Startup Bridgevine has raised $3.5 million in Series C funding from Safeguard Scientifics and Constellation Ventures to launch Offerwire, a consumer focused site that aggregates home services deals. This round brings Bridgevine’s total funding raised to $16.6 million. Bridgevine previously provided an online e-commerce engine for consumers and small businesses to find and compare deals specifically on connection and entertainment services, such as high speed internet, voice and cable TV offerings.
Bridgevine’s new consumer site, Offerwire, is an aggregation site of deals and offers not only for connection and cable services, but also for music, dvd rental, magazines, credit cards, security and more. It’s like Kayak for home and entertainment services. Users can comparison shop for deals, bundle services together, and as an added bonus, receive cash back for certain deals. Offerwire has a host of big-name vendors on board including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, AT&T, Verizon, Netflix, and LifeLock.
The cashback incentive makes the site particularly appealing. For example, Offerwire says that if you get cable through Time Warner, you could get as much as $100 cash back. Bridgevine’s CEO, Vinny Olmstead, says that the site offers a deal where if you bundle cable, phone and internet services together (the “triple play”), you could receive as much as $300 back from Comcast. Of course, with every referral, Bridgevine takes a cut, which ranges depending on the service bought.
In the past month, we’ve seen some new search engine launches. Two in particular were able to generate a hype cycle of early positive reviews and excitement: Bing and Wolfram Alpha. One was launched by Microsoft, and the other by a startup. It is inherently not a fair comparison because Microsoft has so much more money to spend on marketing ($80 to $100 million is earmarked for Bing)> But most of the buzz so far has been generated by the respective launches with all of the blog and news coverage that entails.
So even though it is not fair, let’s compare the two, because it is instructive. There is little data on actual traffic or search volume for either site at this point. Instead, I looked at another proxy of interest: Google searches for both sites as measured by Google Trends. As you can see by the chart above, searches for “Wolfram Alpha” began to build up the weekend that it soft launched on May 15, peaking the following Monday, and then trailing off after that. It had a strong showing, and then interest waned.
Interest in Bing, on the other hand, started out just as strong with its unveiling last week. Then when it actually launched, interest shot up even higher. The positive experience many people had with their first search certainly helped.
Now, the question is: Can Bing keep up the momentum, or will interest in the latest search experiment fade away as fast as it did for Wolfram Alpha? That is where Microsoft’s big check book and that advertising campaign come in. You are going to be hearing a lot more about Bing overt the next few months: on TV, on the Web, and, yes, even on Google. Microsoft cannot afford to let Bing disappear from view.
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One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how much an advertiser pays per click, would be based on user feedback.
So users would have the ability to vote on advertisements in the same way they vote on stories. The better ads, as determined by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click.
Compare that to the blog post from Digg a few minutes ago announcing a new advertising product:
Today, we're announcing our plans to roll out a new advertising platform — Digg Ads. Digg Ads will give you more control over which advertisements are displayed on Digg. The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system.
The platform will launch as a pilot in a few months, and it will be an ongoing work in progress as we learn more from the Digg community and adjust the system. We're still in very early stages of working with advertisers and building the system, but we wanted you to be the first to hear about our plans.
Digg Ads will appear alongside stories in the river. The sponsored content will look and feel similar to regular Digg content, but will be clearly marked as sponsored. It may link to stories, video trailers, independent product reviews – many of the same types of content you see on Digg every day. The goal here is to give advertisers a way to present content related to their brands and get immediate input on whether it's relevant to the Digg audience, or not.
New Digg ads will appear directly in the news stream and will be clearly marked as sponsored. The more people click on the ads, the lower the price the advertiser will pay. Ads that are buried too often will be priced “out of the system.”
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I haven't been much of a cleantech bull in the past, at least when it comes to venture capital investing. I think it's a huge market, and there's clearly a pressing social need. I just don't quite think the science, government cooperation and economics are there yet for it to be a great opportunity for classic venture investing.
Sure there's low-hanging fruit, and the outliers like Elon Musk who had the cojones to invest $70 million of his own money into building an electric car company. But a huge boom producing several multi-billion winners? Not yet, IMHO.
But Vinod Khosla greatly disagrees with me, and, frankly, you should listen to him, because he's a lot smarter. That came across last week during a rare-sit down with Khosla, the famed venture investor and Sun Microsystems co-founder. It was for my Yahoo show, TechTicker, and I'd lobbied—nay, harassed—Khosla and his poor assistant for about eight months to get the meeting.
I'd initially intended to talk a lot about investing in India, since I'm going there in November, and it's a cause close to Khosla's heart. But we spent most the time talking about cleantech. Khosla Ventures arguably has the largest cleantech portfolio in the business. I counted more than 30 companies from the Web site alone. And, in many cases these are ambitious, science-heavy, swing-for-the-fences type plays. He is one of the only VCs I know who likes to do "science projects" – usually that's a derogatory term in the industry, even for biotech VCs.
Here's a link to our segment where Khosla explains why he believes ethanol—not hybrids and plug ins—are the answer to getting us off oil for good and here's a link to the broader segment we did where he rebuts all my arguments about why cleantech won't be the next big driver of Valley returns. He says that "clearly" ten Googles will be created from this opportunity, because it's not really about solar, wind or biofuels, it's about totally re-architecting the infrastructure of society.
Sounds ambitious, huh? I’m still not sure about cleantech as the next big Valley wave, but that ambition was what I liked about Khosla. Because I just don't hear enough ambitious investment ideas these days in the Valley. Facebook apps, Twitter apps and iPhone apps are all great for consumers and for developers who want nice thriving businesses. And certainly, they’re great for Facebook, Twitter and Apple. But with the possible exceptions of Slide, Zynga and one or two others, they're not the next companies that are going to drive the economy of Silicon Valley, mint millionaires, generate fees to support all those attorneys and accountants, and of course generate enough returns so that institutions want to keep investing in this asset class.
The fact that Facebook is considered risky scares me a little for the future of the Valley. This is a company that's not necessarily doing something new; social networks have been around a while. It's a company that mostly always been run at break-even. It's a company that's generating upwards of $500 million in revenue a year without really "figuring out" its business model. It's a company that has no problem still raising money at nosebleed valuations. And most importantly, it's still growing in almost every user metric that matters. That is not a particularly risky start-up.
Guess what? Twitter isn't either. If you can't look at the growth and usage patterns on Twitter and come up with several ideas to monetize it, you're not very creative. Google built a great monetization engine because it knew intent—in other words, what you were searching for. Twitter knows way more about what's going on at your head at any given moment, and that's ripe for advertising and premium research/customer service products for companies. Is it a slam-dunk? Of course not. The crew still needs to execute, and the Twitter natives are getting restless to see some new features. But it's all execution risk at this point, I’d argue.
Compare that to a company that's making liquid biofuels out of bark or switchgrass. Khosla spoke right to this fact in the third segment of our interview, which I've embedded below. I started out by asking him if he'd turned his back on IT, which is after all where he made his fame and fortune. He gave a few examples of investments he'd snapped up in seemingly "over-invested areas." One strong one was Aliph, the company who makes the Jawbone. It did $500k in 2006 to $140 million in 2008, and it's still growing amid the downturn. (He says this at the 2:15 mark below.)
At minute 3:55, he talks about the venture capital business, and its troubling new aversion to risk. As he puts it the business is more about “capital” these days and less about “venture.” "There are too many people trying to avoid risk; too many people trying to deploy capital as opposed to invest in risk and invest in breakthroughs," he said. You tell ‘em, Khosla.
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We’ve been working hard behind the scenes on the CrunchPad since our last update in April, and have just about nailed down the final design for the device. We’re showing the conceptual drawings here today. In another few weeks we’ll have the first working prototypes in our office.
This launch prototype is another significant step forward from the last prototype. The screen is now flush with the case and we’ve decreased the overall thickness to about 18 mm. The case will be aluminum, which is more expensive than plastic but is sturdier and lets us shave a little more off the overall thickness of the device.
I believe the device now actually looks better than the original concept design we published last summer. Compare the images below to the first prototype and you can see how far we’ve come. If you’re interested, here’s Prototype B. Pictures of Prototype C, which is the device we’re actually demo’ing to people now, are here.
A lot has happened behind the scenes, too. Our partner Fusion Garage continues to drive the software forward, and we are in deep discussions with key partners to bring the device to market. If you’d like to see the previous CrunchPad in action, we have a previously-private video available on YouTube that shows our vision for the user interface and the last version of the software stack. This is a Linux based operating system and a Webkit based browser. The device boots directly into the browser.
The next time we talk about the CrunchPad publicly will be at a special press and user event in July in Silicon Valley. If you’d like to be emailed when new news comes out, send an email to crunchpad@techcrunch.com and we’ll put you on the list.
Here is the near-final industrial design for the CrunchPad:
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At last week’s hush, hush meeting of newspaper execs on how to monetize content and save a dying industry, the American Press Institute presented a white paper that offers a step by step plan of how newspapers should move forward with paid content. Nieman Journalism Lab posted a downloadable copy of the report, which has some interesting recommendations. Poynter also provided a comprehensive review of the report. We’ve embedded the document below.
The report suggests several models to implement paid content, including micropayments, subscriptions and hybrid models. Google is compared to an atom bomb that “blew up the content business into millions of atomized pieces,” leaving news organizations with the mess of putting things back together. Comparing newspapers to “Humpty Dumpty”, the paper paints a “poor-me” tale of how news orgs are scrambling to put all the pieces back together to “restore their integrity.” And of course, news enterprises are also forced to suffer a second related atom bomb: hyper-linking. The report says: “The culture of hyper-linking and hyper-syndication that fuels the interactive Web has become an atom bomb for the old news business model.” So the remedy for putting the pieces back together according to the API: charge for content, stick it to Google, and renegotiate subscription models with Amazon for the Kindle (which it implies is unfairly making more money from content than newspapers). Apparently, nobody at the API has actually read Humpty Dumpty, otherwise they would know that you can never put the pieces back together again.
The API recommends a five pronged business plan, divided by “doctrines,” to charge users for content:
True Value Doctrine: Newspapers should create value by beginning to charge for it.
Fair Value Doctrine: In order to maintain the value of content, newspapers should aggressively enforce copyrights and right to profit from published content.
Fair Share Doctrine: News orgs should start to negotiate with the technology industry for higher prices for content that is aggregated, redistributed, broken up, and linked to.
Digital Deliverance Doctrine: Newspapers should invest in technology and digital platforms that could “provide content-based e-commerce, data sharing and other revenue-generating solutions” at “premium prices.”
Consumer Centric Doctrine: Newspaper need to refocus their content from advertisers to readers/consumers.
The section of the paper that addresses Google is part sad, part funny and part delusional. Google, the “atom bomb,” is also a “frenemy” to newspapers, citing Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, and VP of products and user experience, Marissa Mayer, as the top frenemies at Google. The paper concedes that Google provides 25 to 35 percent of the traffic to news web sites but says that Google is taking a disproportionate share of profits from content creators. Reading between the lines, the paper suggests that Google’s profits are being stolen from newspaper’s profits. In order to seek compensation from Google, the API suggests that news organizations should put legal, political, business and technological pressure on Google, and other “powerful players” in the digital space including MSFT, Yahoo, AOL, and Facebook.
That’s right. Part of the plan is for newspapers, which are technologically challenged, to put “technological pressure” on the technology giants. That plan is even less likely to succeed than the Humpty Dumpty one.
It’s understandable that newspaper organizations are trying to figure out the best way to move forward in the industry, and I think that this report does outline their options for monetization (if that is the remedy) fairly well. Although, many don’t necessarily agree with this. But the passive aggressive finger pointing at Amazon, Google and others seems to be a bit off. As author Michael Connelly wisely says in an interview, “Google doesn’t kill newspapers. People kill newspapers.”
Today at the Startup 2009 conference in New York City, Business Insider’s Henry Blodget interviewed Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes on stage. Hughes recently moved to the city and has been going around to various colleges on the east coast talking to students who have good ideas, but don’t necessarily know how to start companies, as he put it. On the topics of Facebook, the Obama campaign (he was a major player in the online side of it) and even Twitter, he had some interesting things to say.
On Facebook, Blodget of course had to bring up the allegations that the idea was stolen when Hughes was still in college with co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz. “Not true,” says Hughes. While both Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to move west to focus on Facebook full-time, Hughes stayed in school. But it’s a decision that Hughes admits he kind of regrets. He wishes that he could have been working on it full-time from the beginning.
The back story has been told many times before, but from Hughes perspective, Facebook was started as a way for friends to share what they thought was cool on the web in a trusted environment. And to get updates on what other people were doing. It’s hard to know if that’s a bit of revisionist history (at least the way he’s phrasing it), as those two things happen to be exactly what Facebook is so focused on right now. Sharing things from around the web is finally starting to come into focus with Facebook Connect taking off. And getting updates on what others are up to is the major part of the redesigned homepage which, yes, looks a lot like Twitter — that other service dedicated to status updates.
Speaking of Twitter, during the Q&A portion, someone asked for Hughes’ thoughts on the service. Hughes had apparently only just started using it when he was being interviewed for his Fast Company cover story a couple months ago, and the magazine noted that he had done so, “albeit reluctantly.” But now, Hughes seems quite sold on the service. “I think Twitter is great,” he said before going on about how he doesn’t believe that there can only be one service that everyone uses to share things — something which I absolutely agree with. Instead, he sees Twitter as just one of many new ways to communicate on the web, and believes there will be room for “dozens of applications like this.”
Blodget then got Hughes to talk a bit about his experience with the Obama campaign. Hughes broke it down into simple terms, noting that all the campaign really did was use existing technology to make campaigns more efficient. The key parts of that were ways to help the campaign raise money easier, and also to connect with voters to form an emotional relationship.
He talked about how right after one of former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s speeches in which she belittled what the Obama campaign was doing with its online efforts, the entire team got fired up and starting sending out a mass of emails to supporters. Hughes and the team realized that Palin was an extremely divisive person, and used people’s dislike of her as a way to raise money instantly online. Obviously, it worked to the tune of millions upon millions of dollars.
Blodget wondered if that type of campaign victory was a one-time thing, asking if the Republicans had found their “Chris Hughes.” Hughes wasn’t sure if they had, but guessed that in the next round of major elections, the Republicans will probably have a similar game plan. “We weren’t doing brilliant new things,” Hughes said continuing on that they just knew what would work online.
The talk then turned back to Facebook, where Blodget wondered if Hughes felt the company was doing the right things in order to become a profitable company. Not surprisingly, Hughes is very optimistic about Facebook’s business potential, noting that the company is just in the process of trying a bunch of interesting ideas and seeing what works. He reiterated Zuckerberg’s claims that by the end of the year, Facebook plans to be cash-flow positive.
One audience member asked why Facebook wasn’t doing the type of big advertising site branding that its rival MySpace was doing. “There’s a reason we don’t do that. Ads shouldn’t be in people’s way,” Hughes noted before saying that the best type of advertising is non-intrusive and interesting. Clearly, he doesn’t think too highly of MySpace’s Fanta ads.
Hughes is positive that bigger and better online advertising possibilities will exist over the course of the next few years. And he obviously thinks Facebook will be able to take advantage of that in a very meaningful way, given that it has over 200 million users — and is still growing at a nice rate.
There’s no question that Hulu has firmly established itself as one of the dominant video sites on the web. But its incredible growth seems to be dropping off, and quickly. Between January and February of this year, the site saw a 42% increase in unique U.S. visitors and 33% increase in streams. Between Feburary and March, it moved up to become the third most popular video site in the US, with a 14% growth in uniques and a 20% growth in overall streams.
The latest comScore data for Hulu, which covers the month of April, reports a much more modest 4.4% growth in overall streams, from 380 million streams in March to around 397 million in April. And its unique visitors actually went down month over month, from around 41.5 million in March to 40.1 million over the same time span.
Much of the site’s growth between January and February can probably be attributed to its prime time Super Bowl commercial, which introduced the site for the first time to millions of viewers. Since then the site has kept up a star-studded marketing campaign to keep awareness up. I suspect that most of the site’s new users earlier this year were the low hanging fruit — people who would love to watch their TV and movie content on their computer screen, but didn’t know that Hulu even existed. Now the site is going to have to convince the die-hard TV fans to switch up their viewing habits if it wants to keep the same momentum going. Hulu Desktop, one of the first products to come out of Hulu labs, may help with this. But it’s going to be hard to break people out of old habits. Update: As commenter Shahar Nechmad points out below, some of the drop off may have had to do with the timing of the broadcast of new content (though most prime-time shows were still on the air through April, so I doubt that can be blamed in this case). With that in mind, it won’t be surprising if we see Hulu growth continue to slow over the summer, when most hot shows aren’t on the air.
That said, Hulu’s still the number three video site in the US, which isn’t half bad.
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Google is taking a step towards taking all the messy, unstructured information on the Web and putting it into neat little, labeled boxes. Literally, that is what Google Squared does. First announced at last month’s Searchology event, Google Squared is now live. You can try it out.
Google Squared is an experimental search engine that is in its own “labs.” It gives you topical search results broken down by categories, something that Bing does in a different way with guided results in the left explore pane. Google Squared is more comparable to Wolfram Alpha in that it is A) really early stage, and B) goes and finds out every facet of a subject based on a single keyword search. But unlike Wolfram Alpha, it does not “compute” answers based on data that it has ingested into its own databases. Its database is the Web.
Does Google Squared crush Wolfram Alpha today? No. But as I originally suggested when it was announced, adding structure to the Web will eventually win out over a self-contained database. Even if it seems primitive today, its approach scales better than Wolfram’s.
Type in something like “planets” and the results come up as grid with the planet names, images, a short description, the equatorial surface, and the mean density. It only manages to identify seven planets, and those include Pluto and Ceres. (Where’s Uranus?) This is still very experimental. But you can add more rows and columns. When you click on the the “add” box under the planet names, for instance,, it will suggest the missing ones. Or you can add yor own category, and then it will fill in the other boxes in that row. You can also add a column. It suggests categories such as “Date of Discovery” and “Escape velocity” (which is important to know if you are planning to visit and want to ever return).
But how would you get to one of these planets? Well, you would need a spaceship, of course
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Bro's a no no for CoCo? In case you missed the Twitter Tracker bit on Conan last night, here it is again in all its glory. It's a must-watch no matter what you think of Twitter.
Israeli gaming company GameGround has closed a $4.1 million funding round from Sequoia Capital. The company had previously raised a $2 million seed round from a number of angel investors and founders.
For now, we don’t really know much about GameGround other than the team behind it. It was founded in 2007 by Shaul Olmert (formerly of MTV), Guy Margolin (formerly of 888.com, and Itzik Ben-Bassat. Ben-Bassat, who currently serves as Chairman, comes from highly regarded game development studio Blizzard, where he was VP of international and global business development and worked on integration with Internet services. While he wouldn’t get into specifics, he says that Gameground is looking to expand how far the Internet ties into computer games.
For now, the company isn’t actually making any games — it’s making a special agent for Mac and PC that can work with existing games to expand their online functionality, even after they’re released. At this point exactly what can be done with the agent is unclear, but I suspect it will allow gamers to distribute high scores and milestones to their social networks, and perhaps use your social graph to connect you with your friends in-game. Apparently these features will be integrated with the games in an “automatic way”, presumably with little, if any, work needed on the developer’s side.
Here’s how the company describes itself on the site:
For you, gaming is more than a mild diversion. It's a way of life. And soon, life is going to get a whole lot more exciting. Introducing GameGround, an all-new personalized gaming center built around advanced technologies that aggregate all your web-wide gaming activities into a single online destination.
At the heart of GameGround is a powerful yet simple-to-use Personalized Command Center that gives you total control over every facet of your gaming experience. From this console, you'll have the ability to tap into comprehensive, never-before-existing data for any game you play, no matter where on the web you play it, no matter who you play against. This is an unprecedented innovation that simply cannot be found anywhere else in the world of gaming!
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One large component of the “RSS Is Dead” idea is that services like Twitter offer a faster and more curated way to share content. But the problem is that to do this on Twitter, it involves sharing a link to the content and not the content itself. Tweetree solves this — using RSS.
When you log in to Tweetree with your Twitter credentials, you’ll see your normal Twitter stream, but whenever anyone shares a link, Tweetree goes out and grabs the content on that page via its RSS feed and places it right in your stream. Long articles are placed in a frame that can be scrolled through. This is a seamless way to read a ton of content without having to leave your Twitter stream.
Of course, there’s still a couple problems with this. The biggest one is that a number of popular content sites use partial feeds. That basically means that Tweetree will pull in the opening snippet of the story, but you’ll still have to click through to the actual story to see it. Another potential issue is that many sites use Google’s Feedburner product for their RSS feeds. That service has a history of poor performance when it comes to RSS feeds, so it’s possible that when you share a link through Twitter, it won’t yet be on the RSS feed for that site, so Tweetree won’t be able to pull it in.
Tweetree also updates in real-time, using the Twitter Search method of letting you know when new tweets are available and asks you to click a button to refresh your stream. Another nice feature is that Tweetree actually pulls the background that you set up for Twitter, so it looks similar to how your stream looks on twitter.com. And you can send tweets from it, see your replies,direct messages and even search tweets.
We previously covered Tweetree back in December when it launched a way to thread Twitter conversations, to make them easier to follow. That worked to some effect, but this is a much more compelling idea. Now if we could just remove the RSS middle man from the equation, it’d be a great idea.
The iGoogle Showcase lets you copy your favorite celeb’s iGoogle page to your own, or browse through the collection and choose different gadgets and themes to include from varying pages. Some celebs have created customized gadgets that you can embed. For example, Ryan Seacrest’s gadget lets you keep up with all the latest entertainment news. Donald Trump’s gadget offers advice to entrepreneurs, Martha Stewart shares recipes and tips, and Anderson Cooper delivers headline news and extras from his CNN show AC360.
There she goes again. The Justice Department’s antitrust chief Christine Varney is convinced that tech companies are doing wrong and her underlings are going after them aggressively. She has already given Google notice that she is keeping an eye on them. But now the Justice Department is looking into possible collusion among large tech companies including Apple, Yahoo, and Google for purportedly agreeing “to not actively recruit employees from each other,” according to the NYT.
Yup, that’s a real head scratcher. I guess IBM is not involved in the cabal, since Apple hired way one of its top chip designers, Mark Papermaster, and got into a big lawsuit with IBM over the incident. And Yahoo, nobody would dare steal employees away from Yahoo. That never happens (cough, Microsoft). Or from Google—unless you are Facebook.
Stealing employees from each other is a way of life for tech companies. Silicon Valley is one of the most competitive employment markets in the country—for CEOs and VPS to engineers. But all Varney can see when she looks out West is a large antitrust prize. Doesn’t she have anything better to do? Here is a suggestion: Investigate the weird spikes in gas prices that happen regularly for no apparent reason or the insanity that is health care pricing. But leave tech companies alone until they actually step out of line.
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Back in the olden days I used to read Joey Devilla's blog all the time. He was - and is - known as Accordion Guy and he produced consistently cool content. Well, I just stumbled on him again and found that he's doing great, philosophical posts on tech. Take his examination of netbooks vs. smartphones, for example. He compares netbooks and smartphones to two brands of fast food pie. Netbooks are sub-par pies made to look like a real slice of pie - you know you're not getting good pie but the appearance of a pie shape and crust creates cognitive dissonance and makes you think you're getting screwed (which, in most cases, you are - netbooks are sub-par notebooks and horrible "communication devices"). Smartphones are like McDonald's pies in that they don't look like pie - they look like a pared down and highly subjective vision of pie. You have everything in there - the filling, the crust, whatever else - but you know you're not buying real pie and you can sit back and "enjoy" it on that level. Netbooks are faking it while smartphones have no pretensions of pie-like goodness. With me so far?
In the past we’ve written about eBay’s Skype conundrum, or the trouble the former has had to successfully integrate the latter’s communication capabilities into the e-commerce giant’s web services. In the recent press release announcing that eBay plans to spin off Skype as a separate company and file for an IPO in 2010, eBay President & CEO John Donahoe admitted as much when he was quoting stating that it’s “clear that Skype has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal.”
And now Skype is being downright disintegrated from eBay’s services, starting with the UK website. This is what the dry announcement message reads (emphasis ours):
eBay is discontinuing Skype voice and chat buttons in listings as of 10th June 2009 in an effort to remove features with limited buyer and seller usage.
This change does not require any action on your part. We are just notifying you that as of June 10, you will no longer see the Skype voice and chat options when you list new items, they will not be included on the new item page, and they will no longer appear in your existing listings.
We appreciate your continued commitment to good communications with your customers.
Regards, The eBay Team
This comes as little of a surprise now, but I couldn’t help looking up former eBay CEO Meg Whitman’s words when the acquisition news - the company acquired Skype for roughly $2.6 billion ($1.3 billion in cash and the value of 32.4 million shares of eBay stock) back in September 2005 - hit the wire:
“Communications is at the heart of e-commerce and community. By combining the two leading e-commerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in internet voice communications, we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the net.”
Could have happened, hasn’t happened. It’s just the way things go.
(Thanks to Daryl Griffiths for the tip)
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Most men hate to shop. It takes way too much time, we are out of our element, and we end up getting really dorky clothes because we feel like not buying something is an admission of failure. Online shopping is better, but most of us would rather browse through cameras, Web phones, and computers than shirts and chinos (at least I would). Enter the Trunk Club, a new way to shop online.
The Trunk Club gives men their own personal shopper via Skype video sessions who try to figure out what kind of clothes they wear, what is lacking in their wardrobe, and what kind of clothes they might be willing to try. (These are real people, not virtual personal shoppers like Covet). Then they put together about nine different pieces of apparel and send it to the customer in a FedEx box. Once a man (the service is only for men) gets his “trunk” of clothes, he tries them on via another Skype session (he is supposed to change off camera, but I am sure some perv customers will “forget”), gives his feedback to his personal shopper, and then decide which ones to keep. He can return any or all of the clothes at no expense to him. He only pays for what he keeps.
The business model is the same as a retail store. The Trunk Club buys clothing at wholesale and sells it at a normal retail markup. Except that the company has deals with clothing manufacturers which doesn’t require it to buy any minimum inventory. In fact, there is no inventory. Clothes only gets shipped when there is a customer who needs a particular item. It is not a discount service. But the personal shoppers come for free (thanks to Skype and the Internet). Customers don’t pay anything extra for them as they would in a fancy department store. The personal shoppers get a commission based on how much clothes they sell. And the men who are its customers never have to step foot in a store again.
I went through a mock session with one personal shopper from the Trunk Club, Lisa Bruckner. She was very personable and it was fun talking to her. I told her what kind of clothes I wear (jeans or suits, depending on where I am going), what is missing in my closet (polo shirts for summer), my measurements, and other details. Normally, she would then have a box of clothes sent to me and then we would have more back and forth on Skype to fine tune the selection process. But since I was on deadline, I asked her just to send me pictures of what she would have sent (see below). Of the nine items she sent, maybe three of them are things I would actually buy. I’m not really a $48 T-Shirt kind of guy. The Hugo Boss dress shirt looks decent, as do the Penguin Polo, and the pants. But that orange Polo just wouldn’t fly in New York (maybe Palm Springs). I was hoping for better results, but then I am really picky. I am sure that with a little back and forth Lisa would soon be able to hone into my quirky style. However, my wife (who has final say in what I am allowed to wear out the door) was not a fan of the selection, and didn’t like the idea of another woman picking out clothes for me. But she likes shopping, so she doesn’t see the appeal of the service.
The part I don’t like about the service is that you don’t get to see what your personal shopper picked for you until it arrives in the mail. I guess there is an element of surprise akin to opening up a present, but you really have to trust your personal shopper to know what you want. At least initially, it would make more sense for there to be some back and forth digitally between the customer and the personal shopper (with the personal shopper presenting a few ideas and then narrowing them down quickly).
The other problem the Trunk Club is going to have to deal with is men who sign up not because they want to spend $572 for a box of clothes, but just because they are lonely and want to talk to a woman over video Skype. (All the personal shoppers are attractive women). There is a whole perv element that these personal shoppers are going to have to learn to deal with, but all they need to do is hang up and block those men from Skype.
The Trunk Club was started by Joanna Van Vleck, a personal stylist who opened up a showroom for her clients in Bend, Oregon. She was planning to open up retail outlets across the country where men could come in for their personal shopping sessions, but her angel investor backed out after the economy tanked. By necessity, she turned to the Skype model and only needed $50,000 in angel capital to get going. She has been in private beta with about 600 customers for the past six months. She now has 21 shopping experts working on commission, and is adding 5 to 6 every month. The Trunk Club’s hybrid approach is both high touch and scalable at the same time. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more retail concepts like this spring up in different categories, with real people helping you make a buying decision over Web video.
Here’s a promotional video that explains the concept:
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The TV guide doesn’t know who you are, what your favorite movie genre is, what you’ve watched in the past, what your mood is, and so on. Because of that, it is incapable of providing you with any recommendations about what to watch on your TV, or which videos you’re likely going to enjoy consuming right now on your PC or even your mobile phone. With the sheer volume of available channels and VOD content out there, that’s becoming quite a problem for many people. But if beeTV has its way, that problem could soon become a nuisance from past times.
The Milan, Italy-based startup founded in 2006 by an international team of experienced technology and media experts, has just raised $8 million in Series B funding from Italian VC firm Innogest, the largest investment this fund has ever made. BeeTV aims to use the capital to ‘change the way we watch TV’ by pioneering what it calls a Personal Content Channel (PPC), a personal TV suggestion engine that helps you find your way in the ocean of VOD titles and channels out there by surfacing the best choice for you based on your profile and even the mood you’re in.
Here’s how they pitch it:
“beeTV offers the platform operator's subscribers their own Personal Content Channel (PCC), which resides in their set top box (whether IPTV, cable, satellite, mobile or DTT), their mobile phones and their PC. This unique Personal Content Channel identifies the subscriber, searches all the content sources, including broadcast TV, subscription TV, VOD, SVOD, PPV, and PVR/Catch-up and pushes the relevant content to that subscriber.”
The company’s recommendation engine comes in three flavors: beeSTBox is its flagship product which was launched at the recent DEMOfall 08 conference in San Diego (see video below). It’s a solution designed for multicast distribution platforms including cable, satellite and IPTV. To manage, control and share your online TV viewing experience, the company created a product called beeWeb, and it’s also bringing the PCC to mobile devices to enable always-on connectivity and the ability to interact with set-top boxes on the go. It currently has an iPhone application in the works that will allow TV viewers to control their STBs, get recommendations for shows & movies that are relevant to them and available in their specific TV subscription, and also enable them to watch trailers and set their STBs to record or create notifications for the shows they would like to watch.
BeeTV is currently focusing on finalizing its 1.5 version and claims to be engaged with some of the leading TV providers in the world for trials that are expected to roll into their commercial phase by the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was actually a lot of interest for this type of technology coming from content owners, publishers and media companies.
This one looks like a winner, and that was even before I knew who is spearheading the algorithm team that’s responsible for the powerful recommendation technology behind the platform: Gavin Potter, an experimental psychologist formerly responsible for IBM’s Centre for Business Optimization in Europe, who you might know as “Just a Guy in a garage” from the Netflix Prize competition. See this Wired profile for more background on the man.
I’m just hoping beeTV and their investors are in it for the long run and don’t get acquired by one of the majors before they have the chance to expand their platform on a worldwide scale through partnerships and white-label distribution deals. Because everyone deserves the right to stop wasting time looking for content they want to consume thanks to sophisticated technology that relieves us from the need to make choices for ourselves.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
There’s lots of speculation on what the soon-to-be independent AOL should do to drive user and revenue growth, and stay relevant in a world dominated by Google, Microsoft and Facebook. New CEO Tim Armstrong says he’s taking some time to take input internally and create a plan.
But some sources we’ve been talking to say that there’s a real push to remake AOL into an online media powerhouse - one that will rise just as the print media world is falling apart.
There are some real assets. First is that dial up business, which still brings in around $1 billion in free cash a year. The business is deteriorating rapidly, but it will bring in real cash over the next 18-24 months before it peters out. The company also has a social networking base with Bebo and AIM, and integration of those services into other AOL properties and third party sites continues.
But the real opportunity for AOL is to grab marketshare in a relatively open field, say some people close to the company. A contingent of AOL executives are said to be pushing Armstrong to embrace what I’ve heard is called the “Toyota strategy” by building and buying scores of great online media brands. AOL is the “Toyota” and the media brands are like the many car models that Toyota successfully pushes - Highlander, Camry, Pious, etc. The analogy isn’t perfect, but it gives you a good idea of how they’re thinking of organizing things.
The foundation for this strategy is already firmly in place, and has been since AOL acquired Weblogs, Inc. in 2005 for $25 million or so (that was three AOL CEO’s ago, when Jonathan Miller was running things). All those great Weblogs brands have continued to grow at a breakneck pace. Sites like Engadget, TUAW and Joystiq are all great niche brands on their own. And AOL has expanded into many other sub-brands through their MediaGlow division under Bill Wilson.
MediaGlow was unveiled a year ago. These are AOL’s content sites - music, finance, the blogs, and new sites like PoliticsDaily and Love.com. Combined, these sites bring in 76 million unique monthly visitors (Comsore, May 2009). 27 of the Technorati Top 100 blogs are owned by AOL.
The MediaGlow team wants to pick up the pieces of the dying print media business. Advertising is falling off a cliff (billions of dollars in advertising has evaporated). Combined with the high structural costs of print media (high wages, and well, printing on paper and mailing to readers) and the result is a lot of high quality talent is suddenly willing to take a job in online, even at a much lower salary.
The plan would be to build and buy scores of new brands in every monetizable niche possible. If you see a magazine at the newsstand covering a topic, AOL will have their own online brand for that topic, in blog or other format. They’ve already got the publishing platform with MediaGlow. New brands can be inserted or built at little marginal operating cost. And the talent is out there for the taking right now.
That’s where all that cash from the dialup business comes in. They’ve got the runway of 18 - 24 months to buy properties and hire journalists to staff these new brands. And once they get going it’s unlikely any of the other big portals can catch up, particularly if AOL has hired the best talent out there.. Yahoo is the one competitor in a position to do something like this, but there’s been no indication from CEO Carol Bartz that she finds this direction interesting.
I like this strategy - it’s clear and bold. It’s not just following Facebook or Twitter. It’s not entering AOL into the soul-sucking search wars. But building out online content at a massive scale with proven journalists shed from the print world, all backed by dialup cash flow makes a lot of sense. It’s a war that AOL can win. All they have to do is fire the guns.
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my6sense is announcing it has raised $2 million in Series A financing from private investors. The company is pioneering ‘digital intuition‘, artificial intelligence designed to assist everyday users separate the signal from the noise. This is a problem that has grown in magnitudes of severity since the introduction of blogs and RSS into our lives, and compounded even further by the recent rise in popularity of streams (thank you Facebook & Twitter).
In my initial review I tested my6sense’s technology which they chose to apply on an iPhone web app that basically acted like an RSS reader with, well, a sixth sense. The magical part was not only that it worked, it required me to do nothing but consume the content (in my case, blog posts). I didn’t have to rate content-to-interest relevance or assist the application in any way. It took a couple of days to achieve what I described as my "A-Ha Moment"
Suddenly, very relevant info was floated to the top of the main "TOP MESSAGES" pane. By relevant, I mean posts I would absolutely have clicked on through my Reader, but would have had to sift through hundreds of posts before doing so.
my6Sense will use the additional funding to advance R&D and its marketing efforts. It will also continue to focus on applying its technology in mobile applications. To this end, the company plans to release a native iPhone app in the very near future which we will be sure to cover.
Shopping for fashion on the web can be an overwhelming experience. Not only can you find an unlimited amount of clothing on the e-commerce sites of retailers like Nordstroms and Saks.com, but there are also plethora of web-based sites that offer deals for fashion, including Bluefly,Zappos and ShopBop. I love snagging great deals on designer and high-end clothes but simply don’t have the time to peruse all of these sites to find sales for clothes that are in my size and fit my style.
The folks who brought us Riya and visual shopping search engine Like.com have launched Covet.com, a site that acts as a free virtual personal shopper and pseudo stylist for users. Covet will first determine your style based on your responses to a series of photos and outfits worn by celebrities. I found myself choosing between a Chanel-clad Anna Wintour or a leggings-clad Lindsay Lohan. Covet also determines your clothing preference by letting users choose between images that could represent varying types of style (the Eiffel Tower vs. the Golden Gate Bridge, Beer vs. Champagne).
After a series of these decisions, Covet ask you to specify your shoe and clothing sizes and then gives you a profile based on your choices. Style categories vary from edgy urban to sporty eclectic to couture glam, which you can change if Covet gets it wrong. You can also edit your style to filter suggestions by desired (or hated) brands, colors, and styles you prefer when it comes to clothing, shoes and accessories.
Once your style is established, Covet will send you either daily or weekly emails with clothing and shoes found over thousands of online merchants that fit your style and are available in your size. Emails will include two sections of recommendations: those that are on sale and new but full-priced arrivals. If you click on the item in the email, you will be led to a Covet landing page, where you can then click to buy the item directly from the retailer. Covet’s co-founder Munjal Shah says that the site will soon let users indicate if the suggested items fit their style, and Covet will use this knowledge to make more accurate suggestions in the future.
Covet crawls the sites of more than 5,000 retailers and uses the same image recognition technology to group together similar products as Like.com. Covet’s business model is also similar to that of Like.com; Covet makes money on a pay-per-click basis. Each time a user clicks to a retailer’s site, Covet takes a small cut. The same model has proved to be lucrative for Like.com, showing steady revenue growth for a young startup. The company, which launched in 2006, reached a $1 million annual run rate within a year and hit a $20 million revenue run rate last year. Shah says that Like.com’s current run rate is well over $20 million in revenue.
Covet’s main competition is ShopItToMe.com, another personalized shopping service on the web. ShopItToMe requires you to filter desired results solely by brand and size whereas Covet creates a profile based on style, color, brand, fit and size. Both are useful for online personal shopping but Covet’s style analysis adds an interesting twist to service. I do think that daily emails about available products could get a little spammy but both services let you choose to receive the alert emails once or twice a week instead of every day.
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Intuit, the company that makes personal and small business software, has launched a new capability called "Federated Applications" that allows SaaS developers to write their applications using any programming language and cloud platform and connect them to the Intuit Partner Platform. Intuit’s Partner Platform provides a foundation for developers to build and deploy apps that can be integrated with Intuit’s small business accounting software, QuickBooks. QuickBooks has close to 25 million users within 4 million businesses who can buy these apps on Intuit’s own version of its Salesforce.com-like App Store, Intuit Marketplace.
The “Federated Applications” functionality lets developers who have existing SaaS applications that are built with any programming language, database or cloud computing platform publish their apps on Intuit Marketplace. Applications won’t have to be rewritten to conform to QuickBooks but will instead go through a minor configuration process.
Last year, Intuit opened up the API to its management software, QuickBase, to developers who wanted to build web applications and businesses on top of the product, in an effort to enter a space already occupied by Salesforce.com, Google, and Amazon. This recent news seems like another strategic move for Intuit to open up its app marketplace in order to gain a greater variety of apps from different developers. Previously, developers were limited to developing an app for QuickBooks directly on Intuit’s Partner Platform and then could only market that app solely on Intuit Workplace. Now, app developers who have SaaS offerings on other CRMs or software products can tap into the QuickBooks community, and vice versa.
For example, Vertical Response, which creates an e-mail marketing, online survey and direct mail application, sells its app on the Salesforce.com AppExchange and will now sell its app on Intuit Workplace. The VerticalResponse app that sells on Intuit Workplace adds sales and marketing tools to the accounting functionality of QuickBooks.
Other “Federated Apps” on Intuit Workplace include Dimdim, a web conferencing tool; Rypple, a collaborative app; Setster, which assists with scheduling; and ExpenseWare, a travel and expense reporting application.
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RingRevenue, a pay-per-call platform designed for affiliate networks, has closed a $3.5 million funding round led by GRP Partners, Rincon Venture Partners, and Great Pacific Capital. The company is looking to tap into the huge volume of sales that occur via the telephone, helping affiliate networks and ad agencies track phone calls in much the same way online ad clicks are tracked.
The platform allows affiliate networks to assign both unique local and toll free phone numbers to publishers running a given ad campaign. These unique numbers can then be used by the advertiser to track the performance of their publishers’ campaigns and compensate them accordingly. CEO and founder Jason Spievak acknowledges that there are other companies offering call tracking to advertisers, but says that these weren’t built with the affiliate community in mind. Using most other systems, advertisers are forced to manage the logistics of distributing the numbers to publishers and subsequently compensating them. RingRevenue lets advertisers leave the logistical issues to the affiliate networks, who are well versed in them.
The platform also includes a number of features designed to help advertisers maximze their returns. RingRevenue can filter inbound callers in real time, which allows advertisers to selectively choose which callers they’d like to deal with. The service does this by matching phone numbers against a large database of known callers, using data that the company has acquired in-house, along with a number of third party data vendors.
Despite the fact that RingRevenue launched in stealth only nine months ago, it has managed to sign up four of the top ten affiliate networks, including Commission Junction. Aside from its impressive roster of clients, RingRevenue has experience on its side — many of the teammembers previously helped create CallWave, an online telecommunications company that went public in 2004.
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About 45 minutes ago I tried logging into Mahalo to stake a few claims for myself in the site’s revamped directory, which pays users for creating and maintaining their entries. This has proven far more difficult than it should be. In fact, it seems like Mahalo’s account system is totally broken.
First, I attempted to create a new user name for myself. I decided to go with MrCody, which is the name of my dog. Things seemed normal at first, until I noticed that my username at the top of the screen was now ‘mahendranunna’. A refresh later and Mahalo said “Welcome cddesai”. Being the inquisitive reporter that I am, I attempted to navigate through the user’s control panel. I could view the pages that they were currently managing. I tried to ask a question on Mahalo Answers under one of these accounts, and it seemed to work (the site is currently down so I can’t check to see if it actually posted). Over the course of the next twenty minutes, I was logged in as at least 8 different users. I’m not entirely sure what I was doing to jump between identities — sometimes a refresh would do it, other times I’d have the same username for a few minutes. It was bizarre.
We got in touch with CEO Jason Calacanis, who says that the problem is a “caching issue”, and that “the users aren’t actually logged in as another users (just appears that way).” Fine. But the site is still going down sporadically, and I still haven’t gotten the damn Email to activate the account I signed up for in the first place.
Disclosure: Jason Calacanis is our partner in putting on the TechCrunch50 conference.
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I haven't been much of a cleantech bull in the past, at least when it comes to venture capital investing. I think it's a huge market, and there's clearly a pressing social need. I just don't quite think the science, government cooperation and economics are there yet for it to be a great opportunity for classic venture investing.
Today at the 
He talked about how right after one of former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s speeches in which she belittled what the Obama campaign was doing with its online efforts, the entire team got fired up and starting sending out a mass of emails to supporters. Hughes and the team realized that Palin was an extremely divisive person, and used people’s dislike of her as a way to raise money instantly online. Obviously, it worked to the tune of millions upon millions of dollars.
There’s no question that 
Bro's a no no for CoCo? In case you missed the Twitter Tracker bit on Conan last night, here it is again in all its glory. It's a must-watch no matter what you think of Twitter. 
One large component of the “
Back in the olden days I used to read 
In the past we’ve written about eBay’s 
The TV guide doesn’t know who you are, what your favorite movie genre is, what you’ve watched in the past, what your mood is, and so on. Because of that, it is incapable of providing you with any recommendations about what to watch on your TV, or which videos you’re likely going to enjoy consuming right now on your PC or even your mobile phone. With the sheer volume of available channels and VOD content out there, that’s becoming quite a problem for many people. But if 
There’s lots of 
About 45 minutes ago I tried logging into 
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