year ago. They’ve now released statistics today on their usage and donation numbers for that first year.

The company says they’ve registered 12 million users who are now supporting more than 80,000 non-profit causes worldwide. $2.5 million has been raised for 19,445 different 501(c)(3) charitable organizations. According to Facebook, there are 60,000 or so daily users of the application.

Causes was founded by Sean Parker, a partner at Founders Fund who previously co-founded Napster, was the founding President of Facebook, and co-founded the recently acquired Plaxo. His goal with Causes, he told me last year when the company was called Project Agape, is to apply the same ideas around virality that worked so well on his previous projects to the idea of altruism and activism.

So far, so good.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300289366/

Soundflavor has relaunched as a consumer-friendly database of song information that will provide users with a one-stop-shop for song information, videos, and recommendations.

The site sports a clean interface and offers a slew of search options that make it easy to find a particular song or artist. Users can browse and filter their searches by genre, decade, or even by the subject of the lyrics. After choosing a song, the user is presented with a mashup of related information, including artist bios from Wikipedia, recent news headlines, store links to purchase the song, and flickr photos.

Each page also features a “One-Click Playlist” that generates a list of 25 songs based on a song’s “flavors” (which are basically pre-defined tags). The system seemed to work well - a quick test didn’t give me any songs that seemed obviously out of place. The site also allows users to compile playlists of music videos that can be embedded on social media sites or blogs (see below). One neat feature of these widgets is the “Any Requests?” button which lets users generate their own playlist while they’re browsing your site.

Unfortunately, there do seem to be a few hiccups. The site uses YouTube for its music videos, and some songs don’t appear to be correctly matched with their corresponding videos. For example, after entering AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long”, I was treated to a man playing the song… with his hands.

Over the last five years Soundflavor has compiled a comprehensive database of metadata on over one million songs, but up until this point the information was primarily used by other companies that license music. The company brought on Dave Pell, who was previously just an investor, as its VP of Product Design to make the site more accessible to the consumer audience. Pell is known for his past work on sites including Rollyo and Addictomatic. Soundflavor has raised a total of $5.8 million since it was founded in 2003.

There are a number of other players in the music space, including Last.fm and PluggedIn.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300223000/

With all the thousands of engineers at google, you’d think someone speaks binary. But perhaps not. Attendees of the Google I/O conference today were given t-shirts that, presumably, were supposed to spell GOOGLEIO on the back in binary. Just one problem, the actual message printed spells GOOGLEKO:

G: 01000111
O: 01001111
O: 01001111
G: 01000111
L: 01001100
E: 01000101
K: 01001011
O: 01001111

The “I” that should’ve been in place of the “K” would’ve been 01001001.

If you got one of these, save it. It’s definitely a collector’s item now. I’ll pay $50 for an XL, if anyone’s selling.

Check for yourself here - and remember that upper and lower case letters have different binary spellings.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300215993/

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg just took the stage at the D6 conference in Carlsbad, California for an interview with Kara Swisher.

Zuckerberg, of course, is a famously difficult interview (my interview of Zuckerberg from TechCrunch40 last year is here). At first glance, this interview is going much better. The audience, at least, is tame.

Swisher: What is Facebook right now? Define Facebook.

Zuckerberg: Facebook is about helping people share information and share themselves. We build products that help people share personalities, open up, share pieces of them communicate, while giving them complete control over their privacy.

Swisher: What were your inspirations?

Zuckerberg: “We’ve been building Facebook for four years now.” AOL was an early inspiration, hacking things on AOL platform, in chat rooms. A lot of his friends grew up learning how to program on AOL.

Swisher: what was it like to come to silicon valley and get instant attention?

Zuckerberg: Once they got to 30 colleges decided FB was worth spending time on, decided to move to California for the summer. So many great companies driving down 101, like Yahoo, thought it would be good to meet some of them.

He says that at the end of the summer he and some of the others stayed in California, took more time off Harvard, eventually dropped out.

Talking about taking classes at Harvard, Art in the time of Augustus, never went to class once. He said he was planning on catching up but built FB instead. Few days before classes ended he built a tool to have people upload images and information for everyone to collaborate. He passed the class.

Swisher: Asks about big funding from earlier this year, Zuckerberg’s decision to stay CEO.

Zuckerberg: Says CEO sets vision for the company and recruits a team. Says not done executing on vision, still building team.

Swisher: What did you learn in first couple of years as CEO?

Zuckerberg: Says “Beacon was a big mistake for us in a lot of ways” but it reinforced for them that there are lots of ways to share information, they learned.

Swisher: Asks Sheryl why she left Google for FB?

Sandberg: web is becoming more social. thinks trend is increasing. was at google for 6.5 years, was looking for something new. was excited about opportunity to do something small again. really believes in mission, wants to help FB scale.

Swisher: Opening up of the platform, what thinking was behind it?

Zuckerberg: they knew they could never build all the useful applications that were needed. Wanted to allow developers to help them. It grew a lot faster in first year than they thought it would. 300k developers now. Lots of apps they didn’t anticipate or purposefully didn’t want to go after. Music, for example - iLike built app. Another - games - things like scrabulous.

Swisher: What is your relationship wth Microsoft?

Sandberg: It’s good. It’s a good partnership. You can’t go it alone. We’re a small company. Partnerships really matter.

Swisher: With Google?

Zuckerberg: We talk to them all the time. Larry came to his apartment when he had a mattress on the floor. Google does a lot of interesting things, would be good to work with them on some things. Google is such a big company that is doing so many different things, working on social stuff. [no real answer here].

More coverage here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300197024/

Distributing friend connections across the web has been quite a hot topic in the Web 2.0 community as of late. MySpace, Facebook, and Google have all come out with their own initiatives for sharing social graph data with any number of websites. And there appears to be a struggle over just who will ultimately control the aggregated data - if anyone.

So it may or may not come as a surprise that Gigya, a startup known for distributing widgets across social networks, blogs and other social media platforms, is getting into the mix by launching a service into public beta called Gigya Socialize.

I first heard of Gigya’s plans to invert social networking in February when it was called “Wildfire Social”. President Rooly Eliezerov described it then as “better than anything we’ve done so far”. He even conjectured that whoever owned the aggregated social graph could become the next Google…which is ironic in hindsight, of course, given that Google itself beat Gigya to the punch.

Regardless, Eliezerov insists that the announcement of Google Friend Connect doesn’t change Gigya’s strategy, and Gigya Socialize is actually quite unique. He points to two areas in particular: the availability of an API for seamless integration, and the ability to import friends from email contact lists.

Gigya Socialize can be implemented by websites in either of two ways. They can drop in a set of plug-n-play components, like a news feed or sharing panel, that are based in Flash and visually configurable. Or they can work with an API that provides a short list of commands for retrieving and saving user activity and friend data.

While currently you can only import friends from Gtalk, Orkut and (soon) Hi5 with Google Friend Connect, you can invite them from your list of contacts on Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL with Gigya Socialize.

Gigya intends to keep a low profile with this social service. Branding on individual components is kept to a minimum, and users are only brought back to Gigya’s site for account management purposes. The Palo Alto-based startup has no plans to aggregate friend activity across participating sites in one FriendFeed-like hub.

As for monetization, Gigya is thinking about releasing support for inserting sponsored items into the news feeds of participating publishers’ sites. The idea is that advertisers would be able to broadcast their own users’ behavior elsewhere on the web as a form of lead generation. This functionality, however, would be entirely opt-in on the part of publishers.

No websites have yet to roll out Gigya Socialize, although EA Games is said to be working on an implementation and RockYou has shown interest as well.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300161167/

Looking to get tutored in a language by an actual native speaker? New startup eduFire offers one-on-one sessions from hundreds of experienced tutors around the world. The site soft launched earlier this year, and has just enabled “On-demand” tutoring, allowing users to hook up with teachers on a whim.

Instead of hiring a force of professional teachers, eduFire lets anyone become a tutor, and relies on the community to identify the most qualified members. Each tutor creates a personal profile that lists their credentials, their hourly rate, and the languages they teach (they can also optionally leave a brief introductory video). They can also establish a standard schedule, or they can classify themselves as “available”, meaning a member can contact them and initiate a lesson immediately.

The lesson is conducted through the site’s flash-based chat app, after which the student pays the teacher through credit card or PayPal. Students can leave reviews for each tutor, which helps the site weed out the hacks just looking to make a quick buck. The site also tallies the number of lessons a teacher has given as a measure of credibility, and lists the most credible teachers on a language’s main page.

The whole site is intuitive and well thought-out, but there does seem to be one potential problem with the system. The eduFire software is very basic - it’s a text chat window sitting alongside live video (you could accomplish the same thing with any major chat program). After using eduFire to establish contact with a student, a tutor could easily run their lessons from outside of the site, forgoing any fee. eduFire’s CEO Jon Bischke recognizes this, but points out that these teachers will lose out on students because they will appear to have less experience on the site. He also says that the site has a number of improvements in the works for the Flash app, which should make it more appealing.

eduFire’s business model is simple: Let tutors name their price, and take small cut of the action. The site currently takes 15% of tutoring fees, which appear to range from around $10-$30 per hour, depending on the language. For now eduFire is concentrating only on the language space, but intends to branch out later this summer. The concept is solid, and will provide a great outlet for teachers looking to make a bit of extra cash.

eduFire has received $500k in angel funding, and is currently raising a Series A Round. There are a number of other competitors in this space, including Myngle which uses Skype instead of an integrated Flash app.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300160267/

The founder of Netvibes is moving on. Tariq Krim is stepping down as CEO of Netvibes to “spend less time day-to-day” at the company and work on a “new project,” he tells me. (More details on that project later). He will remain on the board of the company and as a non-executive strategic adviser. Current Netvibes COO Freddy Mini will take over the helm as CEO.

“My role was to transfer Netvibes from a personal start page into a widget platform,” says Krim. He feels that the technical foundation for that shift has been completed with the recent release Ginger, the latest version of its site. Krim also reveals that, in an attempt to take on Google Gadgets, “All the technology around our widget platform will be open source.” The APIs and tools will be available on Friday at Netvibes.org. And they will also work for turning widgets into mobile apps.

Netvibes pioneered the widget start page, but fighting against My Yahoo and iGoogle is a losing battle. (Competitor Pageflakes recently sold itself rather than continue to go it alone, for instance). In April, Netvibes showed a dip in unique visitors worldwide to 2.3 million. My Yahoo had 43.7 million, and iGoogle had 22.1 million, according to comScore.

Krim at least realized that he had to turn Netvibes into a broader widget platform. But trying to win the widget wars against Google and others is not going to be much easier.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300143059/

Walt Mossberg just finished interviewing Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker (my real time notes are here, see Peter Kafka’s notes as well).

The two key topics of the interview were the failed Microsoft merger, and Yahoo’s core focus as a company. And while Yang never actually said the words quoted in the title above, his tone and body language screamed “We’re Done.” He was resigned. Beleaguered, even.

Yang dutifully recited PR-supplied sound bites. He said things like “We didn’t walk away from the Microsoft deal. They did.” At one point he said “I like Google” (he still doesn’t realize that they’re Yahoo’s enemy, not Microsoft). He talked about the future, sometimes stringing together four or five unrelated statements about their how they are coming together as a team and focusing on the future. He talked about how outside perception of Yahoo is very different from what’s actually going on internally (although the execs I’ve spoken with say the outside perception is pretty much right on the money).

Yang was not prepared for perhaps the one question that every CEO should be ready to answer at all times: “What is the business of Yahoo?” He was all over the place. He said their core focus included “home page, mail, search, and mobile.” He also said “We can’t be all things to all people. We have become much more focused,” before taking about other areas of focus at Yahoo, including advertising, social networking and their new open strategy.

Decker stepped in and tried to distill their core message, repeating “we focus on homepage, search, mail and mobile” but then went on to talk extensively about advertising, including a new display advertising product that the company will launch in Q3 this year.

From where I sit, I saw no core focus and no clear product or corporate strategy. Yahoo has no idea what they want to do or who’s going to do it. I saw no charisma, excitement or leadership at all (things I’ve seen regularly from Yang in the past). I saw, simply, failure.

“I will never be a CEO again,” Yang said near the end of the interview. Based on what he’s going through, I can understand how he feels.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300131446/

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker were on stage at the D6 conference in Carlsbad this afternoon.

First questions from Walt Mossberg: “Where do you stand with the Microsoft negotiations?”

Yang’s answer: “Microsoft is no longer interested in buying the company. They want to talk about other things, and we’re listening.”

Yang says that Microsoft was very hostile during the negotiations, and that Yahoo was open to doing a deal from day one. “There needed to be the right circumstances” he said, referring to deal price, timing, regulatory issues and other terms. “I didn’t feel like we had a deal even if we could have agreed on price.”

On the rumors about how the deal broke apart: “It’s like when you break up with your girlfriend,” he says, “pretty quickly its he said/she said.”

Mossberg: Why would you want to outsource your search advertising to Google?”

Yang: “We feel very strongly about our ability to monetize search. There’s a value gap between us and the market leader.” He says the test with Google gave them an understanding of how effectively Google could monetize Yahoo’s inventory.

“I like Google” Yang said.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300093717/

Web measurement firm comScore is going mobile. The company is buying M:Metrics for $44.3 million plus 50,000 options of comScore stock. M:Metrics measures mobile Web usage, and will give comScore the ability to track mobile visitors, pageviews, and ads clicked. Its three major products are (from the press release):

MobiLensTM, a syndicated monthly online survey that captures overall mobile phone usage, including device information, data usage, media consumption and demographic characteristics of a representative sample of more than 40,000 mobile device users. MobiLens is available in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Spain, and Italy.

MeterDirectTM, the industry’s first on-device meter that passively measures the mobile Internet behavior and media consumption of more than 4,000 existing Smartphone panelists. The M:Metrics metering technology is compatible with more than 280 device models. MeterDirect is currently available in the U.S. and U.K.

M:AdTM, the first competitive tracking service for mobile advertising that continuously monitors clickable display advertising from a broad representative set of mobile Web destinations to reveal leading advertisers across a variety of market segments. M:Ad is currently available in the U.S. and U.K.

ComScore is a publicly traded company with $87 million in revenues last year. It expects the M:Metrics business to be profitable by the end of 2008 on an EBITDA basis. M:Metrics reveneus are forecasted to reach $11 to $12 million this year, and are expected to contribute $6.5 million to $7 million towards comScore’s revenues for the full year. Founders Will Hodgman and Seamus McAtee will join comScore.

M:Metrics, which is based in Seattle, was founded in 2004. It has raised $18 million from Prism Venture Partners, i-Hatch Ventures, and WPP.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/300079927/