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.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Google Will Be Beaten By Facebook, Mahalo: Scoble
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.
Monday, August 27, 2007
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.
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
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
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/
Monday, August 20, 2007
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.
Blogrovr Blog Recommendations: New And Improved
Keeping up with your favorite blogs can be somewhat of a chore. Robert Scoble talks about following over 700 feeds each day. But if you find that many feeds overwhelming, limiting yourself to a few blogs seems like the only option. Activeweave, however, has a solution.
Instead of searching your feed for relevant content, their Blogrovr browser plugin serves you blog posts related to the content you’re viewing. SphereIt has a similar technology that embedded with posts, like on this blog. The plugin was spun off from an earlier project from Activeweave called Stickis. The posts are taken from your favorite blogs and populate a sidebar in your browser. Today they released a new version of the plugin with an improved algorithm, personalized suggestions, and Google reader integration.
Blogrovr’s updated algorithm has significantly improved the quality and number of stories that show up. Their algorithm pulls in stories from blogs on my OPML feed and seems pretty on target. A look at one of the recent blog posts on the Skype outage shows how I get results related to Skype and the outage, even though there are not direct links between the stories. It’s not a destination like Techmeme for the tech blogosphere, but Blogrovr can scale to a large variety of blog topics.
The new version also supports blog discovery by recommending new blog posts that are highly related to what you’re reading, even if they’re not on your feed list.
The best feature enhancement has been the Google reader integration. Blogrovr now delivers blog posts related to what post you’re reading in Google reader, in real time. It’s still a bit slow in refreshing content, but a useful companion for Google reader.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Zivity: Silicon Valley Elite Dabble in Adult Content
Porn is big business, and the industry has been quick to adapt by copying successful features of new consumer Internet sites. But one thing we haven’t seen until now: respected Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors taking a direct interest in funding or running these sites.
The potential payoff from a successful adult site is clearly too high for Silicon Valley to continue to ignore the space, though. And San Francisco-based Zivity is going to be the first experiment out the door. The founders say Zivity isn’t porn, but that certainly depends on how you define the term. The primary content of the site is naked female models.
The company’s founders include Scott Banister, a co-founder of the recently acquired IronPort, as well as other technology veterans. CEO Jeffrey Wescott led security software architecture and scalability at IronPort, and co-founder Cyan Banister was also an IronPort exec. They’ve raised $1 million in funding, although they aren’t yet disclosing any investors other than Banister. Rumor has it that a number of former paypal execs may have invested.
Like Suicide Girls, Zivity is a social network surrounding pictures of attractive women. Users can log in and join the network and view non-nude photos for free. If they want have the clothes taken off, it costs $10 per month.
Paying users get 5 votes per month to give away to models that they like. And every vote from a user is money in the pocket of the model and photographer - they get 80 cents per vote received. The default split is 60 cents to the model and 20 cents to the photographer, but that can be negotiated by models and photographers who’ve achieved a certain level of status in the system. This is where Zivity differs substantially from Suicide Girls, which pays its models a flat fee for their content.
The company is keeping the look and feel of the site under wraps for now, but did send me the screen shot I’ve included here. They also confirmed this is a Flash interface for viewing the photos, although the site itself is built on Rails.
Zivity is raising a second, larger round of financing now, and will launch later this year. Beta accounts are slowing being given out now.
Previous Adult/Porn coverage on TechCrunch - see PornoTube, Eroshare, Heatseak (porn browser), Socialporn and others.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
CrunchGear Birthday Party - August 20
Hello, New York! On Monday, August 20, 2007 from 7pm until 11pm, we’re going to hold a super fancy birthday party at Red Sky in Manhattan. There will be a open bar — the CG staff will hand out drink tickets like madmen — and we’d love it if you all could join us. Read more about it here
.
Diet Television Trims Name, Takes $2 Million
Later this week, weight loss community Diet Television will announce it’s shortened its name to DietTv.com and raised a $2 million series A. The round was led by MentorTech Ventures.
The site consists of dieting resources and a social network. Their resources include a diet directory, videos, and articles. The diet directory consists of all sorts of diets rated by users and analyzed by professional nutritionists for various factors like ease of implementation, speed of weight loss and allowable alcohol consumption.
You can use their diet and exercise finder to construct the right weight loss program for yourself. Just tell the program what you’re willing to give up and it spits back the best plans to lose weight.
There is an accompanying social network where users can connect with other dieters, share goals and diets. Each user writes down their experiences and tracks their progress in a diet diary. A network seems useful because in an industry full of snake oil salesmen, you’d be more likely to trust a fellow dieter.
DietTv is part of the growing number of social health sites online which include: Wellsphere, Trianeo, DailyStrength, OurHealthCircle, RevolutionHealth, and many others. The formula is pretty straight forward: find people with a common problem and link them together for support.
Facebook Opens Up Their Data Feeds
Dave Winer is tracking some new features being released by Facebook that debunk the theories that the company is focused on building a completely closed silo of user data and news.
Facebook’s news feeds, launched last year to a lot of controversy, has proven to be a brilliant move. It gives users a constant stream of data on what their friends are up to, and help spread new memes through Facebook at a lightning quick pace.
But all that information was stuck in Facebook and there was no way to access it other than logging in and looking at your home page. Now, though, Facebook is starting to turn those news feeds into RSS feeds.
Available feeds include status updates for your friends, posted items for friends, and notifications for any user.
This allows Facebook users (or anyone really) to keep track of what’s going on with their friends without actually visiting the site. Facebook hasn’t made any announcements on this yet, so we don’t know what else is coming. But embracing RSS is sure to win them a lot of friends who’ve been wondering if Facebook is just another closed silo of data. Winer looks to be the first.
Russian Court Finds AllofMP3 Legal
A Russian court has found the former head of AllofMP3 not guilty of breaching copyright, a decision that finds the now shut AllofMP3 legal under Russian Law.
EMI, NBC Universal and Time Warner took Denis Kvasov to court claiming that AllofMP3’s cheap prices breached copyright laws. AllofMP3 went offline July 2 following continued pressure from the US Government on Russia to shut the site, including an escalation of the dispute to the World Trade Organization. AllofMP3 was also the subject of a lawsuit filed in New York last December that attempted to claim damages of $1.65 trillion.
The judge found that the service was legal as it paid royalties to rights holders via ROMS, a Russian organization which collects and distributes fees for copyright holders.
AllofMP3’s holding company MediaServices continues to operate mp3sparks.com, a nearly identical service to AllofMP3 that offers downloads at significantly cheaper prices to mainstream Western online music retailers.
Google Lends Credibility To Sun StarOffice
Google has officially begun distributing office suite and Microsoft Office competitor Sun StarOffice as part of the Google Pack.
The proprietary office suite is based on the same code base as Open Office and was previously offered for $70.
The move was first revealed August 11 but was officially announced August 15.
Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team not surprisingly went negative on the move, writing “What has changed? Star Office has been around for 8 years and has gained no traction.”
To answer Don’s question: credibility.
Google offering StarOffice is a massive credibility boost for the package. The benefits of desktop Microsoft Office alternatives have been promoted for years and although among niche communities they might have found some market share, nothing so far has come close to gaining traction against Microsoft.
General consumers have long since accepted packaged downloads from Google and for good reason; packages such as Picasa and Google Earth are quality offerings that have gained wide acceptance. StarOffice will now benefit from not only becoming a standard download as part of the Google Pack, but also due to the positive consumer sentiment given to most (if not all) downloadable products from Google. Expect StarOffice to have a bigger user base than OpenOffice within 12 months, and at least a measurable marketshare in a similar time frame. It probably wont be double figures, but it will make an impact.
There was no word from Google whether future editions of StarOffice would sync with Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Maine lunch renews France-US relations
By Paul Reynolds The menu was hamburger or hot dog, with baked beans an optional extra. The setting was the Bush family compound at Kennebunkport on the coast of Maine.
Hambugers And Hot Dogs, Sorry No french Fries
French leader meets Bushes at family home in Maine
http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn
MLK Jr. hospital begins closing
By Troy Anderson, Susan Abram and Kristopher Hanson, Staff writers Federal officials dealt a fatal blow Friday to long-troubled King-Harbor Hospital, announcing that the public medical center had failed a critical inspection and would lose the $200 ...
South LA Hospital Is Losing US Funds
Regulators Pull Plug On Los Angeles Hospital That Serves Poor ...
http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Galaxy sinks lower in 1-0 loss to New England
The defeat gives LA a 3-7-5 record at the halfway point in its MLS season. David Beckham doesn't play again. By Grahame L. Jones, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer The draining quality of an abysmal Major League Soccer season is taking its toll on the ...
David Beckham will sit out another MLS game with tender ankle
Beckham Sits Out Another MLS Game
http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn
Asian Central Banks Refrain From Extra Cash Injection (Update2)
By Shamim Adam Aug. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Asian central banks refrained from joining US and European counterparts in pumping additional cash into their markets, reflecting confidence fallout from subprime mortgage losses can be contained without their help ...
Fed-ECB currency swap politically tricky-Wrightson
Armageddon has a silver lining
http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn
Two journalists killed in Somalia
HornAfrik radio host Mahad Ahmed Elmi is shot. Hours later, the co-owner of the station, Ali Iman Sharmarke, is killed in Elmi's funeral procession.
Canadian journalist assassinated
2 Somali Radio Journalists Killed
http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn
