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Citysearch is finally coming around to replacing its creaking site design with something a little more contemporary. Today, it is launching in a major rethink of its entire site in beta that drills deeper into neighborhoods, uses Facebook Connect as an optional identity system, and lets users vote reviews up and down. The beta will quickly become the default Citysearch experience. During a demo at IAC headquarters yesterday, Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti told me:

We’ve been working on it for 10 months and built everything from ground up. In Q1 we will be turning off every system that operates Citysearch today, and running everything in the new environment.

Citysearch’s engineers stripped out the decade-old proprietary code that runs Citysearch and replaced it with open-source code. By replacing what’s under the hood, they were freed up to make some major improvements that are immediately apparent. The main changes are:

1. Hyper-local content. Citysearch is currently organized by city, so no matter what neighborhood you are looking at you get the same city guide. With the beta, Citysearch has mapped each city by neighborhood and placed each restaurant, bar, hotel, theater, or other local business in a specific neighborhood. So now when you are looking for things to do in a given neighborhood, Citysearch can dynamically create a neighborhood guide complete with restaurants, shops, and other businesses. With this one change, Citysearch is going from 140 cities to 75,000 neighborhoods by the end of the year.

2. Hyper-social content (Facebook Connect). This is one of the biggest changes. Citysearch has only 4 million registered users, but it will now adopt Facebook Connect as an optional identity system. That means anytime someone wants to submit a review or rating who isn’t already a registered Citysearch user will be able to simply type in their Facebook username and password. Any review or rating can then appear on your in Facebook feed, just like with the old Beacon program, except with Facebook Connect it’s all opt-in. (Citysearch was an original Beacon partner, but it shut that down long ago). “Friends love to talk to other friends about local businesses,” notes Herratti.

Even better, anytime you see reviews for a particular restaurant or business,reviews from your Facebook friends will show up first. We were wondering when Facebook Connect partners would start announcing their implementations.

3. Rebalancing the power between reviewers, merchants, and editors. Instead of highlighting Citysearch’s editorial voice, the design has been tweaked so that underneath each entry thereare now three columns representing the voice of the business owner, the Citysearch editor, and the user reviewers. Citysearch reviews have become so crucial for many restaurants and bars that they’ve also become suspect in that many businesses try to game the system. Herrati says:

We are looking to restore the balance of content in the local space. By that I mean we feel UGC has been so powerful in this arena, but it also comes with a bag of issues.

So not only do business owners now have their own more prominent column to promote their business, but the reviews are now voted up or down so that the community can self-moderate the most obviously abusive comments.

4. A better mobile experience Finally, since everything has been remapped by neighborhood, Citysearch is well positioned for mobile apps. But Citysearch is also working hard to optimize the experience for mobile browsers. It is using the geo-location API in Google Gears to surface nearby results for anyone using a phone running Windows Mobile 5 or higher. For everyone else, it remembers the last destination you specified by typing into your phone. t is also working on specific apps for phones with GPS chips. An iPhone app will come later this quarter, and Android and Blackberry apps are also in the works.

Overall, Citysearch is taking some big steps in the right direction. Facebook Connect is going to be huge for the site. With the turn of a switch, it now has social features it would have been nearly impossible to build on its own. Who wantsto become someone else’s friend on Citysearch? But if you can find your existing friends there, that is one more reason to use it.

In practice, it still has a ways to go in terms of bringing up the best results at the neighborhood level. At least that was the case for my neighborhood in Brooklyn. The top result for dining brought up a restaurant that went out of business a long time ago. Too bad you can’t vote search results up and down.

In terms of Citysearch’s business, though, the hyperlocal results will really help with its local search business. The one part of the new Cityseearch that is not open-source is Citysearch Pay, its pay-for-performance ad engine that turns up sponsored results on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level. In teh future, it will introduce “event variable price per lead.” Basically, that means businesses will be able to bid on how much they are willing to pay for different types of leads. Viewing a geo-proximate ad on a mobile phone could be one type of lead, texting an address to a friend could be another, as could playing a video profile of a business or making a reservation.

And these types of ads would not be limited to its own site. Citysearch also operates an ad network for partner sites looking to bring more local content. Herrati explains:

Between a quarter and at third of revenues comes from the ad network. If you look at impressions and uniques, it crushes our network.

The ad network’s reach crushes it by ten to one. According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques). By doing abetter job mapping all of its data on local businesses, Citysearch should be able to boost the relevance of its search results and therefore how much it gets paid for them. Maybe Barry Diller should start breaking out results for Citysearch now that IAC is a smaller entity.

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Earlier this year we watched as Redlasso, a very popular video service that allowed bloggers to clip portions of television content, got beaten into submission (at least temporarily) by a flurry of lawsuits. The company’s platform gave bloggers access to content spanning popular channels including CNN and ESPN almost immediately after it aired, and was a favorite across blogs like The Huffington Post and others. Unfortunately, Redlasso didn’t secure any rights to the content it was distributing, and it wasn’t long before the networks started to crack down. 1Cast, a new startup launching today in private beta, is looking to fill the void left by Red Lasso by offering similar clips of recent television footage with one key distinction: it has all been fully licensed. TechCrunch readers can grab one of 1000 invites here.

At launch the site is offering content from Reuters, CNBC, CBC, AP and the AFP, and plans to have more content partners by the end of the year. Footage is sorted into categories including Sports, Headlines, and Suggested, as well as by individual network. Unlike Redlasso, which used its own recording system, 1Cast receives its content directly from its partners. At this point it sounds like some of the networks are slower than others in getting their content distributed (quick turn around was one of the things that made Red Lasso so appealing), but they are expected to speed up over time.

Instead of appealing exclusively to bloggers, 1Cast is trying to serve a more general market by allowing users to create frequently updated video ‘channels’ on topics they’re interested in, which can be embedded on blogs and are also viewable on the iPhone/iPod Touch (it’s sort of like your own personal news network).

In practice the service seems to work adequately well, though I have some problems with it. For one, searching for a specific clip is difficult - videos are all broken into ‘channels’ and grouped with other videos on the same topic, but it’s hard to tell what each clip is actually about without watching it. And it seems that every time you want to watch a clip you need to sit through the ads attached, which gets really annoying when you weren’t interested in it in the first place.

1Cast may catch on with the general public, who may be more interested in the ‘personal news channel’ aspect of the site rather than being able to embed a breaking news clip on their blog. But until the site has a larger collection of content and a better way to search through it, it probably won’t appeal to the same blogger audience that Red Lasso did.

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Each month, AdMob, a mobile advertising network, rounds up the data from over 6,000 mobile websites and applications, analyzes it all, and releases their findings in their Mobile Metrics Report. In the September report, AdMob determined that the iPhone had become the #4 handset worldwide by count of ads requested. In the October release, the iPhone has skyrocketed all the way to #1.

Note that these rankings are not directly representative of sales numbers; while AdMob’s ad network is wide enough that these numbers can provide an accurate picture of usage trends, they don’t necessarily prove that one handset is outselling another.

September vs October Worldwide handset rankings:

Within the Top 5, the only major change is the iPhones sudden surge. Below that however, notice the BlackBerry 8100s sudden disappearance from the list - it has shifted down to #11, sitting just below the BlackBerry 8300. Why might this be? Well, the 8100 is a good half year older than the 8300 - chances are, more 8100s are reaching retirement.

September vs October US handset rankings:

In September, we were a bit surprised to see the iPhone sitting all the way down at #7 in the US while it managed to snag the #4 spot worldwide. In October, the iPhone’s rank seems a bit more well aligned with it’s worldwide status, coming in at #2. iPhone requests have more than doubled, allowing it to knock the KRZR down a notch. The rest of the list moves in relation, though as with the worldwide rankings, we see the BlackBerry 8300 climb as the 8100 sinks.

One thing to note with all of these statistics, however, is that AdMob advertisements embedded into iPhone applications are counted alongside web site statistics. If these same advertisements are not embedded into applications on all of the other platforms, wouldn’t the numbers be skewed in favor of the iPhone? Even if they were given the same real estate across all platforms, third-party applications are a far more significant part of the iPhone than they are of the vast majority of devices; if you own an iPhone, chances are great that you’ve installed (and regularly use) a handful of applications. Can you really say the same about the KRZR, or the Kyocera K24? Wouldn’t this, too, skew things a bit? I’d be interested in seeing how the data changes when limited to any website accessible by smartphone.

Other interesting tid bits from the report:

• 29.5% of the traffic that AdMob saw in October came from a smartphone - 59% of that was from devices running Symbian, while 15% ran the iPhone OS
• 77.7% of devices AdMob saw in October supported Polyphonic ringtones, down from 79.5% in September
• As in September, the Danger Sidekick II is the only Sidekick device to break the Top 20, though it has slipped down from #15 to #16.
• 62.8% of iPhone requests were from the US.
• Most popular manufacturer by carrier: AT&T: Apple, MetroPCS: Motorola, Sprint: Samsung, T-Mobile: RIM, Verizon: LG

If you’ve got a couple hours to kill tearing through page upon page of statistics (now including stats for Latin America!), you can find the full report here.

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Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe finally got approval on their iPhone application - it appears to have been sitting at Apple waiting for approval for over two months.

Well, it was worth the wait. Like Google’s voice recognition app, it’s a much better search experience than the default Google search built into the iPhone browser. The app gives you a visual preview of all search results, which is a noticeably better way of searching on a small screen with a small virtual keyboard.

It isn’t in the app store yet directory yet, but you can download it here.

As an aside, will an iPhone developer please send me a screen shot of the “review pending” page that you have to look at day after day as you wait weeks, or possibly months, for Apple to get around to approving your app?

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For years, people have been turning to the web to ask perfect strangers for advice. But while largely anoymized services like Yahoo Answers have proven to be hugely popular, there’s something to be said for getting advice from people you actually know. Last month we wrote about Aardvark, a social search engine in private beta built by The Mechanical Zoo that distributes your searches across your social graph for quick, highly accurate results that are likely more credible than what you’d get from Yahoo Answers or a normal search engine. Today sees the public launch of another social advice site called Mobspin that is also leveraging the social graph, though in a slightly different manner.

Mobspin CEO Roy Goldman says that while Aardvark is a good service for questions that need near-immediate answers, many questions aren’t that urgent, which is why Mobspin is taking a more passive approach.

To use the site, you first submit a question that you’d like your friends’ help with. But rather than sending out an immediate alert to your friends letting them know that you’d like some help, the site instead sends them sporadic Email digests at intervals they’ve set. Goldman says that friends are generally eager to help anyway, and don’t need to be hit over the head with obnoxious and frequent requests. To help build up your friends list, the site has deep support for Facebook, allowing you to import your friends list as well as syndicate your questions to Facebook News Feeds.

You can also get an overview of the questions you’ve been asked at the Mobspin homepage, which allows users to filter questions by the people who have asked them (you can choose to view questions only from your friends, friends of friends, and so on). The site is also looking to serve as a repository for questions and answers - all submissions will be searchable by keyword, but will be stripped of any identifiable personal data. You can also leave reviews on the site, which are also included in the index.

Mobspin’s biggest obstacle will lie in obtaining critical mass - there isn’t much point in searching the database or submitting a question if you can never find a relevant answer. But it’s a quick way to ask your friends questions, and, unlike Aardvark, it’s publicly available. The site will be going up against a few other similar services, including Ruba, GigPark, and Yotify, which we covered here.

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The big three automakers are clamoring for a piece of the hypothetical $25 billion auto-bailout fund. And newcomer Tesla wants a piece of that too, apparently. The startup auto-maker has requested $400 million in low or no-interest loans to fund two upcoming projects (likely their new $70k electric sedan and a low priced third car).

Tesla has raised nearly $200 million in capital since 2004, including a recent $40 million convertible debt financing. Prior to the debt round, Tesla unsuccessfully tried to raise $100 million in new capital.

But forget the private capital markets. You can’t beat cheap loans from the government. Of course, the entire bailout is far from certain at this point, so don’t count those chickens yet.

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Ocarina, the second iPhone application from Silicon Valley based Smule, has surged to the top spot on the iPhone App store just a little over a week after launching (you can download it here for $.99).

Why? Just like Smule’s first application, a social virtual lighter (yeah, I know), People are fascinated by interacting with others. With the lighter it was competing geographically for the brightest light. With Ocarina, it’s listening to the music of others.

Ocarina, named after an ancient flute-like wind instrument, lets people play haunting, flute-like songs by blowing into the iPhone microphone and hitting the virtual buttons.

Yay. But the cool thing is you can hit a button and listen to what other Ocarina users are playing around the world. It’s social music, and strangely compelling. The company says Oscarina users have have listened to more than three million melodies. You can listen to some of them here.

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Austin Chau and I are here on the Yahoo campus for the Yahoo BrowserPlus release party. I’m going to blog the event as it happens here (Disclosure: I work for Google with the Open Web Advocacy and Gears teams).

First, Ernest Delgado, Canvas whiz here at Yahoo, sent me a cool demo showing a prototype he and Michael Johnston made of Yahoo Maps and Flickr integrating with Yahoo BrowserPlus using the native gyroscope on Macs. You just hit the side of the laptop, for example, in order to jump to the next Flickr picture, or tip your laptop to zoom around a Yahoo Map:

Eric Miraglia is opening the release party up with a nice Introduction to YUI:

* Starts with some really nice demos of things you can create in the browser using YUI.
* Underlying technologies driving browsers are very complicated.
* About 7 knowledge areas needed for web development — each is different than the standard, with bugs and specialized expert knowledge. You get about 672 different permutations of things needed for you to know and test on.
* YUI focused on “A-grade browser support”.
* Good to target toolkits like YUI, since it helps you be future-compatible when new browsers appear like iPhone and Google Chrome
* Goal of YUI: Have a sophisticated widget like a rich text editor work cross-browser using just a snippet small snippet of code.
* Also want things to be automatically accessible.
* Progressive enhancement should be easy and possible, showing a cool demo of hierarchical menus still being readable on Lynx, a version of Firefox with no JavaScript, and then a full IE with CSS and JavaScript on.
* YUI is ala carte, file sizes are small, between 15 and 30K for any given component (including gziped)
* Deployed at Yahoo for three years, on every major property, 400 million users/browsers consuming YUI every month. In properties like Flickr and on the front page, well tested.
* YUI in lots of places: iGoogle, Wall Street Journal, Mozilla, LinkedIn, Southwest.com, Obama website, more
* ~1,000,000 external downloads

Now Lloyd Hilaiel is getting up to present on Yahoo BrowserPlus, the focus of today’s event:

* The teams motivations: people get browsers — browsers could be so much more — plugins aren’t working! Takes too long for new innovations to propagate (5-7 years)!
* Non-goals: no fixing web UI, no web outside the web (like AIR or Mozilla Prism), no improving JavaScript (that’s the domain of YUI, JQuery, Dojo, etc.)
* YES to new web features with low overhead. Low overhead: low intellectual overhead, low overhead to implement and get it into widespread production
* Plugins have strengths (scriptable, cross-browser), but they have problems… installing them sucks, writing them is hard, sharing doesn’t happen, updating is clumsy, securing them is hard
* BrowserPlus enables in-browser desktop applications
* Abstraction layer over web plugins. Implements all the stuff common to web plugs, decreasing cost of development and helping end users with management and installation
* User install core platform just once
* Page requests distinct services it wants to use, if not installed user is prompted to accept services and they are installed on the fly
* Demo of Flickr uploader working in browser using Yahoo BrowserPlus - drag and drop into browser of images, even folders for recursive uploading, 100% leveraging client-side functionality, multiple file selection.
* Demo of a BrowserPlus marble maze game using the Mac’s motion sensor that exposes a single function that gives the laptop’s x and y position and acceleration. Idea is that you can expose simple functions for custom hardware — rest of app can just use web technologies.
* Demo where you can drop a file into a page and then work with the files contents, service coming out soon. Took just one day for them to create. Imagine dragging and dropping vCards or iCal files for example for a web-based calendering system.
* Demo showing desktop notifications
* Services installed on demand, no more monolithic plugins — instead smaller services, installation seemless, no browser restarts
* Authoring of new services currently restricted to Yahoo and partners
* BrowserPlus will be Open Source! Goal is to have Service API and services open source by end of year, everything else by mid next year.
* Need to figure out how to protect end-users while removing Yahoo from the loop of handling serving up the services
* Yahoo roles: consumer of the platform and the project maintainer (bug fixes, feature requested, service adoption)

After a short break the team (Lloyd Hilaiel, Steve Spencer, David Grigsby, and Gordon Durand) did a deep dive on the Yahoo BrowserPlus architecture, security model, user-facing interaction, how web developers interact with it, and how to create your own services. There is some really impressive engineering in here; they’ve tackled some hard problems. There’s lots of great material they went over, too much to summarize here. You can download the presentations from here in Keynote format.

Here’s a snippet of using BrowserPlus from some JavaScript:

Desktop notifications:

Drop-in uploading widget:

Check out the full developer docs that went live for more details.

Services are either binary shared libraries (.so or .dll) or Ruby script! The Ruby interpreter itself is a Yahoo BrowserPlus service that other services can use (services can be composed together and can work with each other, similar to how Unix utilities work with piping).

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/457796689/live-blogging-the-yahoo-browserplus-release-party

When the SEC charges someone with insider trading or any other crime, most lawyers will advise them that the best course of action is usually to keep their mouth shut and fight it in court. But some people just can’t help themselves. Martha Stewart, for instance, tried to fight her insider trading case in the court of public opinion, and it didn’t do her much good. Now another high-profile billionaire, Mark Cuban, is in the SEC’s sights. He knows that from a legal standpoint he should save his arguments for the judge, but he just can’t help himself. Cuban is fighting this case on his blog.

Or rather, he is letting his lawyers fight the case publicly on his behalf by printing their memos on his blog. Yesterday, he posted a response from his lawyer to the SEC complaint in which stated:

This matter, which has been pending before the Commission for nearly two years, has no merit and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion. Mr. Cuban intends to contest the allegations and to demonstrate that the Commission’s claims are infected by the misconduct of the staff of its Enforcement Division.

He prefaced that with the single line:

I wish I could say more, but I will have to leave it to this, and let the judicial process do its job.

Yet today, he kept at it, posting another memo from his lawyer, hinting at how he plans to defend himself:

The SEC knows their case centers on one telephone conversation between two individuals- 4 years ago. The SEC claims there was an agreement between these parties to the conversation to keep certain information confidential. We interviewed Guy Faure, the former CEO of Mamma.com Inc., with whom the SEC claims Mr. Cuban made an agreement. We had a court reporter transcribe the interview. There was no agreement to keep information confidential.

The case revolves around 600,000 shares Cuban sold in 2004 after being alerted by the CEO of search-engine Mamma.com that it was planning an offering that would dilute Cuban’s stake in the company. Cuban was not a board member or corporate officer Momma.com, but that doesn’t really matter. As far as the SEC is concerned, insider trading occurs whenever anybody trades shares based on information about a company that is not yet public.

It appears that is exactly what Cuban did. But there is also a rule that would seem to apply here that it is only insider trading if the “person agrees to maintain information in confidence.” Judging from the questions Cuban’s lawyers asked the Mamma.com CEO at his deposition, his argument will likely be that he never made such an agreement.

The SEC might counter that he is sophisticated investor, he knew it was insider information, and he traded on it anyway, adding to his immense wealth while all the poor schlepps out there who also owned the stock had to take the hit.

There seems to be enough wiggle room here for a court to decide either way. And if it does go to court, there is one more factor that complicates matters in Cuban’s favor. According to an e-mail obtained by Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times, an SEC staffer unaffiliated with this investigation harangued Cuban for being “unpatriotic” because he funded the conspiracy-theory documentary Loose Change, which was critical of the Bush White House.

Cuban’s lawyers might argue that this lawsuit is politically motivated retribution against Cuban in the dying days of the Bush administration.

So if this ever goes to court, the choice presented to jurors could be of a greedy billionaire versus a vindictive President. Either way, Cuban doesn’t want to end up in court. If he keeps laying down his cards in public, maybe he can bluff the SEC into folding.

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Source: TechCrunch
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Barcelona-based 3scale Networks has just announced on its blog that it made the switch from private to public beta for its API infrastructure management system, which enables Web API providers to set up and manage developer and client relationships for their Web Services, monitor usage and enable payments.

3scale features an online marketplace where resources are provided for developers who use Web Services to discover relevant services and set up usage agreements with providers. 3scale’s Quality of Service monitoring keeps track of actual uptime and quality of the contracted Web Service.

3scale launched earlier today with an initial collection of 14 services ranging from search engines and mapping to translation services including Corank, Crawlerinfo, DataNibble, Happenr (full disclosure: I’m a Partner with Oxynade, the company behind Happenr), Ipoki, ISBNdb.com, MaxMind, Swoogle, TaWithYou and Weatherbug.

3scale’s systems themselves are powered by Amazon’s EC2, S3 and Cloud Computing services. Signing up is free of charge and there is no usage fee outside of transaction commissions.

The startup was one of the DemoPit companies that demonstrated at TechCrunch50. The company will also be showing off its wares at the upcoming Le Web conference in Paris, where it was selected as one of the presenting startups.

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