Ajax Girl

During the fourth session of TechCrunch 50, three companies came on-stage and discussed ways to improve advertising, while one company told those in attendance how to streamline email and make it easier to manage email overload. The session featured five panelists: Entrepreneur, Marc Andreessen; MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe; Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com; Entrepreneur Yossi Vardi; and Ash Patel, Yahoo’s executive vice president of the Audience division. Some of the panelists’ comments are mentioned below each company’s summary.

Burt

Burt’s (CB) Copybox is trying to be the “copywriter’s Photoshop.” In order to do that, Copybox attempts to make it easier to create online ads and tailor them to the user viewing them.

Copybox features a “canvas” in its service that lets users input the text in a particular advertisement. To the right of that canvas, the site features variables like “operating systems,” “MySpace,”, and “Weather,” which let the advertiser tailor the text in the canvas based on the user viewing the advertisement.

For example, advertisers can post something in the canvas that mentions Macs. After highlighting that word, users can then click a variable in the right and whenever a person accesses the site on a Windows machine, the mention of Macs will be replaced with a mention of Windows. In essence, the advertisements can be tailored based on who is browsing the site or what’s going on in the world.

Copybox believes that ads don’t talk to Web surfers because of the divide between copywriters and programmers. But with the help of Copybox, copywriters can perform all the programming needs with a simple word processing-like box and a drop-down menu featuring variables that will tailor ads based on the user.

Panelist thoughts

MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and the rest of the panelists believe Copybox has some potential, but would work best with smaller publishers instead of bigger ad agencies, which already have systems they like to use in place.

Yossi Vardi was quick to point out that Google’s code service, code.Google.com could prove troublesome to the company now that it’s easier for programmers and copywriters to work together.

Adgregate Markets

Adgregate Markets (CB) tries to connect the world of display advertising with e-commerce. The first in the space, Adgregate markets replaces display ads, which take users away from a publisher’s site and brings them to a third-party store, and lets users buy products featured in ads without moving away from the page.

Adgregate Markets’ product is a widget that runs as an ad on a publisher’s site. If a user views the ad widget and wants to buy the product it’s advertising, they need only to click the description button under the ad and click “add to cart” to buy it. From there, the user can either pay directly in the widget by inputting credit card information or keep buying products via ads elsewhere.

To ensure security, the widget is always secure during purchase. The company said that even though ads can be displayed on insecure sites, the buying process is secure.

The entire ad unit can be created in Adgregate Markets’ service and users can create widgets on-the-fly exactly to the spec of the required ad unit size on the publisher’s page. Once activated, it goes live on the site.

To increase the reach of ads, publishers can “grab” the widget and embed the code into their site. Publishers, advertisers, and Adgregate markets will share all the revenue.

Panelist comments

Not too much was said about Adgregate markets because each panelist agreed on the most important element of any startup: it’s a great idea that will make money and address a need in the market.

Chris DeWolfe at MySpace was quick to point out that Adgregate Markets’ idea could be used anywhere on the Web and has a strong business model in place that would attract publishers and advertisers, alike.

AdRocket

Trying to address what it believes is a problem in email newsletters, AdRocket (CB) tries to help email newsletter publishers better monetize their emails.

According to AdRocket, most email newsletter advertisements are poorly targeted and most users block those ads, so many times, no one sees any revenue from email newsletters.

To fix that, AdRocket aims at working with major newsletter providers like The New York Times and CNET and collect demographic data and keywords from newsletter subscribers. Once collected (it does so anonymously to alleviate privacy concerns), the keywords that are most likely to yield revenue and have ad units available are shown. From there, a score based on the number of ads and the revenue potential is determined and advertisers can input those ads into their newsletters to (hopefully) increase ad revenue.

Panelist Comments

Chris DeWolfe at MySpace and Marc Andreesen noted that there are some “deliverability” issues with AdRocket. How will the company make sure that newsletters from the companies it works with are actually getting to the users?

Mark Bennioff and Ash Patel noted that the size of the newsletter shouldn’t matter as much as AdRocket believes it does. Instead, the panelists believe the company should focus on working with smaller newsletter companies and worry more about larger newsletters as it grows.

OtherInbox

OtherInbox (CB) tries to solve the problem of email overload. According to the company, it believes that as more people sign up for newsletters, product updates, and countless other services that send emails, inboxes are getting inundated with extras that reduce efficiency.

To solve that problem, users can sign up for OtherInbox (it’s free) and create vanity email addresses for different services. So if you want to receive product announcements from Amazon via email, set up an OtherInbox account called “amazon@yourname.otherinbox.com” and only emails from Amazon will be sent to that address. The same can be done for any place you input email addresses.

When you open OtherInbox, it features folders from every site you signed up with the different emails in a left pane. Once you decide which you want to read, simply click on the email box and you can view all emails sent to that address.

But OtherInbox isn’t just reserved for stores or newsletters. The service lets you create email addresses for anything and can be used to filter your email.

Even better, OtherInbox will soon offer features that can collect shipping notices, receipts, and bill payment reminders, and collect date information from each. Once collected, it will add those dates to Google Calendar, iCal, or any other calendar app.

To block spam messages, OtherInbox uses a “block” button, which will then delete all the spam in a particular inbox and deactivate that address so you won’t get anymore spam.

OtherInbox is currently in private beta, but will be in public beta soon.

Panelist comments

After finishing, Other Inbox received a resounding applause from the crowd, which obviously appreciated the opportunity to filter email into a variety of inboxes.

The panel was dominated by a spat between the company’s creator and Yahoo executive vice president Ash Patel, who claimed similar functionality is already available in Yahoo Mail. OtherInbox’s founder disagreed and said that his service does much more than what’s already found in Yahoo’s offering.

The rest of the panel concurred that it was a good idea and Mark Bennioff said that he would use it for trips to Los Angeles and elsewhere to manage his email and itinerary.

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TechCrunch50’s third session introduced four companies related to enterprise. The judges for this panel were: Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Ash Patel, and Yossi Vardi. You can see our coverage of the first panel here and the second panel here. A sampling of the judges’ comments follows the company summaries.

FairSoftware
FairSoftware (CB info) - FairSoftware aims to simplify the hassles associated with creating a company by eliminating nearly all of the paperwork. Instead of following the traditional route of incorporation, founders agree to a special contract created by Fairsoftware which gives them far more freedom than they’d normally have.

Setup is easy: founders simply enter their company name, draft a brief description, and allocate how much of the company each founder owns. The software also offers employee management tools, allowing them to set how often they’d like to be paid, with all income directed into a PayPal account.

Under Fairsoftware’s contract (which includes a Software Bill of Rights) , these founders (and eventually other employees) are allotted “virtual shares”, which are not subject to the same legal restrictions as normal stock. For example, a company could give this virtual stock to a customer who fixed a bug - something that cannot be done with regular stock.

Yammer

Yammer (CB info) - Yammer bears a very strong resemblance to Twitter, and mimics much of its functionality. However the service is geared towards businesses, allowing coworkers to broadcast messages to each other in a secure environment. At launch, the site is adopting a model similar to Facebook, requiring users to register with a work email address in order to join their company’s network. Companies can ensure further security by restricting access to IP ranges or set password policies.

You can read more about Yammer in our full post on the company here.

Blueprint
(By Connective Logic)
BluePrint (CB info) - BluePrint aims to help facilitate programming for multi-core processors, which is one of the most difficult (and important) problems in the development community.

Multi-core processors allow developers to complete processing tasks more quickly than a single core processor. Recently most computers are shipping with more than one core, but developers oftentimes fail to utilize the cores to their maximum capabilities.BluePrint says that developers can use their tools to convert their standard single processor programs with a minimum amount of coding changes.

During their presentation, BluePrint’s founders showed off a large scale terrorist monitoring program in London that tracked vehicle license plates. Using a single core, the processor was unable to keep up with the data during a peak demand period. But using BluePrint’s multicore scaling, the application was able to utilize CPU cycles on remote computers to complete the tasks.

OpenTrace
(By Rinen)
OpenTrace (CB info) - OpenTrace tries to measure the environmental impact of any product by analyzing the footprints of the components that are involved in its creation For example, a baker could trace the impact of a loaf of bread by tracing the environmental cost of the raw ingredients and their costs of transportation. Other products named included SD cards or a 747 airplane.

To analyze a product, users can use their computer to scan a barcode. OpenTrace will present the data as a visual map linking the various ingredients to their factories, or as a standard sortable list.

By making these environmental footprints standardized and public, OpenTrace thinks it can put pressure on manufacturers to stay green, while also giving them a good marketing tool if they are greener than their competitors.

Benioff:
Fairsoftware: Did you see this feature, “remove founder, and the trash can? That is the VC feature.

I thought the most powerful part is the allocation of shares. Institutionalizing an IR department rapidly is difficult, I didn’t see self-service. I would call it FairShares instead of Fair Software. I would go more narrow. If you built it on our platform, I would sell it to our customers because I think they want it. I think it I great.

Yammer: First of all I really like this company the best. I might use Facebook for the identity model, to kick it off, instead of creating a new one.

The name is not very corporate, it reminded me of what I’m having for Thanksgiving. Maybe you could use a Yam for a logo.

Blueprint: I renamed itScale on Demand.multicore is one of the huge challenges. You are going to encumber traditional software development tool with traditional software development model will be an encumbrance going forward.

Benioff, addresses the Japanese company in Japanese. I think this whole concept of food traceability is critical. I’d partner with somebody like FairTrade to … united marketing, here is a picture of the guy who picked the chocolate. An easier consumer interface. I am on my iPhone, I see the .. of my phone. A killer app for the next decade.

Yossi Vardi: I believe this is a very efficient way for employees to [keep tabs]on bosses.

Blueprint, the whole thing went over my head. I think that Arrington should not bring people who do not have a good American accent to the stage.

Benioff in order to make me look bad talked to them in Japanese. Well,. I also know Japanese {speaks Hebrew]

Marc Andreessen:
-Blueprint is a good idea, and this is a big problem, but is it solving the easy part or the hard part of this problem?

More notes from the panel later.

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In a long-ranging discussion today at TechCrunch50, investor Peter Thiel (PayPal, Facebook, Slide) gave his thoughts on what is the best predictor of startup success.  At the Founder’s Fund, one of the most important factors he likes to look at before deciding to invest in a startup is how much the CEO is paying himself. (This is also a factor that one of his investments, YouNoodle, looks at to value private startups). Says Thiel:

The lower the CEO salary, the more likely it is to succeed.

The CEO’s salary sets a cap for everyone else.  If it is set at a high level, you end up burning a whole lot more money. It aligns his interest with the equity holders.  But [beyond that], it goes to whether the mission of the company is to build something new or just collect paychecks.

In practice we have found that if you only ask one question, ask that.

In Startupland, everybody should be working towards the same goal: that big juicy exit. That’s the only payday any CEO should be worried about (even though more than half of them will never get it).

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We’re in the middle of a wider economic downturn, there are no IPOs, funding is getting thin, but are the Angels unhappy? It looks like not. The downturn has sorted out the wheat from the chaff, the bar has been raised and they feel well-placed against even some of the biggest VC funds. Lucky, then, that working with startups remains a passion for these guys. Jason Calacanis chaired the panel.

Panellists:
Ron Conway, Angel Investor
Yossi Vardi, Investor and Entrepreneur
David Kidder, Founder and CEO, Clickable
Chris Sacca, Investor and Company Advisor
Matt Coffin, Investor and Entrepreneur

Jason started off by asking how they operate.

Ron Conway: I don’t meet lots of companies every week as the bar of quality is so high now. We do a lot of screening of executive summaries. Then there is a phone call, and after that then a meeting. Out biggest investments to date included Google, AskJeeves, PayPal, BrightMail and maybe Facebook - someday!

David Kidder: I raised Angel investment a few times. Angel then moving on to venture. We thought we were going to go Angel the wne venture. We were a TechCrunch 40 company and that influenced our coverage and funds that followed us.

Chris Sacca: I had involvement in Blogger and Twitter. I guess I do three things. I’m an angel with 17 portfolio companies and each one I take a formal advisory role. I also take a role in helping compaies reach a transcation. Other times I spend on working with a multibillion dollar hedge fund buying wireless spectrum etc.

Matt Coffin: I’m a Mahalo investor. I invested in a number of companies in LA like Docstock, Rubicon Project, Demand Media. Market Probability, Inadco as well as a few others.

Yossi Vardi: I’ve been an investor for a while - most famously in ICQ. I didn’t invest in Mahalo as Jason wasn’t convincing! [Joke]

Jason: Ah, but you you wanted to invest in WebLogs Inc.

Yossi: But it’s also didn’t make any sense!

Jason: So, how do startups get to you. How do they get 15 mins to pitch you?

Yossi: I don’t think pitching makes any sense if it’s long. The best way is a good reference from someone I already invested in. Someone I trust. Yes they have to make sense and project enthusiasm and honesty. I am not interested in the business model. I find that the more attractive the model, higher your losses at the end of the day!

Matt: I get to meet startups through referrals from people I trust. Ofen I see something interesting and I have actively reached out to people. You are looking for a screening process for quality referrals. Periodically I see something on a blog. But I have found a number where you think they have all they need, when actually you speak to them and they don’t. If you can bring advice not just capital, that’s also an opportunity.

Jason: How involved can you be?

Chris - I can’t help but be involved in the company. I would be a charlatan if I took stock in companies I can’t actually be helpful in. Maybe they need help on being introduced to an acquirer or something. That’s the way I like to work.

Jason: What do you think the strength of an Angel investor is? Is it possible to annoy a startup in your portfolio or meddle too much?

Chris: That’s where local comes in. I might go and sit with teams over a Saturday and work on on a start page for hours over beers. 75% of my portfolio is within a skateboard from my house in the city.

Matt: The local nature of it is really so critical. Especially when it comes to hiring when you need to get people in a meeting, say.

Ron: A good Angel will be one that every VC will talk to. They build the management team with their rolladex. When the company has traction you get some significant business development done. And also with liquidity - M&A is right now the most viable exit so introducing companies to potential buyers is always at the end of the assembly line.

Yossi: I know when I am annoying when I open my mouth!

Matt: I always say to entrepreneurs it’s your company and you have to make the decsions.

David: Whether as a consortia or individuals you get different things. No one person can solve all problems.

Chris: What’s changed is that it’s not MBAs pitching but actual hackers pitching companies now. I worked on an acquisiton with Google recently where the hackers were good at coding but couldn’t do the acquisition and that’s where I came in.

David: Valuations: The first thing I do is create a “forcing factor” in the deal. You can do self funding to a beta. So for example I worked with Fred Wilson at Union Square recently for instance. We creatied a forcing factor which is a solid beta and THEN I talked to Fred and said all people are flexible, but we believe that we’re stronger with you. It was a healthy balance. We try to drive accountability so that everyone is contributing something.

Jason: So you think one of the best approcahes to VCs it so create scarcity?

David: If you come without a track record you are going to need something which will drive the deal. It’s a different idealogy for an Angel than it is for a VC.

David: Generally a lot of good companies and there will always be one you miss.

Ron: Marc Benioff always reminds me that I turned down Salesforce.

David: As an investor you want to be with a team who has purpose and momentum. If they expect you to solve a problem, it’s not realistic.

Yossi: I’m 40 years in early stage investments. I came to a realisation that I won’t be involved in most of the great deals. It’s good enough to be in a number of good deals. It’s a portfolio play. You can’t invest in one or two companies - it’s totally random. It’s too hard to say. If you know what is going to happen then it’s not high risk angel investing. So you have to go for a number - it’s like they say, love is blind and its the same with angel. It’s blind and you don’t do rationality. Angels should be able to feel… you should comfort yourself for missing big stuff. If you develop discipline and know the stats and the stages and the marks when a company is moving THEN you can take a rational decision.

Ron: I look for sectors: Video gaming, search, social networks, UGC, cloud computing - these are billion dollar sectors - so you try to find the best companies in those sectors and interviews and pick the top 5 out of the top ten.

Yossi: We take a portfolio because its not about being scientific. it’s like they say - spray and pray!

Jason: Guys, you have made so much money that you don’t need to work for the rest of your life - yet you work very hard. What is your motivation?

Ron: It’s interesting! Meeting entrepreneurs who are interesting is interesting. They are the future of technology. Take Larry and Sergey - when I talked to them I was looking into a crystal ball. The future of search - that’s interesting.

Chris: It’s amazing to see how far $25-50,000 can go now. When I get pitched now it’s with a live URL and a view to raise 100k . I work with wireless companies looking to get $150-200,000 just to prototype. There is still lots of meetings and politics. But going back to startups coding in a back bedroom, it feels amazing.

Matt: I also do it for this. But also I had to raise money in the dotcom wipeout after 2001. That was the worst experience of my life. I had an ache in my chest every day. So having had the luck of a big exit I get a lot of satisfaction funding entrepreneurs. I want to help them make it and be part of that.

Yossi: I guess the reason I do it is I that have a Jewish mother. And all my childhood she said I was an idiot and my cousins were smarter as they weren’t contaminated with my father’s non-jewishgenes. So every day I am trying to prove this to her that I am not dumb. But I will have to do it for a very long time as she’s now dead.

Jason: How do you put a valuation on $100,000 investment?

Chris: I probably take an unusual approach. I look at the personal inventory of the entrepreneur. They are often just reacting to term sheets. So I ask them to say what “success” is for them. Then I wrap numbers around it. We put price tags on the individuals involved - will they move the needle by 900k, say? There are now some really big VC funds out there who take a different approach. They will look for something that will either moving the needle for their fund with a $30bn exit, or they won’t do anything at all.

David: I look at what is the right symmetrical outcome. So I put a lot of pressure on the terms not the valuation. You need to work hard and earn the right to get across the finish line. Always work for something clean and simple. If you raised a big A or Angel round and then can’t perform into the price and need more money then people will get hurt in their credibility. So in a recent deal we got high offers but we went for a less expensive deal. We took less money as we knew we could keep the terms intact.

Chris - The B round is where you lose your board and often that is hard. Sometimes you have to realise you will hand the reins over to another guy who has carte blanche.

Jason: What are you looking for in the person of the entrepreneur?

Yossi: Since I am doing very early investment I like to be involved where they work on the proof of concept. I am looking for agreement on valuation. I look for a few things. They have to be top talent. I am not interested in great or good, but top. They also have to be very nice people. Because many investments are not working at the early stage. I always tell my wife that if it fails then at least its a scholarship for a nice guy - I don’t want to give that to a jerk. They also have to be focused. They have to be in the space I like which is consumer facing internet. If they are fulfilling these criteria then there is a good chance I will invest. What they are going to do is less important. Business plans are a great section in the science fiction genre. They are made for the kind of people who like sausages and don’t know how they are made. I mean, how do you do due diligence on something that is inside someone’s mind?

Ron: I want it to be enjoyable in the ups and downs. I look for flexibility and the ability to admit that some ideas aren’t getting traction. You pick a number and get going - $3-5 million. I look for passion and a core intellectual property that comes with the company - that’s often an insurance policy.

Matt: I look for a really good listener in entrepreneurs. Someone who is willing to listen. I would combine that with somoene who is not BS-ing me. If I ask about competition and they’re general comment is we don’t have any competition….. That is annoying.

Chris - If I find out a startup doesn’t know their own space that bums me out. The personal traits are important. I don’t have the energy for assholes any more. I look for people who have studied or worked abroad. And also for people who play team sports - that reflects a healthy individual. I also really only like to work with people who have at one time worked in really shitty jobs. That gives you an amazing perspective on the human condition. And a certain vulnerability - we are lucky to live in a place [Silicon Valley] where you can say you have failed with no shame. That’s an important part of it. Most people who have failed don’t have that characteristic.

Q&A with audience

What does the panel think of colder callers?

Chris: It’s an inconvenience and an imposition. Never put phone calls on business. I can’t archive or search phone calls. Email does all this. So go for well crafted emails. The quality is high but there is a lot of noise out there noe so the email needs to be good now.

Jason: What makes the best email?

Ron: One paragraph pitch and a one page executive sumarry attached. And no NDA’s or confidentiality agreements.

Chris: You need to tell me why your idea solves a problem, why it will work and on what timeline. No NDA.

Yossi: Write something convincing about your background.

David: You need to understand the portfolio of the firm you are talking to. Find a person close to the angel. The strength of your network is in the edge, so use that.

Q: What will be the impact of the downturn in the economy on investing?

Yossi: It’s beginning to remind me of 2001-2004. The money is getting scarce and the industry is afraid to take decisions. This is the best time for angels to invest. We van invest at the top of the deal flow. We don’t have the pressure to release money or show performance like a VC fund. You can use sober opinion. It will be more difficult to raise money now, but the opportunities are still there. There is still a desire to conquer the world.

Ron: I invest in Silicon Valley companies. In 2001-2004 there was a nuclear winter for deal flow dried up almost 100%. Lots of people going back to business school. I haven’t seen that to date. The environment has not changed at all. Innovation in SV is alive and thriving and the deal flow is wide open. It won’t be as bad as the Winter.

David: The market is much less patient now, so if you are raising money, get to it quickly. There are many satellites but few planets. Make sure your business has a lot of planet in it. You may go sideways for years. Locking talent in a bad company that won’t exit is a bad idea. Worse than going bankrupt is nothing happens. We might see that happen in this period.

Chris: The cost of building something keeps coming down. Opportunity cost is not the biggest issue. Now it’s just about starting coding. We have seen the departure of East Coast money which came in to try and make a quick buck. The VCs that are here, with big funds, they have to continue to deploy money. So the macro argument is good but they have to keep flushing money out. There will still be deals that don’t make sense as VCs try to deploy funds.

Jason: Let’s have a show if hands, how many Angels here? Ok, there are lots of angels in the audience.

Question - What about if your startup is not in Silicon Valley?

Ron: If it’s a company I like I will ask the company to move closer to me. If you are tied to locality there are angels all over. There’s also incubators like Y-Combinator or TechStars. You can go to them and they will give you “lift-off” funding and mentoring.

Jason: Liftoff? Is that a new Term? 15-25k to get a product out? I think If you are serious you need to be in a major market. Your’e going to need to be near the investor.

Ron: SV has the entire infrastructure - PR, lawyers, conferences, SEOs. It’s not just the Angels it’s the entire infrastructure that’s impossible to produce elsewhere. Other places don’t have the depth or the amount of choice.

Yossi: Ron has split the world into two: Silicon Valley and all the rest!!

David: You need institutions, talent, rich people and nerds!

Yossi: When was the last time you were in Israel?

Matt: Majority recent - LA - There is core structure in Silicon Valley but in other markets there’s talent and rich peple in NYC and LA and crativity , but outside top 5 markets you will struggle as there is too many

Ron: I have a network of Silicon Valley VCs. Depending on what the company does and how much they are raising we will create a top 10 list. We also try for the highest VC first. Then we target the best parner in the firm who can add the most value.

Chris: The VC investment community - as a result of the current fund sizes they have a conflict of interest. So I keep entrepreneurs out of the traditional VCs. They are managing money for fees. I really try and avoid pushing startups to traditional funds. It creates a situation where you have a 20/80 split and no-one can buy you.

David: We went with people who were local who were good coaches for our company. A board member joining who has experience, has operational experience, is important. The VC needs to be comfortable with the ups and downs of the startup.

Ron: As a final word - SV loves helping the whole country. Google has 2,000 peole in New York!

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The big portals redesign their home pages every year or so, and AOL is no exception - a little over a year ago they were roundly criticized for copying much of the look and feel of Yahoo.com .

But the new trend is to retain user loyalty by adding third party content to these sites, which previously only linked off network for advertisements. Yahoo did this with the launch of Buzz earlier this year.

If these screen shots are real and AOL intends to push them live, this is an even more radical departure from the home-grown-content-only days. The top image clearly shows user-created bookmark links on the top left, links to third party email services Yahoo Mail, GMail and Hotmail, and links to outside social networks Facebook and MySpace.

And the bottom image looks to have a RSS reader, allowing users to pull in content from virtually and third party news site.

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Not all countries are created equal when it comes to social networking, at least in terms of how valuable each user is to advertisers. In an onstage interview with Michael Arrington at TC50, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe confirmed this:

Our international strategy is different than our competitors. We look at advertising dollars, and 95% of all advertising revenues come form 9 countries.

In those countries, we have 30% more unique users than our closest competitor in those 9 countries. So that is really our strategy.

He didn’t name all nine countries, but they probably include the U.S., Japan, the UK, Germany, France, and Canada

MySpace is also embracing Google Gears beyond just messaging. DeWolfe announced a new Google Gears project in the works that will let members take their profiles offline. Currently, MySpace uses Google Gears to power its messaging application. A few minutes ago, DeWolfe explained on stage:

In terms of Google Gears, we are mostly using it with messaging. We are allowing you to take it down to your hard drive. Our next project with Google Gears is to do that with profiles. You will be able to archive it in a timeline, or create a scrapbook of all your profiles.

Something tells me we’ll be seeing more Google Gears projects coming out of MySpace.

Other topics covered in the 15-minute interview:

—On MySpace Music, which may be launching as early as next week (DeWolfe would only confirm that it will launch “this month”), Arrington notes that the CEO search for MySpace Music is taking longer than expected. He asked DeWolfe, “Are you prepared to launch without a CEO?”

DeWolfe responded that he and MySpace COO Amit Kapur are currently managing the business, which has been under development for the past four years and has 70 employees. “We didn’t get a placement firm until a few weeks ago,” noted DeWolfe. “We are launching no matter what this month.”

—On his co-founder Lord Flathead’s hacker past, he and Arrington had the following back and forth:

DeWolfe:If you read it on TechCrunch, it must be true. I am not going to speak for Tom, but he has a lot more technical ability than people give him credit for.

Arrington: Was he a hacker in the 1980s?

DeWolfe: He was a technical guy

—On whether DeWolfe is dating Paris Hilton, DeWolfe parried, “I think the audience is more interested in your personal life than mine.”

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TechCrunch50’s second session introduced four companies related to breaking news and online trends. The judges for this panel were: Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube; Marrissa Mayer, VP product and search; Google; Ron Conway, prolific Angel investor; Dan Farber, Cnet, Editor in chief. You can see our coverage of the first panel here. A sampling of the judges’ comments follows the company summaries.

Dotspots
Dotspots (CB) - Dotspots is an annotation platform that allows users to add text or video comments to any piece of text on the web. Dotspots searches through millions of online news articles, indexing paragraphs of text and using an algorithm to determine when certain passages appear multiple times across different sites.

User comments are presented in each post as unintrusive (but readily visible) bubbles, which expand to reveal the text or video that has been added. Because the site has indexed content across the web, it can append these comments to any article reprints, such as an AP article that has been syndicated across thousands of publications.

To use Dotspots, users can either use a browser plugin/extension, or websites can include it for all users by adding a small snippit of code. The company says that companies have an incentive to include the sidebar, as it makes advertising on their webpages more visible.

Angstro

Angstro (CB) - A newspaper for people in your professional network. The site skims through content across blogs, news sites, and a number of other sources to look for material that is related to the people you know and work with. The site can use existing accounts on social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn to establish which contacts you’re most familiar with and presents content accordingly.

Because there are often many people with the same name, Angstro uses an algorithm to associate certain keyword with each individual. When similar keywords are present in a post or article, the site can associate it with the correct person. Angstro’s feed is generated with the most recent and relevant stories appearing at the top, with the most attention given to stories about you.

While some might speculate that Angstro will only appeal to users from Silicon Valley with a strong web presence, Angstro maintains that personal connections are important throughout all professional fields.

LiveHit

LiveHit - (CB) - An entertainment site that tries to present users with media that is the most popular at any given moment. LiveHit is geared towards the social networking audience, with categories that include entertainment, sports, shopping, and general information. The site monitors how many people are interacting with a piece of content, and presents the most popular links as a stack of clickable snapshots.

LiveHit says that third party sites have trouble keeping their programming up date, perhaps updating once a day if they’re lucky. Conversely, LiveHit updates its content every 2-5 minutes to make sure that viewers always have something fresh to look at.

It looks like LiveHit is aiming to partner with large content providers like MTV, which may not be able to highlight new videos as soon as they start becoming popular. The site is launching today in a public alpha.

StockMood

StockMood (CB) - StockMood uses artificial intelligence to analyze current news articles to determine if a company is receiving good or bad press, and how that in turn affects the company’s stock price. The number of positive and negative articles are plotted on graphs alongside corresponding stock price adjustments. Among the metrics measured is the company’s “Mood”, which indicates how likely the public is to ignore bad news while still responding to positive news.

Besides the graphs, customers can also choose to receive notifications whenever StockMood detects a shift in a company’s public perception. The company’s monetization plans are uncertain, but it is considering offering subscription plans for this sort of service

While seasoned investors will probably resist switching away from their tried-and-true data sources, the site could have a strong appeal to more casual investors. Most investors have an intrinsic understanding that a company’s public perception in the news is correlated to its stock price, and StockMood helps them quantify these trends.

Session 2 Memes Panel Q&A

Marissa Mayer
Dotspots - I loved it. When we launched Chrome, it was clear that given what’s possible having more ratings and reviews are done differently on every site, so a general tool would be very powerful. It’s a really beautiful idea.

With Angstro - As we know from Google alerts, following people you know is big. An issue is the business model - would it be subscriptions or advertising driven?

Live Hit? There is a design and user experience issue. I usually break these things down as push versus pull. In general social networks are passive - people want push. I can’t tell how good the maps of these sites are - there seems like too much hunting and pecking - it’s hard for the user to navigate. How to make it more self evident, without so much work for the user.

StockMood - I thought it was clever - haven’t seen an analysis versus articles site before. A concern is whether it would be too sophisticated for lay people. And conversely, high end investors often have a personal way to analyse stock so getting them to adopt a new model is an issue. I liked that you all have a real technoligy which holds it all together.

DotSpots - Great idea - but where is the business model?

Dotspot repsonded: Out model is first ubiquity - come to the orchard in spring time! Ubiquity is key if we hit critical mass. We solved it with Shopzilla, we can do it again.

Dan Farber
Says that Google will give Dotspots the ubiquity it needs to hit critical mass…
StockMood - Thinks that it will appeal to users with large portfolios
LiveHit - Optimization of finding content is a big market
Angstro - It seems like something LinkedIn could use. Instead of being an island of information, could do this.. since it is already a focused business network.

Ron Conway

How are you going to monetise and commercialise the site? I thought Angstro and StockMood for consumers were very interesting. The variables that produce the ratings that you give… for commercial acceptance there need to be credibility for the consumer. What you lack in monestisatoin you have significant intellectua property.

StockMood responds:With the business model, there are lots of way to monetise. Our CEO is a trading systems guy and you can bet he would make trading systemns use this information. The lowest hanging fruit is subsciption alerts which help people to make money. Especially in the reasoning and AI - the underlying the mood judgements. We wrestled with this a bit becuase we can let the user drill down quite far to the formulas. How big percentage of market will want this is hard to say. There may be 2 diff categories of users.

Chad Hurley

DotSpot seems like a great consumer play and you are not just a destination but something that travels across the web. Angstro has an an interesting presentation of a newspaper like site - but the LinkedIn Comparison may provide more value. LiveHit - The Colours are less important than the product just working. What you’re working on will be more important for the future and you have to figure out ways to serve content. StockMood - I though that this was interesting and different in presenting information. I liked the simple ratings and moods system.

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David Sacks, the founder of genealogy site Geni, just launched a new company called Yammer on stage at TechCrunch50. Yammer is an enterprise version of Twitter. If Twitter asks: “What Are You Doing?”, Yammer asks: “What Are You Working On?” Engineers at Geni created Yammer internally for the company’s own purposes, but Sacks liked it so much he decided to spin it off as its own company. He explains:

The purpose is to allow co-workers to share status updates. You post updates on what you are working on. You can post news, links, ask questions, and get answers for people in your company.

You can see most the most prolific people and the most followed people. It is a good way to discover who is the most influential in your company.

It is also possible to follow specific people or topics (as defined by tags). Conversations can be viewed in threaded mode, like FriendFeed. By keeping up with Yammer, employees can see what everyone else in the company is talking about over the past 24 hours, week, or month.

This is a private Twitter only for employees of a specific company. Just like Facebook in the early days, which required a university e-mail address to join, Yammer requires a corporate email address to join.

Unlike Twitter, Yammer actually has a business model. It is free to use for employees, but if a company wants to claim their network and get administrative tools to remove messages and users, set password policies, or set IP ranges for who can use it.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, one of the judges of the panel on which Yammer launched, commented:

I really like this company the best.

The name is not very corporate. It reminded me of what I’m having for Thanksgiving. Maybe you could use a Yam for a logo.

The service is now live. And the company is also has a desktop AIR app, an iPhone app, and a Blackberry app.

Other Coverage

• Yammer: A “Twitter for the enterprise”
  Source: Webware

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HBO on Monday announced that it will try to use the Web in a slightly different way than its colleagues at NBC and Fox have used it with Hulu: it will launch its own Web video series called “Hooking Up.”

Jessica Rose of “lonelygirl15″ fame will star in the new show and will be accompanied by video bloggers, sxePhil and KevJumba. The 10-part show will start airing on October 1 and will be offered on its own site, Hookingupshow.com, as well as MySpaceTV, and YouTube.

Ironically, HBO said it will not monetize the show during the first year. Instead, it will let users watch the show during the first year and try selling advertising if the show continues for another season.

More importantly, “Hooking Up” is just the first major announcement HBO has made with its HBOlab brand, which aims at expanding online programming and establishing the company a foothold online. But the question remains: can TV networks establish the same basic business model online? Hulu’s success suggests it’s easier to place TV content online instead of creating original content.

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Here at TechCrunch 50, there are a slew of interesting companies worth writing about on-stage. But I came across one in the Demo Pit that’s just as noteworthy.

Called KallOut, the service allows you to search the Web from a Word doc or email without minimizing the screen and going to the Web.  It replaces that with a couple clicks of a mouse. According to the company, its research shows that users can search the Web up to ten times faster by using KallOut. I’m not sure it’ll be that fast, but it’ll definitely improve efficiency.

After installing KallOut, you can click on a small KallOut box over every supported term (there are 100 million of them) contained in documents, email, or websites. (The boxes are small, and not too distracting).   By clicking that box, a pop-up is displayed and shows the best search terms for YouTube, Wikipedia, Google, IMDb, and more. If you want to view one of those links, KallOut displays a small window bringing you to the site, while still letting you work in the document or online. It’s not too useful when you’re in your browser, but KallOut’s pop-up box could be extremely useful when you’re working in a Word document and you don’t want to keep switching between windows to input a search term into Google.

KallOut can search a slew of sites, including Twitter, The New York Times, and those mentioned above, and should offer more support for other services soon.

I didn’t have the chance to use KallOut just yet, but if it works as advertised, the service may hold promise for those that spend too much time switching back and forth between Word and Firefox.

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