Polyvore To Tempt Fashionistas To Create, Then Spend

Polyvore, founded by ex-Yahoo’er Pasha Sadri (he created Yahoo Pipes) will appeal to the fashionistas out there in the world.

Users install a bookmarklet and grab images from around the web (see demo here) - this part is very similar to what Kaboodle, recently acquired by Hearst, does.

They then take those images, plus any images others have uploaded, and create “sets” which are ensembles of individual items, put into, say, a complete outfit. Examples are here.

Sets can be viewed by others, commented, rated, shared, embedded into websites (which I have done above), etc. Users can also take items from the sets (or the set itself) and place it into their own collection for modification (Polyvore also links back to the original set for attribution).

Clicking on any item brings up information about it, plus a link back to the original page where it was grabbed. This is where the potential revenue model comes into play - As a user buys that ring on Amazon, for example, Polyvore can get a revenue share.

Sets can be tagged or favorited, and users can befriend eachother (its a social network). If someone uses an item that you originally saved/bookmarked, you get a status point. The site also runs themed contests to encourage competition and usage. Finally, since no new service is complete without a Facebook application, Polyvore has one of those, too.

The fashion industry is just ridiculously huge. We’ve covered sites that let (mostly) women show off their outfits. And the success of Sugar Inc., which just made its second acquisition, has been phenomenal. My guess is Polyvore will have its share of rabid users, too.

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Facebook Debate: Valuation, Value To Developers and Random Ad Hominem Attacks

I moderated a panel on Tuesday at the Graphing Social Patterns conference. Dave McClure, a panelist, called it “the most fun, crazy, 90-mph rollercoaster, good time panel session i’ve EVER had the pleasure to be on.” I’m not sure I agree it was the best panel ever, but we had a lively discussion about the value of Facebook, the value of Facebook platform to developers, what should be done about black hat developers, and Jason Calacanis, in addition to his insightful comments, threw in a few entertaining personal attacks as well. Thanks to Robert Scoble, Dave McClure, Jason Calacanis and Rodney Rumford for their participation. Video of the session is below.

Video thumbnail. Click to play

Does Google’s Equality Drive Extend To Old People?

Google posted earlier today on its efforts towards building a workplace that provides equal treatment to all staff. Google noted that it has ranked highly on the U.S. Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index during a “time of rapid growth for our population of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees (whose group name is, naturally, Gayglers) around the world.”

Google’s inclusive work environment for GLBT employees should be commended, but does equality in Google extend to old people? Brian Reid doesn’t think so.

Reid is a former Google Director of Operations and Engineering and in now entering his third year of battling Google for unfair dismissal. Reid claims that despite receiving positive work reviews he was dismissed by Google after being told he was “slow”, “fuzzy”, “lethargic”, and did not “display a sense of urgency” and was told by a manager that his ideas were “obsolete” and “too old to matter”. Reid also noted in evidence that some of his colleagues referred to him as an “old man”, an “old guy” and an “old fuddy-duddy”.

It would appear that Reid did act in a fashion that was different to the general working ethos of Googlers. By his own admission Reid would leave work at 7pm and noted that he was regularly asked why he wasn’t remaining at work when Google provided dinner for its employees. An issue with diabetes also meant that Reid was required to eat at regular intervals, even when this meant interrupting meetings.

Google has denied the allegations, saying that Reid was let go after the project he was working on finished. An Appeals court has allowed the case to proceed with a trial date to be advised.

Windows Live SkyDrive Doubles Storage to 1GB, Still Can’t Keep Up With Gmail

Microsoft doubled the online storage consumers can get for free in Windows Live SkyDrive. It’s hard to get excited about that when Gmail is already giving me 2.9 GB of storage, with more on the way—4GB by the end of the month, and 6GB by early January, according to one estimate.

Keep that free storage coming. We’ll use it.

Social Video Company, Mesmo.TV, Raises $900,000 of Series A Funding

Private Equity HUB today uncovered that Mesmo.TV, a social video bookmarking service and provider of a very popular Facebook application, has secured over half of a $900,000 round of Series A financing.

Mesmo.TV’s Davin Miyoshi informed us that Aydin Senkut’s Felicis Ventures, Mike Maples’ Maples Investments, Naval Ravikant’s The Hit Forge, and Georges Harik participated in the round.

We wrote about the launch of Mesmo.TV’s social video bookmarking tool this past July. The tool, which is found on the company’s website, allows users to rate and tag the videos that they enjoy. Mesmo.TV can then recommend videos to you and introduce you to other viewers with similar viewing habits.

This tool, however, has not turned out to be the most successful part of Mesmo.TV’s business. The company’s TV Show Trivia Facebook application, which launched in August, has garnered over 1.3 million users and over 125,000 daily unique visitors. This puts the application amongst the top 45 applications on Facebook, and made Mesmo.TV the largest TV show community on that social network.

Mesmo.TV plans to continue focusing on its social network efforts and looks forward to expanding to other networks, such as MySpace, who might open up in the near future. The company is also talking with TV networks to bring online videos to its users.

MuseStorm Debuts Widget Engagement Platform

Silicon Valley/Israel based MuseStorm will launch a new end-to-end widget syndication platform today at the DEMO conference.

The new offering which MuseStorm is officially dubbing a “content engagement platform” provides four widget syndication aspects: Authoring, Distribution, Analytics & Monetization.

The highlight of the platform is the authoring functionality. First, it provides non-programmers the ability to develop rich media (audio, video, photo, text) widgets. Second, MuseStorm’s platform instantly exports the “source” into a variety of Web formats, including MySpace, Facebook, iGoogle, Netvibes, PageFlakes, etc. Desktop widget export currently features Windows executable, but support for Google, Yahoo, and Mac will be added in the near future. Updated are propagated seamlessly to the universe of deployed widgets, regardless of format.

The distribution aspect of the platform includes Web and Desktop widgets as noted above and will be expanded to IM and mobile. From the analytics standpoint, the MuseStorm platform provides distribution and user interaction analytics which should help publishers optimize their offerings. Publishers can monetize their widgets by integrating ads using advanced features such as event triggers, location of the ad within the widget, and more.

MuseStorm is targeting its offering toward high-end publishers requiring a complete widget strategy. This is in contrast to offerings by Widgetbox and Clearspring which are geared at publishers that are in need specifically of distribution power.

Several publishers have already given the nod to MuseStorm’s new platform. These include Simon & Schuster (BookVideos), CBS (The ShowBuzz), and even MicroSoft which launched a Halo 3 FaceBook app powered by MuseStorm.

Founded in 2005, MuseStorm is based in Sunnyvale with R&D in Or-Yehuda, Israel. Dr. Yossi Vardi provided seed funding in the low six digits. In July 2007 $1M in Series A was provided by Elron (NASDAQ: ELRN). This is Elron’s first Internet investment.

musestorm_screenshot.jpg

Sketchcasting - Another Weapon In The Blogging Arsenal

A new site called Sketchcast launched moments ago - it’s a tool for bloggers and others to create a presentation to express an idea using a sketchpad and (optionally) a †sound recording, and then embed it into a website. Sketchcasts can also be subscribed in iTunes and RSS readers via a feed.

The video below shows an overview of what it is, using the tool itself.

The idea for the product first came from Richard Ziade in a July blog post where he proposed the term and the general need for such a tool. Ziade isn’t associated with the new company around the tool, but they give him credit for inventing the idea. They also say he gave them his full permission to take the idea and run with it. Which is exactly what they did.

Eventvue Grabs Angel Round Over The Weekend

The firstTechStars startup has gotten funded over this weekend. Eventvue has closed a round estimated to be about a quarter million dollars from Brad Feld, David Cohen, Dave McClure, Wendy Lea, amongst others. See our earlier coverage of them here.

Eventvue brings social networking to the context of conferences, helping conference goers re-connect or follow up with business they couldn’t follow up with in the limited span of a conference. Networking at a conference is a fairly inefficient process, left up to chance encounters and stacks of business cards. Anything that can help optimize the limited conference time that thousand dollar ticket bought you is an easy sell.

Confabb is the most direct competitor in the space, but has focused on being a comprehensive directory of the who, what, and where of industry conferences rather than on the palm greasing that goes on at the events. More social competitors include Meetup.com and Eventwax. Eventvue is set for a public launch later this year.

Urbanspoon: Restaurant Reviews Coming To A City Near You

Urbanspoon is a small Seattle startup that wants to help you find the perfect restaurant. Their goal: compete head on with Yelp and other user review sites, specifically around restaurants.

But they are approaching the market in a different way than Yelp and others. Instead of talking users into coming to their site and writing reviews, they’re taking a decentralized approach and aggregating available reviews from trusted sources around the web - local newspapers, citysearch, etc. The approach is very similar to what Rotten Tomatoes has done successfully with movies.

Users can vote on each restaurant in the system and can also leave comments - effectively their own reviews. And anyone that wants a review they’ve written on a blog or elsewhere to be included can do so by adding a bit of code to the post.

So far, so good. They’re claiming 1.5 million monthly page views on 500,000 unique visitors. The company covers fourteen U.S. cities currently, with fifteen more on the way. And they’ve done all of this with a three man team and no funding. All three founders, Ethan Lowry, Adam Doppelt and Patrick O’Donnell, are ex-Jobster employees.

LiveStation Readying Multi-Station Client

The Microsoft/ Skinkers P2P live television streaming LiveStation project demonstrated a multi-channel client at the IBC conference earlier in September.

Although not currently available for general testing, the demonstration proved that a product that streams one channel really well can actually scale over multiple content streams.

The Silverlight powered client competes with other P2P live television products including Zattoo. See our previous coverage here for an overview of the various operators in this space. As Skinkers CEO Matteo Berlucchi notes in the video below, LiveStation does not compete with Joost; this is a product that streams live TV and does not do video on demand.

The following video comes from James Clarke.

Graspr Steps into the Crowded Instructional Video Ring

Teresa Phillips, founder and CEO of Graspr and one-time Yahoo VP, says that “Graspr is not just another video site or social networking community.” I’m not so sure.

The company has granted me access to Graspr prior to its presentation at Demo this afternoon and its public unveiling later this evening. I’ve kicked the tires, and while Graspr explicitly claims to be “the social media and learning company with the Internet’s largest user-generated video showcase for instructional content,” the site could probably be rebranded for any other purpose involving video and members.

This would be totally fine if there didn’t already exist a good video social network for instructional content. But several good ones do exist, including 5min, eHow, Sclipo, SuTree, Expert Village, Instructables, and VideoJug.

To be sure, Graspr works well enough. Everything revolves around instructional videos, so in many ways its like YouTube, et al. In addition to simply browsing and viewing videos, users can jump to particular scenes within videos, add notes to video segments, view related videos, open supplementary files attached to videos, and participate in discussion threads and chat rooms attached to the videos.

On the social networking side of things, users can create profiles and make friends. Their profile pages show all of the videos they have contributed, any of which can be grouped into series.

I’m tempted to label Graspr YASN, but to be fair they will provide an online video editing tool, which helps to differentiate them (well, maybe not from YouTube itself). They also have an ad-revenue sharing scheme in place to incentivise the production of content. I only wish their were more innovative aspects to Graspr that could get me more excited about it.

Piczo Zone: Better User Profiling Through Viral UGC

Social network Piczo has released a new feature into private beta: Piczo Zone. It’s being tested by a small group of users now and will be released generally in a few weeks.

What is it? Product Evangelist Keith Crowell says its a way for users to decorate their profile pages in much the same way as teenagers decorate their rooms - with posters, music, etc. Users take (or create) images, videos, style sheets or just about anything else and then add it to their profile. Each content item also includes descriptive data and tags. When someone creates something (say an image showing a band or artist name), any other user can add it to their profile as well. All of the “stuff” created in the Piczo Zone will then spread virally as the more popular items gets added by more and more users.

Users like this stuff - they can see what the popular kids (however defined) put on their profiles and then add the same things to their own. For now users can’t add stuff that they see directly from their friends’ profiles, but software engineer Devon Boyle says they’ll add that functionality shortly.

Users Love This Stuff. But So Do Advertisers

But there’s another reason this is important: user profiling for advertising. As users add artists/bands, popular movies and well known brands (nike, whatever) to their profiles they build an extremely detailed demographic and psychographic profile of themselves that can be used for far more targeted advertising. As an example, a music label could focus advertising around a new album release to users who’s added certain similar bands and artists to their profile. It’s highly likely that the advertising will be aimed at people who are likely to buy, and ad rates increase dramatically.

The content can also be used to predict new trends far before traditional methods. Users will create their own images for a popular local indie band, for example. As more and more users add the image, someone with access to aggregate data will be able to see what’s going to become mainstream well before it actually does. Since Piczo’s users, mostly teenagers, are the trendsetters, it’s a particularly powerful tool.

Piczo isn’t the first social network to experiment with something like this. In July we wrote about a similar product called HotLists released by HotOrNot. HotLists are made up only of images, but like Piczo users create them themselves and they spread virally as users add them from the profiles of people they view. Users immediately took to the idea, adding brands, movies, artists and other things that they identified with to build out their profile. And HotNorNot now has much deeper user information to aim advertisement at. Everyone wins.

Global Grind: Ajax, Finally, For The Hip Hop Demographic

The global hip-hop community: twenty four million people between the ages of 19-34, from a range of nationalities, ethnic groups and religions. Their collective spending power is $500 billion annually in the U.S. alone. Naturally, there are lots of online properties dedicated to Hip Hop culture. And now they have a customizable Ajax home page, too.

New York based GlobalGrind launches this morning with some serious backing, a venture round (size undisclosed) from Accel Partners and Russell Simmons.

The service is essentially the same as Pageflakes, Netvibes and other customizable Ajax home pages.

Users set initial interests (video, comedy, news, etc.) and get a set of pre-made modules. You can also add feed URLs directly, create multiple tabs, etc. All standard stuff, even if Global Grind has slightly edgier design than the others.

A lot of the pre-made content is directly related to Hip Hop, though, such as one that shows the most recent beefs between rap artists (just like blogger wars apparently, plus money, sex and guns - see image to right). Users can also make tabs public and share content.

The company was founded by Navarrow Wright, formerly the CTO of Black Entertainment Television. The company has twelve employees.

So…will it work or will it drown in the competition? Frankly, I’m in favor of any experiments which bring technology to people beyond the early adopter tech geek crowd. The Global Grind user base is already tech savvy, though, and aware of a lot of the new web products out there. That means they have to be cool and edgy enough to attract and keep users who wouldn’t think of using, say, Netvibes. Having Russel Simmons involved will certainly help in that area. We’ll check back in on them in six months or so and see how things are going.

Five Free iPhone Unlocks from CrunchGear and WirelessImports

We just got off the phone with iPhone Unlock salespeople WirelessImports and we have five free unlocks for CrunchGear and TechCrunch readers. How can you win one? Enter our Steve Jobs look-alike contest. Take your - or a friend’s, loved one’s, or sig other’s - picture in a black turtleneck and jeans and send it to contest@crunchgear.com with the subject line “UNLOCK MY IPHONE.” Reality Distortion Field optional.

You have to have an iPhone to enter and presumably not like/not have Cingular service or be ready to buy one when we pick you. We’ll pick five entrants at random on Friday, September 14 at 12PM EDT. Visit CG for full details.

oDesk’s Facebook Developer Aptitude Test

oDesk, a next generation marketplace for contract developers, has recently seen a spike in requests for Facebook developers.

oDesk offers developers a number of aptitude tests to certify their programming skills in various areas - existing tests include Ajax, CSS, .Net, DHTML and ASP, among others. They’ve now added a forty minute Facebook aptitude test as well. Companies can now sort through developers based on their skill level in creating Facebook applications.

In related news, VentureBeat is reporting that a new course, called Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook will be offered this fall in Stanford’s computer science department. Dave McClure is a co-instructor

PikiWiki: Drag ‘n Drop Files onto Collaborative Pages

PikiWiki, which opened to the public yesterday, is no ordinary wiki. Instead of collaborating with others to edit text-dominated pages, people can use PikiWiki to easily share media with one another in a scrapbook-like environment.

The coolest thing about PikiWiki is how well the company has pulled off its drag and drop interface. After you sign up for a free account and create a blank page, you can drag any file from your desktop environment straight into the browser (on Windows and soon on Mac OSX). The file will be loaded and formatted appropriately by PikiWiki automatically. For example, photos will be displayed in a reduced size and placed where you dropped them. Generic files will be represented by links. All loaded files will be uploaded to PikiWiki’s servers once the page is saved.

In addition to loading files onto a PikiWiki page, you can embellish the page with various color themes and text blurbs. You can also record audio and video right into the page. The company plans to increase PikiWiki’s feature set, so expect to see a greater range of themes and widgets available in the future.

Once you have created a page, you can share it with a group of other PikiWiki users (such as friends or family members). You can opt to allow other group members to edit your pages, or you can simply share the pages as read-only. Pages can also be organized into “scrapbooks” within particular groups. This structure lends itself well to creating a group for each family that wants to create separate scrapbooks for its reunions.

Currently, PikiWiki is entirely free and without any storage constraints. However, the company has plans to monetize the service by charging for storage beyond a certain limit. They also anticipate providing a service in which users can order their scrapbooks as physical objects. Other potential sources of revenue include providing branded accessories for decorating one’s pages.

PikiWiki is a Santa Clara-based company with five employees. They have been working on this product for about a year and a half without any outside funding. It’s great to see them designing a service that appeals to techies and non-techies alike.

Click on the screenshot to visit a sample PikiWiki page (with editing disabled).

PikiWiki: Drag ‘n Drop Files onto Collaborative Pages

PikiWiki, which opened to the public yesterday, is no ordinary wiki. Instead of collaborating with others to edit text-dominated pages, people can use PikiWiki to easily share media with one another in a scrapbook-like environment.

The coolest thing about PikiWiki is how well the company has pulled off its drag and drop interface. After you sign up for a free account and create a blank page, you can drag any file from your desktop environment straight into the browser (on Windows and soon on Mac OSX). The file will be loaded and formatted appropriately by PikiWiki automatically. For example, photos will be displayed in a reduced size and placed where you dropped them. Generic files will be represented by links. All loaded files will be uploaded to PikiWiki’s servers once the page is saved.

In addition to loading files onto a PikiWiki page, you can embellish the page with various color themes and text blurbs. You can also record audio and video right into the page. The company plans to increase PikiWiki’s feature set, so expect to see a greater range of themes and widgets available in the future.

Once you have created a page, you can share it with a group of other PikiWiki users (such as friends or family members). You can opt to allow other group members to edit your pages, or you can simply share the pages as read-only. Pages can also be organized into “scrapbooks” within particular groups. This structure lends itself well to creating a group for each family that wants to create separate scrapbooks for its reunions.

Currently, PikiWiki is entirely free and without any storage constraints. However, the company has plans to monetize the service by charging for storage beyond a certain limit. They also anticipate providing a service in which users can order their scrapbooks as physical objects. Other potential sources of revenue include providing branded accessories for decorating one’s pages.

PikiWiki is a Santa Clara-based company with five employees. They have been working on this product for about a year and a half without any outside funding. It’s great to see them designing a service that appeals to techies and non-techies alike.

Click on the screenshot to visit a sample PikiWiki page (with editing disabled).

Will Kosmix’s Plan To Take Vertical Search Horizontal Go Flat?

Kosmix is a vertical search engine that launched in 2006. They also raised a heap of cash - over $25 million from Accel, Lightspeed and Cambrian Ventures as well as private investors including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Bill Miller of Legg Mason Funds.

Although Kosmix founders Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan might have gone to school with Sergey Brin, their goal isn’t to take on Google. In a bit of a reshuffle since they first launched search engine, Kosmix is now wants to use their search engine to create a “Home Page for Every Topic”. Their strategy is to create a series of targeted topic pages with relevant links, groups, and media. The pages are not only easily indexable by Google, but can easily generate new pages around a topic by typing a phrase into their search engine. It seems part Mahalo, part vertical search engine. Their first such vertical, health search, has been up for some time and currently does around 2.5 million visits and 9 million searches a month. “Neti Pot Facts” is one example of a search in which Kosmix has gained ranking.

They have been working on other verticals as well, listing autos, politics, finance, travel, and video games as their other categories. The hope is to scale to ever more verticals and then bind them together under one search box that picks the right vertical for the page.

Kosmix can continue to expand because they believe their method of search by category is sufficiently scalable. To add a new category, they’ll simply train the algorithm a bit, then let it to crawl the web on its own. Their category based search differs from Google’s popularity based page rank system by siloing websites into categories, then running searches within those categories. Pages are ranked based on how relevant their linking pages are as well.

However, as Kosmix moves horizontally they are placed in competition with a host of new vertical search engines like MedStory and Healthline for Health or Kayak and TripAdvisor for travel. That’s not including the knowledge databases such as Wikipedia and Mayo Health clinic, which high quality edited content. These verticals also offer specialized features such as maps, price comparisons, and symptom search. All things considered it seems a tough road ahead.

Mobile Video Company Vantrix Takes $12 Million Series B

Online platform delivery specialists Vantrix Corporation have secured $12 million in Series B financing, in a round led by JK&B Capital. Existing investors SummerHill Venture Partners, Entrepia Ventures, BDC Venture Capital, and Innovacom have also participated. Ali Shadman from JK&B Capital joins the Vantrix board as part of the deal.

Vantrix will use the proceeds from the round to expand the company’s operations globally and to invest in infrastructure and R&D to support the company’s growing customer base.

Vantrix offers a mobile focused rich media delivery platform; or in laymen’s terms it provides delivery tools that allow video to be easily viewed on cellphones. Manish Jha, CEO of Vantrix said that of the Vantrix platform: “Delivering rich media on mobile phones should not be hindered by obstacles such as the fragmentation of devices, screen sizes, codec types, content formats, media player characteristics and network incompatibility issues. Vantrix helps content providers and carriers worldwide overcome these barriers to deliver ubiquitous and compelling new mobile services to consumers.”

Second Life 2.0: The Metanomics Conference

Things are changing in Second Life. The period of glee abandon in which companies joined Second Life, built giant edifices to their offline brands which no one visited, then ran away has passed. We are now seeing those who survived and new players in Linden Lab’s online world build something new, something perhaps more sustainable and in tune to user needs.

On the surface it appears that Second Life is repeating the internet development cycle, but at an accelerated rate. The scandals and useless attempts at bringing offline brands to Second Life parallel the first web boom. After the crash of 2000, many fled the web, whilst a core few remained and over time, along with new players, started to build interfaces that were useful. Second Life today is like 2001-2002, the dawn on a new age; Second Life 2.0.

A rather late comer to Second Life is Nick Wilson. Wilson was best known as a SEO blogger writing for several years at Threadwatch. After selling the site he cast his direction towards Second Life, launching the Metaversed Blog, a chronicle of the ups and downs of doing business in Second Life. Wilson has officially announced the Metanomics Conference in conjunction with Cornell University, a series of events that will explore business and policy in the “metaverse” of virtual worlds over several months.

I asked Wilson whether we were indeed witnessing a change:

The corporations in SecondLife are just ignoring the backlash, and are getting on with it. We lost a few in the initial rush, but those still standing, are standing strong, and leading the way for others. Breaking the trail if you will. Less about showy press splashes, and more about finding really useful ways to use virtual environments to collaborate with colleagues long distance, engage customers and experiment with the platform.

Interestingly Wilson sees those remaining in and now joining Second Life as looking towards longer term goals:

None of these companies really expects to be pulling profit out of virtual ventures right now. but they all see the potential, and firms like Sun, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Amazon are in it for the long haul.

Wilson says that Metanomics is about bridging the gap between those comfortable in Second Life, and those wary of it:

One of the things that I want to do, is use video, podcasts, web to bring this stuff to people in formats they’re more comfortable with. To bridge the gap between those who’re comfortable in SL and those not yet there. Hence partnerships with SLCN.tv for all of these shows and the team up with Cornell.

The conference preview video is below. The first session is September 17, unfortunately smack bang in the middle of TechCrunch 40, but for those not joining us in San Francisco and interested in the potential of Second Life and other online worlds, it would be worth a look.

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Microsoft Lands EPA As Virtual Earth Partner

On the same day that Google offered street view for Google Moon and $30 million for the Lunar X Prize, Microsoft has announced the signing of the US Environmental Protection Agency as a Microsoft Virtual Earth Partner.

The EPA has licensed the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform to develop mission-critical geospatial and mapping applications and will also integrate Virtual Earth into existing line-of-business applications, including Web-based mapping applications and environmental monitoring systems.

The deal will see Virtual Earth benefit via data sharing and analysis and insight for partner agencies, citizens and nongovernmental NGOs “on topics ranging from superfund sites and oil spills to waterways and the quality of beach water.”

Although Google remains the dominate player in the space, the deal continues Microsoft’s efforts to drive awareness and business through its competitor product. Having said all of that though, Google now offers neighborhood shots from the moon, pretty cool if perhaps without any serious business use; Microsoft might have gotten the contract but Google continues to win the hearts and minds of tech users.

Apple EU iPhone deal expected

Now that Apple has summoned the UK press to a London briefing next Tuesday, it looks like the iPhone announcement is imminent. There are no other significant details about the event at its flagship Regent Street outlet, but I know the venue and it is only big enough for a medium-sized launch with about 200 people. This suggests it could just be the UK iPhone announcement alone, not the German or French one.

The speculation to date is that the leading 02 carrier will get the contract. A well-placed mobile industry source told me: “02 will get the contract because the iPhone is worth an extra 500,000 customers to them. That will pull them well out in front of any other carrier. Vodafone had talked to Apple but they couldn’t stomach the revenue share deal so walked away.”

That would chime in with two recent hints. First, that O2’s chief executive, Peter Erskine yesterday told the The Times newspaper that he believes revenue sharing with key handset makers is an inevitability: “If sharing revenue brings a bigger pie to the table, then we’ll be happy to share that pie… The revenue-sharing model will play an increasingly important role in the future of converged communications.” That is a major shift in the thinking of any mobile carrier, which tend to protect their networks and revenues like she-wolves.

The second reason why it is probably 02 which has won the iPhone - and not the other likely candidate Vodafone - is that the latter has just launched its own music service, almost certainly as a spoiler for the iPhone/iTunes service. Subscribers to Vodafone’s MusicStation will have access to more than one million songs from major record labels, which they will be able to download directly to their 3G phones for a flat fee of £1.99 a week. However, this will be a rental service, so when customers stop paying the weekly flat fee, their music becomes unplayable. Not a fantastic spoiler to iTunes then.

Lastly, there remains a couple more questions. Whether this will be the 2.5G US-style version of the iPhone or the full-blown 3G version, and whether the phones will appear in stores before Christmas or be launched in the New Year. The latter looks a lot more likely at this stage.

Meanwhile, in the US iPhone sales have increased three-fold, from roughly 9,000 units sold a day to 27,000 units, after the recent $200 price cut, according to a study by Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster. This is either down to the price cut or to the plethora of free unlocking services which have emerged online, encouraging consumers to try out their existing carrier SIM in the iPhone. Or both.

WTF: Pitzer College Offers “Learning From YouTube” Class

Pitzer College, located in Southern California, is offering a for-credit class called Learning from YouTube this Fall, taught by Alexandra Juhasz, a media studies professor. The class consists of students watching YouTube videos and then discussing them. They also leave comments on the videos themselves.

One of the students, Darren Grose, says YouTube is “a phenomenon that should be studied…You can learn a lot about American culture and just Internet culture in general.”

Pitzer isn’t known as an intellectual powerhouse among small liberal arts schools (although to be honest I am somewhat biased as I went to a rival school, Claremont McKenna). But this may still be just about the most ridiculous class the school, or any school, has ever offered.

The classes are being recorded and, of course, posted on YouTube. Here’s an example class.

In related news, we recently mentioned that Stanford is offering a class on Facebook. But in Stanford’s case, it is a computer science course that teaches students how to create Facebook applications. It’s not a class where students get college credit for sitting around and watching YouTube.

$15 Million For VideoEgg As They Redefine Their Business

VideoEgg has just closed a $15 million series D round of funding led by Focus Ventures with WPP, Maveron, and August participating. VideoEgg cites plans to accelerate the development of their ad products and international sales network as the reasons behind the investment.

VideoEgg started off as a white-label video host, powering some notable web properties such as AOL sites, Bebo, hi5, Piczo, myYearbook, Dogster, Tagged and others. They then quickly incorporated an ad network. Like many other video startups, they did it through overlay advertisements (Yes, before YouTube). Startups are experimenting with other video ad formats “>as well. VideoEgg has been driving “significant” revenue through their overlay advertising.

Recently they applied that overlay model to Facebook as a new ad network, helping users monetize videos and applications. They reportedly pay a healthy CPM (developers have reported ~$8-10 CPM). Other Facebook ad networks include Lookery, RockYou, SocialMedia, and FB Exchange.

VideoEgg wants to continue developing their ad platform, moving from an impression model to an engagement model, while making ads more social. Although they remain tight lipped on the plans, ad networks on Facebook aim to make ads more engaging by tying virtual rewards to user’s contributions.

College.com: Returning To Facebook’s Roots

Over the past year Facebook has been broadening its horizons, facing a bit of criticism each step of the way. First there was the newsfeed. Then there was the opening of the network to high schoolers and the general public. Largely the expansion has paid off for the Facebook, with the site’s growth rate hastening after each change. However, the changes have left some users wistful for a time when Facebook was a place just for college students.

College.com plans to serve those users. The site has all the basics of any other social networking system, but includes features specifically tailored for college students. They’ve just launched the site into public beta with over 30,000 students at Florida State University. To support the alumni network, they’ve also kept registration open to anyone, .edu address or not.

Like other networks, you can create a profile, make friends, write blog posts, hold events, join groups, and post videos. It’s all specific to what college you go to or of which you’re an alum. Similar to Facebook, your viewing privileges are linked what college network you joined with. However, they’re not tied to your email’s domain name. On top of the usual features, College.com has added some of their own. The more notable smaller features are dating compatibility tests, flash cards, news bulletin board, and a wake-up call feature that rings your phone at any time you choose.

The bigger difference comes with their school specific features. Like Facebook used to support, College.com lets you find and post your class schedule to your profile. To aid with college life, they’ve also included specialized profiles for professors and the Greek system. Professor profiles are listed in a school-specific directory, allowing you to read bios and rate them. The Greek system features profiles for Fraternities and Sororities on campus, with the ability to rush or list new organizations.

I can’t help but feel that a lot of this functionality may wind up returning to Facebook through the application platform. Not to mention the number of college specific Facebook competitors stacking up (ConnectU, CommonRoom) or that they need to keep alumni engaged post graduation in order to sustain any real growth. However, MyYearbook has gotten a lot of mileage out of targeting a social network that’s for and by high schoolers. College.com may do the same.

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People Search Business Just Got More Complicated As Facebook Enters Market

Facebook just announced that they are now allowing public searches of their users by people without Facebook accounts.

Not much information is included in the results (see image below)- just the name and primary photograph included in the user profile, and users can easily elect to stop search engines from indexing their information by changing their privacy settings.

As Om Malik notes, this is yet another competitive threat in the burgeoning people search scene. We’ve recently covered five new people search engines - Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou. All of these services count on the fact that people information is distributed across many different websites and services.

To the extent any one service such as Facebook (or LinkedIn, etc.) gather lots of centralized information about a large group of people and then make it available for general search, these people search engines become much less important. If these startups were public entities, their market valuations would dip today.

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More Competition For IPTV: HP Launching Next.TV

Hewlett Packard has announced a deal to ship a P2P IPTV system with their notbooks (notably the Presario and Pavillion models) beginning in late September. It will also be available as a system update for exiting HP Vista computers. The system is called Next.tv and powered by Dave Networks, a white label IPTV provider. For the launch, Next.tv will feature content from CBS, Freemantle, and Endemol. Their sneak preview also includes MGM, eye.tv, Lazy.tv, and Reality.tv as well. Other partnerships, filling a total of 50 channels, will be announced throughout September.

Next.TV has plans for a desktop version for non HP users as well.

Rex Wong, the former CEO of Applied Semantics (later Google Adsense), is the CEO of Dave Networks. Wong previously expressed a desire to do for video what AdSense did for text. Last April, Rex Wong said, “We will be using the same technology used by Homeland Security to monitor [telephone] chatter. Audio keywording will allow us to contextually figure out where to sell ads and to place more than just pre- and post-roll ads.” He planed to launch the contextual video advertising service on their YouTube competitor, Dave.TV.

While Next.tv’s distribution deal through HP gives them a good head start, they’re going up an increasingly crowded marketplace. Joost, Babelgum, Veoh, British Telecom, Zattoo, and Vuze are amongst the competition. Scoring the best content deals will likely determine who makes IPTV work.

nexttvsmall.png

Amazon & Google To Enter eBook Business

The New York Times is reporting that both Amazon and Google are entering the eBook business this year, joining Sony and others who already have products (the image to the right is Sony’s Reader).

The new Amazon product and service will be called The Kindle and will compete directly with Sony. Google will begin charging users to read the full text of some of the books they have indexed.

Amazon: The Kindle

The Kindle will be a device to read books - black and white screen, internet connectivity via EVDO and a keyboard to take notes and surf the web. The device, which will cost $400-$500, will interact with an ebook service run by Amazon.

The fact that the device can access books without being separately connected to a computer will be a big selling point over Sony Reader, which sells for $300. The Kindle will also be able to surf the web and users will also be able to read newspapers, magazines, etc.

I’ve had a chance to test the Sony Reader on a number of occasions and found it to be a great way to read books, although the content selection wasn’t great. The Kindle will also use E Ink technology for displaying content. It’s great for reading text in all light conditions but does not display video or other animation.

Amazon isn’t supporting the industry’s open standard around eBooks. Instead they are using their own proprietary format from Mobipocket, a company they acquired in 2005

Like the iPod, the key driver of sales of the device won’t be the depth of content available on the associated service, but the availability of pirated, free content on BitTorrent and other P2P networks. eBooks are coming, but they’re not here yet.

Google

Google isn’t getting into the device business. Instead, they will start charging users to view some full text books that they’ve indexed, although this is separate from the Google Book Search Library Project. No word on whether Google is sharing revenue with publishers.

TechCrunch UK Relaunches With One Hell Of A Party

I just returned from our party in central London to celebrate Seedcamp Week and the relaunch of TechCrunch UK & Ireland.

Robert Loch, who’s famous for his London parties, generously agreed to have the event at his penthouse London flat in Soho. His parties are so notorious (and I use that word intentionally) that we had to keep the location secret and only email it out to attendees who’d registered. Even so, 50 or so people showed up “off list” and were able to get in.

Total attendance was about 250 people, including most of the venture capitalists in London who invest in the Internet, most of the Seedcamp attendees and a ton of other entrepreneurs. Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis also dropped by for an hour or so.

One thing I need to remember for our next party - Londoners drink a lot more and stay out far later than their Silicon Valley geek counterparts. We actually ran out of alcohol completely at around 10:30 but Heather soon had another shipment brought in. I left at 1:30 am to get back to my day job. As far as I know the party is still going strong.

TechCrunch UK & Ireland Relaunches

The primary reason for the party was to celebrate the relaunch of TechCrunch UK & Ireland, after a nearly year-long hiatus. I am very pleased to announce the return of Mike Butcher as the editor of the site. Mike knows everyone in London - seriously - and he has deep experience writing about startups at The Financial Times, The Industry Standard and The Guardian, among other publications. We are very lucky to have him rejoin the TechCrunch team. Look for his coverage of Seedcamp on Friday morning London time.

See more coverage of the relaunch at The Guardian.

Thank You To Sponsors

Heather put the party together in a week after we nearly canceled due to a lack of an appropriate venue. Still, a number of sponsors stepped up to cover costs of the event and supplied excellent food and drink. Thank you to all. And special thanks to the Seedcamp team for working with us to organize and promote the party.

Event Sponsors:

Olswang is a leading law firm renowned for its work in media, communications, technology, real estate and more recently, biosciences. Founded in 1981, the firm has grown to a staff of more than 500 and has offices in London, the Thames Valley and Brussels. Olswang is organised with both a sector and service line focus, enabling it to deliver specialist legal advice backed by a strong business perspective.

WorldTV is an exciting, second generation video site offering a slick and user-friendly interface for online aggregation, personal archiving, search and viewing of multi-definition video content in Flash, including access to more than 25 million video clips from a range of popular, well known sites. The service lets users create their own full-screen online TV channel, complete with MTV style logo and all at a cool and easy-to-remember URL. Based in London and Limerick, Ireland, WorldTV will launch out of private beta in November, and is an idea from Smashing Concepts! - the UK ideas and incubation company.

Food & Drink Sponsors:

Thanks to Mucho Mas Burrittos (seven days old, founded by former Skype guys, better than Chipotle) and Hummus Brothers for feeding us, and Stormhoek for supplying the excellent wine for the event. The food and wine was awesome and you kept everyone appropriately fed and watered.

Multiply Lands $16.6 Million Series B

Social network Multiply has taken $16.6 million in Series B funding. The round was led by VantagePoint Venture Partners with Point Judith Capital and Transcosmos Investments also participating.

As part of the deal ex-Chairman of Intermix Media (the original owners of MySpace) David Scott Carlick will join Multiply’s board.

Multiply previously took $6million Series A in July 2006.

Multiply is one of the older social networking sites (it launched in 2003) and has flown under the radar while first MySpace, then Facebook soared; we last covered the site in November 06. Whilst getting little attention Multiply has continued to grow, and at least according to Alexa is now more popular than Bebo, although lower than Orkut or Hi5. Like many of its competitors it appears to have carved out a strong presence outside of the United States, ranking in the top 10 sites visited by internet users in the Philippines (5) and Indonesia (9); 39% of the sites traffic comes from the Philippines.

Europe’s Seedcamp winners announced

The winners of Seedcamp, the new incubator-style event for European startups, have been announced. In an extraordinary decision the 36 judges (made up of Seedcamp investors including nine of Europe’s top VCs, mentors and Seedcamp board) have decided to fund not five but six of the companies out of the original 20. They are (in no particular order):

“Project Playfair”

Currently still in development, Project Playfair - coming out of Scotland in the UK - is about “hypernumbers”. What hypertext did to text, they want to do to numbers. It’s a bold and fascinating idea, one application of which could be collaborative spreadsheet working were each cell talks to another cell on another spreadsheet held elsewhere. Chair of the judges and Seedcamp founder, Saul Klein said: “This team had a night and day improvement from Monday to Thursday. Its almost a classic seed investment. It’s a massive leap of faith, but you have got to want to encourage people who want to do for numbers what happened to text. It’s Excel 2.0. This is an extremely technical team who have solved tough technical issues in their space.”

Zemanta

picture-13.pngZemanta (from Slovenia) has created a ‘content intelligence’ platform to automatically enhance content, making it web-ready. The upshot? Paste in some text and Zemanta looks at it and then starts to add the most likely links to the text, which you can then edit (something a lot of bloggers would kill for no doubt). This kind of application exists a lot in academic and enterprise content management systems but hasn’t appeared on the Web very much to date as these tend to be very CPU/resource intense technologies. It’s a web service API not unlike Akismet in its ability to look intelligently at content and decide what to do with it. Saul Klein said: “We loved the founders, these are passionate, smart guys. They have even got a working application and a customer (albiet in Slovenia, where they are based). This is a great value proposition for publishers. And how many bloggers would like this tool? We also liked the fact that they were coming out of Slovenia [where Seedcamp had lot of applications] and Seedcamp really is about getting to all corners of Europe.”

Kublax

(site in development, but it has a working application)

Kublax syncs with all your bank accounts, utilities, even loyalty schemes like Air Miles and presents all the information in a user friendly format so that you can track your incoming and outgoing cashflow and start to really analysise your personal finances. All the key information (log-ins etc) stays on the desktop in hyper-encrypted files, they claim. It also creates a social network around your personal finances where key information is not revealed but the “crowd” can source intelligence on investments, savings accounts, mortgages, you name it. Saul Klein said: “The consumer proposition is killer. I would love to see with one click all my spending information in one place and visually graphed. We have not had a desktop publishing revolution in the personal finance space. Now personal finance handling doesn’t have to be a desktop application but live and networked. You can even benchmark your spending habits against other people. Sites like Mint are venture backed in the US but this business is very local and can be integrated with local markets. Even though there is a US model the US sites have not been out long. The team has done a lot with nothing. Plus, they are Open Coffee alumni who have really gone all out to get into the entrepreneurial space.”

Tablefinder

Coming out of Sweden Tablefinders’ mission is to aggregate the world’s online bookable restaurants. It’s a marketing platforms for restaurants, but more than that. Normally restaurants use one of two global booking systems, OpenTable or LiveBookings. Tablefinder will aggregate those systems, allowing them to compete on a level playing field. The payment goes from the restaurant to one of the systems and Tablefinder is a partner, so will make an unspecified commission on the restaurant booking. Funding to date has been via a small VC in Sweden. The aim is to partner with LiveBookings and OpenTable, so expect an announcement on this soon. Eventually restaurants could place bids for table bookings in a similar manner as one would bid for Google Adwords and even - eventually - creating a sort of Last.FM style network which learns your preferences for restaurants. Saul Klein said: “They mad a massive improvement over the week. They started off as not a standout idea. But now it’s a search engine and booking engine. We really like the entrepreneurs, they are very focused and passionate. When they weren’t pitching to us they weren’t sightseeing in London - they had a business meeting instead. They had local funding in Sweden but decided that the investment of 50,000 Euro for the 10% was worth it for the Seedcamp experience. Scandinavian entrepreneurs tend to think big, are ambitious and serious, but not arrogant. They are cut from the same cloth as the Skype founders, it’s an amazing zone of innovation.”

Buildersite

Buildersite is designed to be a web-marketplace for construction services, providing homeowners and tradesmen with a trusted venue for transacting business. The domestic construction market in the UK is worth £10bn. Competitor sites tend to be about lead generation but Buildersite instead charges a success fee which is 5% of the project fee. This means the whole service can be free to the homeowner, and it can track bad builders and bar them from the system. Buildersite launched in mid-2006 and now has 3,000 tradesmen on the site. Saul Klein said: “This is a superb proposition, brilliantly communicated. The founder, Ryan Notz, has domain expertise having been a builder himself. It’s a solid idea. This is a market where, when you are told how big the market is, you say I can’t believe it’s that big. And it’s hard to believe how big just the addressable market - alone - is worth. He presented the business well and has already signed a lot of tradesmen. He’s a brilliant bootstrap entrepreneur and is also one of those who has taken advantage of Open Coffee meetings.”

Rentmineonline

This site connects owners and renters, through an online market place providing goods for the renter and capital for the owner. The idea resembles eBay but instead of purchasing, the model is based on renting. Saul Klein said: “Ed Spiegel, the founder, started his first business at university. He went from there to Silicon Valley to be in business development which shows his tenacity. He went from Silicon Valley to be a senior associate in venture funds. He’s seen startups from the inside as an investor and employee. He’s been doing all this so he could do his own thing. He left, went to business school and used his time to find the right software firm in Bulgaria. He moved to Amsterdam to set up the business and bought a boat to run it from. He launched his site this week based on the advice here at Seedcamp. Although it’s a proposition that some might describe as ‘Web 1.0′ we’ve all seen that there have been business opportunities that tried to launch in the late 90s but the market wasn’t there. But if you get the timing right it can really take off. Ed is tapping into trust networks and by integrating with Facebook he has a trust network of 37m people. He’s tapping into a big trend. This notion that it has to be a novel idea is nonsense, it’s the right idea at the right time with the right people.”

All New Bloglines Launches in Beta

Bloglines, the grandfather of web based RSS readers, launched a new beta site this evening at beta.bloglines.com. Like everyone else these days, the most notable new feature is an Ajax customizable home page where users can drag and reorder feeds for a quick view.

Bloglines now has three viewing options - quick view (the new Ajax drag and drop view in the image to the left), three pane “Outlook-like” view and the classic full view with two panes. The site is also trying to manage unread feeds more intelligently, a common user complaint in the past.

The company says more changes are coming. Options for saving, sending and sharing stories, tools for building link blogs, managing blog rolls, etc. are all on the way. In the meantime, the classic bloglines site will remain available at bloglines.com. Feeds remain synced between the two sites.

Product iterations come very slowly at Bloglines, which was acquired by Ask.com in early 2005. The last major news from them was the integration of blog search over a year ago. Meanwhile, Google Reader has quickly grabbed the attention of the early adopter crowd, and is by far the most popular feed reader used by our readers according to Feedburner stats.

Richard MacManus has a much longer review of the product at Read/Write Web.

Who Wants to Buy a Virtual World?

If you felt a little green with envy when Disney bought juvenile virtual world Club Penguin for $700 million in cash and earn out, this could be your chance to grab a piece of the virtual pie.

WhuddleWorld, Inc., creator of eponymous online hangout for kids WhuddleWorld, was forced to shut down in April after running out of money. The team of five that built WhuddleWorld over the last year and a half is soliciting acquisition and partnership offers to get the immersive world back online.

Co-founder Dee Hardrath claims that at the time of shutdown WhuddleWorld had grown to 76,000 registered members and a monthly page view count of 20M. She also says the company still receives emails four months later from loyal followers pleading them to get the world back into operation.

Interested in investing? Drop them a line. Perhaps you will be the one to pull them out of the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Check out our recent roundup of virtual worlds for information about the competitors in this space.

Update: Additional materials regarding the WhuddleWorld business plan and its pre-shutdown traffic have been posted below in comment #21.

Jaxtr Closes $10 Million Series A; Announces 1 Million Users

Jaxtr has raised a $10 million Series A round led by August Capital with Mayfield Fund, Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Luxemburg-based Mangrove Capital participating. They’ve also doubled their registered user base over last month, totalling 1 million users. They plan on getting to a break even point on the investment and to total 20 million users by the end of next year.

Jaxtr, like GrandCentral, uses VOIP as a utility to add features to your existing phone. Many other other VOIP startups focus primarily on cost savings (We have a roundup of VOIP services here). It’s service lets you anonymously post your phone number on the web and get cheap long distance calling rates. It works by connecting calls to your existing phone service through a Jaxtr number on VOIP. Calls are anonymous because they are made to a new Jaxtr number instead of your existing number. This lets you push all calls to voicemail and choose who can and can’t call through directly. Calls are cheaper because long distance calls are made over VOIP lines instead of standard phone networks. Jangl is another player in the category, also enabling you to control access to who calls your phone.

Although you can access the service easily through an embeddable widget, Jaxtr has found a lot of its growth coming from direct call links placed in emails or on non-social networking websites. Jangl has been expanding through a series of business deals, most notably with Various, Inc, Justin.tv, Fubar, and Revision3, bringing their online profile presence to over 20 million.

As part of taking the company to a break even point, they will be releasing a paid service, incorporating advertising, and pursuing new services on social networks (TBA). The paid service is expected to be their lead revenue generator, with the first paid component simply allowing people to buy more Jax, the virtual currency that converts into local phone minutes. Currently users get 100 free Jax each month, which convert into 100 minutes in the US, with conversion rates depending on local telco costs (sometimes as low as 15 minutes in Europe). Longer term plans include tiered monthly minute plans, like cell phones.

Their second revenue stream will be through on-site advertising within user’s Jaxtr accounts. A look at their Alexa traffic shows traffic growing noticeably upward in fits and spurts, mostly due to users checking their Jaxtr voicemail. Although the company currently isn’t disclosing traffic numbers, Konstantine doesn’t dispute the Alexa numbers. He explains the dips as periods during which they had trouble keeping up with the growth.

Google Lands CNN As Exclusive Adsense User

CNN.com and Google have announced an agreement that will see Google’s AdSense become the exclusive text link advertising provider on CNN.com.

The deal will also open up the extensive inventory on CNN.com to Adwords’ advertisers.

Senior VP and GM of CNN.com David Payne said the deal would help deliver relevant ads to CNN users, “enhancing their overall experience on CNN.com.”

Although the deal might not initially sound all that exciting, CNN.com is a top 100 site online according to Alexa, making it one of the most popular media destinations online. That’s a lot of pages and ad inventory for Google to sell ads on, inventory that should pay handsomely for all involved.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, including the length of the agreement, which was described only as “multi-year.”

What Do You Get When You Ask Gmail Fans To Express Email Delivery?

Google asked the question, and found out:

Google received over 1,100 submissions for the collaborative effort.

It reminds me a little bit of Ze Frank’s (what ever happened to him BTW?) Video for Ray project earlier this year. The exercise just goes to prove that tapping into passionate users can deliver; over 1,000 people world wide took time out to video and upload their love of Gmail, with no incentive to do so other than perhaps a 2 second chance of fame. Cheap labor perhaps, but it’s a resource that can and is being tapped.

ProfileBuilder: Manage Your Profile, Not Accounts

nullWith a plethora of social networks for everyone from knitters to dog lovers, managing our increasing number of long tail profiles is a huge pain. The problem of managing a fragmented identity has been attacked two ways: creating a new master account (OpenID), aggregating identity through search (Spock, Wink), or aggregating management of all your accounts on one site. The latter solution has attracted quite a bit of attention with sites like Profilactic, ProfileLinker, and Loopster.

ProfileBuilder is another startup looking to help solve the identity problem by providing one place to manage your personal information. They gave party goers a sneak peek of their identity management tool at the TC 9 party at August Capital. During the beta preview, approximately 5,000 profiles have been created, and ProfileBuilder has received more than 450,000 page views. Now the site has launched to the public.

ProfileBuilder isn’t just about getting friend status updates or single login access, but more about easily controlling what information shows up on what sites. However, they do have an API that allows anyone to build a program to push updates from your profile to other social networking services. The service creates a master profile where you can catalog your biography, photos, links to other services, blogs, and even create new kinds of information pages. You can expose this information to people across the net through an embeddable badge (like View my Profile). When you place the badge on a site, ProfileBuilder knows and lets you choose what type of information gets exposed through the embed on that site. You can manage all your embeds through their website.

Encouraging people to use the service by embedding profiles across the web is no doubt a first step in toward serving as a total online identity solution. Plaxo has been gunning for this distinction as well, and certainly more companies will want to serve as the focal point for identity on the web.

ICCARUS: Three Dimensional Data Visualization

ICCARUS is a new service created by social music and video recommendations startup Scouta. It creates a three dimensional visualization of the data behind a social networking or related website. ICCARUS also shows the social network between members, the memberships of groups, and the links between members and the content they enjoy. Navigate by clicking on points of interest, or searched using commands. Results are dynamic and are delivered in real time, providing an instant visual representation of the given network

The data is fetched via TurboGears and uses the GFX library to create the visual effects.

ICCARUS was launched Wednesday at Webjam Perth and won first place from a field of around 15 demonstrating startups. I spoke with Scouta CEO Richard Giles at the WA Web Awards Friday and he told me that the feedback on ICCARUS had been strong. Scouta plans on further refining ICCARUS with a possibility of providing the service to the public either later this year or early 2008.

The screencast above doesn’t do the service full justice, but it’s enough to give some idea of what it is capable of.

What Ever Happened To GDrive?

Google Blogscoped points to a Google video created by a Google employee (now private) that shows the Gdrive Platypus icon overlaid with the lyrics, “I’ve been ready to launch my product since 2002 … At least round here 5 years ain’t so long overdue.”

Philipp Lenssen suggests that perhaps Google’s online storage solution might have been canceled, but not surprisingly no one at Mountain View is confirming a thing. It does raise the rather valid question: What ever happened to GDrive?

Our GDrive coverage goes back 18 months with Google including references to “Google Drive,” “a place for users to store 100% of their data online” in a company presentation. In April 2006 there was speculation that Microsoft would launch Live Drive prior to GDrive. In October 2006 there was a confirmed GDrive client being used by Google employees. Ten months later and there is nothing.

What is perhaps stranger in a market sense is Google’s continuing slide from being the market leader in online storage to becoming a potential minnow. Google set the standard with the then unprecedented 2gb storage for online mail with Gmail. Today Google’s 2-3 gb of storage sees it lag behind Microsoft who recently announced 5gb for Hotmail, and Yahoo and AOL who provide unlimited email storage. Microsoft has already launched its online storage solution, although reviews, including ours, were tepid.

So is the GDrive more endangered vulnerable than the Platypus it uses for its logo? If you’re a Google employee and would like to set the record straight on or off the record drop us a line. We’d also like to see that video back up on a non-Google controlled website.

France’s Jooce Enters WebOS Space

New Paris startup Jooce says they are targeting the “cybercafe generation” with their new Flash-based web operating system and sharing platform.

Jooce is most like Goowy, another Flash based web OS/desktop. But Jooce is different enough to merit a closer look. They says 500 million people a day log on to the Internet from a cybercafe, and they are the target of the Jooce product. They want access to core customized applications like instant messaging, storage, media player, email and widgets. Jooce offers all of that, and is also a private sharing network among friends.

Every user has their own private desktop for IM, email, storage, etc. But they also have another desktop that friends can access and grab shared files, or drop off a file that they want to share.

The company has raised an initial seed round of financing from Mangrove Capital Partners, one of the original investors in Skype. It is currently a closed platform, but they will be releasing an API in the near future.

Jooce enters a crowded space but is targeting a clear audience. Being backed by Mangrove doesn’t hurt either.

Israel-based G.ho.st, another web OS startup that recently launched, is taking a different approach from Jooce. They’ve built some basic applications to show off the platform but are counting on third parties to do most of the heavy lifting via their API.

Windows Live Messaging Coming To Bebo

Bebo has announced a new partnership with Microsoft that will see the introduction of the Windows Live instant messaging service to Bebo’s social network.

The new service will allow Bebo users to chat to people outside of the Bebo network, from within Bebo itself. What makes the deal perhaps more interesting is that Bebo users will also now be recognized over the Windows Live platform; in effect the deal becomes a sort of merging of member databases. It’s also a first for Microsoft, who has remained somewhat distant from the growing social networking market to date.

Bebo continues to trail behind MySpace and Facebook in the United States in terms of traffic, but as confirmed by comScore August 15, is the most popular social networking site in the United Kingdom.

(via Reuters)

gBox: Give The Gift Of DRM-Free Music

gBox is a new take on selling digital content. Instead of emphasizing sales directly to consumers, gBox is encourages you to create wish lists and buy gifts for your friends and family. To kick-start the service, they’ve sealed a pretty big deal with Universal to be the retailer for their new “Open MP3″ experiment into DRM free music. In a move that’s a snub to Apple’s iTunes, Universal will be buying Google AdWords for their music, linking people to the gBox site to buy their artists’ music. gBox will be expanding to other forms of digital content in the future.

gBox is not only a destination retail site for digital content. It also has an embeddable gift box widget to show off what you want to your friends. Your friends can then buy it for you directly from within the widget. It will be available as a general embed or specialized for 7 of the big social networks (no Facebook). Their current offering, music, will go for 99 cents per track and $9.99 per album (to stay competitive with iTunes). You have to have a gBox account to receive a gift, but not to buy one.

Considering people already pay 99 cents to send their friends virtual gifts on Facebook, I’d expect buying a real song to be an attractive proposition. It also seems like a missed opportunity for a network like MySpace, which runs on Snocap.

You can download the content after its bought for you, but need a special gBox plugin to control the downloads since some content partners (Sony, IODA) will be selling music with DRM. This makes the offering somewhat disappointing, because the plugin will only work for IE (FF on the way) and not on the Mac.

gBox was started in June as an angel funded spin-off from Navio systems. They’re a 20 person company based in Cupertino, California.

Microsoft Tafiti Is Beautiful, But Will Anyone Use it?

We’re pretty big fans of Microsoft’s new Silverlight platform. And just about everyone will agree that Tafiti, a new Microsoft search site built on Silverlight, is pretty darn easy on the eyes. They even got the Jackson Fish Market team (they are creating new visually stunning products) to help out on the project.

But will many people use it? It still uses Microsoft search, which in my opinion is not as relevant as Google or Yahoo. And the site, while pretty, runs very slow.

I think people want fast results served on a clean white page with as little clutter as possible (example). Bells, whistles and pretty graphics are fine, but functionality rules.

That being said, Microsoft isn’t out there claiming that this is their new search paradigm. It’s an experiment to show the power of Silverlight, and at that it succeeds.

Exclusive: BlogMusik To Go Legit; Launches Free & Legal Music On Demand

Back in September last year Michael suggested everyone check out BlogMusik quickly before it was shut down. BlogMusik is a service born in France that lets you search for mp3 files on the web and listen to them in streaming mode for free. At the time the service was young and had no particular licensing agreements. A few months later, the SACEM, the organization in charge of collecting payments for artists’ rights sent them a cease and desist letter with a view to stop the service. A lot has happened since (beyond a rather nice site redesign and addition of sharing features).

BlogMusik will announce tomorrow that they came to an agreement with the SACEM, clearing the service of copyright infrigement accusations. The details of this agreement are not are not being disclosed, but other deals suggest it is based on a revenue sharing mode. BlogMusik’s business model is relying on advertising and affiliate revenue coming from the sales of songs on iTunes and Amazon. This agreement should cover BlogMusik for any music they host wherever the music is listened from. However they still have to come to an agreement with organizations representing majors and labels (Pandora had to face new webradio rates imposed by the RIAA). This is being taken care of according to the CEO of the company and new agreements should be announced soon.

All in all this is a good news for BlogMusik The company now has an opportunity to become a true free legal alternative to listen to music on the internet. Unlike Pandora this is a music on demand service where you choose the titles you want to listen to (although you have a smart playlist option to generate automatically radios out of a song or an artist).

BlogMusik.net will also change name and become Deezer.com. This is a good thing i had a hard time getting the UR/nameL right with this “k” in the middle (not mentionning the .net).

RadioBlogClub, another popular french service was forced a few months ago to change hosting provider following a complaint sent by the same SACEM. The service was interupted a few days and opened again as fresh as new. To date no official licensing agreement was made with the company.

Here are some of the most recent CrunchBoard job posts:

Peer to peer lending service Lending Club will close a $10.26 million series A round of financing from Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners tomorrow. This comes a few months after the company’s $2 million angel round. Coinciding with the investment, Jeff Crowe and Dan Ciporin (former ceo of shopping.com) are joining Lending Club’s board of directors.

Similar to other P2P lending sites (Prosper, Zopa, Kiva), LendingClub matches borrowers and lenders. However, LendingClub doesn’t work through their own website, but solely through Facebook on the application they launched at the F8 platform launch conference. Borrows and lenders a linked up using their “LendingMatch” system, which recommends loans based on credit and their social relationships to each other. The idea being that trusted relationships make lending more likely and defaults less likely. The application currently has over 13,000 installs.

Unlike Prosper, interest rates aren’t determined through bidding, but calculated based on the borrowers credit score, debt to income ratio, and amount of the loan. There are no hidden fees, and the interest rate is fixed for three years. In July the service surpassed $500K in loans. They recently claimed a little more than 4 out of 5 loans get funded and haven’t reported any defaults or late payments.

It’s still the early days for this industry, and as TC commenters point out, it’s very much a case of Caveat Emptor.

Damsels In Success: Networking For Professional Women

Damsels In Success has officially launched with a networking platform that is targeted strictly at professional women.

The service positions itself away from the usual range of social networking style clone sites by being more LinkedIn than MySpace and Facebook, with a dose of content chucked in for good measure.

Members are able to connect and discuss topics including job opportunities, entrepreneurship, mentoring, returning to work after parenting, gender issues in the workplace and more. The discussion forum is supplemented by a blog network of around 50 professional women who blog about issues related to…well, professional women. A job board also connects professional women with potential employers.

Suffice to say, being male I am totally unqualified to pass judgment on Damsels In Success. It’s certainly a well designed site with a clever name. Function wise it seemingly offers a variety of content that could make it a compelling site for professional women. I’ll let TechCrunch’s female readers be the ultimate judges in the comments.

Damsels in Success was founded by Harleen Kahlon, a former lawyer and executive recruiter, and is based in New York.

Facebook Integrates Book Swap Feature into Marketplace

Facebook has developed a book swap feature for its Marketplace application called Marketplace Book Exchange that enables users to buy and sell books from and to each other. Books are identified by buyers and sellers by their ISBN numbers, and curiously it looks as though there is no way to view all of the books offered in a particular network.

On the one hand, this appears to be a smart move for Facebook, as college students are fed up with buying expensive textbooks from their college bookstores. The Social Graph certainly lends itself to buying and selling items from others within a localized market, such as a college campus.

However, Facebook is not the first to try helping college students find better deals online. There are several websites, such as Campus Books and eCampus, dedicated to this purpose. There are even two applications developed on the Facebook platform - Swap Roll Book Exchange and Campus Book Exchange - meant to help Facebook users find books and other items that others currently own and are willing to sell or trade.

While these Facebook applications have a combined total of less than a thousand users each, they may have experienced a surge of growth as students return to campus this Fall. Now that Facebook has developed its own application for book-swapping purposes, these independently developed applications don’t have a chance. Moral of the story for Facebook application developers: if the idea behind your application is any good, expect to see Facebook develop its own application to supplant yours. Don’t expect them to just sit on the sidelines and watch.

Thanks for the tip Noah.

Stat Gaming Services Come To YouTube

The creation of automated friends and general profile gaming has been a part of MySpace for a long time now. The general idea is that by creating more friends and more data you are more likely to gain traffic for what ever it is you are ultimately trying to sell.

YouTube has been fairly immune from widespread gaming to date. YouTube Friend Adders have been around for a while, but given the nature of YouTube, adding friends doesn’t really deliver much in the way of tangible benefits.

A new package, Tube Automator, hit my inbox yesterday. Tube Automator promises to deliver real traffic and results to uploaded YouTube videos by automating the YouTube friend creation process, commenting process and rating process.

The theory is that to gain real interest for a video on YouTube, a video must hit the top lists on YouTube, which includes the most commented videos, most viewed videos and the top rated videos.

According to the Tube Automator site

• [the]Built in account creator creates hundreds of YouTube accounts for you, all you need to do is type in the captcha
• Gets your video featured on the “Top Rated” and “Most “Discussed pages” at YouTube
• Once your video appears on these pages, it gets a large number of page views which makes it appear in the “Most Viewed” section automatically

And just in case YouTube catches on, Tube Automater has the ability to post at random intervals “to make it look like real people have posted and voted” and “Supports proxies to make posts look like they came from visitors across the world.”

I have no idea whether it works or not. In their product demo video (screencast below) they show high rated videos that are claimed to have been successfully promoted using their software; some rated so highly they appear next to videos from well known folks such as Chris Pirillo.

YouTube fans can only hope that Google finds a way of blocking and cracking down on this style of YouTube gaming ASAP. As long as these sorts of packages continue to flourish, the validity of the top lists on YouTube is thrown into question.

Finding DRM-Free Music Online

Over the past half year we have seen arguably the most significant change in the online music industry since Apple launched their iTunes store in 2003. Following Steve Jobs’ open letter clarifying Apple’s position on digital rights management (DRM) in Februrary, major record companies have begun providing their music online free of piracy protection mechanisms.

The first major label to take the plunge was EMI Music, which teamed up with Apple in May to release its entire online catalog through a DRM-free area of the Apple music store called iTunes Plus. Also in May, Amazon announced that it would launch an MP3-only online music store with songs from major labels by the end of the year.

Just this week, Wal-Mart began selling unprotected MP3s of many Universal Music Group and EMI songs through its website. RealNetworks, MTV, and Verizon have also teamed up to launch Rhapsody America, a music service catered toward mobile phone users that will provide DRM-free downloads, in the near future. Even LimeWare, a P2P software maker, has recently announced that it plans to be part of the DRM-free movement (this time legitimately).

Some of the major music companies have been more tentative than others. EMI has thrown the most weight into the DRM-free movement by unlocking all of its online music. While Universal has agreed to release thousands of unprotected albums and tracks through several online retailers - RealNetworks, Google, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Amazon, and gBox - it has done so on a trial basis that will extend only until January 2008, at which point the company will decide whether it thinks DRM-free music boosts or hurts sales. Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group are still standing on the sidelines of the DRM-free movement and appear to be waiting to see how EMI and Universal fare by opening up.

While the progression of things suggests that all online music will eventually be DRM-free, there’s no need to wait to get in on the DRM-free action. Check out the DRM-free online music retailers below to get better quality music that plays on virtually any handheld music device, on any computer, and with any music program. The retailers covered provide music from both major and minor labels.

iTunes Plus

Apple is the eight hundred pound gorilla, controlling something like 70 to 80% of the online music retail market. CEO Steve Jobs predicted in May that over half of the songs provided through the iTunes Store would be DRM-free by the end of this year.

While most of us are familiar with the iTunes Store, you may not have noticed the discreet link to the iTunes Plus sub-store under “Quick Links” on the store’s homepage. iTunes Plus provides 256kbps DRM-free AAC files for $1.29 per song or $9.99+ per album. That’s a 30 cent per-song premium over DRM-protected songs sold through the iTunes Store.

Already bought a ton of music from Apple? You can upgrade your DRM-protected collection to DRM-free for 30 cents per song, 30% of the current album price per album, and 60 cents per music video. Of course, you’ll only be able to upgrade those songs and videos in your collection that are offered through iTunes Plus.

Artists available on iTunes Plus include Coldplay, The Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra, Gorillaz, and The Beastie Boys.

WalMart

Wal-Mart may not be as sexy as Apple but the retail giant does provide DRM-free music from both Universal and EMI. On Tuesday, Wal-Mart began offering 256kbps MP3 versions of much of its music for 94 cents per track or $9.22 per album. These DRM-free offerings are in addition to Wal-Mart’s previous 128kbps DRM-protected WMA files for 88 cents per song or $9.44 per album.

One big downside to Wal-Mart’s online store: you can only download music using a Windows machine. This limitation alone will make it very difficult for Wal-Mart to compete with Apple for mind share.

Artists include Amy Winehouse, Maroon 5, Pink Floyd, Nelly, and Bon Jovi.

gBox

Feeling generous? gBox, which we covered recently, lets you buy DRM-free music not just for yourself but for others as well. gBox users can create music wishlists that can be embedded in other websites and used by friends, family, and lovers to buy music for the list creator.

Universal is the one major label that has agreed to sell music DRM-free through gBox. Songs are 99 cents each and albums are $9.99 each.

Unfortunately, as with Wal-Mart, Mac users who would like to download from gBox are out of luck. This will put a damper on gBox’s otherwise highly viral business strategy of allowing wishlists to be embedded in social networks.

eMusic

You may not have heard of eMusic but the service, with over 2.5 million songs available, is second only to iTunes when it comes to online music sales. Founded in 1998, eMusic was the first company to sell MP3s, which it continues to do on a subscription, rather than per-unit, basis.

Subscriptions come in two flavors: $9.99 per month for up to 30 downloads per month, or $19.99 per month for up to 75 downloads per month. The coolest thing about their subscriptions: once they end, you still get to keep your music, unlike with other subscription services such as Napster. New users also get 25 songs for free.

While eMusic has a long tradition of selling DRM-free music, they still have yet to get in on any major label action. You won’t find any music from Universal, EMI, Sony BMG, or Warner here. But if you eschew popular music anyway, eMusic could be perfect for you.

Audio Lunchbox

If you like eMusic, you’ll probably like Audio Lunchbox as well. The company’s more than 2 million songs are DRM-free and completely indie.

Customers can choose to pay for their music on a subscription or per-unit basis.

Subscriptions range from $9.99 per month to $250 per year. On a per-unit basis, songs are 99 cents each and albums are $9.99 each.

All downloads are 192kbps VBR MP3 files.

AmieStreet

AmieStreet, which we have covered many times, like eMusic and Audio Lunchbox provides DRM-free songs from artists without major label contracts (although, AmieStreet has teamed up with Nettwerk Productions to provide music from big names like Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan).

The most interesting thing about AmieStreet is its pricing scheme. Tracks individually cost anywhere between 0 and 98 cents. Music offered on the website starts off free but goes up in price as more people download it. Therefore, the price reflects the actual popularity of the track in a similar spirit to an auction.

The tracks sold on AmieStreet are always in MP3 format, but the bit rate can vary as artists contribute songs directly to the website.