Flixster, a San Francisco based social network where users rate and discuss movies, closed a round of financing today with LightSpeed Ventures. This was a small round of financing – $2 million or possibly less, but there was apparently heavy competition from Sequoia Capital in the deal (and possibly Kleiner Perkins). Flixster has recently seen very heavy user registration and page view growth, so a sub-$10 million valuation, which this deal almost certainly was, could be considered quite cheap.

There are also rumors that major studios got involved in the Flixster bidding as well, either as an investment or an outright acquisition.

Look for an announcement in the coming weeks.

Update: Comments from founders in the comments (on their way to Aruba apparently) confirming the deal, and traffic stats in this post.

ConvinceMe is a new competitive arguing site launching tonight. It will let debaters carry out public debates, head to head arguments, and a “King of the Hill” free for all about any subject they like. Other argument sites, like Hot Soup and LoveToLead, have focused on sobering issues, like political or philosophical debates and polls. Comment threads and forums have also been great places for people to argue. Just look at the comments for Do the Right Thing.

ConvinceMe lets members talk about anything and ranks them based on how many “convince” points they get from user voting for their argument. Private debates are issued as public challenges from one member to another and end when one site has gained the agreed number of votes for their side. For public debates, each side’s arguments are ordered by the number of votes the arguments have. “King of the Hill” is a twist on the challenge debate, with each member only able to submit one argument for their position. The first argument with 100 votes wins. The final type, public debates are ongoing, with the votes for one side or the other marking the overall opinion of the community on the subject. Apparently pirates are better than ninjas right now. However, it wasn’t “Ask a Pirate” that allegedly pulled in over 300K last year.

IntenseDebate.com is another debate site under development as noted in the TechCrunch Forums.

Update: ConvinceMe has resolved the sign-up issues.

Vizu Answers announced a $2.9 million round of financing today for its poll based market research, led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Marketers can conduct self-serve polling campaigns by designing a poll, picking a demographic, and having it syndicated to relevant publishers’ sites, who get a kick-back for listing the poll by CPM varying by placement on the page. It’s like poll-based AdSense. Publishers can set a minimum CPM for the types of polls they’re willing to show in that poll zone. Sites that run a series of diagnostic demographic polls for their users can command higher rates. You can see some sample polls here.

It seems odd that Vizu pays on an impression basis, when the value to marketers comes from voting, although both methods are subject to fraud. Vizu does track click-through rates for each site and provide this data to marketers planning campaigns. When there isn’t a poll matching the contextual profile of the site (CPM rate, demographic, and textually), Vizu fills the space by running a poll that relates to the page’s text to keep readers accustomed to the feature.

I am very excited to announce a new conference, called the TechCrunch20. This is a joint venture between us (TechCrunch) and Jason Calacanis, who broke the news about this earlier today. The format is simple: Twenty of the hottest new startups will announce and demo their products over a two day period. And they don’t pay a cent to do this. They will be selected to participate based on merit alone.

Many tech conferences today allow startups to pitch and demo their products to their attendees, although there is almost always a hefty fee involved that ranges from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. DEMO, where I am currently, is probably the quintessential example of this model. The entire conference is paid startup demos. There are way too many to digest—60—and it is a well known secret that if you are willing to pay the $15,000+ fee, your startup will really need to suck to be turned down.

While conferences like DEMO are extremely lucrative for the organizers, I’m not sure the startups or attendees attending get much out of it other than a great networking event. There are too many startups for press to give even passing coverage to many of them, and attendees are lost in a sea of pitches that all begin to blur together.

And there is a serious conflict of interest at the conference level. The economics of the event dictate that a certain number of startups must be accepted for a certain fee. Attendees don’t know if they’re really seeing the best startups, or just the best startups that are willing to pay the exorbitant participation fee. A few (or a lot of) duds always make their way in.

Many of the hottest startups over the past couple of years—Digg, YouTube, StumbleUpon and many others—didn’t have the money in the early days to spend on DEMO and other conferences, and so they didn’t participate. We want to give the future YouTube’s a platform to announce those products.

The TechCrunch20 Conference

Jason and I are going to do something a lot different than the pay-to-demo model. The TechCrunch20 conference will be a two day event, held this fall (more details soon), where twenty hot startups will demo their new products—and they don’t pay a dime to do this.

The startups will be invited based on the recommendation of a committee of expert analysts, entrepreneurs and journalists. Twenty companies will be invited, plus a couple of alternates. If a selected startup isn’t ready to launch ten days or so before the event, they’ll be bumped and one of the alternates will take its place.

Jason is the perfect partner for us to work with on this conference. He’s a successful entrepreneur and has held large startup-focused conferences in the past. It is our hope that his experience and our access to new startups will be a winning combination.

More details on the TechCrunch20 conference will be announced soon.

Yahoo’s brand-centric sites, announced in November 2006 and dubbed “Brand Universe”, have started to go live. These sites each revolve around a single popular brand – like this one on the Nintendo Wii – and have almost no original content. Instead, Yahoo is taking content from Flickr, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Answers and other Yahoo properties, along with some slick graphics, and hoping for page views.

Yahoo says to expect 100 or so brand-based sites by the end of the year, and will include sites for popular movies, TV shows, bands, celebrities, games, etc. The next sites to be launched will include the Sims, Halo, Lost, the Office, Transformers, and Harry Potter, says GigaOm.

Yahoo doesn’t seem too concerned with monetization of these pages yet, and they aren’t working directly with the brands themselves. Chances are both of those policies may change in the near future.

Steve Rubel somehow came across a new Digg-like Technorati product called “WTF,” which stands for “Where’s the Fire?” It was briefly live at technorati.com/wtf, but is no longer available.

From the screen shots (see below, care of Rubel), it appears to have very similar features as Digg, where users can vote for stories they find interesting and force them higher in results.

I’ve emailed Technorati for a comment but haven’t heard back yet. This may be a product that they did not intend be available for public scrutiny quite yet, and Rubel’s post may have resulted in them removing it.

Technorati launched a TechMeme-like site called Technorati Explore in early 2006. I just checked it on a whim to see if it was still live – and it’s been removed as well. I can’t find any announcement of the product going dark, so it may have been any time in the last few months.

PriceProtectr is a neat new tool that helps you take advantage of guarantees by many online retailers to refund the difference on purchased items if the price drops in the 30 or 60 days following your purchase (example – Best Buy’s policy). Those guarantees are great, but few people go to the trouble of following up and checking on any price changes for items they’ve purchased.

The company has put together a very simple website, even using a vowel dropping name and the generic web 2.0 logo generator that we’ve previously written about. To use it, you simply paste in the product URL from an ecommerce site (example) and your email address. The company will notify you if the price drops within the time period allowed by the retailer.

As of today, the site claims to have found over $57,000 in savings, with few people aware of the service. This might be something someone just put up for fun, but it is a useful tool. Frankly, retailers should email you themselves if the price drops, and if a service like this gets popular enough, they may start doing that. Supported sites include Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Backcountry.com, BestBuy.com, BestBuy.ca, Bike Nashbar, Circuit City, Cooking.com, Costco, Future Shop, Jenson USA, Office Max, Sears, 6th Avenue Electronics, Staples.com, Staples.ca, and Target. See Thrillist for their review as well.

For good or bad, venture funds are flowing like it’s 1999 all over again. Seattle-based Farecast , which predicts and guarantees airline prices, dipped its toes in the cash pool for its third round of financing, taking $12.1 million from Sutter Hill Ventures and others. Previous investors Greylock Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and WRF Capital also participated, as well as new investors PAR Capital Management, Pinnacle Ventures, and Farecast board member and former Expedia CEO, Erik Blachford.

The company has now raised $20.6 million over three rounds. How are they doing? The model seems to be attractive to consumers. Farecast VP Marketing says in just the last few months since launch they’ve “dropped off $200 million in “potential” revenue to airline websites,” a fraction of which will have resulted in actual sales.

In a battle for relevance in the mobile payments space, mobile to mobile payment service Obopay has acquired social payment service Billmonk. Neither are disclosing the size of the acquisition, which is undoubtedly a tiny and probably stock for stock deal. The integration of the two services will first let users settle the debts they tracked on Billmonk instantly over Obopay’s mobile payment platform and eventually by email. You can see Obopay’s release here and Billmonk’s here. Founders Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom will be moving to Obopay’s new Seattle office to focus on solving the “social accounting problem”.

This is a crowded space with a single, hugely dominate player, PayPal Mobile. See TextPayMe and KushCash as well.

My Currency is launching another take on the wisdom of the crowds, this time aimed at the real estate market. Unlike Zillow, My Currency derives its housing valuations from the marketplace of user opinions by having them assess properties as over or undervalued along with the strength of their conviction. For instance, if I feel a house in San Francisco for 11 million dollars is overpriced, I vote for what lower price I think is right as well as how strongly I feel that on a 1-10 scale. The conviction of my choice and the accuracy of my past votes play into how much I can affect the valuation and price trend of the home. Home listings are a bit sparse at the moment, and rely on self listing.

The hope is that experts and real estate agents will be drawn to the site and its users as a lead generation tool. Quality lead generation has been a problem for online realtors. Founder Karim Tahawi says that 2 out of 3 internet leads produce no sale. The site will allow realtors to make one on one contact to buyers by answering direct questions or attracting clients with their reputations. Experts will establish themselves by their voting records and distinguish themselves as the best at valuing different cities or neighborhoods.

Why be honest in your valuation? My Currency answers this through a reputation score that consists of your past performance valuing homes, contributions to the site, and popularity of your additions. These all play a part in the formula that weights your vote on a property. Contributions are measured on the volume of contributions to the supporting blog, wiki, and Q&A pages. Users that produce more frequently viewed content or selected answers, will have higher popularity scores.

My Currency is San Francisco based and currently angel financed.

Zoho continues to rock along, releasing new products every few weeks (see Zoho Wiki for example) that have turned their Ajax office suite into the best on the web, bar none. See here for all of our previous Zoho coverage.

Today they’ll release their newest product – Zoho Notebook – into private alpha for selected users. After a feedback and testing period they’ll release this to the public in March. Notebook is a product that allows users to create, aggregate, and collaborate content in an online whitespace from other Zoho services as well as any web content. Embedded applications will work just fine as well.

Not surprisingly, Notebook follows a notebook metaphor, consisting of books, with pages that you can drop content from services like Zoho Writer and Sheets onto. The pages currently supports adding spreadsheets, word processor, task, planner, contacts, and calendars as pages or embedded widgets on the pages. Other embedded objects consist of text, images, video, HTML, RSS, javascript, Flash embeds and webpages. Images, video, and audio can be drawn from third party services or recorded right from within the program using recorders from Flixn. Notebook will also come with a browser plugin for Firefox and IE you can use to cut and paste web clips into the notebook. If you can’t find what you need on the web they also have some simple drawing tools (text, box, circle, line, comment bubble) to get the job done. Each object on a page can have its z-depth changed.

Click on the screen shot above for a larger view.

This goes way beyond what Google Notebook offers, which is really just a content clipping service for websites. A good analogy to Zoho Notebook is Microsoft OneNote, a desktop application. But with sharing and versioning.

Each notebook allows very fine grained access control. You can publish a book publicly to a static URL, share just a page, or share just an object on a page by granting read and write privileges to other Zoho members. They’ve also integrated Skype status right into the objects, pages, and books so that you can chat to collaborate with the users you’re sharing with. In the release, they plan on also adding a Zoho chat box to provide another way to connect for members not on Skype so you can edit in real time. Each object and page has version controls as well.

Project Manager Raju Vegesna shows off Zoho below:

KushCash is a mobile payments solution that launched in 2005, and they’re pushing out a new version of the service this morning. Back in 2005, mobile person-to-person payments were seen as a viable niche, since PayPal didn’t yet have a mobile product. KushCash promoted their product to the urban elite – the surf and skater crowds in Southern California where the company is based.

Their world changed significantly in March 2006 when PayPal Mobile launched.

KushCash is a not-bad service but it requires a software download that most phones don’t support. PayPal’s solution uses the text message platform that all cell phones can access. Given PayPal has an easier to use product and it actually works on most phones, I was compelled to ask KushCash this simple question: How do you get over the PayPal hurdle?

The answer:

Hmmm…good question, how do we tackle that giant? We don’t. At least for now. Why tackle a bloated army when you can train a village of talented warriors from far away? I think that what KushCash offers is a completely different beast in its own – yes, of course we’d love users to use KushCash for all types of merchant, sales and personal transactions – and they do, but what I think that KushCash offers that behemoths like Paypal and other smaller competitors don’t is personality, ease-of-use and a fresh format and attitude. If the mobile payment market was set in an old black and white high school movie – we’d be the new student that arrived in the middle of the year. Handsome, yes. Smart? Yes. A rebel? Yes. But he loves his mother and comes home every night for supper, but tears it up on the drag strip after dark. We’re the first to offer social lending features and financial network bragging rights. Regardless of all of that, I think that KushCash would appeal to users that don’t want to use what’s out there. There are users that want a service that functions like Paypal Mobile, but maybe executes it in an easier and more relaxed way but backed with the same safe and secure financial/privacy measures. Feedback is great so far, we have surfers, bankers and babysitters that use KushCash for social lending AND for business.

We’ll check back in to KushCash in six months and see how they’re doing.

Portland based SplashCast is launching this morning after a long beta period. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a long review late last year after demo’ing the product (and he liked it so much he now works there).

Splashcast is a little hard to describe, but once you get it it makes sense. It’s a Flash media player where the user can make various channels of content – including text, video, pictures, and audio files – and then embed the player containing those channels on a website. It basically incorporates functionality lots of other embeddable products. YouTube videos, photo slides shows like those offered by Slide, podcasts feeds, etc. can all be added as channels and will take up a fraction of the screen real estate required by all of those other services. For already busy websites, the Splashcast player is much easier to stomach than 3-4 widgets from separate companies.

Each channel of content also has a RSS feed, so interested viewers can subscribe to it and not have to come back to your website for access.

Splashcast will host content directly, but the real utility comes from plugging in videos from Youtube, photos from Flickr, etc., so that you can keep your media where you want to and not have to copy it over to Splashcast. You can even add voice overs to any of the show segments as Marshall has done below.

Splashcast originally started as QMind, a creator of enterprise e-learning software, and had raised $1.3 million from angels. They relaunched last summer as Splashcast and are currently working on a series “A” round.

For those of you who don’t know the basics of widgets, or the difference between desktop and web widgets, check out this surprisingly unbiased overview post on the Yahoo Widgets blog where they talk about the pros and cons of the four major desktop widget platforms offered by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and Apple.

A key factor when deciding which platforms to consider when building a widget is the overall distribution and the ability to build a single widget for desktop and web use. It’s going to be hard to argue against Vista when thinking in those terms, which will very quickly have greater distribution than all of the others combined on the desktop. And Vista widgets also work on Live.com pages. For companies with enough resources, however, building on all four platforms is relatively straightforward.

The post leaves out all of the widget startups, like Fox-backed SpringWidgets. And more are coming soon. Developers should keep an eye on those platforms as well and build to them if and when they gain traction.

AllFreeCalls, a new service which lets people make free phone calls by first calling a phone number in Iowa and then calling to any of dozens of other countries, just added eight new countries to the permitted lists (plus Antarctica). In an email the founder also said that they handled 80,000 call minutes yesterday.

The company operates under a legislative loophole that gives rural telco’s a kickback on every received call. That kickback is greater than the cost the company bears for making outbound international calls. So someone’s paying for these calls (other telecos? taxpayers?), just not the person using the service. I love bureaucracy.

The Wall Street Journal reported (behind paywall) this morning that News Corp would announce a $12 million investment in online video startup ROO. However, unlike other investments and acquisitions in Internet startups, News Corp. subsidiary Fox Interactive wasn’t involved in the deal. Fox Interactive owns Myspace and has made investments in startups such as SimplyHired. They are the Internet arm of News Corp.

From what we are hearing, not only was Fox Interactive not involved in the deal, they didn’t even know about it. The rumor is that Fox Interactive execs only heard about the investment when they read the WSJ article this morning. And they weren’t happy. An insider told us that they were incredulous News Corp. would do an Internet deal without Fox Interactive’s involvement (or at least knowledge), and said he couldn’t believe News Corp. invested in that “fucking disaster.”

Adding to the embarrassment – Fox Interactive has been having separate conversations with ROO competitor Brightcove, which recently raised nearly $60 million in a round of financing that valued them at a rumored $220 million. Fox Interactive was reportedly in conversations to acquire Brightcove just prior to the closing of that financing, for $250 – $300 million.

This is clearly a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing.

Fox Interactive has been weakened since the departure of former head Ross Levinsohn, who was replaced by an executive with little Internet experience. The fact that News Corp. made a significant investment in an Internet startup without consulting Fox Interactive suggests News Corp. is no longer looking at their Interactive subsidiary to guide them with online strategy.

Update: I got an email from another insider that suggests the initial Wall Street Journal report was incorrect and that News Corp. received warrants to acquire stock in ROO based on certain revenue/performance thresholds. Despite reports coming from Fox Interactive PR that they did know about this deal, we’re sticking with our initial assessment that this was a complete surprise to them.

For-fun betting sites like Gottabet and PicksPal, which combine social networking with betting, are gaining popularity.

The success of PicksPal in particular has been stunning. Friends group together and bet on the winners of upcoming sporting events, or more detailed things like the number of touchdowns in a given game. A small percentage of users on PicksPal tend to be correct in their bets so often that the company started selling their predictions last year.

It’s no surprise, then, that PicksPal is expanding and launching a pop culture version of its sports betting site. The new site, called PicksPop, allows users to bet on things like “Will Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee get back together?” (pays 100/1), “Will Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt announce their separation?” (also 100/1), and “Will 24 be in the Top 10 for the week?” (pays 1/1). All bets are for points, and each user gets 1,000 points to start. Top ranked users are listed on here.

Like PicksPal, PicksPop is also a social network where each user gets a profile page, can add friends, etc.

The company is based in Silicon Valley and has raised $6 million in venture capital over two rounds of financing. They are backed by Canaan Partners and Bay Partners.

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley has hinted future plans of revenue-sharing at YouTube in the coming months. The BBC is speculating that the ads might take the form of 3-second pre-roll, but Chad Hurley didn’t mention that in his comments.

The millions of YouTube videos is a huge inventory that finally gives advertisers a real reason to start investing in the creation of video ads and begin using Google AdSense Video.

I believe there will be three parties seeking compensation:

• Video content owners — owners of original content. (An audio “fingerprinting” copyright system has been in the works for a while, which will match videos up with content owners, in order to compensate audio/video content owners.)
• Video content creators — users that mash-up content into custom creations.
• Publishers — user/company that displays a video on their website to visitors.

One of the many questions is whether ads will appear on YouTube videos that are displayed on websites outside of YouTube.com. If I’m a publisher, I’d want the option to make revenue on a video I publish — but if I’m a publisher (user) on MySpace, MySpace is the ultimate publisher. MySpace is loaded with YouTube videos, but MySpace doesn’t allow external advertising on their website. Also, MySpace has been blocking external widgets randomly and without explanation, so I would imagine that YouTube wouldn’t take a chance by displaying ads in videos that are seen on MySpace pages. Google is already in bed with MySpace, which could lead to rev-share discussions of ads within YouTube videos that stream on MySpace — and also ensure that YouTube doesn’t ever become an unexplained banned victim of MySpace.

YouTube competitors have worked to differentiate themselves by compensating video content creators, but once YouTube enters this game with their top-dog status already — I question what would make a user go to a lesser-visible video site such as Revver, Guba, Metacafe, etc. Competitors have been struggling of recent — Revver lost two founders and Guba lost its’ CEO and two executives.

SocialPicks, a social network around stocks, is officially out of private beta and has added features to make it one of the more compelling places for stock junkies to hang out. SocialPicks tracks imaginary portfolios as they shrink and grow, ranking users by paying close attention to how well their predictions pan out.

The new release comes with a face lift, and a tweaked ranking calculation that takes into account the average return your picks, your accuracy in calling the direction a stock moves, and how highly the community rates your advice. SocialPicks tracks a series of “celebrity” stock pickers like Jim “BOOYAH” Crammer or Warren Buffet and the hope is that professionals will use the service too, in order to publicly assert their trading prowess.

They also hope to generate revenue the stock picking data of top users, PicksPal style. The company has started with a contest for $1,000 to attract some top pickers.

Their new Blog Tracker product is really interesting – submit your financial blog to SocialPicks. They’ll parse your RSS feed to try and determine when you are giving an opinion on the future performance of a stock (human verified). All of these blogs are then ranked by how well these predictions do over time. Currently Main Street Stocks is the top rated blog with a 66% accuracy rating.

If you’re interested in SocialPicks, see our coverage of Motley Fool CAPS as well.

In December I noted that using a Flash interface allowed a little known custom casino chip maker called thechiplab to offer far more powerful schwag design tools than the heavily funded Zazzle and CafePress.

My post didn’t serve as much of a wakeup call – those guys still have design tools stuck in the 90’s (although to their credit Cafepress has been busy rolling out it’s new developers network).

But Goodstorm, another schwag company we’ve written about in the past, has grabbed the bull by the horns and has jumped onto the Flash bandwagon with enthusiasm. The company launched catering primarily to nonprofits, giving charities a way to inexpensively sell custom designed tshirts at a very low wholesale price. The company also launched a widget product last summer.

The new product allows visitors to quickly design their own Tshirt using uploaded or stock images, text and special characters. If you like you can buy just one – a men’s standard Tshirt, designed to your specifications, costs $15.

Store owners can also create their own version of the design tool, with pre-uploaded images and custom pricing. We’ve created one – see the TechCrunch Tshirt store here. Upload your own images and have at it – any proceeds we receive from sales of Tshirts will go to charity.