Soonr, the company that lets you access desktop files and Skype from your mobile phone, has released a version for the Mac. Mike profiled Soonr in May and the lack of Mac support was his one complaint. The new version is integrated with Spotlight and can render Photoshop files from your desktop into jpg for viewing on your phone. Looks cool.
Ted Murphy, CEO of advertising firm Mindcomet, has launched a new service called PayPerPost.com. You guessed it, it’s a marketplace for companies to connect with bloggers who are willing to blog about a product – for a price. The companies can set guidelines for their requests such as whether a picture must be included and whether they will only pay for positive blog coverage. There does not appear to be any requirement that the payment for coverage be disclosed. There is a requirement that PayPerPost.com must approve your post before you are paid. Wow.
TechCrunch does not accept payment for posts.
Is this a bad joke designed to torpedo the blogosphere’s credibility in general? It doesn’t appear to be. If we’re all trying to negotiate a space between Hollywood and mainstream journalism, this is taking things way too far towards the most insipid parts of Hollywood.
Clearly comfortable with the “all press is good press” paradigm, Murphy is emailing bloggers with a link to scathing coverage at Business Week (”Polluting the Blogosphere“) and even includes the words “As seen in Business Week” in the company logo. Blogger Jeremiah Owyang gave us the tip on PayPerPost.com and assures us that though he has grave concerns about this, Ted Murphy is not the devil. I don’t know if I’m convinced.
If you visit the Mindcomet.com website you’ll see that they do advertising for some very high profile clients. I can imagine many of them wouldn’t want to be associated with a project like this at all. Like EarthLink. They have a major campaign underway to improve advertising by paying people to make authentic promotional materials for them. How ironic.
Newsgator and Feedburner are the two most active companies in the RSS space right now. When either of these companies say anything, I pay close attention. Yesterday Newsgator founder and CTO Greg Reinacker (listen to an interview with Greg Reinacker and executives from other feed readers on TalkCrunch) posted something that everyone interested in the future of RSS should pay attention to – a big roadmap for the company’s near term future.
Newsgator properties (including the Mac NetNewsWire) are the second most frequently used feed readers by TechCrunch subscribers according to Mike’s post on CrunchNotes – behind FireFox. I think the company’s roadmap speaks to the future of RSS syndication in general. What are the most recent innovations at Bloglines? Folding blog search into Ask.com and supporting flash inside the reader. The Newsgator next steps discussed in Reinacker’s post blow those away. I think that these are the features and issues that we’ll see from every other vendor in this space.
Highlights discussed below include:
Chinese search engine Baidu, with a market cap of about $3 billion, will be launching a blogging platform on July 13. Search Enging Journal reports (but without attribution) that Cynthia He, a spokeswoman for Baidu, said in a statement: “There’s a product named Baidu Space. I can’t describe the product or give a date, except that it will be very soon and we are very excited. But we’d like to keep a little mystery for now.”
Blogging in China is tricky business to say the least. And it’s fairly competitive – Bokee, BlogCN, ChinaBlog, Sina Blog and Sohu Blog all have competitive offerings and lots of users. Nevertheless, China is a huge market (the second largest internet audience after the U.S.) and has an active blogging community. And some of the blogs are masssive.
Someday, this massive community of people writing and conversing can bring China out of the dark ages freedom-wise. The more people that blog in and about China, the better.
This is just ridiculous. Three year old CouchSurfing, a beloved service used by some 90,000 members, had multiple database crashes, critical parts of the software and data were irretrievably lost, and the backups weren’t performed properly. They are not rebuilding the service. They literally put themselves out of business.
CouchSurfing allowed people to register their home and offer free accomodation to travelers. Creator Casey Fenton, sent the email below to all users of the service (I guess they didn’t lose that data at least).
Dear CouchSurfers,
Two days ago CouchSurfing experienced what could be described as the perfect storm. The database administrators we hired made two critical mistakes. First, we had a major, avoidable hard drive crash. Secondly, the incremental back-ups weren’t executed in the correct manner, and twelve of our most important data files didn’t survive.
I have been working non-stop trying to repair the data, but as difficult as it is for me to say, it has become clear that certain essential pieces are not recoverable. This crash happened at a particularly vulnerable time, in a transition between two back-up methods. If the crash had happened a week ago, or next week, we would have had a different outcome.
It is with a heavy heart that I face the truth of this situation. CouchSurfing as we knew it doesn’t exist anymore. We’ve had an amazing two and a half years.
Members write “CouchSurfing has changed my life” and I know what they mean, it has certainly changed mine and I am eternally grateful.
My vision transformed. CouchSurfing was born out of a dream I had to meet the most interesting people in world and experience their cultures, and it grew into a living, thriving family of almost a hundred thousand. This community has blossomed in beautiful ways I hadn’t even anticipated. It was no longer about what I got to experience, but rather, what genuine, heartfelt good this community can offer the world. We have all opened not only our homes, but also our hearts, our lives. In sharing important moments, deep and meaningful connections have crossed oceans, continents and cultures. I saw in CS, in you, the power to change not only they way we travel, but change the world itself. Thank you, CouchSurfers. You have shown me more than I could have even known. Your generosity and spirit is a gift to humanity.
I have devoted the last three years of my life to CouchSurfing. I have literally poured every cent I have into the site. I’ve sacrificed my health, my time, and my own ability to travel and meet people. In many ways I’ve put my life and wanderlust on hold to build this network. I’m not complaining; it’s been a fantastic ride. As devastating as it is to consider, it looks like the ride is over.
Life is continuously changing, evolving, dying and being reborn. After a fire, the earth is replenished; after a storm, the air is cleared. It feels to me like this loss of CouchSurfing is how it’s meant to be. This crash is like a sign from the universe. Too many random factors aligned to make it as damaging as it is, and though I’ve tried everything I can and engaged the best and brightest database managers, there’s just no way to get it back. In many respects it’s heartbreaking, but at the same time, what we’ve built together is not dead, it lives on in each of us. It lives in the connections we’ve fostered and the culture we’ve created. I want us all to take this CouchSurfing spirit and continue the mission out in the world. We’ve all experienced this common vision and the potential it has to transform the way people relate to each other. Now it is time for all of us to not bury the dream, but rather nurture it’s growth in our own ways, in new explorations and ventures. We all own a piece of the CouchSurfing flame, it’s up to us to keep the fire going and light the world. So let’s do it, let’s light the world! What will you do with your flame?
Goodnight, CouchSurfing. May our flames burn bright.
I love you,
CaseyIf you wish to send your thoughts, encouragement or positive messages, contact us at shunyata@couchsurfing.com
CouchSurfing enters the TechCrunch DeadPool in the most absurd fashion yet. Thanks to David Weekly, creator of another company in the DeadPool (and one doing quite well), for sending this to me.
The Downloadable Television space is heating up. PeerImpact, a service of New York based Wurld Media, announced today that it has signed deals with three major TV and movie studios to offer episodes of popular television programs for download through its peer-to-peer client. The company is adding titles from Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros. libraries to its offerings that already included shows from NBC Universal. The company highlighted The Loop, Firefly, The Dukes Of Hazzard and Babylon Five as shows that will be available. Warner Bros. made a deal earlier this week as well with Guba to provide video on demand.
Downloads will only be viewable for a 24-hour viewing period and prices will start at 99 cents per episode. The studios have framed the agreements as a step towards further delegitimizing piracy, but the DRM wrapped around the downloads make that debatable. Perhaps most important is the juxtaposition of three major media company names and phrase P2P. That will be great for legitimization of the medium.
Sites that allow users to post questions for other users are growing in popularity and Guruza looks like an especially interactive one. It was created by Rich Collins, Adam Thorsen and friends under the name One Room Software in Palo Alto.
Here’s how it works. You ask a question and set a price you’ll pay for an answer that satisfies you. Users can scan the list of questions, leave their replies and the person who posed the question decides which if any answer they like best. That person receives the financial reward, transactions performed in PayPal. Guruza takes 20% when you cash out with the money you make answering questions.
How do you know people will pay? Each person who poses a question has the number of questions they’ve asked and the number of answers they’ve paid on displayed below their name. How simple is that? It’s an active little community already, with most but not all questions being about software development.
The best part is AIM, GTalk or Jabber IM notification when users you’re watching come online or when some one wants to discuss your question. You get a link to an inline chat sent via your IM client. All the answers and discussions are viewable by users even after the question is closed, so there’s a lot of potential for building a cool public knowledge base here.
The site developers say we should watch for a major design upgrade next week. I think it’s a pretty nice system already.
There are any number of different ways to get a question answered online, but I like this one. If free information is what you’re looking for, it’s hard to beat the sheer mass of brain power at Yahoo Answers. Ask.Metafilter costs five dollars to get in once and you’ll get lots of answers of varying quality. Google Answers has a fifty cent listing fee per question and is tough if you suffer from Google exhaustion. Oyogi is free but rarely used. Qunu requires a jabber compatible IM client.
I like the simplicity and interactive features in Guruza. I also like that it was put together by a couple of guys and their friends. I’ve already put it to use in asking one question and I may continue to do so if it works out well for me.
Online shopping and analytics service Mpire announced its first two sponsored buying guides today, a home and garden catalogue sponsored by Zillow and a baby and toddlers guide sponsored by Judy’s Book. Mpire mines data from transactions on eBay, Craigslist, Yahoo and Overstock.com to display price trends and quantities of items searched for. The buying guides are sponsored, stylized displays of that data in particular shopping niches. Unfortunately, I don’t think they work very well.
Mpire is a 16 person company based in Seattle that just launched this month. The team is interesting. Matt Hulett, Chairman & CEO, used to be the President of the corporate travel division at Expedia. J. Richard Rock, former Senior Director of Business Development at eBay, is a primary investor. Philip Rosedale, Founder and CEO of Linden Lab (the home of Second Life) is an advisor. With a team like that I can imagine that great things are possible.
I like the price trend graphs that Mpire offers and if I refine my searches enough to exclude accessories related to my search terms then the data looks helpful. These new sponsored buying guides don’t do that though. One highlighted item, for example, is a Weber grill. When I see it in the Mpire catalogue there’s a nice low average price listed, but when I click through I see eBay listings that include grill covers, replacement parts and other things that include the product name in the search results. This makes the average price of the grill itself appear much lower than it actually is.
The company says that Mpire provides helpful data on real market value for items bought online. That may be true for some items, but I don’t think it works with these buying guides. In my conversation with the company, Styx concert t-shirts were a favorite example. I imagine that the real market value of obscure items are well delivered by Mpire, but I’m not so sure about the kind of very general search terms highlighted in these sponsored buying guides.
Search results are also dominated by eBay auctions because low prices are what’s prioritized. Craigslist results aren’t integrated in the page, they just have a simple interface for performing your search in Craigslist.
The idea here is a good one and it is useful if I really roll up my sleeves and refine my searches a number of times or if I’m searching for an item that’s relatively straightforward. Trying to fashion a catalogue out of search results is a tough thing to do though. Keeping the interface simple relative to some complicated data is a real challenge as well, I imagine. Overall I like the idea but I think the implementation leaves a fair bit to be desired.
Google Checkout launched early this morning and may significantly change the online shopping sector. The system offers low transaction costs for merchants and mediation between buyers and sellers online in exchange for access to what will be a huge amount of data about shopping and sales conversions. There doesn’t appear to be many benefits for buyers in the system.
There are $10 discounts at many participating stores, but in order for me to welcome a new system like this into my life I need features that beat what’s already available.
Not a stored value system like PayPal, Google Checkout is more like a unified shopping identity for buyers who can give their credit card number to just one company (Google) and limit email contact received later from places they shop online. I’m not sure how much I trust Google at all and I’d need a more compelling feature set in order to give them this information (I use GMail because it’s a great system). I hope that stores will offer both PayPal and Google Checkout services, though it seems very unlikely.
The Google Checkout site is in its infancy, with only about 100 stores listed as participating at the program’s inception and few variant URLs that redirect yet to the program page. The program, though high profile in the media, is described on its page almost entirely in terms of its benefits to sellers. The system is limited to sellers in the US, many people were hoping that it would be available in more countries than PayPal is.
AdWords participants will gain extra benefits, with a $10 in sales processed at no cost for every $1 they spend on advertising with Google. Transaction fees are remarkably low, roughly 2/3 of PayPal’s basic rates.
The service’s pricing structure may ultimately be profitable enough for Google, but the major strategy here could be to access shopping data. The biggest question then appears to be whether consumers trust the Google brand enough to look to the company for more than just access to the rest of the world’s data, but as a repository for our own data kept private from a world of online shopping vendors. The benefits over PayPal seem clear for sellers, but whether consumers will react favorably is my question.
I like having a store of money in my PayPal account and automating monthly subscription payments. Neither of these appear to be an option with Google Checkout. I don’t know why I’d use Google Checkout over PayPal if I had a choice, and if I don’t have a choice I’m liable to resent it. Maybe someday all this data on my shopping habits will be used to better serve ads I’m interested in via Minority Report type billboards, Google style. I don’t know.
The Yahoo! IM team just released the 3.0 version of Yahoo! IM for Mac. Yahoo! Messenger for Mac was last updated in September, 2003. Its feature set is interesting, but it appears to lack two of the PC version’s most compelling qualities: VOIP and the growing library of plugins built on the recently released software development kit. It’s hard for me to imagine using any single IM client on my Mac when I can use Adium and connect with all major IM systems at once.
Here’s what it does have:
Coming soon: chat with Windows Live (MSN) users. It will be a beautiful day if even the smallest amount of forward progress towards IM compatibility appears.
I’ll be very curious to see if the VOIP and plug-ins available to PC users are included in the future features the company promises.
ConnectBeam is a weeks-old startup looking to take social bookmarking into the enterprise sector. I love it when the cross-pollination between consumer services and business use starts with consumer practices and this is just one of many such developments recently. ConnectBeam makes tagging items into personal or shared archives simple, even in company intranets. It’s a straightforward use of social bookmarking technology with some nice touches and a fundamental business orientation.
Lead by Puneet Gupta and Prem Malhotra in Newark, California the company originated as a system for students. After academic publisher Reed Elsevier and other large vendors expressed interest in putting the system to use for business, ConnectBeam was reborn. Gupta told me that they are engaged in encouraging conversations with a number of large potential customers and are actively seeking funding as well.
I was impressed with ConnectBeam, both in terms of ease of use and security. The site is designed to incorporate just a little social networking into bookmarking activities. Users get their own archives, organized in topical pages, and can invite others inside or outside their company to view and/or contribute links to those pages. That permission can also be revoked, which is nice. Intranet pages behind a firewall can be bookmarked and accessed through IP validation.
User accounts are created in connection with your work email domain, commercial email domains can’t be used to start accounts. Readers here should be able to start free accounts at ConnectBeam to check it out with email addresses other than the big web mail names. The first five users per domain are free and a tiered pricing system will start once an organization’s user base has grown beyond five.
The ConnectBeam bookmarklet for adding a URL to your archive autopopulates all the requisite fields but also adds an image from the page, scrapes a summary of each page’s text and suggests tags. Archive project pages can be commented on and you can search either in your own archive or company wide.
Gupta told me that ConnectBeam can also work as a private label solution for companies with large web sites filled with various products and information. Most purchases are proceeded by online research and a bookmarking system allows potential customers to store and refer back to product and information pages later. Perhaps more importantly for vendors, Gupta says, the system could provide valuable forecasting and supply chain data.
I find anecdotal discussions about the usefulness of social bookmarking in large organizations and business all the time, but most use either public consumer grade services or an ad-hoc system developed in-house. I think that a vendor dedicated to providing this service has a lot of potential. I asked Gupta why companies would employ the services of a startup instead of looking to large established vendors to add social bookmarking to their offerings. He told me that startups have greater potential to be agile, disruptive and responsive. That’s a big part of the Web 2.0 story and I’ll be interested to see if ConnectBeam can find success in making it reality.
Zlango is a new Israeli startup (there is a lot of innovation going on there) that has created a very interesting new language and associated application that could change the SMS landscape (as well as, eventually, email and IM). Israel design firm Mantis is involved with the project.
The language is based on icons, or pictures. Each icon has a specific meaning – a person pointing to himself for “me” or a heart for “love”. There are over 200 icons included in the Zlango language today.
Users of the service download a thin 64K Java or Brew application for their GSM or CDMA phone. The application converts the icons into a SMS message and then re-translates back to icons at the receiver phone. To see how it works visually, check out the flash tour here and then try out the simulator here.
At first glance this is nothing more than a nifty piece of mobile software and a way to send icon based messages over inexpensive and ubiquitous SMS networks.
But I think the cultural implications of Zlango may be much deeper.
First, two users can communicate using Zlango even if they do not speak the same language. The cross-cultural implications are obvious.
Second, Zlango is not a static language. Rarely used icons will disappear over time, and new icons will be added to the language. One thing that isn’t clearly addressed on the site, though, is whether users will be able to evolve the language directly as happens with spoken language. Allowing users to create, use and share their own icons, some of which will eventually make it into mainstream usage, will be critical for Zlango’s success in my opinion.
Zlango claims that user testing shows that “the majority of youth who tried it, felt comfortable to say that they commanded the language in less than one hour.” After testing the simulator for just a few minutes, I believe that to be true. Complex messages can be created in just a few keystrokes, much faster than normal SMS.
I don’t know if this will catch on with users or not – we’ll have to wait for the upcoming launch to see. Downloading the software is certainly a barrier to adoption and I suspect Zlango will focus on doing deals with carriers to build this directly into phones. They’ll need mass adoption quickly to ensure that copycat services don’t destroy the potential network effect before it has time to establish itself. But all that being said, it’s intruiging to see the birth of a new icon-based language and watching this spread virally, or not, will be interesting. Watch for updates on the Zlango blog.
Adobe launches the Flex 2 product line tomorrow along with Flash Player 9. Flex is a web web development environment used by programmers to build rich web applications that can make use of Flash and/or Ajax. The main advantage of Flex is that it makes developing Flash applications a lot easier, and easily combining it with Javascript to make full feature-rich web applications. Many development suites have made claims in the past to ease the development process with rich web applications, but most developers still stick to using just text editors and Javascript libraries as the simple approach offers most flexibility.
Flex seems to be on the right track, offering a powerful environment that will allow the developer to build either Flash applications, and in the future, full Ajax applications. The IDE is based on Eclipse, which is already very popular and is open source. Flex adds support for syntax completion, an integrated compiler and a realtime debugger that will save a lot of the common pain with debugging web applications.
Adobe has a new pricing mechanism for the Flex platform, but the basic Flex SDK is now free. There are many different options in this space, the most popular being the open source web application development environment OpenLaszlo. With what is already a great feature set and the ability to work well with other Adobe applications I am sure that Flex will be a hit with wep application developers who would like to build cool apps, but who don’t have the patience to learn the finer details of ActionScript and Javascript. Adobe have listed a large number of sample applications that were built using Flex on their website, and also have a large number of developer resources.
Bill McCoy, GM of Adobe’s ePublishing Business, has an overview of the announcement on his blog. Adobe also launched Flex.org yesterday, a new resource for Flex developers.
A UK developer who goes by “Tones” has created a Flock-specific extension that puts Meebo, and therefore Yahoo, AIM, Gtalk and MSN IM, directly into a sidebar in the Flock browser (the extension also works for Firefox). Since Flock and Meebo are two startups I use, this looked interesting.
I’ve downloaded the extension and tried it out. It works as promised, although it requires constant re-sizing of the IM windows to make it work right. Until the kinks are worked out (possibly via Meebo’s support of the project, which I encourage), I don’t recommend using it.
But I do support the idea behind this entirely. IM should (optionally) be pulled right into the browser, where most of the action on a computer today occurs anyway. There should be no need to use a separate set of clients on the desktop for IM, or even go to Meebo’s website. Just as Flock has built a photo uploader directly into the browser (for flickr and photobucket), they should integrate IM functionality directly into it as well.
More TechCrunch posts on Flock are here and Meebo are here.
ShopWiki, an incredibly innovative online shopping community, will announce today another step to expand their service’s offerings. The company will pay users $50 per video for the first 500 submitted product review videos selected for inclusion on the site – that’s $25k total. This site is nuts already and paying people to add video reviews is going to take it over the top in terms of usefulness. Or maybe it’s just really cool. I’m not Mr. Online-shopping by a long shot and even I think ShopWiki is loads of fun to use.
The company was founded last year by Eliot Horowitz, former DoubleClick CEO Kevin Ryan and DoubleClick Co-founder and former CTO Dwight Merriman. It’s self funded and aims to profit only from contextual advertisements. Its feature set is awesome.
ShopWiki says it crawls more than 120,000 online stores for its search results. Its search engines understand complex natural language queries. There’s a price slider and user written reviews.
The two most notable features to date have been user written and edited (but ShopWiki vetted) wiki buying guides for more than 1,200 item types and a color wheel that will filter your search results by the color of the item. The color wheel was launched just last week and is really quite a technological feat in and of itself.
The further inclusion of user created short videos about various products is likely to be a powerful addition to this already very impressive site. Lest you think that a start-up paying that much money for user generated content indicates Bubble 2.0, think about the subject matter at issue. All the lip-synched music videos in the world probably aren’t worth 25k, but product reviews by users just may be. Shopwiki already adds value to the user experience by leveraging users’ writing in its company-vetted wiki shopping guides. The availability of select videos on key pages should carry this strategy even further.
Whether the timeliness of those videos will be maintained in time-sensitive sectors like electronics is a question – but if a system like this takes off then many people will want to be the face in the newest iPod review video. The best video of all those submitted for that page should be worth well more than $50 to ShopWiki.
The human edited blog highlight site TopTenSources will announce tomorrow that they have acquired the social shopping site Style Feeder. I really like both these companies and am excited to see how the partnership develops.
TopTenSources is lead by long time technologist Halley Suitt. The site is based on human editors selecting their favorite 10 blogs on a wide variety of topics, from food to blogging to Second Life.
Style Feeder was created by Philip Jacob, a coder with experience at several prior startups. The service uses some classic Web 2.0 tools to create a highly usable shopping experience. A javascript bookmarklet lets users tag items sold on any site and populates an image field by first asking that the product image is clicked on – very nice. URL and description are autopopulated and users apply tags. The item is then added to your Style Feed, a wishlist page that can be tracked by other user’s interested in your style and shopping proclivities. Users can join topical groups and add a box of small images from their wishlist to their personal website elsewhere.
Style Feeder is not currently monetized, but developer Phillip Jacob told me that ideas ranging from affiliate links to private label versions for large online communities are being considered. Halley Suitt told me that the degree of integration between the TopTenSources site itself and Style Feeder is yet to be determined but that TopTenSources is happy to consider itself a company with diverse offerings beyond its flagship site.
I’ve thought that TopTenSources was under appreciated for some time now and I will be excited to see where they go next.
Marc Canter’s much anticipated PeopleAggregator is starting to roll out, password protection is scheduled to be removed Wednesday around noon Pacific time. PeopleAggregator is the product of 3 years of self funded work by Canter to bridge the gap between all the online social networking services available and move the industry towards a standards-based place of collaboration. I took a look inside the system today and talked to Canter on the phone. I wasn’t convinced that this was important before today – but now I am.
Canter was the founder of a company called MacroMind in the 1980’s. MacroMind became Macromedia and Canter says he’s paying penance today for the role he played in locking users into Macromedia Flash. PeopleAggregator is all about using open standards to prevent lock-in in one of the most important sectors of the new web – online social networking.
Here’s how it works. PeopleAggregator.net will be a fully functioning online social network in and of itself, but it will share information with other services through common identity standards for our profiles and through APIs (application programming interfaces) for our writing, multimedia and contacts.
Perhaps most important, PeopleAggregator will also provide new social networks with hosted software and later next month will offer downloads of the software for organizations who prefer to host it themselves. Licenses will be free for nonprofits and will cost commercial ventures a one-time sum after they successfully monetize the system.
What this means is that it will be easy to come and go from new social networks, instead of being locked in to one just because you’ve put the time and energy into using your account there. Instead of being at the mercy of one centralized database and service, if Canter’s vision succeeds then countless social networks will proliferate with unique styles and function but with interoperability.
You can currently log in to PeopleAggregator with a LiveJournal or Flickr ID and cross post automatically to LiveJournal, Xanga and any other system that uses the Blogger, Atom or Metaweblogs APIs. Microsoft recently announced the renaming of its new open identity standard, CardSpace, and that will be one of many identity standards supported by PeopleAggregator. Canter expects AOL, Yahoo and Beebo to get on board soon – MySpace will be the hard one, he says.
Canter says he’s got big plans for RSS parsing by item type, with access control for friends, etc. The site already has a nice UI for structured blogging, something I never thought I’d be interested in. The use of a graphic interface, linked to forms that tag new content as a blog post, an event listing, a product review, etc. is so easy in PeopleAggregator that I can imagine myself and others using it happily.
I enjoyed testing PeopleAggregator out, and it solid enough with a few bugs, but what’s most exciting is that any problems I have with its interface, culture or rules are no big deal – I can just take my identity, blog posts and pictures over to another social network that supports open standards and that I like better. That’s power for users.
I talk to people creating new social networks regularly. I always ask them if they are supporting open identity standards. None of the other startups I talk to are. Here’s a way to do that and thus win loyal users through trust instead of lock-in.
The Google Desktop team just announced that version 4 of the software has left beta status, so all you cynics about perpetual beta can give it a rest! This version only spent 6 weeks in beta. Maybe GMail is next, who knows?
Today’s announcement included the expansion of Google Desktop into now 27 languages, the availability of a new drag and drop system for gadget (or widget) UI development and a contest for the development of new gadgets. If you’re a PC user interested in having the newest Digg headlines, a Skype plug in or NASA TV on your desktop then Google Desktop Gadgets could be for you. (In previous TechCrunch coverage, Mike has posted a number of critiques of Google Desktop’s privacy and file handling features.)
Development contests like this are always of interest to me. Are they just a cheap way to score programming energy? Are they the ticket to future fame and fortune by the newly high-profile winners? Does anything truly useful come out of them? Since so many of these gadget/widget things are based on nice displays of RSS feeds, I’m convinced the possibilities are nearly endless. How about a widget that displays oceanic conditions from the Maine Ocean Observing System’s weather beacon RSS feed, or a gadget that grabs and displays the RSS feeds of all comments on my blog. Now that could be useful. Gadget/widget things may end up being the primary use of RSS, in fact.
Will we see more innovation in the gadget space or the widget space? That’s a ridiculous question.
Coupons by mobile phone service Cellfire goes nationwide for Cingular users today, with support for other carriers said to be on the way in the future. Oliver over at MobileCrunch reviews Cellfire and points out that tests in California saw coupons redeemed at a rate of almost 20%, with some surpassing that mark. That’s pretty incredible compared to paper coupon redemption rates.
The number of participating merchants is small right now (7 total, including Hollywood video) but with a success rate like that you know more companies are going to be interested. Will consumers want to download software to their phones, check for coupons at large retailers and hold up their phone displays in front of check out staff for a discount? The company says that dedicated software is perceived as far less intrusive than SMS messages and that makes sense.
I’d say it could work, but it looks like it already has in early tests. Will the rest of the world go as California goes? Will people continue to use the software after the novelty runs out? We shall see. I have a hard time getting excited about coupons on my phone, to be honest, but it seems that other people don’t. I imagine this will be common practice in the near future.
The airfare prediction Farecast launches its public beta today, enabling travelers to leverage more than 60 billion records of past airfare prices to predict whether prices will rise or fall over the next 7 days. The beta covers only flights departing from Seattle and Boston, but the company plans to roll out US-wide coverage through the end of this year.
The company showed me around the site last week and it looks really useful. The primary upgrade from the private beta is the addition of ajax, making the functionality all the smoother.
The main brain behind Farecast is Oren Etzioni, the head of the University of Washington Computer Science Department’s Turing Center and the founder of search engine MetaCrawler. With $8.5 million in funding from Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group and WRF Capital, Farecast development and testing has taken 3 years. The company told me that about 20% of its staff of 22 are data miners or Phd scientists.
Users select departure and destination along with flight dates, then are shown a graph of past ticket costs, a prediction of the next week’s likely price shifts and a percentage of confidence in the prediction. Tickets are then purchased direct from the airlines, except when multiple vendors are to be used, at which point Farecast works with Orbitz. Advertising contextual to your search will be displayed near the results.
It’s nice to see data mining applied to more than watching you and me, for a change. Presumably this kind of technology could have any number of different applications and systems like this are already used to cut down on industrial inefficiencies I’m sure. Whether a new world of consumer facing data mining applications is responded to favorably by industry or whether they see it as a loss of leverage over consumers seems to be a key question.
Indeed, questions have been raised about whether airlines would approve of such a system; at least some say they like the fact that the purchases are direct from them instead of through a costly third party. Other people have said that the airlines will just change their price patterns if the system proves successful in predicting price dips. Farecast seems determined to have an amiable relationship with airlines and it will be interesting to see if they succeed.
Mike reviewed Farecast when it went into private beta; he complained that SouthWest wasn’t included and always has the best prices. SouthWest doesn’t open their prices to anyone and Farecast does include Southwest schedules in their search results – so it seems they are doing their best. Whether it matters remains to be seen.
I know I tend to buy plane tickets without enough research, so I’ll be checking Farecast and it’s 60 billion plus observations, though of course I’ll check elsewhere as well. If the company’s data is consistently verified by my anecdotal experience then I’ll be back for more. Hopefully Portland will be added to the list soon.
