Update: ImageShack CEO Hints At His Grander Ambitions
Erick Schonfeld
3 comments »
Yesterday, I reported a strong rumor that Sequoia Capital had invested in image-hosting site ImageShack. Today, I spoke with CEO and founder Jack Levin. He would not comment specifically on the funding rumor other than to say that over the past few months he’s been in discussions with a variety of VCs. So he may still be in the late stages of discussions, or he may have closed the round. He really wouldn’t say. But at the very least, he is definitely looking for funding.
He was, however, very forthcoming on other aspects of his business. And outlined a grand ambition befitting an early employee of Google (his claim to fame is the clustering architecture that Google is based on).
Levin did want to correct a few things from the original post, in which I said he has self-funded the startup until now. “I never put a single dime into the company,” he says. Unless you count the $80 for the first month of server hosting back in November, 2003 when he was still working at Google. But that month the company made $200, so it has been profitable from the start. His secret:
We were profitable for the last three years. The most different thing about our company is that it would take 7 to 8 million dollars in opex [operating expenses] per year to run a media hosting company like ours if you were using traditional non-off-the-shelf clustering technology, where we use a tiny fraction of that amount, which allows us to be profitable and take risks other companies can’t.
Because of the way he designed his back-end architecture, he can serve two terabytes of images from a single $1,000, Linux server. So he spends only about $200,000 a year on capital expenditures and now has about 500 servers. He was also able to leverage his industry connections to get really cheap bandwidth rates.
Also, subscriptions make up a tiny portion of revenues. Most of the revenues come from advertising on the site. ImageShack serves about 10 million ads a day, mostly to people who go to the site to upload their images. Although the site also attracts 500,000 brand new visitors every single day. Levin also notes that it is “unlikely we will ever modify the image” with ads because “that would be like spamming the Internet.”
Rather than put ads in or around the images it hosts, Levin is working on harnessing all the data his service generates about content consumption (perhaps to better target advertising on ImageShack or to syndicate that targetting data to ad networks). Like Google and Yahoo, he is deploying the open-source Hadoop software to create a massive distributed supercomputer, but he is using it to analyze all the data he is collecting. Levin is vague about how he plans to make money from this data, but it is clear he is convinced the data is pretty valuable. He explains the opportunity in broad strokes:
We are like a broadcasting company that broadcasts in every country, in every language, on every topic. There are a lot of misconceptions in the Valley hat the Internet is just two or three companies. But that is not true.
Don’t you think it is ridiculous to see business plans based on how many Facebook widget users you have? We have millions of Websites using our services. It doesn’t matter what Facebook does.
So I am still not sure if Sequoia funded his startup, but I can see why it would want to.
| Website: | imageshack.us |
| Location: | Los Gatos, California, United States |
| Founded: | November, 2003 |
| Funding: | $10M |
ImageShack is one of the largest image hosting websites on the internet. They have a subscription service, but the majority of their revenue is produced from advertising related to their free image hosting. Learn More
The Biggest Tech IPO of 2008 Is Coming Out of Russia: Search Engine Yandex to Raise Up To $2 Billion
Erick Schonfeld
9 comments »
The Google of Russia is Yandex, and it is preparing for an IPO on Nasdaq in the fall with the hopes of raising $1.5 billion to $2 billion, reports Reuters
. That would give the company a $5 billion valuation. Yandex was founded 15 years ago and the last funding I can find was only $5.3 million back in 2000, according to Quintura CEO Yakov Sadchikov (Quintura is a smaller search engine also based in Russia). If that is all the company raised, it will be a huge payday for investors ru-Net Holdings, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, and Tiger Technologies.
Yandex has a bigger search market share in Russia than Google (it is the biggest site in Russia overall). And in Europe it is the No. 3 search engine, ahead of Yahoo and Microsoft. Globally, it is in the top 10.
Its revenues, though, are not that large, considering its ranking. In 2007 it reported only $167 million in revenues, which was a 130 percent increase from 2006. Founders Arkady Volozh (CEO) and Ilya Segalovich (CTO) still run the company.
| Website: | www.yandex.ru |
| Location: | Moscow, Russian Federation |
| Founded: | 1993 |
| Funding: | $5.3M |
Yandex is leading the leading search engine in Russia. Their search engine automatically searches all possible forms of a given word, takes into account the distance between the searched words within sentences and paragraphs, and searches documents… Learn More
CBS President Leslie Moonves Drops By CNET HQ
Michael Arrington
2 comments »
CBS President & CEO Leslie Moonves paid a visit to CNET headquarters in San Francisco today, we’re hearing.
He came alone. No Quincy Smith, No Michael Marquez (the guys who did the deal). No entourage of any kind. The goal? Address the troops (all of CNET, in person and via a webcast) and let everyone know how this $1.8 billion merger is going to play out.
The main message: CNET is now the cornerstone (or one of the cornerstones of CBS’ online strategy. Neil Ashe, CNET’s CEO, will report to Smith, and CBS Interactive’s various properties (such as Last.fm, CBSSports.com, etc.) will all become one big family, moving traffic and leveraging “deep relationships with big advertisers (auto, pharma, tech, etc.).” Expect lots of interaction points between the the TV and online properties.
Will they succeed in their grand integration plan? First they have to close the merger, which isn’t a done deal. This was a hurried negotiaton, in reaction to the looming threat from a activist shareholder group, led by Jana Partners, with ambitious goals of overhauling the company.
CNET signed a confidentiality agreement with CBS on May 7, according to the merger agreement (Section 8.02(c)), just one week before the deal was announced. CNET’s investment bank, Morgan Stanley, certainly didn’t shop the deal much to other likely buyers before CNET signed.
Other bidders may still come to the table. And if they bid more, CNET has to pay a relatively paltry $35 million breakup fee (good analysis of this here). Perhaps now that CNET is engaged, other suitors (see Microsoft) may suddenly find it a lot more attractive than it was a couple of months ago.
Still, all signs are positive for CNET right now. The merger price, which works out to $11.50/share, is, coincidentally, $.50/share more than Jana Partners said they could expect to get for the company by 2009. So the only question left is, does anyone want CNET more than CBS does?
| Companies: | CBS, Viacom, Warner Bros |
Leslie Moonves is President and Chief Executive Officer of CBS Corporation. In this role, he oversees all operations of the company, including the CBS Television Network, The CW (a joint venture… Learn More
| Website: | www.cnetnetworks.com |
| Location: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Acquired: | May 15, 2008 by CBS for $1.8B in Cash |
CNET Networks is a publicly held media company with a focus on technology. CNET Networks owns many popular websites, including CNET.com, News.com, ZDNet.com, MP3.com, and Download.com. CNET Networks also creates and distributes video content under… Learn More
Twitter: Something Is Technically Wrong
Michael Arrington
81 comments »
Their words, not mine.
I’ve mostly stopped bothering to post when Twitter is down like it is now and like it was yesterday (honestly, it’s news when they keep the site live for 24 hours at this point). But, seriously, they need to get their act together. It’s past embarrassing.
Rumor is they’ve closed their big round of funding and things are all high fives over there, but much more of this and people aren’t just going to talk about bailing on the service for something new, they’re really going to do it (yes, even me).
Or how about just having enough respect for your users to let us know what’s going on.
Anyway, I’m in a particularly bad mood because I have food poisoning (thanks very much Grand Hyatt Seattle) and Twittering it was going to make me feel marginally better because a bunch of people would say something nice in a reply. But they take even that away from me.
Update:
Wow, somebody’s listening. Actual communication is so welcome: “We caused a database to fail during a routine update early this afternoon. We switched to a replica and expect this recovery to take place quickly.” What would be great is if Twitter just moved their blog to another platform so that it doesn’t fail when users need it most.
| Website: | twitter.com |
| Location: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founded: | March 1, 2006 |
| Funding: | $5.4M |
Founded in July 2006, Twitter is social networking and micro-blogging site that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through… Learn More
TechMeme Finally Adds Search
Michael Arrington
21 comments »
Tech news site TechMeme launched on September 12, 2005. It was an immediate hit and remains the most important blog news aggregator: Dan Farber wrote perhaps the best description of the site to date, back in 2007: “TechMeme provides a one-page, aggregated, filtered, archiveable summary in near real-time of what is new and generating conversation.”
But right from the start people noted that TechMeme had no search feature. Founder Gabe Rivera answered at the time: Don’t hold your breath. For posterity’s sake, here’s our first post on TechMeme, then called Memeorandum.
Anyway, those days are over, starting today. TechMeme search launched moments ago at techmeme.com/search, making it easy to find archived stories. Results are returned only for items that have appeared as full headlines on Techmeme, in reverse chronological order. Headlines appearing only in “Discussion” are excluded. And basic search only returns results that appear in the title of the item or in the first couple of sentences.
There is also an advanced search feature, however, that allows for full text search of the underlying blog post or article. Users can also search just by date, author, source, etc.
For now, Rivera says, he’s only releasing search for TechMeme. Search for sister sites Memeorandum (political news), WeSmirch (celebrity gossib) and Ballbug (baseball news) will come “soon.”
TechMeme also isn’t just a one-person shop any more. Rivera hired his first employee, Omer Horvitz, who built the search feature, late last year.
See the BloggerBoard for details on the top tech blogs and bloggers based on TechMeme headline data.
Update: Well we had this exclusively for all of 10 minutes. TechMeme’s post on the new feature is here.
| Website: | techmeme.com |
| Location: | Menlo Park, California, United States |
| Founded: | October 16, 2004 |
Launched in 2005 as Tech.Memeorandum.com, the site that is considered by many as the blogosphere’s daily tech newspaper was later renamed Techmeme (pronounced “tech-meam”). Stories often hit Techmeme days before the New York Times and other… Learn More
Hulu Shares Usage Stats, Expands Distribution Network
Mark Hendrickson
18 comments »
Hulu, the online joint video venture between NBC and News Corp that officially launched two months ago, is sharing some stats on its viewership.
According to the Nielsen Net Ratings, Hulu led all network sites in total video streams and overall engagement time in April. Hulu users are streaming over 63 million videos and, on average, are watching over two hours of video per month each.
Hulu is not just a destination site; it also syndicates content to a network of other sites, such as AOL, Comcast, MSN, MySpace, and Yahoo. Today they’re announcing that they’ve also signed up TV.com, TVGuide.com, Break.com, Zap2it.com, BuddyTV, Flixster, and MyYearbook. That’s an impressive lineup and one that’s sure to help make Hulu a household name before long.
The Los Angeles-based company is working to get its content out on the web through more grassroots channels as well. Hulu users can now send videos directly to MySpace, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Windows Live, Delicious, Google Bookmarks and Digg without having to embed any code (Hulu uses each of those sites’ sharing interfaces to do this instead of implementing a service like Gigya).
Videos can also be added to sites that support oEmbed by simply submitting their URLs. The oEmbed sharing format automatically converts the URLs into embed codes, making the copy and paste process even easier.
Finally, Hulu says that it is working with Facebook to display mini-feed notifications about what you’ve been watching for your friends.
| Website: | www.hulu.com |
| Location: | Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Founded: | March 1, 2007 |
| Funding: | $100M |
Hulu is NBC Universal and News Corporation’s online video joint venture. The site focuses exclusively on professional content and does not take on YouTube directly as a viral video destination. The site… Learn More
| Website: | www.Break.com |
| Location: | Beverly Hills, California, United States |
| Founded: | June 1, 1998 |
| Funding: | $21.4M |
Break.com, (originally Big-boys.com) is an entertainment website aimed at men. Most of the site’s content is humorous, with the majority of it being videos, pictures and flash games. The company says they show over 12,000,000 videos and 5,000,000… Learn More
| Website: | buddytv.com |
| Location: | Seattle, Washington, United States |
| Funding: | $9.05M |
BuddyTV is an online TV guide and discussion center. It provides original articles, news and interviews on a large range of TV content. In addition to content provided by BuddyTV, fans can conduct TV jockey broadcasts about their favorite shows. … Learn More
YouTomb: Where Videos Go to Die
Erick Schonfeld
26 comments »
Ever wonder exactly how many videos are taken down from YouTube because of copyright violations or other reasons? So did the folks at the MIT Free Culture student group. They created YouTomb to document all YouTube videos that have been taken down. It is currently tracking 177,000 videos, and counts 4,394 that have been taken down for alleged copyright violations.
For each video taken down, YouTomb records the title, description, who uploaded it, when it was taken down, and some screen shots. You cannot watch the videos on the site. But it does document what happened to them, in case any were taken down wrongfully, in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which requires that Youtube chooses to comply with by removing any videos for which it receives a take down notice). The biggest users of the take down notice ion Youtube include TV TOKYO, Viacom, Warner Bros, and World Wrestling Entertainment.
(via Google Operating System).
| Website: | youtomb.mit.edu |
| Location: | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States |
| Founded: | 2008 |
YouTomb is a research project of MIT Free Culture. The purpose of the project is to investigate what kind of videos are subject to takedown notices due to allegations of copyright infringement with… Learn More
Popjax Launches Branded Video Trivia Games With Heavy Metal Rockers Avenged Sevenfold
Erick Schonfeld
9 comments »
Two of the most popular things to do on the Web are play games and watch videos. Popjax, a startup backed by Shasta Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, combines the to to create a new form of casual game: video trivia. The company creates mashups of its own trivia questions with embedded videos from YouTube.
Now it is going after rock bands to create branded video trivia games for their fans. The first band to create a game is Avenged Sevenfold. If you are a heavy metal fan (and I know that you are), you can play the game here. The band will also embed the game on its fan site and MySpace page (where it has 719,000 friends). It keeps fans on their site longer and Popjax splits the ad revenue and affiliate sales fees from the application with the band.
Now how about creating a trivia game for a band I actually listen to? (I know, I’m old).
ScrnShots Upgrades: An Interview with Co-Founder Derek Kehler
May 20, 2008 — 02:43 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — Add a Comment
ScrnShots is a newer service that pretty much does what the name of the company implies: it’s a screen shot-taking tool that aggregates your captured images and organizes them similar to a personalized bookmarking service.
This is geared mostly towards designers who may find a particular image or website layout that they like, and would like to save it for later review or perhaps with a few of their friends. ScrnShots isn’t limited to websites, however. You can use ScrnShots to capture images from your desktop or a saved document.
The initial release of ScrnShots featured a desktop application that wasn’t quite fully fleshed out. Now with some recent upgrades, ScrnShots has a Mac version that’s been improved even from the Alpha version of the service that’s shown in the video below.
[ScrnShots] Desktop Application Preview from Greg Bell on Vimeo.
I conversed with Derek Kehler, co-founder of ScrnShots, about the way in which the new beta version differs from the Alpha release. The primary change is that the new tool works with your browser, removing many of the steps you’d need to take in order to capture, save and organize a screen shot with the desktop version. You can read Kehler’s responses below.
Kristen Nicole of Mashable: It looks as though the tagging window has been improved. It almost appears to be somewhat of a sidebar tool instead of a pop up window. Is that the case?
Derek Kehler, ScrnShots co-founder: Yes, you’re right: the biggest change from alpha, to beta (current version) is that ScrnShots Desktop lives in the menu bar (taskbar on PC). The advantages to this is that it is easily accessible at all times. For example: if you are browsing, and you find something that you like, you click the icon in the menu bar, choose “take a screenshot” and you don’t have to change windows at all!
KN: Does the updated version auto-populate information such as the URL when taking a screen shot?
Kehler: We decided against it for the Mac and PC apps. We would have been able to pull the last accessed URL from your default browser, however, the problem with that is that it assumes that people are taking screenshots of websites; and that’s not always the case.
We’ve seen people take screenshots of their desktops, desktop wallpaper, desktop software, etc, etc. We are, however, planning on having the firefox plugin auto-populating! I think it’s safe to assume that if people are taking screenshots with a firefox plugin, that we can take the liberty to auto-populate that field.
KN: What about auto-populating things like tag words?
Kehler: We’ve made a few improvements, the biggest of which is that we are planning to have auto-completing tags, based on your previously tagged screenshots. We’re not 100% sure if this feature will be available on the first release. Tag auto-completion will only be available on the Mac version of the app for now.
KN: For the PC version, are there any features that are different from the Mac version?
Kehler: The biggest difference between the two will be the auto-complete for tags. The PC app will live in the taskbar on the bottom right, and will function almost identical to the Mac version.
KN: do you know if/when the Firefox plugin will be ready, and could you tell me a little bit about how it will work?
Kehler: It will live at the top of your browser window (the same as the Delicious plugin, or any other plugin), and will have a dropdown menu with similar menu items to ScrnShots Desktop. The biggest difference is that the plugin will auto populate the URL field for you. All in all, it will function very much like ScrnShots Desktop. The plan is to release all three of the apps together. However, our development schedule is somewhat insane right now, so a lot could happen within a few days.
Report: Russian Search Leader Yandex Set for Massive IPO
May 20, 2008 — 01:53 PM PDT — by Adam Ostrow — — 1 Comment
Russia’s leading search engine, Yandex, is set for a massive IPO this fall according to a report from Reuters. The site claims approximately 47% of the search market in Russia (Google is second), with revenues of $167 million last year. Yakov over at Quintura notes that the company has about 2.2% of the total European search market, which beats both Yahoo and Microsoft.
The IPO would reportedly raise $2 billion for Yandex and value the company at $5 billion. That may seem aggressive, but dominant Chinese search engine Baidu trades at similarly lofty levels – 43x sales at today’s closing price of $372/share. Investors see dollar signs when a search player dominates a market in the way that Google dominates the US, and hence the interest in buying up shares of companies like Baidu and Yandex.
Twitter Is Down (Again): Mashable Asks (Again), “What Are You Doing?”
May 20, 2008 — 01:20 PM PDT — by Adam Ostrow — — 54 Comments
Following outages last night that Mark blamed on the Democrats, Twitter has gone down again this afternoon. I’ve been noticing the outages for at least an hour, but I’ve seen other reports suggesting that it has been down longer.
In a cheap attempt to get a high comment count, Mashable looks to fill the void, and asks you to tell us what YOU are doing in 140 characters or less in our comment section.
Editor’s Note (#2): It’s now Tuesday (5/20) and Twitter is down once again. Let the Mashable Twitter replacement thread continue!
Editor’s Note (#1): This was originally posted last time Twitter went down for an extended period of time (May 15th). Rather than make a fresh post each time Twitter crashes, we’ll just bring this post back and let the comment thread continue 
While you wait for Twitter to return, you may also enjoy Allen Stern’s new hit music video: “Twitter Come Back“:
[inspired by this friendfeed thread]
Read The News While Playing With Google Earth
May 20, 2008 — 01:08 PM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — Add a Comment
Searching through Google News via your boring ol’ Web browser not doing it for you? Need something more visually engaging? Try Google’s new layer for it’s Earth application.
Introduced earlier today, the Google News feature for Google Earth (pardon the partial redundancy), which can be found within the Gallery section of the Layers menu, offers users the option to view headlines through geographically aligned data windows. That may not sound very captivating, admittedly, but it is actually quite interesting. If you’re not pressed for time and can spend a moment or two zooming about the globe and clicking small newspaper icons, the layer actually does show to work quite well. Maybe too well. Yeah, warning to those easily distracted: many, many minutes may pass while you “briefly test” this new release.
How thorough is the layer’s spread? It goes as far and as deep as the search engine’s 4,500 news sources will take the user. Canvas the US, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere and you really won’t be lacking for stories. If anything, there’s way, way too much to consume. So handle with care. And watch the clock. Unless someone else pays the bills. In which case, while away, dear friend, while away.
ExpoTV Matches You with Product Owners, for Precise Answers
May 20, 2008 — 12:57 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — 4 Comments
I occasionally get questions sent to me (and a bunch of other people) through LinkedIn’s question forum, which allows users to submit a question or a request to a select portion of their contact list. This is an easy way to leverage the group of people you have in your immediate and semi-extended network, and you typically get a halfway decent response in a timely fashion. I’m often surprised by the quick turnaround such a system can provide.
So when ExpoTV told us that they’d be adding a new platform called Ask an Owner, I was pretty happy to see this type of functionality layered into its product review system. Ask an Owner is a near-real time forum where users can submit questions about a particular product, and ExpoTV will distribute these questions to the users that have reviewed that product.
This is somewhat similar to Yahoo Answers, which provides automated contact tools for getting the questions to the right people as well as returning the answers to you. But with ExpoTV’s niche approach to product reviews, the new platform is more like an automated and targeted forum. This process limits the amount of time needed for a visitor to dig through reviews for the specific information they’re looking for, and better utilizes the experts that populate the majority of ExpoTV’s review content.
So what could make this better?
Even though ExpoTV’s new system is likely to work well, based on my experience from LinkedIn and Yahoo Answers, there’s one community that I’ve found is even better for quick and useful responses–Twitter. If ExpoTV could manage to leverage Twitter, or a similar, internal feed system for spreading content to a number of targeted people for fast and explicit responses, I would be quite impressed.
Techmeme Search Makes Me Remember Technorati (For A Split Second)
May 20, 2008 — 12:22 PM PDT — by Stan Schroeder — — 1 Comment
First, the news: the best tech news aggregator out there - or memetracker as we like to call it - Techmeme, has added a long sought feature: search. Nothing too fancy, although the advanced options are a plenty, as you can see from the screenshot below. And damn useful, I might add.
Note the checkbox. By default, Techmeme search only matches keywords found in the title and the summary; you need to uncheck “Search title & summary only” if you want to search the full text of articles.
Why the Technorati mention? Well, Techmeme search effectively kills the last big reason I’ve had to visit Technorati. Techmeme now has it all. Tracking news on blogs? Check. Following conversations/trackbacks? Check. (Technorati’s Percolator does this, but not as good as Techmeme) Top list of blogs, if you care for that sort of thing? Check. And now there’s search, which has lately been the only reason why I’d go to Technorati - to quickly search what the blogosphere has been saying about a topic.
The only advantage of Technorati at this point is that it tracks all blogs and it follows all kinds of blogs, while Techmeme focuses on tech news only. TechMeme does however have sites running off of the same algorihm in other categories, such as WeSmirch for celebrity news and Memeorandum for politics, though those don’t yet have the new search features.
However, with Technorati’s track record of weird updates or just plain old stagnation, in a year or two it might find itself overrun by Techmeme.
Summize Gets Distribution Deal with HuffPo; Twitter’s Path to Mainstream?
May 20, 2008 — 12:01 PM PDT — by Adam Ostrow — — 7 Comments
Summize, the former review aggregation site that has since shifted focus to Twitter search, has signed an interesting distribution deal with The Huffington Post that may foretell the future direction of the company.
Starting today, every tag page on HuffPo features realtime conversation search of the topic of that respective tag. So, if you’re looking at the tag for “Facebook,” you’ll see both stories from HuffPo about the social network as well as the most recent conversations taking place on Twitter about it, via a widget that has been inserted into the sidebar. If you’d like to see more conversations, there is a link for that too that takes you to the Summize search results page for the term.
Abdur Chowdhury of Summize tells me that while this was done through a business development deal with The Huffington Post, his company will soon be offering up a widget that any site can use to add similar functionality. Why might one want to do that? As I’ve mentioned before, I think tools like Summize and Tweetscan are amazing tools for brand management. As a web publisher, if you offer tagging or search functionality, adding links to relevant conversations is a nice value-add for your readers that will keep them on your site. And with search ad revenue typically paying a lot better than display ads, the more search queries you’re able to drive, the more money that flows to your bottom line.
Meanwhile, if Summize’s publisher strategy is successful, it also stands to drive a lot of mainstream adoption to Twitter. And that’s certainly possible. While Twitter may be made up mostly of digerati, it has reached a point where the conversation has moved beyond tech, hence, making Summize’s widget useful to publishers outside of the current Twitter demographics. The Huffington Post is certainly a big start for Summize, it will be interesting to see which other publishers jump on board in coming months.
Skype Strikes Deal With Jaman, Gives Film Snobs Something To Talk About
May 20, 2008 — 12:00 PM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — Add a Comment
Skype is huge. Really huge. One of the most successful VoIP and IM services on the planet. Jaman, on the other hand, is…less huge. That may change.
No, Jaman isn’t likely to encounter a usage boom in the coming weeks. Growth, sure, but not massive surge in traffic. This is to be expected where independent film distribution on the Web is concerned. But news reported today by Chris Albrecht of NewTeeVee, that Skype and Jaman have entered a deal to allow users of the first service to share clips gleaned from the second, will no doubt come to be seen as a fairly convenient development.
So far, Skype users have been able to access the video archives of sites like DailyMotion and Metacafe. Now the indie film buffs can share in conversation within the Skype universe, too. Ebert & Roeper never had it this easy.
Jaman also notes that it has struck distribution deals with Magnolia Films (”The Smartest Guys in the Room”) and First Look Studio (”The Contract”), adding to its already impressive international archive of short- and long-form movies.
Hulu Signs Deals With TV.com, Flixster; Coming To Your Facebook Mini-Feed
May 20, 2008 — 11:17 AM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — Add a Comment
Hulu, a Web-based television project backed by News Corp and NBC Universal, has in months past signed distribution deals with numerous third parties, including Yahoo, AOL, MSN, MySpace, and Comcast. Today the venture begins to present its content on TV.com, a CNET/CBS entity, and in the weeks ahead will arrange to broadcast videos through TV Guide, Break, Zap2It, BuddyTV, Flixster, and MyYearbook. The company is also working with Facebook to build a mini-feed feature to “see, share and announce what video they’ve been watching.”
Released from its private beta designation just a few months ago, Hulu has reportedly been seeing good growth since its launch. According to Nielsen Net Ratings, which studied the company’s progress in April, there have been north of 63 million video streams requested by users, with the average visitor having viewed some two hours of material each month. 
Of course, the latter statistic appears quite miniscule when compared to the median viewing time for traditional broadcast television within the US. But for a startup with less than year’s experience in the public space, its seems to be well on its way toward its goal of ad-supported consumption to complement its founders’ main businesses.
The intention of Hulu is to cater to viewers interested in premium content wherever they may reside or visit. Such is the reasoning behind the website’s promotion of material on third-party sites as well creation of links to social services like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, StumbleUpon, and Google Bookmarks and for users to embed videos on personal websites or blogs. Web users’ have a natural tendency to want to share media with friends online. The allowance of this activity is what is likely to give Hulu the widespread audience it needs to ensure the viability and eventual profitability of the business.
Bubble Alert: Facebook Traffic Declines 10% in April
May 20, 2008 — 08:56 AM PDT — by Adam Ostrow — — 18 Comments
The latest stats from Nielsen Online show a significant decline in month-over-month unique visitors to Facebook in the US. In April, traffic fell to 22.4M uniques, down from the 24.9M reported in March. Year-over-year traffic growth decelerated from 98% to a much more modest 56%. MySpace also saw a modest decline (from 60.3M to 58.7M), while LinkedIn continued its torrid growth from 7.8M uniques in March to 8.6M in April.
Here’s the chart from Nielsen:
Compete, which also tracks only US visitors, also showed a decline at Facebook in April, though a more modest 4.2%.
While past declines in Facebook traffic have been attributed largely to seasonality, this one is a bit more difficult to put a finger on. Smaller social networks like Buzznet and Imeem that are also comprised of largely younger users showed month-over-month growth, while as noted above, LinkedIn grew incredibly fast.
Is Facebook fatigue finally upon us? In a recent poll, our readers seemed to think so, and the company appears to be quickly moving to return to was once its most alluring feature - simplicity. They are set to unveil their re-designed user profiles shortly, which aim in part to get rid of the clutter that has loaded up Facebook since they launched their application platform. We’ll see if it helps move the numbers back in the right direction when we check in on the stats next month.
Placely Officially Launches. How Does it Compare to Other Travel Planners?
May 20, 2008 — 08:55 AM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — 3 Comments
Placely officially launches today, but how does its travel planning suite stack up against some of its competitors? With a focus on updating friends, blogging and tracking everyone’s travels, there’s only a handful of prominent sites that are comparable to Placely. TripIt and Dopplr are two of them. With a focus on tracking one’s own travels within a social networking environment, I looked at three things when comparing these travel sites: Tracking, Connectivity, and Accessibility.
Tracking
Placely has a unique tracking tool that lets you see where your friends will be at any given time. The color-coded friends appear on a map so you can see their location at-a-glance. Flight information can also be entered, so that you can be updated on things like frequent flier miles. What’s missing, however, are ways in which to export tracked data, whether via RSS feeds or iCal sync. Tracking updates outside of Placely’s site are limited to email alerts.
TripIt tracks flight and travel information, as well as hotel and dining reservations, amongst other things. This brings the tracking capabilities full circle in order to encompass most aspects of your trip. There are also both RSS feed and iCal sync options for exporting some of your tracked data.
Dopplr also features iCal sync for trips added to its site, but there are no other direct tracking tools that provide automated information that can be used in conjunction with your trip plans or network.
Connectivity
With Placely, this is a key feature for its network. In tracking others’ trips, you can determine who you’d possibly like to connect with while you’re both in the same city. Group travel-planning is one of Placely’s more recent features that allows for organized trip-planning for multiple people. What’s missing, though, are direct options for connecting with friends while traveling. Adding friends is easy, and viewing their trip blogs for advice has no direct application for your own trip but can be rated and discussed.
TripIt offers more automated features for connecting with friends that are in the same area as you are, at a given point in time. This is also integrated into your calendar, so it’s easier to directly make plans with other users. Viewing user information outside of connections, however, is quite limited as TripIt is more of a planning and tracking tool than a full-fledged network.
Dopplr, like Placely, also has some group travel-planning capabilities. Other users that are your friends are your fellow travelers, and can be viewed on a map as well. If you’d like to keep up with their trips, you can subscribe to their trips through iCal. When you add a trip to Dopplr, you’ll also see the trips of others that have recently been to the same location, so you’re automatically being connected to others for learning about the area and getting travel tips.
Accessibility
Placely could greatly improve on its accessibility outside of its website, through feeds, calendar sync, third-party apps on larger social networks, and on mobile devices. Travelers that are on the go typically have mobile access, even if they can’t get on an Internet-connected PC.
TripIt recently launched a mobile version with SMS support that offers full access to your saved trips, including your itenirary with flight and other reservation details, contact info and confirmations. This is the most robust mobile tool of the three sites.
Dopplr also has a mobile version, and iCal sync, so it’s rather accessible if you’re able to browse the web on your handheld, as there doesn’t appear to be any SMS support.
