Google continues to add cities to its Street View maps product that launched earlier this year. You can now view and stroll through high quality photos of most of the downtown areas of San Diego, Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando. Nine cities are now covered - click on the camera icons to dive into the city and see it.

Microsoft is working on competing products, but they are not as elegant or easy to use. See our coverage of Street Side and Virtual Earth 3D.

Labels: Adds, Cities, Closes, Costs, Four, Google, GPRS, mp3 capability, polyphonic ringtones, Server 2003., Street, View

This is the second recent acquisition announcement for Hearst Interactive Media - UGO for around $100 million last month, and tonight they are announcing the acquisition of Kaboodle, a social shopping service that launched in late 2005.

Kaboodle, founded by Manish Chandra, Keiron McCammon, Chetan Pungaliya, closed a key distribution deal with eBay a year ago. Comscore numbers show rapid growth, with 2 million or so unique monthly visitors currently.

The acquisition price is not being disclosed, but we’re hearing it was somewhere between $30 - $40 million, all cash. The company raised three rounds of financing totaling $5 million from Shea Ventures, Kanwal Rekhi, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, Garage Ventures, Georges Harik, Rajeev Motwani, Iggy Fanlo and others.

One other thing we’ve heard - investor Ron Conway was “instrumental” in putting this deal together.

Labels: $, 30+, Acquires, dolce, for, Hearst, Kaboodle, million, neeta lulla, polyphonic ringtones

It’s no secret that video sites like YouTube benefited from added traffic generated by hosting copyrighted content. But as these sites get acquired, integrate advertising, or just want to avoid a billion dollar lawsuit, they seek to shed their seedy past to stay kosher with the big media giants they hope will feed them content and advertising dollars.

There are a lot of startups offering technological means of keeping their noses clean. Most of the solutions function as digital detectives, comparing the video fingerprints of copyrighted content with uploaded content for a match. Some of these companies include Audible Magic, Advestigo, Gracenote, MotionDSP, Philips, and iPharo. YouTube has implemented Audible Magic, although I haven’t noticed a difference. MySpace also incorporated Audible Magic but took the added step of banning re-uploading content violating copyright (“Take Down Stay Down” initiative).

However, while computers are great for solving well defined problems at a dizzying pace, they don’t always do that well when the rules become murkier. Judgments need to be made about whether playing a song or video constitutes “fair use” and simply changing a few characters of the title can fool more basic filters. That’s why 5-year-old BayTSP has decided to keep humans in the loop. The WSJ takes an in depth look at the company.

The Journal reports that BayTSP has hired more than 20 “Video Analysts” to watch videos and report copyrighted content starting at $11 an hour. Their searches are helped by BayTSP’s software, which most likely gives them a head start on what to look for. The company’s most notable client is Viacom, which it supplied with the data for their 100,000 video DMCA takedown request last year. Viacom says it pays BayTSP more than $100,000 each month for the service. The takedown requests have resulted in over 230,000 clips being removed from YouTube for Viacom. BayTSP says its error rate on Web videos is only around 0.1%.

Despite these efforts, video piracy remains rampant both on Google video search and many other social video sites. Once content is taken down, some users simply re-upload them to the site. MySpace is apparently countering this behavior through a file blacklist, but other video providers are certainly concerned with pushing away potentially valuable content and users. Content providers have continually leaned on the heavily manual DMCA safe harbor clause, while copyright holders clamor for embedded filtering. Google has recieved a long list of take down notices. AT&T has expressed an interest in filtering their network directly.

One thing’s for sure, there’s still a lot more debate needed amongst us humans before the computers chime in.

Labels: $11, An, And, cartridges. handsfree speaker, Copyright, Costs, gabbana, Here, Hour, integrated handsfree speaker, Is, It, Of, Protection, The Future

Blockbuster announced the acquisition of movie download site Movielink this evening. The price is not being disclosed (meaning it isn’t “material” to Blockbuster’s shareholders), although the Wall Street Journal says it was less than $20 million.

Movielink was created in 2002 as a joint venture of most of the big studios - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Studios. $100 million or so was spent building the company.

That’s $80 million in losses for the studio investors on their Movielink project, which is money that could have been invested in higher ROI investments. Like suing their customers.

This is clearly a hedge move by Blockbuster, which is locked in a death spiral with the cheaper and more convenient Netflix. Netflix also launched an awesome free movie on demand product earlier this year (and are using much of their operating profits to fund it). Until now, Blockbuster had no answer.

But Movielink certainly isn’t going to be a silver bullet for Blockbuster. We looked at all of the players in Movielink’s space last October. Their competitors include, besides Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, CinemaNow and Guba (and, let’s be honest, BitTorrent). Movielink has a very deep library of movies, but they are DRM’d to the hilt and the studios force them to price downloads at higher-than-dvd prices.

Blockbuster’s salad days ended in 2002, and the stock has slid steadily since then. It is no longer profitable. There are just too many options for consumers who want to watch movies at home. The company’s biggest asset, and biggest problem, are the long term leases it has on its 9,000 retail stores. It needs to defocus on Netflix and think about how to use those stores to its advantage. Otherwise, its long term prognosis is clear - deadpool.

Labels: A, Block, buster, Buys, Desperate, Do, EMS, FutureBazarOnline.com, Latest, Loser, shopping, Something, To

So the internet looks like a huge cloning jungle? Ideas blossom here and others replicate them there? Often abroad. TechCrunch covered yesterday a German copycat of Geni and the connection was indeed pretty obvious.

Business2.0 just released in its August edition (print magazine) a list of clones per country of 4 star Web2.0 companies: Digg, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. There is just one problem, the information is pretty much inaccurate and even wrong. Let’s take France for example. SkyBlog, the largest french social network, is nowhere near FaceBook, and even so it was there much before (would be closer to MySpace maybe). Scoopeo, supposed to be a Digg clone, is not a French company, but a Belgium company (the service is in French though). DailyMotion was created before YouTube: who is cloning who?

Other local players might have been much more relevant to quote and it seems like their source of information is not bullet proof. And from what I can read here, the same goes for the India selection. I don’t know well enough other countries to detect other mistakes, but maybe you can.There is clearly a case to be made here: clones are everywhere and this is the price to pay in a booming industry; But Business2.0 failed in pointing the right players out.

Labels: again, Business2.0, Cloning, flight mode, GPRS, handsfree speaker, Is, jewelry, Labels: child, try, Who, Who?

We all knew big layoffs were coming at the San Francisco Chronicle, but I had hoped that they’d try to keep at least one of the business/tech writers that is responsible for my occasional purchase of a copy of the paper. No luck.

The paper that is losing $1 million per week could fire every journalist it has on staff and still not break even. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying. 80 reporters, photographers and copy editors plus 20 in management will be gone by end of summer.

And the best reporters aren’t waiting around to see who gets laid off. They are walking out the door, into better jobs.

Jessica Guynn and Dan Fost are gone. They the reporters who were regularly attending events, talking to tech execs and developers and generally gunning for the interesting stories. Both resigned. Fost is freelancing. Guynn got a raise and a new job at the L.A. Times covering silicon valley.

Ellen Lee, Ryan Kim, Verne Kopytoff and Tom Abate remain to cover business and technology. They are fine writers, but the loss of Guynn and Fost is a serious blow to the newspaper. I found that when I was reading an interesting story in the Chronicle, it was usually written by one of them.

One bit of good news. David Lazarus, the brilliant strategist who suggested that only newspapers are qualified to do “real” journalism, is among those who’ve left. I’ll miss his occasional rants, but his blog-hate wasn’t helping the newspaper.

Al Saracevic, who’s taken an occasional public shot at TechCrunch, was promoted to Business Editor - he now controls the entire business section of the paper. Al is an incredibly nice guy but, like Lazarus, he’s firmly in the “does’t get new media” camp.

These losses may have made the bottom line look marginally better for this fast sinking ship. But losing the talent isn’t going to make people want to read the paper. They should have done everything they could to have kept Fost and Guynn.

Labels: Are, Best, Business, FutureBazarOnline.com, Gone, neeta lulla, Section; The, SF Chronicle, Trims

the online/offline calendar and organizer, has closed their series A round of financing from Adobe Systems Incorporated and LMKR. In what is becoming an annoying trend, the company is not disclosing the size of the round.

You’ll probably recognize the company from the somewhat viral product demo that swept the blogosphere last October. Since then they’ve been through a private and public beta.

Scrybe is a Flash-based organizational and productivity tool that works both online and offline. It consists of multiple calendar management, to do lists, web clip bookmarklet, contact list (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or Outlook importing), and The system operates offline by caching your changes and then uploading when the system reconnects. Zimbra and Google Gears provide similar online/offline products.

The driving principle behind the application is usability. Scrybe’s main selling point is that the application retains the context of the data that you’re working with by “zooming” instead of flipping to the data. One example is the calendar. The cells of the calendar expand and contract as you edit a week, day, or hour more closely while still showing the details of the surrounding days. See the extended video below for more details.

Labels: A, Closes, HP, inbuilt Dictaphone, Infrared, MMS, Scrybe, Series