There’s More To The FaceBook Traffic Story

Om Malik says Facebook traffic is tanking, based on the September Comscore data which shows a 9.3% decline in uniques v. steady uniques at MySpace.

There’s a problem though - he’s showing unique visitor data but talking about traffic. The Comscore data for U.S. traffic shows only a 4% decline, from 15.2 billion to 14.7 billion page views. MySpace declined 2% in that same period.

And the data is also only taking U.S. traffic into account. Over the last year, non U.S. users have grown to become more than half of Facebook’s total audience. Comscore worldwide data runs a month behind U.S. data, so that information is not yet available for September.

But the bottom line is, there isn’t enough information yet to make any kind of definitive statement about Facebook traffic. It’s also worth noting that something very similar may have happened last year (a September dip in traffic) At the very least we need to wait for the international data.

Data is below - unique visitors is top, below is page views.

Wikipedia Hits Mid Life Slow Down

We posted yesterday on the move by the Wikimedia Foundation to relocate from Florida to San Francisco, but aside from the obvious conclusions that the move would allow Wikimedia to tap into the superior developer community out West, there may be another reason as well: a mid life slow down.

It’s tempting to call it a mid-life crisis, but it’s far too bland for that label. Robert Rohde has put together a statistical analysis on Wikipedia activity and has discovered that things are rapidly slowing down on Wikipedia after years of astronomical growth.

According to Rohde, since the beginning of the year the rate of editing articles has declined 17%, new account registrations are down 25%, user blocks are down 30%, article protection is down 30%, uploads are down 10% and article deletions are down 25%.

Rohde also has also put together some graphs here that show that an increasing number of edits are reverts (now at 20%) as opposed to the addition of new material, which he aptly calls “Unproductive Article Edits.”

Exclusive: MapQuest Plays Catch-Up With Launch of Beta

AOL’s MapQuest may be the market-leading map site by a long shot (with 50 million monthly visitors versus 30 million for Google Maps), but it is still playing catch-up when it comes to features, functionality, and mash-up capabilities. Today, it finally took a big step into the modern Web era with the launch of MapQuest Beta. This is not just a sandbox where MapQuest can safely play with the newest Web 2.0 toys. It’s the new face of MapQuest and by the end of the year will take over the main site, which still remains a very 1.0, page-based destination. MapQuest Beta, in contrast, is built on Ajax, and is thus more of a single-pane experience. I got a sneak peek.

Here’s a screen shot of the new MapQuest:

picture-242.png

. . . versus what you see today:

picture-240.png

Despite the improvement, the new MapQuest is still pretty bare bones at this point. You can see the map and driving directions in different panes on the same page, and can also create routes for multiple cities (same as on Google Maps). Or, you can collapse the directions pane so that the map covers the entire page. The search and navigation has been simplified to a one-box approach. You can save maps and routes, and share them with people. And you can print out the exact map image easily at the zoom level you want. There is nothing earth-shattering here, but it adds up to a much-needed upgrade for MapQuest. You can read more details here on the new MapQuest Beta blog.

Over the next few months, though, expect to see new features rolled out at a rapid clip, about every two weeks You will soon be able to drag the location pins around to read what’s underneath (they will remain connected to the spot they are marking by a thin line). The maps will become embeddable in other sites. Live traffic updates will be added. And people will be able to annotate the maps. Again, many of these features are already available on Google Maps or Yahoo Maps.

picture-239.pngBut MapQuest still has the biggest market share, and that share is not yet declining (see chart). Given all the innovation going on with online maps these days, that market share is extremely vulnerable. Now MapQuest will be based on a new technology architecture that hopefully will allow it to respond more nimbly to the incredible diversity of map features and applications that are out there. Still, don’t expect it to do anything too crazy. It’s got 50 million mainstream users that it does not want to alienate. My prediction is that it will remain very much focussed on driving directions and other routing applications, which is its strength. I don’t think we’ll be seeing too many geo-tagged videos on MapQuest. Instead, it will deploy Web 2.0 features to improve its core mapping functions and deepen the loyalty of its existing users. Imagine how grateful they will be when they realize they no longer need to be stuck with a user interface from 1999.

Does Chess Need to be Crowdsourced?

A new site that just launched today called CrowdChess aims to answer that question. You log on and sign up for a game. Each side is made up of teams of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people. Anyone on a team can suggest the next move, and the move that gets the most votes is the one that is played out. (Here are the rules. If anyone reading this ends up playing, please report back your experience in comments).

I am all for tapping into crowd intelligence, and the Web is letting us do that in very interesting ways (see Digg, Wikipedia, Threadless, Freebase, Wikinvest, Kaltura, LingoZ, ZiiTrend, etc.). But does everything need to be crowdsourced? I wonder if a group of amateurs playing CrowdChess will ever be able to beat a grandmaster (or the modern-day version of Deep Blue, for that matter)?

Or will technology, in this case, take something beautiful and destroy it. Can’t two people just sit in a room and play chess?

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Plaxo + LinkedIn + iPhone = Brilliant

TechCrunch has been hard on unified address book provider Plaxo in the past, and probably with due cause, given their previous spam promoting ways, but I am now reevaluating that view based on Plaxo Sync.

I wrote about Plaxo’s improved Sync features back in June; although it sounded good I didn’t really have cause to use it then. Confronted with a “how do I sync various platforms, including the iPhone” problem I hit Google looking for a solution, and I kept finding user recommendations for Plaxo. Plaxo’s Sync tools support a variety of platforms, including Outlook, Internet Explorer (for Yahoo Address Books) Mac OSX and Thunderbird. Unfortunately they can’t sync with Gmail yet, but they can download your contacts from Gmail, although it does sync with Google Calendar.

Plaxo can also download LinkedIn contacts; LinkedIn does offer downloads/ plugins as well but nothing quite as comprehensive as Plaxo. We’ve looked recently at Facebook replacing LinkedIn as a business networking tool, however being able to access LinkedIn connections via Plaxo makes LinkedIn all that much more useful as it delivers access to LinkedIn contacts everywhere, including the iPhone (Plaxo imports into the Mac OSX address book, that can then be synced to an iPhone via iTunes).

The other selling point of Plaxo is the universal contact nature of the product; the ability for people to update their contact details on Plaxo and push that information out to other people is a definite positive.

The basic Plaxo service is free, including the sync functionality. The $49.95 upgrade adds Plaxo support (which if it works well you should never need to use) and duplication filtering. The duplicate filtering tool isn’t brilliant, it missed some duplicates on a test, but after running it a second time it found more; a handy feature but perhaps not worth the $49.95 annual fee.

Blyk launches ad-based mobile network

Blyk, the mobile virtual network operator offering free phone call minutes and messaging in return for sending customers advertising, launches in the UK today. Renting airtime from France Télécom’s Orange network and targeting only 16-to 24-year-olds, the network will target the ads based on a detailed profile customers will fill out on their website. It’s ironic timing. MySpace is today announcing an ad-supported mobile version of its site to get on the new mobile advertising bandwagon.

As I wrote earlier this month, the Blyk launch is timed for the start of the new school term in the UK. It’s a smart move but it’s not surprising. Blyk has a very experienced team, headed by backer former Nokia president Pekka Ala-Pietila and Antti Öhrling, a branding veteran.

Blyk is giving itself 3-4 months to make an impact on the highly competitive but mobile-obsessed UK market and will use real-time feedback on what “the kids” are doing to help brands with the targetting process. To make sure the audience is the right one, only 16-to 24-year-olds will be allowed on it, with cross-checks for age in place. Advertisers, including Buena Vista, Coca-Cola, I-play Mobile Gaming, L’Oreal Paris, StepStone and Yell have already confirmed that they will be among the first advertisers.

Blyk isn’t selling handsets, it’s sending out SIM cards, so customers will need an unlocked phone capable of MMS. Every month, Blyk users will get 217 free texts and 43 voice-call minutes as standard, on condition they opt in to receive up to six ads to their phone a day. It’ll cost 99p per megabyte to browse mobile sites.

Meanwhile the MySpace news coming out of Fox Interactive Media is just part of their overall plans to roll out mobile versions and start picking up ad revenues. FoxSports.com, the gaming site IGN, AskMen, Photobucket and its local TV affiliates will all have mobile versions in the coming months. Right now MySpace has subscription-based version of of the service with AT&T and Helio, but the new mobile sites will work on all US carriers.

The new mobile Fox sites will allow users to send and receive messages and friend requests, comment on pictures, post bulletins, update blogs, and find and search for friends. Initially, advertising will taker the form of sponsorships and banner ads, but the company says it plans to move into more targeted advertising based on registration data and local ads based on a user’s location via GPS.

The concept of using mobile advertising to subsidise calls and thus win market share is not new. Virgin Mobile in the US recently reported that 330,000 of its 4.8 million subscribers have agreed to view ads in exchange for free calling minutes. But basing an entire mobile service on this business model is to date untried, and it’s fairly obvious why. Mobile operators generate billions upon billions in voice and text revenues, yet mobile advertising is estimated to only generate $1 billion to $2 billion in revenues worldwide this year.
However, voice revenues are flat or falling (messaging never goes out of fashion, it must be noted) and the mobile ad market is expected to surge from from $5 billion to $11 billion within five years, generating much needed growth, says the IHT.

The UK market, in particular, is poised to get very, very busy in mobile advertising terms. Last week reports began to circulate based on a Guardian story that Google - a dead cert for a mobile ad play - was considering a move into the UK wireless market after the regulator Ofcom said it would auction off older 2G spectrum currently allocated to Vodafone and O2.

Your Truman Show Takes Lifecasting To Widgets

Lifecasting startup Your Truman Show will present a Video Map Widget at DEMO today, bringing their life story focused video product to social networking sites.

VideoMap can be placed and accessed by anyone using Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, YourTrumanShow or other sites. Its selling point is a graphical video relationship map, which, according to YourTrumanShow’s Founder & Chairman Arturo Artom, “Lets you see who links to you and who you link to as well as the video content you have both collected and may wish to share. VideoMap let’s you go from topic to topic and from life to life.”

See our previous coverage here. Aside from the clever name, Your Truman Show is trying to bring the traditional idea of a blog as an online journal to the lifecasting field. The chronological time line via the “V-Link” interface provides something different in an increasingly competitive vertical.

Chat With Mark Zuckerberg At TechCrunch40: The Video

One of the highlights of the TechCrunch40 conference last week was when I had an opportunity to sit down with Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. We talked for 45 minutes about some of the big projects Facebook has launched over the last year - including the launch of the News Feed in 2006, the Facebook Platform, dealing with user abuse by third party developers and much, much more.

Mark also made a surprise announcement about mid way through the talk - the launch of fbFund, a new entity that will make grants to facebook application developers.

The entire video is embedded above.

TechCrunch40 Launch Success: Ponoko

We are being flooded with emails regarding the TechCrunch40 conference - things we did right, things we did wrong (lots, apparently), and suggestions for next year. All are welcome, but what I like to see the most are the emails from presenting companies talking about what’s happened to them since they went up on stage last week.

I’ll be pulling all of the feedback into a wrap up post later this week, but today I received an email from Ponoko, one of the forty launching startups, that really made me feel like the whole thing was worth it. “We reached 1 million website hits within 23 hours 27 mins and 6 secs of launch,” said Derek Elley, the company’s chief strategy officer.

They also wrote a blog post noting some of the coverage the company got immediately after launching - there was a lot of it. So much, in fact, that the site went down for a while.

Ponoko is a cool way for designers to create new physical products and sell them. Users collaborate on design and prototyping all the way through to production. Check it out - the website is back up and humming.

How To Lose All Your Friends Immediately, In Real Time

Don’t even think of using this to contact me. Trumpia is an absurdly stupid new site that, like the efficient crank calling tool we once covered, will likely be used to annoy people far more often than it will be used for any useful purpose.

Here’s how it works: Register for an account and tell it the contact information for your soon-to-be-ex friends. Make sure you enter their instant messaging, cell phone and email contact information for maximum impact. You can then group your friends and message them all at once by texting a message to Trumpia. Your friends receive the message on all of their communication devices at the same (email, SMS, IM), ensuring that there is no way in the world that they can plausibly claim to have missed it. The video below shows how it works.

The idea is that a friend may miss an email or instant message, but they sure as hell won’t miss it if you hammer them at every single point of contact that they have. The act of contacting friends via Trumpia is aptly called “blasting”:

Blast people on their mobile phones, instant messaging and emails at the same time so you can contact everyone in real time no matter where they are, no matter what they are doing…Once you are signed up for Trumpia you can start blasting your friends right away, even if they haven’t signed up.

The only way to make the madness stop is to sign up for the service and tell it not to contact you any more. Remind anyone of Plaxo in the old days?

Contrast this with GrandCentral, which is a much more reasonable way for people so solve the problem of too many points of contact. Grand Central is elegant and useful. Trumpia is just stupid and I pray that PR people never hear about it.

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PlanHQ Still Tiny, But Getting A-List Attenti

Fuser: Manage All Your Email and Social Networking Messages in One Place

Another product that aims to simplify your digital lifestyle is launching today. Give Fuser access to your email and social networking accounts, and the website will organize all of the messages from those accounts in one place so you don’t have to bounce back and forth between multiple interfaces to handle them.

Fuser is still in beta and I ran into a few glitches while testing the site, but it certainly has promise. You can pull in accounts from any IMAP or POP email service and the social networks MySpace and Facebook. Once you have loaded your accounts, messages from all of them appear in one collective inbox. It’s impressive to see posts to my Facebook wall displayed like email messages next to my actual email messages.

Not only can you view messages from all of your accounts together, you can also reply to them as with a normal webmail client. If you want to reply to a Facebook wall post, you can hit reply and either leave a note on your friend’s wall or send them a Facebook message. It’s quite surprising how much of Facebook’s functionality Fuser has been able to extract out of that social network’s website.

Beyond organizing all of your messages in one place, Fuser plays around with the social network data to add a little functionality. You can view a “leaderboard” of your social network friends to see who communicates with you most frequently. Friends are ranked according to how many times they have sent you messages or posted on your wall, and you can view rankings according to certain time periods. Nothing terribly revolutionary, but their attempts demonstrate how it is still possible to mash up Facebook data from outside of the developer platform.

Fuser is free and supported by discreet AdSense advertisements. Check out Orgoo for another message aggregation service. Orgoo, which presented at TechCrunch40 last week, differs from Fuser by integrating instant messages, video conferences, and SMS messages instead of data from social networking accounts.

Demonoid Down, For Now

Our favorite torrent site is no more, at least for today and tomorrow. Demonoid, the previously fully-private torrent catalog and tracker is down, according to reports at TorrentFreak. Trackers have not been responding for over 24 hours, and the site is completely down.

Demonoid was the second largest tracker online, after ThePirateBay, and has seen its fair share of legal threats and takedown notices from copyright holders and associated groups. Demonoid shifted operations from The Netherlands to Canada back in June after their previous ISP balked at legal threats, but it appears that Canada is no safer as the likely cause of the downtime now is the Canadian ISP blocking the website.

Demonoid was our favorite torrent site, because membership and ratio tracking meant that it provided both a large catalog and much better speeds than alternate trackers. Recently they opened up the last 14 days worth of torrent listings to public access, making the site a quasi-private tracker. Demonoid accounts are also amongst the most requested in inviteshare, and its popularity has blossomed recently as it overtook other previously more popular public trackers which were beginning to fill up with fakes and spam.

Copyright groups have had recent successes against tracker sites and catalogs, no less than a few days ago TorrentBox was also taken down. But at the same time, the recent MediaDefender leaks showed that their effort to plant fakes in popular torrent sites had no impact on the most popular torrent sites including Demonoid - a credit to the communities at these sites who would flag fakes.

Takedown efforts seem to be in vain, as even the once much-loved Suprnova has recently made a come-back. The most that a takedown can accomplish is the intermediate interruption of service to that particular community, but as most BitTorrent users access and use more than one site, and the release groups continue unimpeded, the end results of these efforts from copyright groups are very under-whelming. Shutting down Demonoid for a few days will have no impact on the volume of BitTorrent traffic, and Demonoid will be back shortly and with more interest and new users than ever before.

MySpace Blocking Mobile Users In Australia

Mobile internet access is hot at the moment, from the iPhone through to T-Mobile’s New Sidekicks (maybe not so hot, but you can see CrunchGear’s coverage here), so you’d think MySpace would be providing unfettered mobile access to its user base? Wrong.

In Australia, mobile phone users not using the Optus mobile network have been blocked from accessing the new MySpace mobile site, being re-directed instead to the main MySpace page, which is even more unusable on a mobile than it is on a normal computer.

Optus has an exclusive provider contract with MySpace, and they are apparently not alone: the practice is widespread globally with MySpace blocking access from non-provider mobile phones in major markets, including we would presume the United States, although we are unable to confirm that at this time.

As I sit here browsing Facebook via the amazing Facebook iPhone site (oddly enough over the Optus network), I can’t help but ask the question: is MySpace Insane? Are they trying to milk every last cent out of the site before they are defeated by the ever popular Facebook, which I’d note have just passed MySpace by traffic in the United Kingdom. A sane strategy would be to provide easy access to as many people as possible, strengthening and growing your user base in an increasingly mobile world. Revenue would flow as a conseqeunce of having more users, instead of banning potentially the majority of them.

The mobile operators are presuming that users will take up their services to access MySpace which could work, but I can’t see millions of people switching because of it.

Although MySpace users miss out under this model, the biggest loser of all is MySpace. Greed isn’t good when you put profit before users, and denied access to MySpace via their mobile phones users will take their business elsewhere.

Technorati Launches Streaming Updates Service

Technorati has announced the launch of Technorati Topics, a live river of news stream that delivers a moving list of blog posts.

It replaces the just relaunched Technorati home page.

Technorati’s Dorion Carroll said that the changes were due to user feedback on “how [Technorati] should organize the vastness of the blogosphere and help people find the good stuff and help great bloggers be found….In particular, [there were] a lot of blog posts asking us to build what bloggers want.”

It would be easy to be unkind to Technorati, and some may suggest that the move today is a case of shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Technorati has lurched from one crisis to another this year, losing a CEO and downsizing as it attempted to be everything to everybody whilst failing to deliver a killer product any vertical. On the other hand, as a long time Technorati user it’s good to see Technorati going back to its roots as a blogging search engine. There is still some work to do in terms of improving the indexing, but in terms of focus Technorati Topics is at least a step in the right direction.

BlogTV Integrates Streaming Video into Facebook

Israel-based BlogTV will be releasing a Facebook application for sharing amateur video today.

The application, which you can get here, lets users stream shows through a widget on their profile pages. You can also browse your friends’ live streams, posted videos, and upcoming shows. Broadcasts can be viewed on a fuller canvas page with chatting capabilities built right in.

The company also says that users will also have the ability to promote their shows in their friends’ news feeds.

With this integration, BlogTV joins the ranks of uStream and Stickam, who have also created Facebook applications. We recently covered the handful of companies making it easier for people to stream video online.

Some statistics provided about BlogTV by the company itself:

* Average time spent on the BlogTV site is 20 minutes
* 350 live shows are broadcasted every day
* The most popular tag for recorded shows is “music”

Check out some screenshots below for a preview of BlogTV’s new application:

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Propeller Will Be The New Netscape Digg Clone

AOL has announced that Propeller.com will be the new home for the Netscape social media experiment. What was once considered a possible Digg-killer is now relegated to the backwaters of AOL.

In a statement, Tom Drapeau said that AOL was “working hard behind the scenes to ensure a smooth transition before we officially launch at this new destination,” which given the site isn’t live yet is code for we eventually found a spare domain to rid ourselves of our Digg clone.

It might be too early to Deadpool the Netscape Social news experiment yet, but without the type-in traffic and brand recognition of the Netscape name, the whole idea will struggle to survive; after all the Netscape name, and previously Jason Calacanis’ evangelism was really all the site had going for it. I’ve heard some unconfirmed reports that since the initial announcement the site has been bleeding staff and contributors as well; I give it 12 months max, or AOL flogging Propeller off during this time for a fairly low sum.

Wikipedia: 2 Million Article Milestone

Wikipedia had its 2 millionth English language article written on September 10th, the company says.

The two millionth article was on El Horminguero, a Spanish language television show. Wikipedia user Zzxc wrote the article.

Wikipedia, founded in January 2001, is six years old.

Hacks Make Their Way Into Yahoo Products

Yahoo Hack days are a lot of fun, and some pretty interesting stuff comes out of them. But a persistent question is whether or not they are much more than fun - and if any of these hacks ever make their way into actual products.

The answer, apparently, is yes. Tonight Yahoo is announcing two product feature launches that were originally created at Yahoo Hack Days. - Shop By Color and MapMixer.

MapMixer

MapMixer is a tool that lets users “pin up” their own image over Yahoo Maps. The two images are melded to create a hybrid version that can be saved and viewed privately or made public - users can also adjust opacity and perform other tweaks to make it look just right. The ideal use is to add a very detailed map to the existing, less detailed Yahoo map. The melded map can also be embedded in a non-Yahoo website. See images to right and below for examples.

Google Maps allows various types of annotations, but nothing exactly like this.

Shop By Color

Shop by Color is a new Yahoo Shopping feature that lets users search or narrow results by selecting one of 56 different color hues instead of typing the color in manually.

Like.com, which we’ve covered recently, also allows image searching with non-text as the input. What Yahoo is launching is a lot different, but it is exciting to see image search moving beyond purely descriptive text as the input. Images can be queried directly, whereas previously just the metadata around an image could be queried.

Both were developed at Yahoo!’s Q1 2007 internal hack day on March 23rd. Hayro Kolukisaoglu and Sundeep Tirumalareddy created Shop by Color, and Nimit Maru created MapMixer.

Mixx To Take A New Look At Social News

I generally don’t get that excited when I hear about yet another Digg-like social news site coming on the scene, but Virginia-based Mixx may be different. Part of the reason is the founding team, which has deep Internet and news experience.

The company is led by CEO Chris McGill, formerly the General Manager of Yahoo News and more recently the VP Strategy at USA Today. The site describes itself at its core as taking the best features of Digg, LinkedIn and My Yahoo. Look for a private beta launch soon, sign up now on the landing page.

The company is almost certainly funded but won’t yet disclose any details.

We have a few conceptual screen shots, below. It’s hard to understand these without a little bit of context, but my interest is piqued. Top screen shot is the unauthenticated home page. Second is the home page when signed in. Third is “groups” view. More on Mixx soon.

Yahoo Makes Tiny Acquisition: BuzzTracker

Yahoo has acquired news site BuzzTracker, a tiny news aggregation site, for somewhere between $2 - $5 million. Alan Warms, CEO of parent company Participate Media, will join Yahoo as Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo News (a job with a bit of a revolving door, apparently).

The price is lower than the $7 million that Fox paid for NewRoo, a similar service, in 2006.

As lovely as BuzzTracker is, its odd that Yahoo didn’t make a run for TechMeme, the heavyweight in the automated news tracking niche. Until now, BuzzTracker has mostly been known for leaving spammy comments on blog posts that talk about TechMeme or Technorati to get a little extra traffic.

Chris Alden Makes Himself Comfortable At Six Apart

Chris Alden just took over as Chairman and CEO of blogging infrastructure startup Six Apart. Barak Berkowitz, CEO since 2004, steps down. Berkowitz will remain with the company as an advisor.

Alden joined Six Apart a year ago as part of the acquisition of Rojo, a company he founded.

Six Apart was founded in 2002 by husband and wife team Ben Trott and Mena G. Trott. Mena was the original CEO.

A Offline Gmail Client: Sweet

A report from India’s Hindustan Times indicates that Google is prepping an offline version of Gmail.

It’s claimed that a client has already been designed, is in testing, and runs (not surprisingly) on Google Gears. Google has previously offered an offline version of Google Reader using the Gears browser plugin. Other companies embracing the Gears platform include Zoho.

Although the story is unconfirmed by Google at this stage, it would be fair to presume that an offline version of Gmail happening is a given, the only question is when it will be available. Google continues to put together its jigsaw puzzle of office functionality as it builds a serious Microsoft Office competitor.

Dopplr, Social Network for World Travelers, Gets A-List Seed Funding

Dopplr, an invite-only social network for sharing travel plans with friends, has announced early-stage financing of an undisclosed amount from Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group led by Saul Klein.

The social network bills itself as useful for people who travel at more than five times per year and want to inform friends of where they plan to go. The greatest benefit from sharing travel plans seems to come from discovering when friends will be in the areas of the world you plan to visit. If you decide to take a trip to London, for example, and one of your friends currently lives there, Dopplr will notify you of that fact.

While not yet open to the public, the company claims that Dopplr’s users have already shared 110 million kilometers (70 million miles) of trips to over 2000 cities around the world.

The investors in this round of funding have financed other notable companies such as Last.fm, Joost, FON, LinkedIn, Flickr, Technorati, Wikia, Xing, Stardoll, Six Apart and Netvibes.

Want or have an invitation to Dopplr? Head over to InviteShare.

Thanks for the screenshot David.

Aka Aki: Mobile Social Networking “Auf die straße”

Mobile devices remain social networking’s final frontier. There have been a few mobile applications coming out of the established players (Facebook), but social networking on the mobile phone has largely been an area for new entrants. They’ve included Loopt, Bluepulse, Zyb, MocoSpace, and SK telecom’s own Helio.

Aka Aki is a relatively new German mobile social networking startup running a private beta in Berlin. They aim to take social networking “to the street” (auf die straße), letting you discover and connect with other members as you go about your daily routine.

The service has two components: mobile and web. You can use the site as a standard social network (messaging, friending, etc), but the real differentiator comes from their Java/Bluetooth mobile application.

After you set up a profile with some salient details, Aka Aki uses your phone’s Bluetooth to find similar users who come within 20 meters (~65 ft.) of you. Then you can use the application to page through each of these profiles and connect with them. It’s reminiscent of Proxidate, the mobile dating service that alerts you of singles that enter within your Bluetooth’s range. Naturally, the Aka Aki is ideal for people who frequent crowded social spots such as bars, concerts, and parties.

However, the model comes with some significant drawbacks. Aka Aki’s can leave phones open to attacks over open Bluetooth connections and the users open to unwanted solicitations as they broadcast their profile everywhere they go. Aka Aki’s 20 meter limit makes it useful for random meetings instead of keeping tabs on friends. It also means you have to find yourself in those crowded spaces with other members fairly frequently to find it useful.

MetaCard: The World’s First Virtual World Credit Card

Singapore based FirstMeta has launched MetaCard, a credit card for Second Life that is claimed to be the world’s first virtual world credit card.

The MetaCard works in the same way as a normal first life credit card works. Applicants are provided with a credit limit and present the card when purchasing goods at merchants who accept the card.

MetaCard comes in two flavors: Basic and Gold. The Basic card is subject to a avatar check and provides a credit limit of L$5000 ($18.60) per month. A Gold MetaCard offers a credit limit of L$10,000 ($37.20) per month and can only be obtained by providing real world credentials and a real life credit card for automatic payments. Interest is charged at between 0.13% and 0.15% per day, which would we roughly 54% per annum, but compounding. Payments are 2% of the total amount used plus fees outstanding at the end of the month, and users have 21 days to make their monthly payment. MetaCard holders must also spend L$500 ($1.86) per month or face a monthly maintenance fee of L$300 ($1.12).

FirstMeta also offers MetaCard holders a savings account under the MetaSavings brand, offering interest rates of between 0.06%-0.09% daily.

Although the amount of credit offered by FirstMeta is (in real life terms) rather low, it will be interesting to see how services like these develop in online worlds given that in effect they are financial services that would likely be subject to real life laws. Whilst Second Life companies such as the World Stock Exchange clearly state that they are in effect pretend outfits (ie: games), and therefore are not subject to real world laws, FirstMeta is actually providing credit that is tied to a real world account; in effect by securing their credit services they have crossed the line into the real world.

(in part via SL Insider)

Can Google Do What Amazon Couldn’t? The Search For Steve Fossett In The Nevada Desert

When computer scientist Jim Gray was lost at sea earlier this year, Amazon stepped in to help. They arranged for a satellite sweep of the area and stored the images on their S3 storage service. They then created a task on their Mechanical Turk service to allow volunteers to scan the images to look for the boat. Thousands of people joined the search, but he was never found.

Now Steve Fossett, a 63 year old aviator, sailor and adventurer with a number of world records, has disappeared as well. On September 3, an airplane he was flying in Nevada failed to return. No one has any idea where he is.

His friend Richard Branson now says he will use Google Earth to try and find Fossett. Google may have taken new satellite photos over the last few days which may have information that can help find him.

With Gray, there was a lot of data to review and a boat appears as a very small number of pixels in a given satellite image. Looking for a plane, or even a weather disturbance, in the Nevada desert may not be much easier. Still, if Branson and/or Google call for volunteers to help with the search, I am sure that thousands will join the effort. And once again, Mechanical Turk would be a perfect way to organize the volunteers, even if they are looking at Google data.

Let’s all hope that this has a happier ending than the Jim Gray story.

Google Adds Search To Google Reader

The most popular online RSS reader (depending on what stats you believe) just got better. Google has announced that Google Reader now has search.

The search box is located directly above the reading panel to the right of the Google Reader logo. Users can search all subscribed feeds or search by category/ tag.

Google Readers biggest competitor Bloglines recently released a completely new version that has been getting positive coverage; adding search to Google Reader (a feature Bloglines has had since May 2006) shines the spotlight back in Google’s direction.

It may be completely unrelated, but at the time of writing anyway Google Reader is experiencing difficulties with showing read/ unread items in the reading panel, showing all items as unread since roughly the same time search went live. The sidebar list of tags though is working fine.

reader.jpg

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Google Books: Embed Book Clips Into Websites

Google Books released a useful new tool this morning - the ability to embed parts of public domain books directly into other websites and/or Google Notebook.

The clip from the image above is embedded below. You can choose an image or text embed (both are below). It’s useful for bloggers who want to discuss a certain passage of a book, although taking a screen shot and uploading it does exactly the same thing. The image embed lacks a link back to the original source material for some reason. The text embed has a link but the formatting isn’t so wonderful.

The Adventures of Oliver Twist By Charles Dickens OLIVER TWIST CHAPTER I TREATS OP THE PLACE WHERE OLIVER TWIST WAS BORN AND OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING HIS BIRTH AMOXG other public buildings in a certain town which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning and to which I will assign no fictitious name there is one anciently common to most towns great or small to wit a workhouse and in this workhouse was born on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader in this stage of the business at all events the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter For a long time after it was ushered into this world of sorrow and trouble by the parish surgeon it remained a matter of considerable doubt whether the child would survive to bear name at all in which case it is somewhat more

Breast Isn’t Best On Facebook

A dispute is erupting between breast feeding activists (known as “lactivists”) and Facebook over pictures of breast feeding on Facebook.

Facebook has taken down pictures of users breast feeding, and has even gone as far as banning users completely on the basis that the pictures constitute “obscene content.” Suffice to say the lactivists aren’t the least bit happy.

According to a SMH report, lactivists complained that their images were removed despite the fact they contained no nipple, questioning the logic of the Facebook obscenity accusations: “Where does the feeding stop and the boob begin?? A peek of nipple?” Where indeed.

Facebook spokeswoman Meredith Chin said Facebook does not prevent lactivists from uploading photos of themselves breastfeeding, but went on to say “Photos containing an exposed breast do violate our Terms and are removed”. Now I might be male so I have no recent first hand experience but I’m confused as to how breast feeding cannot include breasts?

The lactivists are calling for supporters to join their Facebook group Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!, which currently has over 7000 members.

Google Will Be Beaten By Facebook, Mahalo: Scoble

Above is part 3 of a 3 part Robert Scoble video blog series on “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years.” To see the other parts scroll on the player; Part 2 at around the 6 minute mark gets to the main points*.

Essentially Scoble argues that Google is in trouble because they are unable to adapt their algorithms and business model in the face of social search sites such as Mahalo and even Facebook; Techmeme is thrown in for good measure as well. Scoble argues that the search results from sites such as Mahalo will appeal to more people due to their ability to be socially constructed as opposed to Google’s computer generated results.

As much as I think that Jason Calacanis is doing a good job with Mahalo, and that he is creating decent content for those frustrated by current search technologies, I’m not even sure Calacanis would be so bold as to argue that his company is going to kick Google’s butt in four years time.

Scoble though does open the more interesting question: what is the future of search?

I won’t even start linking to the many, many search startups that are trying to answer that question.

Scoble seemingly forgets though that even if Google’s current model doesn’t incorporate social search, there is absolutely nothing stopping Google going out and acquiring one of these companies then incorporating their model within the Google product family. I’m also not convinced that we are yet to see the David to Google’s Goliath, but I could be wrong.

* for what ever reason Kyte insists on showing only the latest video in the embed so I was unable to include Part 2 straight up.

MyLiveSearch Not As Completely Useless As I Expected

I’ve been beating up on MyLiveSearch for months now. The startup promises to create the first real time search engine, where results are indexed literally as the search is conducted.

It all started back in May when the unknown startup got big press in Australia as a search startup that “Google is keeping a close eye on” (with no supporting evidence whatsoever). WebProNews called the service “revolutionary” based on a phone conversation with one of the founders and without actually testing it. The company, which sports a 1995ish design, also missed its much touted June launch date. All of this hype provided lots of ammunition for some easy trashing.

But now the startup is set to launch this Wednesday, and we’ve had a chance to test it over the weekend. While I don’t think the company has much of a chance of displacing Google as the king of search, they are innovating in the area of real time searches. And their approach to search is unique in that all the work is placed on the user’s computer.

First, MyLiveSearch is not actually indexing the web. Users must install a browser plugin (Windows/IE only) and then select a base search engine to start every search (Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft). Users can also select a different starting point, such as Wikipedia.

The first ten results for a query are pulled from the selected search engine or other starting point and displayed. Then MyLiveSearch begins to spider out from those sites and index other results, which are displayed as they are generated. All of the spidering is done from the user’s computer, though, not MyLiveSearch’s servers. This is the reason for the plugin requirement, of course. And it has the side benefit of putting basically zero resource strain on MyLiveSearch itself.

Overall the results are not super impressive. Google is indexing many websites nearly constantly now, so real time results are less important than they were a couple of years ago. As an aside, Google’s faster indexing time has also affected the blog search engines, which are really only useful today to show chronological or reverse chronological results - Google is indexing many blogs as fast or faster than they are.

But MyLiveSearch is attacking the search problem in a new way by pushing all of the work to the user’s computer. Users still get Google or Yahoo (or whatever they like) data for the top ten results, and then see real time stuff spidered from there.

There are still a number of bugs and annoyances with the service that need to be ironed out. Only one search can be conducted at a time and you can’t have multiple windows open using the service. You also can’t refresh a results page, forcing you to re-enter the query.

MyLiveSearch won’t be the most likely to succeed search engine to launch in 2007, but it probably won’t be the worst, either.

Amnesty Hypercube Brings Web Widgets To The Desktop

Mesa Dynamics has announced the alpha preview release of Amnesty Hypercube, a desktop platform for web widgets.

Amnesty Hypercube allows users to use web widgets, such as those provided by Google Gadgets, Pageflakes, Widgetbox and others on their desktop in a similar fashion to Apple’s Dashboard, Yahoo Widgets, Google Desktop and the Vista Sidebar.

The theory goes that there are “hundreds of thousands” of publicly available web widgets, flash games, and videos that are designed to run on the web; Amnesty Hypercube brings this choice and variety to the desktop.

Amnesty Hypercube includes a directory of over 150 web widget providers that can be browsed by category and explored from inside the application. Widgets from the directory can be imported automatically into Amnesty Hypercube via its “NoClick” technology.

Desktop widgets tend to be something people either love or hate. If you’re a serious desktop widget connoisseur and are stuck using something like Vista (which is a fairly dismal range of widgets) Amnesty Hypercube could well be for you. As a Mac user I don’t see the need quite as much, however using something like this does expand your widget options.

Amnesty Hypercube is available for both Windows and Mac, and is offered as freeware.

The Steve and Woz Lego Set

Get ready for the next mini run specialty lego set from Podbrix - this time it’s the “Young Woz and Jobs Playset” and goes on sale on Wednesday (8/29) at 6 pm PST:

Re-creating the early years of Woz and Jobs collaboration the Young Woz and Jobs Playset is a 300 unit limited numbered edition and features meticulous detail. What ideas was Jobs percolating in his subconscious back in 1972? The included mini thought bubble attempts to answer the question.

These tend to sell out quickly, so if you’re dying to have one make sure you log in right at 6 pm with your credit card in hand.

Podbrix is a three person team based in Maryland; the sets are designed by artist “Tomi.” The last set they sold was in August 2006…and these things tend to sell out in about 12 minutes. See Jackson Fish Market for more.

Magnify.net Launches Video Focused Ad Network

Video startup Magnify.net will today invite Magnify.net site owners to participate in a beta test of its new advertising program, the “AdShare Network.”

The AdShare Network gives site owners the ability to earn directly from their video channels, both from the network itself and by allowing users to deploy their own ad inventory.

We first covered Magnify.net in March; Magnify.net allows publishers to create their own video channels, and populate it with videos from other sites, including YouTube, Revver, Yahoo Videos and others. The new advertising network gives current and prospective users a better incentive to create video channels other than by offering a quality service: money. As the site relies on videos pulled from external services, Adshare Network is not offering video advertising, only traditional advertising that can be displayed around videos on the network.

Magnify.net recently passed 10,000 user generated video channels and hit seven million page views in July.

magnifyad.jpg

Clown Co. Gets Website and New Name: Hulu

This morning news broke about NBC Universal and News Corporation’s joint video venture, hitherto dubbed “Clown Co.”, after a press release was sent out by a Hulu.com representative claiming that “Hulu” was the new name for that venture.

Initially, I was a bit concerned that this could be merely a hoax, as no press releases were sent out by NBC or News Corp. themselves. However, after speaking with the Hulu representative, Christina Lee, and seeing the news spread across the circuit like vine, it does appear as though this announcement is authentic.

The Hulu website, shown above, simply solicits email addresses for a private beta to be launched in October. There is also an open letter from CEO Jason Kilar explaining the choice of “hulu” as a name: “Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building.”

Jason goes on to explain that the private beta will initially involve only a small number of people but will grow with time. Distribution partner sites will include AOL, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo.

With Hulu, NBC and News Corp. now have two placeholder video websites intended to eventually challenge YouTube, the other being Didja, a website for entertaining commercials.

Our previous coverage of Clown Co., er Hulu, can be found below:

* Wow - Clown Co. Got That $1 billion Valuation (still nameless though)
* Dear Clown Co.: Name This Thing Fast Before It’s Too Late
* News Corp, NBC May Announce Distributed YouTube Competitor Today; Google Scoffs

Thanks for the tip and help Jon Burg.

Update: Hulu is set to launch in the Fall around September and will focus on professional content and not take on YouTube directly as a viral video destination. The site remains solely an enterprise of the Fox/NBC joint venture, which raised over $100 million in financing from Providence Equity Partners. Videos will be played in their own embeddable branded player.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/17/tierranatal-connecting-mexicans-in-north-america/

Hispanic social network TierraNatal launched in July with a model that seeks to reunite Mexicans where ever they live.

The bilingual site focuses on location based networking with users being asked to specify their place of birth (or hometown) in Mexico. Users are encouraged to use the service as a way of keeping in contact with friends and relatives who might have moved elsewhere, such as the United States. Over 300,000 Mexican towns and cities are listed.

Design wise it’s one of the better social networking sites I’ve seen in recent times. The usual array of social networking features (profiles, pics, blogs etc) are combined with some decent looking graphics and a functional layout that works well.

The site competes with Spanish language/ Mexican focused version of MySpace and LatinoAIM Pages.

TierraNatal was founded by Liliana Townshend and was developed by San Diego based Digital Telepathy.

Some People Benefited From the Skype Outage

Alexa stats up to August 17 show a massive rise in traffic to Skype competitor Gizmo Project and a more modest rise for Grand Central at the peak of this weeks 36 hour Skype outage.

The SIPphone owned Gizmo Project offers a nearly identical package to Skype, but with added features including built in recording, and cross platform compatibility. Gizmo’s traffic tripled in the space of three days and rose to a rank of 8,561 in Alexa from a 3 month average of 19,102.

The Google owned Grand Central offers a one number everywhere telephone service. Whilst the service doesn’t compete with Skype in the softphone market, the service does provide functionality that competes with Skype services such as Skype In. According to Alexa, Grand Central hit a 4 week high on Friday with a 33% increase in rank over its 3 month average.

Google Takes Stake In Tianya.cn

Google has acquired a stake in Chinese social portal Tianya.cn.

Tianya.cn offers a variety of services including user blogs, classifieds, photo hosting, news, sports news and University information. The site is ranked as the 63rd most popular website in China according to Alexa.

As reported August 17, Google stated its intention to acquire 1 or 2 China focused internet companies and invest in 5 over the next 12 months. The investment in Tianya.cn would appear to be the first of those 5 investments. The percentage of Tianya acquired by Google, or the price of the purchase was not disclosed, although it is believed the stake could be as high as 60%

HiPiHi Seeks To Standardize 3D Worlds And Develop Interoperability

China’s answer to Second Life, HiPiHi, announced at the State of Play V conference in Singapore Monday its intentions to work towards standardized 3D worlds, with an aim of eventually delivering interoperability between various platforms.

HiPiHi said it would cooperate with “global leaders in the Internet and communication industry to establish a set of relevant hardware and software standards for the development of the 3D platform.” The company would then work with other 3D virtual world providers to finalize these standards with the goal of allowing users to interact and transact between different virtual worlds.

HiPiHi current platform is remarkably similar to Second Life in both looks and features, with users creating the world and being able to own land and objects.

Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life has recently taken some steps towards opening its platform, including open sourcing the code for the Second Life client, however the Second Life world has remained closed to 3rd party servers. Linden Lab has previously said that they have “a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups” (indeed, they called it inevitable) so it will be interesting to see whether they join HiPiHi’s initiative.

Zoho Goes Offline (in a good way)

Online office suite Zoho will launch offline functionality for Zoho Writer this morning, and other applications in their suite will follow shortly.

The offline functionality was built on Google Gears, an open source project launched by Google in May 2007. Users will need to install a browser plugin to take advantage of the functionality. After that, an option will appear in the navigation bar to “Go Offline.” The feature works with Internet Explorer v.6 and higher, and with Firefox (including Mac) v1.5 and higher.

For now they are offering read-only functionality offline. Read-write functionality will appear in 3-4 weeks, the company says. Zoho will also begin to roll out offline functionality for their spreadsheet, presentation and other applications in the coming weaks.

Zoho, which competes head-on with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, managed to launch offline functionality on their product before Google did. The fact that they are using Google software to do this makes the story somewhat ironic.

An overview video of the feature is below.

Greystripe Hits 14 Million Downloads Of Free Mobile Games

GreyStripe has passed the 14 million downloads mark on its free mobile gaming content site Gamejump.com in just over 12 months.

Gamejump.com’s model provides downloadable mobile gaming content ad supported and free in a market where paid downloads are the norm. Ads are displayed before and after each game.

Greystripe took $8.9million in Series B funding in May, in a round led by Steamboat Ventures, the VC arm of the Walt Disney Company; good credentials for a gaming content provider.

Gamejump.com features 800 games by 70 publishers and includes a variety of genres to appeal to different users. Gamejump has seen users download an average of 3.4 games each and the number of females users downloading games has been fairly close to the number of male users.

Greystripe recently signed a deal with Konami, the publisher of titles including Frogger and Dance Dance Revolution, that will see Konami’s extensive catalog of games being provided for free to Gamejump.com users. The paid mobile download industry likes to label free game services as delivering inferior quality; the provision of Konami content would seem to suggest that this isn’t the case, and certainly it’s a positive sign that the free ad-supported model of mobile gaming may actually be a winner.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/21/conduit-labs-closes-55-million-series-a-funding/

Conduit Labs, a yet-to-launch gaming virtual world, just closed a $5.5 million series A round with Charles River Ventures and Prism Venture Works. In addition to the financing, CRV’s Susan Wu and Prism’s Will Kohler have joined the company’s Board of Directors.

The details on the site are in flux and scarce. However, the service will be in the emerging space of “immersive online gaming meets social networking”. Their vision is to combine the best of social networking and online virtual world gaming, which Co-founder Nabeel Hyatt loosely termed as “Facebook meets World of Warcraft”. They don’t want to recreate a social network online, but rather marry existing networks (even perhaps Last.FM) with a 3D gaming experience. In the real world you can call up some friends and play a simple game of basketball. Conduit wants you to enable you to do the same thing easily online.

The product will be a 3D virtual world that runs on Flash through your browser. Once online you’ll get to connect with friends to play games. Flash will make the application more accessible than a lot of the existing 3D virtual worlds, which require long downloads. HiPiHi recently tried to help solve this problem by pushing for virtual world interoperability. They also want to make the games more accessible than existing online MMORGs aimed at hardcore gamers. The games aim to capture the casual social experiences of games like Wii Tennis or Guitar Hero.

The team behind Conduit Labs has a significant amount of experience with casual games and 3D worlds. Some of Conduit Lab’s co-founding members (Dan Ogles, Michael Sheidow, and Daniel O’Brien) served leading roles in creating games like Guitar Hero, Asheron’s Call, one of the first 3D massive multiplayer worlds, and the Lord of the Rings Online.

The company was founded by Nabeel Hyatt in April, while an entrepreneur in residence for Prism Venture Works in Boston, Massachusetts. They’re currently a team of 4, but will be expanding to 10 in the next 6 weeks.

Stocks.us: A TechMeme Clone For Stock News

tocks.us recently surfaced in the TechCrunch Forums. It’s an aggregator around public company stock news that has a suspiciously similar approach and look/feel as blog news aggregator TechMeme.

The site groups news items from major media (Reuters, WSJ, USAToday, etc.). Lots of stories = higher placement on the site. Newer stories are linked in the right sidebar. It updates every 15 minutes.

Like TechMeme, this will be a killer resource for people tracking breaking public company news.

The difficult part of building an aggregator like this is figuring out what stories are related and grouping them properly. TechMeme uses links between blogs. Since major news sites don’t link to each other, Stocks.us must be using keyword and semantic analysis.

New Playboy Social Network Built On Ning

Well, this is a big win for build-your-own-social-network Ning, which just raised a massive round of funding. The new Playboy social network we covered earlier today is actually built on Ning, not self-built code or one of the many other white label social networking options available.

Once you actually sign up for the site it becomes clear it’s Ning, since their pervasive toolbar remains at the top of the site. Users actually use their Ning address to log in. You must have a .edu address to get an invitation, but you can then sign up using any Ning account.

Whether or not this network is successful, it’s great validation for Ning.

Interview With Facebook’s Joe Hewitt, iPhone God

The Facebook iPhone application was a one-man job. Joe Hewitt joined Facebook when the company he co-founded with Blake Ross, Parakey, was acquired last month. He quickly got to work on the company’s iPhone app, which was released just a month after he joined the company.

Hewitt has been one of the key figures in figuring out some of the hacks around iPhone applications - dealing with no keyboard, the flip screen, etc. He has been a major contributor to the iPhone discussion group at Google and released his own framework and sample code, called iUI, that dozens of other developers have integrated into their own apps.

Nik Cubrilovic and I spoke with Hewitt for 26 minutes late last week to get his thoughts on the challenges and opportunities around iPhone web application development. Hewitt also talks about some of the features he’s like to see to make the iPhone an even better user experience.

Download it at TalkCrunch or listen to it in the audio player below.

Listen Now:

Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Update: Robert Scoble has a good video interview with Hewitt as well.

Honesty In Media

Credit where it’s due: Rupert Murdoch’s online news properties are at least now being honest.

This post admits that it has no news value other than to note that the MSM has further gone to the dogs…or cats as the case may be. “Meh watching yuz az a takeover target” perhaps? Will the new online honesty will policy extend to the News Corp owned MySpace: “yuz has yuk templates. ” and “Beware the Ides of Facebook.”

Update: was asked by email why this is relevant. News Corp owns MySpace along with a pile of other web properties, including the just recently acquired Wall Street Journal. News Corp web properties play an increasing large role in reporting on our industry, as well as participating in it.

MocoSpace Has Strong Growth; Race To Be MySpace For Mobile

Forget watching the big social networks slug it out for market share. People want to take their social networks with them when they step away from the computer. That means applications have to be mobile friendly.

Most of the big networks have mobile versions of their site, with stripped down functionality. Facebook has, hands down, the best mobile application if you happen to own an iPhone. But for the most part, competition in the desktop arena has limited the amount of attention any of the big networks are giving to the mobile world.

That might just give some runway to new startups focused solely on mobile. We recently covered ZYB, a Danish startup that just launched a mobile social network on the back of it’s mobile address book backup service. The specifics of their service largely limit them to Europe, where users have more freedom to add applications to their mobile devices.

In the U.S., one of the stronger contenders is MocoSpace, a Boston based startup that launched a mobile-only social network last year (see coverage at MobileCrunch from April 2006).

The service is very easy to use from a mobile phone. Registration is dead simple - it took about 20 seconds on my iPhone earlier today. Right away MocoSpace starts to suggest possible friends based on proximity, online status or random selections. You can then add photos and video from your phone (or upload them from a desktop/laptop computer), chat with friends, and create a stripped down “blog” which is similar to Twitter in functionality.

MocoSpace says they are serving close to 500 million monthly page views - which is pretty impressive since “almost all” of those page views are from mobile devices. They are also approaching 1 million registered users, and 6,000 new users sign up daily.

MocoSpace raised a $3 million in a Series A financing in January 2007. Investors included General Catalyst, Pilot Group and Michael Deering. The company has 15 employees (half in Boston, half in Israel).

If you are a startup targeting the mobile social networking space, we want to hear from you.

Orkut Redesign. Borrrrrring

When I wrote about the upcoming Orkut redesign yesterday I was hoping for something a little more…I don’t know. Inspiring? Instead we get new icons and rounded corners. I’d love to hear what some of the designers out there think about Orkut.

The new look for the second biggest social network on the planet is below. Here’s the old version. I’m underwhelmed.

See All Sex Offenders In Your Neighborhood

Vision 20/20 offers a free web based mashup of sex offender data and Windows Live Maps.

Users simply add their address, city and/ or zip code to the Vision 20/20 site, and then the locations of sex offenders in the immediate vicinity are displayed over a map. Clicking on each sex offender leads to a profile which includes the name, address, and crimes of the sex offender, as well as a mug shot.

It does seem like a rather logical use for a maps mashup, and it functions well. According to Vision 20/20’s publicity there is 650,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, now everyone can find out where they live.

I Want This In Photoshop Immediately

This image resizing and manipulation demonstration is sort of jaw dropping, particularly as the video goes on. The related paper, written by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan is available here.

CrunchBoard Jobs

Here are some of the most recent CrunchBoard job posts:

• Facebook Application Developers at Coolapps.com in New Hope, PA

• Director of Business Development at Truveo in San Francisco, CA

• Web Designer at BWE an IAC company in Charlotte, NC
  

• Java Guru at MTV Networks in New York, NY

• Experienced Web Hacker at Zivity in San Francisco, CA
  

• Java Technical Lead/Architect at The New York Times in New York, NY
  

• Software Engineer/Architect at CastTV in San Francisco, CA
  

• Business Development at Panache in Encino, CA
  

• Flash Developer at IAC/Dow Jones in New York, NY
  

• Director of Product Management- Also Director of Engineering at GreeneSearch in San Francisco, CA

http://www.techcrunch.com/

Skype Suffers Major Outage

Skype has suffered a major service outage that started from approximately 3am PST Thursday.

Skype advised that their engineering team had determined that the downtime was due to a software issue, with the problem expected to be solved “within 12 to 24 hours.”

The issue was serious enough to cause Skype to temporarily disable all downloads of the Skype client.

Skpe has had a very strong record of uptime previously and this outage is a first in recent memory. In comparison Twitter was down intermittently from 7pm PST Wednesday for around 6 hours, a fairy regular occurrence. Skype remained down at the time of writing as at 7:30am PST.

Google To Increase Investment In China

Google is looking to acquire “one or two Chinese internet companies” and will invest in five in the next 12 months as part of a continued push to increase market share in the worlds fastest growing internet market.

Google has previously focused on building partnerships in China, with Google technology powering Chinese search portals Sina.com, Soso.com and 163.com. Google also made a strategic investment in popular Chinese browser Maxthon in April.

The Chinese acquisition strategy for Google would not seem as difficult as might immediately be presumed; a number of the leading Chinese search companies are listed on the NASDAQ. Market leader Baidu sits at the less appealing (from an acquisition viewpoint) market cap of $5.73 billion, however lesser players are well within a more likely price for a Google acquisition; No 2 ranked search player* NetEase.com (163.com) has a market cap of $1.78 billion and third placed Sohu.com has a market cap of $1.08 billion.

Baidu.com currently dominates the Chinese search market with a market share of around 55%

* traffic rankings per Alexa May 2007.