As we first reported the existence of a few days ago, Google’s Theme Gallery for Chrome has gone live. On the page, you can find 29 official themes that range from subtle (greyscale) to hideously ugly (legal pad).
Installing them couldn’t be simpler. Just pick the one you like and click on the “Apply theme” button. The theme will download and in the download manager at the bottom of the Chrome browser window, simply select “open.” After you have the new theme installed, you’ll see an option to return to the default theme. If you close that, you can revert in the Preferences area, under “Personal Stuff.”
These themes work on the latest developer builds of both the Windows and Mac versions of Chrome (I haven’t tried out Linux, but I imagine they will work there as well).
It’s nice to have the option to personalize and skin your browser, but most of these themes are way too distracting. And some, like the “Baseball” theme, make seeing tabs almost impossible. They also remind me of my beautiful work of art (pictured below) in creating a new custom theme for Gmail. Can’t wait for Chrome to give us access to make our own themes!
[thanks to everyone who sent this in!]
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Slowly but surely, Google Maps is filling up with more and more places. If you do a search in a major city, you are likely to find landmarks, museums, famous stores and restaurants labeled right on the map even if you did not specifically search for them.
If you pull up a map of midtown Manhattan, for example, you’ll see museums like MOMA and the American Folk Art Museum, as well as tourist attractions like the “Tree at Rockefeller Center.” But some of the famous buildings are also marked, like the Sony Building, the Trump Tower, and the CBS building. Churches and chocolate stores show up as well.
High-end stores like Harry Winston and Takashimaya are also on the map, as are more common ones such as the Gap. Some well-known restaurants are also highlighted. La Cote Basque, an expensive French restaurant on 55th Street is on there, but so is Sapporo, a great Japanese noodle house on 49th.
When you click on a labeled building or landmark, an information window pops open with the exact address, phone number, description, and link to a Wikipedia article if available. And as you zoom in more places become visible. At some point the map could become pretty crowded, Google hopefully is looking at search history and click behavior to surface the most important places. Each place on the map becomes a visual search result. I like the direction this is going.
NetMarketShare has just released its latest report on browser usage, covering the months of June and July. The results show the impact of the launch of Firefox 3.5 on the browser market, as well as the steady decline of Internet Explorer 6 and 7 as they give way to IE8 and other browsers.
Firefox 3.5, which didn’t officially launch until June 30th, now claims 4.54% of the browser market, though most of these new users were likely previously on Firefox 3.0, which dropped from 20.03% in June to 16.21% in July. Internet Explorer 6 and 7 continue to see their user-bases fade (which is a decidedly good thing, especially in the case of IE6), and it seems that many (though not all) of these are heading to IE8. IE6 dropped from 30.15% in May to 27.21% in July, while IE7 saw a drop from 31.16% to 23.09% in the same time frame. IE8 has grown from 5.95% in May to 12.46% in July.
Adding all versions of Internet Explorer together, Microsoft’s market-share has remained fairly stable over the last few months — it dropped to 67.77% in April, then rose to 68.32% by June, and has since dipped back down to 67.68%. It’s certainly not going upwards, but it’s no longer hemorrhaging users the way it was last fall, when it dropped from 74.18% to 69.72% between September 2008 and January 2009 (other reports have shown major losses for IE more recently).
Likewise, Firefox is also holding fairly stable, dropping from 23.84% in April down to 22.75% and hovering around there since (for July it was at 22.47%). Any downturn in Firefox’s growth can likely be chalked up to the growth being seen by Safari and Chrome, both of which still represent relatively small but steadily growing user bases. Safari has risen from 3.53% to 4.07% between April and July, while Google Chrome has risen from 1.79% to 2.59% in the same time frame.
This report is also notable because it represents a change in the way NetMarketShare analyzes browser usage. Before now, NetMarketShare only reported its raw stats, without taking into account how disproportionally measured countries could skew results. Now the site has started to weight traffic data based on the number of Internet users in a given country (the impact of a user measured in China will be greater than one measured in the US, for example). Worth noting are some of the changes Net Applications has seen resulting from the weighting change. From the Net Applications site:
Baidu - Baidu goes to 9% of global search engine usage. Baidu is on a major growth curve, which is affecting the relative share of all other search engines. Google - Because of Baidu’s growth, Google’s global share is actually going down. This is almost completely due to Baidu and does not reflect the rest of the world. Apple - Since Mac share in the U.S. in significantly higher than the rest of the world, Mac and Safari share drop in the global reports. Opera - Opera goes up to 2% in global reports. This reflects the significant share they have in Eastern Europe and Asia.
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We’ve written about Foursquare a number of times. It’s a really nice tool for keeping track of where your friends are, while at the same time playing this oddly competitive social game. As a stand-alone app, it’s great. But the data it’s collecting may be just as interesting, and the service SocialGreat is one of the first to make use of it.
The idea behind SocialGreat is very simple: To show the most popular places in cities during set periods of time. As the tagline says, “Where’s the crowd?” But here’s why it’s better than a regular rating system: You vote with your feet. As in, if you go to a place, and check-in there, it gets a point on the leader board.
The service launched in New York City a couple weeks ago, and last week it added San Francisco. This allowed it to track the movements of nearly 3,000 people, which provided some interesting data about how groups migrate from place to place. But starting today, it’s now available in all the cities that Foursquare is available in. This will undoubtedly mean a lot more data points, and even more interesting information.
SocialGreat uses Foursquare’s API to pull your information. When you visit the site, you click the “Join” button and you’re taken to a Foursquare page to allow your data to be sent via OAuth. Your data is then entered into the information pool.
SocialGreat’s main page keeps it simple: You can track the hot places based on hour, day, week, or all-time. A list shows you how many people have been to that place, as well as the recent trend of people going or not going there (expressed in positive or negative numbers, respectively). To the right of this list, all of the popular places are shown on a map. From there you can click on any of them to get their address.
One downside is that a lot of people use Foursquare to check in at a city, rather than a place. That’s why in the image above you see “San Francisco” leading the pack. The same is true in New York. Still, that should be easy enough to filter out if the service chooses to.
As I said, it’s a simple idea and application, but it’s potentially a very good idea to track trendy places based on a very real metric — people actually going to them. Of course, it will be more useful the more people who sign up and use Foursquare, and in turn allow SocialGreat to access their data.
SocialGreat is the brainchild of Pepper Lillie’s Bill Piel and Googler Jon Steinberg (which is kind of interesting since Foursquare itself is the similar, follow-up service to Dodgeball, which Google bought in 2005, only to let it die). The duo also go the help of Drop.io CEO Sam Lessin.
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There's a lot of talk of 2010 being the year of the tablet or, more correctly, the year of the Mobile Internet Device (MID). These devices were supposed to change the world a few years ago (remember Origami?) but never did and we basically bumped over MIDs and into netbooks, resulting in the race to the bottom we're now seeing. But now we learn that Dell might be making a MID and that Apple is planning a bigger Touch. These two rumors are fairly concrete - I'd give the Tapplet a 75% chance of happening and a Dell MID about 80% - but there's a big problem: people don't like MIDs.
Searching for photos on the Web takes way too much time. There are simply too many photos to sort through and not enough good ones. Image search is a major priority for all the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing), and they’ve all been tweaking their image search to make it better. But for the longest time, Flickr (which is owned by Yahoo, but separate from Yahoo Image Search) has been my default image search engine because that is where I can usually find the best photos.
Flickr’s been coasting. Its image search hasn’t been updated in a while—until today. But once again it has turned up the awesome on image search.
For the longest time, image search results on Flickr would be returned as a single column of fairly large images that you’d have to scroll down and tab through to get to more pages. You could filter the images by “recent,” “relevant,” or “interesting.” Now that scroll view is still available (it is called “detail”), but the default view shows small thumbnails scattered across the page. As you resize the browser window, you get more or fewer images automatically. You can also hover over an image for more information (such as number of views, comments, and faves, as well as tags, location, and date) without clicking through. (They should add licensing and copyright information as well). These new features help save time by giving you a better preview of each photo, similar to what Yahoo is doing with its main image search.
You can also view by medium-sized thumbnails and, my favorite, in slideshow mode, which takes over your whole screen and shows each image huge on a black background with a thumbnail navigation ribbon along the bottom. The slideshow view is much more immersive and feels more like a desktop photo app.
You can still sort by “recent” or “interesting” (”relevant” is no longer an option though). There is also a new drop-down menu that lets you search everyone’s photos, or only your photostream, that of your contacts, friends and family, or special collections such as Creative Commons images or Getty photos. Some of these options were only available in advanced search before. Again, this helps remove steps in the search process. All in all, I think Flickr just kept me from jumping ship.
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Last March, two reporters for Current TV were caught and detained by the North Korean military after illegally crossing into the country from China as they reported on fleeing refugees. While some intial reports seemed optomistic that the pair — Chinese-American Laura Ling and Korean-American Euna Lee — would be released shortly in an act of good-will, that didn’t prove to be the case: both reporters were subsequently sentenced to twelve years in a North Korean labor camp for “hostile acts against the DPRK” and illegal entry into the country. Repeated calls by US officials to free the pair have seemed to fall on deaf ears.
But today, their story has a happy ending. Former President Bill Clinton has managed to convince North Korean President Kim Jong Il to pardon both reporters, only hours after arriving in North Korea during a surprise visit to the country. According to Reuters, Clinton is the highest-level US representative to visit the country in nearly ten years.
The families of the imprisoned women have issued the following statement on their official website:
The families of Laura Ling and Euna Lee are overjoyed by the news of their pardon. We are so grateful to our government: President Obama, Secretary Clinton and the U.S. State Department for their dedication to and hard work on behalf of American citizens.
We especially want to thank President Bill Clinton for taking on such an arduous mission and Vice President Al Gore for his tireless efforts to bring Laura and Euna home. We must also thank all the people who have supported our families through this ordeal, it has meant the world to us. We are counting the seconds to hold Laura and Euna in our arms.
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When I walked in to SpinVox's plush UK HQ this morning the tension in the building was obvious. Following a fortnight of controversy and allegations that the whole thing is powered not by technology but by a simple, massive, call center operation, this was the first ever live demo to the media of their famed voice to text platform. There were nervously exchanged glances and bad jokes from senior staff. But the guys managed to hold it together for long enough to usher us in to a conference room and ply us with pastries. We were not asked to sign an NDA, but we were asked not to record anything that happened in the room. Ironic, really - and the reason that some media declined the invitation.
CIO Rob Wheatley took us through a technical explanation that, while honest about the existence of human agents in the process, didn't give away as many secrets as he made out, before leaping to what we all came for: the demo.
The big technical question surrounding SpinVox - the one they refuse to answer (as they did again today) - is what proportion of the messages they process are seen by a human being. Whatever the answer their backers are clearly convinced: today they raised another $25 million (£15 million) from existing investors.
So what happened in the demo, and what can we infer from it about those proportions?
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When Heath Ledger passed away in January 2008, he had no shortage of things he was working on. Just about everyone in the world, it seems, saw The Dark Knight, but he had smaller projects too. One of those was directing a music video for the band Modest Mouse, for their song “King Rat.” Today, that video debuts on MySpace Music.
The video, which is animated, is meant be a statement against modern whaling practices in Ledger’s home country of Australia. Sadly, Ledger died before he could complete the video, so The Masses, a film and music company Ledger was a partner in, stepped in along with co-director Daniel Auber to finish it.
Obviously, plastering the fact that Ledger directed a video that they have exclusively all over the page would have been an easy way for MySpace to get a ton of traffic. Instead, the main MySpace Music page and the video page itself makes no visible references to Ledger. That seems rather classy, and the video still has over 22,000 plays so far. “This is a pretty meaningful exclusive for us,” MySpace’s VP of Global Communication, Dani Dudeck, tells us.
You can find the video here or below. When it’s on iTunes, proceeds from the video will go towards the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a non-profit focusing on marine wildlife conservation.
When I walk into a bar, it’s always been a dream of mine that they’ll play a theme song for me. You know, kind of like how when a batter steps up to the plate in a baseball game, he gets his own song. (Okay, really what I’m thinking is more along the lines of X’s version of “Wild Thing” playing when Ricky Vaughn takes the mound in Major League.) The problem with that is, what song do I pick? I think I know now.
Mistah F.A.B.’s “Hit Me On Twitter” is 3 minutes and 56 seconds of awesome.
Here are some choice lyrics:
“I follow you, and you follow me, we can kick it, like one of the homies.”
“What’s your government? I see your screen name. Is this really you, people playing teen games.”
“First it was BlackPlanet, then MySpace, then Facebook took over my place. Whoa, now I’m stuck on Twitter. If I see a girl then I’m gonna go get her.”
F.A.B. goes on to give shout outs in the end to Diddy, Britney (Spears, I assume), MC Hammer, Ashton Kutcher, Barack, Soulja Boy — okay fine, all of those are somewhat normal. But also included: Shout outs to Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams as “the inventors of Twitter.” (Sorry Biz Stone, he leaves you out.)
He concludes, “@MistahFAB, hit @ me.” Looking at his Twitter account, he does actually seem to use Twitter quite regularly, which is more than a lot of entertainers can say.
Over the last few months, YouTube has made it clear that it’s keen on helping its premium content partners monetize as effectively as possible — and it’s obviously having some success doing it, with the number of monetized views increasing rapidly. Today the site is launching a new feature that will give those monetization rates another boost: YouTube Promoted Video campaigns will now be able to appear on a video’s ‘watch’ page, turning the product into what’s effectively an ‘AdSense for YouTube’.
For those that aren’t famililar with the terminology YouTube uses to identify its pages and advertising products, here’s what that means. Up until now Promoted Video campaigns have been primarily shown on search result pages — I might run a campaign with “guitar” as a keyword, and when someone did a search for that term, my video would show up as a promoted result. In this sense, the program was quite similar to Google’s AdWords feature. Today, though, YouTube is going to begin showing Promoted Videos on the ‘Watch’ pages, where videos are actually shown alongside comments and related other content. Promoted videos that appear here will be matched with the content that’s already on the page, hence the AdSense comparison. Anyone running a promoted video campaign will be able to choose if they’d like to stick with the old product (displaying their video in search results) or on the Watch page.
Premium content partners will also benefit from the product — whenever a Promoted Video is matched against a piece of content they own (or that they’ve identified using Content ID), they’ll get a cut of the revenue as well.
I spoke with YouTube Product Manager Matthew Liu, who says that the addition is part of YouTube’s overarching goal of increasing the amount of money its partners can generate (the more money they make, the more content they put up — and YouTube makes more money in turn). Before now, the site has done this in a few ways: it makes it easier for partners to monetize more videos with Content ID, which lets them monetize UGC, and highlights parter content as Featured Videos, which drive more traffic by heavily promoting the videos to YouTube users. And, obviously, today’s release will let them earn revenue through yet another channel as users begin running Promoted Video campaigns against their premium content.
The global rise of Facebook is nothing less than astounding. In the month of June alone it gained 24 million unique visitors worldwide, compared to the month before, for a total of 340 million unique visitors worldwide. It is now the fourth largest site in the world, trailing only Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo sites, according to comScore (see table below). Facebook itself only officially acknowledges 250 million active registered users (but you don’t have to be a registered user to visit some Facebook pages).
In the past year, it has grown 157 percent, gaining 208 million visitors. It long ago passed its rival MySpace on a global basis, way back in April, 2008. Since then, it has passing even bigger sites on its way up. In the chart above, the blue line is Facebook. It passed Amazon back in August, 2008. eBay fell by the wayside in January, 2009. It surged past AOL sometime in February, 2009, and just last month it finally passed the Wikimedia Foundation sites (which includes Wikipedia).
So there it stands at No. 4. It will be a while, if ever, before it catches up to the three world leaders: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. They each have between 240 million and 500 million more monthly global unique visitors than Facebook (see chart below). But it’s always good for a company to have stretch goals.
In the U.S., Facebook had 77 million unique visitors in the month of June, making it the sixth largest site in the U.S. (after Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and all Fox Interactive Media sites combined).
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Delicious was once one of the hottest social sites on the Internet. That’s why Yahoo bought it in 2005. But it’s weird now to even think about it as a social site, I get more of the utilitarian vibe from it these days. People still use it, but it’s more of a repository. Or, to put it another way, it’s where links go to die.
Contrast that with services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed where people are sharing and re-sharing links all over the place, and having conversations about the content, making it feel alive. And that’s what Yahoo wants to tap into now, with another revamping of Delicious. And not surprisingly, this revamp is very Twitter-centric.
The biggest difference is that the main Delicious homepage is now an area called “Fresh Bookmarks.” Previously, the main page contained the most popular bookmarked pages on the site, but that is now relagated to the second tab. This redesign is all about freshness, which is to say real-time-ness. Delicious looks at and refreshes this list of links every minute or so based on what people are bookmarking and what they’re tweeting. This model, while flawed (I’ll get to that), does make the main page of Delicious more interesting.
“Design” is the most popular tag on Delicious, according to Yahoo, and that meant a “Popular Bookmarks” area that was dominated by things like “200+ Paper Brushes For Photoshop.” For some people, that is useful, but for at least just as many, those types of links are not useful in the least bit. The redesign is an effort to move away from that.
One problem I see with this Fresh Bookmarks area is that the tweets it uses in its equation, often don’t have anything to do with the content being linked to. Yahoo did this on purpose, noting that some 81% of tweets don’t contain URLs, and they still wanted to use data from the most amount of tweets to populate this area. So instead they use keywords in tweets, but this often results in tweets populated below the shared content that have absolutely nothing to do with it.
And on top of this new Fresh Bookmarks area, when you bookmark things, Delicious now allows you to also tweet your links out at the same time. This should be useful to people who want to save stuff for later, but also want to let others know about it. You can also easily email links to people, and send them to your Delicious contacts. This is all done through the bookmarklet.
And the search aspect of Delcious has been completely revamped as well, making it easier for power users to dig through things they’ve bookmarked in the past. The new search area also features rich content, so if someone shares a YouTube video, you can play it inline. The same is true with Flickr images.
All of that is great, the problem is that it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Delicious has long just been about saving links and not about sharing them like many of the new, more versatile social sharing services out there. If Yahoo wanted to tie the product into Twitter, it should have done that months ago, to get ahead of the curve, rather than at the back of it.
The problem now is that there are plenty of other services people are already using to share stuff on Twitter. Most people still just paste links right into the update box, and Twitter uses Bit.ly to shorten them. This is allowing Bit.ly to collect a huge amount of data about what people are sharing — something which it could use soon to take on Digg and Delicious.
And on the bookmarking side of things, the trend seems to be towards simple. Mike likes a service called Pinboard, I’ve long been a fan of Instapaper. Both require less effort to use than Delicious, and are quicker.
But you don’t have to take our word for the downsides of this new Twitterification of Delicious, just listen to its founder, Joshua Schachter (who left Yahoo last year, to go work for Google). He’s not even waiting for the embargo to lift on these new changes, he’s just ripping them left and right. First, he notes:
I can’t BELIEVE delicious delicious did integration with other social networks before finishing with its own. sigh
I continue to be amazed at how companies are starting to use Twitter in a professional way (see for example my profile on Best Buy’s efforts with @Twelpforce). Another case in point: RealEstate.com is today launching the beta version of @Housewatch, a Twitter bot that can instantly deliver statistics and information to home buyers, sellers and agents who use the social networking service.
Here’s how it works: you follow the (protected) account, and as soon as the bot follows you back you can use a variety of commands through direct messages sent to the account. RealEstate.com’s Housewatch can respond to simple commands to automatically deliver data on everything from median home values to neighborhood crime statistics and monthly mortgage calculations. To get an overview of which commands are supported, you can DM the word ‘commands’ to the bot, but here’s the full list:
Stats - median home price (by city) Value - home value (by address) Income - median, per capita and median disposable income (by city) Weather - monthly high and low temperatures (by city) Demographics - population count and density (by city) Cost - cost of living including local sales tax and a ranking of household expenses based on an average of 100 (by city) Transportation - median travel time to work in minutes, and average use of public transportation (by city) Environmental - air pollution and ozone indices based on an average of 100 (by city) Crime - total, personal and property crime rankings, based on an average of 100 (by city) Fixed - monthly loan payments including insurance and taxes Equity - amount of home equity using current value minus outstanding mortgage balances Amort - full amortization schedule including monthly payment, total interest paid and total amount paid over the lifetime of the loan
Information sent in response to most of these commands will evidently include a link to more comprehensive information found on the RealEstate.com website, but the company has humans on Twitter who can guide people looking for more info as well (Dennis Kuntz aka @RealTweet). Ironically, Kuntz appears to be on holiday so the automated responses will have to do for the moment.
All in all, it’s pretty cool way to get access to this type of information from RealEstate.com, even if I’m not sure how many people exactly will be using it, unless they’re die-hard Twitter fans who refuse to simply visit the website and also happen to be looking for a house while tweeting.
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Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pitango Venture Capital are pouring more capital into WeFi, operator of a global, community-based network of WiFi hotspots, in an undisclosed Series B round of funding and following an earlier round by both investors secured back in May 2007. The follow-up financing was provided to support WeFi's business and financial needs, and according to the release is being allocated toward expanding development, marketing efforts, and strengthening unspecified partnerships.
The WeFi community so far has mapped over 30 million WiFi access points, and counting. Next to this directory and the community formed around it, the startup boasts a free software program that allows users to automatically connect to WiFi locations wherever they are. The tool, which was previously only available for Windows and Mac users, is increasingly finding its way to mobile devices, which makes a lot of sense. More specifically, the company has recently introduced applications for the Windows Mobile, Android and Symbian platform.
Additionally, WeFi recently announced the launch of WeROK, a mobile entertainment / communications portal as well as the opening of WeFiApps, a WiFi powered app store for mobile tools.
WeFi was established in February 2006 by Yossi Vardi, Tamir Scherzer, Arnon Kohavi and Shimon Scherzer, and is incorporated in Delaware, U.S. with R&D facilities in Israel.
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Sure you're not going to make a Hatori Hanzo sword - yet - but Shapeways, a 3D fabrication service, has just announced stainless steel printing, allowing you to make steel objects as easily as you would made resin or plastic prototypes. That's right: something that took our ancient ancestors generations to perfect is now available to anyone with a CAD/CAM program and some Red Bull.
Ginipic is a nice desktop application that allows you to crawl a host of photo sharing services as well as your own machine for pictures, making it a close to ideal image search tool. Can’t believe it took me so long to discover it (Orli was quicker than me).
It’s basically a tool that you can dock on your desktop and use whenever you’re in need of imagery (which obviously applies to us here at TechCrunch quite often). Simply select a source (local pictures, Flickr, Photobucket, Google, Bing, etc.) and enter a search term, and the tool returns a nice canvas-view of the results. If you want, you can filter down based on file size, data, width, height, weight etc. until you find what you’re looking for.
When you click through to a result, Ginipic (gotta love that name) shows you a preview of the picture. You can then favorite it, share it on your usual social networks, set it as your desktop background, save it to disk or a built-in lightbox that contains your desired selection of pictures. All your searches are saved so you can go back to your history quite easily, and I completely dig the fact that you can easily drag and drop pictures from results to the desktop or other applications. Only thing missing I can think of is a basic, built-in photo editor that would enable me to crop and resize images without leaving the app. Otherwise, it’s all good.
You wouldn’t tell from the design and smoothness of the feature-packed application, but it’s the work of a startup that completely bootstrapped the whole thing. The Israeli company, currently only 3 employees strong, did inform me that they’re currently initiating talks with potential investors and hope to raise some seed funding soon. CEO Lior Weinstein tells me there’s a revenue stream they can tap into (besides offering a paid ‘pro’ version): some parties have already approached the young startup to see if they could get a company-branded version of its software.
One note regarding software requirements though: Ginipic currently only works on Windows computers with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installed. A Mac version should be available ‘in the near future’.
If you can, try it out and let us know what you think.
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Has European music startup Spotify finally figured out the online music business? Some big investors seem to think so. Rumors surfaced today that the company is raising a new round of financing of $50 million or so, at valuation of $250 million. We’ve confirmed those rumors from a source close to the company, and have uncovered lots more information about the secretive startup.
First, we’ve confirmed that Asian investor Li Ka-Shing, who invested in Facebook in 2007, will invest in this round, as will a yet to be finalized venture firm. Also, data on previous financings was not completely accurate. Last October there were rumors that the company had raised €15.3 million from Northzone Ventures and Creandum at a €71.6 million pre-money valuation.
In fact, that round was closer to €20 million, and included investments from the big music labels - Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music Group. All of the labels, says our source, paid the same price for the stock that the venture capitalists did, other than one label that got in very early. That deal valued the company at €100 million, and secured (as much as possible) the long term support of the big music labels.
The new financing will bring in new “strategic” investors, which include rights holders in other geographic locations, according to our source. And while new investors are balking at the $250 million valuation, strong demand from venture capitalists is supposedly driving this deal to a close.
The company has yet to launch in the U.S., but boasts 2 million UK users, its biggest market. They are also launched in Germany and Sweden. Users can listen to music for free on a downloaded application with advertising, or pay a premium fee to remove the ads. Some labels are supposedly making more money now from Spotify than iTunes in the markets the service is available.
Keep an eye on this company. And let’s hope it launches in the U.S. soon.
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iLike is launching a new iPhone application today that takes advantage of the iPhone 3.0 update’s new features in some of the best ways that we’ve seen yet. Dubbed “Local Concerts”, the application lets you follow any artist you’d like and receive alerts whenever they announce that they’re coming to a local venue. For anyone who has ever tried to keep tabs on their local music scene, this is going to be a must-have. You can grab the free app here.
Using the app is pretty straightforward: it allows you to view all venues in your area, with concert listings for events that are going on in the near future or further down the line. But it also includes a number of nifty features that the iPhone didn’t previously support. One of these is automated personalization — the application can look at your iPhone or iPod Touch’s library, and determine which artists you should probably be following (though you’re free to adjust the list on your own). Once you’ve found a concert you’d like to attend, the app includes links to sites where you can purchase tickets. Whenever you’ve got an alert, you’ll see a message pop up on your iPhone (much like an SMS message would) regardless of if you have the application open.
Now, iLike has previously offered a more basic application on the iPhone but it was much more basic — if you forgot to check the application manually, you wouldn’t know that your band was coming to town or their tickets were about to go on sale. And the old app didn’t have the automatic artist detection, either.
The one thing I wish the app did have was an option to not only determine which artists you’d like to follow based on their appearance in your music library, but also to take into account the number of times you actually listen to those artists. Obviously this would make things a bit more complicated, but there are plenty of artists I have on my iPhone simply because I feel obligated to fill the device’s storage space to the brim. In any case, iLike’s current suggestion system will be plenty helpful for most people. You can see it in action in the video embed below.
Alongside today’s launch, iLike is also releasing some of the initial stats for its custom iPhone app platform, which it launched in May. Over 250 artists have now used the platform to build their own applications, including Reba McEntire, Ingrid Michaelson, and Rusted Root. The applications allow artists to build rich iPhone apps — including music, video, concert listings, and Twitter feeds — with a minimum of effort It also taps into iLike’s syndication platform, which means content can be delivered to iLike’s 50 million fans easily.
iLike’s Local Concert Demo
iLike’s Artist Platform Demo
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Let’s start off by saying the clip below, taken from the new Adam Sandler movie Funny People, is NSFW. So don’t click it if you don’t want to deal with a lot of swearing. About Facebook.
And apologies for the atrocious quality. The studio said it would takes weeks or something to get all the signoffs for approval, so we just found the movie on the interwebs and used that. In other words, watch this ASAP before it’s taken down, because it’s highly unlikely the studio will simply put up a bunch of ads on YouTube and realize this is great viral marketing for the movie.
Yesterday I showed a clip from the movie showing Seth Rogen asking "I wonder if Tom and Craig from Craigslist would ever get in a fight….Who's tougher? Tom has more friends…Craig has weirder friends though. Craig has friends that are willing to do a lot more for cash, I'll say that."
But the really shocking stuff were the "f**ck Facebook, In the Face" comments. Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and, yes James Taylor all say it. Plus a lot of other quips, like MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson asking Sandler “Do you actually use MySpace?” Sandler replies “No, no no. I f*ck girls, Tom. I don’t have time for that.”
In all there’s about 5 solid minutes of MySpace footage, most of which is shot in front of a big MySpace logo on the stage.
Interesting use of the brand. I’m not sure I would have gone in that direction.
See the movie though. Best one this summer so far after Star Trek.
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Social recruitment service KODA.us has just raised $1 million in funding from a group of private angel investors, bringing the total of seed investment injected into the San Francisco startup to $3 million.
KODA.us essentially wants to bring social networking and job recruiting together into one unified service, which it claims is “more professional than Facebook but more personal than LinkedIn”.
The idea is that by broadening the resume job seekers can submit or upload with personal attributes and relevant life experience, employers could get more extensive information about potential candidates based on profiles that are more personal than those usually found on traditional recruitment sites. On the other hand, KODA wants to give employers themselves the opportunity to portray job openings within the context of organizational branding, so that potential job candidates can get a feel of the corporate culture within companies before actually applying.
The site has only been in beta for two months after being in the making for the past two years. Jeff Berger, Co-Founder and CEO of KODA explains why he thinks traditional job boards are not cutting it anymore:
"Using a job board is like searching for a needle in a haystack. KODA gives you more needles, less haystack, and we've developed proprietary technology that facilitates a smoother recruitment process for both candidates and employers."
I’m not so sure online job boards are that unsatisfactory at all, and this isn’t the first service to try and marry social networking with online recruiting. So far, I haven’t seen too many of those ventures get any significant traction, and I honestly think LinkedIn, XING and other comparable professionally-oriented social networks do a fine job with the recruitment part of the equation, even within the target group KODA is eying (GenY’ers).
That said, KODA says it’s seeing increasing traction even while it’s only been in beta for a short while, claiming it has established relationships with over 350 corporations, non-profit organizations and private businesses and already featuring thousands of job opportunities in various U.S. cities and regions. The main reason it has achieved the latter is that its crawler can pull up-to-date job listings directly from employers' websites and put them on display on KODA.us.
I’m skeptical about KODA’s ability to make waves in this space. Your take?
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
It must be disconcerting to a big Internet company to shut down a whole website and nobody even notices. Not even a short note on Twitter from a concerned user until now. But that’s what apparently happened.
At some point Yahoo shut down Bix, a karaoke and contest website that they acquired in late 2006. Yes, at some point in 2006 someone at Yahoo said “Karaoke? Contests? We gotta own that!”
Six days ago at least it was still up and running at bix.yahoo.com. Now that just redirects to m.www.yahoo.com.
We first wrote about Bix in July 2006 and then again in August 2006. The company had raised $6.77 million from Sutter Hill Ventures, Trinity, and others prior to the acquisition.
If anyone knows when exactly this shut down, we want to know. It at least needs a proper burial before dropping into the deadpool. We’ve also got an email in to Yahoo PR.
Bill.com has closed an $8.5 million funding round led by August Capital, with previous investors DCM and Emergence Capital also participating in the round. As part of the deal, August Capital’s David Hornik will be joining Bill.com’s board. Bill.com has now raised a total of $17 million.
Bill.com looks to help businesses streamline the convoluted processes that are often involved in paying bills at large companies. Unlike your typical personal bill payments, which simply require hopping onto your bank’s website and transferring funds, large busineses typically have fairly complex approval processes in place before a bill gets paid: various managers have to sign off on the bills, and then they have to get sent to the finance department that handles the actual payments. Even worse, most businesses still use inefficient paper documents throughout the process.
Bill.com takes the process digital. To use it, you fax your bills to a specified phone number (any bills that come in digitally can simply be Emailed into the service). Bill.com automatically scans the document, and lets you Email it to anyone who needs to sign off on the bill before it is paid (mangers click a special link to indicate they approve). Once everyone has signed off, the finance department can use Bill.com’s payment system to make the actual transactions. The service uses OCR to archive all documents for later searching. And while the service caters in part directly to businesses, Bill.com also appeals to accounting firms, as it can streamline the way they process their clients’ bills.
Bill.com charges a base fee of $24.99 a month for one user, with each additional user running $9.99 (there’s also a small fee associated with each check payment). It’s hard to gauge just how much money companies are saving in terms of time saved using the system, but VP Marketing Jeff Schultz says that companies are reporting upwards of 50% deductions in the amount of time taken to pay bills.
Bill.com was founded by René Lacerte, an entrepreneur who has proven he knows what he’s doing in this space — he previously founded online payroll service PayCycle, which was just acquired last month by Intuit for $170 million.
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Revision3’s PR firm is urging me to write about the upcoming Diggnation episode being filmed in at the Palms Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas with Kevin Rose and Ashton Kutcher. And I aim to please. But what I can’t figure out is, how do projects with Ashton Kutcher like this and the disastrous 24HoursAtSundance earlier this year help Digg find relevance in today’s world?
Sure, Kevin gets to hang out with the Hollywood crowd and become BFF with Ashton. And yes, I’m somewhat interested in hearing all about “Ashton Kutcher’s Web 2.0 Strategy,” as pitched to me in the email (in the same way that I can’t not look at accidents as I drive by). But none of the story ideas pitched to us (Ashton and Kevin: Why Traditional Hollywood cares about Unconventional Silicon Valley, How mainstream consumer products are merging with new media, Why Ashton thought it was important, in fact, critical to reach Diggnation's audience), along with “exclusive access” to Kevin and Ashton, really interest me. What I really want to know is this:
Why is Kevin Rose screwing around in Las Vegas with a movie star when a fricking URL redirect service is preparing to eat their lunch?
Digg isn’t the shiny new startup that it once was. Twitter has almost twice the audience that Digg has (45 million v. 24 million worldwide uniques in June according to Comscore). As recently as March Twitter was still smaller than Digg. Now, it’s not even close.
Digg’s product needs serious attention from Kevin. The recent DiggBar changes that enraged users caught Kevin off guard because he was on vacation in China and didn’t know what was happening. He needs to pay attention. Or else relinquish his control of the Digg product to someone else who’ll pay attention.
The next six months are critical for Digg. They are rolling out a new real time product to try to compete with Bit.ly and Twitter. It seems to me that Digg’s investors would be happier if he were working on that, instead of partying in Vegas with the guy from Dude, Where’s My Car?
That being said, I still can’t wait to hear Kutcher’s Web 2.0 strategy and his advice on “merging the worlds of mainstream entertainment and new mediums like Internet Television.”
Update: Kevin Rose response in comments below:
Mike, I set aside two days a month to shoot episodes of diggnation (this has been the routine for the last 4yrs), and we shoot several live shows per year. Without a doubt the podcast has proven to be a great tool to spread the word.
Sorry about the strange pitch from the PR agency.
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Let’s start off by saying the clip below, taken from the new Adam Sandler movie 
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Revision3’s PR firm is urging me to write about the upcoming 
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