Company: CustomScoop
Launched: in private beta
Location: New Hampshire

What I like best about CustomScoop’s new prospective search/press clippings product is that it is dead simple to use. I spoke to Chip Griffin, CustomScoop’s Chief Innovation Officer and founder, tonight about his new service.

Steve Rubel has been testing CustomScoop and wrote about it earlier today.

CustomScoop has had a successful high end search/clippings product for five years. Pricing ranges from $300 – $1,500 per month and includes lots of bells and whistles.

The CustomScoop Personal product strips out many of those features and enters the market with a free version (allowing one search per account), with a paid version coming soon that allows more searches – the fee will be “substantially less” than the prices charged for their core high end offerings.

CustomScoop is more more, and less, than existing prospective search engines like PubSub. More because they monitor sites not covered by existing prospective search engines (including pages without feeds) and because they offer much more tailored searches (language and country filters, more keyword inclusion/exclusion functionality, etc. Less because they search only 25,000 blogs, whereas blog search engines generally hit the entire blogosphere (tens of millions of blogs).

However, CustomScoop, like Memeorandum (profile), carefully chooses what they consider to be the most important blogs that will supply their customers with pertinent information.

In addition to the 25,000 blogs, CustomScoop also monitors U.S. Online News (5,000 sources), International Online News (2,000 sources), US & EU Government Web Sites (7,000 sources) and Policy Web Sites (1,200 sources).

Search results, as they come in, can be viewed via RSS, twice daily emails or on the CustomScoop website. They’ve snuck in some nice ajax to speed up the review of large result sets.

Goowy is a browser based desktop tool built on Flash. See our August 17, 2005 profile of Goowy for additional information.

Until recently, Goowy’s main draw (other than it is extremely fast) was a very nice email application. Goowy also allows access of your regular email account in the Goowy UI via pop.

New Features

Goowy has launched new applications on their flash platform.

The two key new beta products are a calendar and a basic RSS reader. The calendar application is tightly connected to email, and the feature base is as good as most ajax calendars we’ve reviewed. With these additions the suite of products is now becoming much more useful.

In the near future Goowy will also be creating a virtual file storage product and allowing email pop into and out of Goowy. Virtual file storage will have an optional desktop application allowing for simple drag and drop access of files into Goowy.

They’ve also made the strategic decision to open their API to developers for the creation of new desktop widgets.

Pricing

Pop email access (in and out), email and file storage beyond 100 mb to the 2 gb range and other Goowy premium products will be priced at around $20 per year. The core products will remain free

We’ve been following the evolution of Dave Winer’s OPML Editor for most of this year (TechCrunch Profile). We’ve experimented with it, but never fully understood all of the incredible potential that it has to organize and distribute information..

Now we get it. We’ve created a directory, in OPML format, of every TechCrunch company profile. Dave has put the TechCrunch directory up on Scripting News. The directory updates on Scripting News automatically as we update the OPML file. All of our content is therefore available on the Scripting News site.

Dave wrote about this last night:

Preview: TechCrunch directory in Scripting News

There are so many stories that connect together in this one development, I’m going to have to do a podcast to explain (and I will, tomorrow), but in the meantime I wanted to show a rough top-level of the project, and give a brief idea of where it goes.

First, look at any archive page on Scripting News, for example the page for today.

http://archive.scripting.com/2005/09/28

If you look in the right margin, you’ll see a box that lists the top level of an OPML directory being edited by Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch. Each of the items in the directory is an article on TechCrunch. I wanted to include his content in mine because I would point to every review he writes, they’re all on-topic for Scripting News readers.

When he makes a change to that directory, the box recalcs. When it appears on www.scripting.com tomorrow, it will recalc every time I update Scripting News (that page is statically rendered). If you want you can include Mike’s directory in your site, or in your directory through inclusion. It’s a normal OPML file, edited with the OPML Editor.

This is, in so many ways, the kind of collaboration I envisioned when I released the OPML Editor. Mike, a lawyer who loves technology, is exactly the kind of person I want to empower with OPML.

This is just a start. We’re working on the taxonomy and interface. But this is an interesting experiment in using OPML to solve real-Web problems. If you’d like assistance in working with OPML, please email us and/or check out OPML.org.

Company: Slide
Launched: 2005
Location: San Francisco

Everybody wants to get media distribution done right. Slide and Filmloop both tackle the problem through a desktop application that is constantly updated with media items, scrolling to your hearts content. Contrary to Filmloop that is in closed Beta, Slide is out there and we’ve seen it for ourselves at our last barbecue.

I’ll be honest about it and say I saw both applications (Slide and Filmloop) as yet-another set of applications that sit on your desktop taking screen real-estate showing you pictures (by now you’ve figured I don’t use the Dashboard Slideshow widget on my mac, I bet). After seeing slide in action, though, I actually liked it.

Slide allows you to subscribe to content feeds by selected publishers or by your friends. This means that slide can become a useful tool on the job if you need to monitor graphical data, or it can be fun with your family if you want to keep watching new pictures from your loved ones. Me, I prefer the first. Initially I thought of a couple of applications, like monitoring webcams, graphical data or watching other kind of dataset that can be expressed through pictures. Then there’s the novelty uses like delivering music to selected people, etc.

All in all, even if you don’t like when things take some desktop space, you may find some of Slide’s capabilities interesting enough to give it a try, so go download it and try it for yourself.

TechCrunch channel on slide:

I almost forgot that there’s now a TechCrunch channel for Slide, so if you want to subscribe to it, click here and the Slide guys will take care of the rest for you. Sadly at the time of this writing there’s no MacOSX version so I can run it on my own machine, but we have it running on our demos machine in the living room. Nicely done!

FilmLoop (profile) has a 6 minute video of the founders demo’ing their product on the DEMO website.

It looks pretty slick. And a lot like Slide.

Company: Rollyo
Launched: September 28, 2005
Location: San Francisco

Overview

Rollyo, which launched today, allows you to create and publish your own search engines, based on websites you decide to include. John Battelle and Steve Rubel wrote about Rollyo earlier today as well.

The basic idea? Create customized searches (built on Yahoo search) that include only those sites you want to include. Search those sites for information that you know you can trust. And, see what other’s have created, and leverage those searches as well.

To set up (or “roll”) a search, you are asked to name up to 20 websites, pick a category and tag the search. A search can be public or private – public searches are ranked by popularity and listed on the site. You can also share searches with others directly.

Once you search, you can also expand the search out to all websites to get additional results.

In their About section, Rollyo says:

Rollyo is the fast, easy way to create personal search engines using only the sources you trust.

Are you tired of wading though thousands of irrelevant search results to get to the information you want? Ever wish you could narrow your search to sites you already know and trust? With Rollyo, you can easily create your own custom search engines, and explore and save those created by others.

WHY ROLLYO?

Rollyo puts the power of Yahoo! Search in your hands, by giving you the tools to create your own personal search engines – with no programming required. All you have to do is pick the sites you want to search, and we’ll create a custom search engine for you.

Team

Dave Pell, Founder + Roll Player
Angus Durocher, Engineering + Roll Model
Dan Cederholm, Designer + CSS Jedi
Alex Wright, Zen Master User Experience Architect

Company: JotSpot Live
Launched: September 27, 2005
Blog: JotSpot Live blog
Location: Palo Alto, CA

JotSpot Live, a JotSpot company, launched today. They’ve created an awesome wiki tool that solves at least two common wiki problems – the specialized markup language and multiple simultaneous users.

I love wikis. We have one. They are perfect for group collaboration.

But wiki code is different from everything else and while it isn’t difficult, it’s silly to have to use it (note Social Text’s wikiwyg, however, which is a nice wysiwyg editor for wikis). And only one person can edit text at any one time.

Jotspot Live solves both of these problems. It also doesn’t require any server software. It’s a dead simple wiki application. With a few feature additions (like link and image support) it will be good enough for most people to use.

It’s built with Ruby on Rails and uses Ajax to allow dragging and dropping of text around the screen. Add users by adding their email address. The wiki has presence functionality, meaning it shows you who is live on the page at any time. Multiple users can edit text simultaneously.

Abe Fettig, who is one of the people who built JotSpot Live, writes this about it:

I’ve been working on a project at JotSpot that is so incredibly cool, I get excited every time I think about it. It’s called JotSpot Live.

JotSpot Live is a real-time wiki interface that allows multiple users to edit the same page at the same time. Calling it “SubEthaEdit for the web” is an oversimplification, but that’s probably the quickest way to wrap your head around the concept. Unlike SubEthaEdit, JotSpot Live doesn’t require any special client software: it’s a web application that runs in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, using nothing but HTML, script, and CSS.

It’s not perfect. Brian Benzinger (who also writes about JotSpot Live here) and I are editing a page right now and he’s found a bug that occurs when two users simultaneously edit text. We also noticed that if one person logs off and then back on, two separate versions of the wiki page seem to run and each person only sees themself as “present”.

Other problems: Slow load time, no image support, it doesn’t tell you who written or edited text, there is no page delete function and you can’t uninvite people once they are added.

However, all of these bugs/feature adds are easily fixed.

Fred Oliveira (TechCrunch editor) wrote a post on webreakstuff about problems with wikis and collaborative software in general in July 2005. He identified many of the problems that JotSpot Live addresses.

Pricing

Free for up to five wiki pages per month. Includes advertising.

$5/month for up to 15 pages per month. No ads.

$20/month for unlimited pages. No ads.

There are no restrictions on functionality or number of users.

Team

Joe Kraus, co-founder and CEO
Graham Spencer, co-founder and CTO
Ben Lutch, Vice President, Operations
Ken Norton, Vice President, Products
Link

Additional Reading

Ben Barren, Paul Kedrosky, Reg Cheramy, Media Guerilla

Company: zvents
Launched: next week
Location: Menlo Park, CA

I had a chance to see a demo of the upcoming Zvents service this evening at the NetService Ventures Group office on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park.

Mark this one down as an ajax showcase. Zvents is a complete events ecosystem, with search, event creation, calendaring, sharing and blogging/webmaster tools (lots of ajax here) for promotion of events and calendars.

It looks similar in many respects to EVDB (now eventful), although the search functionality is clearly a generation further along and it certainly is a very good looking site.

zvents opens up next week and will be launching at the Web 2.0 Conference.

Peter Caputa wrote a detailed analysis of this space, including eventful and zvents, on PC4Media.

Team

Tyler Kovacs
Tom Hill
Ethan Stock
Matt Melmon
Paul Martino
Allie Williams
Tim Harrah
Chris Serrano
Chris Law
Diane Barrera

One of the great features of Measure Map (profiled here and here) is that it gives you real time stats on almost every aspect of your blog.

One of the features I like to check out every once in a while is “Browsers your visitors used today”. Today I noticed that 69% of TechCrunch visitors use Firefox, whereas only 16% used Internet Explorer and 14% used Safari. These numbers vary a bit from day to day, but Firefox always has a commanding lead.

Measure Map is still in closed beta but has given me permission to post the image below, grabbed earlier today.

Skype released parts of their product roadmap at VON in Boston last week, and screen shots are up at SkypeJournal.

Upcoming version 1.5, schedule to be released in October, is to add video and client-side web presence features. Version 1.6, in November, streamlines the client and adds social networking, among other features.

Later releases include blog/webmaster tools, PTT, user rewards program, offline IM, shared groups and video mail.

PubSub (profile) has been experimenting with blog stats recently (see their pubstats page). Zachary Rodgers reported earlier today that PubSub has released it’s newest stats tool – a list of the top 1,000 most influential blogs.

The PubSub LinkRanks 1000 is a list of the most consistently influential sites that publish feeds, based on their average LinkRank scores over the past 30 days. To create this list, we’ve averaged the daily LinkRanks of over 16 million sources. We’ve also included a 15-day average as well as each site’s current LinkRank as additional points of comparison.

PubSub also says “LinkRanks is PubSub’s method of measuring the strength, persistence, and vitality of links appearing in over 16 million sources that PubSub monitors.”

Robert Scoble says “Ahh, more fun with blog search ahead!”

The lists includes 15 and 30 day trailing data for each blog, current rank and percentile and a link to site stats (example – techcrunch).

Web 2.0 This Week
September 18-24

We had a terrific turnout for our TechCrunch Meetup on Thursday and look forward to hosting future events regularly (at least monthly). It is wonderful to have so many smart, obsessive people in one house for an evening – the demos were absolutely fantastic and lots of cross-pollination occured throughout the evening.

Thank you again to everyone who attended and posted pictures.

Too much to fit in the summary this week. Stuff that nearly got in:

• Six Apart talks about Comet, their future blogging product (via Robert Scoble)
• People are really liking NetVibes (and so do we!)
• Less-than-Stellar Google Blogsearch Reviews are coming in.
• Richard MacManus on Mashups

And last week marked a new Google product of course, the first in…well a week.

1. Recent TechCrunch Profiles

FilmLoop, Mefeedia, Placeopedia, ObjectGraph, Google Wifi, Feedburner (stats), Truveo, TailRank, Searchfox (update), VideoEgg, Remote Control Mail, Slawesome, Findory (update), Attensa (update).

2. FeedBurner Stats Mirror General Blog Growth

FeedBurner released new operating statistics on their blog on September 20, and lots of people noticed the exponential growth. They are now managing 100,000 feeds and over 4 million people subscribe to those feeds.

Our comments are here. We congratulate Feedburner on their growth and note that the trend is likely to reflect similar exponential growth in RSS usage across the web. So, congrats to all of us!

3. Web 2.0 Meme Map

Tim O’Reilly posts his Web 2.0 Meme Map on Flickr.

Result of a “What is Web 2.0?” brainstorming session at FOO Camp 2005. Meme maps adapted from business model maps developed by Beam Inc.

As we all struggle with defining Web 2.0, visual cues always help. I’m not as excited about this as others, though. Simple is better. We’re not at simple yet.

See Richard MacManus, Dan Grossman and others on the Meme Map.

4. Ajax not Perfect?

Venture Capitalist Dan Grossman, who’s young blog is now on my must-read list, writes a comprehensive and intelligible post describing in detail some of the shortcomings of Ajax.

5. Microsoft Reorganization

Microsoft announced a massive reorganization last Tuesday. See our detailed analysis here discussing why this is important for Web 2.0 (written by TechCrunch editor Keith Teare).

6. Qumana Blogger Survey

Qumana finishes a survey of bloggers and publishes the results in two parts:

• Part 1 – http://blog.qumana.com/blog/_archives/2005/9/22/1250138.html
• Part 2 – http://blog.qumana.com/blog/_archives/2005/9/24/1255292.html

Some of the data is surprising – 34% of respondents read 30 or less feeds, and the average blogging time per week hovers around 3-5 hours. Both of these stats are far less than I would expect. Lots of additional stuff there worth noting.

7. We Had to Find a Way to Fit This In

Yes, it’s Web 2.0 and I’m not arguing with you about it. This site may save more relationships than all of the online dating sites combined manage to start.

Attensa, which we profiled on August 29, 2005, has released v. 99 of its feed reader for Outlook.

The main new feature in the release is support for tagging of feeds, blogs and posts:

We’ve integrated an incredibly easy way to tag articles and feeds using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. Tags are simply keywords you add to add context to RSS feeds, articles, Web pages, blog posts, photos, even music you discover online.

The new tagging feature can be used in Attensa to keep feeds and articles organized but it also works with Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a great way to keep track of anything that captures your attention on the Web and to share those things with people with similar interests. When you set up your bookmark page on Del.icio.us, not only can you see the pages you’ve you tagged, you can also see related articles from other people who tagged the same pages or used the same tags as you have. Since every Del.icio.us page has an RSS feed, you can also subscribe to feeds based on a given subject, user, URL, or tag. It’s a pure attention stream that you can explore.

You can add tags to articles and access them using a pull down list using the Attensa Toolbar for Internet Explorer. When you tag articles with Attensa your bookmark list on Del.icio.us is updated and synchronized automatically. With the addition of tagging, Attensa gives you a set of tools for organizing your feeds and articles. Categories let you create a hierarchal structure using folders to keep feeds organized. Tags give you a more free form tool for keeping articles organized and they connect you with the del.icio.us social network.

Attensa is aggresively adding features to compete with other readers and has an excellent product suite. However, some (including Jeff Nolan) have stopped using Attensa’s Outlook product because of reported difficulties in making these third party applications work with Outlook properly.

Attensa also has a new logo. I liked the old one better.

Findory has a first-class personalization engine for blog and other news (see our profile on September 3, 2005).

Findory has built up a loyal following in the nearly two years since its launch. However, many users requested the ability to include RSS feeds of their choice directly into their blog and news channels. Greg and Alex just added this functionality, making Findory nearly perfect as a news source and reader.

Findory users now have the ability to add feeds directly into Findory – one at a time, via an OPML cut-and-paste or simply by directly importing your feeds from Bloglines, if that is your current reader. You can also import other users’ public Bloglines feeds.

Once you’ve imported these feeds, the powerful Findory personalization engine takes over and presents posts to you in a personalized way, based on what you (and community members like you) tend to find interesting. Click on TechCrunch posts a lot, and you’ll start to see lots of new posts from TechCrunch and other blogs on new web 2.0 companies.

Findory is squarely attacking the current efforts by Attensa, SearchFox, Personal Bee and others to present your feed information in a more intelligent and useful way. The standard readers quite simply don’t work for power users with 100+ feeds any more – and companies are trying very hard to find ways of sorting through this information for you before you start to read.

And unlike Attensa (who hasn’t launched their personalization product yet) and SearchFox (in private beta, although you can get an invite fairly easily), Findory is live and open to everyone.

Findory does not support folders, so if you tend to group your feeds that way Findory will not work well for you. If you methodically check your feeds and like knowing what order they are in, you may want to stick to your current reader. But it is very fast, and does group informaiton well according to interests.

Additional Reading

Inside Google, SEW, BlogHerald, Threadwatch, New Media Hack, RSS Compendium Blog

Service: Slawesome
Launched: September 24, 2005
Creator: Babak Nivi
Location: San Francisco

Slawesome, which demo’d at the TechCrunch Meetup last Thursday, is a neat tool for recording and sending voice messages via email.

Unlike vemail, slawesome does not require a download. And unlike Springdoo, Slawesome is free.

Once you’ve registered, you can record a message of up to 2 minutes and send it to any number of email addresses. A link to the file is included in the email. At this time there is no functionality for downloading the sound file.

Messages are archived and can be set to private or public status.

This is a young, raw service, but worth trying.

Disclaimer, Fred Oliveira, one of the TechCrunch editors (and site designer), worked on Slawesome.

Company: Remote Control Mail
Launched: Will launch early October
Funding: Closing Angel Round
Location: Portland, OR (development also in Russia)

Overview

RemoteControlMail will provide you with a permanent (snail) mail address, gather all of your incoming mail, scan (the outside), notify you of its existence (with the outside scan), scan the inside if you like (for a fee), and then either forward it to you or shred it, on your command.

You can sign up now for RCM. The service will begin working in a couple of weeks.

Who would want this? Anyone who moves a lot or maintains multiple residences. Businesses that need a physical mailing presence in another city. People who are concernced about identity theft (everyone should be). Or people who just want more cyber-control over their real world mail.

I spoke with the founder and CEO, Ron Wiener, today about RemoteControlMail’s launch a few days ago and got a better understanding of the service.

Dealing with real, actual (snail) mail isn’t very much fun. An endless and prodigious trail of junk mail comes through our mailbox (and incidentally, only 17% of it is ultimately recycled). As a country we get over 200 billion pieces of mail a year.

Remote Control Mail is the first company to try to solve this problem for us by virtualizing our real-world mail box.

Once you register, Remote Control Mail assigns you a permanent mailing address and you can then redirect all or some of your incoming mail to that address.

Upon receiving a piece of mail, RCM will scan the outside of the package or envelope and notify you of its existence via email or through the RCM website. You can choose to have the inside of the package scanned, and then either have the item forwarded to you (singly or grouped with other mail), or shredded and recycled.

An example of your RCM mailbox:

John Smith
RCM# 1234
14525 SW Millikan Way
Beaverton, OR 97005

Pricing

Basic pricing is $2.50 per month + $.10 per mail piece and $0.95 per package. RCM charges extra fees for forwarding, scanning ($10.-$.20 per page), shredding ($0.1 per ounce) and archiving. Link

Team

Ron Wiener, Founder, Chairman and CEO
Michael Miles, P.E., Director of Automation Technology
Brett Prochaska, Director of Software Development
Len A. Bayles, Chief Utility Player – Engineering
David L. Richardson, Director of Operations
Jeff Evans, Director of Marketing
Link

Thank you to everyone who attended our meetup/bbq last night in Atherton. We are definitely going to do this at least monthly, and we had a number of offers for corporate sponsorships last night to cover food, drinks, etc. in the future.

If you have any pictures from last night, please upload them to the wiki picture area (or place a link to buzznet or flickr or wherever you’ve posted them).

Also, I see posts by Tara, Ethan, Esteban, Justin Smith, Kevin, Chris Heuer, Ho John Lee, and Saha on the meetup. Thanks for writing!

Tara is also tagging her flickr pictures of the event with the tag “techcrunchbbq”. Good idea. I’ll do the same.

Pictures:

Read More

Company: VideoEgg
Launched: September 19, 2005
Location: New Haven CT

VideoEgg, founded by three Yale graduates, launched at DEMO in Huntington Beach, CA on Monday.

Given the light content on their website, my bet is that the folks at VideoEgg have been working quite hard over the last few weeks to get the product ready for release.

VideoEgg is a web-based publishing service that allows users to capture video content from virtually any device and format and publish it to the web. Click here for an example featuring Buzz Bruggeman.

At first glance, VideoEgg has some really excellent features. A live demo is available on their site, and allows you to drag a video into the viewer to get a taste for how easy it is to use. Flash 8 allows the viewing of videos with enhanced quality.

From their launch press release:

Today, VideoEgg, Inc. unveiled the VideoEgg Publisher, a new Web-based video publishing technology that makes it easy for everyday Internet users to capture, encode, upload, and watch online video for the first time. A ‘universal adapter’ that captures directly from hundreds of devices and reads dozens of formats, the VideoEgg Publisher allows users to painlessly publish video that anyone can watch without worrying about player compatibilities, encoding settings, or extra software. VideoEgg announced the Publisher at the DEMOfall 2005 Conference, the invitation only, leading industry showcase for launching innovative technology products.

Currently, posting video online is complicated for users, requiring a highly technical understanding of formats, encoders, players and servers. The VideoEgg Publisher simplifies the difficult video encoding and posting process, allowing users to capture video directly into a Website from camcorders, Web cams, and mobile phones. It also accepts video files via a simple drag-and-drop interface. Before movies are encoded and posted, users can perform basic edits with the Publisher’s simple editing tools.

Using this system, videos are immediately available for viewing online through the Flash-based VideoEgg Player, a “playerless” solution that does not require external players like Windows Media and QuickTime.

Lots of interesting information about the service above…and the last paragraph is really interesting. Publishers can easily integrate content directly on their website by simply adding a html snippet.

This is something I really like about VideoEgg – it appears that they are really focused on making their product as easy as possible to use.

I’ve downloaded their software (which seems to be off the site now) and am digging through a box for my video camera. I’m hoping to get some good content up and indexed on Truveo.

Additional Reading (and Listening)

DowntheAvenue, VentureVoice (interview with the founders), Buzznovation, Carl Plumer

SearchFox (profile) just announced the availablility of additional invitations to their beta.

If you’d like an invitation to try it out, email “support at searchfox dot com” with your preferred username, and reference code xb17.

As you may have read in our profile of SearchFox, we believe they have created a potentially disruptive product in the RSS Aggregator/Reader space. It’s worth testing out if you are interested in how the attention idea can help push relevant content to you.

TailRank just released an alpha product for their new analytics service.

My understanding is that it is a personalized search/recommendation/ranking engine for the long tail of blog content.

Kevin Burton (co-founder of Rojo), is TailRank’s founder and writes about the launch on his blog (subscribe to this blog if you haven’t).

TailRank is a next-generation weblog ranking system which takes into consideration a lot of lessons learned from other Web 2.0 products and services. Needless to say I’m really excited! I love my job and there’s a lot of innovation in this space right now.

We’re still in early alpha development mode and still building out a team. Things are going well and everyone I’ve pitched seems really excited.

I hope to have a public release in a few weeks but feel free to register for a beta account and we’ll send you out something as soon as possible. I’ll obviously be talking about TailRank a lot on my blog in the coming weeks so feel free to subscribe.

Kevin will be demo’ing the product at the TechCrunch Meetup tomorrow.