Archive for February, 2008
« Previous Entries Next Entries »Last.fm proves widgets work - but do the Brits get it?
Friday, February 29th, 2008CBS-owned Last.fm says 3rd party web widgets hooked into its API added 19 million music users to its user base in January, in addition to the 21 million active users accessing the service through the Last.fm site itself. As a result it has launched a dedicated showcase site to highlight the best widgets and tools. The site opened to developers in 2003 but has not set up a dedicated home for them at build.last.fm. Some of the widgets that have come from this innovation include a tool that shows favourite CD covers on Wordpress blogs, a tool that graphs music preferences and one that tracks listening habits on a user’s mobile phone.
So here’s a question. Why was is it that at last night’s Mashup event on widgets on London last night, so many audience questions about widgets were along the lines of “Where’s the money?”. Was the audience just plain dumb or did the eminent list of speakers not get the information across well enough?
I noticed that plenty of ‘brand managers’ in the audience seemed to be worried about what would happen if someone put a widget containing their brand on a site which did not portray their brand in the best light. But I have to ask, what about lots of people putting the widget in the perfect place for their brand? Ever heard of the long tail? This feels like a very old and dead conversation. The people who don’t get this are seriously in trouble.
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on Feb 29, 2008, 12:28PM
Phorm might be onto something
Friday, February 29th, 2008
Since behavioural targeting company Phorm launched recently I’ve looked at the ins-and-outs of the system and it does look pretty interesting. Phorm is basically an add-on service for an ISP which looks at all your web surfing and attaches an anonymous cookie to your machine. ISPs trying to target advertising based on this packet data appeared way back in the first dotcom boom, but no-on could make it work. Phorm uses a technology called ‘deep packet inspection boxes’ to track EVERY website you visit. Normal cookies are tied to just the one web site they came from, or the ad-network, like DoubleClick’s. Phorm’s cookie looks at all of them - with some exceptions, like banks - and collects information on browser type, response to advertising, the URLs of some of the web pages viewed and search terms entered. Where the Phorm cookie sees a page with a Phorm advert tag on it, it serves an ad. So it wouldn’t, say, put an advert on the BBC web site because the BBC wouldn’t have put the Phorm tag into the page.
But despite this sounding like a privacy nightmare, the Phorm cookie is given a randomly generated ID number attached to a nameless profile of the categories sites a user appears to be interested in. This profile is then matched against advertisers to target ads against that user who’s actual identity (email addresses, surnames, street addresses etc) is not known. What information they do have - which is just the surfing habits of that PC - gets deleted after a few hours. Phorm’s privacy claims have been approved by Ernst & Young and Privacy International. The cookie doesn’t track you on sites like SSL or forms you fill in. Of course, data is secure as the companies that keep it - and it’s possible to de-anonomyse data. Phorm says it wouldn’t mix surfing data with, say, an ISP’s billing data on users.
Phorm’s system also alerts users to a list of blacklisted sites, in a scheme called Webwise. This is the carrot to keep people from switching off the Phorm cookie, which they are given access to and told it is watching them.
Phorm has so far launched in the UK with BT, TalkTalk, and Virgin Media.The Phorm cookie also recognises publishers signed up to Phorms ad system, so the partners for that are the FT.com; iVillage; Universal McCann; MGM OMD and Unanimis.
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on Feb 29, 2008, 2:53PM
Microsoft WorldWide Telescope Presented at TED; Huge Expectations Set
Friday, February 29th, 2008
So the rest of us can’t quite cry along with Robert Scoble - not just yet - but the attendees of TED had the opportunity to do so today when Microsoft presented the stargazing software we wrote about last week called WorldWide Telescope.
Microsoft has launched a website for the service that says “coming in spring 2008″ and provides a FAQ sheet along with a couple video montages of people reacting to the product. These videos don’t show the product in any substantial way but rather serve to further the hype (apparently it wows not only tech bloggers, but children, well-renowned professors, and other experts as well).
Few people have seen the product yet, but based on the testimonials on the website, it better be significantly better than the existing Google Sky, which launched last August as part of Google Earth, and the open source Stellarium (which is hugely better than Google Sky already).
Below is the only screenshot of the product that has been published so far. From what we can gather from the website, WWT is built on top of Microsoft’s Visual Experience Engine. It will also sport these features:
- WorldWide Telescope is an observatory on your desktop, allowing you to see the sky in a way you have never seen before; individual exploration, multi-wavelength views, stars and planets within context to each other, zoom in/out, and a capability for anyone to create and share a tour of the universe.
- The Visual Experience Engine delivers seamless panning zooming around the night sky.
- WWT delivers seamless integration of science:-relevant information including multi-wavelength, multiple telescope distributed image and data sets, and one-click contextual access to distributed Web information and data sources.
The product is based on Jim Gray’s SkyServer and is therefore considered an extension of his work.
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on Feb 28, 2008, 12:45AM
Favorit’s RSS reader integrates commenting
Friday, February 29th, 2008
Fav.or.it, the RSS reader with integrated commenting (a story TechCrunch UK broke), has launched its beta, though you’ll still need an invite to get in while they scale up.
With Fav.or.it you can make comments on blog posts from within its reader - no need to click into a browser to the original post. Disqus, the distributed commenting system, will be using the fav.or.it API. So if you use Disqus for comments, fav.or.it users will be able to leave comments too. Fav.or.it is more feature rich than Google Reader and has community features like story voting, sharing, tagging. The site already has lots of feeds to pick from and an approach called slices. Some developers are already building features on top of Google Reader’s shared items data, such as ReadBurner and RSSMeme. But fav.or.it is as early as any of those guys, so it’s still a wide open game.
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Copyright Infringement Continues To Pay: $4 million For Crunchyroll
Friday, February 29th, 2008
San Francisco based Crunchyroll, a sort of YouTube for anime and other mostly Asian video content, raised a $4 million round of financing led by Venrock Associates, with partner David Siminoff joining the board of directors. The company, which launched in the summer of 2006, was founded by three HotOrNot employees. Our sources tell us that HotOrNot founders Jim Hong and James Young also participated in the round.
We first covered the company in August 2007, and noted that they rely almost exclusively on copyright infringing content. Users, of course, flocked to the site. In July 2007 it had 1.3 million unique visitors (Comscore). In January 2008 that jumped to 2.6 million uniques, and 245 million page views.
Last year the site charged users a premium fee of $6 and included advertisements around content. We pointed out that this weakened their reliance on the Digital Millennium Copyright safe harbor provision, which protects service providers from liability for content uploaded by users. Today the site announced that there are no longer any ads, although the premium account option remains. It looks like they hired some lawyers.
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on Feb 28, 2008, 2:10AM
Picnik Now Offers Premium Features For Free
Friday, February 29th, 2008
Online image editing startup Picnik has announced that users will now have full access to all of Picniks editing features for free.
Tools now available to all users include advanced edit tools, special effects, additional fonts and shapes. The service will be ad supported, but those wanting an ad free experience can sign up for Picnik Premium for $24.95 a year.
Why the change? This is how Picnik spins it:
We want to make everyone feel like a photo editing superstar. Picnik is already the world’s leading online photo editor, but there are still a lot of people living tragic, gloomy lives believing that powerful photo editing tools cost hundreds of dollars, come in unopenable boxes, and are impossible to use. By offering an ad-supported version of Picnik, we can make much richer, deeper, and ultimately better photo-editing functionality available to more people around the globe: Photo editing awesomeness for everyone.
The more likely reason: they can afford to do so due to the money they’re getting from Yahoo for the Flickr deal, and in the face of increased competition (both existing and future) Picnik needed to offer more. Still, Picnik was a good package before this announcement, and now it’s better again.
See our February 2007 review of online Photo editing sites here.
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We’re Sorting Through Some Crazy Google/Yahoo Rumors
Friday, February 29th, 2008
Google is continuing to try to disrupt Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo, and, we’ve heard, may even be considering a bid to acquire a significant chunk of Yahoo’s stock (keep reading though, we’re calling this a long shot at best).
Google clearly wants to see the status quo continue in the search space, and would rather fight a fragmented market than a single, stronger, Microsoft/Yahoo. That’s why they weighed in shortly after the initial Microsoft bid, saying “Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions.”
Sources with knowledge of the deal are saying that Google also hired veteran M&A expert George Boutros as Credit Suisse the day after the Microsoft bid was made, to advise them on how to respond to the deal. That advice, one source says, may be leading Google to place an unsolicited bid to acquire just under 20% of Yahoo’s stock at an inflated price.
The goal isn’t so much to close the deal, which would almost certainly be opposed by U.S. regulatory agencies. But rather to throw another curve ball at the Yahoo Board, which is already dealing with the Microsoft bid and a likely challenge to their board seats this June. If the Yahoo Board, particularly the outside board members, were preparing to fold to Microsoft, a Google bid might give them pause. And any delay buys Google time - during which other factors can come into play to stop the deal.
“It’s a relatively cheap way for Google to confuse the situation further, and, potentially delay or disrupt a Microsoft acquisition” said one advisor to the deal, requesting to remain anonymous.
While multiple sources have confirmed that Google is being advised by Boutros, only one is saying that Google might be preparing to place a bid in the next couple of weeks. Credit Suisse analyst Heath Terry said last November “Over time, Google will continue to gain share until they have effectively reached 100 percent.”
Arbitrageurs, who today hold as much as 20% of Yahoo’s stock during this risky period, have not heard this rumor, either, according to another source. These are the guys that hire private investigators to track executives and known advisors, monitor private jet traffic and otherwise gather information about possible M&A deals through any legal (and sometimes not so legal) means at their disposal. Generally they hear rumors first, and trade on the information before the press gets their hands on it. For example, some arbitrageurs say they had already factored in News Corp.’s possible Yahoo bid days before we broke the news. The fact that the arbitrageurs holding yahoo stock haven’t heard anything about this makes the rumor significantly less likely to be accurate.
Assuming Microsoft does not back away from its bid, look for them to nominate their own slate of directors for the Yahoo board a few days in advance of the March 13 deadline. Google, or anyone else who might try to disrupt this deal, will likely make their move before then.
Thanks to Nathan Lipson at TheMarker (he’s currently shaking down sources in New York) for comparing notes with us on the rumor mongering.
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on Feb 28, 2008, 2:25AM
Akimbo Reinvents Itself Again, Takes More Money
Friday, February 29th, 2008
Online video provider Akimbo has reinvented itself again as a white label video service provider and has taken a new round of funding.
Akimbo’s new white label video solution includes an advertising system and “supports multiple business models including ad-supported, transactional, subscription, download-to-own, download-to-burn, pay-per-minute, gift cards and account credits.”
The new round of funding came from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, and Zone Ventures, although the amount was not disclosed. Existing investors include AT&T and Cisco and funding before the new round was $31.7 million.
San Mateo based Akimbo has had a colorful history. Initially starting as a VOD integrated hardware and content provider, it later abandoned the hardware model for an internet only solution that offered a software interface for Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition. That service was discontinued in August 2007.
The first client for the new Akimbo is MavTV.
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on Feb 28, 2008, 2:55AM
Quarterlife Might Not Have A Long Life On NBC
Friday, February 29th, 2008
Quarterlife, the made for MySpace TV show that became the first internet show picked up by a TV network has bombed.
According to Nielsen Ratings for Tuesday night, Quarterlife managed only 3.86 million viewers for its 10pm debut on NBC, compared to the fan resurrected but short second season of Jericho with 6.9 million viewers and Primetime: What Would You Do Now? with 7.6 million viewers.
Although no decision has been made as to whether Quarterlife will return for a second outing next week, these poor figures would suggest that Quarterlife may not have a long life on NBC.
Some may suggest that Quaterlife’s failure to make a successful cross from online to network TV isn’t a positive for future shows following the same path; certainly it doesn’t make things easier. A first failed experiment won’t necessarily mean the crossover idea will fail again in the future. As more and more people turn to the internet for entertainment, the volume of professionally made video content will continue to increase, and sheer numbers would suggest that Quaterlife may become the first of many crossovers to come as television networks scramble to find new content that viewers want to watch.
(via RWW)
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Google Docs Gets A Visual Overhaul, Now More Office Like
Friday, February 29th, 2008
Google has quietly updated the look of Google Docs, offering a more Microsoft Office (pre 2007) like interface.
First spotted by Philipp Lenssen, the changes aren’t huge, but visually they’re pleasing. Gone is the Google Docs blue background toolbar with its unique layout. In its place is a grey toolbar that will be immediately familiar to users of other offline and online office packages. Fonts now have a dedicated box with the list being rendered in the particular font listed. Text sizing also gets a familiar drop down box as well.
The changes have been rolled out across the three core Google Docs products (Writely, Spreadsheets and Presentations).
Although still not as fully featured as offline alternatives, and even some online competitors as well, Google Docs has gained strong support in the first adopter community and is slowly finding a market in the business world as Google pushes its corporate packages. The new look will make it easier for new users to immediately use Google Docs and that will help sell the package.
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on Feb 28, 2008, 4:35AM