Akimbo Jumps Into Deadpool, Takes $56 Million With It
Jason Kincaid
6 comments »
Akimbo
, the online video provider that never seemed to establish an identity, has closed its doors. The sudden move is surprising, given that the site raised $4 million in funding less than three months ago.
Akimbo launched in 2002 as a hardware-based VOD company. Using a hard-drive equipped settop box, users could download a variety of shows from 200 content partners. In October 2005 the company shifted directions and introduced Akimbo for Media Center, which did away with the hardware and allowed users to use Akimbo through a plugin on compatible computers. Finally, last February, the company reinvented itself once more, and became a whitelabel video service provider.
Given Akimbo’s multiple personalities, it’s not surprising that it has run into trouble - but why give up after only three months in a new space? The company has seen management issues (the former CEO left, and disagreements apparently arose after his replacement with Thomas Frank). But that still doesn’t explain why the company would give the whitelabel space such a half-hearted effort.
According to VentureBeat, the entire staff has been laid off, save for three members who are staying on to facilitate the company’s shutdown. The company had raised $56 million over multiple rounds of funding, with investors including AT&T and Cisco. Akimbo has been added to the Deadpool.
| Website: | akimbo.com |
| Location: | San Mateo, California, United States |
| Funding: | $35.7M |
Akimbo’s is a white label video solution including 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… Learn More
TechCrunch Sponsors Are Great
Mark Hendrickson
Comments Off
Thank you to our great group of sponsors who make reading TechCrunch possible.
ScribeFire, Firefox extension for integrated blogging in your broswer
Levelwing, Internet advertising agency
BoonEx, community software
Rackspace, hosting services
RaiseCapital, connecting entrepreneurs and investors online
e.factor, networking platform for entrepreneurs
eBuddy, web-services meta instant messenger
MediaTemple, TechCrunch’s own hosting provider
Also, following is a list of upcoming conferences that may be of interest:
OReilly’s Graphing Social Patterns, June 9-10 in Washington, DC. Use “gspe08tech” for a 15% registration discount. OReilly wants to give away two free tickets to the conference to TechCrunch readers. Email freeticket [at] techcrunch [dot com] if you’re interested in securing a free ticket. OReilly will select two names at random next Wednesday, May 28 at 5 pm pst.
Supernova, June 16-18 in San Francisco, CA. TechCrunch readers automatically receive a $200 discount here. Come join TechCrunch as we co-host the Mobile Connections forum with Kevin Werbach Monday night at the conference.
OReilly’s Velocity Conference, June 23-24 in Burlingame, CA. Use “vel08tech” for a 15% registration discount.
Run to your checkbook. TechCrunch has new advertising sponsorship packages available:
- 50% sponsorship rotations on TechCrunch, an affordable new way to gain visibility with TechCrunch readers.
- RSS feed sponsorships. Reach over 940,000 TechCrunch RSS subscribers daily– some of our most rabid readers.
- new sponsorship units on our fast-growing CrunchBase directory.
- bundled pricing options for participation across multiple TechCrunch Network websites, including CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, TechCrunchUK and TechCrunchFR.
Learn more here or contact Heather Harde.
GigPark: Recommendations From Your Friends
Erick Schonfeld
11 comments »
Yesterday at the Mesh conference in Toronto I met Noah Godfrey, one of the founders of GigPark. A social recommendation Website that launched last February, the site recently pushed out a major redesign. It’s like Yelp, but only with recommendations from people you know.
The point of GigPark is to collect and share recommendations of local services with your friends. You import your contact list from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, or Hotmail. Or add it as a Facebook application. Then you can start asking questions. Does anyone know a good doctor, lawyer, plumber? What’s the best Thai restaurant in town? And you can start giving your own recommendations. All of these questions and answers appears as a consolidated feed from you, your friends, and the friends of your friends.
It only works with friends who have joined GigPark or added the Facebook app, but you can make your page public to share it with friends who are not members. Here’s Godfrey’s public page.
The site also lets you search for specific services, like restaurants or dog walker. And you can see who recommended what.
For each recommendation there is a page with the original recommendation and contact information. Comments can be made on any recommendation, and they can be added to your favorites as well. Most of the features work within Facebook as well. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather get recommendations from people I know or who I can ask about than from anonymous strangers.
GigPark has been bootsrapped so far with $200,000 from Godfrey and his co-founder Pema Hegan. It competes with Trusted Opinion, which has raised $3.6 million.
Mobissimo Has 1/223 The Capital Of Kayak (And Out Executes Them)
Michael Arrington
23 comments »
Connecticut startup Kayak has raised $223 million in venture capital and employs 58 people to build and grow its travel search site. Its chief competitor, San Francisco based Mobissimo, has raised $1 million and has just 15 employees. Mobissimo also became profitable last year, and the company doesn’t have to raise more money unless it’s to fuel faster growth or acquisitions.
It’s also clear even from a cursory comparison of the two sites that Mobissimo is trying harder than Kayak to help you find exactly the flight and hotel you are looking for. Kayak is largely similar to other travel search sites - enter where you want to go and get back results from a number of providers, sort by price, etc.
But Mobissimo has implemented a number of just plain smart features that provide the kind of travel options that you usually need a human operator or travel agent to get to. In addition to normal search results, for example, users also see options for the lowest priced non-stop fares, the lowest priced alternative dates, and the lowest priced business class fares (without doing new searches). And if there’s a train between the two destinations, Mobissimo will show those results along with the flights - you may get there faster and cheaper that way, and you’d never think to search for train schedules separately.
And even better, the service will look for related destinations and show you the lowest fares there, too. For example, a search for flights to Poland may show other Eastern European destinations if the prices are a lot lower. Or if you are looking for flights to an airport near a beach, Mobissimo will show you other flights to other beach destinations, perhaps thousands of miles away (and skiing, and wine regions, etc.). It’s very hard to find these kinds of travel options with online searches. If you are flying to Warsaw, you just don’t think to do a search to Prague, too, to see if it’s vastly cheaper.
And if all you want to do is find a quick getaway to gamble, play golf, drink wine, go to a beach or just about anything else, you can search primarily by activity, too. Mobissimo also has widgets on the site that pull in third party information about the destination. Weather, Flickr photos and (soon) travel guides are included in the left sidebar.
All of this isn’t to say that Mobissimo has more traffic or sales than Kayak - see the Comscore chart here for their relative sizes. But Mobissimo is a solid, profitable startup with a great user experience. And they’ve done it with next to no financial resources.
The company was founded by Beatrice Tarka in October 2003.
| Website: | mobissimo.com |
| Location: | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Founded: | October, 2003 |
| Funding: | $1M |
Mobissimo is a travel search engine that indexes over 180 travel sites. It searches and compares prices from online travel agencies around the world, traditional airlines, low cost airlines and consolidators. Its search engine performs real-time… Learn More
| Website: | kayak.com |
| Location: | Norwalk, Connecticut, United States |
| Founded: | January 1, 2004 |
| Funding: | $223M |
Kayak is a travel search engine. It indexes hundreds of global travel sites to help you find the right flight, hotel, rental car or cruise line. Once you’ve found the way you want to travel, Kayak allows you to choose from which site you want to… Learn More
Hints of a Facebook Operating System In New Design
Erick Schonfeld
53 comments »
It’s become a common trope to say that Facebook and Google are vying to become the operating system of the Internet. But there are some very clear hints of that in Facebook’s upcoming new design, which it just opened up to today in a developer sandbox. (You can see it at http://www.new.facebook.com, although you’ll need to download some libraries to start testing apps with it).
It appears that Facebook is moving closer to becoming a Webtop application, fusing elements of the desktop into the Web experience.
Eagle-eyed TechCrunch reader Ryan Merket (above) noticed something vaguely familiar about the new design. See the menu bar above his profile? Look closely. Its got some handy menus on the left that take him to his profile, his friends, applications, and inbox.
And on the right of the menu bar is a search box. That is the same visual metaphor you find in the menu bar on desktop operating systems.
The menu choices are different than on you desktop, because these tap into Web applications and resources. But the navigation is the same.
Menus on the left.
Search on the right.
And don’t forget the chat bar on the very bottom that, like a status bar, shows you how many of your friends are online and lets you chat with them.
Could this be the work of Facebook’s Parakey acquisition from last July finally bearing fruit? Parakey was the pre-launch startup from Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt that was working on a “web operating system.” Facebook was rumored to have beaten Google on the deal.
Facebook is already well on its way to becoming an operating system of sorts for the Web. (This time around there will be room for more than one OS). It is the application platform of choice for many Web developers. (Tomorrow, it turns one year old). But why reinvent the wheel on the user interface side when everybody is already trained how to use a menu bar? The aha moment will be when people click on those menus and a whole new world opens up to them.
| Website: | facebook.com |
| Location: | Palo Alto, California, United States |
| Founded: | February 1, 2004 |
| Funding: | $493M |
On February 4th, 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook, a social network that was at the time exclusively for Harvard students. It was a huge hit, in 2 weeks, half of the student body… Learn More
| Website: | parakey.com |
| Location: | Mountain View, California, United States |
| Acquired: | July 1, 2007 by Facebook |
Parakey was founded in early 2006 by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt of Mozilla/Firefox fame. Little has been revealed about what Parakey will actually do, but it has been touted as both a… Learn More
Newt Gingrich Talks Tech, Presidential Aspirations
Michael Arrington
18 comments »
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is in Silicon Valley today talking about his American Solutions organization, which recently opened an office in Palo Alto. I spent about thirty minutes on the phone with him talking about a wide range of issues: the upcoming elections, tech issues in general and his own presidential aspirations.
The podcast and transcript is below. Last night I asked Twitter users what questions they’d like me to ask, and I added a few of the good ones to the interview.
I asked about his thoughts on the upcoming presidential elections. He clearly supports Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal as McCain’s running mate, and also says there’s a good chance that Hillary Clinton will end up teaming with Obama on the Democrat side of things. How will those two teams stack up? He gives the Democrats a 60% chance of winning.
I also asked Gingrich about his own presidential aspirations: “The other twitter question is, When are you going to run for president? Please run for president.” Gingrich responds that he’s looking at a 2012 or 2016 run: “All I can say is that if they look at American Solutions and they look for the senate transformation, they will see the early stages of how you would write a second contract with America. If you get to the point it is clear enough and powerful enough, and if that point there is a big enough demand whether it is in 2012 or 2016, I will get to the point where I would run. If my mission in life is to be the teacher for the next generation of politicians, then I am pretty happy doing that too. I am going to wait and let the American people sort that out.”
Transcript:
TheRarestWords: Intriguing Semantic SEO Project from Russia
Erick Schonfeld
12 comments »
A mysterious yet intriguing project from Russia has come across our inbox. It is a search-engine optimization analysis tool for Websites called TheRarestWords. For any given URL, like Microsoft’s or Techcrunch’s, it shows you the rarest keywords on the homepage (i.e., the ones most likely to give your site some search-engine juice), other sites with related keywords, and a list of categories the site would fit under based on those keywords. For Microsoft, some the rare keywords it identifies are “silverlight,” “biztalk,” “onecare,” “skydrive, “popfly,” “ballmer,” and “ozzie.” You can try your site by going to http://therarestwords.com/YOURSITE.com.
TheRarestWords then tries to tap into crowd intelligence by letting anyone add a 100-character definition for each keyword, which could give it a semantic edge in trying to categorize each site. This could also be gamed pretty easily, but this looks to be just a Web project at this point. It could also be used to create a Wiki dictionary like Lingoz or Wiktionary, but that does not seem to be the focus of the project.
The developer is a mysterious Russian who does not want to give out his name. You can find more info on his blog and on this forum post. Mircea Goia from MyTestBox dug into it for us and reports:
The author and the sole founder – who is from Russia and wants to have a low profile for now - says it is just a hobby that was started in December 2007 and he calls it a “linguistic experiment”.
Their spider (called TheRarestParser/0.2a) started scouting the internet in May and extracted words from many websites. It looked at which one are used most often on those websites and which ones are rarely used, or not at all. For now it extracts only the words from the first page of a domain. It doesn’t go deeper than that, however the spider managed to index 20 million words from many domains.
The author wants to implement new options like:
* Trend spotting (which of the words are gaining popularity - like “django” is becoming more popular, “python” is still strong, and which are losing it like “perl”)
* Help with SEO for mom-and-dad kinds of business sites (it could be useful from this stand point, the author says)
* Auto-categorization of your sites against a big list of categories (actually, at this time it has already been implemented, but the algorithm still needs to be perfected)
The interface is confusing the first time you go there, but there is some interesting data you can pull from it. For instance, you can have an SEO fight between any two sites by typing in the address: http://therarestwords.com/vs/your-site.com/competitors-site.com. This feature shows which rare words your site has that your competitor doesn’t and vice versa.
For example, here’s TechCrunch Vs. GigaOm. This is only a snapshot of what is on each frontpage, but we are more likely to get search traffic right now for terms like “friendfeed,” “gamestop,” and “blogosphere.” While they are kicking our butts on “qualcomm,” “powerset,” and “sarcasm.” (At least that was the case before I put up this post. I really can’t let Om beat us on sarcasm).
CrunchBase Now Integrated With LinkedIn API
Michael Arrington
24 comments »
We will shortly be releasing a new version of CrunchBase, the company and people database wiki that you often see linked to here on TechCrunch.
In the meantime, though, we’ve added a few new features to the product, including integration with LinkedIn via their API. You can now click a button and see if you are linked to any of the employees at any particular startup. The image to the left shows Google, but you may be surprised to find a connection to someone at even the smaller new companies we cover. The integration is identical to what Business Week announced last December.
More news from CrunchBase coming soon. And if you haven’t put in your own bio and picture yet, or information about your startup, please add it. We’re now tracking 4,460 startups and over 10,000 people.
If you want to add the LinkedIn widget to your own site, there’s more information here.
Microsoft To Shut Live Search Books
Michael Arrington
16 comments »
Microsoft is shutting down its book digitization initiative, which launched in 2006, the company said in an email today (full text is below). The publisher site is already down, the books site itself will be shut next week, and Microsoft posted a blog post on it here.
The company has digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles to date. Google’s competing product, Book Search, is adding 3,000 books per day to their index, although they have not disclosed the total number of books scanned.
The New York Times had a good overview of the book digitization process in an article last year. There are also a few examples of some funny stuff getting into the scans.
The image to the right is the Kirtas APT Book Scan 2400 Gold robotic scanner, which can read 2,400 pages an hour. Microsoft used these machines to scan books.
Email from Microsoft:
Dear Live Search Books Publisher Program Partner,
We are writing today to inform you that we are ending the Live Search Books Publisher Program, including our digitization initiative, and closing the Live Search Books site. We recognize that this is disappointing news to you and to the users of the Live Search Books service. Ending the Live Search Books program is the result of a strategic decision on our part to focus our investments in new vertical search areas where we believe we can more effectively differentiate Live Search.
Given the evolution of the web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for search engines, consumers, and content partners. For example, this past Wednesday, we announced our strategy to focus on verticals with high commercial intent, such as travel, and offer users cash back on their purchases from our advertisers.
With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make
book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries. With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower
costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content. We will continue to track the evolution of theindustry and evaluate future opportunities.
As we wind down Live Search Books we will be reaching out to you in partnership with Ingram Digital Group with information on new marketing and sales opportunities designed to help you derive ongoing benefits from your participation in the Live Search Books Publisher Program. As part of this initiative, we will be making the scan files we created from your print book submissions available to you for free. We will follow-up next week with more information on these offers.
The Live Search Books Publisher Program site (http://publisher.live.com) will be taken down immediately. The Live Search Books site (http://books.live.com) will be taken down next week.
We sincerely appreciate your support and regret any inconvenience that this decision has caused. You can read more about this announcement on The Live Search blogInterPlay: SGN In Bed With Mashable [Video]
May 23, 2008 — 04:17 PM PDT — by Pete Cashmore — — Add a CommentProving once again that Mashable is in bed with C-level execs, our second interview from Thursday’s distinguished InterPlay social gaming conference features Shervin Pishevar, CEO and co-founder of the Social Gaming Network.
SGN is the force behind the popular social games Warbook, Text Twirl, Free Gifts, Jetman and more, with distribution across Facebook, hi5, MySpace and Bebo. They serve a network of games developers, too, through the SGN Developer Platform. The company was the premium sponsor of Interplay, and claims 1 million daily players plus 50 million app installs.
“Social gaming is pretty nascent right now…it’s in the Pong stage of social gaming”, Pishevar begins, “[we're] investing in bringing a community of developers together so we can collaborate and set best practices and standards”. SGN, then, is this generation’s Atari.
But where’s the business model? Virtual goods, Pishevar responds; Free Gifts has seen the exchange of over 80 million virtual items, and sponsored virtual goods can place brands in the transaction. Charging for gifts may also be feasible: a survey within the Facebook app asks users how much they’d pay for a gift if a good percentage of the cost went to charity: a reassuring 24% of respondents say $1.
So we leave with the assertion that somewhere between an Ugly Bear, a Garden Gnome and a Four Leaf Clover, there’s gold: a social transaction that converts to a monetary one. And surely that’s the holy grail of advertising: users engaging meaningfully with brands, and an interaction model that goes with the flow of the app, rather than against it.
Shervin Pishevar is the CEO and co-founder of the Social Gaming Network.
Pete Cashmore is the founder and CEO of Mashable.
[img credit: Kevlar Sindome]
Facebook Tries to Take the FriendFeed Concept Mainstream
May 23, 2008 — 01:18 PM PDT — by Adam Ostrow — — 10 Comments
Facebook is quickly moving into the aggregation game, today adding a half dozen different services you can now import into your Mini-Feed. The new services include YouTube, StumbleUpon, Hulu, Pandora, Last.fm, and Google Reader.
To try it out, I added my Google Reader Shared Items. Much like FriendFeed, it displays some recent stories I’ve shared in the RSS reader, and provides direct links to them so my friends can check them out. I like the fact that it bundled my most recent 5 shares together – this will create less clutter for my friends in their News Feeds. The Hulu integration is a pretty cool idea also that was hinted at earlier in the week – now your Facebook friends will know what TV shows you’re watching on the video service – similar to what Comcast appears to have in mind with its Plaxo acquisition.
The news was announced on the Facebook blog, but I’m curious what else the social network has in store to try and get more people using the feature. Right now, the only way to get to it is to click an “Import” link that appears at the top of your mini-feed. My feeling is that the vast majority of users have no idea what that might be referring to, and hence will probably ignore it, unless they have a lot of early-adopter type friends and start to see the new stuff popping up in their News Feeds. A bit of user education on Facebook’s part would be a smart move, as integration with mainstream services like YouTube and Hulu gives them an opportunity to bring in mainstream users before FriendFeed has a chance to reach them.
As MG Siegler notes, the one big thing Facebook’s implementation is lacking right now in comparison to FriendFeed is the ability to comment on items. However, it certainly wouldn’t take much for Facebook to offer this - they already offer commenting on just about everything else including photos and posted items.
Facebook started allowing you to import feeds from third-party services last month, with initial options including Flickr, Picasa, Yelp, and Del.icio.us.
InterPlay: Vanessa In Bed With Mashable [Video]
May 23, 2008 — 12:28 PM PDT — by Pete Cashmore — — 3 CommentsThursday’s InterPlay conference at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco saw notables from RockYou, Meebo, Kongregate, Zynga, Electronic Arts, Mochi Media, MySpace, Bunchball and more come together to discuss the intersection of gaming and the social web.
Panel topics included “Methods for Distribution and Development” and “Show me the Money: Monetizing and Advertising”. The panelists were eloquent and the event slickly co-produced by TheMIX agency and Room Full of People. Sponsors included Charles River Ventures, Ustream.tv, DeviceAnywhere and OfferPal Media. SGN, the Social Gaming Network, was the gathering’s premier sponsor.
The afterparty, held in a tented courtyard at the nearby Hotel Tomo, offered a peek into this anime-adorned geek retreat, with the two open rooms sporting LCD TVs, iPod docking stations, free Wi-Fi and seven-foot high manga murals. I reclined with theMIX agency’s Vanessa Camones to ponder the future of social gaming on the web.
“I think we’re moving to a new phase,” says Camones, “…we’ve achieved the network growth…it’s not so much about being viral anymore as it is about being engaging with these new games and applications.”
Engagement is the holy grail, it seems, for all social networks, applications and games: a transition from the pageview factories of yore (hi, MySpace) to Facebook’s meaningful interactions and enviable session times. Keep them engaged, the theory goes, and the money will follow.
In the second half of this series, more pillow talk reveals where that business model might reside.
Vanessa Camones is a founding member of theMix agency, a San Francisco and North Oakland-based social web strategy, consulting and public relations firm. Clients include SGN and RockYou.
Pete Cashmore is the founder and CEO of Mashable.
[img credit: Kevlar Sindome]
Microsoft Dumps Book Search: Giving Way to Google?
May 23, 2008 — 12:26 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — 2 Comments
When the world first began to realize the potential of the Internet for storing indexing and sharing information, there were several initiatives on leveraging the web for indexing things like scientific journals, and books. While the traditional publishing industry has been a bit slower to adopt this potential whole-heartedly, there have been several initiatives by companies like Microsoft and Google to change all that.
These two companies in particular were hoping to build on the search and research aspects of such shared knowledge from the publishing and academic world, but alas, Microsoft no longer sees the monetary benefits of cultivating such a project. Microsoft has decided to close down its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects, effective next week.
According to Microsoft, the benefits of having a focused set of resources going towards these projects just isn’t worth it. Coming after the announcements from Microsoft for its pay program and the integrated launch of recently acquired travel search vertical Farecast, it’s clear that Microsoft is shifting gears, trimming the fat in terms of its search components, and redirecting efforts towards those niche areas that will bring Microsoft the most reward in the end.
While Microsoft was good enough to give the original content owners the digital copies of their content, they’ve essentially made Google more prominent in the space, as it is still determined to continue with its hope to digitize and index all the published content in the world. Microsoft feels that crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.
In Microsoft’s blog post about this announcement, the company will be “reaching out to participating publishers and libraries. We are encouraging libraries to build on the platform we developed with Kirtas, the Internet Archive, CCS, and others to create digital archives available to library users and search engines.”
Leaving things up to the developer community is probably a good ida for this particular niche, as the bulk of the traditional publishing industry hasn’t been the speediest to adopt online efforts for searching, indexing and using content. There are, however, a number of networks like Shelfari that will eventually be able to further this process along, and could still take advantage of some of the tools that Microsoft has developed towards this end.
Facebook Profile Redesign: Sandbox Now Open to Developers
May 23, 2008 — 11:09 AM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — 2 Comments
Changing the design of a user profile isn’t usually a terrible big deal, but when it comes to Facebook, there’s a lot more at stake than just the rearrangement of a user photo and their basic information. Developers have begun to make a living on the ability for Facebook users to share more content on their profile pages, and the third-party developer economy has a lot riding on the way in which users interact within their Facebook profiles.
So Facebook has been keeping the developers, and the rest of the world, updated on their ongoing changes in regards to the user profile redesign. The latest–Facebook has opened up the beta sandbox for the new profile design. This gives developers an opportunity to test out their apps on the new profile layout before it’s implemented across the site next month.
Some key points:
* New Feed story sizes and types – including the template bundles
* Adding application tabs, and how application tabs function
* Publisher integration
* Setting up the new “main profile section” and adding those to profiles
* Application info sections
See here for more information on some of the recent updates made to the new profile design, as they relate to developers. Access to the sandbox can be found here.
BeerSuggest Recommends Beer [The Startup Review]
May 23, 2008 — 10:45 AM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — — 1 Comment
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: BeerSuggest
20 word description: Beer Suggest is a niche wiki/social community for beer lovers.
CEO’s 100 word description: Beer Suggest is a niche wiki/social community for beer lovers. Registered users have the ability to add/edit beers and breweries. In addition users can rate, comment, review, and tag beers. Based upon the users ratings they are given suggestions on other beers that they might like. Each user has many stats related to their ratings/reviews including favorite beers, favorite beer styles, etc. which can be shared with friends that the user makes in the community. Each user can also recommend beers to their friends. There are also a variety of ways to search for beers, breweries and beer events located near you.
Mashable’s Take: BeerSuggest is a new site that’s just opened to the public today. You can imagine, it’s a site that suggests beer, similar to wine review sites. These suggestions are based on the preferences you’ve indicated through site activity, namely rating and reviewing beers. Once you’ve rated enough beers (5-star rating scale, add to favorites, write a review, etc.) then there’s enough data on BeerSuggest for the site to recommend some ale.
Other users can make suggestions specific to you as well, through the internal suggest system for friends. You can also gather some data on the breweries, and stats are provided for top beer, top breweries, and top users on the site.
One helpful thing on BeerSuggest is the existing basic data on most beers and breweries out there. So even if no one has given a particular beer a review yet, the basic data is already on the site, awaiting someone to add their personal perspective. In this sense, the data that grows on BeerSuggest is much like a wiki, with users able to edit images, descriptions, etc. in addition to giving their reviews.
Nevertheless, BeerSuggest is just one of hundreds that have started similar sites, and has no differentiating factors right now to help it stand out from the crowd. A pairing feature for finding beers to go with certain dishes or events would make it more useful, as would a mobile search tool so you can choose the right beer while you’re at a restaurant or standing in the beer section of your local grocer.
Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials
15+ Tools For The Best Golf Season Ever
May 23, 2008 — 08:07 AM PDT — by Sean P. Aune — — 13 Comments
Summer is almost upon us, are you ready for some golfing? Why not use some of these tools to check out courses, find some people to go golfing with, share your scores - all those things a true golfing fanatic craves.
(more…)
Social Media Marketing FTW!
May 23, 2008 — 08:05 AM PDT — by Guest Writer — — 12 CommentsThis is a guest post written by Jackie Peters (@jackiepeters), CVO and Founding Partner of Heavybag Media.
I’ve spent the past two days at the Executing Social Media Conference in Pasadena, CA. The conference brought together thought leaders in the social media space, brand managers, mavens and gurus. It was a small crowd, an intimate setting that allowed for an open and naturally flowing conversation. I really enjoyed listening to and talking to Brian Solis (@briansolis), Jeremy Pepper (@jspepper), Peter Shankman (@skydiver), Nathan Gilliatt (@gilliatt), Phil Gomes (@philgomes) and Chris Heuer (@chrisheuer) to name just a few.
What I was happy to see was that the many thought leaders who were present made it a priority to help brand managers go back to corporate and make a case for social media marketing. Those of us who are immersed obviously realize the value of engaging with people via social media. We realize the power of citizen reporters, word of mouth, media sharing, transparency and interaction. We have the tools, we have the stats, we have the case studies, we know how to develop effective strategies.
Our job now is two-fold: make sure the fakers who claim they get it, but really don’t, don’t screw things up, and educate clients, potential clients and our peers so they are able to make intelligent decisions in selecting an agency and implementing a social media strategy. (Oh, and we talked an awful lot about Twitter too.)
Happy Memorial Day Weekend - Ad Discount and Sponsor Thanks
May 23, 2008 — 08:04 AM PDT — by Tamar Weinberg — — Add a Comment
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Yahoo Board Member Leaves; First Sign Of Disintegration?
May 23, 2008 — 04:18 AM PDT — by Stan Schroeder — — 10 Comments
Edward Kozel, a long-standing member (eight years) of Yahoo’s board of directors, has left the board. Official reason? He wants to “spend more time with his family,” and he would have left sooner, but he had “decided to stay on the Board of Directors following the Company’s receipt of an unsolicited proposal from Microsoft.” As noted by CNET and others, Kozel hasn’t stepped out from various other boards he’s also member of, which makes this move a bit suspicious.
Regardless of whether the reasons cited are true or not, Yahoo’s board is now reduced from 10 to 9 members, and the annual shareholders meeting has been delayed. It also means that Carl Icahn has to remove one member from his proposed board of directors. Finally, it might mean that things have started to seriously fall apart at Yahoo, who’s bruised and battered enough as it is.
Latest comScore Search Stats: Google Up, Everyone Else Down
May 23, 2008 — 03:05 AM PDT — by Stan Schroeder — — 3 Comments
Google has already won the search battle; everyone already knows it’s the place for search, and it is now enjoying the fallout, consisting of late adopters, tech-shy users and others who are less likely to switch from sites they’ve been using for years, but they’re slowly hopping to the bandwagon. And no one is leaving.
That’s one way to explain Google’s relentless upward trend in the search market. There are other explanations, but there’s no denying the fact that everyone else is losing market share, and Google is gaining more and more of it.
comScore numbers for April show that Google has extended its lead month over month, rising from 59.8% to 61.6% in overal market share, while Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Ask have lost 0.9%, 0.3%, 0.2% and 0.4%, as you can see in comScore’s table below.
It will be very interesting to see how these numbers will look now that Microsoft has launched its Live Search CashBack initiative. I sincerely doubt that it will significantly impact Google, but Microsoft might snatch some market share from other competitors.
