I first heard about Picaboo from Robert Scoble a few days ago. Picaboo is a way to create, share and print photo albums.

Picaboo was founded in September 2002 by Howard Field and Kevin McCurdy, and is funded by Kleiner Perkins and Softbank. They launched in May 2005.

It only works on Windows right now (although Mac user have built in software for this stuff that works very well already). Picaboo requires a client download and the album editing occurs on this client. While I’d prefer a web app (flash or ajax), having a desktop client does speed things up considerably.

Picaboo is free to download, and creating and sharing albums is also free. They generate revenue from the sale of printed albums and dvds. A printed photo album is $25 plus shipping and includes up to 20 pages. Each additional page is $2.

I spent a considerable amount of time this evening test the software, creating an album and sharing it with Brian Benzinger to test out the features.

The user interface is extremely easy to use and required little or no help or FAQ reference.You simply upload pictures, choose a format for the album, add text, etc.

There are a wide variety of album choices. You can also add music, or any other sound file (commentary, for instance). One thing I didn’t like is that the pictures must be locally stored before uploading. You cannot, for instance, give it a flickr username and use those pictures.

Once you’ve created an album, you can share it with “pals”, who can, if they’ve downloaded the picaboo software, view the album and add to it, creating their own version. You can also publish an album to the web for viewing by anyone. For some reason, the web version of albums will not play any music or other sound file you’ve assocated with it (a serious flaw in my opinion).

I used photos from last weekend’s tagcamp event to create an album, which can be viewed here. You can’t hear it on the web version, but the soundtrack I added to the album is, in my opinion, perfect. Let me know what you think.

I’ve been using Blogbridge for a few weeks now. It’s the first time I’ve seriousy used a desktop application to read feeds – I really like web based readers because there is no software download, compatibility issues, etc., and because many of the desktop readers are not free. But so many Blogbridge fans have emailed me suggesting I try it out that I did. And based on what I’ve seen, I give it a thumbs up.

Blogbridge is also open source. The founder, Pito Salas, tells me that there are at least six non-employee developers contributing to the project. There is a business model – Blogbridge eventually hopes to roll out premium features on top of the open source code base. For now, everything is free.

Blogbridge comes in three flavors – Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. It is written entirely in Java. There are new releases weekly – the current release is v. 2.7.

The default user interface is three panes. Folders on the left, feeds in the middle and posts on the right. Importing OPML files is a snap, you can read feeds offline (a big benefit over web based readers), and they are actively supporting Dave Winer’s Reading List idea (although no integration yet).

Each pane has scroll bars, meaning, like Bloglines, you can scroll through the pane without losing your place in other panes (something that drives me crazy with other readers). Like all readers it seems, Blogbridge does a poor job properly rendering HTML, so posts look a little off.

Blogbridge also has expert guides to assist users in finding feeds relevant to their interests. Lots of people I know and respect are on that list, including Richard MacManus, Jeff Clavier, Dan Gillmor, and Shel Holtz.

I’m a big fan of open source projects, and Blogbridge is an excellent reader. Blogbridge is located in Arlington, Mass.

CourseCafe is a search and social bookmarking tool for students that the founder, Puneet Gupta, demo’d at TagCamp last weekend. The company is located in Mountain View and is angel funded.

At first blush, the question came to mind as to why students can’t just use existing search tools like Google and social bookmarking applications like del.icio.us to handle their research needs. After the demo I understood why CourseCafe may be compelling for students to use on top of existing services.

The site, which is currently under closed beta, has automatically uploaded entire course schedules for most colleges and universities in the U.S. Students can quickly add the courses they are taking. As the company gets some history behind it, the bookmarks saved from previous semesters in the same course will stay available to students, giving them a good start on finding relevant web documents.

Search is integrated directly into the site using Yahoo and Google APIs. A bookmarklet is also available for sites found outside of CourseCafe. Bookmarking and tagging a link is straightforward and functional. All students of a course that bookmark items will be able to see other’s bookmarks, creating additional value for students (and reasons to use the site). There are other great features as well, such as limiting searches to .edu sites.

CourseCafe is young and raw right now. But if they can find a way to tap into the college crowd like Facebook has (our profile of Facebook), there’s a good chance they’ll have some success.

There are obvious product extensions as well, such as hosting notes and other course information.

Trulia is a vertical search engine for real estate. Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen, Stanford MBAs, founded Trulia in 2004, and just moved their ten person company into shiny new offices in San Francisco. Trulia is currently angel funded.

The site launched a month ago with California listings only. Trulia will be rolling out new states (the next one will be this week) in the near future.

Like Oodle, Trulia pulls its content from multiple, distributed sources. In Trulia’s case, its data is indexed from real estate professionals’ websites, where the most detailed information on home listings is located. Trulia often has listings that aren’t included in the MLS, either because the agent hasn’t uploaded the listing yet, or for some new home construction, they never appear in the MLS at all.

The site, which is advertiser supported, has excellent integration with Google maps and provides email and RSS notifications of new search results. Another feature that I really like are the statistics. For any given search, Trulia will show statistics on average home prices per bedroom (but for some reason no average across all home listings), average time a home is on the market, average price per square foot, etc.

Trulia does not show for sale by owner listings at this time. Their main goal, in addition to providing a rich user experience, is to serve real estate professionals by lowering their marketing costs and driving traffic to their websites. Pete tells me that indexing information from professionals’ sites is not easy – it has to be properly parsed and formatted for re-display on Trulia, and duplicate listings removed (some websites show listings from third party agents).

I had the opportunity to sit down with Ajay Juneja, the founder of Mountain View based Speak With Me, at Tag Camp this weekend. I had a half hour demo in his car and was completely blown away by what he’s created. You can see pictures of Ajay and his car at my flickr account.

What’s so special about his car? He’s layered a proprietary dialog manager, which semantically parses and analyzes data, on top of off-the-shelf speech recognition software, to create one kick ass computer system that is controlled with an array microphone. It allows you to control your car via speech. It was jaw-droppingly impressive.

For the demo, Ajay controlled his stereo system verbally, changing songs, picking tracks, controlling volume, etc. The commands he used to do this were in absolutely plain English and varied considerably in structure. For instance, Ajay at one time said “go to track 3″. Another time he said “play for me another one bites the dust”. Later, “I would like to hear wonderful tonight by eric clapton. “louder”. “quieter”.

Everything worked. No errors. Perfect. He repeatedly tried to trick the system by asking for a song with the wrong artist, etc. The system simply asked him, in its charmingly computerish voice, whether he wanted to hear the song, or a song by the artist.

Ajay then showed me their navigation product, which will integrate into car’s existing nav systems. Drivers will be able to control many aspects of the driving experience verbally once this product is commercially available.

I didn’t want to get out of the car. Frankly, I wanted to find a way to steal his car.

Robert Scoble saw Ajay’s car months ago at BarCamp. He agreed (verbally) to a non disclosure agreement and couldn’t talk much about it. Now, Ajay’s company has advanced enough that he is talking about many aspects of the product, and giving demo’s, without NDAs in place.

Ajay graduated from the computer science program, with a minor in robotics, at Carnegie Mellon University. He also took graduate courses at the language technologies institute (see also the speech to speech product being discussed all over the web today, which is has also been developed at Carnegie Mellon), where this software has been under development for ten years. The original Carnegie Mellon researcher on the technology behind speakwithme is Matthias Denecke, who is now an advisor to Ajay.

Speak With Me will not be commercially available until at least late 2007, when it will be built directly into cars (they are negotiating deals now) and available at high end car stereo shops. The car stereo product will be around $400-$600, and the navigation system will be in the $2,500 range.

They will also offer additional services. One example – the car’s voice can be a celebrity. Ajay asked me how I’d like to have Paris Hilton, or whoever, interact with me to control my stereo and navigation system. Yep, I’d be up for that.

Ben Ruedlinger’s Blogniscient relaunched today with a completely new look and feel. An old screenshot of the service is here.

Blogniscient is a blog news organizer that, like Memeorandum, uses a propreitary algorithm for determining what’s hot in the blogosphere at any given time. Unlike Digg, which creates news items based on user bookmarking and subsequent voting to determine front page items, Blogniscient and Memeorandum are automated.

Another similarity: both have hard to remember, and difficult to spell, domain names.

Memeorandum has two verticals currently: Politics and Tech. Blogniscient has five: politics, tech, sports, entertainment and business. Blogniscient also has an “all category”, and additional tabs for “top blogs” and “freshest stuff”.

Memeorandum does not rank blogs publicly. They include new content on the top right area of the site, and additional new content on the bottom left. Memeorandum also includes older content that has fallen from the main area, on the bottom right of the site.

Blogniscient just posts a link and summary of top articles. Memorandum goes two steps further – showing blogs that contribute to the discussion, as well as a permalink for the entire discussion group. For instance, Blogniscient’s new launch is the top story on Memeorandum right now, which you can see by clicking here, even after it’s fallen off as stale news.

Memeorandum appears more transparent in their ranking because you can actually see and link to blogs which have contributed to the discussion.

Memeorandum also can show news items from major publications like the New York Times, and press releases, as the main news items. Linking blogs are shown in the discussion area. I also find this to be a very useful feature.

Taking everything into consideration, I still believe that Memeorandum is a better service. I’ll use Blogniscient too, but Memeorandum has actually changed the way I approach the web – I spend more time on Memeorandum than any other website.

In addition to the robust and open search functionality released by Del.icio.us earlier this week, there are at least two additional new features that are worth noting. I also have a few more thought on the search function below.

Media Player

Del.icio.us has built a media player directly into the site. If you find a link to a MP3 file, a small icon appears to the left of the bookmark that can be clicked to play the file. Try it out.

Tag Bundles

Tag Bundles are, effectively, tags of tags. This feature existed before, but it is now much easier to create and edit tag bundles with a simple click of tags.

The Del.icio.us Search Engine

I’ve been using the del.icio.us search function a lot over the last few days. For certain searches, del.icio.us has far more relevant results than any other real time engine. The data isn’t necessarily deep, but the top result is super relevant. More on this (possibly) later, but del.icio.us may have just very quietly created the best (real time) search engine on the web.

Delicious.com

One last thing. Someone pointed out to me recently that delicious.com is now redirecting to del.icio.us. The domain is registered under Joshua’s name. I think it’s a great move to obtain the domain, and I wouldn’t mind a re-brand with the new URL.

I had an early peak at Shadows while it was still in beta, back in July. Shadows is a Pluck product.

Last week, Pluck took the beta tag off of Shadows and released v 1.0. Dave Panos, Pluck’s CEO, gave me a walk through of the new functionality last night.

Shadows is a social bookmarking site with good features, and all of the expected bells and whistles. But the reason I like it so much is that they’ve come up with a really interesting application for all the bookmark data they collect – shadow pages.

If you choose to install their toolbar, you can click on “Shadow Page” from any web page and be redirected to that page’s Shadow Page. This page is a collection of metadata gathered from user bookmarks.

For instance, here is the Shadow Page for Apple’s iPod Nano. The Shadow Page includes notes from users who have bookmarked the iPod Nano web page, a tag cloud of tags used to describe the page, users who’ve tagged it, etc. A user can choose to make any bookmark private, but any public bookmarks are included on the Shadow Page.

It’s a really unique product and a good twist on social bookmarking.

Shadows also has set up groups, like this one for Web 2.0. Links are automatically collected here by users who tag pages with “web2.0″. There is also a tab for a general discussion that any user can participate in.

The fact that all of this metadata for websites is being collected is not that interesting. What is interesting is that anyone can access this site metadata (and only that site’s metadata) by simply clicking a button in a toolbar.

Shadows has been slowly building up a loyal user base, many of which are interested in highly niche content. An example is this Shadow Page on Harry Potter. An entire community has emerged around this page, with users writing their own Harry Potter fiction, thousands of discussion items, etc. As more groups are formed (and users will soon have the ability to create a group on the fly, based on how they tag a page), more of these microcommunities will sprout, generating lots of page views for Shadows.

I’ve launched a new companion blog to TechCrunch called CrunchNotes. I wrote a longish introductory post describing exactly why it exists (and why TechCrunch exists), but here’s the essence:

So, why am I starting CrunchNotes? The main reason is that I find that sometimes, I want to talk about more than just new companies and products. Sometimes I have something to say about what’s going on in the blogosphere or the world. Sometimes I want to link to something interesting another blogger has written, but which has nothing to do with new companies. I found that doing that on TechCrunch tends to dilute the core value of that blog.

Yeah, I just quoted myself. Sorry. It won’t happen again.

If you are interested in reading CrunchNotes, here’s the feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/crunchnotes.

Thanks to Fred Oliveira, who designed CrunchNotes (and TechCrunch).

Update: February 5, 2006: CircleOne is now called Prosper.

Rumors are flying that a super-stealth BenchMark backed company called CircleOne (also known as p2pcredit) will be launching as soon as this weekend. The domain name, www.circleone.com, is not yet live.

If the rumors are correct, the company will be similar to Zopa, a London based company that we profiled in August. Zopa syndicates small loans out to many people, taking a fee..

Whois information on the domain (registered at register.com) shows the company is located in San Francisco.

Something about the rumor must be wrong…Benchmark has also invested in Zopa, which has announced that they will be launching in the U.S. at some point.

Update: An ebay employee has joined circleone and has a profile on LinkedIn (I am not going to point to it). This person describes CircleOne in the profile as follows:

CircleOne is a consumer loan platform through which people can borrow money by setting their own interest rates, like an eBay for personal loans.

CircleOne’s founding principle is that people from close communities act more responsibly towards each other. CircleOne leverages this powerful concept of group responsibility and applies it to person-to-person lending – resulting in better interest rates for people that borrow and lend.

I came across two very funny web 2.0 satires today.

Web Two Point Oh! is a site that will generate “a pre-created VC friendly Web 2.0 company just for you!”. My company is “zVodidoo” and my product is “rss-based collaborative document editing via ajax”. I like Richard’s too – Blinonorati, a “tag-based wiki via flash”.

And Russell Beattie finally categorizes all of these new companies in an intelligent way. “Scrape Engines” kills me. I love that some of the comments seem quite offended.

Flickr announced that they are now supporting photo printing. They are giving away 10 free 4×6 prints to each user to start. Only people with U.S. credit card addresses can participate for now.

Photos can be delivered, or picked up at any Target store with one hour processing. The costs are very reasonable, too. See the FAQs.

On a separate note, I’ve been using the Flickr Uploader recently to upload photos. I know its been around for a while, but it sure does make uploading pictures (and tagging them) a lot easier.

By the way, take the “beta” off the logo, guys. You’ve arrived.

TechWeb has opened nominations for its second annual BLOG-X Award. All technology blogs that are published independently of a major publishing company are eligible, and the ten blogs that receive the most nominations by December 9, 2005 will have the chance to win the award. You can nominate up to five blogs.

Please nominate TechCrunch if it is one of your favorites.

Riya (formerly Ojos) will be opening its doors to 10 or so lucky alpha testers tomorrow morning.

Riya leverages potent facial and text recognition technology with an intelligent interface to help people make sense of the thousands of untitled and untagged photos that are building up on their hard drives (and on the web).

We previously profiled Riya (then Ojos) on August 31, 2005

I went by Riya’s offices today and met with the team to get a look at their product. According to Munjal Shah, Riya’s CEO, I am the first outsider to get a chance to bang on the live product. Given how hot Riya is right now, I consider that a huge honor.

The process starts with registration and choosing a privacy setting on your pictures. You then download a client application that uploads photos you choose to include in Riya. The actual uploading takes a while – about 4 hours for each GB of photos. Instead of waiting around, Riya will email you when the process is complete.

That’s when the fun starts. In my case about 400 pictures were uploaded. I was presented with a view of facial thumbnails of everyone in my photos. Riya asks that you begin to educate it by telling it who the people are…it then very quickly starts to auto-tag pictures with a surprising level of accuracy.

Riya also recognizes text in photos, and lets you select any area of a photo and tag that as well. For instance, you could select just the Eiffel Tower in a photo and tag it as such. Within moments, everything of importance in all of my photos was tagged. And more importantly, it was searchable.

It’s an easy step to allow friends to also tag and search your photos (if you choose), and even allow full public search.

Linking these two features – massively automated tagging of everything in photos, with search, is compelling to say the least. The folks at Riya call it “tag locally, search globally”.

Riya is going to be successful. They have real technology. And, as people use it to tag photos, Riya will create a database of unique attributes of people. Once enough people start using the service, Riya will be able to auto-tag people’s names with less and less training by the user. At that point, why would anyone try a competing service? Riya will have technology (protected by patents) and an incredible network effect as well.

Riya plans on having a destination site that will be free, and will OEM their service to other photo services. Sites like flickr can certainly try to duplicate Riya’s service, but unless they move very quickly Riya’s network effect Riya will be insurmountable.

In fact, Riya could become so ubiquitous as to actually cause real privacy concerns. One question I asked the team today was – “what if you get so much data on people that I could take a picture of a crowd, upload it to Riya, and instantly have the names of every single person in the crowd?” Apparently, their technology is not that powerful – yet. Riya’s ability to know who’s in a photo is largely based on who you are and the people you are connected to.

To fully appreciate Riya you have to see it visually. I’ve posted a few screen shots below of my experience using it earlier today.

Get in to the Riya alpha if you can. It’s going to be a popular service.

Wink is a very interesting new search site that combines traditional search results with del.icio.us and other user generated metadata.

We profiled Wink on October 12, 2005 and Michael Tanne, the CEO, gave a demo at our party last week. Wink was also one of the sponsors of our party.

Wink is in private beta right now and are dripping in new users a few at a time to test the service. Thousands of people have been waiting weeks to get in.

As part of their sponsorship of our party, Wink has agreed to guarantee immediate access to the first 100 people who request a beta account at Wink and write “techcruncher” in the note section. This process is automated – if you don’t receive an immediate invitation you either misspelled “techcruncher” or 100 people have already requested an invite with the code. If you aren’t one of the first 100, they will still make an effort to get you to the top of the list.

Michael has requested that I stress that beta testers should be willing to spend some time helping them build out the service. You can do that by tagging results, syncing with your del.icio.us tags, creating search sets and, generally, performing a lot of searches.

WaxMail is a free voice email service for Outlook from the guys who created Skylook (see our profile here).

WaxMail requires a small download and a quick installation with Outlook. From there, all you have to do is click a button to record a voicemail. The sound file is saved as an MP3 and is attached to the email, which can also include text and other attachments. WaxMail is free, although there is a small text advertisement added to the email. For those wishing to exclude the add, WaxMail charges a $29.95 one time fee.

We’ve profiled a few companies in this space – vemail, slawesome, and springdoo. They all do things a little differently…and for many people WaxMail will work best.

The downside is that it only currently works with Outlook, and I really dislike Outlook. The upside: it’s free, it works incredibly well and it has a very slick interface. Also, I love the fact that files are actually sent as attachments (meaning they can be listened to offline, easily forwarded, etc.) instead of forcing the listener to click on a link. Check out Jason Clarke for additional information.

Try it out and send me a voice message at editor@techcrunch.com

UPDATE: Robert Scoble just discovered WaxMail as well and has some ideas on using it for podcasting.

Company: Kaboodle
Launched: October 26, 2005
Status: $1.5 m in angel funding
Location: Santa Clara, CA

Kaboodle opened its doors this afternoon for an official launch on Wednesday.

I met with Manish Chandra, the CEO, earlier today for a walk through and came away very impressed. In addition to Manish, Kaboodle’s founders include Keiron McCammon and Chetan Pungaliya.

Kaboodle is a free social bookmarking service. And it really does take things to the next level in terms of usefulness, particularly for certain types of stuff. For instance, Kaboodle really shines when bookmarking ecommerce content.

The first thing to do after registration is add a kaboodle button to your browser. When you click to bookmark content, you are redirected to Kaboodle where you select a “page” (topic). Content is auto-selected, including an image. A click lets you change or add to the content and/or select a new image.

Once you’ve added content to a page you can choose to make it public or private, and share it with others. New content can be added to a page from other sites. Each piece of content can be rated by others, and free-text comments can be added. It is an excellent way to collaborate with others in comparing and contrasting related content. In fact, in many ways Kaboodle reminds me of a wiki once the collaboration on a page begins.

Coming soon functionality includes page badges, search and RSS for users and pages. I’d also like to see tagging functionality added to pages and individual pieces of content.

Om Malik wrote a lengthy post on Kaboodle a few hours ago. In my opinion Manish Chandra and the rest of the team have done a great job rolling this out. They are talking to bloggers and mainstream press simultaneously, and the site is a textbook example of how to walk new users through how the service works. They’ve thought through launch strategy and usability in a very intelligent way.

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. We profiled it on September 21, 2005, just after they launched at DEMO.

Michael Bazeley at SiliconBeat writes today that VideoEgg is moving the company from New Haven, Connecticut to Silicon Valley. Michael also reports more interesting news – that VideoEgg has launched a partnership with Six Apart that allows TypePad users to post video to their blogs using Videoegg technology. Check out Venture Voice’s podcast interview with Mena Trott of Six Apart and VideoEgg co-founder Kevin Sladek as well.

VideoEgg, which is incredibly easy to use with just about any video device, is now directly available to a huge blogging base. My hope is that someone creates a wordpress plugin next.

Congratulations to the VideoEgg team on this partnership. I’m looking forward to having you in the neighborhood as well.

Reports are out that Google Base will be launching soon, perhaps even today. Dirson has a screen shot up on Flickr and additional images are on Wouter Schut’s blog.

Google Base appears to be a service to publish content directly to google and have them host it in a centralized way. If so, this would be going completely against the accelerating trend of decentralized publishing.

My prediction: when the dust settles, this will either be largely ignored or universally hated. Centralized content is boring…so much is going on at the edge of the web, why would anyone try to put it all back in the center?

Philipp Lenssen has more details, including the text from the screen shot below:

Post your items on Google.

Google Base is Google’s database into which you can add all types of content. We’ll host your content and make it searchable online for free.

Examples of items you can find in Google Base:

• Description of your party planning service
• Articles on current events from your website
• Listing of your used car for sale
• Database of protein structures

You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.

UPDATE: Tom Oliveri, Product Marketing Manager at Google, has posted a short note about Google Base on the Google blog:

You may have seen stories today reporting on a new product that we’re testing, and speculating about our plans. Here’s what’s really going on. We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps. We think it’s an exciting product, and we’ll let you know when there’s more news.

Thanks Anthony.

Fred Wilson reports that Del.icio.us has extended its existing user-only search to everyone. Previously search was available only if you were logged in to your del.icio.us account. Check it out on any del.icio.us page, including here.

Joshua Schachter has not yet written about this on the del.icio.us blog.

Search functionality has also been expanded. In addition to showing your own results in addition to everyone else’s, you can search using “and” (such as apples and oranges) to drill down into more relevant results. Results are returned if the query term is contained withint the title of the bookmark and/or within tags.

UPDATE: Per Joshua’s comments below (the founder of del.icio.us), del.icio.us comments are also searched. You can use “tag:tagname” to just search tags. If you are going to do multiple tag search, AND must be capitalized. I like the extended functionality a lot.

David Weinberger also posts some very interesting del.icio.us stats.