Update (Dec. 1): “Kevin” is Kevin Hague, the co-founder of Knowesys. CEO Kathleen Romano ends the conspiracy theories in a comment here.

Update (Nov 30): JotSpot Founder Joe Kraus reponds in the comments.

Sometimes it isn’t until a blog post gets deleted for one reason or another that it grabs people’s attention. That happened today when a relatively new blogger named “Kevin” deleted a blog post titled “The JotSpot Google Merger,” where he complained that JotSpot left them stranded as a partner after Google acquired the company last month.

Blog posts are cached upon posting by a number of search engines, so the text of the original post is easily recovered:

The JotSpot Google Merger

So I’m finally at a point where I need to blog about the JotSpot (http://www.jotspot.com/) merger and how it was handled. The company I work for builds custom JotSpot Wiki’s for enterprise class companies and “was” JotSpot’s first Partner. We were JotSpot’s only Gold Partner and were evangelist of the technology during the last two years. We made a massive investment in JotSpot, learning new API’s, developing Wiki converters and custom applications for use with JotSpot.

To preface what I’m about to say, I am very happy to have worked with the JotSpot people, I learned a lot about new technologies from AJAX, XML, JSON and Wiki technology in general. I congratulate everyone at JotSpot and wish them good luck at Google.

Unfortunately, my company was one of the few (many?) who had a negative impact from the merger. Besides us, it is the other JotSpot Partners and customers who are now “left holding the bag”. What is truly interesting from our perspective is that no one at Google cares about the people who helped build the JotSpot product. Or if they do, it is through the rose colored glasses of lots of money. I guess that cures everything.

Here is what I’ve learned from this experience:

1. If you sign a partnership agreement, get some kind of notification clause that gives at least thirty days (preferably more) notice before any party terminates the agreement. We were notified of the merger on the same day it was announced and had to play fire control with our customers.

2. Look for signs of impending trouble. Before the announcement, we noticed everyone at Jot acting strange. Upgrades were being posted quickly and these changes were causing problems with nearly everyone’s code. Little or no communication occurred prior to the upgrades. Why would a company do things to hurt its customer base? Well, I guess the answer is that Google was the biggest customer and probably demanded the changes prior to purchase.

3. Pick your hosted application service provider well. Relying on web hosted application services is much more dangerous than I ever would have assumed. This is especially true for those services that are “closed source” like those of JotSpot. If an agreement is made with an application vendor like JotSpot, get some kind of service agreement that extends beyond merger/buyout. These type of agreements are a bit shaky but if the management team is any good, they’ll include them in the buyout agreement.

4. Part of the buyout agreement should include clauses specifying a roadmap. Taking an entire company “Dark” after a merger does nothing but cause problems for customers. In the JotSpot case, no one knows what Google is planning to do with JotSpot technologies. Will customer applications
continue to work?

My question to Google (and the JotSpot people) is how can you treat your customers, some of which have been there from the beginning so poorly? Does the Google mantra “do no evil” apply only when convenient? I’m wondering if the lack of customer focus will yet again provide us with another wonderful exploding “Tech Bubble” here in the valley. Just my two cents….

There was some discussion on TechMeme of the original post, but nothing significant. The interesting issue isn’t that JotSpot had an angry customer, but rather who put pressure on this blogger to pull his post and replace it with:

Sure the post was controversial, but unless it was fabricated it gave the world good information on how JotSpot treated its customers as the company was acquired. What I want to know is, what company does Kevin work for, and who pressured him to delete the post?

Entrance exam preparation is costly and not exactly what I’d call fun. A company that launched on Monday called Grockit is dropping costs and making the process a bit easier to get through.

Grockit was started by Farbood Nivi, who has been teaching exam preparation since 1998. He worked for Kaplan and was Teacher of the Year for The Princeton Review in 2002. Just a few months ago he decided to start his own prep school where students can attend WebEX classes.

Grockit is significantly cheaper than the major review schools but Nivi says his profit margin is bigger.

“The other guys tend to be enormously bloated as far as companies go,” Nivi said via IM on Thursday. “They have very inefficient operations. They spend $1.5 million to generate $1.4 million. The virtual world is cheaper and more pervasive.”

To start out, Grockit is offering 16 90-minute sessions plus the official GMAT review text books for $399. Kaplan online is $1,249, The Princeton Review is $899, and Manhattan GMAT Prep is $990. Nivi says that the Grockit price may go up a little within the next year but he doesn’t have actual plans to increase it.

“One student has dropped the course with a competitor and decided to buy a laptop with the money he is saving by taking Grockit instead,” Nivi said. “Taking one of the big guys means that just applying to a hand full of MBA programs is a couple of thousand dollars out of your pocket.”

For now, Nivi is satisfied using WebEX where students and teachers can chat and interact. In the future he hopes to develop his own software for interactive classes. He also hopes to branch out from solely GMAT prep and start ACT courses next year because he believes that the ACT “is going to eat the SAT.”

To promote his service, Nivi and his staff of teachers have signed up as experts on BitWine. They are also banking on word-of-mouth marketing, hoping that saving money is a major incentive for hopeful students.

The obvious question here is if Grockit is a get-what-you-paid-for type deal. Having not taken entrance exams in six years, I couldn’t think of appropriate questions to quiz Nivi with but his experience is impressive enough to say his school is worth serious consideration. Especially for anyone considering dropping major ducats on an MBA.

AOL Video has decided to spread some holiday cheer by giving away over 30 free movie downloads for one day only on Saturday.

Several of the titles are, appropriately, Christmas movies such as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and Jack Frost, but there will be some non-spirited ones available such as Spiderman 2 as well. The free offering begins at 6:00 a.m. Eastern Time and customers are limited to one movie per person, but not one per computer.

Normally, movie downloads from AOL Video are priced from $9.99 to $19.99 per title. We reviewed AOL Video in October and found it to be lacking in selection and high in price compared to the other movie downloading services. But on Saturday, we would argue that it will be one of the better ones. After all, who can argue with free?

Yahoo! redesigned their TV listing
site this week. Certain bloggers have expressed their displeasure with the makeover. I think it looks good but certainly could be more functional.

Most Yahoo! pages are getting Flash-ier so it was time for the TV listing page to go under the knife. Some complaints have been that the Ajax interface slows it down but that wasn’t my experience.

The problem is not the “cool” new color scheme. The problem is the design placement. The most pertinent information is not close enough to the top. I have to scroll down too far from the Scrubs, Ugly Betty, and Grey’s Anatomy promos before I get to the “My TV” grid, which is the reason I would go to this site in the first place. They’ve also placed “TV News,” “Juicy Gossip,” and “Latest Recaps” before the actual listings. I’ll go to the PerezHilton blog if I want that crap.

I don’t think this is another example of Yahoo! spreading its peanut butter. I think this is Yahoo! giving itself the makeover it needs but maybe trying to hard to be cool. Function before fashion, Yahoo! Learn from Meevee.

Update: Apparently Yahoo has had seen the backlash themselves on their own blog regarding the TV listings page. It’s not pleasant. Hopefully they’ll take note.

Jingle’s free 411 service has announced that users have now placed over 100 million 411 calls.

The company, which we profiled in October 2005, has raised over $60 million in capital to date, has taken over 3% of the U.S. 411 market.

We interviewed Jingle Networks CEO George Garrick and investor Josh Kopelman back in October at TalkCrunch. Jingle isn’t creating a new market – they are destroying an entrenched, $8 billion market with a free product.

We could tell that there was some real excitement over at Yahoo HQ yesterday – four separate Yahoo PR folks emailed to make sure we knew that Google had announced the closing of their Answers product.

While the announcement was the final nail in the Google Answers coffin, in reality, the “Answers” war has been over for months now.

Google Answers launched in 2002, at a time when the desire for cheap user generated content wasn’t valued much because the advertising market was in a slump – monetizing page views was much harder than it is today. They adopted a for-pay model, where experts received a fee for answering questions, and Google took a 25% cut. By Google’s own admission, just 800 people participated in Google Answers over the last 4+ years (note: see the first few comments here regarding the 800 users number – it’s unclear exactly what Google is referring to).

In contrast, Yahoo Answers launched less than a year ago and with a much different model. Asking a question is free, and user responses are rated by the community and ranked. Users clearly like the model. By August 2006, people had written over 30 million answers to questions, and it had become one of Yahoo’s bigger properties. Yesterday, Yahoo said that Yahoo Answers had over 60 million unique worldwide monthly visitors, who have written 160 million answers to questions.

This wasn’t a war, it was a massacre, and a case study in why all this “Web 2.0 stuff” actually has legs when applied properly. Google went for a direct revenue stream, a business model that made sense in 2002. Yahoo, launching much later, launched a free product and used the ideals of community participation to remove friction from the process and get out of the way of users. This incentivized use and has created a massive number of page views that Yahoo is now monetizing. The network effect kicked in big time.

This was a much needed win and morale boost for Yahoo, which is in the midst of executive turmoil and is struggling to remain an independent entity. Their excitement, which I’ve witnessed only indirectly over the last 24 hours, is palpable. The challenge now is whether Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, who seems to have one foot out the door, or some other Yahoo executive, can leverage this win to help turn Yahoo’s business around more generally.

And it is also a great development for Google, which has now signaled a willingness to kill off failed product experiments and deploy resources in a more efficient manner. It seems that the mantra of “features, not products” discussed by CEO Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin in their most recent public earnings call is being put into practice. This willingness to admit that a project has failed, and kill it off, will allow Google to experiment on a grander scale in the future.

Late yesterday, Yahoo!’s Tomi Poutanen posted an “open invitation” for Google Answers researchers to join Yahoo! Answers.

We’re all about the holidays at CrunchGear this week. We have a full DSLR round-up as well as an amazing look at some high-end audio gear for those with a bit of cash to burn.

We also take a look at the Nikon D40, the Helio Drift, and the Expresso S2 Exercise Bike for burning off those Thanksgiving calories. We’re also running a Commenter Appreciation contest for our loyal readers. Care to join them?

Zoho, the online Office suite company, will launch a Microsoft Office plugin today that will allow users to save documents directly to their Zoho account from Microsoft Office and Excel.

The company is also announcing open APIs and a partnership with Desktopize to create virtual folders that allow users to save files to their Zoho account directly from their desktop.

Raju Vegesna, who calls himself the evangelist of Zoho, discussed the news with us last night and said that the company is essentially beating Microsoft to what it should have already done with Office Live, which is bridge the gap between offline and online office applications.

“Office Live has no web-based spreadsheet or word processor,” Vegesna said. “So I can send you the plugin so you can just put in your Zoho account details and you can use it as if you’re using the Office itself.”

The new plugin will enable users to save and collaborate from Word or Excel (but not PowerPoint yet – that is in the works), as well as open existing Zoho documents in Word or Excel.

Vegesna said that Zoho did not have to work closely with Microsoft to build the plugin because Microsoft “documentation is fairly open.” It is compatible with Office 2000, 2003, and 2007.

Saving documents to two places is a hassle so the plugin, as well as the “desktop icons” will allow users to avoid visiting the Zoho site quite as often.

“People are asking for this,” Vegesna said. “Currently they have to go to Zoho.com, login, and upload documents. We have them doing this an average of five times per day. This will let them go straight to Zoho without having to go to Zoho.com, upload, etc.”

Zoho’s decision to open APIs was so that other developers could integrate Zoho into their applications, such as storage Web sites like Omnidrive or Box.net.

When Zoho last spoke with TechCrunch, the company had approximately 100,000 users. Vegesna estimates that the number is closer to 150,000 now.

Spokeo wants to be your home page. They want to bring you your favorite blog feeds, MySpace updates, new YouTube videos, and friends’ photo albums all in one eyeful.

Spokeo combines the top 20 social networking destinations with any RSS feeds you like into one glimpse through a multimedia RSS reader. But you can’t actually navigate within the networks. It just gives you a run-down. Sort of like My Yahoo! for Web 2.0 sites.

“The problem with start pages like My Yahoo! is the personalization part,” said Harrison Tang, founder of Spokeo, in a phone conversation on Wednesday. “People don’t really know how to add content. It takes like ten steps and a lot of people don’t know how to do it. So we’re assuming that most people are interested in reading online information on the same page that tells you where your friends are, what pictures they’re taking, and what your favorite blogs like TechCrunch are saying.” [I swear he said TechCrunch!]

This is a great idea but it needs some work. For starters, (and here is the woman in me speaking), it’s just not pretty. And it could learn from My Yahoo! and at least give me my local weather. Also, it’s not easy to import information to the site. I tried to get it to feed my MySpace info and somehow ended up with MySpace buddies and information for someone named Gnatalie instead. Shouldn’t I need a password to do that? Consequently, I had a pretty hard time figuring out how to get Gnatalie off of my page and get my own MySpace information on.

Your Spokeo home page is organized into three categories on the side bar: Me, My Friends, and Featured Users. Users can then navigate what their friends or popular Spokeos are up to based on their tags or activities.

Spokeo was started by four Stanford buddies who love MySpace and Flickr and quite obviously TechCrunch and were tired of not having all of their info in one place. The site was funded through “angel investors” so far…meaning their parents.

It may not be a multi-million dollar venture-backed startup, but Lev Walkin has an elegant solution to a common feature of the social web, commenting. JS-Kit is an entirely free little javascript embed that allows you to add threaded comments to any web page in one line:

"<script src="http://js-kit.com/comments.js"></script>"

JS-Kit works by running Lev’s javascript code, which along with the website’s referral, fetches the appropriate comment data from his server. The comments are fully customizable by CSS and multiple comment instances can be displayed on the same referring URL by changing the “path” attribute of the comment. That way you could have a photo page with unique comment threads for each picture. However, while JS-Kit allows for a lot of customization, it still lacks some of the more advanced administrative features of fully integrated comments, such as those of our Wordpress blog.

Lev Walkin is a Cisco Security Engineer out of Santa Clara, and originally came up with the idea as a way to help he wife, a web designer, easily add comments to her sites.

Feel free to test the script after the jump…

Read More

Yahoo! is getting in on the group text messaging biz with the launch of their new site, Mixd. TechCrunch was tipped off to the site’s existence today but we have not been able to determine how long it has been live.

Mixd allows users to set up groups and text or share photos within those groups. Texts and photos can be managed online as well as on a mobile phone.

Text recipients can reply to all, “whisper” by replying to just one other person, or “mute” by turning off the message chain. But judging from some initial testing, all of those functionalities are not the easiest things to figure out. It’s simple enough to sign up for the service but difficult to manage contacts, groups, and the numbers assigned to groups and commands. Yahoo! tries to simplify things by asking users to text a number instead of a word, which I’m not sure makes things simpler.

It looks like Yahoo! is going for the “cool” angle on this one. The “About” page says, “Mixd is about going out. Coordinate last-minute meetups, share pictures and videos from your phone, and remember last night on a website we create for you, automatically.”

We have had our eye on several group SMS services lately such as Zemble, Dodgeball, and Twitter. It is a little surprising that Yahoo! wants in on this game but then again, why not?

So far this service is only available to US phone numbers. Regular text messaging fees apply.

Thanks to Noah Kagan to tipping us off about this new site.

Maybe the world actually does need another photo sharing service. In a recent Spanish blog, one user wrote, (translated from Spanish) “If there is anything in the entire world that I refute, it is that Flickr is in English.”

A new photo sharing site called Pikeo launched in beta about three weeks ago in English, Spanish, and French. But language is not the site’s only claim to fame. The company is emphasizing mapping as the most salient feature.

“Maps are the center of the experience,” said Celine Lacombe, project manager for Pikeo, in a phone conversation today. “We think that pictures tell stories when they are inside of maps so that you know where they’ve been taken.”

The cool thing about tagging photos on Pikeo is that users can search photos based on three separate criteria: Who, What, and Where. So if you search for “Paris,” you can find photos categorized by who took them, what they were photographing, and where they are geographically.

Pikeo also has a fast uploading function that doesn’t require users to download a pesky desktop application. You can upload an entire folder directly from the site and it works in the background so that users can continue to browse photos while uploading their own.

Pikeo was built on Adobe’s new Flex 2 technology. It’s about as easy to navigate as they come.

Pikeo development was spearheaded by the San Francisco-based R&D unit of France Telecom. The company will host an official launch party next Tuesday in downtown San Francisco. To land yourself an invitation, click here.

Yesterday we compared a new service called BitWine to Google Answers. Apparently that was the last day we could make that comparison because at 10 p.m. last night, Google announced that they would be closing the service by the end of the week.

So if you’ve got a pressing question, ask now or forever hold your peace.

“Google is a company fueled by innovation, which to us means trying lots of new things all the time — and sometimes it means reconsidering our goals for a product,” wrote Andrew Fikes and Lexi Baugher, software engineers for Google, on their blog. “Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months. For two new grads, it was a crash course in building a scalable product, responding to customer requests, and discovering what questions are on people’s minds.”

So far no word on how Yahoo Answers is doing in comparison but isn’t it possible that community asking services such as these will become extinct as people learn to better navigate the Web themselves?

Update: Yahoo representatives contacted us today with data on just how Yahoo! Answers is doing. It seems that the service has 60 million users worldwide and 160 million answers.

Om Malik posted a rumor today regarding a new BitTorrent financing and possible ouster of CEO Bram Cohen. We did some independent digging and have come up with what I believe is accurate based on multiple sources and a leaked document: BitTorrent has raised a $25 million Series B round of financing from Accel Partners and previous investor Doll Capital Management, bringing the total capital raised to just under $34 million.

And CEO Bram Cohen, who created the BitTorrent protocol, is definitely on his way out. The company has retained the well known headhunting firm Heidrick & Struggles to find a replacement as soon as possible. No word on what, if any, role Cohen will have going forward.

More Upcoming BitTorrent News:

The company is yet to launch a new service to sell licensed video content on its own retail site, and has signed licensing agreements with, among others, Warner Bros. and Paramount to sell movies and TV shows at prices starting at $1 each. The company will also announce deals to put the BitTorrent software on DVRs, cable boxes, and wireless routers, enabling BitTorrent users to download legal movies or TV shows to PCs and TVs.

BitTorrent is making a real effort to stay legitimate and in favor with the RIAA and MPAA, which of course doesn’t sit well with the majority of the world’s 70 million BitTorrent users. Napster failed miserably when they tried to work with the RIAA. We’ll see how well BitTorrent does this time.

Update: In a very tense conversation with Bram Cohen and BitTorrent’s Director of Communications, Lily Lin, today, the company made it clear that Bram is with the company for the long haul. They would not comment on the CEO search.

Wal-mart sold an option for a digital download with the purchase of the “Superman Returns” DVD when the movie went on sale today. This is the store’s first foray into the digital movie business.

According to CNN, 40 percent of all DVDs sold in the U.S. are sold at Wal-Mart. But so far, the company has left online movie sales to others. It seemed the big retailers were getting antsy about digital movie stores, particularly in October when the president of Target sent a letter to the movie studios warning that their DVD sales were down and the store could no longer be expected to reserve as much shelf space for physical DVDs if something wasn’t done. Looks like Wal-Mart is taking the if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em solution instead.

We did a review of digital movie download vendors and found several winners. But Wal-Mart’s venture into this space is the first time physical DVD are linked with the “soft copy” of the movie.

When customers buy “Superman Returns” at Wal-Mart, they can choose to pay $1.97 more to play it on portable devices, $2.97 more to play it on PCs or laptops, or $3.97 more to play it on either portable devices or PCs/laptops. But not in iPods. According to the company’s Web site, “The Portable format is optimized for on-the-go viewing using ‘PlayForSure’ portable video players. If played on a PC, the image quality will not be as good as the higher resolution Standard format. These videos are not compatible with Apple iPods. Portable format videos are encoded at a 320 x 240 resolution with an average bit rate of 500 kbps.”

Any movie that is downloaded from Wal-Mart will be stored in a user’s Wal-Mart Video Download Manager as well as their Windows Media Library. Users can only have the movie on one computer at a time, but they can re-register the license on on any number of computers, meaning it is possible to play it on the computer with the license and then move it to another computer only if you move the license. Kind of confusing.

If this is the best Walmart can do, we’ll be filing this under “Failed Movie Download Models” in the near future.

An official document posted to Digg today summarizes an agreement between the U.S. and Russia in which Russia has agreed to close down AllofMP3.com, and any sites that “permit illegal distribution of music and other copyright works.”

The agreement is dated November 19 and posted to the Web site for the Office of the United States Trade Representative. It summarizes the joint efforts of the two countries to fight content piracy, an issue known to be centered in Russia and Eastern Europe.

“This agreement sets the stage for further progress on IPR issues in Russia through the next phase of multilateral negotiations, during which the United States and other WTO members will examine Russia’s IPR regime,” states the document.

The document specifically names AllofMP3.com as an example of the types of Web sites that they will shut down. We contacted AllofMP3.com and the company sent us an official statement stating their legality. It says that the company has offered to remove illegal music at the copyright holders’ requests.

“For months, AllofMP3 has stated the company will comply with the request from any copyright holder to remove any music from the site. However, the company has not heard from the Russian Licensing Societies or the record labels. Perhaps, opt-out requests are not being made because the record labels can’t clear the rights.”

Still, the company is being made an example of for all to see. Russia is instructed to terminate leases for companies that facilitate online piracy, as well as inspect plants regularly, and take criminal action where there is evidence of commercial sale piracy. The government will be expected to begin complying by June 1, 2007.

A company called BitWine launched an interactive search site about three weeks ago. It is much like Ether in that it is a call-an-expert service, except BitWine is integrated with Skype. In fact BitWine will be a Skype plugin when Skype 3.0 launches, which will likely be in early 2007.

With BitWine, users deem themselves experts in specific categories and establish their per-minute consulting fee. Then when another curious user needs an answer about a given topic, they can browse the experts in that category, select someone whose price and expertise they prefer, and Skype them live. As soon as the transaction is over, the “expert” is paid via PayPal.

We spoke with BitWine co-founder Alon Cohen today, trying to figure out why this site is necessary and how it is different than Yahoo! Answers or Google Answers.

“When you look at Google Answers and Yahoo Answers, you don’t really know who is answering because it’s chat based and text based,” Cohen said. “For instance, I asked a question last night and I had to rephrase the question three times for people to understand me. One question and one answer is usually not enough. You need a visual conversation with someone you trust.”

On BitWine, experts get ratings based on their consultancy performance. Cohen sees this as a way for people to make money in their spare time off of their random hobbies. After all, where else are you going to sell your consulting services on model ship making or knitting?

Sites like this really are only as good as their community size. What good is an “operators are standing by” scenario, when no one is calling in?

“This is a big issue that we have many concerns about: the chicken and the egg,” Cohen said. “You want experts there to begin with and you want enough traffic there so that the experts will stay.”

He said the company will target experts through blogs and discussion forums and also attempt to create affiliations with other Web sites’ questions pages.

BitWine was founded by Cohen, who was previously the co-founder of VocalTec, a VoIP company, and Elad Baron, who recently sold his company, Whale Communications, to Microsoft.

Stickis, which we covered briefly back in October last year is launching its service this afternoon. Stickis, at first glance is a FireFox and Internet Explorer plugin much like other web annotation programs, such as Fleck, Diigo, and Trailfire. Stickis does do the webpage “sticky note” annotation of these programs. However, Stickis is not just about marking up a single page. It is about creating and subscribing to “channels” of these notes and other data sources.

The channels can consist of notes left by people, RSS feeds (blogs), and even specialized data channels for web services such as OpenTable or Yelp. When you subscribe to a channel, be it another user’s “sticky notes” or Yelp reviews, that channel is added to your network and begins to populate, in reverse chronological order, a collapsible tray that’s tucked away on the side of your browser screen. Then, when you visit a page, such as TechCrunch, that tray is populated with summaries of any related notes or reviews from you network through an analysis of the url and tags of your current page and those included in the note. One click on a summary brings up the sticky note.

Stickis does a deeper analysis for the web service channels such as OpenTable and Yelp, which makes it possible for a restaurant’s Yelp review and OpenTable reservation search widget to pop up in my tray when I go a page linking to a restaurant. I believe this contextual method makes it a much more consumable service than others, which require you actively seek out information by visiting an annotated page. It also allows for greater control of what data you see because of the subscription based method.

Creating notes is done with a fairly robust WISIWYG editor, allowing users to style text and backgrounds, as well as embed photos and movies by drag and drop. This makes it very easy to go through Flickr and start commenting away. Without the plugin installed users are still treated to a proxied version of the site with an AJAX version of the Stickis layered on top like this. A note or several notes can be replied to and even leave trackbacks when they link to blogs, because your personal Stickis channel page is in fact a personal blog where notes are stored as taggble posts. This can also be changed to post to a personal blog instead. Replies to notes will not clog your tray because you will only see the channels you subscribe to. You will see that a reply was made to a note, however, and can click through to it. If you see something you like, you can add the note’s creator to your network of channels.

Stickis is based in San Francisco and currently funded by about a million dollars in angel financing. They plan to monetize the business through the third type of Stickis content channel: web services. The hope is that Stickis will provide an easier and more relevant way for surfers to get a publisher’s content, drive more traffic to their site, and use their services. Yelp and OpenTable serve as the first vertical they are testing this out with. It’s easy to imagine some other verticals as well, such as concert ticket sales or travel accommodations. There’s no specific talk about how payments would be structured but affiliate fees seem the most sensible.

Feel free to get Stickis or view a preview of the service on TechCrunch through the link below:

YouTube and Verizon have partnered up to bring video clips to the mobile phone. The feature will launch in December as part of the Vcast $15 per month service.

Verizon customers will be able to view “select” video content, as well as post videos from their mobile phones. Given that most mobile-generated content, videos or photos, lives and dies on the mobile phone, this may be a valid way to enliven it.

YouTube’s deal with Verizon is only exclusive for a limited time, meaning customers of other carriers needn’t wait long to receive a comparable service.

The big question here is: What does “select” video mean? The beauty of YouTube is, (or at least has been), that it is so organic. Will corporate video selection mean that users will only have access to approved content? How boring! It may be a lose-win situation in that YouTube videos streamed to the phone will be lame, while videos streamed from the phone to YouTube could be much cooler.

A silicon valley startup called Presto has quietly launched a new service aimed at people who don’t currently have Internet access, but want to be able to receive emails and photos from loved ones. It combines a special printer produced by Hewlett Packard with a web service that sends data to the printer over a normal phone line – no need for internet access or a computer.

Featured prominently throughout the Presto website are pictures of happy old people receiveing photos from (younger, presumably tech savvy) loved ones. My guess, based on those ubiquitous pictures, is that old people are the target demographic for the Presto service.

Teasing aside, Presto looks like a pretty cool service for some people (possibly the parents and grandparents of TechCrunch readers). The printer costs $150. Take it out of the box and feed it electricity and a normal phone line. No need for broadband internet service. You are assigned a special @presto.com email address, and when someone sends photos or other content to that email address, it prints out on the printer. The old person user simply takes it off the printer and looks at it. We’ll be getting a test version of the printer and service and will post a more lengthy review after a hands on experience.

The service itself costs another $10 per month, which is where Presto makes their money. HP makes their money off of the ink cartridges that people will buy after using the service.

I do have a spam concern. It’s a pretty good bet that spammers will be sending mass emails to %@presto.com, knowing that a hard copy will be printed out and delivered to the end user. I’m sure Presto will have filters in place to deal with most of this. But I also wonder if Presto’s incentive to sell advertisers the right to send a limited amount of “special offers” to Presto users will become too great to ignore over time, perhaps in exchange for a free or reduced price account. We’ll see.

Presto is backed by Kleiner Perkins and Clearstone Venture Partners.

Update: I should have done this before, but I dug into the potential spam issue a little more. You have to be an accepted sender for the printer to accept the email, so unsolicited spam will not be printed. However, to access the user account to accept/reject friends requires a computer, so I guess a family member or friend will help them with account maintenance if they don’t have one.