FUTURE SHOPPING BAZAR

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.

Labels: Deadpool: Amp’d, Google, Junkies, Lame Sales Front, Mobile’s, Remain, Sordid, Tales From, The, Yahoo

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

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

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

Labels: DivShare Upgrades, File, Free, Google, Hosting, Its, One-stop, Service, Shop, Yahoo

Just one week to go until TechCrunch40 conference. Forty new products will launch over two days, with a $50,000 cash prize going to the “best-in-show” product as selected by the panel of experts.

But the entrepreneurial spirit isn’t just alive and kicking in the startups. The big guys have some stuff to show, too. Yahoo and AOL will both launch new products next week at TechCrunch40. And it’s likely we’ll add one more “BigCo” product to the mix as well later this week. The Yahoo and AOL products are being launched outside of the core 40 new launches, and will not be eligible for the $50,000 prize. But they will launch it in front of the main crowd, and audience comments and questions will be part of the show.

More announcements coming this week. The conference is now virtually sold out - there are a handful of tickets remaining. Register here.

Labels: $, AOL, At, Crunch40 Tickets, Google, New, o Launch, Products, TechCrunch40, Yahoo

Todd Teresi has announced over at Yodel Anecdotal that Yahoo! will acquire online global ad network BlueLithium for about $300 million in cash.

According to the announcement, BlueLithium is the fifth largest ad network in the United States and the second largest in the United Kingdom with 145 million unique visitors per month.

Teresi describes the acquisition of this company with over 100 employees as important for making Yahoo! “one of the world’s leading online display ad networks.” Apparently, Yahoo! believes that BlueLithium’s data analytics and behavioral targeting tools will help them get there.

Yahoo!’s acquisition of the company comes less than 5 months after Google acquired DoubleClick and less than 4 months after Microsoft acquired aQuantive, albeit for much larger sums ($3.1 and $6 billion respectively).

BlueLithium was founded in 2004 and named 2006 Innovator of the Year by AlwaysOn. Details are available in Yahoo!’s official press release.

Labels: $, Acquires, Ad, Blue, Chairman, Coming, Google, Lithium, Network, Yahoo

The New York Times took their personalized home page product out of beta today - see it here. The look and feel is about the same as it was a a year ago when it went into private beta - Think MyYahoo, Pageflakes or Netvibes, with the New York Times logo and without the widgets.

There’s an argument that the product will bring customized home pages to the masses, although frankly Yahoo has already done a good job of this with well over 50 million users. This will be particularly useful for people who live, eat and breathe the New York Times, but others may find it a bit much.

Users can also add pre-selected non-NYT content or their own favorite RSS feeds, and modules can be dragged around the page, just like every other customizable home page.

Labels: Chairman, Launches…My, New, Playboy Launches Social, Times, Yahoo, York

The new Yahoo Mail interface went into public beta in September 2006, although Yahoo was testing it long before that. Tonight Yahoo takes the “beta” label off of the product and makes it the default interface for all new Yahoo mail accounts.

Yahoo mail already has an integrated RSS reader and instant messaging. They also recently announced unlimited storage for all mail users.

They are also releasing a few new features.

Shortcuts: Mail now has a number of intelligent shortcuts. Things like addresses, places, dates, contact information, etc. are underlined with blue dots. Click on the link and see a mashup with maps (for addresses), travel guides (for places), calendar (for dates), etc. New services are being added regularly.

SMS/Text Messaging: Yahoo wants you to use their mail application whenever you contact your friends, however you contact them. In addition to emailing or instant messaging clients, you can now send them a text message from the mail interface. Their responses also come in directly to Yahoo Mail. It currently works for U.S., India, Philippines and Canadian mobile numbers.

Is Yahoo Mail a better webmail application than GMail? In our comparisons GMail always comes out on top, although the main reason is tagging of messages and the fact that GMail gives free forwarding and POP access to the account. Yahoo still charges $20/year for forwarding or POP access. For users who still like their desktop mail clients, POP access is an important feature. Yahoo says they are considering making it a free option, but they have a lot of paying mail customers. If they make too many features free, they jeopardize that revenue stream. Offering unlimited free storage really pushed the limits, so I don’t expect them to move more features from paid to free any time soon.

The new interface is the final realization of Yahoo’s 2004 acquisition of Ajax pioneer Oddpost. The new mail product is based largely on ideas first launched by Oddpost in 2002.

Startups aren’t just sitting around as the big guys upgrade their webmail apps, though. Our favorite product in this space is Orgoo, which launches this fall and lets users pull in mail and IM accounts from any number of providers. Foldera is another promising product in this space (I was previously on their board of directors, but I do not own any stock in the company).

Labels: Beta; New, CEO, Features, integrated handsfree speaker, jewelry, Mail, Of, Out, Yahoo