Update (April 2, 2007): For those of you still sending in emails pleading with me not to stop writing about startups – this was an April Fools joke. I do not in fact believe that there “just isn’t anything left to invent.” Thank you.

Tomorrow we will announce that we have acquired Philip “Pud” Kaplan’s FuckedCompany.com in a stock for assets transaction. The basic details of the transaction are included in a press release that will go out around 9 pm PST tonight, and Pud has also mentioned this on his personal blog. We weren’t going to announce this for another week or so (even though I hinted at it on CrunchNotes), but too many people know about it already and news of it was starting to leak (see Wired and CNET as well). I don’t want to be in a position again where other sites are breaking our news, so we’re announcing officially this weekend.

We’ve been working on this deal for months, it is good that we are finally able to close and announce it.

FuckedCompany first went live in 2000, chronicling failing and troubled companies in its unique and abrasive style after the dot com bust. Within a year it had a massive audience and was getting serious mainstream press attention. As the startup economy became better in 2004, much of the attention the site received went away. But a large and loyal audience remains at the site, coming back day after day for its unique slant on the news. At its peak, FC had 4 million unique monthly visitors.

Since FC focuses on the negative news coming out of startups, and TechCrunch tends to focus on the positive, this combination may seem odd. But the sites are in fact extremely complementary. For example, the audiences are about equal in size and have very little overlap. So from day one we will double our reach and traffic.

Reasons For The Merger

The market moves in cycles, and its clear that we are at the tail end of the current boom (disregard recent statements I’ve made to the contrary). Thousands of startups launched in the last year and a half, and well over a billion dollars was invested in them. Even in good times, 90% of startups fail. But recent events make me believe that even a 10% success rate might be optimistic going forward. Some recent trends that alarmed us:

• Smart people are saying the end of the current boom is near, and these guys are rarely wrong in their predictions. See, for example, Peter Rip’s recent post “Web 2.0 – Over and Out.” Peter really nailed the analysis in that post – and it’s hard to argue with any of his conclusions.
• The TechCrunch DeadPool, where we track failed startups, is growing exponentially. If the failure rate of startups continues to grow this fast, we will be at a point where failures will begin to outnumber new funded startups. Since 9/10 startups fail, by focusing on the negative we will have much more content for the site.
• While plenty of startups are launching, we aren’t seeing any actual innovation any more. There just isn’t the “wow” factor around new startups like in 2004/2005. That does not bode well for the future – there just isn’t anything left to invent.
• We’ve noticed a significantly higher number of negative comments on TechCrunch relative to past periods. Our readers are unhappy; they want a change in editorial tone.

Also, the current trend in blogging, led by Valleywag and others, is to “go negative first, and ask questions later.” That tabloid-style journalism tends to generate a lot of eyeballs and, subsequently, advertiser dollars. This is something we just can’t compete with. By acquiring FC, we can go more negative faster than anyone else out there, when and if we need to.

With the combination of these two companies, we can now effectively cover a startup from the idea stage, through the hype and funding stage, and then cover its inevitable bankruptcy and liquidation as well.

What To Expect

Integration will occur slowly. The FuckedCompany site has a notice on it about the announcement and will soon be upgraded to more of a TechCrunch look and feel (white background instead of the previous black and red, and a new logo that matches our font and style. For now, though, we are keeping the sites separate and each will continue to operate normally. Deeper integration will occur over time.

Many of our readers still enjoy reading about new startups, and we won’t stop covering them. But we will likely move new startup coverage, which will be a secondary consideration going forward, to a new blog over time. TechCrunch and FuckedCompany will begin to mirror each other’s content, and at the appropriate time the brands and sites will be merged.

Please Give Us Your Feedback

It’s important that we continue to tweak our business model to ensure that we stay relevant and publish compelling content going forward. That’s the main reason this transaction occurred – we are seeing the end of an era and are acting on what we are seeing.

I know our reasoning won’t satisfy every one of our readers, and I understand that this is a lot of change coming very quickly. I want your feedback to ensure that the merger is done tastefully and properly. Leave your comments below, or send me a private email (my email address is on the About page). I definitely want to hear your opinions.

When TechCrunch first launched in June 2005, there were no blogs dedicated to covering new startups. Today, nearly two years later, there are dozens of excellent blogs doing this, and mainstream media is paying attention as well. Entrepreneurs with new ideas will always have a way to reach potential users and customers. They just won’t be able to do it here any more.

Update (3/31/07 2:52 PM PST): We’re gotten many requests for the text of the press release. It isn’t officially going over the wires until tomorrow, but i’ve posted it below. It’s still in draft form.

TECHCRUNCH TO ACQUIRE FUCKEDCOMPANY

Will Roughly Double Monthly Audience and Create New Opportunities For Expansion

ATHERTON, Calif., April 1, 2007 – TechCrunch announced today that it has agreed to acquire the assets of FuckedCompany, a website that features breaking stories on dot com company failures. Assets to be transferred in the transaction include the domain name fuckedcompany.com, all content on the site and other assets related to its business.

Following the completion of the transaction, the unique monthly visitors to the combined sites will be roughly double what TechCrunch.com achieves currently.

“We’re thrilled to be part of the TechCrunch team,” said Philip Kaplan, the founder and original editor of FuckedCompany. “We see this as the natural transition for our company as TechCrunch follows what is happening in the world of technology and start ups and Fucked Company tracks what happens when they fail. The combined company will be able to grow and stay relevant no matter what the current economic forecast.”

“I’m excited to be working with FuckedCompany, a website that helped define the extravagance of Web 1.0, and which serves as a constant reminder to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that the market moves in cycles,” said Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch. “As the Web 2.0 movement cycles down, we can now focus on covering those startups that clearly aren’t going to make it to a liquidity event.”

The transaction is expected to close shortly. More details are available on www.techcrunch.com and www.fuckedcompany.com.

About TechCrunch

Founded in 2005, TechCrunch is a leading network of weblogs and other sites focused on providing news, analysis and services around new technology startups. The TechCrunch network delivers more than 4 million monthly page views to 1.5 million unique month visitors. The TechCrunch network includes Techcrunch.com, a weblog focused on new web startups, CrunchGear.com, a weblog focused on new technology gadgets, MobileCrunch, a weblog focused on mobile technology, Japanese and French versions of TechCrunch.com, and Crunchboard, a job listing site.

About FuckedCompany

Founded in April, 2000, Fuckedcompany was the premiere news website covering the first dot-com bust. At its peak, Fuckedcompany was visited by 4 million unique users monthly and was named “Site of the Year” in 2000 by both Yahoo and Rolling Stone, and was #6 is TIME Magazine’s “Best of 2000.

Magnify.net is a new video startup that is different from the rest of the crowd. Unlike YouTube and dozens of others, it isn’t focused on building a portal around user-uploaded videos. Instead, they are allowing website publishers to create their own video channels, and populate it with videos from other sites (like YouTube, Revver, Yahoo Videos, etc.) that allow embedding.

The result is a highly targeted niche video site that integrates very well into existing content websites. To see it in action, see this channel that they created for TechCrunch. There are a ton of publisher settings to allow customization, but the general idea is that we would add this to the site, and allow readers to add their own videos that they think will be interesting to this audience.

I’ve set the TechCrunch page up so that any reader can add video (direct from their computer, via a search feature or by pasting the actual video URL from a video site), and it will go into the collection after at least three others have reviewed it and it has at least a 5/10 rating on average (or an admin approves it). Videos that are approved can be rated, commented, tagged, shared, etc. Magnify.net also offers a RSS feed of all videos on the site, so readers can subscribe and stay up to speed on new videos.

Here’s an example of deeper integration with TechCrunch: One of our recent posts showed a Joost commercial. This video has also been added to the video site where others can interact with it as well.

This is actually perfect for the new CenterNetworks experiment where Allen Stern is calling for companies to send in demo videos of their products. They should set up a Magnify.net channel to organize these – the ratings feature is already built in. I’d like to get these videos onto TechCrunch as well, and readers can simply add them.

I’ve also been adding startup demos from ScobleShow. If startups have demo videos that they’d like to have this audience see, this would be a good place to add it.

There are other features as well that I haven’t mentioned (playlists, widgets, etc). The site is still very much in beta and needs some work on flow and the user interface (some features are hard to find). I’ve also noticed it runs very slow.

Magnify.net was founded by Steve Rosenbaum and Simon Cavalletto, and Scott Milener (previously Browster) is also involved. They have raised $1.2 million in seed financing from New York Angels and NextStage Capital. 3,500 channels have been created to date.

Whos.Amung.us is a neat widget we came across tonight that some websites will want to add. It shows the number of concurrent users on a site at any given time.

Clicking on the widget also gives good stats on the recent URLs people visited as well as popular pages. Like Sitemeter (which we also have in the bottom right of the sidebar), it doesn’t do anything Google Analytics or other stats services don’t do – but it is an easy way to share more data about your site with your readers.

There is also a firefox extension that shows the total number of readers on your site at the bottom of the browser at all times.

We’ll keep it on TechCrunch until it manages to take the site down for the first time (every widget we add seems to do this eventually).

I have to say that I expected something a little more exciting. Our previous Joost coverage is here, and we have a long post on them coming up. Thanks Orli.

If you’ve applied for a job before, you’ve probably fretted over how to answer questions like “are you inclined to rely more on improvisation than on careful planning?” or “do you like to create challenges for yourself when you take on a new project?”. Companies commonly use personality tests filled with questions like these to assess the fit of a potential employees with the company. There’s a whole laundry list of these personality tests here. Some companies, like Google, have even developed their own.

All of these tests are sets of written questions meant to poke and prod at a candidates mind to get a real sense of their ability and personality. However, the meaning behind these questions is relatively transparent, motivating candidates to give the answers they think their employer wants to hear.

Startup Pairwise is taking a different approach to personality tests. Instead of words, Pairwise will use images to test a candidates mentality using data gleaned from their LikeBetter picture game. LikeBetter is a flash based game that shows you a series of pairs of images uploaded by users. For each pair, you pick which image you prefer. Based on the choices you make, LikeBetter makes a guess about your personal traits, which you then confirm or correct. As more people use the system, LikeBetter discovers the strong correlations between the choices people make and the attributes they express.

Based on this data, Pairwise creates a quiz using some of the most highly discriminating pairs, chosen to have the strongest and most confident predictive power across the broadest spectrum of personality traits. They can then track a candidate’s behavior through the test and make an educated guess about their personality based on the correlations they made in LikeBetter. Pairwise does their best to make the test harder to read into by being a completely image based test and using non-obvious pairs (no GI Joe vs. Barbie).

Under the hood, LikeBetter is using an iterative application of Bayes rule called Naive Bayesian inference. The method uses a lot of dense statistics involving proposing hypotheses and dependent probabilities. If you really want to learn about it, check out the Wikipedia entry. On the other hand, the employment quiz is not making and testing hypotheses, but comparing the user’s behavior with the statistics they collected through LikeBetter and determining the the applicants tendency toward either extreme of an attribute (i.e cleanliness vs. messiness).

Pairwise’s first customer is Y Combinator, for whom they crafted this little Y Combinator founder quiz based on personality tests done on all their current founders. Y Combinator will be using the test in their application drive ending April 2nd. We’ve included the test for you to take below. Here’s how I fared.

Update: The quiz has been revised and updated.

Y Combinator Founder Personality test. To take the test, pick which image you prefer in each pair:

Statsaholic (formerly Alexaholic) launched a year ago and provided much easier access to Alexa traffic data than the Alexa site itself. Statsaholic also had other features Alexa didn’t offer, like embeddable graphs and data smoothing. Others agreed, and soon started linking to Statsaholic instead of Alexa when doing traffic comparisons. At one point, Alexa was the no. 3 search result on Google for “Alexa.”

Statsaholic was not using the Alexa web service to get the data, because Alexa doesn’t offer the graph data via their web service. Amazon, which owns Alexa, could have complained or simply shut them down when it launched, but they didn’t. They actually complimented the service in a post on the Alexa blog last April.

But somewhere along the line Amazon decided they didn’t like Statsaholic and got their lawyers involved. They filed a domain name dispute earlier this year to get ownership over the Alexaholic domain name. Ron Hornbaker, the owner of the service, stopped using the alexaholic domain name and moved the service over to Statsaholic.com while the dispute was ongoing.

That didn’t appease Amazon, which then took the step of blocking Statsaholic from accessing Alexa graphs, although they left other sites doing the same thing intact. Statsaholic started getting data in other ways, and eventually Amazon just turned off all ability to hot link to their graphs from any outside site.

Meanwhile, Amazon implemented many of the Statsaholic features and pushed the graphing function to the home page of the Alexa site.

The Statsaholic side of the story is here. I’ve been playing phone tag with Amazon PR to talk about this for over a week but have been unable to do anything other than swap emails and voicemails to try to schedule a time to talk. In their defense, they say they tried to work with Statsaholic, even going so far as to “explored an acquisition” before shutting them down.

What bothers me about the situation is that Amazon sat on it for a year, complimenting the service along the way (and copying it). Then, just when the service started getting really popular, they took drastic measures to shut it down.

I’ll continue to try to talk to Amazon about the situation, and there very well could be additional facts that put this in a different light. But for now we are left without a service that many of us used regularly for research, and Amazon looks like a bit of a bully.

Yesterday I sat down with Sean Parker at his offices at the Founders Fund in San Francisco to see a demo of his new and yet-to-be-named startup (the working name for the project is Project Agape).

Parker is a larger-than-life twenty seven year old who co-founded Napster and Plaxo and was the founding president of Facebook. He’s been working full time on Project Agape for the last eight months, while still putting in the hours at Founders Fund as a Managing Partner.

Parker knows about how to apply viral principles to ideas. Half of our 1.5 hour meeting was spent discussing these principles and how to fine tune ideas to the point where they can grow exponentially. The only thing that can stop a good viral idea is when it runs out of population, he says. If Napster, Plaxo and Facebook are any example, he just might be right.

Project Agape is still under a heavy cloak of secrecy (Om Malik first got wind of the new venture a week and a half ago), although I was able to see a demo and some additional conceptual work. Parker’s goal, he says, is to apply the same ideas around virality that worked so well on his previous projects to the idea of altruism and activism.

Charities, political parties and affinity groups all rely on participation from people who share the same beliefs and ideals. But recruiting and fundraising are largely stuck in the pre-Internet era: social pressure and guilt are applied to get others to donate to that marathon for the Leukemia society, or donate time working with the homeless. Parker wants to harness those proven incentive structures use his new startup to increase their effectiveness.

New sites like Change.org and dotherightthing and Six Degrees help people talk about issues online, but they don’t go far enough in using virality to get new users and get them actually doing things. Parker wants the kind of activity around these organizations that Facebook sees – tens of thousands of new daily users and hours and hours of social interactions. The result, he says, will be a much more efficient engine for organizations to get volunteers and raise money.

The company is based in Berkeley and will make some announcements in the coming weeks, and a beta product will be available in a couple of months. Stay tuned for more.

The “enhancement” that Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson made to Presidential Candidate John McCain’s website was mentioned on the Daily Show Thursday evening. Lots of other mainstream press attention, too. Davidson’s shareholders should be happy – this was a major guerrilla marketing event for Newsvine.

Screenshots and video are below.

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about German startup SellABand when it launched last August.

Like Amie Street, SellABand has an innovative way for struggling new artists to get their music heard, and make some money as well. Artists sign up and upload some of their music. Users listen to it. If they like it, they pay $10. If a band reaches $50,000 in donations, SellABand helps them record an album with a studio and expert producer.

It’s great in theory. At the time of our original post there wasn’t much data – 130 bands had signed up in the first couple of weeks, and had raised a few hundred dollars each.

But a few months later, wow. 2700 bands from all over the world have signed up, and four have already reached the $50,000 mark and have recorded albums (Nemesea, Cubworld, Second Person and Clemence, and more are on the way. Mandyleigh, one of our readers, is currently no. 4 on the top list and looks to be headed to the studio soon.

Listeners who donate to an artist get a free CD when the goal is reached – and are refunded their money if it isn’t. Artists get 1/3 of all advertising revenue from their profile, and 60% of proceeds from eventual album sales. They also get all rights back to their music a year after the album comes out.

Prom Queen is coming, and it will be distributed on MySpace. Is the future of new media going to be a world where stories are told over eighty episodes that are each ninety seconds long? And advertising galore – pre rolls, post rolls, and product placements. This may be the highest advertising to content ratio ever seen. The budget for the show is just $100k, which is nothing more than a rounding error in Hollywood.

If enough MySpacers put up with the ads and watch Prom Queen, there will be literally thousands of these shows hitting the web. And all the big portals will gleefully pushing them to us, because they’ll get a revenue share from all those ads.

And if there’s a show that’s any good, users will strip out all those ads, mash those eighty episodes together into one 700 MB file and put it on bittorent. Then the lawsuits will start.

In an interview with NewTeeVee, ex-Disney Chief Michael Eisner (the guy behind Prom Queen, through his startup Vuguru) talks a lot about protection of intellectual property (”I think the Viacom lawsuit [against Google/YouTube] is very promising”) and how people must get paid for their work.

Those are important messages, but as I said with a post about Clown Co., save it for the shareholders. Users want a compelling product, with as few ads as possible mucking things up.

He never talks about the user experience, of the rise of the cream from the chaotic cesspool of user generated content as a real threat to Hollywood’s professionals. He thinks new media is nothing more than “technological advancement and expertise in distribution and exhibition.” “Old media, where he lumps “Greek mythology and Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill and Happy Days” together, is where the creativity is. He says old media types “understand motivation, and character, and where the denouement goes, and how to develop interests between characters, and make people laugh, and cry”

It’s good to see the Shakespeare and Happy Days guys trying new things. But I think he’s underestimating the seismic shift that’s occurring right now around content creation and distribution. Unlike before, the audience can easily create their own content and distribute it to millions on YouTube. Some of that content will be better than anything Hollywood produces. And it won’t cost even $100k to create.

Scrapbook maker Scrapblog strutted its stuff at the We Media conference last month, went off the grid, and finally came back online today.

Scrapblogs are Flash-based slide shows made up of pages of photo or video layouts you can jazz up with a myriad of designs and effects. Transitions can be added between each page and you can set the mood with some background music as your show plays. You can publish a Scrapblog publicly or by invite only and embed it as well. If you choose, viewers can leave Flickr like embedded comments on key spots of the show.

Scrapblog’s editor is a flash application, which may make a lot of you cringe, but not for good cause. Scrapblog, as we’ve mentioned before, has one of the most natural feels of any online application out there. It’s full screen and closely mimics the design of a Windows desktop application.

Creating a Scrapblog starts with a creation wizard that lets you pick one of 19 different design themes to frame your pages of photos. You can then cover this canvas with by dragging and dropping in photos, clipart, shapes, text, and even videos. Each of these media objects can be hyperlinked, overlayed, resized, rotated, and edited along several parameters.

Photos are given special treatment and support frames, shadows, as well as that quintessential web 2.0 effect, reflections. Photos can be pulled from your computer, Photobucket, Yahoo Photos, Flickr, and WebShots. Video, on the other hand, is drawn solely from YouTube. After you’ve laid out the pages, you can choose from 12 different transitions between them and from 22 different songs to play along with the show.

Photo slide shows are a crowded space which includes the 38 million user giant, Photobucket, along with two newer players, RockYou and Slide, bringing in tens of millions in financing. Like FlipTrack, however, Scrapblog keeps a distinct niche by offering a more richly designed presentation less like a series photos and more like a hipper version of Powerpoint.

The basic format for embedding images into a web page using the <img> tag has been around almost as long at HTML itself, since the first graphical web browser. It works, and it is used constantly. But can it be better?

Advertising network AdBrite, which is always looking for new ways to think about things, says it can. This morning, AdBrite launches BritePic to help people add a lot of new functionality around embedded images. Just by changing the embed code, web publishers can add a caption, watermark, zoom, share, resize and other features. And an advertisement, if they choose to.

The end product is shown above. Instead of embedding an image using a standard tag like:

<img src=”http://farm1.static.flickr.com/53/144942552_81a96c87cb_o.jpg/”>

BritePic simply uses a javascript code (non-javascript version is also available for myspace, blogger, etc.) and a very lightweight Flash 7 player to show the image with lots of additional features. BritePic has a code generator tool (see image at bottom of post), although all of the parameters are in the code itself, so power users can just quickly write it out. Here’s the code for the above image:

<script>
britepic_id = “297898″
britepic_src=”http://farm1.static.flickr.com/53/144942552_81a96c87cb_o.jpg”;
britepic_keywords=”Laguna, dog, pets, cute, perfect”;
britepic_show_ads=”1″;
britepic_caption=”Laguna: Attack Dog”;
britepic_width=”560″;
</script>

Any of the parameters can be changed above. When you register with BritePic you add a watermark and payment information if you choose to include advertisements in pictures. The id in the code above tells it what watermark to add. BritePic doesn’t host image files, so the src field tells it where to pull the image from. Keywords can be added (future functionality will show related pictures), adds shown or not, a caption added, and the width reset.

There are also a number of features in the pull up menu at the bottom left of the image above. Zoom is my favorite. Zoom in on a picture and see a larger version of that area. If you are using a large image and resizing, there will be less pixelation. But even for non-resized images the zoom feature could come in handy. On this blog, where we are limited in the horizontal space allowed for images, it will allow us to upload larger images and allow people to zoom in, or simply click to see the larger image on a new page.

The company has created a demo video, which we’ve embedded below.

AdBrite was founded by Philip Kaplan and Gidon Wise. Background information on the company is here.

Silicon Valley/Colorado based photo and video sharing site Photobucket has 36 million registered users and adds another 85,000 per day. If the growth rate continues, they’ll have 60 million users by the end of the year. More users visit Photobucket each month – 17 million, than Facebook. 56% of those users are under 35, and 52% are female. 300,000 unique websites link back to Photobucket. They move a lot of data.

Fortune wrote a long article on the company yesterday – the first time mainstream press has noticed this already large startup.

Photobucket generates revenue through premium accounts, and advertising on the site. The rumor is that they are nearing break even, and aren’t spending much of the $15 million they’ve raised in venture capital ($8 million or so is left in the bank).

Basically, Photobucket is kicking butt. So the question is, how much are they worth?

Lehman Brothers, the investment bank they’ve hired to explore a sale of the company, is saying $300 – $400 million or more in private talks with potential buyers.

Included in the documents distributed to buyers is a revenue breakdown of the company by year. In 2005, Photobucket revenue was $4.35 million, growing to $9.34 million in 2006 and on pace to hit over $32 million this year. Last year, advertising accounted for 68% of revenue. This year, they estimate it will grow to 79%. See full revenue breakdown in the image below.

Photobucket wouldn’t comment on this article, but our sources indicate that a number of acquirors are very interested in the company at this price. Given revenue growth and another deal in this space, this might be cheap.

It also looks like Photobucket will be sporting a new home page design soon. Screen shot is below.

Music community site MOG launched a 2.0 version of their site today. We previously covered MOG in our roundup of social music services, and when they launched an embeddable music player.

The core MOG service is a client application called Mog-o-matic that monitors what music you listen on a variety of media players. That’s paired with personal music profile pages where you can blog about the music you like and find recommendations for new songs from users like yourself. Recommendations are either based on the bands you manually add to your collection of artists you listen to or gleaned from Mog-o-matic.

MOG’s core functionality is still there, but they’ve reorganized and added some new features to make the site appealing to non-members.

The new design has brought order to chaos that used to rule the main page by categorizing posts by type and content along with a new personalization tool called the “Magic Button”. To make it easier for non-Moggers to surf the site, posts are now tagged as music reviews or news and segmented based on whether the post includes audio, video, or just plain text. The new “Magic Button” lets you apply a personalized filter to any content on the site based on your Mog-o-matic music profile.

The video section also includes a really cool YouTube hack called MOG TV (competitor iLike has a similar feature). MOG TV consists of all the YouTube music videos for a given artist. It reminds me of MTV back when they used to actually play music videos. You can filter which of the 400K of indexed YouTube videos play based on artist, the music preferences listed on your profile, friends preferences, or the Magic Button.

MOG is most similar to Last.fm, with it’s journal feature where listeners can make blog posts about any band. However, MOG has made user generated posts the focus of the site, with music recommendation secondary. Last.fm focuses on their music recommendation software, with user generated content secondary. iLike, recently hit over 500K users.

StreetAdvisor is a new entry in the plethora of rating services popping up all over the internet. Some ask us to rate what we buy, the places we go, and even each other. This Australian startup applies ratings to your neighborhood.

StreetAdvisor is a search engine for neighborhood reviews. Reviews are broken down by street and composed of narrative, video, and ratings based on 22 factors of appeal (reminds me of eHarmony). The factors are mashed into an overall score and also broken into five star ratings across 5 categories: vibe, wired (communications connectivity), health (environmental quality), value, and essentials (utilities and services). You can search for neighborhood ratings by search box, or browsing a Google map with push pins marking the different reviews. Browsing the map lets you choose which of the 22 factors are most important to you by slider bar, with more relevant reviews having larger pin heads.

The site also incorporates some community features for added stickiness: a “guidebook” and “streetboard”. The guidebook serves as a place to write generic posts that didn’t fit into the 22 factor review. The streetboard is a communal board that serves as a place to converse with your neighbors through topic threads or general “shouts” to the crowd. The two features are a start, but not near the depth of community discussion you can get from an Outside.in or Smalltown.

I can understand the need for these neighborhood ratings, startups like Zillow and Trulia have done a good job of monetizing the quality of a neighborhood, but are relatively poor at capturing the intangibles. However, I don’t understand how they will motivate enough users to participate and make the service really useful. Neighborhood ratings don’t strike me as something a broad audience is particularly passionate about and rely on only a small pool of contributors for each review. Qualified neighborhood reviewers don’t reside all over the city like Yelp’s army of restaurateurs, but are instead a small group of people that live on the street in question. Reaching at least one person on each street across the 26 countries they cover and motivating them to review their block is a daunting task indeed.

Openfloodgate, like Scribd, lets content creators publish their works to the web, but with decidedly more control. The site is the project of Tina Seelig, Executive Director of Stanford Technology Venture Partners and Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship. Recently released from beta about two weeks ago, OpenFloodgate currently features a variety of stories, poems, lyrics, photos, recipes, etc, uploaded by the site’s users. Once uploaded, each work can then be rated, downloaded as a pdf, and commented on by other users.

OpenFloodgate provides more control than other publishing sites. First, the site allows publishers to limit who can see their work to a group or just yourself. Also, unlike other document sharing sites, OpenFloodgate publishes every work as series of image files or PDFs, making it harder to plagiarize the author’s content. This puts OpenFloodgate, and sites like it, in a better position to handle the copyright woes that come along with user generated content and also eventually charge for the content down the road.

JibJab, the creators of the famous 2004 U.S. presidential election parody cartoon “This Land” have a new original video out called “The News,” embedded above. The new video premiered tonight at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner.

All of their original videos can be viewed here.

JibJab is slowly expanding from pure content creation to becoming a hub for humor-related video and other media. In October we mentioned their Great Sketch Experiment.

In my opinion, “The News” isn’t as good as previous content from JibJab, although things really pick up at the 1:20 mark.

The company was founded by brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis and is currently headquartered in Santa Monica, CA. JibJab raised a Series A round of funding from Jon Flint at Polaris Ventures in June.

TripSync, a distributed booking system aimed at trip planning for small to medium sized businesses, quietly launched last week. We recently reported on some other distributed booking systems as well.

TripSync is a web based application that lets your business book and manage the three major details of any business trip: flight, rental car, and hotel. You use a search wizards to find and make bookings in each of these categories. After specifying all the details, you can pay for all the arrangements by credit card, or hold off on payment and reserve the listing for 24 hours (most travel sites don’t have this option). When the booking is finalized, an itinerary with accompanying maps is saved to your online account and emailed back to you.

That would be all well and good for a one man show, but TripSync also has an administration level making it possible to plan trips for other members of your organization. Each user can make the administrator’s job a bit easier by setting their preferences for the types of flights, cars, and hotels they want. Armed with this info, the admin can then make and manage trips for every employee and post them to their TripSync account.

Each trip can be managed on site, or through an easy to use Outlook plugin that automatically posts your trip itineraries to your calendar (Google and Yahoo calendar coming). The Outlook plugin makes it easy to rebook your plans by simply dragging and dropping the appointment to a new spot on your calendar. If the slot is available it will rebook. They have a great demo of the whole process here.

TripSync has larger plans than being a destination site for trip planning. They are currently integrating their technology with various partners in tied to booking services such as conferences, expense reporting programs, and CRM applications. They also plan to lower the affiliate margins travel services have to pay. Currently the site’s search engine uses Sabre Holding’s database of travel information for flights, cars, and hotels (Travelocity also uses them). Sabre charges monthly fees for storing this information as well as a for each booking made on through the service. These fees are somewhere around $9-$12 per booking for flights (depending on complexity) and cut into airline’s profit margins. South West has decided not to play this game and decided to never participate in these large globally distributed databases. TripSync wants to circumvent Sabre and book directly through the service providers for a smaller affiliate fee, allowing them to compete with lower booking prices.

TripSync is based out of White Plains New York with $3.5 million in financing they received from lead investor Ascend Venture Partners along with First Round Capital and various other angels last April.

Wired Magazine is hiring one or two bloggers for its Epicenter business blog. You must be “fast, accurate, curious, motivated and willing to trash Digg every once in a while to be considered (I added that last qualification myself ).

To apply, email them a 200 word blog post on a recent Silicon Valley business topic. Details on the position and how to apply are here.

Of course, if you think you’re really hot, send me an email instead. We give stock options.

TailRank, a popular blog news organizer that competes with TechMeme and Megite, has opened up its back end and will provide the service as a platform to application developers who would like to add a blog index and ranking service. The new service is called Spinn3r and goes live at around noon today. Rumor is it already powers Gnoos, which we covered last June.

Spinn3r indexed 1 million blogs. They are charging a monthly licensing fee per thousand blogs crawled, indexed, and delivered.