Bad news for Portland-based Open-ID startup Vidoop (as well as Vidoop partners like AOL, MySpace and Flock): it’s apparently out of business. Earlier this month the company announced layoffs, but based on an email string that was forwarded to us, the company is now out of “officially out of business” and winding down.
From CEO Joel Norvell to Vidoop insiders, where he says that the company has no funds to pay wages or other liabilities, and that employees are being offered computers in lieu of wages:
Vidoopsters:
I am currently working with our counsel on next steps, but here is what I know:
Vidoop LLC is officially out of business. Unfortunately, there are no funds to pay the unpaid wages or other liabilities. I don’t yet know if this means there will be a bankruptcy filing. However, we are in the process of winding down and vacating the office.
Tomorrow and Friday we will be offering certain equipment such as laptops and desktop computers to employees in lieu of a certain amount of wages owed. As an example, a laptop might be worth $1000 in back wages. You would only need to pay taxes on the actual book value of the asset, which might be $250. So you would write a check for $0.153 on $250, or $38.25. The company’s liability to you would be reduced by $1000, and you would have a laptop for $38.25.
The investors who walked out of the May 5 deal created a situation that made an orderly shutdown impossible. However, several of us have worked nonstop to preserve everyone’s stake in Vidoop, and efforts are ongoing. We hope to provide details soon.
Thanks to everyone who is volunteering their time to help shut down the office. There is simply no roadmap for a situation like this, and I know it is frustrating. Your support during this difficult period is very much appreciated.
Joel
It’s not clear how long the Vidoop service will remain active. The company promised “plenty of warning” of a shutdown of MyVidoop on May 14, but since then have been silent.
Life is not easy for search engine startups. FIrst, it’s hard to create something that doesn’t fall flat against Google. Too much hype (Google Killer!), whether the company drives it or not, inevitably leads to disappointment.
Cuil is walking dead, for example, and Wikia Search is just dead. Other ambitious projects like SearchMe are dealing with tepid user enthusiasm, and Wolfram Alpha’s over-hype has cost it credibility.
Any search engine startup with a shred of common sense wouldn’t want to create a lot of hype about itself before launching. There are too many dead bodies lying around to prove how badly that strategy works.
But on the other hand: ambitious startups need to hire talented engineers, and they need lots of money. Crawling and indexing the web is expensive and requires thousands of servers. Those servers aren’t free. So there needs to be at least a little awareness of the startup out there for hiring and fundraising purposes.
New search engine startup Blekko has been trying to figure out exactly where pre-launch press should begin and end. They’ve said very little up to now and haven’t made any big promises at all. We first covered them in early 2008, and have subsequently noted some high profile investors that have put money into the project.
But that’s it. The company has said clearly that they don’t want press, and most bloggers and other journalists have respected that. Not only that, all their website has on it is a cute paper bag puppet. No ridiculous promises of anything at all. We had to beg them just to get a logo (the puppet looked absurd as their logo in CrunchBase).
So why the slight buzz yesterday and today? They’re preparing to launch later this year and they are raising more money to ramp up. They’re starting to show people a little more of the product. We’re impressed. As are others.
Is Blekko a Google killer? I don’t think so. And the company isn’t claiming that, either. But I do think they have a really cool search product that a lot of people are going to love. I look forward to writing about it when they prepare to launch.
But until then we’re going to give them the privacy they’ve requested to fully bake the product. Because the last thing we need is another over-hyped pre-launch search engine that’s called a failure just because they aren’t a Google slayer a week after launch.
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If anything sucks more than being the target of an ambitious but delusional gubernatorial candidate who has suddenly developed a bit of a fetish for prostitution, it’s being ignored by that candidate. As far as Village Voice sees the world, Craigslist just got a bunch of free press. And they want their share.
When Craigslist management was facing a criminal investigation for listings on the site they did the smart thing. They talked about the law, and they pointed out that the real smut was on other sites that were being ignored by the South Carolina Attorney General. If you really want hard core porn and prostitution, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster pointed out, check out Village Voice’s BackPage.com.
That’s all body fluids under the bridge now, of course, since a federal judge smacked down McMaster and forbid him from stalking Craigslist management.
But Village Voice is still smarting from those Buckmaster links in that blog post. Yesterday they issued a very official press release titled “Village Voice Media to Craigslist CEO Buckmaster: Calm Down, Back Off; There is Nothing Wrong With a Little Competition.”
In an email, Village Voice’s PR firm accuses Buckmaster of “leveraging the legal bind he’s in to damage Craigslist’s competition.”
The real reason for the press release and press outreach, of course, is to get a little bit of the spotlight pointed to backpages, too. Because their official story doesn’t make sense.
Backpages has adult ads, lots and lots of them, and they’re proud of it: “We will continue to exercise our right to accept legal adult postings,” they say. All Buckmaster did was link to a whole bunch of them. And since backpages desperately needs the traffic, what they really should be doing is thanking Craigslist, not attacking them.
What we learned today: If you really want to pay for sex, backpages is the place to go.
Full press release is below:
Village Voice Media to Craigslist CEO Buckmaster: Calm Down, Back Off; There is Nothing Wrong With a Little Competition
PHOENIX, May 29 /PRNewswire/ — Last Friday, Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist, fired a deliberate, unnecessary and wholly inaccurate shot across the bow of Village Voice Media and backpage.com, our online classified advertising property. Given the serious nature of what Buckmaster inferred in his post about Village Voice Media newspapers and backpage.com, we can’t sit on our hands and be silent.
In the original blog post, which was later “submarine” edited to reword and soften some of the attacks towards Village Voice Media, Buckmaster complained that politicians are attacking Craigslist but not Village Voice Media and other media outlets because they have a “need for positive stories and campaign endorsements from those very same newspapers.
“Is it possible that writing stories critical of Craigslist’s (relatively tame) ‘adult service’ section is more career-friendly than attacking their own employer (or journalistic media brethren) for operating a (far more graphic) ‘adult service’ section of their own?”
Buckmaster and Craigslist are in a tough, and in many ways, frightening situation - they have a number of moralistic state Attorneys General threatening them over their adult ads, and a raft of bad press following the terrible tragedy in Boston that the company is admittedly in no way responsible for. But, the manner in which Buckmaster is responding to this pressure - by disingenuously lashing out at competitors and caving to political pressure - is inexcusable, and displays a remarkable lack of sound judgment.
In 2002, Village Voice Media recognized the forces that were changing the classified advertising market and created backpage.com to answer that challenge. We’ve put a lot of work into making it the No. 2 free classifieds site in U.S. We’re fine with being No. 2, proud in fact. Buckmaster, apparently, is not. Instead of working with his competitors to find a way to solve, or at least mitigate issues surrounding adult ads - the shortcomings of automatic content filters is something we are all trying to fix - Buckmaster simply attempted to take the competition down with him. And, his methods leave much to be desired.
First off, our newspapers don’t endorse politicians and rarely have anything nice to say about them, so to say that politicians aren’t going after Village Voice Media because they need our endorsement isn’t viable. Secondly, Buckmaster is only complaining because a competitor is challenging his economic advantage in the free classified arena - which he built in part on adult ads - and has made him a very wealthy man. His talk of building community and serving his users rings hollow. It now appears that, as is so often the case with New Age entrepreneurs, it’s all about the money.
We will continue to exercise our right to accept legal adult postings from our users and concentrate on growing backpage.com. We are aggressively building additional technical solutions as well as increasing our manual site inspections to improve efficiency of removing content that is illegal or otherwise violates our Terms of Use.
About Village Voice Media
Village Voice Media is a collection of 15 weekly newspapers and daily Web sites, including New York’s Village Voice, the LA Weekly, Denver’s Westword and the Phoenix New Times. Online, in print, and on mobile devices, VVM’s products combine music, food and events coverage with gritty, hard-hitting journalism to create the most powerful city guides in each market. While the focus of the brand is local, its free classifieds site backpage.com, partnership with social recommendation engine LikeMe.net and national sales force, Voice Media Group, extend its reach on a national level.
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Warning: It appears that a worm has hit Twitter-the tweet will say “Best Video” with a link to “http://juste.ru.” If you see this in a tweet, do not click on the link. It’s unclear exactly how the worm is spreading. But from the look of Tweets about the virus, if you click on the link, you account could be compromised and spammed.
According to reports on Twitter, users who clicked the juste.ru video link had their account compromised and passwords stolen. Further details about the virus are limited but Twitter’s official spam account was updated this morning stating that Twitter is aware of the issue and making steps to resolve the virus. The Tweet also warned users to not click the Best Video link.
This isn’t the first worm to hit Twitter. In early April, Twitter’s service was infected with a worm that appeared to have originated from the owners of the website StalkDaily. This week, Twitter was hit with a “Twittercut” worm, which also compromised users’ accounts if they clicked on a link.
UPDATE: Twitter has posted the following update to its status page stating that the site is aware of the virus:
No matter how good that "best video" looks, don't go to any juste.ru domains. We're aware of the situation and are working on it.
UPDATE 2: Twitter has also noted that they’ve temporarily suspended some legit accounts to clean up the spam. Again, this is just temporary for the real accounts that were spreading the worm.
Venture capitalists can be valuable sources of information about the tech community. Not only do they have quality insider information but they also have a knack for figuring out how to evaluate startups. So it makes sense that their blogs can be compelling reads.
Larry Chang, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, has compiled a list of the 100 top VC blogs, according to the number of Google Reader subscribers for each one. Chang admits that the rankings don’t necessarily equate to the best quality of content and that there is fine content coming from VC blogs with less subscribers. But the list is a good starting point. Chang says he will be highlighting the best VC blog posts from this list on his blog every two weeks and will update the directory to add new VC blogs quarterly.
Here are the top 20 on the list, with their Google Reader subscriber numbers (you can see all 100 on Chang’s blog):
When you’re on the road, passing time reading up on things online from your mobile phone, it can be quite a pain in the ass to bookmark articles for later or share them with others. Smub aims to change all that by debuting a web-based tool that you can access from anywhere and lets you easily bookmark and share stuff from your mobile browser without necessarily having to register for the service.
Smub is incredibly simple to use. All you need to do when you’re browsing an article on your computer or mobile device is add “smub.it/” in front of the URL and it will take you to a page where you can bookmark the link to your Smub profile if you have one, or alternatively your favorite social bookmarking service or one of the more popular social networking services without the need for a separate account. Currently, Smub boasts e-mail support as well as direct push to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Mixx, Reddit and HelloTXT.
Smub is a very basic service, but a useful one that’s been pretty well executed. Once you’ve saved a bookmark to your Smub profile, you can set a relatively short URL which redirects to it (e.g. smub.it/robinwauters/netflix.ceo - yay, another toolbar-in-a-frame) and you can also add keyword tags and comments to the article in one swoop. You can manage your bookmarks from your account too, and share them on the services cited above later if you choose to. To get started, you can import the bookmarks from whichever browser you’re using, and you can easily pull in your friends’ contact details from Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Windows Live Hotmail to make it easier and faster for you to share ‘Smubs’ with them.
I like Smub already, and I suspect that while the team clearly wants to make sure the service is mobile-friendly (it works particularly well with the iPhone) some people will be interested in simply using it on their computers. For those, the Smub guys added a Firefox extension and toolbar which can come in quite handy if you’re using multiple social bookmarking services.
Now go smub something and tell us what you think.
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Over the last 15 years or so, most of us have adapted to the new forms of communication that pervade the web, ditching letters (and in many cases, phone calls) in favor of rapid fire IMs and Email. But there’s still at least one formality embedded in most of us that’s been hard to overcome: the personal signature. The simple act of signing a document, silly as it may seem in an era of fingerprints, photographs, and passwords, is something that has been engrained in us. And while signing a digital document with an “Okay” button or check box may be legally binding, they’re so basic that it makes the gesture feel insincere.
Cue the digital signature - handwritten signatures input using either your mouse or a tablet, which are then embedded alongside the document in question. These have around for quite a while, with companies in this space including DocuSign and EchoSign. Now RightSignature, a new startup that launched to the public last month, is looking to make things even easier.
CEO Daryl Bernstein says that the existing digital signature companies don’t focus enough on the user experience, making it difficult to actually read the document you’re meant to sign. So RightSignature has built a proprietary PDF viewer that shows a large portion of the document alongside a box for your John Hancock. Bernstein also says that competitors tend to focus on large companies, so RightSignature is trying to make its service more accessible to smaller businesses (you can send a document out for signing in around sixty seconds). You can get a feel for the document signing process on this page.
The service supports Google Docs, as well as native formats like PDF and .DOCX. Other extras include the option of requiring a photo taken by your computer’s camera alongside a signature and a free iPhone app that lets you sign documents on the go. The service offers a variety of distribution options, allowing users to send documents to a bulk list of users, and can also be used for petitions.
Users can send five documents per month for free, or can choose from a number of plans starting at $11 a month per user to get unlimited document sending. TechCrunch readers can get two months of the premium service for free by signing up through this link.
The service seems to work well, but RightSignature has a long road ahead - its competition is already quite well established, and some businesses may be hesitant to rely on a new service for their important document signatures. That said, the simplified UI may be enough to entice small businesses who had previously been scared off by the daunting nature of some of these other services.
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Earlier today, we wrote about Facebook updating its terms to get ready for the roll-out of its payment system. Well guess what, it’s already here.
The application GroupCard is currently testing the new payment system live for all accounts that have it installed. I included some screenshots below. It’s very straightforward: There’s a big “Pay With Facebook” button, similar to the “Facebook Connect” buttons you see throughout the web. Next to that, there are the other options to pay with Visa, Mastercard, etc.
Clicking on the “Pay With Facebook” button pops open an overlay which asks you to confirm payment via your Facebook Credits. My $2.99 card cost me 30 Facebook Credits. Expect to see this roll out to other applications soon.
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Bad news for Portland-based Open-ID startup 
But that’s it. The company has said clearly that they don’t want press, and most bloggers and other journalists have respected that. Not only that, all their 
And you thought the 
When you’re on the road, passing time reading up on things online from your mobile phone, it can be quite a pain in the ass to bookmark articles for later or share them with others. 
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