Saturday, October 13, 2007
Tales From The Deadpool: Amp’d Mobile’s Sordid Remain
This is a New York real-estate story and one of marketing excess. It’s about Amp’d Mobile, the too-hip-for-its-own-good virtual mobile carrier that filed for bankruptcy last June after burning through $360 million in capital. A lot of that money was spent on things like MTV ads to attract 175,000 young, urban customers. The problem was that nearly half of them turned out to be unable to pay their bills.
Today, a company called VoodooVox, which I wrote about last week, occupies Amp’d Mobile’s former posh offices on Union Square in Manhattan, complete with a massive terrace overlooking the city. VoodooVox CEO Scott Hamilton was able to acquire the space and it’s custom-built contents “by feeding on the corpse of Amp’d,” as he so delicately puts it. For $16,000 at bankruptcy court, he was able to to get a couple hundred thousand dollars worth (his estimate) of furniture and other surplus.
As Hamilton was cleaning out the desks and filing cabinets, he came across some of those excesses in the form of marketing schwag—like condoms stamped with the unfortunate tagline, “Try not to die.” Little did the Amp’d marketing genius who came up with that line know that the expiration dates on the condoms would outlast the company.
Hamilton also found a closet full of Amp’d fleece jackets. Maybe he should send those to all the investors who pumped money into Amp’d and themselves got fleeced in the process.
Today, a company called VoodooVox, which I wrote about last week, occupies Amp’d Mobile’s former posh offices on Union Square in Manhattan, complete with a massive terrace overlooking the city. VoodooVox CEO Scott Hamilton was able to acquire the space and it’s custom-built contents “by feeding on the corpse of Amp’d,” as he so delicately puts it. For $16,000 at bankruptcy court, he was able to to get a couple hundred thousand dollars worth (his estimate) of furniture and other surplus.
As Hamilton was cleaning out the desks and filing cabinets, he came across some of those excesses in the form of marketing schwag—like condoms stamped with the unfortunate tagline, “Try not to die.” Little did the Amp’d marketing genius who came up with that line know that the expiration dates on the condoms would outlast the company.
Hamilton also found a closet full of Amp’d fleece jackets. Maybe he should send those to all the investors who pumped money into Amp’d and themselves got fleeced in the process.
Labels: Deadpool: Amp’d, Google, Junkies, Lame Sales Front, Mobile’s, Remain, Sordid, Tales From, The, Yahoo
Windows Live Adds Events to Its Roster
Over the next few days, Microsoft will be rolling out a new service called Windows Live Events, which will be a customized version of Windows Live Spaces for organizing events and sharing memories among participants. (The link above may redirect to Windows Live Spaces for some people, as the roll-out of the service will be gradual across different geographies). Windows Live Spaces is, of course, Microsoft’s family-friendly answer to MySpace—and it’s not doing badly, drawing 100 million unique visitors and 2.5 billion page views a month, according to Microsoft.
Windows Live Events is an attempt to carve out a specific niche for for Windows Live Spaces around events. It’s like Evite with a little social-networking fairy dust sprinkled on top. You can manage invitations and RSVPs for a party, wedding, or any other event by setting up an invite list and sending out a mass e-mail with a link back to your Windows Live Event site. All the event details are also available as an RSS feed, making it easy to export the information. On the site itself you can post information about the event, but it is also a place where attendees are encouraged to come back to share their photos, videos, or blog posts after the fact.
Thus, every event big or small can have its own social Website. “We want it to be a place where people can share their memories and stories after an event,” says Windows Live group product manager Jay Fluegel. Your guests always take better pictures than you at your kid’s birthday party. Now they have an easy way to share those pictures with everyone who was there.
As with Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live Events is very customizable. You can change the color, fonts, background, and play with the design and different features on the site, including adding discussion boards, blog posts, and photo- and video-sharing modules. You can also take your pick from the assorted gadgets (aka widgets) available in the Windows Live gallery. For instance, you could add a countdown-to-the-birth gadget for a baby shower or an Amazon wish list for a birthday party.
Here is Microsoft’s official blog post about the service. Microsoft keeps dribbling out these Live services. Some are unremarkable, and some are solid improvements over Microsoft’s current offerings. People who live on Facebook or MySpace probably won’t flock to this service. They will manage their events where their friends already hang out online. But for everyone else, especially families, I can see this gaining some traction. Expect Microsoft to launch more Live services before the year is out.
picture-226.png
Windows Live Events is an attempt to carve out a specific niche for for Windows Live Spaces around events. It’s like Evite with a little social-networking fairy dust sprinkled on top. You can manage invitations and RSVPs for a party, wedding, or any other event by setting up an invite list and sending out a mass e-mail with a link back to your Windows Live Event site. All the event details are also available as an RSS feed, making it easy to export the information. On the site itself you can post information about the event, but it is also a place where attendees are encouraged to come back to share their photos, videos, or blog posts after the fact.
Thus, every event big or small can have its own social Website. “We want it to be a place where people can share their memories and stories after an event,” says Windows Live group product manager Jay Fluegel. Your guests always take better pictures than you at your kid’s birthday party. Now they have an easy way to share those pictures with everyone who was there.
As with Windows Live Spaces, Windows Live Events is very customizable. You can change the color, fonts, background, and play with the design and different features on the site, including adding discussion boards, blog posts, and photo- and video-sharing modules. You can also take your pick from the assorted gadgets (aka widgets) available in the Windows Live gallery. For instance, you could add a countdown-to-the-birth gadget for a baby shower or an Amazon wish list for a birthday party.
Here is Microsoft’s official blog post about the service. Microsoft keeps dribbling out these Live services. Some are unremarkable, and some are solid improvements over Microsoft’s current offerings. People who live on Facebook or MySpace probably won’t flock to this service. They will manage their events where their friends already hang out online. But for everyone else, especially families, I can see this gaining some traction. Expect Microsoft to launch more Live services before the year is out.
picture-226.png
Labels: Adds, Events, Google, Its, Live, Roster, To, Windows, Yahoo
DivShare Upgrades its One-stop shop Free File Hosting Service
When it comes to decide where and how to host your files on the web you ask yourself two main questions: Are you ready to pay for it? What is the best service for a the type of file you need. File hosting/sharing is a totally crowded space with both vertical solutions (think Flickr or PhotoBucket for pictures, Scribd or SlideShare for documents, YouTube for videos) and horizontal solutions (RapidShare, MediaFire, YouSendit, Megaupload,…). Most of those services stop being free when you need extra space or extra bandwith. Honestly it is really hard to find out your way in the jungle. But if you are a heavy user or are only interested in hosting and controling sharing options you might want to consider a one-Stop shop like DivShare that has been here a for few months. They are starting to release today a series of innovations that will make the service more unique and attractive.
The whole service is now providing a one-stop solution that will save users the download process, whatever the format of the file is. They offer free unlimited hosting and convert to flash nearly every file type (audio, video, office documents,..) instantly upon uploading with embedding capabilities. This is different from a company like Wixi which is built around a social network and where files are indexed and shared. They have built a universal flash player that makes the access and viewing easy and save you the download process (here is an example).
They are also rolling out a new iPhone and Facebook application as well as an API as of next week. With the iPhone app you’ll be able to view and email easily all your documents. The Facebook application “Projects by DivShare” enables students to create a special wall to add and view documents within Facebook.
They will rollout on Tuesday an API that enables any site including social networks to outsource for their hosting capabilities for any kind of file. Divshare has a premium option that enables you to rebrand totally your player (see below an example). I am not sure what is the level of SLA guaranteed by DivShare but this is a ground explored already by Amazon with S3 and EC2. The difference being that DivShare will be free and will provide viewing capabilities. If you want to rebrand the appearance then you will have to pay and become a DivShare Direct customer.
You can argue that some of those features can be found here and there. And their new player looks a lot like the one Docstoc is offering (for office documents only). But the blend of features and the free unlimited hosting makes it a good option. Will they be able to keep that promise as the service grows specially with a model based on advertising only? Time will tell and the challenge will not be simple.
DivShare has been my personal favourite for a long time and those improvements will help me stick to my judgement. If you guys are blogger they have a great plug-in for file uploading and hosting too. They officially launched in December 06 have over three million monthly visitors worldwide, and 150,000 registered users. The company based in Cupertino, California, has only four employees and is self-funded but is planning to take outside funding.
CenterNetworks has an interview of the co-founder David Altschul back in February
The whole service is now providing a one-stop solution that will save users the download process, whatever the format of the file is. They offer free unlimited hosting and convert to flash nearly every file type (audio, video, office documents,..) instantly upon uploading with embedding capabilities. This is different from a company like Wixi which is built around a social network and where files are indexed and shared. They have built a universal flash player that makes the access and viewing easy and save you the download process (here is an example).
They are also rolling out a new iPhone and Facebook application as well as an API as of next week. With the iPhone app you’ll be able to view and email easily all your documents. The Facebook application “Projects by DivShare” enables students to create a special wall to add and view documents within Facebook.
They will rollout on Tuesday an API that enables any site including social networks to outsource for their hosting capabilities for any kind of file. Divshare has a premium option that enables you to rebrand totally your player (see below an example). I am not sure what is the level of SLA guaranteed by DivShare but this is a ground explored already by Amazon with S3 and EC2. The difference being that DivShare will be free and will provide viewing capabilities. If you want to rebrand the appearance then you will have to pay and become a DivShare Direct customer.
You can argue that some of those features can be found here and there. And their new player looks a lot like the one Docstoc is offering (for office documents only). But the blend of features and the free unlimited hosting makes it a good option. Will they be able to keep that promise as the service grows specially with a model based on advertising only? Time will tell and the challenge will not be simple.
DivShare has been my personal favourite for a long time and those improvements will help me stick to my judgement. If you guys are blogger they have a great plug-in for file uploading and hosting too. They officially launched in December 06 have over three million monthly visitors worldwide, and 150,000 registered users. The company based in Cupertino, California, has only four employees and is self-funded but is planning to take outside funding.
CenterNetworks has an interview of the co-founder David Altschul back in February
Labels: DivShare Upgrades, File, Free, Google, Hosting, Its, One-stop, Service, Shop, Yahoo
Friday, October 12, 2007
eXpresso Gets $2 Million To Grow An Online Office Suite
eXpresso is an online collaboration tool around Excel spreadsheets. While a bit late to the game, they have plans to expand to other productivity tools as well. They will be announcing a new $2 million round of financing from Novus and Rocket Ventures on Monday, with the target of raising another $2 million soon. This is on top another couple million they’ve made off the sale of their original product, Smart DB, to Rocket Software (no relation to the venture group). The money will be put towards expanding their current Excel product and building a online Powerpoint application due out next Summer as well.
However, eXpresso isn’t the usual AJAX online spreadsheet competitor. Rather, it’s a series of collaboration tools and back-end database secret sauce wrapped around Microsoft’s own online spreadsheet editor, Microsoft Excel Web Component. This avoids a lot of the compatibility issues faced by other editors when they try to import Excel documents on to their platforms. The company seems oddly positioned by leaning heavily on Microsoft’s technology, but CEO George Langan assures me that they can continue to develop the component without Microsoft’s support and have a great deal of patented IP in the database system they run on. Microsoft has abandoned the technology themselves, announcing an end to development of the Office Web Components. Instead, they are focusing on developing new technologies around Microsoft Sharepoint.
The spreadsheet editor works smoothly, provides a familiar interface, and exposes a great deal of Excel’s desktop functionality online. You can edit cells, add formulas, sort, filter, and format. Google and Zoho have been aggressively adding a lot of these features themselves, but support auto-fill and charts as well. They also offer more applications. You can create a new file from within the program or sync one directly from Excel using their plug-in. eXpresso also offers file permissions (down to cell ranges), enables real time chat, and file management (version control, spreadsheet comparison). It’s currently free in beta, but will cost $10 or less per seat when it’s finally released into production.
However, eXpresso isn’t the usual AJAX online spreadsheet competitor. Rather, it’s a series of collaboration tools and back-end database secret sauce wrapped around Microsoft’s own online spreadsheet editor, Microsoft Excel Web Component. This avoids a lot of the compatibility issues faced by other editors when they try to import Excel documents on to their platforms. The company seems oddly positioned by leaning heavily on Microsoft’s technology, but CEO George Langan assures me that they can continue to develop the component without Microsoft’s support and have a great deal of patented IP in the database system they run on. Microsoft has abandoned the technology themselves, announcing an end to development of the Office Web Components. Instead, they are focusing on developing new technologies around Microsoft Sharepoint.
The spreadsheet editor works smoothly, provides a familiar interface, and exposes a great deal of Excel’s desktop functionality online. You can edit cells, add formulas, sort, filter, and format. Google and Zoho have been aggressively adding a lot of these features themselves, but support auto-fill and charts as well. They also offer more applications. You can create a new file from within the program or sync one directly from Excel using their plug-in. eXpresso also offers file permissions (down to cell ranges), enables real time chat, and file management (version control, spreadsheet comparison). It’s currently free in beta, but will cost $10 or less per seat when it’s finally released into production.
Labels: An Online, eXpresso, Gets $2 Million To, Google, Groupsites, Grow, Office, Suite
Friday, October 5, 2007
Microsoft Beats Google To Online Health Records With HealthVault
It’s not often that Microsoft gets the drop on Google. But today it launched HealthVault in beta, a free online repository where anyone can keep their personal health records. Meanwhile, Google Health has yet to launch, having recently lost its leader Adam Bosworth.
With HealthVault, you can import your health records from your doctors, hospitals, labs, prescription drug plans, and other healthcare providers. You can also type them in yourself, or upload data from personal health monitoring devices such as glucose or blood-pressure monitors. The site also incorporates a health-specific search engine like Healthline’s (here is the results page for “glucose“), and lets you save your searches. Microsoft plans to make money through health-related search ads, but says it won’t target those ads to any personal data in someone’s stored medical record. Access to the site will require a Windows Live ID and a password that you can share with healthcare providers. Patient privacy will obviously be a major concern here, and fears of compromising it will likely be the biggest hurdle to adoption among both consumers and their doctors.
But it is worth trying to overcome that hurdle. Getting people to embrace digital personal health records is a Holy Grail for both the healthcare and technology industries. By making health records accessible on the Web to both patients and their doctors, better tracking of medical conditions and quicker responses to changes in those conditions could yield vast improvements in healthcare outcomes. Dangerous symptoms could be spotted earlier by doctors, while at the same time patients would have the information necessary to better take care of themselves. A shift to widespread use of online personal health records is the first step needed to change the focus of the healthcare system from one of constantly treating full-blown ailments to preventing them in the first place.
With HealthVault, you can import your health records from your doctors, hospitals, labs, prescription drug plans, and other healthcare providers. You can also type them in yourself, or upload data from personal health monitoring devices such as glucose or blood-pressure monitors. The site also incorporates a health-specific search engine like Healthline’s (here is the results page for “glucose“), and lets you save your searches. Microsoft plans to make money through health-related search ads, but says it won’t target those ads to any personal data in someone’s stored medical record. Access to the site will require a Windows Live ID and a password that you can share with healthcare providers. Patient privacy will obviously be a major concern here, and fears of compromising it will likely be the biggest hurdle to adoption among both consumers and their doctors.
But it is worth trying to overcome that hurdle. Getting people to embrace digital personal health records is a Holy Grail for both the healthcare and technology industries. By making health records accessible on the Web to both patients and their doctors, better tracking of medical conditions and quicker responses to changes in those conditions could yield vast improvements in healthcare outcomes. Dangerous symptoms could be spotted earlier by doctors, while at the same time patients would have the information necessary to better take care of themselves. A shift to widespread use of online personal health records is the first step needed to change the focus of the healthcare system from one of constantly treating full-blown ailments to preventing them in the first place.
Labels: Google, Health, HealthVault, Microsoft Beats Google, Records With, To Online
The Next Internet Millionaire: Inspired Programming Or Lame Sales Front
Snap Shots Options [Make this Shot larger] [Close]
Options
Disable
Search
Put Snap Shots on Google
Close
TechCrunch
* Forum
* About
* Contact
* Company Index
* Advertise
* Archives
* Toolbar
* Cool Jobs
* TC40
* Subscribe Techcrunch posts
* Subscribe by Email
* Subscriber count
* stumblecrunch.png
October 5
Stixy: Free-Form Collaboration and File Sharing Spaces
Mark Hendrickson
3 comments »
The internet ought to have made it dead simple to share files long ago. But for some reason, I still scratch my head every time I want to send a batch of photos or a collection of documents to a non-technical friend without resorting to email (which is not a dead simple solution in my book).
That’s why I get excited when I see companies like Stixy attempting to make file sharing not only as easy as it should be, but more pleasurable and intuitive along the way.
Stixy’s underlying concept is simple, and one that we have seen elsewhere in different forms: provide a desktop-like space in the browser where you can upload and share files. We recently gave out a batch of invitations to another new service, Wixi, that does this very thing.
Stixy provides a “free-form” area to drop your files, but it’s also very much like PikiWiki in the sense that it doesn’t settle for simple desktop icons. The files and other items placed in a Stixy workspace are more expressive. For example, photo files are displayed as small versions of themselves and sticky notes can be stuck anywhere. Therefore, Stixy is less like a traditional operating system desktop and more like a bulletin board.
The ability to access and interact with elements in a Stixy workplace (whether they be files or other widgets) is not yet very extensive. Currently, you can add only four element types to a workplace: sticky notes, photos, documents, and to-do notes. Both types of notes are pretty simple widgets and documents are displayed as simple icons. But there is a lot of potential for Stixy to expand the collection of widgets (and perhaps eventually create an open platform for widget development) as well as to improve the current widgets so they are more interactive. It would be great to be able to preview Word documents and PDFs in the bulletin board environment instead of downloading a local copy or opening them in another window. The same thing goes for video and audio files.
Despite the usefulness of the free-form workspace for files, it would also be great to see a more traditional file system view built into Stixy as an option for when I want to sort quickly through a bunch of files stored in the system. Currently, you wouldn’t want to add more than a couple dozen elements to Stixy because it would get too crowded. If Stixy were to develop more standard file views (as an alternative, mind you), it would be moving in the direction of a Web OS while remaining cognizant of the fact that preview functionality is paramount in an online storage environment (people don’t want to download a file each time they want to check it out).
It is important to keep in mind that Stixy is ultimately a collaboration tool (as any Web OS-like service probably should be). The company has decided to keep ownership of Stixy workspaces very simple, in fact so simple that usually there is no real ownership. If you share a “stixyboard” (it’s name for a workspace) with one or more other users, you give those users equal power over board management. Any participating user can edit any aspect of the board, and any user can delete the whole thing completely. Therefore, this is a tool for people who trust each other and not one suited for a broad social networking environment. Stixyboards can be kept entirely private, shared with other users, or opened up to the public at large (for either editing or just viewing).
Currently, Stixy has placed a 10mb cap on each file upload but no cap on total disk space usage (which will inevitably change as traffic increases). The company plans on making money from advertisements (not yet on the site) and premium memberships (also not yet available). The company is currently working on chat and messaging functionality to enhance collaboration. The ability to drag-n-drop files straight from the desktop (a la PikiWiki) is also in the works. And in the longer term, Stixy will probably feature a file versioning system along with an activity history log.
Stixy, which is based in Karlshamn, Sweden but also operates in Mill Valley, CA, launched just a couple weeks ago around the same time it exhibited in TechCrunch40’s DemoPit. I’ll be looking forward to seeing whether Stixy remains as a standalone product and/or becomes incorporated as a feature of other websites that facilitate file sharing.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
Plaxo + LinkedIn + iPhone = Brilliant
Duncan Riley
0 comments »
TechCrunch has been hard on unified address book provider Plaxo in the past, and probably with due cause, given their previous spam promoting ways, but I am now reevaluating that view based on Plaxo Sync.
I wrote about Plaxo’s improved Sync features back in June; although it sounded good I didn’t really have cause to use it then. Confronted with a “how do I sync various platforms, including the iPhone” problem I hit Google looking for a solution, and I kept finding user recommendations for Plaxo. Plaxo’s Sync tools support a variety of platforms, including Outlook, Internet Explorer (for Yahoo Address Books) Mac OSX and Thunderbird. Unfortunately they can’t sync with Gmail yet, but they can download your contacts from Gmail, although it does sync with Google Calendar.
Plaxo can also download LinkedIn contacts; LinkedIn does offer downloads/ plugins as well but nothing quite as comprehensive as Plaxo. We’ve looked recently at Facebook replacing LinkedIn as a business networking tool, however being able to access LinkedIn connections via Plaxo makes LinkedIn all that much more useful as it delivers access to LinkedIn contacts everywhere, including the iPhone (Plaxo imports into the Mac OSX address book, that can then be synced to an iPhone via iTunes).
The other selling point of Plaxo is the universal contact nature of the product; the ability for people to update their contact details on Plaxo and push that information out to other people is a definite positive.
The basic Plaxo service is free, including the sync functionality. The $49.95 upgrade adds Plaxo support (which if it works well you should never need to use) and duplication filtering. The duplicate filtering tool isn’t brilliant, it missed some duplicates on a test, but after running it a second time it found more; a handy feature but perhaps not worth the $49.95 annual fee.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
October 4
China Blocking RSS Feeds
Duncan Riley
30 comments »
china.jpgThe Chinese Government has added a blanket ban on all RSS feeds, according to a report at Ars Technica.
There has been reports previously that Feedburner feeds have been blocked, but to-date information delivered by RSS feeds has generally gone uncensored, providing Chinese viewers information that would otherwise be blocked if attempting to visit a regular webpage or blog.
A quick test of WebSitePulse’s Great Firewall testing tool indicates that no one in China will be reading this post via feed, although whether the main page of TechCrunch is blocked in open to question, WebSitePulse suggests that it’s ok, however the Great Firewall of China site says that it’s blocked.
The number of broadband internet users in China will surpass the United States within the next 12-18 months; China is fast becoming one of the most important online marketplaces in the world. Whilst some could well argue about the rights of a sovereign nation to censor content within its own borders, the more pressing issue from a Web 2.0 development and industry perspective is the use of the Firewall by the Chinese Government to unfairly block foreign competition, particularly at a time where the Chinese Government is trying to start, or is already in Free Trade Agreement negotiations with a number of countries, including Australia.
There is also some suggestion that China will enter an APEC FTA in the future: would it then be fair that online industries are either excluded from the FTA or that access rights are ignored by China under those agreements? Western Governments are still generally not focused enough on the benefits of online business in a broader economic sense, so unless there is some serious lobbying, or more understanding leadership, our industry will likely be forgotten in the clamor for mineral, industrial and agricultural trade.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
The Next Internet Millionaire: Inspired Programming Or Lame Sales Front
Duncan Riley
22 comments »
internetmillionaire.jpgThere’s been a fair bit of talk over the last month in online marketing circles about e-book salesman Joel Comm’s latest venture: The Next Internet Millionaire.
For those not familiar with Comm, his business started from he is best known for selling expensive ebooks advising people how to make money from Adsense, and then later like a lot of people operating in this space, he sold ebooks showing people how to sell ebooks or in their speak: “internet marketing.”
The Next Internet Millionaire Program itself is a straight rip-off of pretty much any Mark Burnett produced show ever made, think Survivor or The Apprentice, and comes complete with a Survivor-esque introduction, an Apprentice style expert panel, and tasks that have to be completed by the contestants. Each week one contestant goes home, until there is one survivor…sorry Internet Millionaire.
I’m not entirely sure which way to side in relation to the program. On the one hand it’s slickly produced and some of the expert advice is worth watching, particularly if you’re in the ebook…sorry Internet Marketing business. Yet on the other hand you just know that the whole show is a front for Joel Comm Inc; a vehicle from which he can further expose himself to a broader audience and ultimately sell more ebooks and related products. If it works, good for him I guess, but ultimately you can be the judge. Episode Seven as follows:
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
Tailrank 2.5 Launches. It Still Falls Short
Michael Arrington
21 comments »
Tailrank founder Kevin Burton notified us that version 2.5 of his news aggregation site has launched, as well as a new version of the engine behind it called Spinn3r. We’ve taken a look at the new site, and in our opinion it still falls short of being a useful application.
We’ve been a bit harsh on Tailrank over the last few months, even suggesting that it may be time to deadpool it. But the site was without any content at all for a few weeks, and when Burton said it was fixed the site was filled with spam (Burton writes about the spam attack here).
So back to the new version…the spam is gone, but the stories are all at least a day old. Burton originally promised this release in early July. It came three months later, which is not unexpected when software is involved. But he knew that we’d be taking a critical look at the site. If his indexing engine can’t keep up with the news, how can he expect people to spend time visiting the site? We just criticized competitor shoutingmat.ch yesterday for the same problem. This is a competitive space (Techmeme is the clear leader, and there are lots of others), and anything short of perfect won’t stand a chance.
We’ll keep giving Tailrank the benefit of the doubt and hope to see it improve soon. But I’m not sure anyone else out there will do the same.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
Social Video Company, Mesmo.TV, Raises $900,000 of Series A Funding
Mark Hendrickson
4 comments »
Private Equity HUB today uncovered that Mesmo.TV, a social video bookmarking service and provider of a very popular Facebook application, has secured over half of a $900,000 round of Series A financing.
Mesmo.TV’s Davin Miyoshi informed us that Aydin Senkut’s Felicis Ventures, Mike Maples’ Maples Investments, Naval Ravikant’s The Hit Forge, and Georges Harik participated in the round.
We wrote about the launch of Mesmo.TV’s social video bookmarking tool this past July. The tool, which is found on the company’s website, allows users to rate and tag the videos that they enjoy. Mesmo.TV can then recommend videos to you and introduce you to other viewers with similar viewing habits.
This tool, however, has not turned out to be the most successful part of Mesmo.TV’s business. The company’s TV Show Trivia Facebook application, which launched in August, has garnered over 1.3 million users and over 125,000 daily unique visitors. This puts the application amongst the top 45 applications on Facebook, and made Mesmo.TV the largest TV show community on that social network.
Mesmo.TV plans to continue focusing on its social network efforts and looks forward to expanding to other networks, such as MySpace, who might open up in the near future. The company is also talking with TV networks to bring online videos to its users.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
Zipidee Wants To Be THE Marketplace For Digital Goods
Nick Gonzalez
13 comments »
zipidee_logo.pngIn 1995 eBay sold a laser pointer online and kicked off the online marketplace for selling physical goods. As networks improved in the intervening years, the idea of what can be bought and sold online has grown to include digital goods, such as music, e-books, and videos as well. Zipidee wants to be a market for those digital goods, and is expected to launch some time in the next week.
It’s by no means a new concept, there are several sites out there that trade in digital bits: Payloadz, Tradebits, e-Junkie, Lulu, Edgeio, and more. eBay already sells digital goods, with delivery often handled through these third party sites. iTunes can also sell your content, but requires an approved label if you want to get paid.
However, Zipidee will offer considerably more control over pricing and distribution than these other sites. Merchants on Zipidee will be able to create their own virtual store where they can list their digital wares for sale on the site directly or across Zipidee’s website widgets. It’s an ideal setup for anyone selling an instructional video series or their own audiobook.
zipidee_player.pngAudio and video can be uploaded to the site to be rented or bought at whatever price the creator wishes and consumed via downloads or streams. Other services often only allow downloads.
You will be able to track the sale of their good in real time and adjust the price accordingly using their analytics dashboard. Creators will also have the option of protecting their product with Zipidee’s own DRM system. DRMed goods come with a license to play the media through their web or downloadable player on any computer with your Zipidee credentials.
Zipidee will make money through a $1 listing fee (waived to start) and roughly 80/20 split of the purchase price, like Lulu (Zipidee takes a smaller cut for higher priced goods).
To start, Zipidee will focus on digitizing the kind of media now sold at conferences and trade shows as DVDs or Books. For launch, they’re digitizing materials from a series of consultants and speakers such as DreamUniversity and MightyVentures who currently sell millions of dollars in physical merchandise directly to their customers.
Yet, there’s still a big question over whether and where people will buy “long-tail” digital content. Zipidee is fighting the trend toward free digital content (wikipedia, 5 min) and people are reluctant enough to even pay for big-media’s content (most songs on iPods do not come from iTunes). There is also a question as to whether the best way to sell this content is horizontally in a single marketplace, or vertically by topic. There are a great number of digital content verticals out there already that could serve as points of sale for independently produced content (DocStoc, Scribd, Amie Street, 5 Min, Snocap). We’ll have to see how it all pans out when Zipidee launches.
zipidee_screen.png
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
Does Chess Need to be Crowdsourced?
Erick Schonfeld
41 comments »
picture-185.pngA new site that just launched today called CrowdChess aims to answer that question. You log on and sign up for a game. Each side is made up of teams of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people. Anyone on a team can suggest the next move, and the move that gets the most votes is the one that is played out. (Here are the rules. If anyone reading this ends up playing, please report back your experience in comments).
I am all for tapping into crowd intelligence, and the Web is letting us do that in very interesting ways (see Digg, Wikipedia, Threadless, Freebase, Wikinvest, Kaltura, LingoZ, ZiiTrend, etc.). But does everything need to be crowdsourced? I wonder if a group of amateurs playing CrowdChess will ever be able to beat a grandmaster (or the modern-day version of Deep Blue, for that matter)?
Or will technology, in this case, take something beautiful and destroy it. Can’t two people just sit in a room and play chess?
picture-186.png
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Web 2.0 News & Ideas |
Exclusive: Arrington Goes Nuts in “Unnecesary Force”
Erick Schonfeld
30 comments »
This just went live from JibJab. There are now two new movies in their Starring You line of animations where you can upload your head to star in the movie. Here’s one with Arrington and me called Unnecessary Force, which jibjab kindly made for us. I tried to stop him folks.
Also check out Math Camp Massacres. (For more on Starring You, check out this video).
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in TechCrunch Network |
Microsoft Beats Google To Online Health Records With HealthVault
Erick Schonfeld
39 comments »
picture-183.pngIt’s not often that Microsoft gets the drop on Google. But today it launched HealthVault in beta, a free online repository where anyone can keep their personal health records. Meanwhile, Google Health has yet to launch, having recently lost its leader Adam Bosworth.
With HealthVault, you can import your health records from your doctors, hospitals, labs, prescription drug plans, and other healthcare providers. You can also type them in yourself, or upload data from personal health monitoring devices such as glucose or blood-pressure monitors. The site also incorporates a health-specific search engine like Healthline’s (here is the results page for “glucose“), and lets you save your searches. Microsoft plans to make money through health-related search ads, but says it won’t target those ads to any personal data in someone’s stored medical record. Access to the site will require a Windows Live ID and a password that you can share with healthcare providers. Patient privacy will obviously be a major concern here, and fears of compromising it will likely be the biggest hurdle to adoption among both consumers and their doctors.
But it is worth trying to overcome that hurdle. Getting people to embrace digital personal health records is a Holy Grail for both the healthcare and technology industries. By making health records accessible on the Web to both patients and their doctors, better tracking of medical conditions and quicker responses to changes in those conditions could yield vast improvements in healthcare outcomes. Dangerous symptoms could be spotted earlier by doctors, while at the same time patients would have the information necessary to better take care of themselves. A shift to widespread use of online personal health records is the first step needed to change the focus of the healthcare system from one of constantly treating full-blown ailments to preventing them in the first place.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
« Previous Entries
TechCrunch Sponsors
EdgeioText
Want to buy text links on TechCrunch?
esports mobio participative web skitch web analytics xing
more...
TechCrunch Network
* InviteShare
* CrunchGear
* CrunchBoard Jobs
* CrunchNotes
* TalkCrunch
* MobileCrunch
* TechCrunch UK
* TechCrunch en Français
* TechCrunch 日本語版
* TechCrunch
Search posts
Powered by Edgeio
Techcrunch hosted by MediaTemple
Marketing Consulting by Pronet
© 2007 TechCrunch
Options
Disable
Search
Put Snap Shots on Google
Close
TechCrunch
* Forum
* About
* Contact
* Company Index
* Advertise
* Archives
* Toolbar
* Cool Jobs
* TC40
* Subscribe Techcrunch posts
* Subscribe by Email
* Subscriber count
* stumblecrunch.png
October 5
Stixy: Free-Form Collaboration and File Sharing Spaces
Mark Hendrickson
3 comments »
The internet ought to have made it dead simple to share files long ago. But for some reason, I still scratch my head every time I want to send a batch of photos or a collection of documents to a non-technical friend without resorting to email (which is not a dead simple solution in my book).
That’s why I get excited when I see companies like Stixy attempting to make file sharing not only as easy as it should be, but more pleasurable and intuitive along the way.
Stixy’s underlying concept is simple, and one that we have seen elsewhere in different forms: provide a desktop-like space in the browser where you can upload and share files. We recently gave out a batch of invitations to another new service, Wixi, that does this very thing.
Stixy provides a “free-form” area to drop your files, but it’s also very much like PikiWiki in the sense that it doesn’t settle for simple desktop icons. The files and other items placed in a Stixy workspace are more expressive. For example, photo files are displayed as small versions of themselves and sticky notes can be stuck anywhere. Therefore, Stixy is less like a traditional operating system desktop and more like a bulletin board.
The ability to access and interact with elements in a Stixy workplace (whether they be files or other widgets) is not yet very extensive. Currently, you can add only four element types to a workplace: sticky notes, photos, documents, and to-do notes. Both types of notes are pretty simple widgets and documents are displayed as simple icons. But there is a lot of potential for Stixy to expand the collection of widgets (and perhaps eventually create an open platform for widget development) as well as to improve the current widgets so they are more interactive. It would be great to be able to preview Word documents and PDFs in the bulletin board environment instead of downloading a local copy or opening them in another window. The same thing goes for video and audio files.
Despite the usefulness of the free-form workspace for files, it would also be great to see a more traditional file system view built into Stixy as an option for when I want to sort quickly through a bunch of files stored in the system. Currently, you wouldn’t want to add more than a couple dozen elements to Stixy because it would get too crowded. If Stixy were to develop more standard file views (as an alternative, mind you), it would be moving in the direction of a Web OS while remaining cognizant of the fact that preview functionality is paramount in an online storage environment (people don’t want to download a file each time they want to check it out).
It is important to keep in mind that Stixy is ultimately a collaboration tool (as any Web OS-like service probably should be). The company has decided to keep ownership of Stixy workspaces very simple, in fact so simple that usually there is no real ownership. If you share a “stixyboard” (it’s name for a workspace) with one or more other users, you give those users equal power over board management. Any participating user can edit any aspect of the board, and any user can delete the whole thing completely. Therefore, this is a tool for people who trust each other and not one suited for a broad social networking environment. Stixyboards can be kept entirely private, shared with other users, or opened up to the public at large (for either editing or just viewing).
Currently, Stixy has placed a 10mb cap on each file upload but no cap on total disk space usage (which will inevitably change as traffic increases). The company plans on making money from advertisements (not yet on the site) and premium memberships (also not yet available). The company is currently working on chat and messaging functionality to enhance collaboration. The ability to drag-n-drop files straight from the desktop (a la PikiWiki) is also in the works. And in the longer term, Stixy will probably feature a file versioning system along with an activity history log.
Stixy, which is based in Karlshamn, Sweden but also operates in Mill Valley, CA, launched just a couple weeks ago around the same time it exhibited in TechCrunch40’s DemoPit. I’ll be looking forward to seeing whether Stixy remains as a standalone product and/or becomes incorporated as a feature of other websites that facilitate file sharing.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
Plaxo + LinkedIn + iPhone = Brilliant
Duncan Riley
0 comments »
TechCrunch has been hard on unified address book provider Plaxo in the past, and probably with due cause, given their previous spam promoting ways, but I am now reevaluating that view based on Plaxo Sync.
I wrote about Plaxo’s improved Sync features back in June; although it sounded good I didn’t really have cause to use it then. Confronted with a “how do I sync various platforms, including the iPhone” problem I hit Google looking for a solution, and I kept finding user recommendations for Plaxo. Plaxo’s Sync tools support a variety of platforms, including Outlook, Internet Explorer (for Yahoo Address Books) Mac OSX and Thunderbird. Unfortunately they can’t sync with Gmail yet, but they can download your contacts from Gmail, although it does sync with Google Calendar.
Plaxo can also download LinkedIn contacts; LinkedIn does offer downloads/ plugins as well but nothing quite as comprehensive as Plaxo. We’ve looked recently at Facebook replacing LinkedIn as a business networking tool, however being able to access LinkedIn connections via Plaxo makes LinkedIn all that much more useful as it delivers access to LinkedIn contacts everywhere, including the iPhone (Plaxo imports into the Mac OSX address book, that can then be synced to an iPhone via iTunes).
The other selling point of Plaxo is the universal contact nature of the product; the ability for people to update their contact details on Plaxo and push that information out to other people is a definite positive.
The basic Plaxo service is free, including the sync functionality. The $49.95 upgrade adds Plaxo support (which if it works well you should never need to use) and duplication filtering. The duplicate filtering tool isn’t brilliant, it missed some duplicates on a test, but after running it a second time it found more; a handy feature but perhaps not worth the $49.95 annual fee.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
October 4
China Blocking RSS Feeds
Duncan Riley
30 comments »
china.jpgThe Chinese Government has added a blanket ban on all RSS feeds, according to a report at Ars Technica.
There has been reports previously that Feedburner feeds have been blocked, but to-date information delivered by RSS feeds has generally gone uncensored, providing Chinese viewers information that would otherwise be blocked if attempting to visit a regular webpage or blog.
A quick test of WebSitePulse’s Great Firewall testing tool indicates that no one in China will be reading this post via feed, although whether the main page of TechCrunch is blocked in open to question, WebSitePulse suggests that it’s ok, however the Great Firewall of China site says that it’s blocked.
The number of broadband internet users in China will surpass the United States within the next 12-18 months; China is fast becoming one of the most important online marketplaces in the world. Whilst some could well argue about the rights of a sovereign nation to censor content within its own borders, the more pressing issue from a Web 2.0 development and industry perspective is the use of the Firewall by the Chinese Government to unfairly block foreign competition, particularly at a time where the Chinese Government is trying to start, or is already in Free Trade Agreement negotiations with a number of countries, including Australia.
There is also some suggestion that China will enter an APEC FTA in the future: would it then be fair that online industries are either excluded from the FTA or that access rights are ignored by China under those agreements? Western Governments are still generally not focused enough on the benefits of online business in a broader economic sense, so unless there is some serious lobbying, or more understanding leadership, our industry will likely be forgotten in the clamor for mineral, industrial and agricultural trade.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
The Next Internet Millionaire: Inspired Programming Or Lame Sales Front
Duncan Riley
22 comments »
internetmillionaire.jpgThere’s been a fair bit of talk over the last month in online marketing circles about e-book salesman Joel Comm’s latest venture: The Next Internet Millionaire.
For those not familiar with Comm, his business started from he is best known for selling expensive ebooks advising people how to make money from Adsense, and then later like a lot of people operating in this space, he sold ebooks showing people how to sell ebooks or in their speak: “internet marketing.”
The Next Internet Millionaire Program itself is a straight rip-off of pretty much any Mark Burnett produced show ever made, think Survivor or The Apprentice, and comes complete with a Survivor-esque introduction, an Apprentice style expert panel, and tasks that have to be completed by the contestants. Each week one contestant goes home, until there is one survivor…sorry Internet Millionaire.
I’m not entirely sure which way to side in relation to the program. On the one hand it’s slickly produced and some of the expert advice is worth watching, particularly if you’re in the ebook…sorry Internet Marketing business. Yet on the other hand you just know that the whole show is a front for Joel Comm Inc; a vehicle from which he can further expose himself to a broader audience and ultimately sell more ebooks and related products. If it works, good for him I guess, but ultimately you can be the judge. Episode Seven as follows:
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
Tailrank 2.5 Launches. It Still Falls Short
Michael Arrington
21 comments »
Tailrank founder Kevin Burton notified us that version 2.5 of his news aggregation site has launched, as well as a new version of the engine behind it called Spinn3r. We’ve taken a look at the new site, and in our opinion it still falls short of being a useful application.
We’ve been a bit harsh on Tailrank over the last few months, even suggesting that it may be time to deadpool it. But the site was without any content at all for a few weeks, and when Burton said it was fixed the site was filled with spam (Burton writes about the spam attack here).
So back to the new version…the spam is gone, but the stories are all at least a day old. Burton originally promised this release in early July. It came three months later, which is not unexpected when software is involved. But he knew that we’d be taking a critical look at the site. If his indexing engine can’t keep up with the news, how can he expect people to spend time visiting the site? We just criticized competitor shoutingmat.ch yesterday for the same problem. This is a competitive space (Techmeme is the clear leader, and there are lots of others), and anything short of perfect won’t stand a chance.
We’ll keep giving Tailrank the benefit of the doubt and hope to see it improve soon. But I’m not sure anyone else out there will do the same.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
Social Video Company, Mesmo.TV, Raises $900,000 of Series A Funding
Mark Hendrickson
4 comments »
Private Equity HUB today uncovered that Mesmo.TV, a social video bookmarking service and provider of a very popular Facebook application, has secured over half of a $900,000 round of Series A financing.
Mesmo.TV’s Davin Miyoshi informed us that Aydin Senkut’s Felicis Ventures, Mike Maples’ Maples Investments, Naval Ravikant’s The Hit Forge, and Georges Harik participated in the round.
We wrote about the launch of Mesmo.TV’s social video bookmarking tool this past July. The tool, which is found on the company’s website, allows users to rate and tag the videos that they enjoy. Mesmo.TV can then recommend videos to you and introduce you to other viewers with similar viewing habits.
This tool, however, has not turned out to be the most successful part of Mesmo.TV’s business. The company’s TV Show Trivia Facebook application, which launched in August, has garnered over 1.3 million users and over 125,000 daily unique visitors. This puts the application amongst the top 45 applications on Facebook, and made Mesmo.TV the largest TV show community on that social network.
Mesmo.TV plans to continue focusing on its social network efforts and looks forward to expanding to other networks, such as MySpace, who might open up in the near future. The company is also talking with TV networks to bring online videos to its users.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
Zipidee Wants To Be THE Marketplace For Digital Goods
Nick Gonzalez
13 comments »
zipidee_logo.pngIn 1995 eBay sold a laser pointer online and kicked off the online marketplace for selling physical goods. As networks improved in the intervening years, the idea of what can be bought and sold online has grown to include digital goods, such as music, e-books, and videos as well. Zipidee wants to be a market for those digital goods, and is expected to launch some time in the next week.
It’s by no means a new concept, there are several sites out there that trade in digital bits: Payloadz, Tradebits, e-Junkie, Lulu, Edgeio, and more. eBay already sells digital goods, with delivery often handled through these third party sites. iTunes can also sell your content, but requires an approved label if you want to get paid.
However, Zipidee will offer considerably more control over pricing and distribution than these other sites. Merchants on Zipidee will be able to create their own virtual store where they can list their digital wares for sale on the site directly or across Zipidee’s website widgets. It’s an ideal setup for anyone selling an instructional video series or their own audiobook.
zipidee_player.pngAudio and video can be uploaded to the site to be rented or bought at whatever price the creator wishes and consumed via downloads or streams. Other services often only allow downloads.
You will be able to track the sale of their good in real time and adjust the price accordingly using their analytics dashboard. Creators will also have the option of protecting their product with Zipidee’s own DRM system. DRMed goods come with a license to play the media through their web or downloadable player on any computer with your Zipidee credentials.
Zipidee will make money through a $1 listing fee (waived to start) and roughly 80/20 split of the purchase price, like Lulu (Zipidee takes a smaller cut for higher priced goods).
To start, Zipidee will focus on digitizing the kind of media now sold at conferences and trade shows as DVDs or Books. For launch, they’re digitizing materials from a series of consultants and speakers such as DreamUniversity and MightyVentures who currently sell millions of dollars in physical merchandise directly to their customers.
Yet, there’s still a big question over whether and where people will buy “long-tail” digital content. Zipidee is fighting the trend toward free digital content (wikipedia, 5 min) and people are reluctant enough to even pay for big-media’s content (most songs on iPods do not come from iTunes). There is also a question as to whether the best way to sell this content is horizontally in a single marketplace, or vertically by topic. There are a great number of digital content verticals out there already that could serve as points of sale for independently produced content (DocStoc, Scribd, Amie Street, 5 Min, Snocap). We’ll have to see how it all pans out when Zipidee launches.
zipidee_screen.png
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
Does Chess Need to be Crowdsourced?
Erick Schonfeld
41 comments »
picture-185.pngA new site that just launched today called CrowdChess aims to answer that question. You log on and sign up for a game. Each side is made up of teams of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people. Anyone on a team can suggest the next move, and the move that gets the most votes is the one that is played out. (Here are the rules. If anyone reading this ends up playing, please report back your experience in comments).
I am all for tapping into crowd intelligence, and the Web is letting us do that in very interesting ways (see Digg, Wikipedia, Threadless, Freebase, Wikinvest, Kaltura, LingoZ, ZiiTrend, etc.). But does everything need to be crowdsourced? I wonder if a group of amateurs playing CrowdChess will ever be able to beat a grandmaster (or the modern-day version of Deep Blue, for that matter)?
Or will technology, in this case, take something beautiful and destroy it. Can’t two people just sit in a room and play chess?
picture-186.png
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Web 2.0 News & Ideas |
Exclusive: Arrington Goes Nuts in “Unnecesary Force”
Erick Schonfeld
30 comments »
This just went live from JibJab. There are now two new movies in their Starring You line of animations where you can upload your head to star in the movie. Here’s one with Arrington and me called Unnecessary Force, which jibjab kindly made for us. I tried to stop him folks.
Also check out Math Camp Massacres. (For more on Starring You, check out this video).
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in TechCrunch Network |
Microsoft Beats Google To Online Health Records With HealthVault
Erick Schonfeld
39 comments »
picture-183.pngIt’s not often that Microsoft gets the drop on Google. But today it launched HealthVault in beta, a free online repository where anyone can keep their personal health records. Meanwhile, Google Health has yet to launch, having recently lost its leader Adam Bosworth.
With HealthVault, you can import your health records from your doctors, hospitals, labs, prescription drug plans, and other healthcare providers. You can also type them in yourself, or upload data from personal health monitoring devices such as glucose or blood-pressure monitors. The site also incorporates a health-specific search engine like Healthline’s (here is the results page for “glucose“), and lets you save your searches. Microsoft plans to make money through health-related search ads, but says it won’t target those ads to any personal data in someone’s stored medical record. Access to the site will require a Windows Live ID and a password that you can share with healthcare providers. Patient privacy will obviously be a major concern here, and fears of compromising it will likely be the biggest hurdle to adoption among both consumers and their doctors.
But it is worth trying to overcome that hurdle. Getting people to embrace digital personal health records is a Holy Grail for both the healthcare and technology industries. By making health records accessible on the Web to both patients and their doctors, better tracking of medical conditions and quicker responses to changes in those conditions could yield vast improvements in healthcare outcomes. Dangerous symptoms could be spotted earlier by doctors, while at the same time patients would have the information necessary to better take care of themselves. A shift to widespread use of online personal health records is the first step needed to change the focus of the healthcare system from one of constantly treating full-blown ailments to preventing them in the first place.
* Sphere It
*
AddThis Social Bookmark Widget
* Print Posts
Posted in Company & Product Profiles |
« Previous Entries
TechCrunch Sponsors
EdgeioText
Want to buy text links on TechCrunch?
esports mobio participative web skitch web analytics xing
more...
TechCrunch Network
* InviteShare
* CrunchGear
* CrunchBoard Jobs
* CrunchNotes
* TalkCrunch
* MobileCrunch
* TechCrunch UK
* TechCrunch en Français
* TechCrunch 日本語版
* TechCrunch
Search posts
Powered by Edgeio
Techcrunch hosted by MediaTemple
Marketing Consulting by Pronet
© 2007 TechCrunch
Labels: Copyright, for, Gmail, Google, Inspired Programming, Lame Sales Front, or, The Next Internet Millionaire:
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Mig33 Moves To The U.S.
We’ve been keeping an eye on the mobile social networking world covering companies such as Zyb, Mocospace, Aka-aki, imity, meetmoi, mobiluck. See our roundup post here. Most of the innovation is occurring outside of the U.S., particularly in Europe. That’s why it’s no surprise to see yet another success story, Mig33, originate outside of the U.S. (the company was founded in Australia). The company has over seven million registered users, nearly all outside of the U.S. Today, however, the company is launching their service in the U.S. They’ve also moved the company here - it’s now based in San Francisco.
Migg33 is a mobile application that lets you chat (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) and send instant messages and emails, make cheaper international phone calls, share photos, connect with friends. The key selling point is that they now offer all of this functionality through the WAP browser (wap.mig33.com) currently available on most mobile phones, which has the added advantage of being accessible on your computer too. However, the WAP interface is rather spartan and chatting on a webpage is time consuming. The downloaded J2ME version makes for a richer experience.
The U.S. launch also includes a new free hosted email feature, allowing U.S. subscribers to send and receive e-mail on their mobile phones. This adds to the photo sharing, chat integration, and cheap calling rates by connecting over VOIP lines of the original application.
It will be interesting to how popular the service in the U.S. considering the differences between European and American cell phone use. Europeans have been more likely than Americans to use cellphones for the internet. Cellphones have continually been more a part of people’s lifestyles outside of the U.S.
Migg33 is a mobile application that lets you chat (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) and send instant messages and emails, make cheaper international phone calls, share photos, connect with friends. The key selling point is that they now offer all of this functionality through the WAP browser (wap.mig33.com) currently available on most mobile phones, which has the added advantage of being accessible on your computer too. However, the WAP interface is rather spartan and chatting on a webpage is time consuming. The downloaded J2ME version makes for a richer experience.
The U.S. launch also includes a new free hosted email feature, allowing U.S. subscribers to send and receive e-mail on their mobile phones. This adds to the photo sharing, chat integration, and cheap calling rates by connecting over VOIP lines of the original application.
It will be interesting to how popular the service in the U.S. considering the differences between European and American cell phone use. Europeans have been more likely than Americans to use cellphones for the internet. Cellphones have continually been more a part of people’s lifestyles outside of the U.S.
Labels: $, FutureBazarOnline.com, Gmail, Google, Mig33 Moves, The, To, U.S.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
