Palabea: Community-Based Lingual And Cultural Education
May 27, 2008 — 10:19 AM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — 7 Comments
There are a number of ways you can learn languages these days. You can take a class at a K-12 institution or university, for one. You can buy an educational package from Rosetta Stone. There are online services from Mango Languages and Live Mocha, too, both of which are quite good.
Or, starting today, you can sign up for Palabea, a service that is said to act as an “international platform for language learning.” After spending several months as a limited-access resource, is now open to the public.
Initially launched in October 2007 and presently celebrating its grand opening (though still as a beta), Palabea’s primary purpose is two-fold. It’s macrocosmic objective is to enhance cultural relations. And how it seeks to facilitate those connections and achieve greater cohesiveness is via multilingualism.
Of course, as with many Web startups to come about in the last few years, key words are toss about in rather loose fashion. Everything is a platform. Everything is social. So you take the promotional copy with some measure of doubt. Palabea, however, easily proves that it has the requisite spread and depth to mean what it says.
It is without a doubt an full-on educational platform. Users can upload most anything relevant a modern learning experience. Documents, videos, podcasts. There’s even a place to hold virtual classrooms. Want to connect with particular site members? You may. Want to take your language learning to another level and consult with language specialists and schools? You can do that, too. There are choices for Spanish, Italian, German, French, Russian, Chinese, and English spaced around the world, and the list of organizations - which includes IMAC, ILS, Centro Italiano, StudyGlobal, and Academic English Studies - is bound only to grow.
As a whole Palabea delivers a multifaceted approach to learning. From casual encounters to serious pursuits, its linguistic panorama, painted by a membership of some 50,000+ members, is a fair sizable one given the fact that it has only been in operation for some 9 months or so. And because all features are wrapped in an elegant and friendly layout, it is likely to attract many more users, of a variety of ages and nationalities. Which would be quite a commendable outcome for the effort. The broader the parameters of Palabea’s membership, the better off the community will be.
And if the content provided by the community isn’t satisfying enough, Palabea has also established partnerships with several companies, including Deutsche Welle, Cafe Babel, Babylon, and TANDEM Fundazioa. BBC Learning English will soon be adding resources as well.
Orgoo Sticks Together IM, E-mail, SMS, and Video Chatting [Invites]
May 27, 2008 — 10:03 AM PDT — by Alana Taylor — — 7 Comments
Orgoo is an e-mail/IM integration service that, like goo, sticks together all your different mail accounts, contacts, and IM buddies onto one page. Back when the site debuted, Pete called it: “Meebo meets Netvibes meets social networking on steroids.” If you struggle with managing your Hotmail, AOL, and GMail accounts along with their individual instant messaging providers, then Orgoo might be the right service for you.
Although there are already ways to forward different accounts to one comprehensive e-mail, such as Outlook, and there’s tools like Trillian, Adium and Pidgin that integrate IM accounts, it has never been easier to see your mail, contacts, and IM friends in one place.
After signing up for Orgoo, it only takes three steps to input different accounts from services like AOL, MSN, Google, Yahoo! and more. Orgoo also supports POP, IMAP, and .Mac accounts, and you can also import contacts from Plaxo and Linked In. Orgoo is still in private Beta, so for now only paid Yahoo Mail Plus, Hotmail Premium and Windows Live Plus accounts are supported, but standard accounts are coming soon
The Orgoo interface somewhat eerily resembles the light blue layout of Google Docs. There are three columns, one for mail folders, one for messages, and one for the IM buddy list. It does not offer any spectacular mail features besides the promise of all e-mail in one inbox, instant reply to emails with IM, stored conversations in the Chat and IM Logs, and a calendar (which has not yet been released). However, there are two chat features that are exciting: free SMS texting and Video Chat.
Just like the oTxt widget that they developed, Orgoo offers the option of sending and receiving SMS text messages to any one of your contacts from your computer. Even better, you can now create your own video chat rooms and invite your friends to talk. There’s also no need to signup for an Orgoo account - you can jump right in straight from the home page.
Orgoo is still testing its services, listening to feedback, and tweaking features, but overall it could be a hit with those who have their slimy internet fingerprints spread all over, who accounts with every major service.
For those of you who are still not convinced, some of the features Orgoo promises to provide in the future include: SocialLink to get all the updates happening on yours and your friend’s profiles on any of the social networks, open API’s so developers can build on top of Orgoo’s integrated communications platform, and a Video Chat Widget.
Interested in trying Orgoo? 500 Mashable readers get Beta invites to test it out by following this link.
Ping This!Microsoft Jumping Into Social Bookmarking
May 27, 2008 — 09:30 AM PDT — by Adam Ostrow — — 11 Comments
According to Microsoft Evangalist John Martin, the company is set to release a product called “Social Bookmarks” this week. The product sounds a whole lot like del.icio.us, and will initially be deployed on MSDN and TechNet, so look for it to be mostly hardcore techie bookmarks for now. Features include bookmarking (presumably via a bookmarklet), tagging, and a web-based account where your bookmarks are stored.
As Doug Caverly notes, the product doesn’t sound especially revolutionary. But, when one of the Web giants jumps into a saturated area, it’s all about scale, and that’s something Microsoft obviously brings to the table. That said, Yahoo has done little to take Del.icio.us mainstream since acquiring the original social bookmarking tool (Stan noted the new version of del.icio.us has supposedly been in the works for more than a year), highlighting both the opportunity for Microsoft and the perils of trying to quickly innovate on relatively simple web apps within huge software companies.
Overall, Microsoft Social Bookmarks doesn’t seem like something to get terribly excited about, but we’ll see what the company has come up with when the preview arrives.
Borders Relaunches Online Bookstore Sans Amazon
May 27, 2008 — 08:51 AM PDT — by Paul Glazowski — — 6 Comments
Borders, a company that for seven years tied its Web sales division in with Amazon, is going solo once more, according to David Runk of the AP. After a lengthy hiatus from its solitary existence as an online bookseller, it’s back as an independent entity, and it’s come with a major facelift clearly meant to increase interest in its brand. A visit to the site today will show users a storefront with rich visuals. The site’s centerpiece is a browser window that users can interact with to view highlighted book, music, and movie titles. Border’s has dubbed this feature “The Magic Shelf.”
Users can operate the menu several ways. Choosing from the lefthand menu will bring you to a desired shelf. You can then toggle the transparent arrows present at all four edges of the window to see all new and/or recommended picks. Or users can grab the window and drag their way about the space. How you prefer to browse is entirely within your discretion, which is altogether very pleasant. The bookshelf is an intuitive development. It seems like something that should always have been present in all online bookstores. The design immediately brought to mind Delicious Library, a cataloguing program produced by the software company Delicious Monster and widely celebrated for its elegant presentations of media libraries.
As for checkout options, shoppers are purportedly given the option to receive free shipping on orders over $25. This of course has long been the case with both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, so it’s only appropriate that Borders offer similar concession to its customers. Borders does however make a point that not all products sold will be eligible for the program.
Something Borders is also bringing into play is a free shipping option to its brick-and-mortar locations. If customers feel it imperative not to receive packages at their doorstep or apartment complex, perhaps because of a lack of security for deliveries left unattended, they can choose to have books delivered to a local Borders bookstore, which they can pick up for no extra cost.
What seems puzzling with this approach is that Borders seems intent to have books shipped to stores as consumers demand them. Instead, Borders would likely do well to offer consumers the option to shop the storefront and, if desired books are found to be in stock at an area chain, customers could choose to purchase their picks online and simply pick them up at their convenience - rather than having to walk the shelves at the Borders store itself to make their choices. Might this option create excessive strain on bookstore clerks, having to regularly seek and organize consumer purchases while balancing the needs of customers browsing via traditional, in-person means? Perhaps. But any problems to that effect might only be found through a real-world trial.
Borders claims it is refreshing its online storefront not with the intention of combating with the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, which are certainly more popular among book buyers, but rather that it is hoping to create a more interactive experience for its customers, with author-contributed shortlists, interviews, and other content. Borders also states that, even with the launch of its new website, it remains open to a sale of the business. According to the AP, Borders announced some two months ago that it might put itself up for sale, and that Barnes & Noble very recently “confirmed it put together a team to study the feasibility of a deal.”
Google Is Right About This: YouTube Lawsuit Threatens The Net
May 27, 2008 — 02:18 AM PDT — by Stan Schroeder — — 37 Comments
Things are heating up again over Viacom’s one billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube. According to the BBC, Google’s lawyers have claimed that it “threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information” over the web. On the other hand, Viacom claims that they’re protecting not only their copyright, but also the interests of every copyright holder out there.
My favorite expert on copyright, Mike Masnick, hits the nail on the head again, saying that the broadcast companies and Google (and pretty much everyone else) see the Internet as two different things. He says:
“Media companies still look on the internet as a content platform. That is, they think of it as a new broadcast medium. Most other folks recognize that the internet is a communications medium, and the focus should be on the ease of communication….When it comes to communication,” he argues, “the idea of using copyright to restrict content gets weird in a hurry.
A similar thought came to me as I was listening to some Muxtapes. It’s a beautiful way to share music, but I’m sure that many copyright owners will see it as just another way to steal and pillage. Yes, music gets shared; yes, I may have not bought all the MP3s I’ve listened to on Muxtape yesterday; but it sure as hell didn’t feel like stealing; it felt like fun. People aren’t stealing anything there, they’re making compilations of their favorite music out of love.
Unfortunately for media companies, the Internet enables you to communicate in a technically sophisticated way; you can embed text, music, images and video into the communication, something what only TV, radio and the newspapers could do a couple of decades ago. Now, it can be done by everyone; is it a bad thing? No one can convince me that the Internet is just a medium for a big fat theft; if anything, I’ll believe that the concept of copyright as it is now and the concept of Internet aren’t compatible. Guess which one I’ll discard first.
Economics of New Media: Pay to Play or Free?
May 27, 2008 — 12:22 AM PDT — by Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — — 6 CommentsThere is a truly interesting discussion going on now spanning a couple of blogs on the issue of marketing, advertising, the Internet, and the business model of free. I’ve try to stay within my pay-grade when I take 
apart such finely thought out analysis, but, I’m pretty sure on this one, given my professional history in dealing with these very specific topics addressed by bloggers Steven Hodson, Scott Karp and Alexander van Elsas.
The meme goes back quite a ways. Van Elsas asked back at the beginning of May whether you would be willing to pay for certain types of content:
FREE can lead to a lot of things (see the overview at the beginning) but it often leads to advertisement. It sounds like a great deal. You get the service for free, and the costs are covered by the advertisers. Although it might work well in some cases I believe that in most cases this type of forced attention doesn’t provide the user or the advertiser any value.
The meme was developed further in a piece by Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0:
Traditional advertising formats FAIL on the web. By traditional advertising formats, I mean display ads, video ads, and any other ad whose format and value proposition approximates or imitates that of an offline advertising format.
Google is the ONLY company that has succeeded in web advertising. Why? Because they perfected search advertising, an entirely web-native form of advertising, whose value proposition is perfect for the web and which has no offline analogue.
Why do traditional advertising formats fail on the web? Because people have no patience for them, as they did in traditional media, where we were habituated to looking at print ads or watching TV commercials.
Van Elsas answers Karp:
The only example where advertisement works right now is in search. The difference there is that the advertisement itself provides the user value. If I’m already looking for something then advertisement can actually serve a purpose. It’s what Google has perfected. There isn’t a single other example thinkable where advertisement is so effective. It is also the main reason why I believe that the true value of social advertisement lies outside of social networks. Advertisement should never, ever, interfere with social interactions between friends. It doesn’t belong there, it merely trespasses.
The problem is, and this is completely understandable given the current state of affairs and the unique positions of all the commentators involved, all of this comes from a perspective of content publishers trapped inside the Web 2.0 and Silicon Valley bubble. If you look at it from a marketing and advertising perspective, a position from which I’ve lived as a contractor, professional and adviser in the past, you can plainly see that advertising does work outside the narrow parameters of Google Search ads. Certainly AdWords/AdSense is a uniquely profitable and effective form of advertising on the Internet, but it absolutely isn’t the only example of that. More on that in a bit
What is the solution proposed to counteract ad-based FREE? Micropayments, functionality and content behind pay-walls, of course. Van Elsas and Karp join up with the respectable likes of Allen Stern from CenterNetworks in suggesting that content shouldn’t be so free and subsidized. The problem is, at least for the content that these folks all have in mind (mostly text-based social media content like blogs and social networking sites), free is the limit to what people are willing to pay. Steven Hodson puts a voice to that sentiment today:
As a internet user I would dread the day that the pay for services model becomes the norm. We have already been down that road to a certain extent with Web 1.0 and all the different subscriptions and other methods of getting paid for your work. It didn’t work then and it wouldn’t work now unless you want to widen the technological divide even further than it is.
The fact is that I and a large percentage of the people who are on the web don’t have credit cards which is the principal method of payment accepted by any service wanting to be paid. Even today we are locked out of services like iTunes store or many other services that do business strictly on the web. Then as a subset of that there are also people who don’t have any money beyond what they need to keep them floating at the poverty line. Should all these people be excluded from being able to use the web to its fullest?
Let me backtrack a bit in my own personal history. A number of years ago, back at the beginnings of the podcasting revolution and during the October surprise for the 2004 US Presidential election, the faux pas of Dan Rather put to the forefront in the blogosphere the discussion as to whether or not the Old 
Media was irrevocably broken. Bias, in all its forms, was discussed to the point of complete abstraction from the politics of the issue.
I arrived at the position, at the time, that it was the fault of Old Media that we had such a shoddy news delivery system in play. At the time, we had nine major media conglomerates that ran everything we consumed, from newspapers to radio to TV to movies to books. That has since consolidated down to a handful of companies. Within those organizations, though, a monoculture arose from the top down that created predilictions towards stories that favored not just certain political angles, but certain other types of companies.
Thanks to several insightful bloggers and pundits, I realized that in all existing media models, the product is not the news, the product is the news consumer. The responsibility for the news organization is not to the news consumer, since they don’t pay the bill, it is to the advertisers. On several levels, being called a product is very unsettling.
Given the prevailing winds of media consolidation that still blow today, do you think any of the major networks will ever give fair shakes to stories of anti-trust, for instance (which, incidentally is one of the biggest factors that I believe will lead to us living in a non-net neutral Internet)? Do you think that GE owned subsidiaries are ever going to be sufficiently critical towards their corporate parent’s energy and ecology policies?
Thus, the need for decentralized media was made clear. Not only should media be decentralized, but those media participants should be divorced from their advertising partners.
Shortly thereafter, I made the decision to become a full-time freelance journalist. I very quickly learned the reality of being in the New Media, and that is that you take advertising in whatever form you can get it, because you need to eat. Little by little, my high-minded ideals went out the window as I succumbed to the practicalities of being a professional journalist, blogger and podcaster.
Back to the meme at hand, though, where does this leave us? Well, it leaves us with what is, and what should be.
What is: there are a wide variety of marketing types that work beyond Google ads. Podcasting ads are a perfect example of that, and there are a number of reasons why these work exceptionally well, despite the fact that the resemble Old Media style advertisements (most of these reasons are topics better saved for another day or our company advertiser media kit). The biggest reason amongst them is that Old Media ads are surprisingly effective themselves. It isn’t that the Old Media ad models don’t work. You’ve always got “good ads” and “bad ads” - it’s a matter of the ad consumers taste and the demographic targeting that determines that (Think Superbowl advertisments. They don’t all suck). What makes Old Media advertising fail is mostly the shrinking audiences.
Beyond that, there is still a Web 1.0 mentality with a lot of people in the Internet advertising and marketing 
sector with a mindset (that continues to infect the blogosphere, by the way) that every advertising business model should be set up on the “1, 2, 3 Profit!” model. The more CEOs I talk to on Mashable Conversations, the more I learn that Web technology is becoming a full fledged industry: often nuanced, boring to the casually interested, and ever-evolving and complex to navigate.
That leads me to …
What should be: Google ads at least one thing right. They divorce the media producers from the advertising sales, and they treat the consumer as a product without devaluing them so much as to give them irrelevant advertising content.
The problem is that this ad model isn’t followed very closely, or at all, with most other ad purveyors or other media types. For some reason, the eggheads at Google haven’t figured out a way to apply their technology to podcasting or embedded video in a way that makes the ad type viable to the content producers. They haven’t figured out a way to really do anything other than search advertising really well, in fact. Most blogs-as-business run Google ads somewhere, but they are far from the profit center for them.
The best way to make money as a content producer is to do direct sales, according to folks who’ve been there (I concur). Of course, this leads us down the primrose path to replacing the broken Old Media with a broken New Media. Beyond that, though, it puts publishers in a mentality to where they need to game the system to make money, rather than produce quality and meaningful content. In other words, I’d rather have my sales team treating you like a number than me treating you like a number (much like I’d rather have my lawyer be a merciless jerk than me be a merciless jerk).
Overall, though, bloggers, podcasters, video producers and distributors should look at what other assets that they have which contain value aside from the content and the attention. Many bloggers and podcasters have made very visible and successful livings using their media platforms as a way to subtly advertise that they’re a know-it-all on certain topics (though I think they prefer to be called experts, or sometimes mavens). Similarly, I’ve seen some very interesting business models arising from the concepts of “freemium,” where basics are free, and consulting and additional services cost money. None of this touches the wealth of demographic and targeting data lying underneath the surface of use to developers, analysts and yes, even advertisers that are contained in the un-crunched log files.
Essentially, for all our freewheeling Web 2.0 analysis in the blogosphere, most of us aren’t thinking far enough outside the box to create the income and profit strategies available to us on the FREE business model.
3,000 Developers To Converge On Google I/O Tomorrow. Here’s What To Expect.
Michael Arrington
9 comments »
Google’s third developer conference, and the first to be called Google I/O
, kicks off on Wednesday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco with a keynote presentation by Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of Engineering.
Here’s what to expect:
- A focus on the ecosystem comprised of the browser as an operating system + ubiquitous connectivity + emerging cloud computing.
- Lifting of the restrictions around Google App Engine, their hosted computing environment.
- News about Google Gears
- Android Application Demos
- Minor news about Google Open Social
The big announcement will be around Google App Engine - expect the 160,000 or so developers on the waiting list to be let in tomorrow (75,000 have been given access already). Google will also lift the hard ceiling on resource usage. Currently applications are cut off when resource usage goes over a certain point (the cap equates to about 5 million page views per month for an average app). That cap will continue to apply until later this year, but they will announce the following usage fees tomorrow:
Free quota to get started: 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month
$0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
$0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
$0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
$0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth
This pricing puts Google App Engine storage and bandwidth costs competitive with Amazon S3 (plus Google doesn’t have a per-request fee).
Google is also announcing two new tools for Google App Engine developers: an image-manipulation API and memcache. The image-manipulation API will allow developers to scale, rotate, and crop images on the server. The memcache API gives developers access to a distributed, high-performance in-memory key-value caching system. Memcache would have been useful for our own App Engine app (see it live here) to help us unload common queries from Google’s datastore. Also to note: no additional languages will be supported.
Online Realtors Win Rights to Housing Database
Jason Kincaid
12 comments »
The National Association of Realtors has settled its antitrust case with the Department of Justice, and has given online realtors full access to the industry-standard Multiple Listing Service (MLS) Databases. The MLS is a comprehensive listing of homes that are are available on the housing market, and until this point the NAR has restricted access to online brokers.
These online brokers have been offering fees that are significantly lower than traditional realtor rates, and rather than adapt as an industry, the NAR choose a more childish route and withheld the essential data. The Department of Justice took issue with this stance, and filed suit in September 2005.
The deal is especially important for disruptive online-only companies like Redfin, which rely on being able to access current home listings. If the case had gone the other way, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman says that the company would have died a “slow, grisly death” (SeattlePI). Redfin aims to make the home-buying process more efficient, while saving consumers money in the process (it has been able to save the average home buyer $10,000, which doesn’t sit well with most traditional realtors).
Unfortunately, the settlement isn’t a complete victory for online sites, which will be subject to restrictions on the comments users can leave on each home. If a home-seller asks that a comment be taken down, websites are obligated to comply (consequently, you probably won’t be seeing many negative reviews). Instant customer feedback is one of the most valuable assets of online retailers - to deny consumers access to such information is both annoying and foolhardy on the NAR’s part. The NAR should be supporting traditional brokers by emphasizing personal interaction and service, not by handicapping the competition.
Leaked Screen Shots of Windows 7 Hit CrunchGear’s Inbox
Peter Ha
17 comments »
If you’ve been waiting to see what Windows 7 will look like then you may want to head over to CrunchGear to check out a bevy of screen shots that hit our inbox earlier today. Of course, the release is a couple years out, but we’ve confirmed that this is what the current build of Windows 7 looks like. Coincidentally, Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky was interviewed by CNET about Windows 7, but gave very little, if any, details on the subject. As the saying goes, though, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Mobaganda: A Dead-Simple Invite Site Built On Google’s App Engine
Erick Schonfeld
11 comments »
If you like your invite apps dead-simple, check out Mobaganda. You don’t even have to log in. Just click on start, add the name, date & time, and location, and create an event. The site, which is built on the Google App Engine, generates a Webpage that you can e-mail out to all of your friends.
Once the recipients go to the URL they can RSVP, and you can keep track via RSS or by checking back at the unique URL, which lasts for 30 days. (One downside is that no two events can share the same name during that time period).
Here’s an invite page I made in about a minute for a fake TechCrunch party:
The site generates an e-mail address that can be used to contact everyone on the RSVP list. You can also keep track of the RSVPs through Google Reader:
Or as a widget on iGoogle:
Not that we need more ways to invite friends to parties (see Pingg, Socializr, MyPunchbowl, etc.). But Mobaganda does reduce the process to its bare essentials. (The UI sensibility reminds me of Presdo). It got started as a conversation between Web developer Jason Stirman and Twitter founder Evan Williams. the question they were pondering: Would it be possible to create a better Evite, without even requiring a signup or login?”
Stirman is the creator of OhDon’tForget, a Ruby-on-Rails app that lets you send yourself pre-set reminders via text message (Time picked it as one of its 50 Best Websites last year). Stirman plans on adding text reminders to Mogabanda using OhDon’tForget (when you RSVP, you will be able to add a cell number to get a reminder the day before the event). he is also thinking of ways to add notes, maps, and other features. But he wants to keep it as simple as possible. After all, it is supposed to be the anti-Evite.
Jason Kincaid
10 comments »
StartYourTube, the white label video site we covered last month that lets users create their own “branded YouTubes”, has decided to change its name. The company sent out the following email last week to its members:
Hi everyone ,
We have to choose another domain name for StartYourTube.com
Please take one minute to give us your choicehttp://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=IKrB6jg7c3S_2fSrp3cW4DXA_3d_3d
best,
startyourtube team
Included in possible domain choices are “BoostCast.com” and “StartYours2.com”.
The wording seems to indicate that this isn’t exactly by choice (lawsuit anyone?). However, StartYourTube says that the company has decided on the name change on its own accord. Apparently users of the service want their content to stand on its own, without any kind of implied affiliation to YouTube.
Thanks to Mark Avey for the tip.
The fbOpen Initiative: Facebook Confirms Plans to Open-Source Its Platform
Erick Schonfeld
24 comments »
A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed to us that the social networking company will announce an open-source initiative around its Facebook Platform sometime today or tomorrow. We originally broke this story we broke yesterday. We’ve also learned from another source that the name of the initiative will be fbOpen.
As Michael previously reported:
Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.
They’ll simply map their existing APIs to Facebook Platform (which isn’t trivial) and go. Expect to see the four major technical pieces
This is a nearly inevitable response to Open Social, which is backed by Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Open Social is also an open source platform, run by the Open Social Foundation
More details around the initiative will be announced in the next day or two.
Update: Facebook has issued the following statement about this initiative:
“We’re working on an open-source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running their own test servers, building tools, or optimizing their applications. As Facebook Platform continues to mature, open-sourcing the infrastructure behind it is a natural step so developers can build richer social applications and share what they’ve learned with the ecosystem. Additional details will be released soon.”
IndieFlix Introduces CrowdSourced Film Festivals
Jason Kincaid
13 comments »
IndieFlix, a marketplace for independent films, has launched MyFestival, a new streaming video site that will let film festivals crowdsource the movie selection process. MyFestival is making its debut in conjunction with the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), which is taking place from May 22 to June 15.
For MyFestival’s pilot trial at SIFF, users will be able to stream and vote for any of ten films and ten shorts for free from now until June 8. After the deadline, the votes will be tallied and the winning film will be screened during one of the festival’s most prized time slots. Even the films that don’t win get something out of the deal - the site provides detailed demographic responses that let filmmakers tweak their distribution plans. The site has already forged deals with a number of other festivals, and major venues like Sundance are watching the results closely.
Getting a screening at a film festival can be very competitive, even with hundreds of festivals in the United States annually. Even if a film is screened, getting distribution is considerably more difficult - less than 1% of American films find meaningful distribution. IndieFlix CEO Scilla Andreen says that a new voting system could help expose many of these films to a much broader audience, with the ultimate goal of giving the audience a say in what films are shown at their local multiplex.
Of course, the new system is going to run into a number of problems. The prospect of screening an unreleased film in an uncontrolled environment is a movie studio’s worst nightmare - just plop a video camera in front of the screen and you’ve got a (low quality) copy to share across the internet. Many of the independent filmmakers involved in MyFestival were understandably hesitant to join, but Andreen says that for many of them, the “old school” method hasn’t been working, so they’re willing to try something new.
MyFestival is powered by GridNetworks, a Seattle-based video streaming service. Grid movies require users to install a small “connector” plugin that claims to offer HD quality material in a secure manner. IndieFlix was founded in 2005 and recently closed a $1.3 million Series A round of funding. For the time being MyFestival is totally ad free - the site hopes to finance the site through sponsorships after proving the system’s feasibility. Anther player in the indie film festival space is b-side.
Paglo Launches Its Search Engine for IT
Mark Hendrickson
7 comments »
When we discuss improvements to search technology, we tend to focus on the open web while overlooking its more novel uses behind the firewall. So it’s good to point out advancements being made behind the scenes from time to time, even if consumers don’t directly benefit.
Paglo is a Palo Alto-based startup launching a product into public beta today that empowers IT professionals with keyword search. Its crawler doesn’t index documents, images, and other forms of media found on the internet. Rather, it identifies the resources within a corporate or organizational network (such as devices, users, and software) and essentially makes the information available about them Google-able.
Since Paglo is a hosted solution, IT departments need only to install an open source crawler that will send indexed data to Paglo’s servers, where they are held in a designated silo. We’re told the process of setting up Paglo for a given department takes only minutes, after which IT admins can sign in from anywhere to search their networks.
In addition to simple keyword search, users can set up Google Alert-like notifications for when certain changes occur within a network (for example, when memory gets low on a particular machine). Search queries can be saved as tables, graphs or lists and displayed alongside each other on a dashboard for quick viewing. These queries can also be shared through a built-in community with other IT admins who might be interested in seeing how you keep tabs on your resources.
Paglo signed up 800 companies during its private beta period, which started last Fall. The service will remain completely free through at least the summer, after which it will be sold on a subscription basis.
At $130-A-Barrel Oil, Electric Cars Look Cheap
Erick Schonfeld
64 comments »
With oil prices so high, how much would it cost to convert every registered car in America to an electric vehicle? Nothing, according to computer scientist Philip Greenspun. Well, nothing more than we are spending already in oil.
He figures that if we took the $400 billion that Americans spend every year on oil that goes into cars, we could use that money instead to pay the interest on an $8 trillion loan. That would be more than enough to swap out the 250 million registered cars in the country with electric vehicles, and still have trillion of dollars left over to start building new power plants based on renewable or nuclear energy. (But even if we stick with coal plants, they are still more energy efficient than car engines). Here is his math:
* total oil consumption in the U.S.: 21 million barrels every day (CIA Factbook)
* cost per barrel: $130
* days in year: 365
* total spent per year: $1 trillion
* percentage of oil consumed by passenger cars: 40
* total spent per year on oil for passenger cars: $400 billion
* at 5 interest, how much we could we borrow and pay $400 billion every year in interest: $8 trillion
* number of registered cars in the U.S.: 250 million (Wikipedia)
* cost of a new electric car, if mass-produced: $20,000
* value of a used car, if exported to Latin America or China: $5,000
* cost to upgrade average existing American car to a brand-new electric car: $15,000
* number that could be converted for $8 trillion: more than 500 million cars (i.e., twice as many as we have now)
Okay, so that wouldn’t pay for the $100,000 Tesla electric sports car pictured above (even assuming that it fixes its transmission problems). But with a $15,000 to $20,000 subsidy, we should get electric cars that are a little bit sexier than the one pictured at left.
Why he wants to export our carbon-spewing junkers to China and Latin America, though, is beyond me. That’s just a recipe for speeding up global warming. They need electric cars too.
Orgoo Launching Soon; 500 Invites Available Now
Mark Hendrickson
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Orgoo is an all-in-one communications hub for email, instant messaging, video chat, and SMS that we’ve been waiting quite a long time for.
Mike first covered the USC-bred startup in May 2007 before you could get your AIM contacts into Gmail. And then the company “launched” at TechCrunch40 in the fall with a presentation that emphasized the importance of aggregating all your means of communication.
However, the only part of Orgoo actually available to the public is its proprietary group chat product. That’s about to change: Co-founder Sean Rad tells us that he plans to launch Orgoo towards the end of June, with group chat integrated as an important differentiator.
Until then, he is offering 500 private beta invites to our readers. Get yours here while they last, and then be generous: users can invite up to six of their friends (or InviteShare peers).
Also see Zenbe for another example of startup-driven webmail innovation, although one that takes quite a different tact by focusing on advancements around email itself.
