NBC Dumps iTunes! Apple Dumps NBC! What ever the headline, one thing is sure: by making it even more difficult to obtain affordable, legal downloads of TV shows, more and more people will be turning to Bit Torrent. In Apple’s case, it’s not really their problem, but with NBC you really have to question the business sense of a company that states it is concerned about piracy, then makes the legal alternative more difficult to come by.

As demonstrated in the image below, NBC shows are in plentiful supply on BitTorrent. I’m sure users will welcome the flood of additional downloaders. NBC shows available via BitTorrent include Scrubs, ER, My Name Is Earl, Heroes and just about everything else.

The New York Times has discovered a new claimant for the title of founder of Facebook.

Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg claims that he created the original college social networking system, before either Facebook or ConnectU were founded.

Mr. Greenspan is said to have established a web service that he called houseSYSTEM in 2003, 6 months prior to Facebook launching. houseSYSTEM was used by several thousand Harvard students and provided similar features to what is found today in Facebook; Zuckerberg was a user of houseSYSTEM. Greenspan is also claiming credit for Facebook’s name: he showed the Times an email dated Sept. 19, 2003 describing the newest feature of houseSYSTEM as “the Face Book.” Facebook initially launched under the name and URL of “TheFacebook” in 2004.

Unlike the founders of ConnectU who are suing Zuckerberg for control of Facebook, Greenspan’s claim so far only extends to wanting recognition by others as being the founder of Facebook.

Update: In related news, Facebook has once again asked a judge to throw out ConnectU’s law suit. More here.

We’ve always known that Google has wanted to challenge Microsoft’s desktop dominance in a number of areas, but to date we didn’t know that extended to gaming.

Hidden inside Google Earth is a secret Flight Simulator that takes full advantage of Google’s extensive satellite imagery.

To access the hidden feature, open Google Earth and hit Command+Option+A (note it must be capital A) or Ctrl+Alt+A if you’re using a Windows Machine.

The Google Earth Flight Simulator comes with two aircraft options, a F16 Viper and the more manageable SR22 4 seater. Players have the option of commencing the game from their current location in Google Earth or can pick from a list of pre-determined runways. Control instructions can be found here.

Overall the game play is fairly simple in terms of control, but the striking difference is flying over real pictures of locations. I took a quick flight from San Francisco International, headed North to the Golden Gate then turn back over the city before heading towards the Valley. It wasn’t perfect, but it was as good visually as the paid Microsoft Flight Simulator, and in terms of actually presenting real objects it was better.

Thanks to Marco for the how-to.

We’ve gotten an update on the controversial post we wrote earlier this month on the possible shutdown of the fourteen-month-old old Digg-clone Netscape. Too many AOL execs have had their eye on the Netscape.com domain name, which brings in 3 million or so page views per day. The most likely scenario – The current home page at aol.netscape.com becomes the default page for Netscape.com, and the year old digg-clone moves to a new domain.

We hear that wow.com, a domain previously owned by Compuserve and acquired by AOL, is a potential landing place for the Netscape service. AOL may have different plans for wow.com, however, and the Netscape portal may land somewhere else. Either way, look for a link or module from the old service to remain on the netscape.com domain after the changeover.

We also expect to hear about material layoffs at AOL in the next six weeks, possibly as much as 15% of the 16,000 strong workforce. Next week the senior execs are supposed to be notified of the exact size of the cuts and whether they are targeted to specific business groups or across the board cuts.

This news has been simmering for a while. When Ross Levinsohn (pictured left) resigned as the President of Fox Interactive Media late last year it was rumored that he intended to raise a large fund to acquire Internet startups. He soon partnered with Jonathan Miller, the former Chairman and CEO of America Online and the two have been out raising capital for the last few months. Their new entitiy is called Velocity Investment Group.

They’ve found their partner – $15 billion hedge fund General Atlantic. Details on the amount of capital committed to the new fund are scarce, but General Atlantic issued a press release today announcing that Levinsohn and Miller have become advisors to the fund. The timing is interesting – 5:14 pm EST on the Friday before the long weekend. The press was circling on this story, and the release was obviously made to preempt the news from breaking.

More news should be coming next week as details leak – size of the fund, etc. The new venture will compete with Demand Media and others for acquisitions. Demand Media, which has raised $220 million in capital, was founded by former Intermix Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt. Ironically, Intermix Media, the parent company to MySpace, was acquired by Fox during Levinsohn’s tenure there.

Update: We beat the WSJ by 16 minutes on this one. Their story is here.

Wikipedia attracted a lot of attention earlier this week when Nikola Smolenski calculated how much paper it would take to print out the English entries in Wikipedia. Smolenski calculated that as of last September, Wikipedia’s English index of informative/controversial articles would fill about 750 400 page volumes. Under the assumption of a 6MB volume, the total site would take up about 2,500 volumes (~15GB).

Today Scribd has released some numbers talking about just how big they’ve gotten as well. Since launching 6 months ago, the site has collected over 178,798 documents. That may not seem like much compared to Wikipedia’s over 5.3 million articles (source) across all languages (as of last September), but Scribd users seem more verbose. Scribd users have uploaded over 1.9 billion words, which would take up over 2,287 of Smolenski’s volumes (13.4 GB). No word on how many of those words are copyrighted.

However, Wikipedia is still obviously the pageview king, drawing over 7 billion pageviews (June) and 42.9 million (Feb) visitors per month, to Scribd’s 3.8 million uniques. Google was responsible for 24% of the traffic, and I imagine the same is true for Scribd. Wikipedia also features highly targeted and edited content to Scribd’s library of reports and rants. Although, unlike Wikipedia, Scribd is helping a lot of people catch up on Harry Potter.

Scribd has had quite a ride since launching over 6 months ago. They sustained a considerable amount of traffic after launch, and eventually went on to raise $3.5 million from Redpoint Ventures. Apparently, easily publishing documents online was not a solved problem.

Here’s a chart of the word growth of both Wikipedia and Scribd:

Note: According to statistics listed on Wikipedia, the site (all languages) has grown from 49,000 words in January 2001 to 1.7 billion words last September (the last reported point). Since the data only goes to September 2006, I extrapolated the growth (yellow) assuming the previous year’s monthly growth rate of 7.7%.

We are hosting a party in central London next week on Thursday, September 6 to support the Seedcamp event and to announce some TechCrunch UK news.

Most of the spots are reserved for Seedcamp attendees, but we are opening up 100 tickets to the public as well. To discourage no shows, we are charging a £10 fee per ticket, which will be donated to charity. Tickets are available here. There will be plenty to drink (and we’re working on food), and we’ll be giving away a ticket to the upcoming TechCrunch20 conference.

I will be flying in to London for the Seedcamp event and to attend the party. Hope to see you there.

We are taking a limited number of sponsors to offset the cost of the event. Email Jeanne Logozzo for more information about sponsoring the party.

Yahoo is reported to be working on a new social networking service that matches college students to employers.

Yahoo Kickstart give users profile pages which are focused on the user’s resume, LinkedIn style, as opposed to a Facebook or MySpace profile. Corporations and wannabe employers are then provided with groups that users can join, but with a catch: to join a group you need an invite via a former student who works at that company. For those users who would prefer something a little more social, University pages are open to all students and include discussion forums, bulletins and events.

According to CNet, Yahoo Kickstart is currently a concept only and may or may not see the light of day, either as a stand alone product or as part of an existing Yahoo property such as 360.

Yahoo’s has been trying to deal itself in to the hot social networking space for some time, but with little or no success. The Yahoo 360 blogging come social networking product never took off and Yahoo failed to acquire Facebook. There were even rumors that Yahoo was trying to buy Bebo in May.

More recently Yahoo was rumored to be working on a social networking product by the name of Yahoo Mosh.

White label video host Fliqz launched a toolbar (IE only) that lets you easily upload and embed video content anywhere embed code is accepted. It doesn’t require a registration and hosts the videos on Fliqz servers for free. It’s a sort of distributed YouTube.

Getting a video up is simple. Just select the content from your computer and press upload. Once uploaded the toolbar will spit back some embed code so you can embed the video in a Fliqz player like below. Fliqz also remembers your upload history in case you want to embed them on multiple sites. There also appears to be no limit to how much you can upload and no easy way to discover who’s responsible for posting copyrighted content.

Flock has a similar video management functionality for YouTube built into their browser, minus the hosting.

The New York Times is reporting that NBC will not renew its contract to distribute television shows via Apple’s iTunes service. The agreement was set to autorenew at the end of 2007, but includes a provision that allows NBC to terminate the agreement at the end of the first term with 90 days notice. Disagreements over pricing and DRM seem to be behind the decision.

That means iTunes users will not be able to download popular NBC shows, including Battlestar Galactica, The Office and Heroes, to their iPods. Was the decision influenced by NBC’s ownership stake in the iTunes-competitive upcoming Hulu service? Almost certainly. The last thing the TV networks want to see is Apple having the kind of control over TV content that they do with music – 76% of online music sales come from iTunes.

NBC accounts for 40% of digital video downloads on iTunes.

Here’s a strange new social site that we just got a tip on – ArtOfOffice is a Microsoft site that launched yesterday. It is a place for Mac users to upload artistic content made using Office applications. The community then shares, rates, remixes and discusses the content with other Mac users.

See here and here for example content. As far as I can tell you don’t actually have to be using the Mac version of Office to use the site.

Mac users are not impressed, however. Mostly because the announcement of ArtOfOffice came shortly after the announced delay of Mac Office 2008 from 2007 to 2008. Users were left wondering about Microsoft’s priorities.

In the blog post announcing the new products, the Microsoft Mac team was lambasted for wasting time on side projects while Office 2008 was delayed. The first comment to the post:

Us: Where’s Office 2008 and what’s in it?
You: Look at this nifty website we found!

Another reader:

Jesus, have you guys got a product to ship deadline or not?

And:

Whether or not it took even five seconds of your time, it just looks bad and it sends the wrong message. Read the comments that follow nearly every post you guys put on this blog. Understand the very real frustrations people have with your product. Realize that people are very skeptical that you are going to do much of anything to resolve the issues in the next version of office. In that perceptual environment, does it make good PR sense to unveil some art site? Or, even though it took no staff resources, do you maybe just not go there. Don’t you think it makes it look like you have all the wrong priorities from the perspective of your customers? All we know is that while no one is willing to tell us much, if anything, about how our myriad problems with your product are getting solved in the next version, you sure found it important to let us know about some art site. The disconnect between you guys and your user base is truly stunning.

The Mac team responded by saying that the project wouldn’t cost them “even a day” in shipping Office 2008, but the negative comments kept coming in. The timing of the launch of this new site was, perhaps, a little off.

Thanks for the tip Amit.

The Twitter team must have had a Red Bull machine installed at the offices, because suddenly they’re launching new stuff left and right.

They recently added search and Gmail import features to the service. And on Friday they are launching a new area of the site called “Explore” where they’ll list some of the tools people can use to interact with Twitter off the site itself. Along with Explore they will also be releasing a new visualization tool called Twitter Blocks – “an abstract way to navigate your Twitter neighborhood or block.

Twitter sent us these screen shots but we haven’t had a chance to see it in action yet. Cofounder Biz Stone says “It’s a crazy, interactive, animated 3D application so it’s easier to understand when you interact with it.”

Twitter brought in Stamen Design to help with the project, the same team behind some of the Digg visualization tools launched last year.

Motorola is sponsoring the new Explore site. Screen shots below:

PeekYou is a fairly new site that competes in a growingly crowded people search space.

The site offers the standard features we’ve come to expect from people focused search sites. A general user profile includes tags, which are divided into three categories (life, work and school) for context, web links including social network profiles, bio and picture.

PeekYou was founded by Michael Hussey, the creator of sites including RateMyTeachers.com which were later acquired to MTV. Hussey sees PeekYou as being “the ultimate reindexing of the web and a virtual people pages, spanning the entire web and assigning unique identities to individuals made up of everything from Social Networking pages, blog posts, news stories and known online aliases.” OK, so that is a handful, but he is at least aiming high. The site launched in July 2007.

PeekYou competes directly with Spock and in some respect with Wink as well (see our Spock coverage here, others here), so a direct comparison is called for. I like PeekYou in some ways more than Spock. It could be the aesthetics: PeekYou is much nicer to look at and seems to play more nicely as well in terms of editing, where as Spock may provide better links due to its higher user numbers, but it just doesn’t look nearly as nice. The data in PeekYou, at least for the couple of people I checked, also seems to be more accessible (for now). For example, comparing Michael Arrington on PeekYou and Spock (here and here) you get an immediate idea on what Michael is about in PeekYou, where as in Spock there may be more tags and relationships, but they are partially buried and not always immediately clear in terms of context. All up, Spock may be getting all the attention, but PeekYou does offer a decent alternative.

French social video site DailyMotion has raised a $34 million round from Advent Venture Partners LLP and AGF Private Equity, a division of Allianz AG. The new round comes on top of $9.5 million in previous financing from Atlas Ventures and Partech International. The round puts DailyMotion’s total financing beyond that of their competitors, even MetaCafe’s $45 million total financing. Dailymotion’s executive chairman, Mark Zaleski, said the new funds will “allow us to reach operating profitability”.

These larger investments may be a sign of increasingly competitive times or a desire to take their companies all the way to a public offering. YouTube only raised $11.5 million to reach their exit.

DailyMotion has faired well in the competition for second place amongst video sites. They currently attract 37 million visitors a month. Some of this success is no doubt due to the viewers drawn to pirated content hosted on the site. For instance you can still get complete episodes of The Office. They were also recently found guilty of copyright infringement in July. This is despite implementing Audible Magic’s fingerprinting technology back in June.

However, as others have, they are seeking to clean up their act. When they launched in the U.S., they announced they would seek legal content deals and begin rewarding top content producers. Today’s announcement is more specific, highlighting plans to negotiate deals with makers of music, movies and TV shows. Dailymotion has already signed deals with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group.

Another French company Blogmusik cleared its record in France, signing a deal to continue streaming music as part of a suspected revenue sharing plan. U.S. based Pandora is still kept from going international because of the webradio royalty rates.

DesignMyRoom launched this afternoon – It’s a new product from a company called Swatchbox Technologies that allows people to decorate a real room virtually via a photograph of the room and DesignMyRoom’s library of stuff. Previously the company, which has been around for 11 years, sold 2 million copies of desktop software that has similar functionality as the online tool.

If you thought MyMiniLife was cool, wait until you spend some time playing around with this.

The first step is to pick an empty room, or upload a photo of your own room. You then start decorating it by adding a floor, paint, fixtures, furniture, etc. I made my own room during testing – see the before and after photos above. I also made the project public, so anyone can log in to it and make changes. Have at it.

Objects can be resized, rotated and moved around the room. The next step, the company says, is to allow users to upload their own images and insert them into the room. They’ve also paid attention to details – notice the shadows behind the clover and the lamp, for example, and the light coming into the room from the windows.

It also would be great if they created an embeddable version of the projects (something I assume they’ll do eventually).

There is a clear and really good business model here – selling people the real stuff once they’ve seen it virtually in their room. The company also makes money through product placement and other advertising.

The image carving/resizing video we posted last week has sparked quite a conversation. Most people have been very positive, although there has already been at least one response saying its a bad thing for the web (which seems a little dramatic to me).

Patrick Swieskowski emailed us this afternoon to say he’s created an online demo of the idea, based on using the seams of images to make the alterations. It shows how well this works in action, and users can upload their own images and manipulate them.

For now images can only be shrunk. Pat says he’s working on a way to increase the size of images by seam insertion, too.

There are several startups gunning to be the top Facebook ad platform: Lookery, FBExchange, RockYou, and Cubics. SocialMedia also became one of the early players when they launched their Appsaholic advertising network soon after F8. Previously only a select group of developers were able to sell ads through the service. However, they’ve now opened it to everyone through a self-service model, and some developers are making some real cash off of the service.

Appsaholic isn’t banner advertising like Lookery offers, or developers can get through traditional ad networks. Instead, Appsaholic sells click-throughs to other Facebook applications across their network of affiliated sites. It’s similar to FB Exchange’s link exchange model, but has more features (reporting) and seems easier to use (FBEx requires separate filings, Appsaholic can use PayPal). They have plans for other models as well, including a advertising that rewards users for engaging in advertisements.

How It Works

Developers become a member of the network by tracking their application on Appsaholic and adding some embed code to their application. The embed code adds an iFrame that serves paid links on their affiliates’ applications. The links go to the highest “AdRanked” advertising developer on their live bidding market. AdRank is determined by multiplying two factors, the offered price per click, and the advertising application’s quality score. The quality score is based on a function of the application’s clickthrough rate and viral growth within the network. The idea is that higher quality applications should be rewarded with cheaper advertising. This dissuades disliked apps from spamming the service.

So, for example, a developer whose application has a quality score of 60 and is willing to bid $.10 per click, has an AdRank of 6. Since ads are served in AdRanked order, the developer could boost his AdRank and position in the queue by bidding a bit higher. Currently PPC rates are 10 to 20 cents. Appsaholic takes 12-30% of that revenue.

How It Pays

While that doesn’t sound like a lot, people are still making some significant cash off the platform. Click through rates vary from 0.2%-3.0%, effectively paying about $0.60-$3.00 for every thousand visitors to your application. SocialMedia’s Seth Goldstein is optimistic and only sees these rates as the beginning.

The company cites Greg Thompson as one of their recent successes. Thompson, a contract programmer from London, Ontario, is known for making the popular Facebook application My Aquarium. The application has about 2.2 million users. Within less than a day of running SocialMedia’s ads Thompson made over $500. While CPM rates on VideoEgg can upwards of $8.50, Thompson found they had less inventory. Over the past three months, Thompson has made around $100,000 in Facebook advertising overall.

SocialMedia has shared their network’s revenue to date viewable to the right.

Going Forward

While Facebook hasn’t clobbered an application yet, they’ve definitely laid out some advertising plans of their own. Facebook has also shifted away from installs to engagement, thereby improving how users can discover applications and perhaps undercutting the need for affiliate linking to get big. There’s no telling if Facebook will directly take on advertising within applications. Playing in Facebook’s garden may be risky business, but Facebook need only look to MySpace’s dwindling approval amongst the developers to see what a heavy hand can ruin.

Microsoft employees and even executives are very active on Facebook – over 13,000 of them have a profile on the service.

By comparison, Google has 5,000 employees with profiles, although Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are noticeably absent (Marissa Mayer does have a profile, however, and actively adds friends). Yahoo has just 3,500 employee profiles, and none of the most senior execs participate.

On a percentage of employees basis, Google (47% of employees are on Facebook) and Yahoo (31%) are more active than Microsoft (17%). But the most senior people at Microsoft, including Bill Gates (Chairman), Steve Ballmer (CEO), Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect), all have profiles and appear to be very active on the service. Ray Ozzie has dozens of friends and is actively trying out different Facebook applications. In the last couple of days, he added and then removed a search app, for example.

Bill Gates may be taking an even deeper dive. In addition to having a Facebook profile, he also maintains a profile on HotOrNot that can be viewed on Facebook (HotOrNot confirmed that this is the real Bill Gates).

Since it’s unlikely that Bill, Steve and Ray have a lot of leisure time for social networking and online dating, I wonder why they’re spending all this time on the site?

The two companies have a long term advertising deal, of course. But the success (or not) of that deal has little to do with Microsoft execs spending time on the site. It looks to me like they are genuinely testing the service, perhaps in the hope of making an aggressive acquisition move, or trying to emulate Facebook’s success.

AdMonitor, a Google Maps mashup from mobile ad serving company AdMob, provides real time data on who is viewing mobile ads worldwide, including the network they are on and the phone they are using.

San Mateo based AdMob has seemingly slipped under the radar in terms of attention whilst competitors have been acquired; Third Screen Media was acquired bought by AOL and Screentonic was acquired by Microsoft. And yet this is a company with some great stats and backing. AdMob is now serving 1 billion mobile ads a month and has amongst its investors Sequoia and Accel Partners. Director Maynard Web was COO for eBay between 2002 and 2006 and staff include Tony Nethercutt, the former VP of Sales for YouTube and Kevin Scott, a former senior engineering manager for Google.

The AdMonitor mashup provides an accessible way of seeing just how many ads AdMob is serving. Notably, Nokia would still appear to remain the world most popular provider of mobile phones.

AdMob clients include ESPN and CBS.

MySpace has put the axe to yet another startup. Last night they made a call threatening legal action against freshly launched TellThem.mobi, a service that lets you message all your friends from your mobile phone.

TellThem’s site simply reads:

“On Wednesday August 29th, 2007, we got a call from MySpace threatning to take legal action if we didn’t take the website down. Apparently it violates their terms of service…. switch to Facebook.”

Switch to Facebook indeed. TellThem is only one in a long line of startups getting bullied by MySpace. Previously they killed DatingAnyone, SingleStatus, copied RealEditor, stalled all widgets, and played chicken with PhotoBucket.

I’m surprised this continues to happen when MySpace is trying to embrace developers through a developer platform. Overzealous legal stiff-arming is only contributing to the brain drain around growing MySpace and driving developers to greener pastures.

TellThem plans to move on to Bebo as well.

Thanks for the tip Marshall.

Update: MySpace’s complaint centered around TellThem serving as a proxy for logging into people’s MySpace accounts. The concern is that services like this could be phishing sites collecting credentials for malicious use. Jason Cox, of TellThem said collecting the credentials was necessary because there is no API for accessing the messaging functionality they use. This was not the case for Jason’s last MySpace related startup, BuddyWave.

The Director of Mobile operations has already emailed TellThem and asked them to develop for Facebook.