Polyvore To Tempt Fashionistas To Create, Then Spend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Does Google’s Equality Drive Extend To Old People?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MuseStorm Debuts Widget Engagement Platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.