Just when you thought the real-estate bubble had burst and the economy was going to hell, here comes another real-estate search engine. Today we see the launch of Roost, a real-estate site inspired by the lean look and feel of travel search engine Kayak. In fact, two of Roost’s board members and lead investors from General Catalyst Partners are also on the board of Kayak. Roost was founded in May 2007, and raised a $5.5 million A round.

What makes Roost different is that, instead of trying to list all properties in the U.S. as Zillow or CyberHomes do, or take in feeds from individual real estate brokers as Trulia does, it is negotiating with Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) in each metro area to get a comprehensive set of houses on sale. Redfin also taps into the MLS. (The MLS is what real-estate brokers contributeto and use to find homes on the market, and up until recently MLS data was well-guarded from the Web). Roost launches with more than a dozen cities/MLSs, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. (Notably absent are San Francisco and New York).

Roost is a real-estate search engine with comprehensive for-sale listings in the markets it covers, including for-sale-by-owner listings (which it does not show side-by-side with MLS listings because of industry restrictions). You can see all the photos for a particular house without leaving the search engine, you can see results on a map, and there are sliders (for price, bedrooms, square feet, etc.) to tweak results. It is a pretty-straight-forward site without a lot of bells and whistles. “We are laser focused on search,” CEO Alex Chang tells me. “We are not doing valuations. We are not creating heat maps. We are doing high-performance search.”

On the back-end, Roost hosts a directory of real-estate broker sites and delivers search traffic to those sites based on a combination of natural results and paid search. “I send qualified traffic to the broker,” says Chang. “They are buying clicks from me.” That is the business model. But Chang is going to have to crow pretty loud to get noticed by prospective home-buyers who have many other real-estate search engines to choose from these days, and maybe less incentive to go house-hunting in the first place.

At a dinner last night at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 23andMe founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki announced that they are providing 1,000 free 23andMe personal DNA testing kits to conference attendees. Damn, I thought, I already paid $1,000 (more) for my kit (so much for the benefits of being an early adopter). Rumor is the company is also sending 100 free kits to attendees of the TED conference.

Anyway, after long minutes of negotiation regarding a refund since I could now get a kit for free, Linda and Anne agreed to give one more kit out, to give to a lucky TechCrunch reader. Just tell me in the comments why knowing your genetic background is important to you, and we’ll choose a winner. We’ll stop comments after 24 hours and choose then.

The company won’t say how many kits have been purchased, other than commenting that sales are “way above expectations.” Yesterday the company started selling kits in Europe and Canada. And they just recently launched their corporate blog, fittingly called “The Spittoon.”

I just recently got my 23andMe test results back. I’ll be posting highlights next week.

When the Will Farrell/ Sequioa backed ($15m+) FunnyorDie launched in March 2007 it made a huge splash with Farrell providing original content that quickly went viral. After an initial peak the traffic slowed right down, with some suggesting that it may not rise again. Content has always been the key, and as the Jerry O’Connell send-up of Tom Cruise above demonstrates, they’re still producing the right stuff.

The positive side is that FunnyorDie has slowly grown since their initial post launch slump. According to comScore figures, FunnyorDie did 1.8 million uniques in December on 10 million page views. In perspective this placed FunnyorDie 5th on comScores humor index for the month, behind CollegeHumor at 4th, and ahead of The Onion at 11th. Notably that this is with FunnyorDie allowing their videos, like the one above, to be embedded on other sites, a move that would result in video views not being represented in comScore’s measure of site traffic.

As we speculated, Automattic, provider of the WordPress open-source blogging software and spam filter Akismet, has raised $29.5M in a Series B round of financing led by Polaris Ventures (which put in $20 million of the $29.5 million). Other participants in the round include The New York Times, True Ventures, and Radar Ventures.

The large injection of capital will not only go towards the development of Akismet and WordPress (the downloadable software) but the development of Wordpress.com (its hosted blogging platform), Gravatar (its avatar offering), and BBPress (an upcoming hosted bulletin board product) as well.

Wordpress.com recently boosted its storage cap to 3GB, far surpassing its competitors Blogger and TypePad. WordPress was honored twice at this past week’s Crunchies in the categories of “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Best CEO”.

Last October, Automattic was rumored to have turned down a $200M acquisition offer. The question is: how much did the founders take off the table with this round?

Critical Media, a New York City startup that operates Web-based video clipping and video syndication services for local TV and national news content, jut launched Syndicaster.TV. Geared at local TV stations and television groups, Syndicaster.TV lets broadcasters log onto the Web and capture video clips from any TV station minutes after they air.

They simply select the portion of the video they want by highlighting the desired section of an accompanying speech-to-text transcript. Then they can download the clip as a WMV or Flash file for republishing to their Websites, automatically distribute them across the Web through ClipSyndicate (Critical Media’s TV-to Web syndication platform), or transcode the video clips and send them to iTunes.

Syndicaster.TV is free to any broadcaster who is a partner in ClipSyndicate. “Bloomberg has been using it for four months, making 60 to 90 clips a day,” says Critical Media CEO Sean Morgan. The service is basically a combination of ClipSyndicate and his Critical Mention video-clipping service, which already captures TV signals from more than 600 TV Stations in North America and elsewhere and makes them viewable immediately on the Web. Now he is taking that video and making it instantly publishable to strengthen the position of ClipSyndicate.

Since all the video gets translated into text, the broadcasts from each station can be delivered as an RSS feed to station executives. Morgan is also looking into creating a Syndicaster offering for radio stations, which would capture just the audio and allow them to publish radio-show segments, along with full transcripts embedded as searchable meta data.

TrackMyShipments offers a centralized delivery tracking service that is similar to TripIt.

The concept is simple. Users sign up and forward emails they receive when ordering goods online to TrackMyShipments. The email can be in any format and any layout. The service then extracts the data to create a centralized tracking point for all deliveries. TrackMyShipments regularly pings the original service for updates, and can email or SMS location updates of tracked items to users.

The Milpitas based service is a solid enough idea, although I can’t help that wonder exactly how many people have soo many packages on the way that they need a centralized management service for them. Perhaps this is a service that may find a stronger use base in the corporate sector where deliveries are more frequent, than with average consumers.

If you sell anything online, whether physical goods or services, you’re probably keenly aware of the 2-3% (plus $0.30) lost through transactional fees every time someone makes a purchase with their credit card. This fee rears its ugly head whether you use PayPal, Google Checkout, or Amazon Flexible Payment Service since those companies are largely just passing on the fees imposed on them by credit card companies.

Noca, a startup founded by ex-Visa employees, is attempting to virtually eliminate transaction fees by bypassing the credit card companies altogether with its own online payment service. Since $5 billion goes towards online transaction fees every year in the United States alone, and since online vendors have particularly slim profit margins, the company thinks that the near elimination of transaction fees would be a huge boon for online vendors. Concurrently, Noca seeks to provide consumers with a more rewarding and more secure purchasing experience, thereby making its service appealing to both actors involved in a transaction.

While Noca aims to eventually facilitate online payments for purchases of all sizes, it begins with a focus on micro-payments, and on micro-payments made through Facebook in particular. It has launched two Facebook applications to test its payments system out: OneClick Pay and HelpYourWorld.

The former provides a simple way to send money to friends. As you can see in the screenshot to the left, the idea is to send someone a digital check; you actually enter your routing and account numbers into the application instead of using a credit card. This poses a significant obstacle to adoption (who remembers these numbers or carries around a check in their pocket?). But the company insists that using checking information rather than credit card information increases security and reduces the chances of identity theft. Plus, Noca is working to provide functionality that would allow you to enter your online banking credentials in lieu of your checking information.

The latter Facebook application, HelpYourWorld, provides a good use case for Noca’s micro-payment system. Since the application solicits $1-at-a-time donations for a series of causes, it benefits greatly from Noca’s lack of transaction fees (especially the standard fixed one of $0.30). Noca hopes that many other Facebook applications with similar micro-payment needs will use its APIs to implement its payment service.

As for the benefits to the consumer, Noca promises to provide strong and flexible incentives through cash back schemes, frequent flier miles, and the ability to designate a part of your payment to a charity of choice. The company also insists that its service will be substantially easier to use than others like PayPal, and that consumers will gain access to a much more comprehensive transaction history than they would get elsewhere.

In the longer term, Noca will become much more like a credit card company itself, providing credit to users through direct partnerships with banks. In doing so, it will be able to provide users with the same benefits of buying things on credit without charging vendors standard transaction fees, which it considers mostly oligopolistic fat. To make money, Noca will also attempt to leverage its user data to target them with tailored advertising and product deals.

23andMe, the consumer genetics testing company founded by Sergey Brin’s wife Anne Wojcicki, is now available in Europe and Canada.

The service, which launched in November enables customers to search and discover whether their genes make them more predisposed to certain outcomes, such as cancer or other illnesses.

Michael signed up for a 23andme kit in December. You can read his experience with the service so far here and here.

No word as yet as to when the service will be available outside of Europe and North America. The full list of countries where 23andMe is now available: Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States and Vatican City State.

The problem with most job sites is that the people companies really want to hire don’t put their resumes on them because they are happy in their current positions. If you are a star manager, chances are your employer knows it and is treating you well so that you don’t even think about leaving. Who wants to bother looking for a job anyway if you don’t have to? That’s right up there with looking for a new house in terms of time-sinks to avoid.

The folks at NotchUp, a stealth startup based in Los Altos, California launching later this month, have a better idea. Founded by two Peerflix refugees, Jim Ambras and Rob Ellis, NotchUp tries to lure talented-but-complacent workers and managers into its recruitment pool by turning the job search on its head. Instead of desperate out-of-work employees going hat-in-hand to companies begging for a job interview, on NotchUp, the companies have to pay to interview you. This is supposed to bring out those passive job seekers every company really wants to find.

The site lets you set whatever price you like per interview, but also provides a calculator that takes into account your current position, experience, education, and salary to come up with a number. What I like about this approach is that it uses economic incentives to try to bring a better inventory of talent onto the market, just like Zillow does with its “Make Me Move” feature that lets people make unsolicited offers on houses that are not officially on the market. If a company is willing to pay you a few hundred or even a thousand bucks just to interview you, chances are they are pretty serious and it is not going to be a waste of time. It acts as a filter for both the employer and the prospective employee.

According to the site, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Powerset are all corporate beta testers using NotchUp for recruitment (well, maybe not Yahoo). NotchUp is still in stealth. The only way to get into the site right now is to be invited by a current user, which is how I learned about it.

Setting up a profile is easy, especially if you already use LinkedIn. NotchUp just imports your LinkedIn profile, you set your price, and you are ready to go. Any friend you refer to the site who gets an interview earns you a 10 percent referral fee. As employers search the site, they can make offers to interview you, which you see in your inbox. You can choose to only get offers from corporations, or from headhunters as well. And you can block recruiters from any particular company (like the one you currently work for) from seeing your profile. The service is free for job seekers, and companies pay NotchUp a fee for each resulting interview.

NotchUp is a really good idea. It turns job hunting into something more people will want to do in a way that makes them feel good about themselves. Even if you don’t get the job, you get paid for your time.

According to a company blog post, social news site Reddit has launched, in closed beta, the ability for users to create their own “reddits”.

The new feature will eventually allow all users to create their own social news lists for chosen topics. These customized reddits will come in three flavors: public, restricted, and private. If you set up a public reddit, every Reddit user will be able to view and participate in the reddit. Restricted reddits will only allow certain members to contribute. And private reddits will only be viewable by their own members.

For the next week or so, Reddit will solicit a “handful of users” to try out the new feature before opening it up to everyone. Mixx has implemented something similar, while we’re still waiting for Digg to do the same. As these social news sites become more platform-like, we’ll see them competing with offerings like Fraxi (covered here) and Pligg.

The tenets of Web 2.0 are not without their pornographic, or otherwise erotic, applications. We’ve covered PornoTube and EroShare, both of which are sites for user-generated porn. Now we’ve come across a site called Boobik? (yes, with a question mark in its name, and no, NSFW). If PornoTube is a YouTube of porn and EroShare is a Flickr of porn, then perhaps it’s best to describe Boobik? as a Twitter of porn.

To be fair, Boobik? doesn’t explicitly bill itself as a place for sharing user-generated pornography. Rather, it places the emphasis on social networking (the Facebook of porn?):

boobik is a place to meet people the sexy way.

You can get to know people through them sharing and broadcasting short experiences, thoughts and fantasies. By that we mean what they did last night, just now (hand in skirt under the desk), with whom and how many times). And don’t forget them pictures as well…

But the result, I imagine, will be mostly just to share pornographic material with others. The site’s frontpage shows a series of microblog posts, some of which contain photos with nudity. You can post text, photos, and video embeds with Boobik?, apparently of any rating level (the terms of service doesn’t preclude explicit material).

Want to share erotic thoughts on the go? You can also post to the site from a mobile phone, IM account, or email.

Thanks goes to Orli Yakuel for discovering this site.

Semantic web search startup SemantiNet has raised an initial round of $1.7 million from Giza Venture Capital.

The Tel Aviv, Israel based company is aiming to “make life easy again” by providing semantic web search that allows users “to take advantage of the variety and richness of information and services that exist on the Internet, but in a way that is simple, smart and intuitive,” with the ultimate goal of allowing users to “achieve more while working less.”

SemantiNet was founded in 2006 and includes Yossi Vardi as one of its investors.

(via Globes Online)

The saga of Scrabulous is nearing an end. The Facebook version of Scrabble raised the ire of Hasbro and Mattel, which jointly own the rights to the game abroad and in the U.S., respectively. They have already asked Facebook to pull Scrabulous, one of the most popular apps on the social networking site.

So why is Scrabulous still up on Facebook? A flurry of behind the scenes deal-making has been going on between Hasbro, Scrabulous, and Electronic Arts, which has the license in the U.S. to the online version of the game. Hasbro is trying to get Scrabulous to sell itself for a song to Electronic Arts, or else shut down completely by the end of the day today. Scrabulous has been trying to shop itself to other buyers as well, but its legal liability is scaring away any potential white knights. Unless it gets some sort of reprieve or agrees to sell to Electronic Arts, Scrabulous will be no more, despite the more than 46,000 Facebook members who have joined the “Save Scrabulous” group. What choice does it have, really, but to sell?

And it might not end at Scrabulous. One industry source tells me that Hasbro is going after other knock-off games as well, and sending cease-and-desist letters to Facebook along with the infringing app developers, since it is the one hosting the games. So who might be next? Zynga, for one. The Mark Pincus startup that just publicly launched earlier this month—with $10 Million from Union Square Ventures, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Bob Pittman, and others—has games that are based on Risk (Attack!), Boggle (Scramble), and Battleship (Battleship). Zynga claims on its Website to have 1.4 million players of Attack!, 293,000 players of Battleship, and 257,000 players of Scramble. Battleship, Boggle, and Risk are all owned by Hasbro. If Mark Pincus has not already received a cease-and-desist letter, he will soon.

Social networks have been a boon for casual online gaming, because now it is easy to find someone you actually know to play with. But a safer strategy than knocking off traditional board games without licensing them first is to actually create original games. That is the tack the Social Gaming Network (SGN) is taking. It’s popular Facebook games include WarBook and Fight Club. Collectively, its games are generating more than half-a-billion page views a month. There is a business in there somewhere. SGN, which is part of Webs.com, is in the process of spinning off as a separate company. Maybe it should try to license those board games from Hasbro. Somebody should.

Travel organization service Tripit, a TechCrunch 40 finalist that was recently named by Michael as one of the companies he couldn’t live with out, is getting more social with new location-based social ”Closeness” alerts.

“Who’s Close To Me?” automatically notifies users if their travel plans overlap with fellow travelers while on the road, and “Who’s Coming to my City?” automatically identifies colleagues who will be visiting the users hometown when they’re not traveling.

Tripit claims that the new features “offer a unique social network for travelers and their community of contacts.” The ability to connect with other travelers is a nice addition to what is already a good service.

CEO of Tripit Gregg Brockway said that the service provides a better way for Frequent travelers to keep up to date when they “don’t have the extra time to keep track of their travel as well as the travel schedules of their friends, family and associates.”

Netvibes is opening up the beta for its Ginger release, and 500 invites have been reserved for the first TechCrunch readers to sign up here (enter code: “TCGINGER500″). Ginger will become the default interface for all Netvibes members in mid-February, but if you click fast you can get a peak now.

Netvibes is a customizable start page that lets you add any RSS feed, as well as other apps in the form of widgets that you can drag around the page and place anywhere you want. With Ginger, Netvibes has a new Ajax user-interface that pops down a pane from the top whenever you want to add new widgets to your personlaized start page. It also now lets anyone create their own public “Netvibes Universe” page (before, these were just pages for brands). You can star items in any feed as a bookmarking feature, and there is now an activity stream so you can see what your friends are publicly starring and sharing as well. There is still no internal messaging system, however.

I spoke with CEO Tariq Krim, who took me through the new features by phone from Paris. Overall, Ginger makes the Netvibes experience a lot smoother and finding widgets to add to your start page couldn’t be simpler (even though there are 110,000 widgets to choose from). The problem with Netvibes is that if you don’t get into the habit of going there as your start page first thing when you log on in the morning, you are liable to skip it altogether. I asked Krim when he will turn his widgets into Facebook or OpenSocial apps. That way, people could bring the widgets to where they already go to organize the Web for themselves, if that place does not happen to be Netvibes.

Krim is working on this portability. Netvibes is part of OpenSocial and he’s had Bebo-like discussions with Facebook. “Both consortia would like us to be exclusive on their technology,” he sighs. (Sounds like the platform war is in full swing). Krim says he wants to work with both OpenSocial and Facebook. Ultimately,he doesn’t care where you consume his widgets. By the end of the first quarter, he plans on introducing widget ads in the form of micro-banners and text ads. The problem with widget ads, though, is that there are no standards.

“We need the equivalent of OpenSocial for advertising,” he laments. If only everyone could agree on how to make money, the widget economy might actually come into existence.

Update (Michael Arrington): Tariq Krim gave me a brief overview of Ginger this morning, see video below.

Last October, at the Web 2.0 Launch Pad, the startup voted “Most Likely to Exit First” was CleverSet. Now three months later, CleverSet has sold itself to e-commerce software company Art Technology Group (ATG) for $10 million. It turns out to be a nice exit for CEO Todd Humphrey and founder Bruce D’Ambrosio, who built the company with about $3 million in capital and a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

But it doesn’t quite live up to a lot of the hype surrounding “discovery” right now. CleverSet offers discovery and recommendation engines to e-commerce sites, using a statistical approach to making product matches. The Seattle-based startup competes with the likes of Aggregate Knowledge, Criteo, MyStrands, and ChoiceStream. The investors in those companies are expecting much larger exits. Criteo just raised $10 million in a venture round. And Aggregate Knowledge has raised $25 million.

By those measures, $10 million is either a steal, or discovery just isn’t the next search.