SF Chronicle Trims Business Section; The Best Are Gone

We all knew big layoffs were coming at the San Francisco Chronicle, but I had hoped that they’d try to keep at least one of the business/tech writers that is responsible for my occasional purchase of a copy of the paper. No luck.

The paper that is losing $1 million per week could fire every journalist it has on staff and still not break even. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying. 80 reporters, photographers and copy editors plus 20 in management will be gone by end of summer.

And the best reporters aren’t waiting around to see who gets laid off. They are walking out the door, into better jobs.

Jessica Guynn and Dan Fost are gone. They the reporters who were regularly attending events, talking to tech execs and developers and generally gunning for the interesting stories. Both resigned. Fost is freelancing. Guynn got a raise and a new job at the L.A. Times covering silicon valley.

Ellen Lee, Ryan Kim, Verne Kopytoff and Tom Abate remain to cover business and technology. They are fine writers, but the loss of Guynn and Fost is a serious blow to the newspaper. I found that when I was reading an interesting story in the Chronicle, it was usually written by one of them.

One bit of good news. David Lazarus, the brilliant strategist who suggested that only newspapers are qualified to do “real” journalism, is among those who’ve left. I’ll miss his occasional rants, but his blog-hate wasn’t helping the newspaper.

Al Saracevic, who’s taken an occasional public shot at TechCrunch, was promoted to Business Editor - he now controls the entire business section of the paper. Al is an incredibly nice guy but, like Lazarus, he’s firmly in the “does’t get new media” camp.

These losses may have made the bottom line look marginally better for this fast sinking ship. But losing the talent isn’t going to make people want to read the paper. They should have done everything they could to have kept Fost and Guynn.

Scrybe Closes Series A

Scrybe, the online/offline calendar and organizer, has closed their series A round of financing from Adobe Systems Incorporated and LMKR. In what is becoming an annoying trend, the company is not disclosing the size of the round.

You’ll probably recognize the company from the somewhat viral product demo that swept the blogosphere last October. Since then they’ve been through a private and public beta.

Scrybe is a Flash-based organizational and productivity tool that works both online and offline. It consists of multiple calendar management, to do lists, web clip bookmarklet, contact list (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or Outlook importing), and The system operates offline by caching your changes and then uploading when the system reconnects. Zimbra and Google Gears provide similar online/offline products.

The driving principle behind the application is usability. Scrybe’s main selling point is that the application retains the context of the data that you’re working with by “zooming” instead of flipping to the data. One example is the calendar. The cells of the calendar expand and contract as you edit a week, day, or hour more closely while still showing the details of the surrounding days. See the extended video below for more details.

Pickle Purchased For $4.1 Million

Photo and video sharing site Pickle.com has been purchased by Scripps Networks for a reported $4.1 million. Scripps is the company behind many lifestyles brands like DIY, the Food Network, HGTV, and Great American Country. This is their second web purchase after Recipezaar last month. We covered the site’s launch last June.

Pickle is different from a lot of other sharing sites in that it relies heavily on email and mobile phone submissions to personal and shared project pages. It’s essentially a multi-modal service for dumping your content into a bucket of content that you can expose through their widget. The service supports uploads of photos and videos from computers, mobile phones or digital cameras to any Web site. Scripps plans on incorporating the product into supporting content sharing across their existing lifestyle properties. It was created by an Arlington based company called Incando.

You can see an example of their content sharing widget after the jump (auto-plays).
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Email Attachments Are So Uncool

Online office suite Zoho released another product tonight, called Zoho Viewer. It is similar to Scribd (and the upcoming Docstoc) - upload an office or PDF document for easy viewing on Zoho’s website or embedded into other web pages.

Zoho Viewer is different than Scribd, though. With Scribd, documents are public by default (there is a private option). Zoho isn’t looking to create a community around documents like Scribd does. All documents are private and you must know the URL to view them. They are not listed in any directory or searcheable. So it is useful primarily to quickly upload email attachments and other documents you want to share with a few people but not the whole world. Viewers can also quickly download the document in its original format.

See the video below for an overview of Zoho Viewer. As an aside, I really like Viddler, which Zoho used to host the video. The quality is a lot better than YouTube and the player is very well done.

Powerset Releases Growth Models To Public

New natural language search engine Powerset, still in pre-launch stealth mode, has had a ridiculous amount of press this year. And while some have said there is too much hype around this company (even me), you have to give them some credit. They are certainly open with their plans, and willing to experiment with new ideas.

An example: they announced Powerlabs, a sandbox for users to suggest and give feedback on future Powerset features. People who sign up for Powerlabs are also promised early news, at least an hour before it is posted on the Powerset blog.

Another example: In May Powerset COO Steve Newcomb talked about how the company was predicting future growth, and posted data on their model on the company blog. When readers bravely requested that Powerset release the model itself, Newcomb complied, saying it would be made available this summer. In a post on his personal blog he said the reason for sharing the models was to show that the company intends to be open and give users unfettered access to information:

As I mentioned before, opening up our modeling techniques is part of a larger goal to begin the process of changing our image of a secretive stealth startup to a completely open company that gives you unfettered access to our product(s), the ability to help us design them and to provide insight into the way we think inside of Powerset.

Today, Powerset published the first in a series of models, with a Flash interface. Company-specific baseline assumptions have been removed or altered, but most of the industry assumptions remain intact.

Neal Mueller (Powerset Product Manager) walked me through the models and how they work. This first set helps a company that intends to index the web whether it is better to purchase, lease or create virtual servers on Amazon EC2. Assumptions about the size and refresh frequency of the index can be changed. Since the model is forward looking, it also makes assumptions about future server power and cost reductions from Moore’s Law.

All of the assumptions can be altered in the Flash interface, and the models can be embedded into other websites (although I could not get it to properly embed here).

Mueller says that at least two more dashboard models are coming - one for unique user forecasting and another one that they are not yet disclosing. The company is asking for feedback on the models, and will clearly take it seriously. Newcomb’s personal email is listed on the front page and he requests that feedback come directly to him.

Google Street View Adds Four Cities

Google continues to add cities to its Street View maps product that launched earlier this year. You can now view and stroll through high quality photos of most of the downtown areas of San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando. Nine cities are now covered - click on the camera icons to dive into the city and see it.

Microsoft is working on competing products, but they are not as elegant or easy to use. See our coverage of Street Side and Virtual Earth 3D.

Hearst Acquires Kaboodle for $30+ million

This is the second recent acquisition announcement for Hearst Interactive Media - UGO for around $100 million last month, and tonight they are announcing the acquisition of Kaboodle, a social shopping service that launched in late 2005.

Kaboodle, founded by Manish Chandra, Keiron McCammon, Chetan Pungaliya, closed a key distribution deal with eBay a year ago. Comscore numbers show rapid growth, with 2 million or so unique monthly visitors currently.

The acquisition price is not being disclosed, but we’re hearing it was somewhere between $30 - $40 million, all cash. The company raised three rounds of financing totaling $5 million from Shea Ventures, Kanwal Rekhi, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, Garage Ventures, Georges Harik, Rajeev Motwani, Iggy Fanlo and others.

One other thing we’ve heard - investor Ron Conway was “instrumental” in putting this deal together.

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