FUTURE SHOPPING BAZAR

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.

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Labels: Adds, Events, Google, Its, Live, Roster, To, Windows, Yahoo

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.

Labels: $, FutureBazarOnline.com, Gmail, Google, Mig33 Moves, The, To, U.S.

It may have taken Amazon a few years, but they got it right: their new music store is DRM free and songs, starting at $0.89/track, are cheaper than at Apple’s iTunes. The top 100 best-selling albums are priced no higher than $8.99.

Songs are delivered in MP3 format, meaning they’ll work on any music player, including the iPod. The store opens with 2 million songs from 80,000 artists represented by 20,000 labels. EMI and Universal are on board. The other major labels have no real choice at this point but to follow, and soon.

A software download is required to actually get songs to your hard drive, but it’s available for both Windows and Mac (with Linux coming). That’s good news - DRM requirements forced Amazon to make their movie download service work only with Windows machines.

Average quality is very high - 256 kbps, which is what iTunes uses for non-DRM songs as well.

Labels: $, Alternative, Game On: A, Gmail, Google, iTunes, Real, To

Casual gamers - moms, dads and senior citizens - are the mainstream of the gaming world. So it’s interesting that RealNetworks could be looking to foster community around its RealArcade property, following reports today that it is acquiring NYC-based online casual gaming site Gametrust for somewhere in the region of $50 million. The company, which has already raised nearly $20 million in three rounds, powers some big gaming portals including MiniClip.com and Shockwave.com with its Game Frame platform. The five year-old GameTrust counts TWJ Capital, NJTC Venture Fund, Patriot Capital, CSK Ventures, Topspin Partners, Silicon Alley Venture Partners, Draper Associates and Elon Musk among its investors.

Labels: $, around, develop, games?, Google, integrated handsfree speaker, Networks, Real, socnet, To

We haven’t heard much about Bejing-based startup Mojiti before this week. They popped up in the TechCrunch Forums in January and are notable because the founder, Eric Feng, was previously at Microsoft Research Asia. Nothing other than that, and they do not appear to have many users.

But they sure are in the spotlight now: a source with knowledge of the deal indicates that the $1 billion News Corp./NBC online video joint venture Hulu has acquired the company and is using its platform for the basis of the upcoming Hulu service.

Mojiti is a basic online video platform that also allows users to annotate videos at specific time points. The annotation feature is somewhat similar to another startup, click.tv, which is rumored to have been acquired by Cisco.

The deal may have originally leaked via an overheard airport conversation as the Mojiti execs flew back to Asia after meetings with Hulu in the U.S. Neither company has officially confirmed the deal. Rumored price is in the $10 million range.

It is surprising that Hulu would use a third party platform for their service rather than build it themselves from the ground up. They’ve already missed their promised Summer 2007 launch date, however, and probably think the acquisition will get them to market faster.

Labels: $, Backbone, Form, Gmail, Google, GPRS, Hulu Makes First Acquisition; Chinese Video, integrated handsfree speaker, New, Of, Service, Startup, To

Just five days until TechCrunch40 next week in San Francisco. As of right now we have 27 tickets remaining, which means it should sell out sometime tomorrow afternoon and registrations will be cut off. There will be approximately 900 people at the conference, which is about double what we had originally planned (and hoped for).

Forty companies are preparing to launch products (actually, 39, but more on that below) in front of the full audience and panel of experts, and will compete for the $50,000 prize. An additional hundred startups will be showing their products in the demo stations. On top of that, Yahoo and AOL will be launching products at the event, and we have keynote sessions with Marc Andreessen, David Filo, Chad Hurley, Michael Moritz and Mark Zuckerberg. Jason Calacanis has been coaching startups at Sequoia Capital over the last few days to perfect the demos.

As I said above, we actually only have 39 startup launches planned. The last spot on stage on the last day will go the audience choice from the demo pit companies. Each attendee will be given two tokens (one for each day) to give to the demo pit companies they like best. Whoever gets the most tokens gets a spot on stage and is fully eligible to win the $50,000 prize.

I am really looking forward to the event, and I am absolutely humbled by the outpouring of enthusiasm we are receiving from companies and attendees . I’ve never been associated with a production of this size - there are literally thousands of moving pieces and any number of things can go wrong. There will undoubtedly be a hiccup or two during the conference, but with any luck all of the planning and hard work will pay off, forty startups will get the launch event they deserve and another hundred will get to show their stuff to nearly 1,000 people.

See you Monday! If you are attending, look for additional logistical details and announcements on the TechCrunch40 blog.

Labels: $, Crunch40 Tickets, Gmail, Google, inbuilt Dictaphone, Sell Out; More News, Tech, To

Nokia’s marketing department did some quick thinking yesterday. They’re targeting iPhone users who are angry about the fact that they paid $200 more for their phone than they would have if they waited.

They’ve taken out ads on Google that suggest users check out Nokia’s new Mosh mobile social network. The ads, which appear for searches on “iphone price drop,” say “Sorry, Early Adopters” and suggests they salvage their iPhone experience by checking out Mosh.

There isn’t much to suggest that any angry iPhone users will be turning to Nokia Mosh to ease their pain. But it is some good thinking by a Nokia marketer nonetheless.

Update: Steve Jobs has issued an open letter announcing Apple will be giving a $100 store credit to everyone who purchased an iPhone from Apple or AT&T and isn’t eligible for any other credits.

Labels: Angry, Gmail, Google, iPhone, london, Nokia Marketing, Out, Reaches, Team, To, Users

Israeli startup MyHeritage was a bit of a sleeping giant. Until newcomer Geni came along and shook up the genealogy world with its slick new viral family tree application. Geni quickly reached 5 million people profiles and a monster $100 million valuation just a few months after launching.

MyHeritage has been around since 2005. They’ve quietly raised $9 million in venture capital (about half from Accel and half from two angel investors, Yuval Rakavy and Aviv Raiz). Until recently MyHeritage required users to upload family genealogy information from desktop based software. The information was viewable online but no changes could be made. An unwieldy system, but they still managed to gather 150,000 family trees with 180 million people profiles from 17.2 million users. 150,000 new profiles are added daily. That dwarfs Geni, although MyHeritage had a long head start.

A couple of weeks ago MyHeritage unveiled a number of fundamental architectural changes to their service. They’ve taken the best features of Geni and married them to the stuff at My Heritage that has worked over the past couple of years.

Users can now upload data (name, email, born/died dates, photos, etc.) directly on the MyHeritage website in addition to the client, choosing from17 different languages. The user interface, which like Geni is in Flash, shows a couple of different views to quickly move around a family tree. Over 100 million photos have been uploaded to the site, and users can tag faces with names an attach them to user profiles.

That isn’t all MyHeritage is up to, though. They acquired Pearl Street Software late last year. That acquisition brought matching technology to the company which allows the service to compare family trees to find overlap - even if names are spelled differently or the basic data is somewhat off (slightly different birth or death dates, for example). They are just beginning to roll out the matching service, but they expect to see a lot of overlap between family trees. If both sides agree, the trees can be merged at appropriate places.

MyHeritage hopes, like Geni, to one day have much of the world’s genealogy mapped online. Given that 1 billion people are online today, MyHeritage’s 180 million people profiles is a good starts towards reaching that goal. They eventually hope to have 3 billion profiles, including people who’ve passed away. And at that point the family relationship between any two people in the world is just a mouse click away.

It’s a grand vision, but one that is likely to be achieved someday by MyHeritage or one of their competitors.

As an aside, MyHeritage also has a robust (and free) genealogy metasearch engine that taps into 1200 genealogy databases around the world.

Labels: 180, Geni, Google, Google Reverses, million, MyHeritage Takes, Orkut, People, Profiles, To, War, With

The owners of the now infamous cut price Russian MP3 retail site AllofMP3 have posted that the site will soon recommence trading.

The announcement follows a Russian court decision August 15 that found AllofMP3’s previous CEO was not guilty of breaching Russian copyright laws, and therefore the AllofMP3 service was legal.

EMI, NBC Universal and Time Warner had led the legal case against AllofMP3, with the US Government previously threatening to escalate the dispute regarding AllofMP3 to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

According to AllofMP3, “The service will be resumed in the foreseeable future.”

Labels: All, Dead, From, Labels: child, MP3, Of, Rise, The, To

Google has officially begun distributing office suite and Microsoft Office competitor Sun StarOffice as part of the Google Pack.

The proprietary office suite is based on the same code base as Open Office and was previously offered for $70.

The move was first revealed August 11 but was officially announced August 15.

Don Dodge, Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team not surprisingly went negative on the move, writing “What has changed? Star Office has been around for 8 years and has gained no traction.”

To answer Don’s question: credibility.

Google offering StarOffice is a massive credibility boost for the package. The benefits of desktop Microsoft Office alternatives have been promoted for years and although among niche communities they might have found some market share, nothing so far has come close to gaining traction against Microsoft.

General consumers have long since accepted packaged downloads from Google and for good reason; packages such as Picasa and Google Earth are quality offerings that have gained wide acceptance. StarOffice will now benefit from not only becoming a standard download as part of the Google Pack, but also due to the positive consumer sentiment given to most (if not all) downloadable products from Google. Expect StarOffice to have a bigger user base than OpenOffice within 12 months, and at least a measurable marketshare in a similar time frame. It probably wont be double figures, but it will make an impact.

There was no word from Google whether future editions of StarOffice would sync with Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

Labels: Credibility, Google, Lends, Office, phone, polyphonic ringtones, Star, Sun, To

TokBox is a new site that we just heard about moments ago. It’s completely live but appears to have been flying under the radar until now.

It allows you to set up a video chat channel in seconds. It instantly and accurately detected the camera and microphone on my Mac laptop after registration. At that point, I was prompted to invite someone to the chat via email, or send them to my user page on the site. They click on the link and can participate even without registration. The controls are simple - set volume, mute or kill camera. If the person is not there, you can leave a video message. That’s all there is to it.

If you enable browser popups you can pull the video chat out of the browser and go to other websites or applications without disrupting the conversation. The chat box can also be embedded on another website.

TokBox is also a basic social network - you can add friends who’ve registered to call them more easily. You can also tag yourself, suggesting that the site will try to find people with similar interests and put them together. That also suggests the site may be used for online dating, which is a big venture capitalist-pleaser.

While there are plenty of video chat products out there on the market, including Skype, most of them require at least some software download to the computer. Something about the simplicity of TokBox, which is entirely a web application, suggests it might get very popular very fast.

Update:

Ryan Merket whipped up a Facebook application that integrates the TokBox chat player.

Update2: Check out competitor YouCams as well.

Labels: cartridges. It has a USB Port and is compatible with Windows, Chat, Do, Instant, Me, MMS, phones, pocket outlook, polyphonic ringtones, Set, To, TokBox, Up, Use, Video

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