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monetizing the boss
Yahoo Readies The Meter For Its First Web Services Business »
FEAR OF EVOLUTION
Author's Guild Calls Kindle 2's Text-to-Speech Software Illegal »
easy money
Law Firm Blunder Reveals Value Of Facebook Payout To ConnectU: $65 Mil »
WujWuj’s New Focus: Make Online Retail Go Viral
by Mark Hendrickson on February 11, 2009

When online retail service WujWuj first launched, it focused on helping people pool their money to buy gifts for friends and family. That never really took off, so the service was shut down and is now being reborn with new focus on so-called “group buys”.

A group buy is a type of sale in which the price of an item drops as more people commit to purchasing it. Consumers benefit from lower prices as more people commit, and retailers benefit from an increase in sales volume. Essentially, it’s a way for retailers to incentivize their consumers to market their goods for them, because customers will be inclined to spread the word about deals.

WujWuj CEO Monti Majthoub tells me that most group buys are currently organized in online forums like FatWallet and AnandTech. His new GroupBuy system adds more structure and “viral” potential to the process by leveraging the power of widgets.

Here’s how it works. WujWuj’s retail partners enter their goods into the GroupBuy system and then embed special GroupBuy widgets on their websites. Each widget shows a photo of the item on sale and how much the price will drop as more people commit to buying. Consumers who have already committed to buying (after seeing the products on retailers’ sites) can grab the widgets and embed them on their own social networking profiles and websites, which will then lead their visitors back to the same WujWuj purchasing form.

Customers are guaranteed to pay no more than the maximum price they’ve indicated for a good, and once the time period is up for a particular group buy, all of those who have committed to purchasing will pay the lowest price reached. WujWuj lets retailers charge customers with their own payment gateways and it collects just 1.9% of all successful sales as a fee.

Will this system make online group buys more popular and viral? Majthoub is cautiously optimistic. He points out that several other companies (such as previously reviewed eSwarm) have tried to improve the group buy process and failed. But he also believes WujWuj may have finally devised a system that’s so simple for both retailers and consumers that it might actually take off.

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Virgance: Harnessing The Community To Save The World (Business Plan Included)
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by Jason Kincaid on February 11, 2009

Virgance, a new startup headed by Powerset co-founder Steve Newcomb, is looking to change the world - and make some money doing it. The company, which features the tagline ‘Activism 2.0′, has announced that it has closed a round of seed funding and is already profitable. Now it’s ready to reveal itself to the masses, and hopefully make the world a better place in the process.

Virgance focuses on fostering and promoting benevolent, wide-reaching and important campaigns that also stand a good chance to make money. The Virgance engineering team, headed by VP of Engineering Naseem Hakim (who helped build the very popular Facebook app Circle of Friends), is building a platform designed to help promote these campaigns across a number of social platforms. Newcomb describes the platform as “the next iteration of what President Obama did” - leveraging the power of social media to reach the masses. But these campaigns are not simply about raising awareness - they have to let the community somehow interact, and they have to have a solid business model. Depending on the campaign, Virgance gets a portion of the incoming revenues.

Over the course of a year Newcomb plans to deploy as many as 20 campaigns, in the hopes that a handful of them will be “homeruns” (he calls this the ‘EA’ model, likening it to the video game giant that produces dozens of titles a year, a few of which are very successful). The company’s first full-fledged campaign is 1 Block Off The Grid (1BOG), which helps homeowners looking to install solar power systems team together, using their collective buying power to get discounted rates from solar providers.

Spotify Opens Up In The UK - If It Can Handle The Traffic
5 Comments
by Mike Butcher on February 11, 2009

P2P music streaming startup Spotify has removed the “invite only” barrier from its streaming music service in the UK. Till now it’s been keeping growth in check with an invite-only subscription method. Since it started in Sweden it has that market pretty much sown up, although, bizarrely, it remains invite-only in Sweden. But invites have been spreading across the planet like wildfire for this very simple to use service. And others are using it whether they are in the UK or not.

Redfin Rolls Out The Welcome Mat For Foes Amidst Real Estate Crisis
1 Comment
by Leena Rao on February 11, 2009

In a surprising move, online real estate brokerage Redfin is entering into partnerships with real estate agents from more than a dozen other brokerages in areas that Redfin’s in-house agents can’t reach. Redfin appears to have changed its tune from its founding when the firm wasn’t really getting along with real estate agents. In fact, Redfin seemed to be founded with the mission that consumers could avoid fees associated with hiring and using a real estate broker.

With the real estate market contracting and credit tightening, Redfin has been forced to reconsider its business model. It seems that these partnerships with real estate agents was necessary for Redfin to expand throughout the country without having to hire more agents. Redfin was previously limited to showing listings in the metropolitan areas of Seattle, San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, Washington, and Chicago and will now be adding a presence in counties in Northern California, Illinois and Washington. Redfin laid off 20 percent of its staff in October of 2008 and reported slower revenue growth last year than in years before.

Yahoo Readies The Meter For Its First Web Services Business
19 Comments
by Mark Hendrickson on February 11, 2009

Yahoo is announcing several changes to its Search BOSS service, which lets developers incorporate web results from Yahoo’s main search index into their own web apps. The biggest of these changes intends to transform one of Yahoo’s most innovative projects into a real business.

Since launch, the BOSS API has been provided entirely for free. Now Yahoo is putting in place a freemium model where it’ll be free only for developers who generate fewer than 10,000 queries per day. After that, a tiered pricing model will kick in that charges for BOSS as if it were a utility goes (think AWS). Rates will vary depending on the type of query (web result vs. spelling correction, for example), how many results the developer wants returned per query (with a new maximum of 1000 results), and just how far the developer goes over the free queries cap. The pricing scheme is also backed by a newly introduced service level agreement.

Google Brings Location-Awareness to Email
18 Comments
by Mark Hendrickson on February 11, 2009

Google appears to have a new obsession with knowing and broadcasting your current location. A week after announcing Latitude, which shares your location with friends on Google Maps and threatens to render several startups irrelevant, an engineer has developed location-aware email signatures for Gmail.

After turning on the “Location in Signature” feature in Gmail Labs, you’ll see a new checkbox in the Signature area of your settings that says “Append your location to the signature.” Once the box is checked, all of your subsequent emails will end with something like “Sent from: San Francisco, California”.

Author’s Guild Calls Kindle 2’s Text-to-Speech Software Illegal
41 Comments
by John Biggs on February 11, 2009

Another day, another potentially disruptive technology called out by conservative and fear-mongering industry groups. Paul Aiken, director of the Author’s Guild, is calling the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech system a form of copyright transgression in that it essentially creates an audiobook, albeit automatically. From the WSJ:

> “They don’t have the right to read a book out loud,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “That’s an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law.”

> An Amazon spokesman noted the text-reading feature depends on text-to-speech technology, and that listeners won’t confuse it with the audiobook experience. Amazon owns Audible, a leading audiobook provider.

Pollsb Nabs $1.3 Million In Funding For Lousy Interactive Polling Widgets
27 Comments
by Robin Wauters on February 11, 2009

Pollsb (short for Polls Boutique) has raised a Series A round of $1.3 million led by DFJ Tamir Fishman Ventures and early-stage investors Zelkova Ventures and PhilQuo Ventures. The Tel-Aviv, Israel-based startup had previously raised $700,000 from incubator and seed funding provider Connector Media, which brings the total invested in the company to $2 million.

Here’s how they pitch the service:

> Pollsb is your ticket for a self-discovery ride. Our ride will allow you to learn new things about yourself, and about the way others perceive you. It’ll help you get instant feedback, and ultimately assist you in developing what we call social identity. It’ll even introduce you to some pretty cool people and help you find some pretty cool stuff people like you seem to enjoy.

> The Pollsb ride is fueled by questions, on every topic in the world. Joining you on it are all the other active participants on Pollsb. The insights we provide you stem from where you stand in relation to them.

If that sounds a little vague, it’s because it is.

Huddle adds OpenSocial apps to Intercall conference calls
6 Comments
by Mike Butcher on February 11, 2009

We don’t often report on distribution deals startups make with big companies. But it’s significant that InterCall, the world’s largest conference call provider, is to give each of their 1 million customers an account with UK-based Huddle. The UK startup has built a suite of social collaboration applications which were good enough to make it the only non-US partner for LinkedIn when it added a bunch of OpenSocial apps recently (alongside the likes of Amazon and Google). Huddle is still running on a $4 million Series A round from 2007 from UK VC Eden Ventures, but revenues are coming in at the same time from premium features and enterprise accounts from the likes of UNICEF and even some US government departments.

Modu Comes Out Of The Woodwork With A Truly Innovative Mobile Offering
21 Comments
by Robin Wauters on February 11, 2009

Modu, the heavily-funded Israel-based modular phone manufacturer that enables you to slip a light mobile device into a variety of so-called “jackets” (think music players, other cellphones, car stereos, digital cameras, etc.), is prepping its big commercial launch for this year by unveiling its family of phones at the upcoming Mobile World Congress. The actual sales for the device will start at the beginning of next quarter.

Modu started teasing everyone in January last year, and revealed what it had in store a month after. Crunchgear’s John Biggs dubbed it cool but flawed, but this was all way before the company ever had something to show for its promises and - meanwhile - over $127 million in venture capital funding. Well, now they do.

And Twitter Goes Down Again
43 Comments
by Robin Wauters on February 11, 2009

We’d have never thought breaking the news of Twitter co-founder and ex-CEO Jack Dorsey joining Ustream’s board of advisors would have that much of an effect on the micro-sharing service. As of 11:19 AM CET, Twitter is down for the count, which brings back a lot of memories here at TechCrunch.

I hate to pimp services I was involved in myself, but since it’s a non-commercial, fun project: Twiddict should be able to queue up your tweets for when Twitter comes back again (yes, it asks for your user name and password and no, we won’t do anything wrong with it).

Update: half an hour of downtime now, Twitter Status is silent. I’m getting my Fail Whale T-shirt.

Update 2: the error image switched to a bogus ‘database maintenance’ claim, with a message saying they’ll back in 30 minutes.

Update 3: it’s back (12:08 AM CET). Nearly an hour without tweeting; go catch up now.

Update 4: this update on the Twitter Status blog says it was a database problem and the site was down for about an hour indeed.

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey Joins Ustream.tv Advisory Board
24 Comments
by Robin Wauters on February 11, 2009

Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping in as an advisor to Ustream.tv, the popular live video community site. By now, you will / should have read about how Twitter came to be and how vital the role of Dorsey was to the whole story, essentially laying the groundworks for the real-time updating service we’ve all come to love (or not understand).

This history prompts Ustream.tv’s co-founder and CEO John Ham to state that “Jack has changed the internet forever”, which is a little over the top but no doubt his experience with real-time culture and the pains of scaling rapidly growing internet services will be a big help to the Mountain View, CA-based startup.

Update: Twitter needs some advice too. The service is currently down for the count as from around 11:19 AM CET (aaah, memories).

Yumbunny: Crowd-Sourced Matchmaking With Hilarious Results
32 Comments
by Jason Kincaid on February 10, 2009

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Yumbunny is a new matchmaking site that relies on ‘the crowd’ to help you pick out your future mate. The site presents two people side by side, asking users to vote if they look like they’re meant for each other (it also presents a brief list of the things they like and dislike, so you can get a feel for their personalities). The end result is ridiculously superficial, but it’s also a fun guilty pleasure reminiscent of Hot or Not (some of the matches have left me laughing hysterically).

The site’s biggest draws are its widgets, which allow you to embed Yumyum matching into your blog or social network profiles. You can get either a widget that pits two randoms against each other every time, or one that always features your photo as one half of the pair (presumably this is the widget you’d embed if you were actually trying to use the site to find a match). As an extra incentive to vote on other matches, the more active you are on Yumyum, the more often your photo will be shown to other users. And if at any time you come across a match you think one of your friends might like, you can Email them a recommendation.

New Brain-Scan Tech Uses IR-Detecting Headband
14 Comments
by Devin Coldewey on February 10, 2009

Researchers at the University of Toronto have put together a new technique for coarse determination of thought processes and preferences. It involves a headband set to detect near-infrared radiation, which is apparently emitted by the brain in areas of activity — it has to do with oxygen activity and blood flow. The technique can’t be used to tell if you prefer Coke Zero over Pepsi One (I don’t), but it can be used as a rudimentary choice-making device.

Some similar-in-concept devices are being pitched as game controllers, but they’ve had little success so far. The execution is different, but the idea is the same: supercortical pattern detection.

Tsavo Strays From The Acquisition Model, Develops Three Lifestyle Blogs
25 Comments
by Leena Rao on February 10, 2009

Start-up Tsavo Media, an online media network started by UserPlane founder Mike Jones, has officially added a trio of new blogs, Manolith, Twirlit and KidGlue to its growing media mini-empire. Tsavo, who has appeared to implement a growth by acquisition strategy since its start in September, opted to develop the three blogs in-house.

Law Firm Blunder Reveals Value Of Facebook Payout To ConnectU: $65 Million
48 Comments
by Jason Kincaid on February 10, 2009

The founders of ConnectU were apparently paid as much as $65 million in cash and Facebook stock to settle their longstanding dispute with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, according to an ad unearthed by The Recorder this morning. The advertisment was placed by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, the lawfirm that represented ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendr up until spring of last year, and includes a listing of all of Quinn’s successes over 2008, proclaiming that “It’s Our Opponents Who Need A Bailout.” Listed among the victories was the Facebook claim - a bizarre move given the great lengths all parties involved took to ensure that the press would not learn the details of the settlement.

From the article in The Recorder:

> Lawyers in the heavyweight fight had expended great effort to keep the settlement secret — even going as far as persuading a judge to clear the courtroom of reporters on one occasion. But ConnectU’s former lawyers from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges published the settlement amount in a firm advertisement trumpeting the firm’s prowess….
> The disclosure was apparently inadvertent. Firm Chairman John Quinn asked The Recorder to not print the amount, citing the confidentiality provision, and declined to comment further.

Qik and Boingo Wireless to announce partnership
7 Comments
by Greg Kumparak on February 10, 2009

Like all mobile video broadcasting solutions, Qik works at its best when it’s granted access to a nice fat WiFi pipeline. But beyond their living rooms, their local coffee shop, and that one street corner where they can pick up WiFi signal if they hold their laptop just right, most people don’t have a very wide array of WiFi spots available to them - not without hotspot-by-hotspot fees, at least. Looking to make full-breadth broadcasting on the go a bit more accessible, Qik and Boingo Wireless, a nationwide WiFi provider, will be announcing a partnership later today.

Teens Spend 31 Hours a Week Online
74 Comments
by Nicholas Deleon on February 10, 2009

How much time do you spend online, America? [Waits for answer.] That’s funny because the average teenager spends a cool 31 hours per week online. And what does the average teen do? The usual, I guess you can say—instant message friends, surf YouTube, get homework help, view porn, etc. Just another day in Anytown, USA.

Why no multitouch on the G1? Because Apple said so.
37 Comments
by Greg Kumparak on February 10, 2009

When the G1 launched back in October, a common question clanged through the halls: wheres the multitouch? When a few clever minds managed to patch in their own multitouch support (proving that the hardware could handle it) things got even more perplexing. Had Google just not ironed out the multitouch workings enough to support it in this first device, or had Apple’s patent stranglehold scared them away?

TicketMaster and Live Nation Agree to $2.5 Billion Merger
57 Comments
by Mark Hendrickson on February 10, 2009

This could be good news for the music industry, which suffers from steadily declining record sales and stands to benefit from more ticket sales for live performances. Or just another last-ditch measure to save itself from an inevitable death and rebirth.

According to Paidcontent, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have entered into a definitive agreement to merge into an entity called Live Nation Entertainment.

From the release:

> The companies will be combined in a tax-free, all-stock merger of equals with a combined enterprise value of approximately $2.5 billion. Under the agreement, Ticketmaster shareholders will receive 1.384 shares of Live Nation common stock for each share of Ticketmaster they own, subject to certain adjustments defined within the agreement. Live Nation and Ticketmaster shareholders will each own approximately 50 percent of the combined company. The new company anticipates generating approximately $40 million of operating synergies through the combination of their ticketing, marketing, data centers and back-office functions.

Ticketmaster specializes in online ticketing whereas Live Nation focuses on concert promotions. They will still have to go through regularly review before the merger can be completed, and as Paidcontent points out, there will be those in the music industry that create stiff resistance to this consolidation of power (especially with Ticketmaster’s reputation for monopolizing ticket sales on its own).

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