Netvibes quietly released an updated look and feel this evening. Read about the release on the Netvibes blog here and here.

Key additions to the service include:

• Module search
• New web/blog /video search with results within netvibes
• Customization of look and feel
• MySpace module

Netvibes says in their blog entry that the new release “will change the way you use and view the web” and includes user interface enhancements as well as a bunch of new modules. Putting the question of whether or not this update is as significant as the blog post suggests aside, Netvibes has certainly had a big impact on its users. They have collected over 5 million passionate users and $15 million in venture capital during its brief year of existence.

Netvibes is one of the sites that has stuck with me as others come and go, and I visit it at least daily. I’ve created Netvibes modules for most of the web services I use and it has become the gateway to those services and sites. The site is fast, clean and contains to advertisements. Like Google search, the best thing about Netvibes is that it has no problem with me quickly leaving the site to take care of other business. And that’s why it’s earned my loyalty as a user.

LiveJournal just announced that they will soon begin offering sponsored communities with benefits to participating users and sponsored features provided by companies other than LiveJournal. The SixApart owned social networking site has slowly rolled these plans out over recent months but just made the official announcement tonight. Early feedback from users is decidedly negative. Update: Here’s the newest from the company on this, it appears that they backed down on much of the original plans.

Sponsored communities will be groups sponsored by advertisers who are offering group members things like exclusive movie trailers, behind-the-scenes footage, travel advice, tips and tricks, special deals. It’s funny, I thought most of that was already freely available all over the internet. There is some potential here, and this is an increasingly common direction for social networks to move in, but it will be a difficult strategy to pull off in a compelling way.

The second part of the plan seems much more viable. Sponsored features will be technical add-ons that LiveJournal hasn’t offered its users so far. The first will be an SMS integration service sponsored by Amp’dMobile. This make some sense and it will be good to see what kind of creative features are provided by partners.

Two concerns that arise: the baby could get thrown out with the bath water in that users could be so upset at seeing their alternative to MySpace growing increasingly ad driven that they don’t care about the ad sponsored special features. LiveJournal offers paid accounts already and some users will undoubtedly feel that if they’ve paid for an account, they don’t want to see ads. The new sponsored SMS service, though, will be available only to paid members. That makes sense to cut down on abuse, but we’ll see how those users respond to both paying and seeing ads.

With social networking sites becoming either a dime a dozen or worth a billion dollars, depending on how you look at it, there’s an interesting balance being sought between the need to profit and the need to keep allegedly fickle users happy.

A second concern is that the sponsored features strategy seems to conflict with the spirit of open APIs. LiveJournal uses not the MetaWeblog API or the Blogger API, but one of its own. It’s been praised as good to work with, but not a lot of people apparently do. Is there some kind of artificial scarcity of access to LiveJournal that will be required in order monetize integration with the platform? Or is it just a matter of anyone being able to program against the LiveJournal API but only sponsors having their applications integrated directly into the service and offered by SixApart to the customers. It will be interesting to see if this is an issue.

Online social networking obviously drives a lot of page views, but it’s been questioned by many people whether those users click on ads very often. Hitwise says MySpace drives more retail traffic than MSN Search, but the conversion rate is another question. Sponsored communities are something that many if not all social networks seem to be moving towards, but the sponsored features sound very interesting. If this works, it could well be a model we see employed more often. Perhaps someone will sponsor a MySpace IM that funcitons.

Online photo sharing and printing service Shutterfly raised $87 million in an IPO today, closing up 3.7% at $15.55 per share. VentureBeat points out that the price climbed as high as $16.73 at one point in the day.

Born in 1999, Shutterfly is a survivor of the last bubble and crash. Now it’s an interesting case for considering other possible valuations. It also gives us a chance to look at what a company with a successful IPO took to market. For comparison, Flickr is rumored to have been acquired by Yahoo! for $30 to $35 million.

After J.P. Morgan, Piper Jaffray and Jefferies sold 5.8 million of Shutterfly’s 23.6 million shares, the company ended the day with a market value of more than $350 million. With about 200 employees it had just under a 34% net profit margin on about $84 million in revenue last year. The company has taken $67 million in VC backing to date. NetScape co-founder Jim Clark, and Shutterfly board chair, bought about 30% of the stock sold today.

In a time when IPOs are among the least common liquidity events enjoyed by Web 2.0 startups, for a photosharing site to remain independent and go public is interesting relative to all the startups we profile here.

Shutterfly is a company that has lots of overhead, faces price cuts from competitors and has no shortage of small startups seeking to edge into its market. It makes much of its revenue from shipping and faces questions around scalability. There’s some interesting analysis over at MrWaveTheory.

While Shutterfly offers more than 150 print and DVD products, photo to print startups like OneTrueMedia, Tabblo and Scrapblog offer more sophisticated design capabilities, more viral online distribution and in some cases prominent media partners. Most photo sharing sites online now allow users to print or burn to DVD their archives, though few of them base their entire business model on printing as Shutterfly does.

What does Shutterfly offer in user experience? A product that clearly appeals to mainstream users.

• Unlimited free storage.
• Good bulk uploaders for both Windows and Mac (though not Intel Mac).
• Public and private albums.
• Group collaboration on shared collections.
• Clean URLs, comments on photos, basic crop, border, red eye removal and color change effects.
• They’ve also got business solutions for resellers.

Its primary competitor, HP’s SnapFish, offers much of the same feature set plus mobile upload by email.

I find everything but site navigation pleasing in Shutterfly. My one complaint as a user is that it doesn’t offer tagging. Album navigation means that one photo can’t be found in more than one group. There’s a reason tagging has caught on recently – it’s really useful and makes an group of pages much easier to move around in.

Will the company succeed now that it’s gone public? It’s hard to say, given even its own concerns about overhead, price competition and an increasingly diversified market. You can’t say that Shutterfly is standing still, though. This new infusion of cash, the contemporary features that it does offer and its already large user base certainly look good.

Yahoo has released a new product called BBAuth just in time for its open HackDay today and tomorrow. It’s a mechanism for non-Yahoo applications to access Yahoo’s authentication mechanism and user data in a secure manner.

Most mashups today do not access personal data because of the security issues (not to mention the fact that companies usually think of user data as proprietary). The classic mashup example is mixing Google or Yahoo maps with other data. But there are far fewer examples of mashups involving user data protected from the rest of the Internet via a sign-in procedure.

BBAuth fixes that problem when it comes to accessing data locked up at Yahoo. Using the tools Yahoo provides, non-Yahoo applications can request a user to sign in to Yahoo and give permission for Yahoo user data to be sent to the non-Yahoo application. Yahoo’er Dan Theurer explains how it works in more detail, and points to two test applications he created. The first shows how it can be used to allow sign in via Yahoo credentials, and the second shows how you can access Yahoo photos data outside of Yahoo.

There are two pieces to BBAuth. The first is a single sign on tool to authenticate the user. The second piece is a set of APIs to get into specific Yahoo services and interact with user data. For example, the Yahoo Photos API allows other applications to, among other things, upload photos, tag photos, and modify titles and descriptions. Yahoo is also opening up Yahoo Mail through BBAuth.

Dave Winer says this is a “huge deal” and I agree. See what Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny says about BBAuth as well.

It’s worth noting that Amazon is doing the same thing (but in a limited way) with it’s S3 storage product, and eBay is supposedly testing third party authentication for purposes of verifying (but not changing) user feedback ratings.

It was just announced that DAG Ventures is leading a $15 million B round for Podshow. News got out yesterday and though the investors weren’t named until today, disbelief was the widespread reaction. DAG saw its investment in Grouper, which was presumably much smaller, pay off last month when the video sharing service was acquired by Sony for $65 million. The fund also participated in a $10 million funding in Friendster last month after the company secured a controversial patent. Other investments in the DAG portfolio include SpikeSource and Zimbra.

Podshow assures me that they have a plan to be more than a podcasting company, they intend to be a media company. They want to be a primary enabler of what they believe will be the dominant theme in media in the future when much of the content consumed by audiences will be produced by other media consumers.

Here’s some details to chew on for now, according to Podshow co-founder Ron Bloom.

• Podshow has had between 35 and 40 global brand advertisers over the last year. They have over 1000 shows on the network but wouldn’t discuss revenues.
• The company has partnerships with Sirius Satellite Radio, AOL (details still hazy on this one) and this month announced a partnership with British Telecom (see TechCrunch UK coverage).
• Podshow plans next to move into more mobile devices and into the home.

Bloom tells me that the BT deal, in which Podshow will provide both audio and video in BT’s attempt to radically remake itself, is a model of the direction the company hopes to move in.

This round brings Podshow’s funding to over $23 million. Is this wise? I have a hard time believing that the fund would invest in Podshow, and that Podshow would take the money, without some good information regarding the company’s plan to become a substantial media player. If they can continue landing big sponsorships and partnerships then I think we may see the critics proven wrong. While other user generated content companies struggle with legal issues and advertising, Podshow is a real contender to be a leading new media company in a changing industry landscape.

Earlier this week Apple announced that a new version of webmail for Mac users is “coming soon.” There was a bit of chatter about this around the blogosphere, with most people concluding that this fresh coat of paint on the inferior .mac product is a bit of a yawn. Even Om Malik, who’s been complaining about .mac for a long time and has reason to cheer, isn’t particularly positive about the announced upgrade and says that he hopes that “this is the first of many changes.”

I agree that .mac is Apple’s most difficult to use product and needs a lot of work. However, I think that the changes are important for one reason: There are very few Ajax webmail services today that allow users to access multiple email accounts. .Mac will be one of them.

I believe webmail is the single most important application to show off the power of Ajax. The reason is that we spend an incredible amount of time on email every day – at least 3-4 hours per day for me. When we spend that much time doing something, even small increases in productivity make a large aggregate positive difference.

Ajax makes a big difference in webmail, as we saw with Oddpost years ago. Oddpost pioneered the use of javascript to help it copy the desktop mail experience, and was one of the early Ajax applications. Users could drag and drop emails into folders, open emails without page refreshes, etc. All of these features were tremendous time savers. It had limitations (it only worked on Windows machines and Internet Explorer), but it was acquired by Yahoo in 2004 and forms the backbone of the new Yahoo mail beta (try it out here).

While other Ajax email applications are around (Gmail has some Ajax features but lacks drag and drop functionality, and Live.com Mail is very nice if often slow), none of them except Yahoo allow users to access other email accounts (it’s worth noting that Goowy has an excellent Flash email service that allows users to access multiple email accounts). If you use Gmail.com, you can only read Gmail emails. Same with Live.com. While you can forward other emails to your gmail or live.com email address, you cannot manage separate email accounts and aliases. That’s a big drawback for people who want an Outlook or Mac Mail experience on the web.

What users want is a rich internet interface for email. What they don’t want is four different interfaces for four different email accounts. What Yahoo and Apple get, and what Google and Microsoft don’t, is that to “own” the user you have to allow them to access competitor’s services as well as your own. Google has the best pure free email service on the Internet. But they don’t have the best interface. Yahoo does. And now Apple is combining the power of Yahoo’s open approach to email with the ability to sync their service to a desktop client. A lot of people are going to be drawn to that.

.Mac webmail will now have both multiple account access and rich Ajax features. Only Yahoo currently offers that. And since .Mac syncs with a desktop client (Yahoo doesn’t of course), it is a completely end-to-end solution. Until now, you had to be using exchange server and Outlook to have anything close to that.

This is an important move by Apple that gives its platform a new advantage over Windows Machines and any of the webmail services out there, including Gmail and Yahoo. I look forward to its launch.

The Google Reader team unveiled a revamped version of their online feed reader today and no one can say it’s not a real RSS reader anymore. They even took Robert Scoble’s advice and made a demonstration video!

Changes include a whole new look and feel, folder navigation, unread item counts and the ability to mark items as read or unread. There’s a “river of news” view (click all feeds, view settings, sort by auto) and one click item sharing with friends. The new expanded view lets you scan down lots of items all at once.

I really like it, but the Google team went to great pains to explain the use of RSS in the simplest terms (”your inbox for the web”) and made it easy to switch back to the old interface for users who prefer it.

Robert Scoble had pointed out recently that unlike with Microsoft, who produce videos about loads of products, he couldn’t find videos about Google products anywhere. (Make sure to check out Robert’s new video show too.) It looks like the team took his suggestion, here’s their video. I think it’s does a great job of making the product and the medium easy to understand in just 49 seconds. Now where’s the video for people already familiar with RSS that will convince us to switch readers? Richard MacManus and Niall Kennedy are of the belief that the improved interface could lead to GMail/Google Reader integration.

In related Google news, note that as of today anyone (with Windows) can use Google Talk, no GMail account required.

MediaWeek is reporting (but see updates below) that Facebook will soon add “sponsored stories” or banner ads to the news feed on users’ front pages. The addition of those feeds in the first place caused a big uproar around privacy concerns. The mere addition of advertisements doesn’t seem like a big deal to me – everyone knows it’s a moneymaking operation – but one reported feature could kick off another storm of anger if it’s not implemented carefully.

When one user clicks on an advertisement in their feeds, all of that user’s friends will be notified that the ad was clicked on and will be given an opportunity to join a group led by the advertiser, apparently. Mike Murphy, Facebook’s chief revenue officer, told MediaWeek the following: “Up until now, most advertising on social network sites hasn’t leveraged social networking behavior…This offers a viral opportunity that is unique for advertisers that is not disruptive.”

The write up says “The new Sponsor Stories ad unit will initially be placed in the third position within each user’s News Feed – as either a small banner-like placements or video clip.” If this is the Microsoft/Facebook advertising deal coming to life, this looks like a big gamble for both companies.

Best case scenario: your preexisting ad space will simply contain an additional note that says “your friend clicked on THIS ad, would you like to as well?” Any extra notification for every friend’s click would be terrible – it’s easy to assume that a friend’s ad click would be considered an “event” that you’d be notified of just like so many other actions, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If done well this could be a great move by Facebook – it’s just hard to see the words viral and advertisement in the same sentence and not cringe. It’s largely a knee-jerk reaction, but it’s real.

We reported on the launch of the news feeds as an issue largely of poor communication around a potentially beneficial feature addition. Though advertising in feeds is a logical and fair thing to do, making each ad a spammy social cluster bomb is sure to backfire.

LinkedIn has told me they are likely to do something much more tasteful around ad placement in social networking; focusing on friend recommendations, context and making receipt of ad pitches completely optional. There are certainly good ways to monetize social networking behavior but there are also many ways that could be bad.

Update: Melanie Deitch, Facebook’s Director of Marketing, emailed to tell us that the MediaWeek story we linked to below was incorrect and that in fact, no unsolicited notices will be sent. Only users who have elected to join a sponsored group will be notified when friends in that group click one of the group’s ads.

Update 2 Deitch wrote back to clarify that no one will ever be notified of your ad clicks and the ads will either be for sponsored groups or link directly to an advertiser’s page. Sounds like the MediaWeek story was almost entirely wrong.

Product review search engine Retrevo was selected to launch at DEMO yesterday and it’s pretty cool. We’ve written about competitor ViewScore here before and also launched this month is yet another similar service that just launched called Wize. All of these sites will help you find reviews of electronics and other products and each of them has a unique feature set that adds value to the basic search and aggregation.

What could be better than services that aggregate reviews? Perhaps an aggregate review of these type of services. If that’s what you’re thinking, you’ve come to the right place. If neither gadgets nor reviews are your thing, I think the following are still interesting case studies in how to add value on top of product search and affiliate revenue generation.

Affiliate and contextual advertising have created a seductive opportunity for monetization that many site designers are seeking to cash in on. There are so many sites that try to monetize affiliate links that I’ve grown bored with most of them, but the following ones are more fresh and interesting than most. Between these three sites I think that Wize has the best chance for commercial success, but I really like some of the features of the other two sites, Retrevo and Viewscore.

Retrevo

Retrevo just launched yesterday. It discovers product manuals and previews them if in PDF format, displays information from manufacturer websites, searches blogs and forums, professional reviews and articles and offers a preview pane to easily switch between sources.

It does not offer numerical ratings, saved searches or much else. The variety of sources searched are very good, but not much value added on top of that. For a simple, powerful, thorough search – Retrevo is a good option. The company is backed by just under one million dollars from Alloy Ventures and is seeking further funding. They plan to roll out many new features in the future to support the full life-cycle of product ownership all the way to recycling things. Matt Marshall wrote about Retrevo earlier this week.

ViewScore

Israel based ViewScore uses numeric score averaging and a semantic algorithm to give products an average score out of 100 over thousands of professional reviews online. The review sources are ranked by another algorithm and user feedback. The site grabs product specs, compares similar products and offers comparative pricing from multiple online shopping sites. Users can also sign up to get an alert when a new review for a particular product is available.

Viewscore currently offers 60,000 reviews from 1,000 sources. Blogs and other social media are not included. The company says it hopes to expand it’s basic formula beyond gadgets and into many other fields. See our initial review of Viewscore here.

Wize

Wize aggregates reviews on far more than just electronics, it’s got home and garden, video games, health products and more. It searches shopping sites with user reviews like Shopping.com and Amazon and expert reviews from traditional product review sites. The company says it has 757,136 product reviews from 4,735 different websites for 19,806 different products. That’s a lot of websites, 4,735.

Wize quantifies what percentage of reviews were positive or negative (”users like it”) and it tracks buzz – by simply counting what percentage of reviews for a product were posted in the last 60 days and how the reviews rated that product relative to others in its class. The site combines user ratings with expert review ratings and the buzz formula above to give products an overall Wize rating. User research can be saved via a cookie, without creating an account.

The site is very aesthetically pleasing and probably has the best chance of commercial success. I think people like the combination of trusted professional sources along with simple up or down community voting. It’s not the most subtle, interesting approach here but I think it’s likely to work the best with large numbers of users.

Others

Also worth looking at again if review aggregation is what you’re in the mood for are ShopWiki (our review – it’s got loads of cool features) and Külist, which is strange but kind of cool. Metacritic is probably the overall review ag leader, but doesn’t do gadgets.

These are the types of sites that only so many people probably want to think about them too often – but when you need one they are quite handy. More are sure to pop up any day now, but I think the sites above provide a good look at the state of the art.

Podcasting stats and ads company RadioTail is announcing prior to this weekend’s Portable Media Expo in Ontario, California that they are now offering their podcast stat tracking service Ripple for free to any podcaster. The company hopes that podcasters using the free service will sign up to let RadioTail sell or serve ads for them. Publishers who don’t want to use their web based dyanmic ad serving features are free to use the analytics at no cost indefinitely.

Advertising and thus analytics in online multimedia are on the front of many peoples’ minds right now, but the field is relatively young and still forming. While some companies are clearly going for the big corporate bucks, RadioTail has the look, feel and name of a populist stat tracking service made by podcasters for podcasters.

The company was founded by Greg Galant, the man behind the Venture Voice podcast. Galant worked at both CNN.com and Newlight Venture Capital in a former life. His new company’s list of publishers and advertisers to date already includes BusinessWeek, Nikon, Palm, McGraw-Hill Construction and Microsoft.

There are a number of podcasting stats services available, but RadioTail is doing some good things with Ripple. The service works through a simple redirect at the file download level, so publishers can change hosts at-will, track browser plays in addition to RSS enclosure downloads and doesn’t ask anything of listeners.

Ripple’s statistics are updated once an hour, include the geographic location of listeners amongst many other details, are available in RSS format (very nice) and are displayed in HTML (not Flash like some competitors) for easy printing. The stat viewing dashboard offers an unusually long list of ways to have your data displayed and the company is actively working on increasing the technical usefulness of the data in addition to its direct ad selling potential.

Unfortunately, export in spreadsheet formats falls into the company’s lists of features they intend to build but isn’t available now. Likewise, full vs. partial downloads aren’t tracked by the free Ripple service, though customers of RadioTail’s ad placement service are able to see what percentage of listeners played entire audio files.

Other players in the podcast analytics space include Podbridge, which targets high end big publishers, Podtrac (similar to RadioTail but with a different feature set), hosting service Libsyn and RSS vendor FeedBurner. Thanks go to the guys at consultancy Feedia.net for insight on the key issues in this sector.

Other announcements at this weekend’s Portable Media Expo were to include a rumored new round of funding for Adam Curry’s Podshow, but that story’s already broke. Podshow has raised $15 million more from as yet undisclosed investors, on top of $8 million from its A round. Some people are skeptical to say the least, but it’s evidence that other players are betting on a big podcasting economy. There’s still another very interesting announcement in the online audio advertising space that will come out next week. This growing economy will have a tail, it will need to be analyzed, and RadioTail’s free stats service is likely to work well for many podcast publishers.

The DEMO conference is wrapping up here in San Diego and unlike when it began 16 years ago the conference wasn’t dominated by mobile launches. None the less, there were some very interesting mobile services here like ScanR and Realeyes3D image scanning by mobile photo, Flurry’s simple email and RSS on Java phones and Grand Central (which I’ve written about at length).

3Jam and Pinger both launched multiperson SMS services at DEMO. Probably first popularized by Dodgeball, multiperson SMS is a feature (or a company – your call!) that quite a few people are coming out with all at once lately. The following are some short descriptions of eight companies offering multiperson SMS and a table displaying which services offer particular features.

The List

• Jyngle is a web based service that has voice support, just launched and got a review over on CrunchGear today.
• 3Jam is funded, relatively straight forward and launched here at DEMO.
• Pinger lets users quickly respond to messages by voice and received $3 million from Kleiner Perkins in 2005.
• Swarmteams does a whole lot of things, though we weren’t able to get it to work well in testing for our original review. You might have better luck, and if so then this Irish service could well be worth using.
• Loopt is a location aware service funded by YCombinator and Sequoia. We reviewed it at launch.
• Dodgeball is old school and was acquired by Google in 2005.
• Twitter is for groups of friends who want varying levels of instant, automatic updates on each others’ activities. It’s a product of podcasting company Odeo.
• Moblabber is a mobile social network that users can receive topical messages from automatically.

There are undoubtedly more companies that offer multi-person SMS, or at least there will be by the time I click publish on this post – but I hope that comparing these seven company’s by feature set will help flesh out a vision of the landscape and where we stand today.

The Features

The new version of AOL Pictures came out of beta today and it’s thoroughly underwhelming. The new features are basically all the social things that are standard from a Web 2.0 perspective – Public galleries, Ajax, tags, comments and subscriptions – but none of them are done particularly well. They are getting shown up badly by Yahoo!, Webshots and Photobucket.

The new AOL Pictures offers a picture editor but only for Windows, the Ajax response time feels slow, tags are supported but not in a meaningful way (it’s really still all about folders), photo galleries can be named but only and the site is basically no fun to use. The service probably should have stayed in beta for awhile. Did I mention that it’s not very pretty to look at?

The new Yahoo! Photos came out last month and is better, but Flickr is much better still. If you’re going to follow Flickr’s lead, as everyone appears to be doing – at least do it well. Or acquire someone who’s doing something really interesting. Online video editing is the most obvious next direction for video sharing and Yahoo! just bought Jumpcut this morning. There are any number of interesting little photo sharing sites that are at least doing a better job at the state of the art than AOL Pictures. Two off the top of my head are Photoblog.com and BubbleShare (who are doing some very cool stuff). Zooomr is apparently on the market as well.

AOL Video is far more interesting than this, with its mix of commercial and user generated content, long list of movie studio partners and Viiv deal.

Perhaps many AOL customers don’t want anything fancy, but this looks like a half hearted effort to catch up to competitors that I’m guessing won’t be well received.

Update: That the service offers free unlimited storage should have been mentioned here. It was overlooked in my frustration with the UI but it is important.

Text Link Ads (an advertising network that allows websites to include simple text advertisements on their site) launched a new product this morning called Feedvertising. Feedvertising allows bloggers and other site owners to include advertisements or other messages in their RSS feeds.

We like Feedvertising (note disclosure at end, however) because it’s simple, free, and gives the publisher the ability to sell their own ads directly, include TLA sold ads, or simply put in any message and link that the publisher wishes to include.

We’ve integrated Feedvertising into the main TechCrunch RSS Feed via a Wordpress plugin (plugins for other blogging platforms is coming soon). We’ve elected not to include advertising, instead adding a simple text item at the end of feed content that promotes other Crunch Network sites.

For more information on how the product works, see the video tutorial they’ve created here. I believe a lot of bloggers will want to use this.

Disclosure: TLA has been a longtime TechCrunch Sponsor.

LicketyShip is a new service launching today (we spoke about it previously here) that allows you to shop online at a number of different local stores and to have products that you order delivered within 4 hours. It works by co-ordinating the online stores close to you with courier companies, allowing you to receive goods that you order very quickly. The service is currently in alpha though launching today in the San Francisco Bay Area and has plans to expand in other areas over time.

The service is easy to use, you search for a product by name and specify your zip code. The site will then query local stores and show you results of products that are available to order. When you place an order, it will fetch the item from the nearest store and then have it delivered to you. The ordering process is simple enough, and the only additional cost is a $19.99 fee for the delivery service. Search is currently restricted to electronic goods, but they also plan to expand on this as well.

I know that I often choose to go to a local store over ordering online because I can’t wait for a 2 or more day delivery time, so LicketyShip might make that easier for some. The question is if it is worth the fee, I can see a lot of businesses using this for office supplies and other goods, and possibly some consumers who are impatient. They can delivery up to 7pm on most nights (which I assume means you can order up till 3pm and have it delivered that day) while on Friday’s and Saturdays can deliver up till 8pm. I expect to see more improvements in the product search engine, as well as the range of retailers supported (they have an API) – I don’t think there is any doubt that the tight integration with courier companies and the value-add of same day delivery will be worth something to a lot of people.

The Yahoo! family expanded again today with the acquisition of online video editing service Jumpcut. Here’s the Jumpcut post on the announcement and here’s the Yahoo! Search post. Based in San Francisco and launched just six months ago, Jumput specializes in letting users remix videos already online or edit their own video with its interface. Mike Arrington gave the company a good review when it launched, writing that it was even better than Motionbox – a service he called the best yet for sharing online video just days before Jumpcut launched.

Yahoo! Video already has one of the biggest video search indexes online and will be all the more compelling with the added ability to remix posted content and edit original video online.

The terms of the deal are not being disclosed, although our guess is that Yahoo paid nowhere near the $65 million in cash that Sony recently spent to acquire Grouper, a video sharing site with a P2P focus. Wether the Jumpcut acquisition was large or small – it’s very cool. It’s one more example of the growing importance of remix culture and online video.

oDesk is a Menlo Park-based company that offers a marketplace for contract talent, primarily in the programming services field. We first wrote about oDesk only a few weeks ago, and since then they have experienced strong growth with a rise in the number of projects and suppliers. Today oDesk have announced an $8 Million Series B investment lead by Benchmark Capital, the respectable Silicon Valley firm that has previously backed companies such as eBay, Handspring, RedHat and Juniper. All of oDesk’s previous investors have also taken part in this round, which will see Kevin Harvey of Benchmark join the oDesk board of directors.

At the recent Future of Web Apps conference in San Francisco, Michael Arrington (the editor of Techcrunch) listed oDesk amongst a group of companies that are ‘ones to watch’. We have watched oDesk grow strongly in a space that was previously heavily dominated by both eLance and Guru. oDesk offers a twist on the old model in a market that is desperate for high-quality development and other IT services. oDesk allows it’s customers to track every aspect of projects and jobs that they post to the marketplace, from sourcing the right talent through to managing your relationships with suppliers. It also have a different economic model as all work is charged on an hourly basis rather than a fixed project cost found on other sites.

We are bullish about oDesk’s prospects, not only because of the rising demand for good providers but also because of their approach to connecting and managing the relationship between providers and customers. As indicated in comments in our previous post, and in our own experience, oDesk seems to be loved by both the providers of services as well as it’s customers, and both parties seem to stick to using the service. With Benchmark now putting it’s chips down on oDesk, the service should power ahead even further and become a dominant player. oDesk have said that the funds raised from the Series B will be used to expand marketing activities and to spur growth, it seems that they have the platform right, it is working well for all participants and now it’s time to open the floodgates.

While Marshall hits up DEMOFall, we’ve been treking around New York spotting the latest Nokia phones, the Sony Reader, and the latest in Internet tablets, the PepperPad 3.

Need more? How about hybrid Blu-Ray/HD-DVDs, a music mug, and some hot rock and roll.

The DEMO conference is underway here in San Diego and some clear trends are emerging among the 67 exclusively selected companies presenting. Many of the products are just launched and still less developed than they could be, but they are exciting none the less. The following are some of the most prominent themes of the conference and my favorite examples of companies working in these directions.

Breaking it down

Lots of companies presenting are focused on making data and online objects more granular for portability and user manipulation.

Pluggd is demonstrating a new technology called HearHere, which uses speech recognition and semantic analysis to let users search inside audio files for key words and related terms that are displayed on a heat map for skipping to relevant parts of a podcast. I posted more details and a screen shot in this post on Pluggd.

BuzzLogic is showing off an enterprise social media tracker that’s been two years in development. It discovers and ranks influential blog posts and mainstream media stories about any topic of interest, displays circles of influence in a nice UI and tracks actions taken in response to emerging conversations by a team of users. Priced very low, the company gathers and presents the same kind of data that sophisticated search and RSS could acquire but in one place and a usable format. I think this could be a winner in the race to make the new web usable for non-technical users.

MindTouch is unveiling their DekiBox enterprise appliance that, among other things, extracts data from email messages and attachments with one click and places it in a secure wiki.

SportsStatz works with high schools and colleges around the country to capture video and stats on sporting events. The company provides cameras and software loaded laptops to the schools and the teams get free game tapes and stats. Just four seconds after real time, individual subscribers to the service can search inside games to find particular highlights and view them on the web or with a mobile device. Highlights from favorite players can be subscribed to and delivered automatically. Clips can be saved, shared and commented on in a social networking environment. The service is in early stages but has completed tracking one season of high school basketball in several states and aims to secure partnerships with 1000 schools by the end of the year. Though the site is still being developed, the company’s demo is really impressive and there’s a clear market for capturing and using content like this.

Pixsense uses a patent pending compression algorithm to compress multimedia files up to 85% and is targeting mobile content creation. Established companies from several sectors are expressing interest in the company and making mobile multimedia that much more lightweight is something everyone would love.

My Favorite:
Adaptive Blue launched its Blue Organizer out of beta at DEMO. A Firefox extension for social bookmarking, Blue Organizer combines its own ontology with your tags, lets you perform a very long list of functions with each item you’ve saved and does a lot of smart little things like gleaning tags from topical databases and bookmarking pages automatically once you’ve visited them three times. Social bookmarking is a crowded space, but for people who seek a well constructed tool that balances an intuitive user experience with features to please the power user, Blue Organizer may be a very good option. The beauty is in the details in this one.

Rolling Your Own

Personalization is a key goal for Web 2.0 and a number of companies are making it easier than ever for content providers to make it happen.

PrefPass is going live at DEMO and Adam Marsh’s service targets a key pain point online. Users identify URLs they like in an anonymous profile. PrefPass extracts tags from those pages that are used to generate personalized content on participating sites that would otherwise offer either a dreaded registration requirement (which makes a site the opposite of sticky) or impersonal advertisements and supplemental content. When users go to a participating page, they can click the PrefPass badge to grant access to their anonymous list of preference tags and the site can then offer targeted content or ads. You can see PrefPass in action, sorting TechCrunch posts to your particular tastes at CustomCrunch.com.

NanoLearning is an easy way to make educational games or training modules in Flash. Users provide the content (text, graphics, audio, video, questions and answers) and NanoLearning provides the templates and forms to create your modules. Here’s one example, but I can imagine lots of people rapidly developing tutorials and interactive presentations with this tool.

My favorite:

Widget marketplace Widgetbox just keeps coming up with more ways for publishers to embrace the small pieces loosely jolned ethic and pull live data into their websites. The Hummer Winblad company now lets users place on piece of code on their sites to create a widget field that can then be managed by drag and drop to move any of 200 widgets on and off of the published page. Today the company showed me a browser sidebar popup that lets site visitors continue to interact with your widgets even if they leave a particular URL. For more details check out our initial review of Widgetbox. Widgets might have a silly name (and Cute Overload is right now one of the most subscribed widgets on the site) but just like blogging changed the world by letting non-technical users publish original content easily online, so too are widgets a harbinger of a new era when users are mixing and mashing dynamic data from all around the web.

Let’s talk untethered

Some of the most interesting companies are launching services that will enable communication beyond previous limitations.

JaJah released a mobile product at DEMO that lets users make very low cost VOIP calls through their mobile phones. See Mike Arrington’s longer review of this launch and last night’s news about competitor SoonR’s partnership with WebEX to enable mobile web conferencing.

Flurry is showing off their service that lets more than 200 Java enabled mobile phone provide simple push email and read RSS feeds.

TotalView is unveiling an enterprise VOIP video conferencing product called BeHere that captures a 360 degree view of conference rooms and provides easily configured views on each participant’s desktop. Users can share the view of applications across the system. I wish that the company was doing a lot more with the technology, like offering actual file transfer, chat back channels and conference recording – but the product as it stands is in a good position to be distributed through resellers to VOIP enabled conference rooms everywhere. They’ve raised $7 million in Series A funding, are nearing the end of a B round and will sell the service for less than $2000. It definitely beats a VOIP speaker phone.

My favorite:
Grand Central uses VOIP and a web interface to provide one phone number that can route calls by incoming number to any phone of your choice, manage voice mail on the web, record calls and much more. From the execs harkening from Yahoo! acquired DialPad, GrandCentral has a long and impressive feature set that I reviewed here.

Other companies that a lot of people are talking about at the conference include SystemOne, an enterpise wiki CMS that analyzes your documents as you write and searches for related keywords on the web, in your feeds, files and the rest of the wiki. I reviewed SystemOne a few weeks ago. Koral is another hot topic; it’s an enterprise CMS that offers drag and drop file organizing, recommended tags and IM notification if a user accesses an out of date version of any shared file. Wallop, the Microsoft spin-off social networking service, is obviously a hot topic as well.

All of the companies selected to present at DEMO are worth a look – here’s the list and videos. Excitement is in the air here and the innovation is tangible.

It looks like a couple of factors may be leading eBay to leave the Chinese market completely. Shanghai Daily is reporting that eBay has agreed to sell eBay’s China division and its PayPal service to Tom.com, a company that already distributes eBay’s Skype service to the Chinese market.

Two reasons are cited. First, eBay, which had as much as 90% market share in China for C2C transactions, has lost significant market share to upstart (and free) rival Taobao. eBay is now left with just less than 30% market share for C2C transactions, even after moving to eliminate transaction fees in China a few months ago.

Second, China is preparing new regulations limiting foreign ownership of companies operating online payment systems. After looking unsuccessfully for a partner on its Chinese PayPal service, eBay faces significant regulatory problems.

This comes on the heels of the departure of eBay China’s CEO, Martin Wu. PayPal China’s GM, Liao Guangyu, will take over Wu’s job.

No word from eBay on this yet. Until then, this is speculation, not confirmed fact. As bloggingstocks suggests, this may only be a move to simply partner with another strong player in the Chinese market, as Yahoo has done with Alibaba.

While its certainly significant that eBay is apparently leaving the Chinese market, what interests me most about this move is how effectively a startup ate into eBay’s market share with a zero price strategy. This is something that has been tried and failed repeatedly in the U.S. Perhaps it’s time to try again. First someone needs to address the lock eBay has on user feedback/reputations (see our posts on Rapleaf, a startup addressing this market).

VOIP company Jajah just announced an exceptional new consumer service that will let many cell phone users access Jajah’s very low calling rates through their cell phone (and without using data services).

Ok, it’s true. When I wrote about the woeful state of the VOIP market last week I knew full well that Jajah was preparing to launch a killer new product this evening (and Shel Israel called me on it).

I think that post was good background material to better understand the problems with current VOIP options and the importance of what Jajah just launched. Before today it was difficult for users of normal phones to access VOIP services directly and get cheaper rates on phone calls. They almost always had to be in front of a computer to initiate a call, or go through complicated call, then hang up and call back procedures.

Jajah’s New Mobile Phone Service

Jajah’s new mobile service suffers from none of the “detail issues” that I bring up in the post last week. I walk through how the new service works below, but the end result is that you can set your phone to use Jajah for certain types of calls (such as international calls) instead of your normal carrier. From the caller and receiver’s perspective the call transaction is seemless. A call is made normally, and received normally. The only work is getting it set up.

To use the new service you must be a registered Jajah user. You must have a supported cell phone (see this page to determine if you have a supported cell phone) – Jajah currently supports phones with the symbian operating system…other phones, including Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Treo, will come later this year. Jajah sends a MMS message to your phone. Once you confirm the message a Java application is downloaded to the phone and can be configured by the user. Once configured, the Jajah software handles certain types of calls made from the phone, bypassing the carrier entirely. When you place a call, Jajah routes the call to its own local number, moves the call over VOIP to the destination and calls the recipient via a local number where they are located.

Jajah founder Roman Scharf says that the carriers can’t block what they are doing because they do not use the data services included with many newer phones. Instead, they simply re-route the call through the normal telephone lines. The tricky part, of course is getting the software installed properly on a phone to begin with (something I can’t test right now because I’m in Taiwan and because my phone, the hated Motorola Q, uses the even-more-hated Windows Mobile OS).