Ajax Girl

As the New York Times reported, Skype’s founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, are in talks with several private equity firms and are amassing their own financial resources to make a bid for the internet phone business. eBay bought Skype from Zennstrom and Friis for around $3.1 billion in 2005. We reported last year that eBay would be willing to sell Skype if the company couldn’t support eBay’s core ecommerce business.

eBay has been having trouble finding ways of using Skype across its other products. eBay removed Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstrom in October 2007, reportedly due to frustration at the financial performance of Skype. Ebay also negotiated down the huge earnout due to Skype stockholders and took a $936 million one-time loss around the transaction.

As we wrote last spring, a sale was projected to be likely late last year or in the first half of this year. Of course, with the economy in such poor condition, the sale was probably put off momentarily. There was something brewing between Google and Skype last spring, but nothing came of it. Google recently launched its own voice product, Google Voice (formerly Grand Central).

Skype recently launched a nifty iPhone app, which was downloaded 1 million times in the first two days of its release. Skype recently made a move to be a player in the enterprise space, but it wasn’t clear how much of a money-maker the new service would be.

There’s no doubt that Skype brings a lot to the table but eBay was probably just not the right buyer. Skype’s scalable technology and a proven platform in the VOIP, VOIP2POTS and P2P Video is impressive to say the least. The service currently has more than 405 million registered users.

Following their respective departures from Skype, Zennstrom and Friis formed VC firm Atomico and founded online video/TV site Joost.

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President Obama incorporated technology into his election campaign in an unprecedented way, became known as the YouTube president within the first week of being elected, and seems to be forward thinking in his views on innovation and technology, which is why we endorsed him last year. But now we are almost four months into his tenure as President and leader of the free world, and the Obama administration has yet to name a Chief Technology Officer. They have, I should note, appointed a Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, the former CTO of Washington D.C., whose office is being investigated by the FBI for bribery and money laundering (which apparently occurred when he was the boss).

Still, it’s confusing as to why the President is taking his sweet time to appoint a CTO, when there are clear issues that a CTO could be working on. For starters, there are tech-centric issues like the FCC’s National Broadband Plan to give all American’s high speed internet access, and the DTV Delay Act, which was signed into law in early February. There’s the Open Government initiative, through Change.gov, which seems to be in a stalemate. And certainly a CTO could lend his or her expertise and leadership in incorporating technology into the President’s health-care, education and energy initiatives. Take a look at the technology issues page of the White House’s website for a more extensive to-do list awaiting our future CTO.

And there’s definitely no dearth of talent for this position. The names that have been bandied about for the position even before President Obama was victorious in November include Bill Gates, Microsoft founder; Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s CTO; Eric Schmidt, Google CEO and longtime Obama supporter (but he apparently said no to the job); Vint Cerf, the so-called “father of the internet” and VP at Google; Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law professor and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society; Ed Felton, Princeton computer science professor and founder of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy; Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO; and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO.

Perhaps the Obama administration is being extra careful not to make another “Kundra” mistake and is carefully evaluating the backgrounds of each candidate. But this should hardly take 5 months. Regardless of what the holdup is, we need someone with true technology smarts in the White House soon. I mean, how hard can it be to find a technology exec that has paid his or her taxes? Give us your favorite candidates for America’s CTO in comments. Or take our poll.

Who should be the CTO of the USA?
( online polls)

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Current Media, the media company backed by former Vice President Al Gore, has cancelled the $100 million IPO that it originally announced in January 2008.

In a document submitted earlier today, Current TV attributed the IPO’s cancellation to the current economy:

In light of current market conditions, the Registrant has determined not to proceed at this time with the public offering contemplated by the Registration Statement. The Registrant hereby confirms that no securities have been sold pursuant to the Registration Statement and all activity regarding the proposed public offering has been discontinued. The Registrant hereby informs the Staff that it may undertake a subsequent private offering in reliance on the safe harbor set forth in Rule 155(c) promulgated under the Act.

The media company is best known for cable channel Current TV, which is broadcast internationally to 59 million homes with markets in regions including the United States, Italy, and the UK. Current also has a strong web presence, tapping into popular social media services like Digg and Twitter for special events like the 2008 presidential election.

The network’s social media efforts during the election were deemed a success by the company, but it was still hit by layoffs in November, when it said that the IPO was being “put on hold”. Current says that there have have been no further layoffs since then, and that the direction of the company has not changed.

Via PEhub

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It is becoming clear that activity streams are taking hold as the default communications interface across a wide variety of social networks and media, from Twitter to Facebook to FriendFeed to Bebo and beyond. Yet the more people we try to keep track of in one consolidated feed, the more noise we have to deal with that increasingly threatens to drown out those golden information nuggets we all seek. So it is appropriate that today’s Elevator Pitch comes from Smallaa, a startup that aims to help people sort and categorize their streams by interests.

Smalla is still in private beta, but TechCrunch readers can sign up with the promotion code c3p0. When you sign up, you can bring in your FriendFeed stream. (Integration with Facebook is scheduled for April 23, and then Twitter will come after that). Your regular FreindFeed stream appears in a column on the right.

You also pick what interests you want to follow. For instance, I picked “Internet Startups,” “Technology,” “Google,” and “Unusual Things.” I could have also picked “best Photos,” “Pets,” “Formula 3 Racing,” “home,” or I could have created my own topics. Those selections create an interest stream on the left. This is the main Smaalla stream.

There are two ways you can inject something into the Smallaa stream. You can add it directly as a comment, link, video, or picture and assign it to an interest category when you place it into the stream. (Smallaa asks “What’s going on in your interests?” That could probably be clearer. A simple, “What are you intersted in?” would do.) The second way to inject items into the Smallaa stream is to assign them directly from the FriendFeed stream on the right (which will expand in the future to include Facebook and other streams as well).

For instance, Robert Scoble just wrote a post and did a video trying to explain why Mike is wrong about FriendFeed because of its superior mechansims for picking out signal to noise compared to Twitter. Scoble is particularly enamored with FriendFeed because he can pick out what’s interesting based on how many comments an item gets or how many people liked it. Yet with Smalla, I can simply grab the link to Scoble’s post from my FriendFeed stream and assign it to my “Technology” interest in Smallla. I trust what Scoble has to say about technology, so I pay attention to that, but I can ignore his comments about how awesome it is to live in Half Moon Bay.

Now, everybody in Smalla following with an interest in technology will see that link to Scoble’s post and any comments I have about it (unless they choose to view only items from people they follow in Smalla). The relationship between Smallaa and other services is reciprocal. When I add a post to Smallla, it appears in FriendFeed as well. And whenever you assign an item from a friend in another service, it prompts you to invite them to follow the particular interest you are assigning their item to in Smallla. Finally, as another way to figure out who to pay attention to, for each item in your Smallaa feed, it shows you how many people are following the person who posted it in that category. So again, to pick on Scoble, he might quickly gain the most followers in technology but not so many in fashion. Hopefully, this would create a reinforcing feedback loop which would encourage Scoble to write and share more about technology and less about his favorite pair of pants.

Or as Smalla CEO and founder Tim Lai says in the Elevator Pitch video below, it would be great to follow what Bill Clinton has to say about “politicians or giving public speeches without ever being distracted if he has anything to say about honesty and family values.” Lai built and sold his first software company in Hong Kong, an enterprise document management company called Paradigm, before moving to California. He has invested $3 million of his own money to start Smalllaa.

His pitch would probably have been less confusing if he explained why he is sitting in a racing car at teh beginning, but he comes around to that in the end. If you would like your startup to be featured on TechCrunch, submit your Elevator Pitch.

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Undoubtedly Tesla isn’t going to be happy about this video getting attention, but I think it’s awesome to see CEO Elon Musk take a stand against the company’s many detractors. Last November New York Times writer Randall Stross trashed Tesla as a rich man’s car that the government should shun. “Only the Rich Can Afford It. Should Taxpayers Back It?” he wrote.

Later, the article was much edited after well deserved criticism. Stross also corrected errors suggesting that Tesla’s loan requests were for the $109,000 Roadster, when in fact they were to be used for the $50,000 Model S, they’re most recent and much more affordable all-electric car.

That rewriting, though, apparently hasn’t appeased Musk. In an interview last week (video above) with Yahoo TechTicker, Musk calls Stross a “huge douchebag…and an idiot” (skip to the 40 second mark) and says “What is he doing picking on an electric car company? Why would he pick on the little guy who is trying to do good when you’ve got egregious waste of money in the tens of billions occurring in Detroit?”

Musk also points out that Tesla investors only make money if the loan is repaid, and that Tesla has applied for just 1.5% of the $25 billion appropriation.

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Earlier this week the Google Earth team released a new plugin that allows users to view Google Earth tours directly from their web browsers. These tours, which were introduced in the 5.0 release of Google Earth in February, allow users to create virtual flythroughs through any location on Google Earth, which can lead to some pretty impressive results. Google has compiled a handful of the best tours in this gallery, which includes a reenactment of the historic Flight 1549 landing in the Hudson and a whirlwind tour through San Francisco.

The plugin weighs in at a hefty 30 MB (80 megabytes after installing on a Mac), so it can hardly be considered lightweight. But the functionality is impressive, and could definitely be used in a variety of innovative ways now that the tours have been freed from the Google Earth desktop client. I image news organizations could use the tours to help liven up online reports (tours can include audio voiceovers), and travel companies could use them to help showcase where their tour packages will take their customers.

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As video sites on the Web struggle to find a business model that will pay their mounting bandwidth and storage bills, many of them are trying to reinvent themselves. Veoh, which has raised a total of $70 million, had to cut 35 percent of its staff earlier this month and teh site seems to be losing steam. Unique visitors are down 18 percent from their high a year ago to 15.2 million worldwide, and users of its desktop app VeohTV are down 40 percent to 7.2 million worldwide, according to comScore (see chart below).

Founder Dmitry Shapiro is now back as CEO and he is pouring the company’s remaining energy into a new product launched six weeks ago called Video Compass (read our review). Since launch, it has been downloaded 800,000 times, and is currently being downloaded at a rate of 25,000 a day. Video Compass may amount to a Hail Mary pass to try to save the company. It is an attempt to spread video search across the Web by bringing you search results when you don’t even know you are looking for videos.

The way it does this is through a browser add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer that is triggered whenever you do a search on a growing list of sites, including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Craigslist, Wikipedia, and even YouTube. In the past few days, it just added Twitter Search, MySpace, Hulu, DailyMotion, and Metacafe. Up next will be Flickr, Photobucket, and Facebook.

Whenever you do a regular search on these sites, a ribbon with Veoh video search results pops down triggered by the same keyword you are searching. For instance, if you are searching for “police” on Amazon, a bunch of Police music videos appear along the top ribbon, along with some car chase footage. You can cycle through the videos by clicking an arrow to see more results in the ribbon or you can click on related tags along the top (”Sting,” “crime,” “japanese police”) to refine your search.

If you click on any of the thumbnails, a semi-transparent player opens up and lets you watch it in-situ, without necessarily going to Veoh.com. When you are done, you close the window and you are back at where you left off.

I’ve been testing Video Compass for the past few days, and the video results pretty decent. I find them to be a bit redundant on other video sites such as YouTube, but they can sometimes offer better results on narrower video sites. For instance, try searching for “Moldova” on Hulu and you get one result, whereas the Veoh Video Compass bar turns up plenty of protest videos. And do a search on Twitter and it adds a whole different dimension to your search. Even searches on Google bring up more video results than occur naturally. And you can always turn it off if it starts to annoy you.

The big question is can Veoh create a business around a browser add-on? That all depends on how much of a habit people make of clicking on the Veoh video results and how good they are. Veoh has developed its own behavioral targeting technology which generates both video recommendations and helps target advertising. Shapiro tells me:

Today we are doing a pretty good job monetizing Veoh.com. We serve pre-rolls (at high CPMs), mid-rolls, overlays, and targeted display units. Our behavioral targeting engine lets us get higher CPMs than our competitors, while selling out more inventory. While I can’t share the exact numbers with you, I can tell you that our quarters are in the millions and every quarter has been a record quarter, although we are not cash flow positive yet.

With Video Compass, he can promote content from partners directly in the toolbar when people are conducting associated searches elsewhere on the Web. Movie trailers would be one obvious type of content to promote, but sponsored video ads of all stripes could be placed in both the results or during playback. There is also a lot of empty real estate around the player that can be filled with ads in the future. Finally, Shapiro is working on ways to drive users back to Veoh.com where the monetization model is more clear. So he is not giving up on his destination site entirely.

Relying on people to download his add-on, however, is a risky strategy. Not only does it require people to go out of their way, as more and more browser add-ons adopt similar triggering mechanisms, conflicts could emerge. For instance, Glue has a similar user interface, although it is not triggered by searches. But you can imagine a time when two different add-ons are both triggered and either one cancels out the other or the top of the browser becomes a mess. This is essentially the same problem people have with the new Diggbar and other Website framing mechanisms. They can create a lot of clutter instead of helping you cut through it.

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If you’re a coder who likes to blog a lot, you know the value of a good code syntax highlighter. It helps to draw attention to your code snippets and sets them in a context easily identifiable to anyone who has used a code editor. José Prado came up with a MooTools-powered extension called Lighter.js that provides this capability.

Implementing the highlighting is very easy to do by creating a container element around the code to be highlighted and uniquely ID’ing it so that the container can be found via MooTools built-in DOM traversal factory method $(). You can see an example here:

Ajaxian.com uses a code highlighter as well so if you compare the code above to the screencap below, you can see the similarities. MooTools developers should find it very easy to output a concisely layed out code snippet.

There’s no official demo for the extension but you can actually see it in action on Jose’s project page since the code examples he references are actually highlighted by his extension.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/tDyV2LAKyjY/lighterjs-syntax-highlighting-for-mootools

Time Magazine: “Get Rich Slow”

“At no other time in recent history has it been easier or cheaper to start a new kind of company. Possibly a very profitable company. Let’s call these start-ups LILOs, for ‘a little in, a lot out.’ These are Web-based businesses that cost almost nothing to get off the ground yet can turn into great moneymakers (if you work hard and are patient).” 37signals.com and Ruby on Rails get brief shoutouts in the article. These success stories are going to flood the press over the next few years. This is where it’s at. Thin is in. Our new book, coming along nicely by the way, will be a great guide to starting and running these kinds of businesses.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1674-time-magazine-get-rich-slow

Time Magazine: “Get Rich Slow”

“At no other time in recent history has it been easier or cheaper to start a new kind of company. Possibly a very profitable company. Let’s call these start-ups LILOs, for ‘a little in, a lot out.’ These are Web-based businesses that cost almost nothing to get off the ground yet can turn into great moneymakers (if you work hard and are patient).” 37signals.com and Ruby on Rails get brief shoutouts in the article. These success stories are going to flood the press over the next few years. This is where it’s at. Thin is in. Our new book, coming along nicely by the way, will be a great guide to starting and running these kinds of businesses.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1674-time-magazine-get-rich-slow