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.

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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.”