Good thing Gmail is out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates. (Gmail is the orange line in the chart below). That puts Gmail within sight of the No. 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors. After that there is a wide gulf separating Yahoo Mail and its 106 million monthly unique visitors.
The last time checked on Gmail’s progress was at the beginning of the year, when it seemed like it would still take at least two years for it to catch up to its nearest rivals. But so far this year, Gmail’s unique visitors grew 25 percent, while AOL’s declined 22 percent. Thus, the two crossed paths in July. (Hotmail grew only 8 percent during the same period, while Yahoo Mail increased unique visitors by a healthy 16 percent).
If Google wants Gmail to pass Hotmail quickly and gain the No. 2 spot, my suggestion is to keep pumping in new enhancements through Gmail Labs and to speed up the pace at which mail storage increases. Not that I am a typical user, but I am already at 97 percent of my allotted 7,358 megabytes. One of the primary lures of Gmail has always been its seemingly endless and ever-expanding storage limits. Please don’t make me pay for more storage.
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CubeTree, the collaboration suite built on an enterprise social networking platform, has launched a new group chat feature today that should allow its customers to communicate more efficiently with chat room functionality.
CEO and Co-Founder Carlin Wiegner says that there are also more APIs coming to CubeTree, including some that are related to the new live chat feature. CubeTree also has applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Blackberry, Adobe AIR and Jabber support. Group chats can be enabled so numerous users can communicate with each other at once. After chats are completed, they are archived for later viewing, which you can also search through by keyword.
Just earlier this week, Socialcast launched its own brand new set of developer API’s to help Socialcast users better communicate with each other.
It’s been a long time coming, but it’s almost here: Tapulous is putting the finishing touches on Tap Tap Revenge 3, the next installment of its wildly sucessful iPhone music game. The game, which is best described as a “Guitar Hero for the iPhone”, will feature in-game song purchases, which were finally enabled with the release of the iPhone 3.0 software update in June. If there’s a game ripe to make a killing with these in-game downloads, it’s TTR. Tapulous expects to have the game submitted by the end of August, with general release soon thereafter depending on the App Store’s approval process.
So why does this matter? Tap Tap Revenge and its various spinoffs has been some of the iPhone’s most popular games since the App Store launched last year (in fact, a very similar game was very popular on jailbroken phones before the official store even launched). Gameplay consists of tapping your fingers to a song as colorful bubbles fall down the screen, and newer versions also make use of the phone’s accelerometer so you can shake it to the beat. As with games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, TTR tends to appeal to a very broad audience.
But until now it’s been handicapped by one major obstacle: there was no way for users to pay to download new songs. On console games like Rock Band, in-game purchases have proven very lucrative with gamers regularly plopping down around $2 per song. But the iPhone didn’t allow for this kind of transaction until recently, so Tapulous was forced to sell satellite games like TTR Weezer and TTR Coldplay, which did well but never saw nearly the usage of the main TTR app. Now they’ll be able to license songs from directly inside the flagship app, which means the number of paid downloads will likely skyrocket. It will also likely be easier to get premium artists on the platform, as they will be able to sell a song or two at a time rather than entire albums.
As a teaser, Tapulous has sent us the following frustratingly small screenshot:
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Popular music recommendation service iLike launched a music download service this afternoon, offering users MP3 downloads for $0.89 to $1.29 per song. Previously the service only offered users the ability to sample 30 second clips of songs, or restricted full streaming via a partnership with Rhapsody (now phased out).
iLike says the first song purchased today was Get Away, Jordan by Ernie Haase & Signature Sound. Music is available from all four major labels and “hundreds of indie labels, enabled via MediaNet.”
Rumors of the music store were first reported by CNET’s Greg Sandoval last month. Until now iLike has offered downloads from Amazon and iTunes. Those options remain.
The service is rolling out now on iLike (I was able to purchase a song), and should be available to all U.S. users by end of day, says iLike. iLike applications on iGoogle, Facebook, Bebo and other platforms will also be available “soon” says the company for U.S. users.
We’re enabling the millions of music fans who discover and share music on iLike to purchase songs in-page directly from iLike. Our solution provides a smooth, immediate in-page purchase experience. You can sign up, enter your credit card, and download the music you just bought — all without ever leaving the web page you were on when you discovered the song.
We're making it easier and more immediate for music fans to buy MP3s as an online on-Web activity. iTunes already provides a great music buying experience inside a media player, and we'll continue offering our users the option to jump off iLike to purchase from iTunes. At the same time, we're filling a void by providing a faster way to make impulse music purchases on the web. Our social features and integration into all the major social networks will create a unique music discovery and purchasing experience for music fans across the Web.
The iLike in-page download solution was achieved via direct deals with major labels and a relationship with MediaNet to support the back end fulfillment and provide indie label catalogs. PayPal is providing billing support.
Going forward we’ll continue to enhance our download service, which is currently in Beta, as well as making it available on other leading third party websites where iLike is embedded. Our goal over time is to offer music fans the ability to impulse buy in-page from wherever they are.
In other recent news about iLike, the company is rumored to be raising new capital in an unusual transaction designed to push out Ticketmaster, an investor since 2006.
Images from the purchase flow are below:
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If you’ve ever spent much time working from the command line, there’s a good chance you’re going to love TweetShell, a new Twitter client that replicates the terminal environment in the browser. No, it isn’t very user-friendly — if you’ve never heard of commands like ls or man you’re going to be totally lost here, but if you can hold your own in a Bash shell you’re going to be right at home. (Note: while the site is called TweetShell, the URL is Tweetsh.com.
To get started, it’s probably a good idea to run the man command to get a list of the site’s main features. TweetShell just launched a few hours ago so it’s buggy and is missing some common Twitter functionality, but it has most of the basics: you can login using either OAuth or the ‘old’ less secure way, you can tweet from your account using the wall command, and you can browse through tweets from other users using the directory commands like cd and ls. There are also a number of more advanced commands, though frankly I haven’t been able to figure out how some of them work (feel free to leave tips in the comments).
Of course, there are already a number of Twitter clients that actually run from the terminal, but this runs from the browser, which means it’s more accessible for casual use and you can access it from any computer.
When Robert Scoble, lover of all things web, says something is lame, you know it must be really lame. And that’s what he’s saying about a new Yahoo site, Know Your Mojo! — and he’s right.
The site claims to tell you what kind of “social mojo” you possess by analyzing your tweets. It’s a very simple site, below the big “What’s Your Social Mojo?” question it asks you to put in your Twitter username. You then hit the submission button and it takes you through an animation of a series of pipes. You’re spit on on the other end with what kind of Twitter user you are. The only problem? It’s different just about every time you put in your user name.
Of the 16 different mojo possibilities, I’ve gotten 3 different ones on 4 attempts. Scoble notes similar results. So I don’t know what kind of analyzing it’s doing, but it doesn’t appear to work too well. Of course, that doesn’t really matter because what this is really about is advertising Yahoo’s new homepage. It makes that pretty clear on the results page that tells you to feed your “mojo” by checking out Yahoo’s site and adding content to it.
While all of that has actually nothing to do with Twitter, Yahoo clearly made a Twitter analyzer to take advantage of the viral nature of the service, hoping the masses would tweet out their results and get more people to visit the site, and then Yahoo’s homepage. Sadly, it will probably work, even if the analyzer itself doesn’t.
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There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that Google is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it?
It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the web expanded, the finger protocol faded out, but the idea of needing a unified way to identify yourself has not. That’s why you keep hearing about OpenID and the like all the time.
But those standards, while open, have failed to latch on in a meaningful way with the public at large. One of the holdups is that you have to set up a website or service you use to be your OpenID. It’s relatively easy to do, and you may already have one ready to go, but just not realize it. But it’s still kind of tricky to explain to a regular web user — wait, you login with your website?
But something everyone on the web knows is their email address. And they’re conditioned by services like Google and Facebook to use it as their identifier. The problem with it has been that it’s just a string of text, nothing more. You cannot attach information to it to let others know a bit more about you — something vital for true identification. Then idea behind WebFinger is that you should be able to attach any information you choose to your email address.
The excitement today is that a group of Googlers have apparently finally not only gotten Google’s support to pursue the project, but that they have started working the technical details. As Googler Brad Fitpatrickwrites today:
In other words, we’ve eliminated both technical & political hurdles. We can now work on this spec, implement, push, try, rinse, repeat…. until we’re all reasonable happy.
Googler Brett Slatkin (incidentally, Fitzpatrick’s partner in making PubSubHubbub) explains to us that while it hasn’t been turned on yet, and that there’s still a lot of work to do on the spec, the idea is to go into testing mode soon. Fitzpatrick notes that there will be a small experiment going on internally with some Googlers’ Gmail accounts.
Without knowing much about the technical details behind it, the core idea behind WebFinger immediately strikes me as a good one. It’s taking something everyone knows on the web (your email address) and making it immensely more valuable as a way to identify yourself and information about you. Exactly what kind of information? Here are some of the ideas from the WebFinger Google Code page:
public profile data
pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
a public key
other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
a URL to an avatar
profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.
This is definitely something to watch for in the coming months.
Analytics firm comScore has just released its latest statistics for video steaming sites in the United States for the month of June, and at first glance the results are quite surprising: the top video sites have seen a major shakeup, with many of the top sites abruptly falling in the rankings.
The cause, of course, is the Michael Jackson effect — media organizations around the world dedicated huge amounts of coverage to the pop star’s tragic death on June 25, and many people turned to the web to learn more. Other breaking news that month, including the Iranian election controversy, also likely contributed to the growth seen by news properties.
Hulu, which has ranked as the third most popular video site in the United States for the past few months, has dropped down to seventh. Likewise, Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace, has dropped from second to fifth.
So who took their place? Video search engine Blinkx jumped from sixth place in May with 300,641 views to fourth overall with over 623,000. Microsoft also saw a big jump, rising from fifth place in May with 310,560 overall streams, to third place in June, with 695,661 streams (much of this gain was likely due to increased traffic to MSN and MSNBC). Turner, the parent company of CNN, also saw its video views nearly double.
Finally there’s Viacom, the media conglomerate that includes Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, and BET. Viacom vaulted from seventh place in May with 281,368 views to second place in June, with a whopping 773,554. Again, much of this can likely be attributed to the Michael Jackson news that was featured prominently on MTV, but Nickelodeon also saw strong traffic, which may be related to the summer season when kids generally watch more TV.
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If you need proof that the stream makes complex services more accessible, take a look at Glide Engage. Launched last week, Glide Engage is a stream front-end for the Glide, a Web OS which offers a suite of integrated Web Apps including docs, spreadsheets, photo and music uploading and sharing, calendar, email, Website creation and collaboration tools. Glide can be overwhelming. There is a lot there. But it has attracted its own loyal following of about one million registered users.
With Glide Engage, the various features of the Glide OS become available on an as-needed basis and gives a better entry point for the service. At first glance, Glide Engage is a micro-messaging service on steroids. You can follow (”engage” with) other people in Glide, add comments to your stream, share links and files, create discussion groups and bring different media and people into online meeting spaces. In the left-hand column you can also set up news alerts and see the latest articles being shared on Glide about those topics.
What makes Glide particularly interesting is that it is also a Twitter client. You can import your Twitter stream and read it within Engage like you can with other Web-based Twitter apps. You can Tweet out messages, but also add links to photos, documents, playable music files and videos which bring people back into Glide. Imagine if Seesmic or Tweetdeck hosted their own photos, videos, and other shared files, and had a Web productivity and communication suite as well.
The Twitter functionality is very limited at this point. You can reply to a message or retweet it, and find some information about the person whose Twitter message you are looking at. And when you send a Tweet, you get redirected to Twitter. All of this is a work in progress and will improve over time. To the extent that Glide Engage can extend its OS capabilities to Twitter, the more interesting it will become. Soon, you should be able to create Twitter groups and send out links to Glide’s collaboration spaces, which let multiple people look at photos, videos, documents, and videos in an online meeting environment.
Glide also allows you to assign rights to each file you share, so a document or photo can be shared in view-only mode or you can give others editing privileges. These privileges can be changed on a message-by-message basis. The overall user interface could still use some simplification and isn’t as zippy as other stream reader apps (and I am not sure why the logo looks like a flaming IE logo crashing into the water), but Glide Engage also has some novel features worth exploring.
Glide is built on a sophisticated syncing engine, which means that it can share all of these files on mobile phones as well. It will release an Android app for Glide Engage next week on August 18, followed by BlackBerry, and Windows. The company will do an iPhone app at some point, but since this syncing capability competes with Apple’s MobileMe, it wants to establish Glide Engage on other mobile platforms first.
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Movie piracy is a problem, but it’s not as huge of a problem as music piracy was this past decade. While certainly the size of the movie files and the need for fast broadband connections to get them in a reasonable amount of time plays into it somewhat, also helping is the fact that there are some fairly decent ways to get movies quickly, for a pretty fair price these days. And now Hollywood is apparently trying to change that.
The studios are starting to rally around a horrible new idea: Keeping new releases out of Redbox and more importantly, Netflix for 30 days. Let me repeat that: They think Netflix shouldn’t be able to ship many new movies to you until 30 days after they’re released on DVD.
Now, this doesn’t appear to be set in stone yet for Netflix, as the studios are said to be currently negotiating this with the company, but it is what the studios want. And the strategy is going forward with Redbox, which recently filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox over the same issue. And now, with Universal and Warner Brothers getting on board, another lawsuit seems likely.
And in a move that couldn’t be less surprising, Blockbuster is on the wrong side of this. Despite the company having a strategy to do a massive roll-out of kiosks like the ones Redbox has, it is all in favor of the 30-day window, based on comments CEO Jim Keyes made during its Q2 earnings call.
Why? Well the company once again completely bombed in those earnings, posting a net loss of $36.9 million, while overall sales fell 22 percent in the quarter. It is getting fleeced by the likes of Redbox and Netflix and needs to gain some sort of competitive advantage in movie rentals. A 30-day rental window for its stores would certainly offer that.
Of course, as the name synonymous with movie rentals for the past couple of decades, Blockbuster could have used its power to get ahead of some of these trends (by-mail rentals, cheap kiosks, online rentals/streaming), but didn’t. So now they will have to rely on the movie studios attempting to put stricter rules in place for gaining access to its movies right away. Rules, that would seem to be basically prodding users to obtain those movies illegally.
If the studios are allowing some places like Blockbuster stores to rent movies on day one, but limit Netflix from doing the same, how many of the millions of Netflix users are going to drive to a Blockbuster store to get that movie? Some certainly will, but a lot will also turn to the web and simply download the movie. And some who have never done that before will learn how to get around such a ridiculous restriction.
And Blockbuster’s comments on this are pitiful. Having failed so far with its movies-by-mail approach, online approach, and set-top box approach, Blockbuster is now turning to kiosks. It hopes to have some 2,500 of them by the end of the year and 7,000 of them by next year. Some of their ideas for them are pretty laughable (a good example is the digital transfer of movies to portable media players, but no iPod/iPhone support, meaning that basically no one would use them), but more importantly, Blockbuster is against the two things that made this solution work for Redbox: Availability and price.
Keyes comments during the earnings call indicate that he believe the $0.99 price that Redbox offers its movies for is far too low for a sustainable model. He probably doesn’t mean for Redbox’s end, because they seem to be doing just fine — which is to say, just about the opposite of Blockbuster — using that model. Instead, he seems to be saying that Hollywood can’t survive on such a model, which again, is probably not true, but it’s good that Keyes is the movie studios new PR agent.
Here’s the best part of what he said though:
A vending rental window would enhance the complementary relationship between Blockbuster stores and Blockbuster kiosks. On Fox, Universal, and now Warner titles, for example, we can be far more aggressive in filling the store shelves with product to assure 100% availability of hot new releases. After 30 to 45 days, we can then make use of that product in our vending channel at a substantially reduced cost of goods, since that product will be partially amortized. Our customers can then use Blockbuster stores for depth and breadth of selection and assurance of hot new releases being available on Friday night or Saturday night. The customer can use vending kiosks then for value and convenience.
So basically, he wants to use the studio’s ridiculous 30-day window to prop up his own stores, which are flailing badly. He sees a movie rental ecosystem in which you get new releases from Blockbuster stores, and then slightly older options from the kiosks. Of course, both of those methods of getting movies are already dead, Keyes just doesn’t realize it yet.
He’s investing in these kiosks because Blockbuster has failed elsewhere to make inroads against competitors. But eventually, everyone knows that all of this distribution is going to go online, and then Blockbuster will be left with thousands of kiosks that are useless, just like its store are becoming. At least those won’t be the black holes for money that the stores are, I guess.
Supporting Hollywood’s ridiculous and dangerous idea to place 30-day rental holds on Netflix and Redbox, might prop up his failing brick and mortar stores a bit, but the idea that it will save them long term is laughable.
And Hollywood shouldn’t be tricked into thinking this 30-day rental window is a good idea because they have Blockbuster’s support. Blockbuster doesn’t matter anymore. And they well pay for that mistake in piracy.
If you're on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We've added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks. Here's a quick sample:
It’s a great story for us whenever an entrepreneur makes a crazy amount of money and we get to tell the world about it. For the entrepreneur? Not so much. Hitherto unknown relatives, entrepreneurs seeking angel investments, money managers and supposed baby-mamas all come out of the woodwork with dollar signs in their eyes.
Since I outed their take-home pay from the Amazon merger a few weeks ago, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and COO/CFO Alfred Lin have figured out a way to cope with this: Giving everyone my email address and telling them I’m in charge of their investments.
To be fair, Hsieh told me he was going to do this. He even told me they’d make an investment decision based on my favorite pitch. I just thought he was kidding. Then, two nights ago I had dinner with a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur who had “a hilarious” story to tell me. It seemed a friend at one of the more prominent Southern California investment firms was hounding him for an intro to Sarah Lacy. Clearly, this made no sense since writers don’t generate wealth. We’re lucky to pay rent and have some left over for booze. “No, I need to talk to her about managing this guy Alfred’s money,” the money manager insisted.
So let me be clear: I am not actually in charge of distributing that near-$400 million worth of Amazon stock, but if Hsieh is a man of his word, I will pass on the best single pitch I get in the next two weeks. Send to sarah(at)techcrunch(dot)com or leave in the comments.
Here’s the email he’s sending everyone:
As you can probably imagine, since the Amazon announcement, I am being inundated with many requests for different opportunities, including private wealth management services, investment opportunities, and partnership opportunities.
To help sift through through the various opportunities, I’ve enlisted the services of Sarah Lacy. As a journalist and author, her career has been all about research and figuring out the story behind the story.
I’ve asked Sarah to help sift through many of the opportunities that I’m being approached with between now and August 31. In September, I will ask Sarah to present to me what she thinks the most interesting opportunities are for me to consider.
I’ve cc’d Sarah so you should feel free to email her directly. However, I encourage you to reach out to her in whatever medium you think would allow you to best properly convey the value of your opportunity so that she can give it a fair evaluation relative to all of the other opportunities.
This is the contact information that Sarah has made publicly available on her web site:
The doodle for today’s Google logo might give a new meaning to the term “Google bomb.” While it is not actually a drawing of a bomb—it is an electromagnet in celebration of the birth of its inventor Hans Christian Ørsted—a lot of people might mistake it for a bomb. It has a wire and a clock timer (Update that’s actually a compass) and that magnet kind of looks like a stick of dynamite.
For most of the world, it is just another quirky Google doodle. But for people in Palestine, it might just seem in poor taste. Especially since this is one of the first things they are seeing on the new Google Palestine domain. Yes, there is now a separate domain for Google Palestine, it just launched yesterday. Welcome, Palestine!
Yeah, Google might want to try for a different doodle there.
(Hat tip to Nuke Goldstein)
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If you're like me you've always wondered about making an iPhone game. What mad skillz do you need? What course in computer science will teach you how to vector a jet across the screen? Well, Nicholas Francis set out to solve that problem and came up with Unity, one of the most popular games development platforms for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. CrunchGear: Tell me about your company? Nicholas Francis: Unity Technologies is the company behind the Unity gaming middleware. We have 44 employees with our development HQ in Copenhagen, Denmark. Then we have a bunch of hardcore demoscene guys in Lithuania that have forgotten more about low-level optimizations than most developers will ever know, some developers in Brighton, UK and a few hotshots that work from their respective countries. Our corporate HQ is getting moved to San Francisco - there's so much more business going on over there, that we figured it made the most sense to have business be over there but keep development in Europe. We launched Unity 1.0 in 2005 and slowly grew it. We never had any VC backing or anything, so we've grown the company organically (by about 200% per year. these days we have over 9000 customers - pretty much spread through word-of-mouth. Basically, we're a tool by developers, for developers. Quite simple really, but our tech packs a real punch.
I've been taking a brief respite from my international travels, but the last weekend in August I am hitting the tarmac again. This time, it's a few weeks in Brazil. Right now, I'm planning on spending the time in Sao Paolo but am open to exploring the country further if anyone knows of great start-up activity elsewhere.
I'm working closely with Endeavor which has done amazing work in South and Latin America for more than a decade. But as always, I want to ferret out the best entrepreneurs and investors in the country so send me an email if you have any suggestions at sarah (at) techcrunch (dot) com.
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Marc Andreessen is backing a new browser company called RockMelt. Not much is known about RockMelt other than it is being designed by an all-star team (including software engineer Robert John Churchill from the Netscape days) and that it is tied into Facebook through Facebook Connect. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a screenshot of the sign-in page and speculates that RockMelt is in fact a Facebook browser. Miguel Helft at the NYT leans in that direction as well. It kind of makes sense since Andreesen is on the board of Facebook, but I suspect it is only half the story.
A Facebook browser, however, is a good metaphor for thinking about how browsers, in general, need to change. What would a Facebook browser look like? Well, to start with, you would be able to see updates from your friends on Facebook, share your own updates and media right from the browser, and perhaps IM with your friends through Facebook chat. While those set of features would be convenient, they are nothing revolutionary. Flock, which calls itself the social browser, already incorporates Facebook Connect (and Twitter and other social networks to boot), but it hasn’t taken off. And Facebook itself offers a toolbar for Firefox that lets you see notifications, search Facebook, and share links. There are plenty of other Firefox add-ons which incorporate Facebook features as well.
But the Facebook connection may just be the starting point for a much more ambitious piece of software. Andreesen said as much to the NYT in an interview earlier this year, which Helft quotes from in his article:
Mr. Andreessen suggested the new browser would be different, saying that most other browsers had not kept pace with the evolution of the Web, which had grown from an array of static Web pages into a network of complex Web sites and applications. "There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch," Mr. Andreessen said.
What sorts of things is he talking about? Making the browser social appears to be at the top of the list. The first thing you do is connect to Facebook. But that could just be a building block for a social browser that handles Web apps in an entirely new way. The browser was built around the Web page metaphor, but increasingly the most interesting things happening on the Web do not necessarily exist on any one Web page. They exist in real time data streams (such as Facebook’s portable News Feed and Twitter) and in richer Webtop applications. A modern browser should be designed not only to surf the Web, but to manage your information streams and Web apps all in a seamless user interface.
Whether or not RockMelt is tackling this broader challenge, I don’t know. But I hope it is because we need to move the ball forward with a radical, yet accessible, new approach. Radical, yet accessible—that is the challenge. It must be radical enough to open up new, more efficient, avenues of information discovery, creation, and interaction. It must be a communications platform as well as a browsing platform.
The original browser model was one of consumption, of reading Web pages as if they were documents. Despite all the progress of the past decade, we are still stuck with that legacy to a large degree because it is built into our browsers. So what would a true social browser look like? Below is my own wish list of features (some of these are available as add-ons or in existing desktop clients, but there is an opportunity to unify them in one seamless experience):
It would have multiple modes for browsing, search, following social data stream, and launching Web applications
The home page would be a stream reader which brings together real time streams from across the Web (which Facebook now has with Friendfeed).
IM, email, and public messages (status updates and Tweets) would be always accessible in the toolbar or a sidebar
It would support a variety of Web apps which could be launched seamlessly within the browser without going to a Website and logging in.
One-button access to sharing services of your choice (Flickr, Posterous, Youtube, Wordpress)
Real-time search and alerts from across the Web (social stream, news, finance sites, sports sites, etc.)
Support for Google Gears to give the browser offline capabilities as well as local caching and a light database for computing tasks
That’s just off the top of my head. If you were redesigning the browser from scratch today, what would it look like?
Perhaps you’ve been following the Tr.im fiasco. If not, basically the URL shortening service shut down and said all its links would cease to work by the end of the year, dealing a severe blow to users of any URL shortening service. Tr.im has since recanted its decision (if only to make it easier to sell), but the problem is still a very real one: What happens if your favorite URL-shortener just shuts down? 301works hopes to solve that.
Perhaps you heard about 301works in one of our recent pieces about how Bit.ly was attempting to salvage the Tr.im wreckage. The idea was the 301works would be a centralized hub for all shortened URLs, not run by any one URL-shortener. Tr.im balked at the idea of joining, but plenty of others are, including Bit.ly, Awe.sm, Adjix, betaworks, Cligs, and URLizer. All of them are teaming up with Gnip to launch this project.
One of the holdups in Tr.im’s participation was that it didn’t want one company ruling all of this data. And while Gnip will be handling it at first, to get the project off the ground, the plan is still to find a non-profit group to manage 301works. All the members are clear that they want this to be an open-source project that sets users’ minds at ease about using URL-shorteners.
The service will launch sometime in the next few weeks, after the participating companies have a change to tell their users that they will be backing up their links on 301works. While most are unlikely to have a problem with that, some might, so they’re giving them some time to opt-out.
So how will 301works actually work? Well here are the key points for how companies will be able to back up their links:
URL shortening services decide the frequency that they will make updates.
URL shortening services decide how their updates can be made available to the public. Some services will provide regular uploads and downloads (hourly, daily, weekly, etc) and some will opt for a pure archival approach.
Gnip is providing the infrastructure service to support aggregating data from URL shortening services. Gnip will provide the infrastructure service to compress the data into pre-defined download options for end users.
Companies will be able to submit data via a REST API using HTTP POST over SSL. In addition, Gnip can provide other approaches on request.
All of this sounds great on paper, but the question of just how well this system works remains to be seen. Still, it’s promising that we’re seeing a bunch of companies take action on this so quickly after an incident that left a lot of people concerned about the future of URL-shorteners.
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Facial recognition service Riya will shut down on August 21, 2009, says founder Munjal Shah in an email to users this morning. We are adding it to the TechCrunch DeadPool.
This was one of the original services that defined the early Web 2.0 movement. We first covered it, then known as Ojos, four years ago. The service changed its name to Riya before launching at a party, yes, in my back yard. Here’s our fist full overview of the Riya product, which helped users by auto-recognizing friends in photos and tagging them.
If the RIAA can’t stop music sharing, the U.S. government is going to have an even harder time trying to stop the sharing of federal court documents hidden behind a paywall. Those documents aren’t protected by copyright law.
The PACER service provides on-line access to U.S. Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy court records and documents. The fee to access PACER is $0.08 per page: “The per page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches (one page for no matches.) The charge applies whether or not pages are printed, viewed, or downloaded.” For people who do a lot of legal research, those fees add up quickly.
Enter RECAP, a Firefox add-on created by a group of people at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology. Install the add-on and any documents you access on PACER are automatically uploaded to an Internet Archive repository. These documents are then shared with other users when they do similar searches. See a video overview of how it all works here. The repository already has over one million documents available for free download.
Is this legal? It sure is. The PACER site says“The information gathered from the PACER system is a matter of public record and may be reproduced without permission.” There’s no copyright on these documents.
PACER also says“Any attempt to collect data from PACER in a manner which avoids billing is strictly prohibited and may result in criminal prosecution or civil action.” Technically, though, the data isn’t being collected from PACER by RECAP users, although they are using the site as a search engine of sorts.
Harlan Yu, one of the creators, blogs about the project here.
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FatSecret, an Australian social network focused on nutrition and weight loss that we covered back in 2007, is launching a new API tonight that allows third party sites and services to tap into its database of nutritional data, excercise information, and other health stats. You can access the new FatSecret Platform here.
CEO Rodney Moses says that FatSecret is allowing developers to access the API for free, in the hopes of turning FatSecret into the reliable and accurate resource for nutritional information. He points out the fact that while there are plenty of diet sites on the web that contain nutrition info for various foods, much of the data is disjointed — there’s no established comprehensive source that people turn to first. FatSecret hopes to become the authoritative hub for this kind of information. The site has gathered its data from a number of publicly available resources like the USDA, and also has many user-submitted entries from users on its social network. Moses says that all of the data has been curated to ensure accuracy.
The other component to the new API is a brand utility, which invites food and beverage brand owners to submit their nutrition facts into the system so that they can be retrieved using the FatSecret API.
Moses says that the site itself is still growing steadily, with half a million monthly visitors and around double that number when including users who access the site through other means, like its mobile applications.
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Canadian photo sharing startup BubbleShare will be shuttered on November 15, 2009. Users were notified via email and a notice on the site’s home page.
The site, founded by Albert Lai, first launched in late 2005 and we immediately liked it: “Toronto-based online photo sharing BubbleShare is just wonderful, and ridiculously easy to use. Their interface team deserves a gold star or something…” Adding interface features like zoom just made it even more fun to use.
In early 2007 the company was sold to Kaboose Inc. (TSX: KAB), a small public "family focused online media company" in Canada, for US$2.25 million plus up to another US$750,000 based on an earn-out provision.
Some Kaboose assets, in turn, were acquired by Disney in April 2009 for $18.4 million.
No word on why they’re shutting down, but this may have something to do with it. We’ll always have fond memories of BubbleShare, but it’s now in the TechCrunch DeadPool.
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One of the big problems with starting a new service that relies on user submitted data is getting people to actually use it — nobody is going to routinely boot up your app if they don’t have an incentive to do so. One way to tackle this problem is by working the service into a game, which is a technique that seems to be working quite well for Foursquare, a service that makes it easy to find your friends. GraffitiGeo is a new Y Combinator funded startup launching tonight that’s looking to combine similar gameplay elements to take on a different space: restaurant reviews.
At its core GraffitiGeo allows users to leave brief reviews of restaurants, or for those too lazy to do that, to simply leave a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ — it’s like a highly condensed version of Yelp, or a “Digg for the world”. These reviews and votes can be cast from the site’s iPhone app or from the service’s homepage. The homepage also features a stream of the latest comments to come in from other users, as well as a profile for each restaurant in the system that includes all of its votes and comments. There’s also a nifty feature that lets you view a heatmap of your current region, so you can quickly figure out the hot spots in town.
The gameplay in GraffitiGeo is a bit more complex than that found in Foursquare, which gives you points for checking in but doesn’t really let you do anything with them. With GraffitiGeo, you earn points for every action you take, be it voting on a restaurant or leaving a brief comment. Once you’ve reached a certain point threshold, you can use those points to start a ‘mob’, which you can invite your friends to join. Mobs allow friends to pool their points, which can then be used to acquire territory, which corresponds to actual city blocks. Whenever someone votes on one of the restaurants on the block, the mob gets some street cred too. It’s definitely going to be confusing at first, but it also brings a team element to gameplay — something that Foursquare lacks. You can read more about the mob game here.
GraffitiGeo is also working on a second related iPhone app that combines the site’s data with augmented reality — in effect, it turns your iPhone into a viewfinder for looking up restarurant info (see the video below for a demo). Just hold the iPhone as you would a camera and point it in the direction of the restaurant in question, and an overlay featuring GraffitiGeo comments will hover over it. It’s very cool (we’ve seen a number of other AR apps that are on the way), though we’ll have to wait a while longer to try it out.
GraffitiGeo has some good ideas (especially with the AR app), but it still has its work cut out for it. For one, Yelp is going to prove a very tough competitor — it already has a vast amount of data, and while it may be annoying having to sift through long reviews at times, I don’t think people find it annoying enough to stop using that site. The startup also has some work to do on the iPhone app and the service’s homepage, both of which are functional but could still use some polish.
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Goodbye, Desktop Factory, we hardly knew ye. Desktop Factory was supposed to offer a sub-$5,000 desktop 3D printer. Alas, they are no more and they've sold their IP and assets to an unnamed buyer.
But a funny thing happened as we launched our effort to sell Desktop Factory. We found interested parties who do understand the exciting potential for this breakthrough technology. We found companies that value the industry and can visualize the myriad applications for this affordable printer. Most important, we have found organizations that engage with customers and truly want to be a part of this next major wave in additive fabrication.
It’s been a long time coming, but it’s almost here: 
Popular music recommendation service 
When 
There’s 
Movie piracy is a problem, but it’s not as huge of a problem as music piracy was this past decade. While certainly the size of the movie files and the need for fast broadband connections to get them in a reasonable amount of time plays into it somewhat, also helping is the fact that there are some fairly decent ways to get movies quickly, for a pretty fair price these days. And now Hollywood is apparently trying to change that.
It’s a great story for us whenever an entrepreneur makes a crazy amount of money and we get to tell the world about it. For the entrepreneur? Not so much. Hitherto unknown relatives, entrepreneurs seeking angel investments, money managers and supposed baby-mamas all come out of the woodwork with dollar signs in their eyes.
If you're like me you've always wondered about making an iPhone game. What mad skillz do you need? What course in computer science will teach you how to vector a jet across the screen? Well, Nicholas Francis set out to solve that problem and 
I've been taking a brief respite from my international travels, but the last weekend in August I am hitting the tarmac again. This time, it's a few weeks in Brazil. Right now, I'm planning on spending the time in Sao Paolo but am open to exploring the country further if anyone knows of great start-up activity elsewhere.
Perhaps you’ve been following the Tr.im fiasco. If not, basically the URL shortening service 
Facial recognition service 
If the RIAA can’t stop music sharing, the U.S. government is going to have an even harder time trying to stop the sharing of federal court documents hidden behind a paywall. Those documents aren’t protected by copyright law.
In early 2007 the company was 
One of the big problems with starting a new service that relies on user submitted data is getting people to actually use it — nobody is going to routinely boot up your app if they don’t have an incentive to do so. One way to tackle this problem is by working the service into a game, which is a technique that seems to be working quite well for 
Goodbye, 
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