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- The Gesture Cube May Not Be Real But It Should Be
- FriendFeed Clone Cliqset Launches Social Memory Integration Courtesy Of Evernote
- In Time For The Oscars, Vanity Fair Launches Hollywood iPhone App
- Pew Report: Kids Who Pay for Their Own Phone Are 4 Times More Likely To Sext
- Dropbox Hints At Forthcoming Android And Blackberry Apps
- Viacom’s EPIX Lands Cable Deal With Charter Communications
- Cognitive Match Secures Another $2.5m For Realtime Matching
- Apple Now Lets You Preview iPhone Apps In Your Browser
- Man Resigns On Twitter In Haiku. Happens To Be Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.
- SGN Founder Shervin Pishevar Gives Silicon Valley A Rap Anthem
- AppsFire Draws In Some French Angels To Bankroll Mobile App Recommendations
- Kwedit Launches: The First Completely Unreliable Payment Network
- Potentially Nasty New iPhone Security Flaw Discovered
- ComScore: Netflix Now A Top 20 Online Video Site
- Factual Raises $1 Million Seed Round From Andreessen Horowitz, Idealab, And Angels
- Hurt Locker: Netflix’s 28-Day Window Would Decimate Their Top Rental List
- Davos Interviews: Ning CEO Gina Bianchini Insists Facebook Isn’t A Competitor
- 5min Rules The How-To Video Space
- Monster Buys HotJobs From Yahoo For $225 Million
- Gowalla Aims To Raise $20,000 For Haiti Through Check-Ins
- Check-In For Charity: Loopt Giving To Haiti If You Visit Chipotle, Panera, Or Whole Foods
- The Other Winner In Macmillan v. Amazon: Barnes & Noble
- Bantam Live Takes The Beta Covers Off Its Social CRM
- Quick Look: Kempler & Strauss W Phone Watch
- The Venture Hacks StartupList Helps Fledgling Startups Pitch Top Angel Investors
| The Gesture Cube May Not Be Real But It Should Be Posted: 04 Feb 2010 09:12 AM PST  IDENT's GestIC technology is a gesture-based interface system and they're showing off by describing a cube of some sort that allows you to turn, twist, and pinch your data in 3D. Each side will have different functions and you can access messages and the web just by slipping and sliding on the surface. This is obviously as real right now as the Yeti but you could imaging something like the iPad in 3D with touchscreens on each surface. It also looks quite striking and the interface is great if you're into high-tech Minority Report stuff. Why you'd want this instead of something that fits in your pocket is beyond me, but there's no accounting for taste. GestIC is described as a new HCI method and has already shown up in some devices. You can read more about the cube here. Click through for videos.
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| FriendFeed Clone Cliqset Launches Social Memory Integration Courtesy Of Evernote Posted: 04 Feb 2010 08:58 AM PST
Evernote, the popular site, iPhone (and now Android) app which lets you record your memories by snapping geo-tagged photos, making voice notes, or just text notes and making it easy to search through them, is gaining serious traction on the web. In December, Evernote just reached 2 million unique users, only 7 months after reaching its first million. Of course, it makes sense that users would want to use Evernote to record social interactions. Today, Cliqset, a FriendFeed-like realtime online identity platform that lets users merge and share a vast variety of social information, is integrating with Evernote to allows users to archive social content. With this integration, users of both Cliqset and Evernote can store photos, status updates, reviews, blog posts, videos, music, documents and anything they want to remember or save, to their Evernote account. Cliqset, which offers both a web-based and desktop app, aims to be a one-stop-shop for social communications, pulling in content from close to 70 social networks and services, including MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and more. Users can also update their status, and share photos, bookmarks, reviews on Cliqset and push them out to wherever they choose. Once you activate the Evernote integration and account information, you can share any content on Cliqset via the click of the Evernote icon on the app. You can create folders for Evernote content, and then search for the content within Evernote. The integration has been synced across web-based app, Cliqset’s desktop app, Firefox extension and bookmarklet. While the real-time social media stream is fast becoming a crowded space with Threadsy, Streamy and others offering compelling platforms, Cliqset is continuing to innovate its platform to allow for ultimate syndication. Of course, Seesmic is entering the fray with the acquisition of Ping.fm. Darren Bounds, president of Cliqset, has told us that the platform aims to be a less clunky version of FriendFeed, with a target audience of users who aren't as technologically savvy. Cliqset will be launching an iPhone app in the near future and is currently developing a browser extension for Chrome.
Cliqset + Evernote from cliqset on Vimeo.
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| In Time For The Oscars, Vanity Fair Launches Hollywood iPhone App Posted: 04 Feb 2010 07:44 AM PST
The Academy Awards are just around the corner, and magazine Vanity Fair is launching a free branded iPhone app to promote its Oscar-related content. Famous for its Oscar night party and Hollywood pics, Vanity Fair is also encouraging users to make your Oscar picks on the app. You can download the app here. Within the app, you make your picks for the award categories and receive realtime results on the night of the big show. You can also invite your friends to vote for the people you think have the best chance of winning, compare your selections to those of friends and Vanity Fair editors, and chat within the app via Facebook chat. On Oscar night, the app will show you who is winning from your picks. Of course, the app also offers access to Vanity Fair editorial content including background information on nominees, stories, photos, profiles, trailers of nominated films, and slideshows. This is Vanity Fair’s first iPhone app so it should be interesting to see if the magazine decides to launch a more comprehensive app for its content, a la Lucky Magazine (Both are Conde Nast publications). Other Oscar-specific iPhone apps include The Envelope, from the LA Times and Oscar Edition.
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| Pew Report: Kids Who Pay for Their Own Phone Are 4 Times More Likely To Sext Posted: 04 Feb 2010 07:35 AM PST  The Pew Internet Project says that kids who buy their own phones are four times as likely to sext - that is send inappropriate images or texts to other kids. The sad thing is that some of these images make it into some of the 3,000 reports received by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children every week. While I still think sexting, like rainbow parties, is an overblown phenomenon, the report, found here and embedded after the jump, polled 2,553 Millennials (18-29) and 800 adolescents between 12 and 17. The results were quite interesting.
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| Dropbox Hints At Forthcoming Android And Blackberry Apps Posted: 04 Feb 2010 06:54 AM PST
In an e-mail update sent out to its user base – over four million strong these days – the startup reminds people about the existence of its mobile website but ends the message with a couple of sentences that leave little to one’s imagination:
Furthermore, in the latest post published on Dropbox’ company blog, engineer Will Stockwell notes his resolution for 2010 is “to release some crazy new features for the iPhone app” and to begin poking his head around “some other undisclosed projects.. coughANDROIDAPPcough”. The company seems pretty serious about its plans for servicing Google’s open mobile OS platform, as it’s also looking for an extra Android Developer according to its jobs page. In case you’re not familiar with the service – unlikely given the fact that the startup has won a Crunchie for Best Internet Application at the most recent awards ceremony – Dropbox enables people to sync files and media across platforms and devices, in order to have them available from any location. Dropbox provides users with 2 GB of space for free (twice the storage Google offers), with add-on plans offering more storage and functionality for a fee. Dropbox was founded by CEO Drew Houston and CTO Arash Ferdowsi in 2007, and received seed funding from Y Combinator soon after. The company went on to raise $7.2 million from Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Amidzad Partners. (Thanks to Erin Blaskie for the tip and the TwitPic image)
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| Viacom’s EPIX Lands Cable Deal With Charter Communications Posted: 04 Feb 2010 05:40 AM PST  Epix, the movie and entertainment streaming network that works across your TV, computer, and mobile phone, has landed its fourth cable deal: Charter Communications. In the past few weeks, the network also landed a deal with Cox Communications and Mediacom Communications. We wrote about the service here and here. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Jointly backed by Viacom, Lionsgate, Paramount, and MGM, EPIX provides access to over 15,000 movie titles. The company originally signed a deal with Verizon FIOS, which was somewhat limiting considering only some 2 million people use Verizon’s cable service. Cox brings more clients to EPIX with its base of 6.2 million customers, which including 2.7 million digital cable subscribers. Mediacom, the 7th largest cable provider in the U.S., will bring with it a base of 1.3 million subscribers in 22 states. And Carter, which is the fourth largest cable provider in the U.S. will bring EPIX to 5.7 million homes by May 2010. One of our main issues with EPIX was that it was tied to Verizon FIOS but it appears that the company is steadily adding more cable providers to distribute its service. Epix was also said to be close to an agreement with the Dish Network, which would bring a large list of 14 million subscribers. Unfortunately, the platform offers a sliver of available movies out there, since it only includes the movies available through the studios that are backing the company. But EPIX is useful because it transcends the TV and your computer and it’s fairly easy to use. Now that EPIX has scored deals with Cox and Charter, I’m sure the company is looking to cross Time Warner and Comcast off the list.
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| Cognitive Match Secures Another $2.5m For Realtime Matching Posted: 04 Feb 2010 02:49 AM PST
The Cognitive Match startup is applying artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content (product, offers, or editorial) to realtime content. It’s doing this in part by relying on an academic panel of professors in artificial intelligence from Universities across the UK and Europe who specialise in machine learning and psychology. The idea is to ensure maximum response from individuals, thereby increasing conversion, revenue and ultimately profit. Last year it raised a Series A investment from Dawn Capital, rumoured to be in the $1m+ ballpark. Today Dawn has stepped in again with a follow-on Series B investment of $2.5m which the company will use to accelerate its growth. That takes it’s war-chest to around $3.5m
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| Apple Now Lets You Preview iPhone Apps In Your Browser Posted: 04 Feb 2010 12:09 AM PST
At the time, you weren’t able to actually listen to a sample of music tracks from your browser, but that changed earlier this year when Web-based audio previews were quietly added (paving the way for the imminent roll-out of iTunes.com). This morning, Apple activated the iTunes Preview feature for iPhone / iPod Touch applications in addition. To see this for yourself, open any direct link to an iPhone app (example) in your favorite Web browser. You’ll notice that instead of only throwing up a dialog box prompting you to confirm that you wish to launch iTunes on your desktop, you’ll see a nice page with the app logo, price, description, screenshots, rating, reviews and more in a new window or tab. Simultaneously, iTunes will be opened and you’ll be directed to the app’s detail page in the App Store. All in all, this is a logical move for Apple to make: the prior way links to iPhone apps were handled wasn’t particularly user-friendly. You still get the option to confirm that you want to open iTunes or do nothing when you click a link to download or purchase apps, but at least now you’ll also get a nice overview of what an app is all about and how other users are liking it. Next up: iTunes Preview for video content? (Hat tip to Gerry Cardinal III)
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| Man Resigns On Twitter In Haiku. Happens To Be Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Posted: 03 Feb 2010 10:51 PM PST
When you’re on your way out of a job, there’s a lot of fun ways to exit. Some choose to take all the staplers in the office, some show up to the last day in shorts, some pull a Jerry Maguire. And some tweet out a haiku. That’s exactly what Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz did tonight. Here’s his tweet:
Really, what more needs to be said? Schwartz had been serving as Sun’s CEO since 2006; prior to that he was the company’s COO. It has been known that he would resign for several days now following Sun’s sale to Oracle, which the EU just approved. Schwartz has always enjoyed this type of public discourse, as he continued to blog in a time when very few CEOs would dare do such a thing. His latest post was on January 27, describing what he’d be doing next.
Indeed. Tonight he started that off with a bang (and we love the two self-promotion links).
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| SGN Founder Shervin Pishevar Gives Silicon Valley A Rap Anthem Posted: 03 Feb 2010 10:27 PM PST
Then, late in 2009, he found himself wandering through Europe as part of one of Dave McClure’s Geeks On A Plane adventures. After an evening at the BetaHaus in Berlin, Germany, Pishevar put on his iPod and stumbled across Jay-Z’s song “A Star Is Born”. Inspired, he set upon a creative mission: to create a cover version that captured the spirit of Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship. After penning the lyrics, Pishevar took advantage of the services offered by GreetBeatz, a startup that lets you contract professional rappers to sing anything you want (he paired up with Thunda). And thus Silicon Valley’s rap anthem was born. Of course, not every entrepreneur is successful with their first startup. And it appears that they don’t always nail their first rap song, either. As you watch the clip below, you may well get the urge to start giggling, perhaps with a cocked eyebrow as you try to get a handle on what you’re watching. It’s a lot to take in, with everything from The Fonz to cameos from James Hong, Phil Kaplan, Joe Greenstein, and Saar Gur. And then there’s the babies. Lot of babies. I’m not entirely sure what emotion Pishevar was trying to elicit, but he sure made me smile (and cringe). But even if it’s pretty clear that he should stick to his day job, by making this video Pishevar has shown what Silicon Valley is all about. He’s cultivated an idea from lyrics jotted on a piece of paper into a full fledged music video. He channeled his passion to make something. Plus, he gets bonus points for including the Fonz. Now say it with me: Platform. Platform. Platform. H-ayyyyy.
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| AppsFire Draws In Some French Angels To Bankroll Mobile App Recommendations Posted: 03 Feb 2010 06:00 PM PST
With more than 140,000 apps on the iPhone alone, there is a real need for services which help you find the best apps. Apple’s iTunes ratings and genius recommendations only go so far. One startup attacking this problem is French-Israeli AppsFire, which just raised its first angel round. AppsFire was co-founded by former TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon and Yann Lechelle. The investors are a group of successful French entrepreneurs (yes, they exist), including Marc Simoncini (CEO of dating site meetic.com), Jacques-Antoine Granjon (CEO of Vente-Privee.com), Xavier Niel (CEO of French ISP Free), and entrepreneur and angel investor Jean-David Blanc (who also recently invested in Square). The amount raised wasn’t disclosed but it is believed to be in the low seven figures. AppsFire offers a simple utility app which makes it easy to share iPhone app recommendations with your friends. Since its beta launch last summer, more than 10 million apps have been shared, leading to hundreds of thousands of clicks to iTunes. It also highlights apps through its AppStar Awards. Recently, AppsFire started promoting its own short link for iPhone apps, http://getap.ps/, which opens up iTunes on both the iPhone and desktop computers to a specific app’s page. While you are waiting for iTunes to open up, information about the App appears on the landing page, developers who use getap.ps will get analytics on conversions and other stats. This America Life (http://getap.ps/thisamericanlife) and DailyMotion (http://getap.ps/dailymotion) are already using it. The startup plans to move beyond the iPhone to other mobile devices with growing app markets such as Android and Blackberry. It also recently launched PasteFire, a way to share other things such as Web links, emails, phone numbers, and photos to and from your iPhone. It will start to give users app recommendations based on the content they copy in PasteFire as well. The whole focus of the company is to help people discover new apps and drive more downloads and sales of apps. Competitors include Appolicious, 16Apps, and others.
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| Kwedit Launches: The First Completely Unreliable Payment Network Posted: 03 Feb 2010 05:48 PM PST
Here’s how Kwedit works: they let users take on fake debt instead of paying for virtual goods with real money (or via scammy or legitimate offers). A user promises to pay later. It’s not an enforceable promise, and there is really no consequence if a user doesn’t pay. But there are built in incentives to pay it off, and Kwedit expects some percentage of people to actually do so.
As users take and pay off, or default, on Kwedit promises, a virtual Kwedit score moves up and down just like a real-life credit score. Users get more credit (err, Kwedit) when they actually pay the stuff they agreed to. And if they don’t pay, the kwedit score goes down and getting more Kwedit becomes difficult. There’s some risk that users will try to sign up under another name to start fresh – but since most of the virtual games are on social networks and tied to established identities, that won’t work very well.
What do I think of this? I think it’s brilliant. Social gaming companies like Zynga have said that they can only monetize a few percentage points of users via direct payments. They try to increase that number via offers, which is a slippery slope towards Scamville. Kwedit falls in between direct payments and offers. And even if users default, the Zyngas of the world aren’t out any cash. They’re just giving away virtual stuff in exchange for the Kwedit, after all. I have some concern about cannibalism, where a user chooses Kwedit instead of paying directly even though they have a credit card. The company says that will certainly be an issue, but they think that on balance they’ll be a net-positive payment option. If Kwedit’s early days are successful, look for all the gaming companies to jump on board quickly. And I also think this is a great idea for other virtual goods services – like online music. I’d love to pay for music on iTunes or MySpace music via Kwedit. At some point, we may just be able to. At launch Kwedit is available on 100 social games, and also as an option on Social Gold. Is Kwedit unreliable? Yep. Is it Brilliant? Absolutely.
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| Potentially Nasty New iPhone Security Flaw Discovered Posted: 03 Feb 2010 05:04 PM PST
Wuh-oh! Considering its popularity and the number of handsets floating around out there compared to the number of security exploits discovered thus far, I’d say Apple has done a pretty good job of keeping things locked down. As this just-discovered flaw proves, however, nobody’s perfect. Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >>
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| ComScore: Netflix Now A Top 20 Online Video Site Posted: 03 Feb 2010 04:34 PM PST
The movie rental giant crossed into the top 20 video sites on the web for the first time in December, according to numbers from ComScore. Specifically, they now sit at number 19, just ahead of Break Media, and just behind Justin.TV. And with over 127 million views last month, and rising fast, it shouldn’t be long before they’re in the top 15 with the likes of Facebook and ESPN. As a streaming service, Netflix has seen huge growth over the past year as it continues to cut deals to get its content on different living room set top boxes. The service clearly believes that streaming is its future, even as it alienates some of its current bread-and-butter DVD rental customers by doing things like agreeing not to rent new DVD releases until they’ve been out for 28 days (something which hurts the availability of the most popular movies on the service). And that’s the right stance, but they’re going to have a hard time convincing the studios to ever give them newer release films to stream since those guys still believe they can sell DVDs no one really wants to own. This week, Netflix also announced the addition of a bunch of new indie films to its streaming catalog. And during their quarterly earnings report last week, they revealed that nearly half of their subscribers are now streaming some content. Here are the top 20 video properties by number of videos streamed per months (in thousands)
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| Factual Raises $1 Million Seed Round From Andreessen Horowitz, Idealab, And Angels Posted: 03 Feb 2010 04:00 PM PST
If you co-founded the company that became Google AdSense, as Gil Elbaz did with Applied Semantics, you don’t have any problem finding investors when you want to start a new venture. Elbaz sold Applied Semantics to Google for $100 million in 2003, and launched his latest startup, Factual, last October. He doesn’t really need the money, but so many all-star investors were clamoring to get in that he raised just over $1 million in an angel round. His angel investors include Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz via their Andreessen Horowitz fund, Bill Gross via Idealab, Esther Dyson, Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos, as well as New York City seed fund the Founder Collective. Factual is setting out to get people to create as many open databases as possible by providing tools for creating table son any topic, embedding them and sharing them. There are already hundreds fo thousands of tables on Factual, dome large some small. For instance, Creative Commons created a database filled with Websites using Creative Commons licenses that contains 4 million rows. All the data in Factual is editable in a wiki-like fashion and is available through Factual APIs. Chris Dixon, founding partner of Founder Collective (and CEO of Hunch) says they invested because of Factual’s “huge ambition.” In order for the Web to become programmable, it needs data and lots of it. “I think of it as Wikipedia for structured database-like information,” says Dixon. It joins many other efforts pursuing similar ambitions, include Freebase, Wolfram Alpha, and even Google.
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| Hurt Locker: Netflix’s 28-Day Window Would Decimate Their Top Rental List Posted: 03 Feb 2010 03:31 PM PST
Each month, Netflix releases a list of the top 25 rented movies for the previous month on its Facebook page. This week, they gave out the data for January 2010, and guess what? Of the top 25 rentals, over half (13) would not have been fully available to rent for the month under the new 28-day rule. And some wouldn’t have been available at all. Clearly, this new policy is going to have a bigger effect on Netflix users’ rental habits that the company wants you to believe. Here’s a full list of the top 25 rented films in January 2010 with their DVD release data next to the title, followed by a yes/no note of if they would have been available to rent for the full month of January:
A few other things to note. First, two of the movies on this list benefitted from the fact that December 1 was a Tuesday (the day DVDs are released). In other months, these films may have missed the 28-day window depending on when the first Tuesday of the month was. Second, Netflix actually started implementing its 28-day rule in January, so films such as The Invention Of Lying were already subject to this and as such, not available to rent from Netflix. It’s hard to know if these movies would have made the top rental list even if it were available, but it’s worth noting (and more on that below). Third, it’s already a bit difficult to rent new releases due to demand, so it’s certainly possible that if Netflix focused on supply of newer films rather than removing them until 28 days later, many of the newer films would be even higher on the list.
Going back to The Invention Of Lying, while it wasn’t available to rent on Netflix, it has been available to rent on iTunes since its release (because Apple didn’t sign the bogus deal with the studios). Interestingly enough, it has been in the top 10 rentals on that service ever since its release (and that’s impressive given its relative lack of star power and somewhat tepid reviews — did I mention this movie made a whopping $18 million at the box office?). As I noted at the time, it looks like Netflix gaves its competitors, such as iTunes, a big wet kiss by agreeing to this 28-day window. If they agree to it with the other studios as well, Netflix’s rivals could see a surge of activity around these new release movies. It’s too early to tell about illegal movie sharing on the torrent sites as a result of this new rule, but I would watch those charts closely to see how many Warner films show up on there simply because they’re not available to rent on Netflix. Netflix continues to add older movies to its streaming service, as well as indie films, which is great, but it’s underestimating how much people care about renting newer releases. They just need to look at their own charts to see that. [images: Summit Entertainment]
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| Davos Interviews: Ning CEO Gina Bianchini Insists Facebook Isn’t A Competitor Posted: 03 Feb 2010 03:13 PM PST Up next in our series of tech interviews at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week: Gina Bianchini, the CEO of social networking service Ning. Ning has never had the press attention of Facebook and Twitter. But there are 41 million registered users on Ning, and Gina says that 92 million people a month worldwide visit Ning sites. We spoke at length in the interview about how the world sees Ning, and how Ning defines itself. Anyone can easily create a Ning social network, cobranded or white labelled. 2.5 million of them have been created so far. In some ways Ning networks are competitive to Facebook Pages (here’s the TechCrunch Facebook page). Both allow for a presence inside of a social network. And when faced with a choice, most may choose Facebook simply because it has so many hundreds of millions of users to help word spread virally. Gina doesn’t see it this way. She notes that Facebook pages have limited features and are locked within Facebook itself. Ning allows for deep social experiences around brands and things. Instead of the product competing with Facebook (and Twitter, etc.), she sees Ning as the center of an ecosystem that includes all of these products. A fascinating excerpt from the interview:
And in fact Gina doesn’t think any of these companies – Facebook, Ning, Twitter, LinkedIn – really compete with each other. “Each one of them has gotten really comfortable and more narrowly focused on the thing they do better than anybody else,” she says later in the interview:
The full transcript is below. Interview with Ning CEO Gina Bianchini Michael Arrington: I'm here with Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, hello Gina. Gina Bianchini: Hi, how are you? MA: Good. Thanks for joining the World Economic Forum in Davos to sit down and talk about Ning for a little bit. How do you like the hotel? GB: I describe it as Swedish dorm room chic, and it's pretty great actually. MA: Even though there's no internet access in all the internet executives' rooms? GB: It's a little ironic. MA: So everyone's down here in the lobby working. GB: I almost feel like that's our purpose here in a way. MA: It's good for me because if I want to talk to you, I just go to the lobby and you're on your computer and you can't really hide when you only have internet access in one place. GB: Absolutely. MA: Is this your first World Economic forum? GB: It is. MA: And what do you think of the conference itself? GB: It's pretty amazing. It's a little overwhelming actually because there are so many people from different walks of life doing so many interesting things, and it's all packed within a small Swiss ski town, that's it's kind of hard to get your bearings. But it's been wonderful. I really enjoyed our panel the first day. MA: Yeah, you were on a panel with Evan Williams, Randi Zuckerberg, Owen VanNatta, and Reid Hoffman was there. I was there reporting on it; you guys talked about social networks. Do you feel like there's a good amount of attention here to technology? It seems like there is. GB: There absolutely is. It's rare that you go to conferences that have a broad policy and political base, as well as being something that's just technology focused, and I've had more people come up to me, trying to explore how to use social technologies to change the world, and I think that that is always a great conversation to have. MA: Do you find that most people here are very familiar with Ning? New for some people? Is Ning part of the established set of technology companies that people here know about? GB: I don't think so. I think the thing that has actually been really surprising to me is how many people touch a Ning network from all walks of life. I had someone from a pretty large advertising agency say to me that their team in Brazil has been using Ning for basically three years. MA: The advertising agency has a Ning presence. GB: And even better, they're using it for their internal team to coordinate. So I think the thing that's been the most fun from my perspective is that we made the decision early on that we would share branding, that we weren't going to be a service that was basically one size fits all, but that what we do, being a social platform for interests and passions, and really being about unique social experiences, that we needed to share the brand. And we needed to basically allow our network creators to put their brand first with Ning being a bit recessive. So we don't have the same visibility that a Facebook or a Linked In or a Twitter has, but we actually think that for what we do, it's absolutely critical that we give and we share brand identity, because what people are doing on Ning is creating unique contextual social experiences for the things that really matter to them. And so, that's actually something that's been fun for me, is to see all the different ways that people are using Ning today, and in some cases, they absolutely know it's Ning, and in other cases, they don't know it's Ning. That's not white label. MA: You allow domain mapping which is very basic Ning – is there some footer that is any Ning branding at all? GB: Yes, absolutely. MA: We'll talk about that in a little bit with your numbers. You've raised a lot of money; you've raised $119 million dollars now, and your last valuation was $750 million, is that right? (GB nods). And you count among your investors, Reid Hoffman, the founder of Linked In. And Marc Andreesen's actually cofounder, but he's also on the board of Facebook. Is it awkward at all, with Marc being on the board of Facebook and Reid being Linked In heavy? Is it at all awkward? Because they are both competitors, right? GB: Not at all. No, and that's actually why it's ok. I think that this is the thing that has really been emerging in the last year, is the fact that different people – or I should say actually, the same people, are using different social technologies for different purposes. And I think at some level, the true story of the last few years has been that everybody's been trying to figure out where they fit into the world and whether or not different people are competing directly. I thinks it's an interesting evolution that I did not expect, and I don't think any of us expected when we started, because there's always the sense that it is a horse race, it's not a zero sum game as it relates to social technologies, and in fact what's happening, is that the same people are using Linked In for their professional identity; they're using Facebook for connecting to people that they know in the real world, and have gone to school with, that are friends from the neighborhood. What Twitter is about is news and real time events in a way that is different from Facebook. And what we do is basically enable people to dive deeper and create rich social experiences for the topics and things that they truly care about. The aha moment that I had was that's what actually makes us human beings, and what makes us people, and these different social technologies all work together really well. For example, two weeks ago we launched Twitter integration, and we've seen a huge increase in terms of people sharing content from their Ning network. MA: That's both signing in and publishing back to Twitter? GB: It's just publishing to Twitter, and then people coming back with a shortened url. And what's been great about that is that people love to be able to share on Twitter. They love to be able to share and then come back in, and we're seeing that in the numbers. And I think we'll shortly launch a similar integration using Facebook because it just makes sense, and it's what people want. They want to have a very fluid relationship between Linked In, Twitter, Ning and the networks they belong to. And Facebook. And I think that's something that from the inside, we all realize. Why for example, Reid Hoffman has been a great supporter of Ning, why Marc can sit on the board of Facebook and Ning, and why Marc is an investor in so many of the social technologies that exist, and I think that's something that's really fun about it right now. MA: When you integrate with Facebook, will that be in the sense of signing in to your Ning account through Facebook and publish back to Facebook? Or more like what you're doing with Twitter, and just publish back to Facebook? GB: More like what we're doing with Twitter for v1, and there's no political strategy that says we should have Facebook connect or we shouldn't have Facebook connect, it's just a matter of we're seeing what's working and integrating rapidly from here. MA: How about just from a user perspective and integrating the social graph and having your friends listed in one place? Is that something that you think there may be demand at Ning? GB: Absolutely. It's something that we'll explore in the next few months as we move forward. MA: One place I personally think you do compete with Facebook is company pages. Companies set up a profile to get fans, and it's not just their friends but they promote it, they put it on their advertisements. They also might do that with Ning whether it's the Ning network or the domain mount and make it look all their own. They might do both but it seems like there's a clear direct competition between Ning networks and Facebook pages. Agree, disagree, how do you see that? GB: Absolutely disagree. I love the fact that there should be this perceived horserace, where one person wins and one person loses, and that's just not how it's working today. And what's really cool is the fact… MA: Do you see people doing both? GB: Yeah, absolutely. MA: That's why you don't think there's competition? GB: That's why we can actually integrate with Twitter and use Twitter as a distribution channel. And basically send people very fluidly to Ning and then people are publishing from Ning into Twitter really effectively. And so what I think actually is happening , and we're seeing this especially among people who are artists, and people who started in 2005 and 2006 with a myspace page, which is they basically look at it and they say, "ok, Facebook, myspace, Twitter, phenomenal for distribution. That is the place where I can put up a fan page and within a few hours I can have a million followers." The same thing is true for twitter. So if you basically look at the people who have over a million followers, they are getting increasingly sophisticated in terms of understanding that those are phenomenal, but very lightweight distribution channels. What they're realizing and I think where the market is going is the sophistication around, where you're sending people and where the destination is, whether that was originally a blog, or whether that was originally a website is actually becoming a rich immersive social experience. MA: And now you're talking about Ning? GB: And now I'm talking about Ning. MA: And a Facebook page isn't as rich and immersive social experience. GB: That's not what they're trying to do. They're trying to give people away within Facebook to say, "I'm a fan of Pete Wentz and Fall Out Boy" or "I love Adidas." I think that's fantastic, but it's very lightweight. It's good that it's lightweight because it means that people have a way to thread all of these ways that they want to interact with brands, with celebrities, with artists, with things that they truly care about. But I think where the market is going and where you'll see more and more people do interesting things, is where is the hub, where are they sending people. And that is Ning. For example, Soleil Moon Frye has 1.4 million Twitter followers and just launched a Ning network two days ago. And her excitement about it is that she can allow and enable the people following her on Twitter, primarily moms and young moms who have the same messy wonderful life as a mother that she does. That she gives them an opportunity to really dive deeper into what she cares about and what she's passionate about, and really building that out as a small but very powerful lifestyle brand for moms. MA: How many international uniques are you tracking? GB: On a global basis, by IP address that excludes bots, we have 92 million monthly uniques. And four months ago we had 70 million global uniques. MA: Does that include the Ning networks that are domain mapping? GB: Yes it does. MA: So that's a fourth of Facebook, something like that? But you don't have the compressed footprint that Facebook has, or even Twitter, which is smaller than you. Why is that? GB: Very simple reason: one size fits all social platforms are easier to get your head around because they have the overarching brand identity. When you're on Facebook, you are on Facebook, and it is blue and white. And when you're on Twitter, you are on Twitter. In our case, we took a different approach and we have a different strategy, which is for us to enable unique, immersive, very rich different social experiences around the things that people care about and really allow them to dive deeper, as I mentioned as that hub. MA: So the things people care about get the press attention as opposed to Ning sometimes. GB: Absolutely. For example, Linkin Park just launched their official website which is now a social experience on Ning. And that was 3 or 4 days ago. Because they realized that what their fans want is this social opportunity to say, "I love you on myspace, I love you on Twitter, I want to know what's going on and what I should be paying attention to. But then I want a way to dive deeper into the Linkin Park experience." MA: (drawing diagram off camera) What you're saying is that Ning is sort of the center. And you've got Facebook and Twitter and myspace. So that's a good way of thinking about it. Do you think that Facebook, Twitter and myspace think about it that way? GB: I don't think they see us as a competitor. Here's what I think is happening in the market. And this is not rainbows and sunshine saying this – what's really interesting is that all of these companies were basically founded in 2005, 2006, 2007, and what's actually happened is that each one of them has gotten really comfortable and more narrowly focused on the thing they do better than anybody else. Facebook with Facebook light is actually going more in the direction of connecting you with the people you have strong relationships with your real identity, with status messages, and with photo sharing. And they do that better than anybody else. Twitter – and they had that year where, is Twitter a competitor or are they not – you can see in the past 6 months is that while there's some overlap, it's not a horserace, they're not actually competing head to head where Facebook wins and Twitter loses. So Twitter's about news and real time events. You've seen the same thing with Linked In, where they've gotten really strong and have tremendous momentum by basically saying, "we own professional identity." Professional identity has different characteristics than what you want to do with your friends on Facebook and that's actually great. And then for us, interests and passions. If you look across the market, the thing that's interesting is that none of these companies actually have a number two. And what gets confusing about it is, Facebook doesn't have a number two. Twitter doesn't have a number two. Linked In – you lived through that – all of the competitors are gone, and they are the dominant player. And in our case, we don't really have anyone else who is creating unique social experiences as an online platform, and specifically an online social platform. What's confusing to a user of the market that wants to see the head to head horserace, zero sum game, Microsoft/Netscape situation, it's not actually happening. It's really actually a race for each one of these companies and services to get as much traction and deliver as much value to an individual with the thing that they do better than anybody else. MA: Ok. Are you happy with your revenue model and how that's going? GB: Absolutely. MA: How happy, like 9 out of 10? GB: (laughs) We don't talk about revenue. I'm happy to talk about the revenue streams that we have. MA: It's ads, it's upsells right? GB: It's ads, it's upsells, and premium features like virtual gifts which we launched in October that allow our network creators to make money from their networks. So when a member of the Lost Zombies Ning network which is 10,000 people who dress up as zombies and take pictures and videos and connect with each other in building this collaborative documentary . It's lost zomies.com, check it out, it's awesome. And what they're doing with virtual gifts, is their members are giving them bloody chain saws, and when that transaction happens, we split the revenue 50/50 with the network creators. We think there are tremendous opportunities there. MA: How many bloody chainsaws have been given? GB: I don't actually know specifically. MA: Are the member of the group? GB: I'm a member of Lost Zombies, I am. MA: You should be like Tom from myspace, a member of every network. GB: That's a good idea, I like that. MA: With a really ridiculous pose in some picture. So what is revenue? Are you profitable yet? Are you approaching profitability yet? Are you approaching the point where you could be profitable? Do you want to slow down growth? GB: We're really happy and so are our investors. It's the benefit of being a private company, but it doesn't make your job any easier. MA: How many employees do you have? GB: We have 166 employees. MA: And you said you're not going to talk about profitability. GB: We're not going to talk about revenue, profitability. MA: Facebook does, they're private. GB: I know. MA: Twitter doesn't. Myspace doesn't. Hint? Million a month? 10 million a month? GB: We're really happy with where we're at and where we're going. MA: When you approach profitability will you announce that? GB: Stay tuned. MA: That's at least something. I can drop that now. It think that's it. How many registered users? GB: We have 41 million registered users and we're adding about a million registered users ever 12-13 days. MA: And you're not spending anything on marketing or you are? I've never seen anything. GB: No, it's primarily email. As we launched Twitter, and soon we'll launch Facebook, those are actually great sources of new members coming in to and across the Ning networks. The good news/bad news of our model is that it's incredibly productive and effective in terms of growth and exponential growth, but certainly we've made a different decision than other services in terms of really sharing that brand placement. And then allowing people to create really incredibly rich unique social experiences on Ning. MA: Who goes public first? Zynga, Facebook, or Linked In? Personal opinion. GB: I am not great at predicting timing but I think all of them are incredibly good businesses that are real. And the reality is that two or three years ago Zynga wasn't in existence, but everybody was wondering, how are social technologies going to make money. I think the story of 2009 was that one size fits all… MA: Bloody chainsaws, is how they're going to make money. GB…social platforms went mainstream. And I think the story of 2010, 2011, 2012 is social platforms become real businesses. MA: You going to be going public you think? Is that your aim? Or have Andreeson get Facebook to buy you, some large competitor? GB: We are very confident that we can be a large independent company. MA: Thanks very much, enjoy the rest of the conference. I really appreciate it. GB: Thank you so much.
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| 5min Rules The How-To Video Space Posted: 03 Feb 2010 03:06 PM PST
December’s comScore data shows that 5min saw 30.5 million unique viewers, ranking just below Turner Networks (30.6 million unique viewers) and just above AOL (30 million unique viewers). Google saw 136 million unique viewers and Hulu saw 44.2 million unique viewers. 5min ranks as number 14 out of 100 properties in ComScore’s video metrix, according to unique viewers. In terms of videos streamed, 5min saw 75.4 million streams which pales in comparison to Hulu’s 1 billion video streams and Google’s 13.2 billion video streams for the month of December. If 5min was ranked by streams, it would most likely rank lower on the list, as AOL and other video properties had more streams than the startup (AOL saw 210 million streams). Regardless, the data indicates that 5min, which has raised $12.8 million since its launch in 2006, is growing into the Hulu for niche content. The company has forged partnerships for branded content with Scripps, Hearst and other media companies. 5min monetizes each video with pre-roll ads, overlays, and companion banners and has a rev share with the content providers. Both publishers and advertisers who use the company's self-serve VideoSeed product, which uses semantic technology to automatically match videos to their respective audiences. The site sees its biggest competitor as the leader in niche content, Demand Media. While most of the startup’s traffic is from the U.S., 5min hope to expand its international presence through partnerships. And 5min expects to be cash-flow positive this year.
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| Monster Buys HotJobs From Yahoo For $225 Million Posted: 03 Feb 2010 01:23 PM PST
Yahoo has ben trying to unload HotJobs for a while, and it finally came to a deal with Monster, which will take the site off of Yahoo’s hands for $225 million in cash. As part of the deal, Monster will continue to power Yahoo’s job listings for three years. Both Hotjobs and Monster have been lagging newer job search sites such as Indeed, which searches the entire Web for job listings. According to comScore, Indeed’s jog search reached 8.4 million individuals in the U.S. in December, 2009, compared to only 5.4 million for HotJobs and 6.1 million for Monster. Maybe with the acquisition, Monster can take the top spot again, although there is a lot of overlap in those numbers. For Yahoo, it gets rid of a declining property, boosts to its cash position, and can focus on growth areas. Yahoo has been selling off or shutting dow non-core assets, including recently selling Zimbra to VMWare for $350 million, shutting down its Shopping API, and of course the long-awaited deal with Microsoft to hand over its search to Bing. Monster recently launched its 6Sense semantic search technology across different products including resume and candidate search. 6Sense is aimed at bringing up more relevant results even when there is no exact keyword match by using semantic analysis and understanding the different ays that the same job or job requirements can be described. Monster needs all the help it can get. Today it announced fourth quarter revenues of $213 million, down 27 percent, and a net loss of $2.1 million. For the year, revenues were down 32 percent to $905 million. Full year net income was $19 million, compared to $125 million in 2008.
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| Gowalla Aims To Raise $20,000 For Haiti Through Check-Ins Posted: 03 Feb 2010 01:01 PM PST
Called “Hearts for Haiti,” Gowalla’s campaign will take place on Monday, February 8 in the San Francisco Bay Area. When someone uses the service to check-in at one of three selected locations during a specific time, Gowalla will donate $50 in that person’s name to the American Red Cross for each check-in. So basically, all you have to do is show up at one of these places, check-in, and you’re donating to charity. The goal is to raise $20,000, the company notes. The selected venues include two different Peet’s coffee shops and a Barenaked Ladies concert in San Francisco on that day. Here’s the details of the February 8 activities:
Joining Gowalla and Peet’s in the effort are Alice Radio, a popular Bay Area radio station, and The Counter, a burger joint. Two morning show hosts from Alice Radio will appear alongside Gowalla co-founder Josh Williams and community manager Jonathan Carroll at the check-in destinations throughout the day. Alongside Gowalla’s $50-per-check-in pledge, Peet’s will be donating 10% of all sales made at the Emeryville and Mill Valley locations during the effort.
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| Check-In For Charity: Loopt Giving To Haiti If You Visit Chipotle, Panera, Or Whole Foods Posted: 03 Feb 2010 12:49 PM PST
We recently wrote about location-based mobile social network Loopt’s push to launch deals for check-ins, and today, the startup is putting use check-ins to philanthropic use. For every check-in at Chipotle, Panera Bread, or Whole Foods around the country, Loopt will donate $1 towards the Haiti earthquake relief. Half of the proceeds from the check-ins will be given to the American Red Cross and the other half will be donated to Doctors Without Borders. Loopt founder and CEO Sam Altman said the spots were chosen primarily because they are seeing many check-ins at these vendors. It’s truly a generous and worthy initiative and it also provides a noble inventive for users to enable Loopt’s check-in technology, which the startup recently launched. Text messaging has also played a significant part in fundraising for Haiti earthquake relief; with mobile donations reaching $35 million.
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| The Other Winner In Macmillan v. Amazon: Barnes & Noble Posted: 03 Feb 2010 12:04 PM PST
There’s been a lot of hoopla the past week over Amazon’s fight with book publisher Macmillan. The main issue is that Macmillan wants higher prices for its e-books, while Amazon wants to keep prices down for its Kindle device. Amazon went as far as to pull all of Macmillan’s books from its store, but quickly admitted that they’d eventually have to give in to Macmillan’s demands. Why? Well the obvious answer is Apple, whose new iPad device with its iBooks Store is allowing publishers to set higher prices. But don’t forget Amazon’s other rivals too. One reader wrote in to tell us how he was looking for The Politician, a new book by Andrew Young about John Edwards. The book, which is published by Macmillan, is not available on Amazon.com right now due to the dispute. When the man noticed that he turned to Amazon rival Barnes & Noble for the book — and from the looks of it, he’s not alone. The book is actually the number one best seller on Barnes & Noble’s entire site. On another rival’s site, Borders, it’s the number five best seller. Pressure from Apple aside, Amazon can’t afford to blackball these publishers because people can so easily turn elsewhere to get the book. Even though it’s not available on Amazon, The Politician is still the number 49 best seller on the site through partner sellers — even though they’re selling the book for significantly more than Barnes & Noble or Borders (or than Amazon would if it were available through them). [thanks Shmuel]
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| Bantam Live Takes The Beta Covers Off Its Social CRM Posted: 03 Feb 2010 11:27 AM PST
Today, Bantam Live, is launching the commercial version of its social CRM workspace and is rolling out premium features of its product. Bantam Live provides an online workspace for business teams that has "social CRM" features, which include a real-time dashboard stream of messaging and workflow activity along with a native CRM application. Members can share information, track activity, and manage contact and company relationships both inside and outside the organization via a real-time activity stream. We last wrote about Bantam when the startup debuted its product at TechCrunch’s RealTime Stream CrunchUp last July. Bantam extends a company’s sales outreach and customer relationships out to the social Web. For instance, with Bantam, a user can search Twitter, import a new contact with one click, initiate task workflows with team members to engage this new contact, and then converse with the new contact for lead generation. All of this happens within the same application, integrated with Twitter and soon other social networks like Facebook. Bantam Live also allows users to search, monitor, and connect with people across the web for sales leads, business development, and marketing purposes. Members also can manage their calendars, file sharing and task management within the platform. Similar to the activity stream on Facebook, Bantam Live will now include co-worker notifications, workflow information, customer communications and other messages within a realtime stream in a dashboard. Bantam Live also recently raised a second round of funding from angel investors, bringing the startup’s funding to $1.7 million. Of course, Bantam will face competition from Salesforce’s upcoming product in the social CRM space, Chatter. But Bantam’s CEO John Rourke maintains that his offering is not only comprehensive, but also more reasonably priced than Chatter. Plus, Bantam is entering the marketplace now, ahead of Chatter. That being said, Bantam is still entering a crowded space that includes many worthy competitors besides Chatter, including Jive, Cubetree and Socialtext. Bantam Live charges a monthly subscription fee for a range of plans that range from $19 (for a Personal plan) up to $140 per month large groups/heavy use. We have a special offer for TechCrunch readers in the month of February; enter the promocode “TECHCRUNCH” when signing up for Bantam, and you will save 50% on your first two paid-months, after a free 30-day trial.
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| Quick Look: Kempler & Strauss W Phone Watch Posted: 03 Feb 2010 11:01 AM PST  Do you dream of jet boots and ninjas from space? Sure, we all do. Well, the future just arrived in my mailbox, friends, and it's the Kempler & Strauss W Phone Watch, an unlocked GSM phone inside a watch. Is it amazing, you ask? Does it come with a jet pack, you ask? The answers are "Yes" and "No." The phone is about as big as a Garmin GPS watch and has a touchscreen and small camera. I'm going to wear this thing for a few days and report back on how it feels to wear the entire world on your wrist but this far it seems to work fine. The screen is amazingly hard to type on without a little stylus, but it's fun to try. Interestingly, you can even make and take calls without a headset. How much does it cost? $199, friends, and it's available for pre-order now. While it will never replace the standard phone, it's nice to be able to tell people to talk to the hand. Or talk to the wrist. Or whatever. Click through for a video Quick Look. Look for a review next week.
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| The Venture Hacks StartupList Helps Fledgling Startups Pitch Top Angel Investors Posted: 03 Feb 2010 10:17 AM PST
The project is a followup to the Venture Hacks AngelList, which launched yesterday. AngelList is a basic directory of over 80 established angel investors, including their all-important contact info (or, at least, the best people to get a reference through), what the investor looks for in a startup, and other key information. These members of the AngelList will all be receiving the weekly StartupList, which obviously makes it a huge boon to any startups that land a spot on the list. Nivi says that the system is already working — after an initial release on Twitter they’ve had nine angel investors ask for intros to the startups, including David Cohen (Techstars), Mike Hirshland (Polaris), and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. To get on the list, you’ll have to apply through this site. Your pitch will be judged by the two members of the Venture Hacks team (Nivi and Naval), who will be looking for traction, ’social proof’, and a solid team (though you don’t necessarily have to be excelling in all three areas). Your elevator pitch will have to be kept to around 150 words, and you need to have a minimum viable product (as defined by the Venture Hacks guys).
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File sharing and syncing service 
Everyone knows “realtime” has been a hot tech category for the last year or so but as we all know the ‘realtime problem’ is getting some kind of intelligence out of that firehose, and, crucially, eventually working out if or how it can be monetised. Search found its way with keyword targeting, but what will happen around realtime? 
In November 2009, Apple 
Something tells me 
There was some hoopla yesterday about the news that Hulu had 
As you may have heard by now, Netflix has agreed to movie studio demands that they 
Worse, as I alluded to above, at least four of the movies (and seven if you include those released on December 22, since that would put their availability in the last week of January) basically wouldn’t have been available at all in January under the new 28-day rule. People hoping to see Inglourious Basterds or The Hurt Locker before the Golden Globes or other awards shows would have been entirely out of luck.
MA: Do you see people doing both?
Earlier today, we noted that 
If you’re a startup looking for some early angel investments, you probably have a list of people you’d love to work with mapped out in your mind. Unfortunately, there’s also a good chance that you have absolutely no idea how to get their attention and pitch them. Today | You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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