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.

Eventbee: AdSense for Events Has Busy Plans

Eventbee an event management startup out of Sunnyvale, CA has been a busy little bee lately. They are rumoured to be launching two Facebook apps (one for event registration and one for event recommendation) in the next week or so (who isn’t?). They are also developing a channel on Ustream.tv to cover local events. The company provides a great package of event management tools including online registration, email marketing (souped-up spam) and online event promotion.

Their online event promotion tools include a nifty service called Event Network Listing that can only be described as “AdSense for events.” The service lets event planners for a fee list an event on any site or blog in Eventbee’s growing partner network. The partner network consists of sites and blogs that have AdSense-like code embedded on their sites. This allows for highly targeted and controlled event promotion. You can see Eventbee’s network event listings in action on Rajesh Setty’s LifeBeyondCode.

Eventbee partners get paid in two ways. First, they get an initial listing fee for each new listing that they get to set in advance. Second, when event ticket purchases are initiated from their site they receive a commission. The commission amount is set in advance by the event planner. Eventbee keeps 29% of the total earnings partners make.

Event planners can create customizable event pages on Eventbee’s site just like you can with Eventbrite (see our Eventbrite TC20 page here). Tickets sold from event pages start with fees as low as 1.45% of ticket price, plus a minimum fee of $0.25. RegOnline and Acteva also offer online event registration.

Eventbee’s glorified spam, I mean, email marketing service is tightly integrated with their online registration. You can create beautifully designed emails by importing HTML code or using their WYSIWYG editor. The service allows you to track bounced emails, opened emails and online registration URL click-throughs.

They currently have over 6,000 event managers. They are self-funded with CEO Bala Musrif claiming to be profitable since 2005 with no plans for raising money.

Saturday Morning: I’m Watching Tubecast

Good find over at Go2Web2 - Tubecast.tv is a new Internet video startup that, like others, is building a user interface layer on top of the online video services like YouTube, Veoh, etc.

For the most part the site has grabbed a lot of content from those sites and organized it into channels ranging from music videos to martial arts. Videos are shown on a schedule like normal television, although you can skip ahead.

What’s cool about it is that you can watch videos full screen with a click, and browsing to new content is much easier than using the video sites directly. This isn’t for searching, but it’s an excellent time waster if you want to browse pre-selected content.

What I like best about sites like this is that they are completely browser based and no download is required. I’m thinking Joost is going to have to move in this direction eventually. They can offer lower quality video via the browser, saving the higher definition content for the P2P application

The site’s blog is here.

NoSo - Backlash Against Our “Always On” Culture

“Meet no friends, attend no events and make no connections.”

NoSo, short for No Social, is more of an art project and cultural backlash than an actual startup. You join, get a user number (everything is anonymous) and then create and/or join “NoSo’s,” which are held wherever the organizer chooses to have it: parks, cafes, street corners and other public places.

Other users come, but people “meet without meeting.” Users arrive alone, unplugged and aren’t allowed talk to anyone, presumably taking comfort in the fact that other NoSo users are there sharing their experience. “Allow the NoSo experience to envelope you,” the site suggests. The video on the home page of the site describes the other details. A sample event is here.

It’s an obvious play on Flash Mobs, although, of course, without publicity.

This also appears to be a semi-serious endeavor.. The NoSo founders (Artists Christina Ray and Kurt Bigenho) were interviewed by 10ZenMonkeys:

We invite people to take a break from their every day experiences carrying around laptops and cellphones, and give them the chance to just disengage from the noise, the social network, the constant communication that’s going on around us all the time. We let them just experience the absence of that — the feeling of being without all those distractions. And a NoSo could happen in a number of different places. It could happen on a street corner, or in a cafe, or in an installation in a gallery setting.

LendingClub To Close $10.26 Million Series A

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 wit 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.

USAToday Says Traffic Way Up

Less than twelve hours after I posted that USAToday’s traffic appears to be going the wrong way, they issue a press release saying traffic is way up.

USATODAY.com, recorded a 20% year-over year increase in traffic for the month of July 2007 and a month-over-month growth of 24% according to Nielsen/NetRatings. It was also reported that more than 10.6 million unique visitors came to USATODAY.com in the month of July.

Much of the increase was attributed to the Simpson’s Movie (the site held a contest around it) and an exclusive interview with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

This was issued way too fast to have been a response to my post, so the timing is coincidental. I also received an email from Pluck CEO Dave Panos, who says that their social networking tools are doing very well on USAToday’s site. He says “The results that USA Today has received from our social media tools has been absolutely phenomenal and usage continues to skyrocket each and every month. I wish I was a liberty to give you the specific metrics — but they are staggering.”

Well, if the results are indeed “staggering,” (in a good way) the Comscore data must be pointing the wrong way. That’s good news for USAToday, and even better news for Pluck.

But the situation isn’t certain. The Comscore data I posted only went through June. The data released today is for July. A 24% traffic increase from June to July is too much of a jump, too. As they said in the press release, the Simpson’s contest and the Rowling interview probably helped drive most or all of the gains.

What would be ideal is if USAToday or Pluck published a case study on the results of the social network experiment to date.

TechStars Demo Day - Class of 2007

Y Combinator wasn’t the only incubator to demo their most recent startups today. Colorado-based TechStars also brought their startups on stage - ten of them - to give the audience a first look at what they’ve been up to all summer. Each startup gave 5% of their equity in exchange for $15,000, operational support, office space and mentoring.

Most of these companies are unlaunched and seeking additional angel funding (exceptions are noted). Here are our notes on each - and see Don Dodge for his take:

EventVue builds social networks around conferences (see confabb, an existing competitor). The idea is to let people connect before, during and after conferences in an online space, to add to the physical interaction at the conference itself. The company plans on generating revenue by charging an affiliate fee for each new registration. They are currently looking for $150k in funding.

Intense Debate - see our previous coverage. Intense Debate is a souped-up blog commenting widget that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Currently installed on 30 blogs. Installing the plug-in on your blog (WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad) adds threading, comment analytics, bulk comment moderation across all your blogs, user reputation, and comment aggregation. They are looking for $500k in funding.

socialthing! is an ambitious project that simplifies the management of digital content (blogs, photos, music, friends, social networks and links). Users can also synchronize information from and to various social networks from their profile page. Strong viral component. Revenue from advertising. Raising $500k.

J-Squared Media has launched their “Sticky Notes” Facebook application. It has 1.7 million users after six weeks, who have sent over 4 million sticky notes. They are working on several other related Facebook applications and are cash flow positive with $30,000/month in revenue from cost per action advertising. Not seeking funding. More here.

Search-To-Phone is a mobile search service via voice. Call and leave a voicemail asking about a product or service. The request is then routed to the appropriate business to call you back with information and/or a special offer. Built on TellMe and Gold Systems technologies for voice recognition. They’ve signed a business development deal with Excell Services to provess 10 million calls. They are looking for a small capital investment and more partners before launching.

Villij is a recommendation engine that analyzes your online life (social networks, blogs, bookmarks, etc.) to find people who may have similar interests as you. Raising $500k.

MadKast has the honor of being the first TechStars startup to launch. Our previous coverage is here. They’ve made a dead simple way to increase distribution for your blog with one line of javascript or one click for Blogger and TypePad. Once the widget is installed, readers can send a blog post via email, mobile MMS, or social bookmarking networks to friends. They are raising $300k in capital.

FiltrBox is a content monitoring and filtering service for blogs, news sites and other websites. Content is filtered by topics, keywords and context and then delivered to the user via RSS, email and/or text messages. Filters can be adjusted via sliders and will learn what you like over time. Raising $500k in capital.

KBLabs is developing Facebook applications and widgets. Wah! Cool was their first application, which launched four weeks ago. It now has 100k subscribers and is generating 1.5 million page views per week. Other applications include Post Secrets, Motivate Me and Track Bot. The founders are going back to college this Fall but will continue to consult and build Facebook applications. They are not looking for funding.

BrightKite serves location based notifications (”place streaming”) over email, instant messaging of text messages. The idea is to stream content about a place, from a place. Friends are alerted when you are nearby. You receive offers from local businesses. Etc. Targeted towards conferences, bars, parties and public places. It is also a platform for third party applications. Raising $500k in capital.