Ajax Girl

I know this back end plumbing stuff is boring to most of you, but Gnip is worth the trouble to understand. The company, which helps ease the transportation of social content between services (like getting Twitter data to Plaxo, for example), took a new $3.5 million round of financing. Investors include Foundry Group, First Round Capital and SoftTech VC, and the company has raised a total of $4.6 million, all this year.

The company acts as a clearing house for social content, easing the load on content distributors like Digg, Twitter, Delicious and Six Apart. Content consumers like Plaxo and MyBloglog benefit from a single endpoint and a standardized way of accessing data. In short, it unclogs the plumbing.

TechCrunchIT spoke with the Gnip founders on video immediately after launch. In September they launched version 2.0 of the service, and discussed their business model.

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Juice, a Firefox browser sidebar developed by Linkool International, has launched to the public. The powerful plugin automatically culls information from around the web whenever you search for or highlight a term, making it a handy reference tool that I could quickly get used to. It also doubles as a media storage tool, allowing you to simply drag and drop videos and image files into the sidebar to save them for later.

Juice pulls from sources including Wikipedia, Google News, YouTube, and our own CrunchBase (through its API) to offer users a quick at-a-glance summary of many popular topics. The sidebar is very polished, allowing for in-line video playback and expandable text summaries, and the media storage function is intuitive.

At this point it seems that the plugin’s database is still fairly small, as many searches (even for such common terms as “Superman”) result in a notice that “Juice has learned a new keyword”. Within a few minutes these new terms are added to the database automatically, and the issue will probably be gone within a few weeks of the public beta.

Juice is the first application from Beijing-based Linkool Labs to integrate the company’s “intelligent discovery engine” which uses “natural language processing” and “a dictionary management system” to produce semantic results. It’s impossible to tell just how much processing is going on behind the scenes, but search results are generally accurate, though it’s possible to find some words that will “trick” the system.

There are a number of Firefox extensions that offer integrated reference lookup, including CoolPreviews, Briteclick, and others that can be found here.

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The U.S. Election isn’t until tomorrow, but doesn’t it already seems like Obama has won? That is certainly the impression you get if you look at any of the polls, state-by-state electoral maps, or prediction markets out there. Even the latest Fox News poll has Obama leading McCain by 50 percent to 43 percent.

My favorite prediction tool, and the one with the best record of getting elections right, is the Iowa Electronic Markets. In its winner-take-all market for the U.S. Presidential election, it is predicting that Obama has an 89 percent chance of winning the majority of votes (see graph above). NewsFutures, similarly puts Obama’s chances of winning at 90 percent, and Intrade has his stock trading at 90.6.

All the traditional telephone polls similarly show Obama in the lead, especially those that bother to call people on their cell phones. But you cannot really trust those polls. They are notoriously wrong. It is better to look at state-by-state breakdowns projected onto an electoral map. The New York Times, for instance, has Obama clearing at least 291 electoral votes to McCain’s 163 (he needs 270 to win):

The NYT also has a nice interactive graph that shows all the major poll results and how they’ve changed over time. Again, I trust markets over polls any day, and it is interesting to note that in another Iowa Electronic market predicting the share of the vote each candidate will get, it is predicting a closer race than even Fox. Right now, it has Obama winning 53 percent of the vote compared to 47 percent for McCain.

Remember, those numbers can literally change overnight. And the only poll that counts is the one taken in the election booth.

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Last week Google announced a new set of gadgets for Gmail Labs that offer integration with Docs and Google Calendar. But perhaps most exciting (and under-emphasized at the time) was the introduction of support for third party gadgets, giving users the chance to add features to Gmail beyond what Google offers.

One of the first developers to take advantage of the new feature is Remember The Milk (RTM), a popular To-Do list application that we reviewed back in 2005. The service allows users to access and input to-do items from a variety of locations, and offers its core service for free (you can pay $25 a year for support on extra mobile devices). While RTM offered support for Gmail before now, it was reliant on a Firefox extension, raising the barrier to entry and cutting out a large portion of the browser market.

The new Gmail gadget works across on all popular browsers and isn’t dependent on any plugins. Unfortunately adding the gadget isn’t exactly intuitive - you’ll first have to enable the “Add any gadget by URL” feature in Gmail Labs, and then manually enter the RTM gadget location (http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/gmail/rtm.xml). You can find the full instructions at the RTM blog here.

The Gmail blog post notes that this process isn’t very user-friendly yet, explaining that it is mostly for developer experimentation rather than widespread use. But it’s an exciting taste of things to come, and it looks like Google is going to be expanding developer access even further, allowing them to integrate their gadgets beyond the left nav-bar. Look for more Gmail addons to make the jump from plugin to native gadget in the near future.

Thanks to Orli Yakuel for the tip.

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Trying to push through their search advertising deal, Google and Yahoo have revised the terms of the deal to satisfy antitrust objections by the Department of Justice, reports the WSJ (article behind the pay wall). The main concessions are putting 25 percent cap on the search-related revenues that Yahoo can generate from the partnership and making it a two-year deal instead of a ten-year deal.

Putting a revenue cap on the deal goes a long way towards limiting the monopoly factor because Google will only be able to take a quarter of Yahoo’s search-advertising business instead of all of it. As Michael has wrote a couple weeks ago:

A cap means Yahoo can only rely on Google to a point, and if the cap is small enough then Yahoo will be forced to continue to invest in their own search business, so it removes a lot of the meat behind our objections.

The original deal was non-exclusive and was expected to bring in $800 million in additional revenues to Yahoo. There was also an escape clause in case of an antitrust lawsuit or if a minimum revenue threshold is not met. A 25 percent cap on search revenues would cut that $800 million in half.

But maybe this is just a stalling tactic until a new Presidential administration and new Justice Department officials come into office. Would the Google-Yahoo deal do better under an Obama or a McCain administration? Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s endorsement of Obama will not be forgotten—by either side.

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We are pleased to announce that we will hold a TechCrunch party that will close LeWeb conference next month in Paris. LeWeb is probably one of the most important web event in the industry and certainly the most important in Europe with more than 1500 participants coming from all over the world. TechCrunch has a been a media partner for a couple of years but this year we will do a little more and we’ll hold a special event december 10th at night.

We are expecting about 600 to 1000 participants (yes, even after 2 days of conference and a Myspace party..) and the party will be open to partcipants and non participants of the conference (all details will be announced soon). Music, open bar, quality mingling in an international crowd will be the agenda.

The party was announced a few days ago on Twitter and TechCrunch France and we have already 2 key partners for the event: SFR development and HotelaParis.com.

We have a few more sponsorship opportunities. If you are interested contact us at dan [at] techcrunch.com

Still need a ticket to LeWeb? TechCrunch readers get a 20% discount.

See you in Paris!

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Live video streaming seemed to be all the rage for a while, popularized by startups like Justin.tv, Ustream, Qik, Mogulus and Flixwagon.

Yahoo jumped on the hype wagon back in February 2008 by launching Y!Live, an ambitious effort put forward by internal incubator Yahoo! Brickhouse. Yahoo Live was supposed to tap into the troubled internet juggernaut’s vast online video audience by getting them to broadcast their lives in real-time.

Now Yahoo software engineer Keith Thornill has published a blog post announcing that Y!Live, which never really passed the idea stage, will effectively stop broadcasting December 3. Yahoo is hosting a townhall on Wednesday to wish the service farewell.

Live video streaming still presents an enormous opportunity considering the way people’s behavior on the web is changing, but it is of course extremely expensive and hard to scale. Serving the same video to thousands, let alone tens of thousands of people simultaneously generates higher bandwidth bills than serving them asynchronously like most video sharing sites do. YouTube, by far the most popular online video property on the web, is rumored to want to start experimenting with live video streaming some day, but so far we haven’t seen anything surface.

Perhaps the Yahoo from a year ago would have no problem continuing to test the waters and keeping the service alive a bit longer, but the way things are looking now they’ll be looking to cut costs in every possible way for a while.

It’s also quite telling for the service’s popularity that no one has cared to comment on the blog post yet. Also, at the time of this writing there are exactly 1,379 people watching 48 live channels.

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As the entry fee for smartphones drops lower and lower, the wallet friendly price point found with most feature phones (or, as some might say, “dumbphones”) is beginning to lose its luster. In a day when obtaining a smartphone requires little more than 50 bucks and a 2-year promise, what’s the point of going for anything less?

According to the “Mobile Market View” study released today by The Kelsey Group, 18.9% of mobile consumers in the United States are now toting smartphones, with 49.2% planning to pick one up within the next two years.

Mobile search activity is also up across the board. When they surveyed mobile consumers on how they’d been using their handsets, they found the following:

• Downloaded or looked at maps or directions: 17.6 percent, up from 10.8 percent in 2007
• Searched the Internet for products or services in their local area: 15.6 percent, up from 9.8 percent in 2007
• Searched the Internet for products or services outside their local area: 14.3 percent, up from 6.4 percent in 2007
• Obtained information about movies or other entertainment: 13.7 percent, up from 8.2 percent in 2007
• Connected with a social network, such as MySpace or Facebook: 9.6 percent, up from 3.4 percent in 2007

To state the obvious, it’s quite apparent that consumers are more ready than ever to embrace mobile devices into their daily lives. What isn’t as apparent, however, is the responsibility the mobile industry has to get their act together and make use of this. Unless they’re damn sure they can come up with something worthwhile, it’s time to adopt open and royalty-free platforms. Drop the horribly misguided efforts to create new, proprietary platforms which do nothing but increase segmentation and confuse users. With only 19% of US mobile users owning smartphones and nearly 50% looking to jump on board, we’re going to see a whole lot of new smartphone owners soon - so lets make it as easy as possible for them to enjoy it.

(Image via Jacob Bøtter)

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A Flickr user named Garrett Ryan Smith uploaded the 3 billionth photo to the site today. The last big milestone was 2 billion photos, a year ago.

They’re well behind Facebook, with 10 billion. And they’re falling further behind - a year ago Facebook had just 4.1 billion photos.

Still, it’s a staggering number of photos for a site that launched in 2004.

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