FriendFeed Launches Rooms
Michael Arrington
14 comments »
Activity stream aggregator FriendFeed launched
a new feature called FriendFeed Rooms this afternoon, which are effectively topic-based accounts that anyone can create or join (depending on privacy settings). Users can then add links and messages to relevant content.
The main difference between Rooms and a normal FriendFeed account is the fact that multiple users can author it, and that you can’t pull third party feeds into the service.
FriendFeed usage continues to grow steadily, and has clearly gained from Twitter’s (a competitor of sorts) constant downtime. I still haven’t gone religious on it, though, as some have. That’s mostly because i don’t like having a third party service centralize all this data about me and then not let that data back out again. See my rant on the Centralized Me for more on that.
Ex-eBay/Skype Execs Let You Share Stories With Tokoni
Jason Kincaid
12 comments »
Feel like sharing? Two ex-Ebay/Skype execs have created Tokoni, a social story sharing site that they hope will become the web’s virtual “front porch”. The site, which quietly launched last December, hopes to foster a warmer and better connected sharing environment than other similar communities on the web.
Tokoni is essentially a community of connected blogs with a social networking slant. After creating a personal profile, members can write an unlimited number of stories. Each story (which is basically a blog post) can be tagged with keywords and placed in ‘Hubs’, which are essentially groups of related stories. Stories can include embedded images or YouTube videos, and other members are encouraged to leave comments and participate in a discussion at the bottom of each story.
At first glance, Tokoni seems like a pretty half-baked idea. People have been sharing personal stories online since the dawn of Usenet, and allowing members to group stories by topic isn’t exactly a novel feature. Why not use a blog?
Then again, painfully simple ideas have been known to work in the past (YouTube and photobucket come to mind). It’s possible that Tokoni will fill a niche for users that just want to sit down and write without having to deal with blogging software or forums. And the community aspect helps differentiate the site from a blog by allowing writers to quickly find and link to stories posted by others without having to sift through the blogosphere.
Tokoni’s most encouraging assets are its founders. Mary Lou Song was eBay’s third employee, and her husband Alex Kazim has held a laundry list of top positions: Director of Engineering at eBay, President of Skype, SVP of eBay New Ventures, and VP Marketing at PayPal. The site also features a strong list of investors, including eBay Inc and a number of current eBay execs.
Tokoni isn’t the only player in this space. In fact, there are literally thousands (if not more) of sites that are dedicated to story sharing, though many of them revolve around a specific topic or community. Six Apart also offers Vox, a simple blogging service that offers some of the same tagging and group features. Tokoni has an impressive set of credentials, but unless it can find a better way to differentiate itself, its stories will fall on deaf ears.
Reminder: One More Day to Apply to Supernova’s Mobile Connections Forum
Michael Arrington
0 comments »
Quick reminder that tomorrow, Friday, May 23 is the deadline to submit ideas for the TechCrunch “Mobile Connections” forum that will be hosted at the upcoming Supernova Conference on June 16. The forum will discuss important themes to advance innovation in the mobile environment, and we’ve invited the TechCrunch community to submit your ideas to participate.
How to participate
At the forum, we want to talk about important mobile themes to grow the future of wireless– platforms, standards, privacy, monetization, etc. This is not a startup contest — it’s a search for ideas. We’re challenging anyone to make submissions. We want to hear about innovative concepts, prototypes, research lab projects, hacks, and business ideas that can engage the mobile development community. Companies are welcome to submit, but the focus of your proposed presentation should be on themes broader than your own product / service.
If your submission blows us away, we’ll invite you to join us on stage Monday evening at Supernova 2008. There is no charge to submit your ideas or to present as part of the Mobile Communications Forum. Additional details are available here. Email your submission to mobile@supernova2008.com by midnight PST, Friday May 23, 2008. We will notify selected participants by June 2.
Get tickets
Supernova is extending discounted registration to TechCrunch readers. Preferred pricing is $1,495 ($200 discount.)
Thank you Sponsors
Thanks to Nokia for sponsoring the Mobile Connections Forum and making this lively discussion possible. Several other sponsor slots remain open. Please email Supernova for additional sponsorship details.
Supernova will also have a special Technology Showcase for demonstrators during the opening Networking Gala, evening of June 16. Email Jeanne Logozzo to learn more about demonstrator sponsorships.
Twitter At Scale: Will It Work?
Nik Cubrilovic
114 comments »
Only two days ago the contact messaging application Twitter suffered another bout of downtime, leaving some users frustrated and others asking why the platform continues to suffer problems.
I have recently spoken to an individual who is familiar with the technical problems at Twitter as well as the challenges that lay ahead for the startup. He re-iterated his belief that the problems lay not with Blaine Cook (the former head of engineering who was shown the door), nor with Joyent NTT (their host) but with the early lack of understanding of how complex their problems would be.
The issue is that group messaging is very difficult to achieve at a grand scale. Other large sites such as Wordpress and Digg are mostly dealing with known problems, such as how to serve a large number of pages or a large number of images. Twitter is unique in that it needs to parse a large number of messages and deliver them to multiple recipients, with each user having unique connections to other users.
Social networks have similar complexity issues, but they only usually need to route a message to a single user (or at the most to a defined group). Even so, social networks like Friendster struggled for years with technical and scaling issues. Twitter is specifically dealing with text messages, and in most cases with active users those messages are very frequent and go out to hundreds of contacts (or followers, as they are referred to in Twitter). Every new Twitter user and every new connection results in an exponentially greater computational requirement.
Some of the best web applications are able to efficiently solve very complex problems to produce simple results for users (Eg. Google). The success of these applications is due to the innovative efforts by developers to solve large technical challenges, where they have often had to break new ground for solutions. For Twitter to reach a similar point of reliability they too will need a very comprehensive, ground-breaking solution.
The source that I spoke to also commented on how ill-prepared the Twitter team were and are for their current and future challenges. The small team contains a handful of engineers, with only a person or two committed to infrastructure and architecture. He goes on to point out that at Digg the team for network and systems alone is bigger than the total engineering team at Twitter, and that at Digg they are lead by well-known “A-list rockstars”.
The problems at Twitter are often attributed to their use of RubyOnRails, a web development framework. Twitter is almost certainly the largest site running on Rails, so fans of the framework and its developers have been quick to deflect the criticism and point it back at the engineers at Twitter. Utilizing a framework that has never conquered large-scale territory must certainly add to the risk and work required to find a solution. As an out-of-the box framework, Rails certainly doesn’t lend itself to large-scale application development, but was a big part of the reason why Twitter could experiment and release early.
Rails has enabled Twitter to prototype quickly, to quickly launch and then to easily iterate with new features. But the old adage of “Good, Fast, Cheap - pick two” certainly applies; and Rails would do itself no harm by conceding that it isn’t a platform that can compete with Java or C when it comes to intensive tasks. Twitter is at a cross-roads as an application and Rails has served its purpose very well to date, but you are unlikely to see a computational cluster built with Ruby at Apache any time soon.
What we see at Twitter today is a very useful and popular service, but one with very complex underlying technical challenges to overcome. Twitter will require not only a new architecture approach and a big injection of the best minds they can find ($15 million can help), but will also need a little patience from users and those of us observing.
After unsuccessfully trying to sell his startup Sxip Identity to Google or Microsoft, CEO Dick Hardt is now facing a lawsuit over the insolvency of his startup. Hardt is perhaps best known for his amusing slide show explaining his company’s Identity 2.0 system. It typically started with the slide at right asking, “Who is the Dick on your site?” Investors are now asking a similar question.
Hardt is not making funny slide presentations these days. According to a complaint from investors in Vancouver, where Sxip Identity is based, Hardt raised $370,000 as a bridge loan until he could sell the company. According to TechVibes, which covered this last week:
When Hardt’s attempts to sell Sxip Identity failed, he told the plaintiffs that Sxip Identity was insolvent and that their notes has [sic] little or no value. This is where things get messy. The plaintiffs allege that Hardt failed to disclose that there were two separate Sxip entities (Sxip Identity and Sxip Network - he is CEO and President of both) and that only Sxip Identity would be a party to the notes.
Sxip Identity is indeed insolvent with a March 2008 balance sheet indicating that they owed Sxip Networks $4.7 Million and Hardt personally $275K. Sxip Identity’s total assets at the time were just under $1 Million.
That’s a pretty slick move, Dick.
Identity is still a problem that needs to be solved. Unfortunately, Sxip won’t be solving it.
Just because someone can give a good pitch, does not mean they can build a real company. Below is Hardt giving his slide show pitch at eTech in 2006.
ScribbleLive: Two Guys In Canada Launch Sweet Liveblogging Platform
Erick Schonfeld
45 comments »
I am at the Mesh conference in Toronto right now sitting next to two guys liveblogging the event on ScribbleLive: Michael De Monte and Jonathan Keebler. They are the founders of ScribbleLive. Jonathan is typing notes while StumbleUpon founder (and semi-famous Canadian) Garrett Camp is being interviewed on stage, while Michael is adding links and photos. (Earlier in the morning they liveblogged Club Pengiuin co-founder Lane Merrifield’s keynote). The Ajax-based platform automatically updates the page as they add more content.
It is a pretty sweet platform for something they cobbled together in their spare time for $1,500 (Canadian). De Monte is the director of online production at CTV and Keebler is a technology manager there. I am just sitting here watching them liveblog and it is definitely an improvement over typing in Wordpress and constantly hitting save, and forcing readers to constantly hit the refresh button. For people watching the liveblog, it updates automatically without having to reload the page.
Since it is Ajax, you can watch liveblogs on your iPhone and it will just scroll. Another nifty feature: you can e-mail text or photos from your phone (or anywhere) and the content appears directly in the post. Also, readers who are logged in can reverse the order of the entries, so they can read the liveblog from the beginning, or see the most recent additions up top.
This is something I would want to use for liveblogging events, if only they offered an embeddable widget that I could put directly into a TechCrunch post. Right now, the posts exist on ScribbleLive’s Website. But De Monte whispers that an embeddable widget is something they are working on. Other features on the roadmap include the ability to post from Twitter and comment that will travel with each entry.
| Website: | scribblelive.com |
| Location: | Toronto, Canada |
| Founded: | January 1, 2008 |
ScribbleLive is a live blogging platform that allows for multiple authors to write at the same time. Built on Ajax, it supports text, links, Youtube embeds, and JPG embeds. Learn More
Howcast Aligns With AOL, Metacafe, Bebo, and blip.tv
Jason Kincaid
12 comments »
Howcast, the instructional video site founded by three ex-Googlers, today announced that it has formed distribution agreements with AOL, Metacafe, Bebo, and blip.tv.
Howcast provides professionally produced instructional videos that range from “How to Make Sushi” to “How To Make a Water Gun Alarm Clock“. Many films come from the site’s Directors Program, which pays qualified members a small fee to produce guides that follow a supplied Howcast template. Directors receive increased compensation through a rev-share system for especially popular videos.
Howcast says that the new distribution deals will significantly expand its audience. The site had previously established distribution agreements with Myspace, YouTube, Verizon FiOS TV, Joost, and ROO.
Howcast has a number of competitors in this space, including 5min, Videojug, and to some extent, Instructables.
| Website: | howcast.com |
| Funding: | $8M |
Howcast is a portal with professionally-shot instructional videos on a variety of subjects. It competes in a crowded marketplace with ExpertVillage, 5min, and Instructables. Howcast leverages content distribution deals with Myspace, Verizon, Joost,… Learn More
Google Sites Moves Out Of the Enterprise
Erick Schonfeld
26 comments »
When Google Sites launched in February, it was part of the Google Apps group that targets enterprises large and small. Now, consumers can create a wiki Website using Google Sites, without the need to have their own domain.
Google Sites gives you a basic template to create a Website that can be edited by the public at large or a smaller group of people. Photos, widgets, videos, and other elements can be added. Here is a video showing what you can do:
Brightcove Subsidiary Launches In Japan With $5 Million
Erick Schonfeld
8 comments »
Web video distribution player Brightcove is entering the Japanese market with a new subsidiary called Brightcove K.K. Rather than use some of the $86 million it has already raised, Brightcove sold off a piece of the subsidiary for $4.9 million to Japanese investors, some of whom will also act as sales and distribution partners. Participating in the round are Dentsu (biggest advertising company in Japan), J-Stream (biggest content delivery network in Japan), Cyber Communications (biggest online ad network in Japan), and existing Brightcove investor Transcosmos (Japanese media conglomerate).
Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire says in an e-mail:
Japan is an outstanding market for Brightcove, with exceptionally high broadband penetration rates and the 2nd largest media market in the world. Amazing, online video (commercial, monetized online video) in Japan is a nascent industry
We have majority ownership and control over this subsidiary, and will be hiring a general manager as well as a staff of technical, sales, marketing and operational staff to build the business.
However, Brightcove K.K. also has several significant strategic partners who are collectively investing about $5M into Brightcove KK, and who are also going to act as sales and marketing agents for Brightcove in Japan. We don’t plan to build a lot of direct selling infrastructure in Japan, instead leveraging the robust sales teams and customer footprints of our partners.
J-Stream will be offering Brightcove video streaming as a service to its customers, while Dentsu and Cyber Communications will be selling ads across the Brightcove K.K. network.
| Location: | Japan |
| Founded: | May 22, 2008 |
| Funding: | $4.9M |
Brightcove K.K. is the Japanese subsidiary of Brightcove. It was set up to create a Web video streaming and distribution services for Japanese customers. Learn More
| Website: | brightcove.com |
| Location: | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States |
| Funding: | $86.2M |
Brightcove is an Internet TV platform/network that allows content makers to monetize their content with ad revenues. The site has two different content makers in mind, independents and established media entities. Brightcove provides different… Learn More
The Empire Strikes Back: Our Analysis Of Microsoft Live Search Cashback
Michael Arrington
112 comments »
Everyone has an opinion on today’s move by Microsoft to shake things up in the search space. Their new Live Search Cashback product shifts search advertising from cost-per-click (CPC) to cost-per-action (CPA) and give a lot of the revenue back to users. Most writers are negative. Some excessively so. After hearing Bill Gates give the pitch and trying the service myself to make a couple of purchases, here’s what I think: It’s a bold move that goes for Google’s throat, and it will likely have a material impact on their search market share.
Our complete analysis is below. The key takeaway: Google’s search dominance is growing, and everything Microsoft has historically thrown at them has done nothing to slow them down. This new approach is both desperate and brilliant. Desperate because Microsoft is giving away most of the search revenue to get market share gains. Brilliant because they have such a small share of search revenue today that they have little to lose, and they are hitting Google hard in their core business.
The Numbers
Microsoft had to do something fairly drastic to get back in the search game. They’re third in U.S. search market share with under 9.1% of the total pie. Just six months ago they had 9.8% market share. Google, by contrast, has 61.6% and is growing steadily:
Without search market share, Microsoft can’t get search revenue market share. And it isn’t just a matter of splitting up the pie. This is a winner-take-most market: Having 9% of search doesn’t mean Microsoft has 9% of search marketing dollars. Far from it - publishers go to Google to partner on ads, which means advertisers must go there to get inventory, and a very healthy auction system pushes up prices. So not only does Microsoft (and Yahoo, and everyone else) have much fewer queries than Google, they are also generating much less revenue per query as well.
So how much revenue are we talking about? Today the worldwide online advertising market is somewhere in the $40 billion range, and there are estimates that it will grow to $80 billion by 2010. The search piece of that is big - about 40%. So $16 billion or so today, growing to $33 billion by 2010. Google gets the vast majority of that search revenue today.
Microsoft’s core revenue is derived from Windows and Office, and the future doesn’t look to be very bright for desktop software sales. Google’s revenues, currently at $20 billion a year, could someday surpass Microsoft’s (Microsoft is currently at about $50 billion/year in revenue) if nothing is done to change the game.
Remember how everyone feared Microsoft’s dominance in the OS and Office worlds in the late nineties? That’s Google today in the search advertising space, a much bigger long term market.
FriendFeed Launches Rooms. Moving Towards Semantic Web?
May 22, 2008 — 03:48 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — 4 Comments
Everybody loves FriendFeed, right? That includes me. You can debate all day whether or not FriendFeed will be able to go mainstream or just add to the noise, but my biggest hope for FriendFeed has always been an improved way in which to utilize feed content for personalized purposes, through filtering and recommendations.
I know that certain aspects of this personal desire of mine aren’t quite feasible yet, and as we’ve seen with Twitter, the true value of such broadcasting tools can be found through applications that aren’t native to the initial product itself.
But a new feature on FriendFeed takes us one step closer to the type of personalized use cases I want to see within its service. The new feature is called FriendFeed Rooms, and it allows you to form groups around a topic of your choice, where a mini (niche) feed can be shared in a targeted and private manner.
FriendFeed has been using it internally for some time, and the new option is now available for all users. A new “rooms” tab at the top of the page invites you to create one of your own. Settings allow you to make a room public or private. Items can be shared via FriendFeed or with FriendFeed’s bookmarklet.
In all honesty, this new feature very much reminds me of Twine, because the FriendFeed bookmarklet gives you a choice of where to share your content. Is FriendFeed too moving further towards the semantic web? I’d say that FriendFeed rooms increases that potential, as it still needs more search and filter options incorporated into its service. Nevertheless, these niche FriendFeed rooms could become more relevant than a personalized news source, if implemented correctly.
The Fastest Talking Guy in Social Media Tells Us Where All of This Might Be Going
May 22, 2008 — 01:36 PM PDT — by Guest Writer — — 10 Comments
This is a guest post written by Jackie Peters, CVO and Founding Partner of Heavybag Media.
I’m here at day two of the Executing Social Media conference in Pasadena, CA. Blogger, PR stuntman, and social media maven Peter Shankman gave a very energetic keynote on how the social web is changing the way we do business and make money. Peter is CEO of The Geek Factory, Inc. and has recently launched Help A Reporter Out (HARO), a service that helps journalists connect with sources.
Peter prefaced his entire presentation by telling us the problem with predictions; he played a short clip from the movie Back to the Future 2, which was released in 1987. According to the film, in 2010 we would have a fax machine in every room - the Internet hadn’t proliferated yet and fax machines were what the writers could envision.
That out of the way, Peter went on to share with us a few predictions he has about the future in regards to social media and technology. Peter sees an information overload starting to occur. There are too many channels, tools and platforms out there. He sees a convergence into one tool that helps you manage your entire network from any device at any time and automates the process for you. He cites FriendFeed and Socialthing as an early entrées into the space.
Knight Resigns as Wesabe CEO to be with Family; Hedlund takes the Reins
May 22, 2008 — 01:35 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — 3 Comments
When an entrepreneur goes all in on a company, they tend to consider that their baby. But when an actual family member requires undivided attention, the choice to leave a company you helped start is an easy one to make. Social personal finance site Wesabe is losing its CEO and co-founder, Jason Knight, for this reason.
His newborn son was diagnosed with a serious respiratory condition, and requires “ongoing medical attention and constant care,” said Knight. Wesabe’s Chairman and co-founder Marc Hedlund, who was the company’s chief product officer prior, will be stepping in as the new CEO, effective immediately.
The rest of the Wesabe team, including Hedlund, has a great deal of respect for Knight and the decision he’s made. This isn’t the first time Hedlund has been in the CEO role. Before co-founding Wesabe, Hedlund was the CEO of Popular Power, as well as an entrepreneur-in-residence at O’Reilly Media. Surely Hedlund’s experience will make the executive transition less stressful for Knight and his family. Our thoughts are with them.
See here for coverage of Wesabe’s very useful service or below for an intro video, and check out Stern’s interview with Hedlund for additional background.
NewsGator Launches Recommended Feeds Based on Attention Data
May 22, 2008 — 12:00 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — 1 Comment
Ever since news aggregators emerged online, they’ve been aiming to provide recommendations for the best news to read. The trend has recently resurfaced with new tools, user feedback and communities, all of which provide an ample amount of data that can be used to infer certain things about the popularity of a given news item.
NewsGator’s online RSS Reader, which includes FeedDemon and NetNewsWire under its umbrella, has teamed up with SenseArray to provide recommendations to its users. SenseArray filters through NewsGator’s feeds, and sorts them according to relevance based on the number of times users click on links, tag items, or forward articles. Direct user feedback, which can now be provided on NewsGator items with thumbs up/down voting, is being incorporated into the new SenseArray filters for recommendation purposes as well.
At first glance, it didn’t appear as though the new recommendations would be tied to the new increased support for APML (attention data), which NewsGator just released yesterday. But in corresponding with the NewsGator team, I found out that recommendations and your APML will be linked together from the very beginning. According to NewsGator, “whenever a user clips, tags, emails, or does any other action, we store a weighted score. We use that to create an attention score for the feed in APML, and we also use those scores like ratings in the collaborative filter.”
This is a good thing, as the user attention data and recommendations are quite related, and will only become more so once things get going with NewsGator’s new system. Tying recommendations into APML from the beginning will only add value to the end users in the long run.
Has Digg Changed Its 24-Hour Policy?
May 22, 2008 — 11:44 AM PDT — by Stan Schroeder — — 4 Comments
As all Digg regulars (read: fanatics who spend most of their day digging and submitting stories. Yes, that includes me) know, stories in Digg’s upcoming sections have a 24 hour expiration time; if a story is older than one day, and it hasn’t reached “popular” status, it is removed from the upcoming section, never to come back.
However, currently there are a number of stories accross all upcoming sections with timestamps of 25, 26, and even 30 hours or more. Has Digg changed their policy, or is this merely a temporary glitch? The official Digg blog is silent, but I guess we’ll know soon enough.
Thanks to Muhammad Saleem for the Twitter tip.
ABC Launching Upgraded Video Player For Fall Season
May 22, 2008 — 11:43 AM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — 3 Comments
ABC, the Disney-owned television network, launched its proprietary Web video player about two years ago, before any other had come to pass from competing broadcasters. And in that time, rival services have been created to deliver streaming video of full-length episodes of current and archival programming. Hulu and Fancast are two examples of startups born in the last 12 months or so that have broad ambitions for their founding companies. Yet it is somewhat surprising that, despite ABC’s greater tenure in the IPTV space, younger entities proved more adept at progressing new medium as it grew in popularity. Hulu itself has been well admired for incorporating features that allow for content sharing among viewers by way of embeds and social bookmarking and so forth.
Well, today ABC has revealed plans to spend the next several months doing some much need catching up, according to Andrew Wallenstein of Hollywood Reporter. In preparation for its fall season, the company is upgrading several features on its browser-based video player, incorporating a full-screen viewing option (for both SD and HD downloads), closed
captioning, and what is likely the most requested feature presently absent from the system: “the ability to send video links that can be embedded on blogs and social networks.”
Numerous critics (yours truly included) have dealt ABC negative marks for maintain its independence on the Web insofar as its television programming is concerned. Questions as to why it hasn’t offered material up to Hulu viewers are regularly raised as new developments and collaborations in the market are announced. Yet ABC cannot be faulted to greatly for keeping bounds between its own operation and that of competing networks. In March, the company’s digital chief, Albert Cheng, reported that the health of its standalone effort is quite good, with substantial ad rates being secured. And if Nielsen Online is anything of a reputable gauge of market viewership, ABC’s ability to pull in some 8.9 million viewers in the month of April alone is rather commendable given the relative youth of Web-based television as opposed to traditional over-the-air and cable-based services.
ABC’s new player, which is based on technology created by Move Networks, will sport a redesigned interface with better navigation features. It is expected to be released as a closed beta in the summer. A public launch is slated for the days ahead of the network’s fall premier week.
WeMix’s Never-Ending Remix Contest. Collaborate with Ludacris.
May 22, 2008 — 11:36 AM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — Add a Comment
We’ve seen our fair share of celebrities that want to break out into the world of online social networking. Typically these celebrities participate in a site that’s related to their primary profession. It’s no different with WeMix and one of its partners, Ludacris.
Unlike most other celebrity-featured social networks out there, you won’t find an overwhelming emphasis or reliance on Ludracris’ content, but there is enough to make site visitors aware. WeMix is an online community for unsigned music artists (singers, songwriters, producers, rappers) to meet with each other and collaborate. It’s the collaboration feature that’s key for WeMix, as it’s being pushed as the major differentiating factor.
The collaboration tools are something I’ve wanted to see included in many of these niche music sites, and so far most of them have been pretty basic. I know that as professional musicians, the actual mixing of content should be done with the proper equipment. And while we’re on the topic, it’s important to note that WeMix’s mashup tool is limited to video content that’s been uploaded to the site, resulting in mashups that are reminiscent of the deservingly famous Sponge Bob & Soulja Boy remix–but less funny.
But for collaboration purposes, I’d really like to see better structured options for sharing content amongst the community members for the purpose of working towards a singular, revenue-generating goal. There’s often licensing issues that intersect with such goals, and networks like SellABand are working their way around this to some degree.
WeMix is hoping to help out on this end as well, as artists on the site are unsigned and are looking for additional support from within the industry. Unfortunately, the actual collaboration tools aren’t very developed, and won’t get you much further than your MySpace page already does. Except for the fact that those artists with the most votes get a chance to turn their demos into records by collaborating with music notables like Ludracris (who else?).
Google I/O Ticket Winners Announced
May 22, 2008 — 10:39 AM PDT — by Tamar Weinberg — — 1 Comment
Last week, we held yet a second ticket giveaway for the Google I/O Developer Conference in San Francisco. We asked you about your thoughts on the web technology that is most promising for the future.
We got a great variety of answers, but our four winners have been selected. They are:
Rob Johnson
Scott Lockhart
Chris Smoak
Niklas Bulitta
Thanks for participating and we hope you enjoy the event!
It’s not too late to get tickets to attend Google I/O, which will go down next week. Visit the conference page where you can get more information and sign up.
Is Sonico The Top Socnet In Latin America? Not Even Close, Says Hi5.
May 22, 2008 — 09:59 AM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — 12 Comments
Yesterday we brought you word from the social folk at Sonico that said they had essentially played their cards very right over the past 9 months or so and that they’d effectively claimed the title of Latin America’s largest network, growing faster and larger than regional stalwarts like Hi5 (very big throughout) and Orkut (very big in Brazil particularly). Sonico referenced its data from comScore records circa March 2008.
Hi5 now tells Mashable otherwise. The network cites a worldwide traffic number, also from comScore, this time for April 2008, which shows its own visitor figures strongly outpace those of Sonico: 45.6 million for Hi5 and 7.5 million for Sonico, respectively. As for the Latin American market, Hi5 claims 12m unique visitors monthly. Given that Sonico lives mostly in the same region, that would more or less put it with about half the traffic as Hi5.
Why the massive discrepancy? What Hi5 is saying, in short, is that Sonico neglected to include the full range of Latin American countries in its report. Sonico highlighted a list countries that fall under the loose designation of “main Latin American markets.” Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Hi5, meanwhile, asserts itself as the #1 social nework in 26 nations positioned on 4 continents. The ones it highlights for the Latin American region: Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Honduras, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Barbados.
Hi5 also goes on to tout its much more expansive support for 23 languages, a networking record for all intents and purposes (with many more to come, whose inclusion will be made possible through a user-powered translation program, launching today), but the company’s main argument is Sonico’s selective measurement the Latin American market. Which, given the true scope of the region, is a just point to raise.
Naturally, we were cautious when reporting Sonico’s assessment of its growth and present status. That’s why yesterday’s title on Mashable was posed in question. Hi5 is has been known for quite a long while as the mainstay of the Latin American region. For Sonico to have climbed the proverbial ladder in less than a year’s time would certainly be as massive achievement, and a surprising one.
Alas, like many things in this global social networking market we have today, the picture is always more complex than it seems. As things look today, Sonico does in fact show strong growth, and a majority share in several Latin American markets, so competition is very much in evidence. But Hi5 maintains that it is the region’s overall traffic leader.
SpotCrime: Mapping The Criminal Landscape [The Startup Review]
May 22, 2008 — 08:32 AM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — 6 Comments
Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.
STARTUP DETAILS:
Company Name: SpotCrime
20-word Description: SpotCrime is a website devoted to aggregating, mapping, and discussing crimes throughout the United States.
CEO’s 100-word Pitch: At SpotCrime, our goal is to improve the lives of individuals and the safety of communities by empowering our users through mapped crime incident information. We are dedicated to mapping all available crime incident data using a Google Maps mashup as our interface. Additionally, we have provided multiple platforms for delivery of crime information such as an iPhone optimized page, cell phone text message crime alerts, a FaceBook App, and Google gadgets and maplets.
Currently we are mapping over 125 cities, have over 1 million incidents in our database, and are about to release crime maps for 80 universities. We strongly believe that there is wisdom in the noise and therefore this crime data belongs to everyone as a tool to lead a safer life. In the darkness of crime that confronts our country, SpotCrime hopes to shine.
Mashable’s Take: Curious to know how good or bad a criminal history your town or city displays as of late? Want to see what it is you’re getting into if you’re moving to a new neighborhood - or trying to avoid certain areas? Maybe you’re just looking to do a comprehensive research report for your civics class. Whatever the case, SpotCrime tells you what you need to know, quickly and easily. No need to venture out to city hall or read the daily paper to. SpotCrime gives you a comprehensive bird’s-eye view of events.
A directory of reported incidents in major towns and cities within the US, SpotCrime, based in Baltimore, Maryland, delivers within its Google Maps mashup any relevant cues of things culled from news reports around the states. From shootings to robberies to vandalism to assault, to arson, the site monitors a list of 125+ cities, and it is purported to have catalogued some 1 million criminal incidents, which, given the evident frequency of such activity in the country, is rather impressive. Dispiriting, too, for sure.
Of course, there’s no question that the site is altogether very basic and not quite befitting of a solid Web 2.0 label. (Though comments can be left.) Presentation could use some additional refinement and perhaps a rearrangement of advertisements. But given SpotCrime’s purpose, layout isn’t all that important. And chances are any visitors will not bookmark the URL for future reference, but rather, if crime is a concern or simply something one wishes to keep abreast of, one might register an account with the service to receive alerts of incidents as they become known.
In all, SpotCrime can prove useful, for a myriad of reasons. It does not cover every zip code of every state in the union, but what it manages to procure from various sources seem enough to be of some assistance to some portions of the public.
Social Media Marketing Primer: How Blendtec Got Its Face On
May 22, 2008 — 08:07 AM PDT — by Guest Writer — — 11 Comments
This is a guest post written by Jackie Peters, CVO and Founding Partner of Heavybag Media.
George Wright, Marketing Director of Blendtec gave a great presentation during lunch at Executing Social Media, a conference held in Pasadena, CA. The conference is designed to assemble great minds in social media to teach and mentor those who are just beginning to explore the landscape, and to exchange ideas with each other. George’s presentation really struck a chord with me in the sense that the Blendtech story exemplifies how important it is for companies to have a face. And, I got to watch him blend a rake!
Before “Will It Blend,” Blendtec was a faceless company that manufactured blenders; their consumer grade blenders run around $400. The Will It Blend story begins shortly after George began working for the company. He was walking around the factory and stumbled upon Blendtec CEO Tom Dickson. Dickson was testing the new bearings in a blender by blending a 2 X4. The company’s employees went on with their work unphased, apparently the practice of “extreme blending” was a regular occurrence there at the factory.
George was smart enough to recognize this gem and turned it into the widely acclaimed “Will It Blend” series of videos. He simply unveiled the face that the company had all along. The videos were distributed online and Blentec employees reached out to their personal networks to let them know. Word spread and “Will It Blend” became a viral phenomenon, garnering of 100 million views in total. Blendtec’s marketing now serves as a profit center for the company, the videos have made over $50,000 in ad revenue from Revver.
I believe in every successful viral campaign there’s at least an ounce or two of luck, but let’s dismiss that and focus on everything else. What we are seeing now in online communities is a shift toward humanness. It’s no longer acceptable to the Internet savvy individuals to interface with a faceless corporation. Social tools like blogs, messaging services and community sites have broken down barriers between individuals and also between brands and consumers. The “Will It Blend” story comes from a place of authenticity, it lends a face to Blendtec and makes them approachable.
Jackie leads strategy development for Heavybag Media’s clients. Heavybag Media is an interactive marketing firm that connects the dots between brands and communities. They develop campaigns and marketing strategies that utilize social tools, community platforms, traitional and non-traditional media and cutting edge technology.
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