MySpace’s DeWolfe Says New Music Joint Venture to Launch in September
MySpace’s upcoming music joint venture with 3 of the 4 major labels, first announced in April, will launch in September (EMI is still a holding out, but from what we hear they may be ready to fold soon). Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, mentioned that date and gave other details about the joint venture in an interview today with Adam Lashinsky at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Half Moon Bay, CA.
This is the first time a launch date has publicly been revealed. MySpace is counting on the music store as a new growth business - and bringing in the major labels as equity partners helps ensure their long term buy in. The seemingly successful Hulu business model which brought in News Corp and other content owners last year will set the example.
Music almost certainly plays a part of MySpace’s continued dominance of Facebook in the US Market. Facebook continues to rely on iLike for music - Myspace, by contrast, has already had a deep music offering and hosts pages for 5 million artists. MySpace says that 65% of their users embed music on their MySpace pages, and over 5 billion songs are streamed on MySpace each month.
There are still a lot of details that need to be explained about the MySpace music venture, and we still eagerly await announcement about the CEO of the new venture.
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Liveblogging Eric Schmidt/Google Interview at Brainstorm
Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on stage right now at Fortune’s Brainstorm conference being interviewed by Fortune’s David Kirkpatrick. Here are my notes live:
Q: What is Google’s next great revenue stream?
Schmidt: How about text ads?
Q: The biggest knock against Google is that it is a one-product company. how do you respond to that?
Schmidt: Google is a one-product company. It is called Google. We think about features, not products. People usually talk about text ads when they say that. While the vast majority of our revenues comes from text ads, there is no single large category of text ads or geography. It is well diversified. We serve text ads against content that is not searchable.
Q: We select for people who share our values. We don’t value experience very much. We also select for people who want to work with other people. Because it is collaborative.
Q: But you are known for saying that it is hard to manage larger groups?
Schmidt: If you look at the history of software development, all the interesting things that have been built have been built by two people. It is the nature of software technology.
Q: Isn’t working in larger teams going to be necessary?
Schmidt: this is an unsolved problem. You start small, then you have big projects. You follow a traditional S Curve, but the time you have become like this you are entirely predictable {talks about 20 percent time as driving creativity and helping to recruit top technical people]. It serves as pressure cooker release valve.
Q: Almost every challenge you have has to do with scale. I hear more people saying I don’t feel safe that Google should have so much information about me.
Schmidt: Because of the way technology works, all the technology companies are aggregating information about people. It is a political debate. Countries differ on this question. England has the largest number of closed circuit cameras by a factor of ten, but they also let you sue the papers if you feel you are defamed.
We get into constant problems with some prosecutor who subpoenas information we don’t want to give them, and we resist it. Which is why we don’t fully operate in China. Our argument is that information is not available in your domain. So countries are now trying to rewrite their laws to say this information cannot be available anywhere on the Internet.
Q&A from audience:
Q: What about mobile?
Schmidt: Our wireless initiative was a perfect outcome. It was the cost of an outcome. I am on the board of Apple. Last night I was in Palo Alto and there was a line outside. It shows the device is a step forward. IPhone’s competitors all have dec A phone is GPS, a camera, a computer, and a browser. The Phone is tehfirst one with a really functional browser. We show full ads, so that is a huge for revenues/
The new category of apps that have not come out yet really is a breakthrough. One winner of the Android apps, it looks around, names the buildings it sees and tells you what is happening inside of them. That is a really interesting product. In mobile there are a lot od product that have that WOW factor, because of the use of GPS.
I think all the most interesting next-generation social apps will be mobile.
Q: [Sam Whitmore asks if Google does any work for the government related to the Patriot Act]
Schmidt: Regarding the Patriot Act or any of the three-letter organizations, absolutely not. We do provide the federal government with some search and other services through our [government] sales group.
Q: enterprise plans?
Schmidt:
The easiest for us to enter the enterprise is to address high pain levels like e-mail, messaging, calendaring.We have something like a million companies using these services, mostly small. My view is that it will be a many-year process, but we will create tools that will eventually go to the top.
[Interview is over].
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Facebook Growth Explodes Globally, Levels Off In The US
Comscore has just released the latest data on Facebook growth patterns, which clearly show that Facebook’s recent push to expand abroad has paid off. The site has seen extremely high growth rates across Latin America, The Middle East, and the Asia Pacific. Europe, which accounts for a much larger user base, continues to grow at a steady clip as well.
North America still accounts for nearly 40% of Facebook’s monthly growth, but its rate remains fairly constant, hovering at an increase of around 47,000 uniques over the last seven months.
Earlier this year Facebook finally managed to catch up to MySpace’s total unique visitors, largely on account of its rapid global expansion (MySpace continues to dominate in the US market).
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Max Levchin To Facebook: Developers Need More Certainty (And A Payment System Would be Nice Too)
Slide was not too happy when Facebook temporarily pulled one of its most popular applications, Top Friends, from the social networking site for exposing too much profile information to people who were not friends.
Ahead of today’s F8 developer conference, I asked Slide CEO Max Levchin what Facebook could do to make developers’ lives easier. Not surprisingly, he’d like to see clearer rules about what is and is not allowed, as well as more formal, contractual partnerships between Facebook and app developers. (Facebook is expected to announce a tiered partner system today, and Slide may not qualify as one of the “preferred” partners because of the issues that led to Facebook’s police action).
Slide’s VP of Strategy, Keith Rabois, goes even further. He warns that if Facebook keeps shifting the foundation on top of which app companies are built it will threaten their viability. This might all sound like sour grapes, but coming from the biggest provider of apps on Facebook it does carry some weight.
Levchin, who was one the co-foudners of PayPal, also thinks that Facebook needs a universal payment system so that developers can start charging for apps like they can on the iPhone. The question is whether anyone would ever want to pay for a Facebook app.
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A Quick Look at the Beats by Dr. Dre Noise-canceling Headphones
Thought this might be interesting for the jet-setters in the Web 2.0 world. Monster Cable, the makers of cable, just sent us the new Beats by Dr. Dre, a pair of noise-canceling “studio” headphones aimed at the mid-range audio consumer. At $349, these are priced at exactly the same point as the Bose QuietComfort 3 which I’ve used for over a year now. I’ve been wearing the Beats for the past hour and found them on par with the QC3s in terms of noise reduction. They have very crisp bass and a nice separation as well.
Best of all the, the Beats use AAA batteries instead of the QC3’s battery pack, which means you’re not stuck if you forget to recharge. I’ll be taking a flight tomorrow and I’ll bring these along to test - I’m just about sold on the QC3s when it comes to noise reduction but I’m game to try these out in a real-world scenario. Look for a full review next week but until then pop over to CG to look at some more photos.
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Mobile Search Trends Show Economic Decline And Rise In Pizza
V-Enable, a voice-enabled mobile 411 system, conducted a study by taking a random sampling of 20,000 searches in major metropolitan areas from customers of several V-Enable partner carriers including Alltel and MetroPCS. The findings clearly represent interesting trends caused by the recession. For one thing, people are eating more pizza! The results for the top restaurant searches for the period between October 2007 and June 2008 are:
1. Pizza Hut
2. McDonald’s
3. Domino’s Pizza
4. Starbucks
5. Papa John’s Pizza
6. Little Caesars Pizza
7. Taco Bell
8. Burger King
9. Wendy’s
10. Denny’s
Sit-down restaurants like Olive Garden, Applebee’s and Red Lobster, have dropped off the list, while recession-proof comfort food like Pizza Hut and Domino’s shoot to the top of the list. 380% more searches for Pizza Hut have been conducted during the period, and searches for Domino’s Pizza have increased 980%. High gas prices are keeping people at home ordering in, and they are opting for cheaper alternatives. Financial analysts have explored this area extensively, and have deemed several of these restaurant chains “recession-proof stocks.”
There are several other search-related economic indicators from V-Enable. U-Haul, a company that was never on any top 50 list, jumped to #23 in general search, possibly because of a rise in foreclosures. Macy’s dropped from #17 to #49 in retail, a direct correlation to the fact that people just don’t have the discretionary income that they used to. Motel 6 has never showed up on a top 50 list, but they are now #37 in general search, quite possibly because travelers can’t afford the costly alternatives. Mobile search happens in real-time and is unaffected by SEO, making these statistics arguably more reflective of consumer sentiment than web search.
V-Enable is a mobile information system, where users can speak the name of a restaurant or residential listing and receive location and contact information. The company also has live operators working behind the scenes so that users can call and get human assistance, if necessary. V-Enable sent us similar retail statistics in December. The company is backed by $10.1 million over 3 rounds from Siemens Mobile Acceleration Corporation, Sorrento Ventures, SoftBank Capital and Palisades Ventures.
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It’s Facebook Day! Say Hello To The Three Tier App System
Today is definitely Facebook day as they hold their second annual F8 developers conference in San Francisco. Last year they released their developer platform, which led competitors to hurriedly release their own competing offerings. What’s in store for tomorrow? We’ve made our predictions, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage at 1:30 to make his keynote, and workshops will follow all day after that. The full schedule is here.
Some of the news is breaking early. For example, we will almost certainly see the Facebook payments platform launch in some form, for example - Facebook desperately wants to find a way to help application developers make money beyond advertising, and the iPhone App Store has shown that people are willing to pay for quality applications.
Even more certain is the launch of Facebook Connect, which will allow third party services to authenticate Facebook users and merge profile data into their offerings. Digg will be one of their launch partners, and will show off the new product on stage, say our sources. However, neither CEO Jay Adelson or Founder Kevin Rose will attend the event.
We’ve also heard from sources that Facebook will announce a tiering system for applications, confirming what Boomtown wrote earlier today. Five to ten top tier apps, which have proven themselves trustworthy and which create as good or better a user experience as what Facebook is able to create itself, will be named in the near future. iLike (music) and Causes (charity) will be announced tomorrow, and more will come soon. We heard that Flixster (movies) was on the short list but was bumped at the last minute - perhaps due to their MySpace partnership announced yesterday.
Other apps will be grouped into a middle tier, where most of them will fall, and a bottom “unwashed masses” tier for untrustworthy or spammy apps that have little user value. Each tier will have different rules for engaging with users, particularly around invites, messaging and entry into the news feed.
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Video: Scoble Tells the Comment Trolls To Go Back to Digg
Robert Scoble caused a stir yesterday with a post on how tech bloggers are failing our readers. We all chase the same stories, get spun like a top by the PR machine, and can’t sustain a conversation about a single topic for more than a few days before we all rush to the next shiny object.
I caught him on video at the (surprisingly snoozy) Fortune Brainstorm conference. He pines for the old days of blogging, before comments were taken over by trolls. He seems to think the trolls all came from Digg and should go back there. More likely, it is just a sign that blogging is attracting a bigger audience
The problem is, as he put it in his post:
Our commenting systems really suck. . . . Only the most motivated will leave comments. That’s usually someone with an axe to grind. That’s cause we’ve failed you. We haven’t moderated jerks out of our commenting system so now no normal person would go close to anything resembling a modern commenting system.
It’s not only that. There was a time when a good idea (like a cheap Web tablet) would be chewed on for a month by the blogosphere, going back and forth between different bloggers, and getting refined along the way. We’re all slaves to the news cycle now, talking about the same thing for a day or two, and then moving on. But does it have to be this way?
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Glam Media Snags A Google Exec To Head Up Corporate Development
Glam Media has hired Michael Adair, most recently Google’s head of North American sales finance, as their new VP Corporate Development and Finance. Prior to Google Adair was an investment banker at Lehman Brothers and he has an MBA from Harvard. He’ll be responsible for making investments and acquisitions on behalf of Glam.
Glam, a women-focused advertising network, raised a massive $85 million round of financing earlier this year - bringing their total capital raised to over $115 million. A lot of that money was reportedly taken off the table by Glam’s founders, but the company clearly has the cash and stock currency to make acquisitions.
Presumably Adair’s deep finance and banking experience will help him make those acquisitions and investments as Glam gears up to compete with Sugar Inc. and other competitors.
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MedPedia Is Wikifying the Medical Search Space
The medical industry is one that thrives on innovation and evolution. New procedures, medicines, diseases, and theories are released practically every day. In such an environment, the need for a website to reflect and allow for documentation is apparent.
MedPedia is a new project, currently in development, that will offer an online collaborative medical encyclopedia for use by the general public. In order to keep the content accurate and up-to-date, content editors and creators have to have an MD or a PhD. Several highly-esteemed medical colleges will be contributing content to MedPedia, including Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School. Medpedia is also receiving support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and many other government research groups. The content from these organizations will then be edited by MedPedia’s community of medical professionals.
MedPedia is currently in closed beta with a live preview site, where contributors can apply to be included, and users can submit feedback and suggestions. They plan on opening up their beta in late 2008.
The site will feature content about diseases, anatomy, procedures, medications and medical facilities in two ways. The topic front page will be written in easy-to-understand language for the general public, but there will also be a more technical page where medical professionals can discuss more in-depth with a clinical tone. With more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions, more than 10,000 drugs prescribed each year, thousands of medical procedures being performed and millions of medical facilities around the world, they have their work cut out for them.
There is obvious competition with established medical resource sites like WebMD and MayoClinic. Those sites have done really well, but there’s always room for disruptive technology like this. Look at what Wikipedia did to Britannica, a 250-year old encyclopedia publisher. The advantage MedPedia has is its large range of medical professionals who create content based on their specialties, rather than having several in-house doctors creating content on a range of topics they aren’t formally familiar with.
This system is advantageous both to MedPedia and the medical professionals. MedPedia benefits from their knowledge and experience, and the doctors are able to promote themselves in their specific field of expertise. MedPedia contributors will also be able to form committees and boards in specific areas like “Childhood Obesity” and “Skin Cancer.” Each professional that specializes in that field will be able to join the committee (five of whom will make up the board) and will oversee the content generated and edited in that field.
MedPedia was founded by James Currier, a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Currier founded Tickle, a quiz and personal test site in 1999, which sold to Monster in 2004 for about $94 million (though it recently lost a hefty portion of its staff and was said to be shutting down). After taking some time off to spend with his family, he started an incubator called Ooga Labs. He is also known for singing in the Here Comes Another Bubble video, from the group The Richter Scales. Currier is one of three co-founders for the group, which was surrounded by some controversy (they also performed the song live at The Crunchies). He got the idea for MedPedia when he found himself constantly searching for medical information online, like if his three-year old son needed to go to the emergency room for a fever.
The Advisory Board includes Gilbert S. Omenn, M.D., Ph.D., Professor University of Michigan Medical School; Linda Hawes Clever, M.D., M.A.C.P., Clinical Professor University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical School; Joseph B. Martin, M.D., Ph.D., former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University; and Mitch Kapor, philanthropist and founder of Lotus Development Corporation, designer of Lotus 1-2-3, Chair of Board of Directors for Linden Lab (creator of Second Life), Chair of Mozilla Corporation, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Wikimedia Foundation.
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Zynga Raises $29 Million B Round (Led By Kleiner Perkins) and Buys Virtual-World Facebook App YoVille
Social gaming network Zynga just got some serious funding. It raised $29 million in a B round led by Kleiner Perkins. (IVP and prior investors Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group and Avalon Ventures also participated in the round). The company is also announcing the acquisition of YoVille, a virtual-world app for Facebook with 150,000 daily active users. And, along with the cash, new Kleiner partner Bing Gordon is taking a board seat and an operating role at the startup.
Bing recently left Electronic Arts, where he was the chief creative officer and one of its founding executives. But he was already an informal adviser to Zynga, and helped bring the deal to Kleiner. Zynga CEO Mark Pincus says:
He is super-involved in product strategy, brings the gaming DNA to us, and is an amazing CEO coach. He’s already stopped us from doing stupid things.
Like what?
Stupid things like build a PC downloadable MMO game that would cost anywhere from $5 million to $30 million, and would be free to play with virtual goods.
That’s a dig at other gaming startups. Zynga specializes in casual games you can play with your friends on social networks. Some of its hits include Texas Hold’Em (with four million hands of poker played daily), Attack, and Scramble. Al told, they attract 2.9 daily active users across Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks. On Facebook alone, Zynga’s games have 1.6 million daily active users (right behind Slide, RockYou, and SA Ventures).
The company raised $10 million just last January, and Pincus claims he still has all of that money in the bank and is cash-flow positive with 80 employees. But he feels the stakes are about to get higher as the worlds of casual social gaming and online video games collide. That means he will have to spend more money on both production values and marketing. Pincus tells me:
I think in 18 months these games are going to be highly graphical and immersive. You will be able to jump in and have a casual experience of today, and if you want to go deeper you will be able to.
As it becomes harder to get viral growth, you will need marketing.
Zynga uses its most popular games as a distribution mechansim for new games by cross-promoting them. But Zynga is not alone in trying to build a social gaming network. Competitor SGN raised $$15 million last May, and counts Jeff Bezos as an investor. Both are trying to disrupt the current gaming giants (like EA) with lower development costs, lower marketing and distribution costs, and more social gameplay.
Pincus wants to keep his player acquisition costs low, but add in some of the deeper engagement that online multiplayer games enjoy. He is building some of these games now. But he no doubt will do more buying of small fry gaming app startups. (Playfish looks like bait in this area).
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Yet Another Open Data Foundation?
Chris Saad, a co-founder of the Data Portability project has posted that tomorrow at OSCON a new Open Data Web Foundation will be announced by David Recordon and others.
The goal of the new foundation is to set out the actual data specifications, legal structures around data portability and in helping to evangelize set formats. Saad says that the initiative is different to the Data Portability project in that it is details oriented around specific technology and legal implementations rather than the broader evangelizing effort that has come out of Data Portability:
Continue reading on TechcrunchIT >>
Update: David Recordon has responded by saying that he isn’t at OSCON tomorrow.
Update 2: David Recordon has confirmed that an Open Web Foundation will be announced on Thursday morning.
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Episodic Makes Flash Videos iPhone-Friendly
One of the most frustrating things about the iPhone is that it can’t handle Flash, which has become the standard for streaming video on the web. YouTube managed to work around this by transcoding all of its videos into the H.264 format, but other video serving sites have failed to follow suit. Today Episodic, a video web publishing company, has launched a new web app that looks to solve this problem by converting Flash-based videos into a format that the iPhone can play in its native Safari browser. The service works with content uploaded to a number of different video sites, including Blip, YouTube, and Metacafe.
The site takes standard RSS feeds and scans posts for any video content, which it then converts to an iPhone-friendly format. Each blog’s converted feed can be accessed from a static URL (for example, you can check out a feed of WebbAlert at http://iphone.episodic.com/WebbAlert from your iPhone). Hypothetically, a video blogger could redirect to this static Episodic URL whenever an iPhone user visited their site.
While the video conversion seems to work well, Episodic’s app is still very limited. There’s currently no way to take a standard URL and convert that page’s content to video - you need to generate a playlist using an RSS feed. Some bloggers may also take issue with the fact that videos are now being hosted outside of their site (anyone can submit your site’s RSS feed for conversion). CEO Noam Lovinsky says that this shouldn’t be an issue, as the site is merely serving as a syndication platform, and will do everything it can to respect bloggers’ wishes.
Episodic is also hoping to help bloggers monetize their video content by offering an advertising and analytics service for streamed videos. Unfortunately there’s currently no way to authenticate who owns the videos - you could easily input an RSS feed and then start monetizing someone else’s content. Lovinsky says that the site is working on this issue, and that the company’s ultimate goal is “to help people get paid for the content they create”. In the future, the site intends to roll out a full-fledged video platform designed to help serial video creators generate professional content quickly.
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GigaOm Buys A Mobile Blog - One Less Independent Blog In The World
Blogging network GigaOm will announce the acquisition of the small but excellent mobile-focused blog jkOnTheRun this evening. Founders James Kendrick and Kevin Tofel will remain in Houston and continue doing their thing.
The deal size isn’t being announced, and it’s likely small. But it shows what might be the beginning of something that I wrote about in March - the rollup of the better blogs (subjectively defined) as the space gets hyper-competitive (you gotta love zero barriers to entry).
I predict that this is just the beginning of the process that will accelerate over the next 12-18 months. Larger blogs lacking the stomach for competition will sell to large media corporations. The more competitive large blogs who want to see this thing through will start to acquire the smaller ones and group by topic areas. Whoever builds the network of the most interesting and prodigious voices will eventually “win.” Or perhaps everyone will win, but to different degrees.
I’m sticking to my argument that blogs should get cash positive and then start to acquire others - raising a slug of money just gives people an incentive to spend it, and you lose control to a group of investors who may know little or nothing about how to build a blog.
And what’s most clear in all of this is that the small, independent, passionate blogger who writes day and night about whatever it is that captures her imagination plays an important role in the ecosystem. They keep the larger blogs honest, and the best of them will grow into large properties in their own right. It’s a beautiful, nasty, hyper-competitive and chaotic world we bloggers live in, and most of the time I wouldn’t change it for the world.
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Google In Final Negotiations To Acquire Digg For “Around $200 Million”
Google’s on and off negotiations with Digg have been back on in a big way for the last six weeks, we’ve heard from multiple sources inside and outside of Google. The two companies have reportedly signed a letter of intent and are close to a deal that will bring Digg under the Google News property. The acquisition price is in the $200 million range, says one source.
We first wrote about the Google-Digg negotiations in March. Despite a vigorous denial by Digg CEO Jay Adelson the negotiations continued, although Google’s Marissa Mayer reportedly cooled on the company for a period of time.
The companies are now in final negotiations according to our sources, although it could be a couple of weeks before it closes. And while the major deal points have been agreed on, the acquisition could still fall apart. Microsoft, which was previously interested in the company, may be willing to step back in at a much lower price.
Most of Digg’s revenue comes from a three year ad deal with Microsoft, which will be terminated on a sale to Google. Digg has raised $11.3 million in venture capital.
Meanwhile, Google’s fascination with the Digg voting concept continues.
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Apple Launching App Store Beta Program
Apple’s App Store has seen an unprecedented amount of success and exposure since its launch, with millions of total downloads and 909 applications already available. Unfortunately, Apple has been unable to keep up with the influx of submissions from developers (each app must be approved before it appears on the store), leaving many companies frustrated and confused as their apps sit in limbo.
Adding to the frustration has been the difficulty associated with testing an application. As Craig Hockenberry, one of the people behind the popular app Twitterific explains:
The big problem here is that the only way to install software on an iPhone or iPod touch is with the App Store. There are also no provisions for beta testing… The only way to “test” a fix is to release the changes to tens of thousands of users. It’s the developer equivalent of playing Russian roulette.”
Now we’re hearing from an app developer that Apple is finally going to start rolling out a new beta program in the next few days. Details are slim, but it seems like Apple is capping the total number of beta participants at 100 per app. In order to download a beta app, users will need to submit their iPhone’s serial number to the developer, who will then need to flag its eligibility in the store itself. All betas will still be distributed through the App Store - you won’t be able to download one on an external site.
It sounds like developers that haven’t had their apps approved yet will still be able to participate in the beta program. This should alleviate some of the developers’ anxiety (at least they’ll know their app will work once it goes live), but it still doesn’t address the the delays and lack of communication that many developers are complaining about.
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Sugar Inc Breaks Up With NBC, Brings Ad Sales In House
Fast growing women-focused blog network Sugar Inc announced that they’ve terminated their year-old ad sales relationship with NBC. All ad sales will now be via an in-house sales team, says the company.
There was speculation that NBC’s recent investment in Blogher, arguably a competitor to Sugar, was to blame. But Sugar CEO Brian Sugar (guess where the company name came from) says this was purely an economic decision. NBC’s cut of ad sales simply got too expensive.
Comscore says the Sugar sites have 4.6 million unique visitors and 24 million page views per month. We’ve heard the company will do around $15 million in revenue this year, with 2/3 of that from advertising. Assuming NBC takes 50% of sales, that’s $5 million Sugar is paying them every year. Bringing sales in-house certainly makes sense.
Sugar is also clearly gearing up to compete with Glam Media, a company that represents other women-focused sites for ad sales. To get there, though, Sugar needs to build up their own sales force. It looks like they’re doing exactly that.
Disclosure: We partnered with Sugar for our LA party earlier this year.
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TicketLeap Gets $2 Million For Modest-Sized Event Ticketing
TicketLeap, a service that helps promoters sell tickets to their events though a self-serve platform, has raised $2 million in a Series A funding round led by MentorTech Ventures and Ben Franklin Technology Partners.
TicketLeap differentiates itself from large ticket vendors by catering to small companies and events. Rather than charge event coordinators for selling their tickets, TicketLeap passes on the cost to the ticket buyer by charging a small fee along with each ticket. The Philadelphia-based company was founded in 2003 by Christopher Stanchak, who initially created the site as part of Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program.
There are a number of strong competitors in the ticket management space, most notably Eventbrite, which charges event planners a set fee of 2.5% for every ticket sold (users can also choose to pass on the fee to their customers, as they can with TicketLeap).
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Chad Dickerson To Leave Yahoo For Etsy
Chad Dickerson, a long time Yahoo exec and the head of their Brickhouse special projects group, is leaving the company to become the CTO of Etsy, a a website that allows users to buy and sell handmade items. Mike Folgner, the former GM of Yahoo Video, will take Dickerson’s place at the head of Brickhouse.
We first covered Brooklyn-based Etsy, which has a cult-like following, back in 2005. Since then the company has raised over $30 million in venture capital. The most recent Comscore stats show nearly 2 million monthly visitors and 83 million page views worldwide.
This is a blow to Yahoo on par with the loss of Bradley Horowitz, Dickerson’s former boss, earlier this year. Dickerson ran Yahoo’s developer platform and oversaw their various internal and external Hack Days.
Dickerson joins the ranks of departed Yahoo execs, which gets larger every week. He wrote a long post on his personal blog about his reasons for leaving, but he doesn’t say the one thing that is on every Yahoo’ers mind: they crave leadership, and they aren’t getting it.
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Are Facebook Ads Going to Zero? Lookery Lowers Its Guarantee to 7.5-Cent CPMs.
Nobody can make money on social network ads. Even Google (which controls a lot of the inventory on MySpace) is having a hard time. How worthless are these ads? Lookery, an ad network for social apps on Facebook and elsewhere, is renewing a promotion, guaranteeing 15 cents per thousand page impressions to app developers who sign up. With two ads per page, that comes to 7.5 cents per thousand ad impressions (CPMs). Back in January, Lookery was offering 12.5 cents per ad impression. So that means Lookery has cut its ad rates nearly in half.
Other social app ad networks, such as Social Media, are commanding CPM ad rates of around 50 cents by focusing on higher-quality inventory. Lookery is not so picky, and thus is probably more reflective of the what the majority of Facebook apps can expect to get (85 percent of its inventory is from Facebook).
Promoting a guarantee to starving app developers who have no other options is working for Lookery. When it offered its first guarantee in January, it was serving 140 million ad impressions per month. Now it is serving about three billion per month. (Social Media serves two billion).
Lookery is hoping all of those pennies will add up, but it isn’t counting on it. CEO Scott Rafer says the ad network is running at break even in terms of gross profits. But his plan is to use it to “bootstrap a data services business.” To that end, he is beginning to collect age and gender audience metrics from all the publishers in the Lookery network. For instance, the Facebook app Friendzii (which seems like it is geared towards people with no friends who are hoping to meet some) is actually most popular among 35-to-44-year olds.
If Lookery can’t sell ads to marketers, maybe it can sell the data.
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Engadget Chief Ryan Block Confirms Resignation, To Start New Company With Peter Rojas
Ryan Block confirms our previous story that he’s stepping down from the top spot at gadget blog Engadget.
He will be launching an as-yet-to-be-named startup with Peter Rojas, Engadget’s former editor-in-chief (pictured left, next to Block), focusing on the consumer electronics space. We’ve speculated that the new site may be called Devixe and may include forum and social networking features. We’ve also heard that it will have a strong editorial component.
So who’s taking over Engadget? Block’s no. 2 Josh Fruhlinger takes over AOL Tech network, including Switched, TUAW, Download Squad, and the Engadget network. Associate Editor Joshua Topolsky will be Engadget’s new editor in chief.
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MySpace Confirms OpenID Support, Launches Data Availability On Flixster and Eventful
MySpace is rolling out a couple of announcements this morning a day ahead of Facebook’s F8 developer conference.
The first is confirmation of our story that they are supporting OpenID, although they aren’t releasing any details (It’s our belief that they will first issue OpenID IDs, and possibly become a relying party later).
The company is also announcing the launch of two new Data Availability integrations: Flixster and Eventful (we built what we believe is the first Data Availability app last month).
MySpace is also making a core policy change to Data Availability. Previously third party services were not allowed to store any MySpace user profile information at all - they simply requested it from MySpace, used it to create a web page and then dumped it. Now MySpace is allowing 24-hour caches of profile information, and permanent caches of certain “core elements” of a user profile.
Screen Shots:
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Michael Arrington’s $200 web tablet project
Noted hardware engineer Michael Arrington has asked the world to build him a "Macbook Air-thin" web tablet for $200, which he will then offer as an open source reference design. It should run Linux, Firefox, and Skype, he requests. Since only one of those is a company that can be invested in — and has already been purchased by eBay — I must presume that Arrington has funded a small tablet plantation.
We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200. Help Us Build It. [Techcrunch.com]
Michael Arrington’s $200 web tablet project
Noted hardware engineer Michael Arrington has asked the world to build him a "Macbook Air-thin" web tablet for $200, which he will then offer as an open source reference design. It should run Linux, Firefox, and Skype, he requests. Since only one of those is a company that can be invested in — and has already been purchased by eBay — I must presume that Arrington has funded a small tablet plantation.
We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200. Help Us Build It. [Techcrunch.com]
Kluster Launches Private Survey Manager
Kluster, the crowd sourcing startup that launched earlier this year, has introduced support for new private Klusters designed to help groups manage decision making.
Each Kluster offers users a chance to ask a group a question (say, “What features should go into the new TechCrunch tablet?”). Each participating member is then categorized from the administrator panel - in this case, we might categorize voters as “Designers”, “Engineers”, and “General Consumers”. Once the data has been compiled, survey administrators can use the sites “klusterEQ” to manage how much weight should be given to the responses from each participant (we might want to rate a Designer’s style rating higher than a Engineer’s).
Kluster seems to be taking a multi-pronged approach to the crowdsourcing space, which includes a number of competitors like Ideablob and Innocentive. Last month the site launched NameThis, a site that lets companies ask the crowd what they should call their new product.
Private Kluster Tour! from Ben Kaufman on Vimeo.
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Propeller 2.0 Launches: Ditching The Vote Count, Adding A Mascot
Propeller, AOL’s Digg-like news site, launches version 2.0 later this morning. The site sports a new design and logo and now has a mascot - described as “part professor, part citizen journalist” (see image below).
But the biggest feature change is the removal of a pure Digg-like vote count. In its place is an algorithm based popularity ranking of 1-10, which takes into account “many more aspects of participation” when determining popularity. Voting on a story is now called the more nebulous “prop it.” The service has also cut down the number of news categories. Those remaining include Arts & Entertainment, Business & Finance, Family, Humor, News, Science & Technology, Sports and Style.
Taking a page from the Yahoo Buzz playbook, headlines from the service will also be integrated directly into AOL and AOL News.
Propeller has had a rocky history. It first launched in June 2006 under the Netscape.com domain as “a better Digg” in that paid editors chose the top stories from user-submitted and voted links. Soon the site was paying top Digg users to move to them.
In August 2007 rumors circulated that the site was going to be shut down. We called it “Kaput” last September, but we were wrong: the site would live on under a new domain, Propeller.com.
Netscape traffic promptly spiked downward, but Propeller, led by general manager Tom Drapeau, filled the gap and has had steady growth since then.
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Ok, We Have Our First DNA-Based Dating Service: GenePartner
It was only a matter of time before someone launched a dating site that looks for potential matches based on DNA compatibility. That time is apparently today with the launch of GenePartner (ok, it’s not the first, but it’s the cheapest).
The Switzerland-based company says they can use a $199 DNA test (compare to $1,000 for 23andMe) to help you find your perfect match, statistically speaking. They’ve analyzed “hundreds of couples” and have determined the genetic patterns found in successful relationships. Based on their algorithm and your DNA, they’ll determine the probability for a satisfying and long-lasting relationship between two people (color me skeptical).
What about romance? Chemistry? That certain je ne sais quoi when you meet someone and get a tingling sensation in your stomach? Forget it. The future of dating is DNA tests and buccal swabs, so get used to it:
A brush for collecting your DNA sample from your saliva – called a buccal swab kit – will be sent to your address. Following the simple instructions included with the kit you will gently collect the DNA from the inside of your cheek. Use the addressed envelope supplied for returning the brushes.
GenePartner is looking to partner with dating sites and have those services encourage users to see if they’re a DNA match.
Will they be able to avoid tough emerging U.S. laws around genetic testing? Well, they’re in Switzerland. My guess is they’re not going to be too worried about California and other state laws prohibiting their service.
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Bezos Says He Wants S3 Uptime to Be Nothing Less Than Perfection. (Yeah, Work On That).
When cloud-computing services like Amazon’s S3 go down, as it did again this weekend, it raises the question of whether they are ready for prime time. If these services keep going down, can startups rely on them enough to build their businesses on top of them? At Fortune’s Brainstorm conference in Half Moon Bay today, in response to a question from the audience, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said that the company takes reliability and uptime very seriously, and knows that it will be the basis of competition in this budding industry. He said:
I think we are at the dawn of what will be an important industry. Important industries are rarely built by one company. Companies that can demonstrate high-availability track records will have bigger parts of this market. Market mechanisms will push companies to reliability.
When we have an outage like yesterday, we see that as a crucial driver. We won’t be satisfied until we have uptimes and availabilities that are indistinguishable from perfection.
When we have a problem, we know the proximate cause, we analyze from there and find the root cause, we will find the root fix and move forward.
Perfection is not necessary. Amazon’s S3 customers would probably be happy with just more redundancy so that they don’t have to suffer eight-hour outages. Amazon will no doubt get a pass as it learns how to scale these services, but how long will that goodwill last? There are other alternatives out there, with more coming on every day, even if they are not as well known.
(On a different subject, when talking about the Kindle, he had a nice quote about the importance of devices becoming invisible:
We had a microwave oven that would beep every minute until I turned it off. I called it a self-important device.
This is a favorite theme of his, but it is a good design principle. He didn’t mention anything about the next-generation Kindle though).
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Slydial Lets You Avoid Awkard Calls, Go Straight To Voicemail
It’s Friday night, you’ve got a blind date in an hour, and the last thing you want to do is make small talk with a stranger. You’d like nothing more to cancel, but there’s no easy to do it. Text messages and emails are out of the question - they’re too cold and impersonal, especially with so little notice. So you call, hoping with every ounce of your soul that the message will go to voicemail. Of course they pick up after one ring, and a hopelessly clumsy conversation ensues.
Slydial, a new service from MobileSphere, is looking to offer users a way to avoid this situation. The service allows users to call any mobile line and go directly to voicemail, without the awkward conversation. Their phone will actually display a missed call from your original number, but they won’t have a chance to answer it.
To use the service, dial 267-SLYDIAL (267-759-3425), and enter your contact’s number (note: this isn’t a toll-free call). Slydial works with all US wireless carriers, and users can make the initial call from either landlines or mobile phones. And, if you really hate talking to people, you can make an account on the company’s website and use a contact list to leave voice messages from your computer.
Slydial seems like a service that is ripe for abuse, but it’s still great to have (I just saved it to my contacts list). Sure, it’s devious and impersonal, but at least it isn’t a text message. And voicemail is dead anyway, isn’t it?
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3rd Annual August Capital Meet-Up Is This Friday - Final 200 Tickets
The time has come for us to release our final 200 tickets to the 3rd Annual August Capital Meet-Up. To join us this Friday, on July 25th, register at EventBrite. We look forward to seeing you along with hundreds of other techies at August Capital’s amazing outdoor patio in Menlo Park, California.
The only tickets left for August Capital are reserved for event sponsors. We still have a few sponsorship opportunities and demo tables available for companies to show off their products. If you are interested in supporting the event, please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde. If you are a member of the press wanting to cover the event, please contact Sarah Ross.
We will be donating 100% of the ticket proceeds to Malaria No More, an inclusive, grassroots movement to control malaria, a preventable and treatable disease that kills more than one million people each year. $10 happens to exactly cover the cost of a single bed net that will protect a child from Malaria, by the way.
Attendee identification will be checked at the door. Due to the strong demand for tickets, we regret tickets are not transferable and not refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door.
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