DimP, a direct manipulation video player, lets users drag items on the video screen to move forward and back instead of just via a scroll bar on the bottom of the video. This is not only more fun, but it also allows users to scroll through video to where they want to be “at least two times faster,” In a paper presented by Pierre Dragicevic, Gonzalo Ramos, Jacobo Bibliowicz, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Ravin Balakrishnan, Karan Singh from the University of Toronto, the authors present their method for browsing video by directly dragging content by “1) automatically extracting motion data from videos; and 2) a new technique called relative flow dragging that lets users control video playback by moving objects of interest along their visual trajectory.”
Whatever that means, one thing’s for certain. At least some of these guys are going to be getting job offers from Adobe. Their paper and another video demonstration is below. Thanks for the tip Brian.
New startup Infectious wants to satisfy that urge that we all undoubtedly have to spice up our car a little. Make it unique. Express our personality. Etc. Founder Tim Roberts, who was part of the founding Twitter team, says that your car is the most visible social product you own, but it is also the least expressive.
Infectious sells specially designed vinyl stickers that can survive up to two years through car washes, the desert sun and Canadian winters, no problem. And when you want to take the stickers off because your friends won’t go near your car (or you need to sell it), you just blow a hair dryer on it for a few seconds and start peeling – your paint job won’t be affected. This is the same stuff they use to put advertisments on taxies and busses.
You can purchase one small sticker (see TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson applying one to his car in the video below) or get stickers that cover the entire car. All of the designs are done by artists, who are paid for their work in exchange for granting exclusive licensing rights to print on vinyl. The artists retains all other rights. Eventually, Roberts says, users will likely have the ability to upload their own art and turn it into a product that they and/or others can buy.
Infectious stickers don’t really compete with bumper stickers. It’s for people who may hire and artist to design art for a car and then get a custom paint job. These projects can easily run into the thousands of dollars, and aren’t reversible, so few people do it. Infectious wants to broaden that market to people who may do this on a whim, and then remove or change it later.
The company raised a small round of funding last year from True Ventures. They are entering private beta today and plan to open up to all some time this summer. If you’d like to get in now, the first 100 people to email techcrunch@infectious.com will be given beta accounts and a 20% discount on all stickers.
Here are two videos. The first is Roberts showing us his car with Infectious stickers. The second is our Mark Hendrickson bravely applying one of these to his own almost new Mazda (thanks to Loren Feldman for doing the video work).
Keeping up with your friends on social networks is hard work (enough so that many of us spend hours at it every week). Wouldn’t you like to make a few bucks for your trouble?
Meet UrTurn, a new startup that hopes to create a unified virtual currency across all major social networks. The site has just launched in a public beta, and is currently available as a Facebook app (with MySpace coming shortly). The first 250 TechCrunch readers who sign up using the code ERAS4 here will receive 500 bonus points.
In some respects UrTurn acts like a virtual pyramid scheme – users can get points by inviting their friends (and even more points if those friends add the application). But users can also get points by performing everyday actions. These earn fewer points, but they add up – if you were to add two friends, five photos, and two status messages on Facebook every day for a year, you’d have enough points for an iPod Touch.
Users spend their points at UrTurn’s virtual store, where they they can buy gift cards or digital gadgets (we can expect the store to grow as the site expands). Alternatively, users can put their points up in a marketplace and sell them for cash. You’re not going to get rich this way, but getting paid to surf Facebook is certainly an appealing prospect. In an effort to reduce gaming of the system, the site requires users to tie their accounts to an active PayPal account
At this point UrTurn is exploring a number of ways to monetize their application. Besides standard advertising, UrTurn is considering placing a tax on every marketplace transaction. The site is also planning to release an API that will let them integrate and have a rev-share with other applications, allowing them to distribute points based on usage of third party apps (the site will launch a pilot program with five appssavvy apps next month).
Virtual currencies have had a long history of failure – in the late 90’s Beenz.com unsuccessfully tried to establish a worldwide currency that could rival the dollar and the pound (that company closed its doors in 2001). UrTurn is going to have to fend off countless users trying to abuse the system, and they may have a tough time monetizing their app when so little effort is required on the user’s part. That said, social networks are craving an effective micropayment system, and virtual currencies may be the answer. Acebucks, which we covered last fall, is another company that is trying to establish itself as a unified currency for social networks.
Activity stream aggregator FriendFeed launched a new feature called FriendFeed Rooms this afternoon, which are effectively topic-based accounts that anyone can create or join (depending on privacy settings). Users can then add links and messages to relevant content.
The main difference between Rooms and a normal FriendFeed account is the fact that multiple users can author it, and that you can’t pull third party feeds into the service.
FriendFeed usage continues to grow steadily, and has clearly gained from Twitter’s (a competitor of sorts) constant downtime. I still haven’t gone religious on it, though, as some have. That’s mostly because i don’t like having a third party service centralize all this data about me and then not let that data back out again. See my rant on the Centralized Me for more on that.
Feel like sharing? Two ex-Ebay/Skype execs have created Tokoni, a social story sharing site that they hope will become the web’s virtual “front porch”. The site, which quietly launched last December, hopes to foster a warmer and better connected sharing environment than other similar communities on the web.
Tokoni is essentially a community of connected blogs with a social networking slant. After creating a personal profile, members can write an unlimited number of stories. Each story (which is basically a blog post) can be tagged with keywords and placed in ‘Hubs’, which are essentially groups of related stories. Stories can include embedded images or YouTube videos, and other members are encouraged to leave comments and participate in a discussion at the bottom of each story.
At first glance, Tokoni seems like a pretty half-baked idea. People have been sharing personal stories online since the dawn of Usenet, and allowing members to group stories by topic isn’t exactly a novel feature. Why not use a blog?
Then again, painfully simple ideas have been known to work in the past (YouTube and photobucket come to mind). It’s possible that Tokoni will fill a niche for users that just want to sit down and write without having to deal with blogging software or forums. And the community aspect helps differentiate the site from a blog by allowing writers to quickly find and link to stories posted by others without having to sift through the blogosphere.
Tokoni’s most encouraging assets are its founders. Mary Lou Song was eBay’s third employee, and her husband Alex Kazim has held a laundry list of top positions: Director of Engineering at eBay, President of Skype, SVP of eBay New Ventures, and VP Marketing at PayPal. The site also features a strong list of investors, including eBay Inc and a number of current eBay execs.
Tokoni isn’t the only player in this space. In fact, there are literally thousands (if not more) of sites that are dedicated to story sharing, though many of them revolve around a specific topic or community. Six Apart also offers Vox, a simple blogging service that offers some of the same tagging and group features. Tokoni has an impressive set of credentials, but unless it can find a better way to differentiate itself, its stories will fall on deaf ears.
Quick reminder that tomorrow, Friday, May 23 is the deadline to submit ideas for the TechCrunch “Mobile Connections” forum that will be hosted at the upcoming Supernova Conference on June 16. The forum will discuss important themes to advance innovation in the mobile environment, and we’ve invited the TechCrunch community to submit your ideas to participate.
How to participate
At the forum, we want to talk about important mobile themes to grow the future of wireless– platforms, standards, privacy, monetization, etc. This is not a startup contest — it’s a search for ideas. We’re challenging anyone to make submissions. We want to hear about innovative concepts, prototypes, research lab projects, hacks, and business ideas that can engage the mobile development community. Companies are welcome to submit, but the focus of your proposed presentation should be on themes broader than your own product / service.
If your submission blows us away, we’ll invite you to join us on stage Monday evening at Supernova 2008. There is no charge to submit your ideas or to present as part of the Mobile Communications Forum. Additional details are available here. Email your submission to mobile@supernova2008.com by midnight PST, Friday May 23, 2008. We will notify selected participants by June 2.
Get tickets
Supernova is extending discounted registration to TechCrunch readers. Preferred pricing is $1,495 ($200 discount.)
Thank you Sponsors
Thanks to Nokia for sponsoring the Mobile Connections Forum and making this lively discussion possible. Several other sponsor slots remain open. Please email Supernova for additional sponsorship details.
Supernova will also have a special Technology Showcase for demonstrators during the opening Networking Gala, evening of June 16. Email Jeanne Logozzo to learn more about demonstrator sponsorships.
Only two days ago the contact messaging application Twitter suffered another bout of downtime, leaving some users frustrated and others asking why the platform continues to suffer problems.
I have recently spoken to an individual who is familiar with the technical problems at Twitter as well as the challenges that lay ahead for the startup. He re-iterated his belief that the problems lay not with Blaine Cook (the former head of engineering who was shown the door), nor with Joyent NTT (their host) but with the early lack of understanding of how complex their problems would be.
The issue is that group messaging is very difficult to achieve at a grand scale. Other large sites such as Wordpress and Digg are mostly dealing with known problems, such as how to serve a large number of pages or a large number of images. Twitter is unique in that it needs to parse a large number of messages and deliver them to multiple recipients, with each user having unique connections to other users.
Social networks have similar complexity issues, but they only usually need to route a message to a single user (or at the most to a defined group). Even so, social networks like Friendster struggled for years with technical and scaling issues. Twitter is specifically dealing with text messages, and in most cases with active users those messages are very frequent and go out to hundreds of contacts (or followers, as they are referred to in Twitter). Every new Twitter user and every new connection results in an exponentially greater computational requirement.
Some of the best web applications are able to efficiently solve very complex problems to produce simple results for users (Eg. Google). The success of these applications is due to the innovative efforts by developers to solve large technical challenges, where they have often had to break new ground for solutions. For Twitter to reach a similar point of reliability they too will need a very comprehensive, ground-breaking solution.
The source that I spoke to also commented on how ill-prepared the Twitter team were and are for their current and future challenges. The small team contains a handful of engineers, with only a person or two committed to infrastructure and architecture. He goes on to point out that at Digg the team for network and systems alone is bigger than the total engineering team at Twitter, and that at Digg they are lead by well-known “A-list rockstars”.
The problems at Twitter are often attributed to their use of RubyOnRails, a web development framework. Twitter is almost certainly the largest site running on Rails, so fans of the framework and its developers have been quick to deflect the criticism and point it back at the engineers at Twitter. Utilizing a framework that has never conquered large-scale territory must certainly add to the risk and work required to find a solution. As an out-of-the box framework, Rails certainly doesn’t lend itself to large-scale application development, but was a big part of the reason why Twitter could experiment and release early.
Rails has enabled Twitter to prototype quickly, to quickly launch and then to easily iterate with new features. But the old adage of “Good, Fast, Cheap – pick two” certainly applies; and Rails would do itself no harm by conceding that it isn’t a platform that can compete with Java or C when it comes to intensive tasks. Twitter is at a cross-roads as an application and Rails has served its purpose very well to date, but you are unlikely to see a computational cluster built with Ruby at Apache any time soon.
What we see at Twitter today is a very useful and popular service, but one with very complex underlying technical challenges to overcome. Twitter will require not only a new architecture approach and a big injection of the best minds they can find ($15 million can help), but will also need a little patience from users and those of us observing.
After unsuccessfully trying to sell his startup Sxip Identity to Google or Microsoft, CEO Dick Hardt is now facing a lawsuit over the insolvency of his startup. Hardt is perhaps best known for his amusing slide show explaining his company’s Identity 2.0 system. It typically started with the slide at right asking, “Who is the Dick on your site?” Investors are now asking a similar question.
Hardt is not making funny slide presentations these days. According to a complaint from investors in Vancouver, where Sxip Identity is based, Hardt raised $370,000 as a bridge loan until he could sell the company. According to TechVibes, which covered this last week:
When Hardt’s attempts to sell Sxip Identity failed, he told the plaintiffs that Sxip Identity was insolvent and that their notes has [sic] little or no value. This is where things get messy. The plaintiffs allege that Hardt failed to disclose that there were two separate Sxip entities (Sxip Identity and Sxip Network – he is CEO and President of both) and that only Sxip Identity would be a party to the notes.
Sxip Identity is indeed insolvent with a March 2008 balance sheet indicating that they owed Sxip Networks $4.7 Million and Hardt personally $275K. Sxip Identity’s total assets at the time were just under $1 Million.
That’s a pretty slick move, Dick.
Identity is still a problem that needs to be solved. Unfortunately, Sxip won’t be solving it.
Just because someone can give a good pitch, does not mean they can build a real company. Below is Hardt giving his slide show pitch at eTech in 2006.
Update: After I put up this post, I spoke with Dick Hardt. His biggest issue seemed to be with my opinion that he failed to build a a real company. Fair enough. I suggested that he e-mail me a response, which is reproduced below:
Erick
Thanks for the followup call and the offer to post a response on the article. There are some corrections contained below on facts you state, as well as additional information that I think upon examination, may lead you to change your opinion. As for responding to the lawsuit, I have attached Sxip’s statement of defense so that your readers can see both sides of the story.
– Dick
“Hardt is not making funny slide presentations these days.”
Incorrect. In the past month I gave a keynote presentations at the MySQL conference, an identity conference in New Zealand and a conference on identity management trends in Hamburg. I think the Identity 2.0 message is an important one to given. I also think my presentations are still funny. The deck is now over 1000 slides and people are laughing at the appropriate spots.
“Identity is still a problem that needs to be solved. Unfortunately, Sxip won’t be solving it.”
This is your opinion, but I don’t think it makes sense when you look at the facts. Sxip is working on solving the Identity 2.0 problem. We merged our efforts into the OpenID community a couple years ago, I sit on the board of the OpenID Foundation and am active in the community. OpenID looks to be a real contender for solving the Identity problem … at least that is what I read on TechCrunch.
Additionally, our Firefox add-on, Sxipper (available at http://sxipper.com) supports OpenID and helps users manage their passwords and fill in forms with the click of a button. Sxipper continues to be actively maintained and the user base is growing 5% per week. As the product matures, perhaps you will give it a review?
“Just because someone can give a good pitch, does not mean they can build a real company.”
From comment 33: “No, not too harsh. The company is bankrupt and on top of that there are allegations of self-dealing. If it had been a real business, Google or MSFT would have been more interested.”
The company is not bankrupt.
I have successfully built and sold companies (ActiveState the best known). We had a real business with Sxip Access with solid partnerships with SFDC and Google. We sold that business to Ping Identity. Google and MSFT look at lots of real businesses and don’t do an acquisition.
I stand corrected on Hardt’s presentation habits. As for Identity 2.0, Sxip and Hardt may be making important contributions to OpenID (I don’t dispute that), but laying claim to OpenID’s achievements for Sxip is a bit of a stretch. As for my comment referring to the company as bankrupt, that was a mistake due to my misunderstanding one of Hardt’s comments below (No. 26) referring to a “reorganization” of the company and also the fact that I was responding quickly from my Blackberry on a plane ready to take off. I should have said insolvent. His statement of defense to the lawsuit is embedded below the video.
I am at the Mesh conference in Toronto right now sitting next to two guys liveblogging the event on ScribbleLive: Michael De Monte and Jonathan Keebler. They are the founders of ScribbleLive. Jonathan is typing notes while StumbleUpon founder (and semi-famous Canadian) Garrett Camp is being interviewed on stage, while Michael is adding links and photos. (Earlier in the morning they liveblogged Club Pengiuin co-founder Lane Merrifield’s keynote). The Ajax-based platform automatically updates the page as they add more content.
It is a pretty sweet platform for something they cobbled together in their spare time for $1,500 (Canadian). De Monte is the director of online production at CTV and Keebler is a technology manager there. I am just sitting here watching them liveblog and it is definitely an improvement over typing in Wordpress and constantly hitting save, and forcing readers to constantly hit the refresh button. For people watching the liveblog, it updates automatically without having to reload the page.
Since it is Ajax, you can watch liveblogs on your iPhone and it will just scroll. Another nifty feature: you can e-mail text or photos from your phone (or anywhere) and the content appears directly in the post. Also, readers who are logged in can reverse the order of the entries, so they can read the liveblog from the beginning, or see the most recent additions up top.
This is something I would want to use for liveblogging events, if only they offered an embeddable widget that I could put directly into a TechCrunch post. Right now, the posts exist on ScribbleLive’s Website. But De Monte whispers that an embeddable widget is something they are working on. Other features on the roadmap include the ability to post from Twitter and comment that will travel with each entry.
Howcast, the instructional video site founded by three ex-Googlers, today announced that it has formed distribution agreements with AOL, Metacafe, Bebo, and blip.tv.
Howcast provides professionally produced instructional videos that range from “How to Make Sushi” to “How To Make a Water Gun Alarm Clock“. Many films come from the site’s Directors Program, which pays qualified members a small fee to produce guides that follow a supplied Howcast template. Directors receive increased compensation through a rev-share system for especially popular videos.
Howcast says that the new distribution deals will significantly expand its audience. The site had previously established distribution agreements with Myspace, YouTube, Verizon FiOS TV, Joost, and ROO.
Howcast has a number of competitors in this space, including 5min, Videojug, and to some extent, Instructables.
When Google Sites launched in February, it was part of the Google Apps group that targets enterprises large and small. Now, consumers can create a wiki Website using Google Sites, without the need to have their own domain.
Google Sites gives you a basic template to create a Website that can be edited by the public at large or a smaller group of people. Photos, widgets, videos, and other elements can be added. Here is a video showing what you can do:
Web video distribution player Brightcove is entering the Japanese market with a new subsidiary called Brightcove K.K. Rather than use some of the $86 million it has already raised, Brightcove sold off a piece of the subsidiary for $4.9 million to Japanese investors, some of whom will also act as sales and distribution partners. Participating in the round are Dentsu (biggest advertising company in Japan), J-Stream (biggest content delivery network in Japan), Cyber Communications (biggest online ad network in Japan), and existing Brightcove investor Transcosmos (Japanese media conglomerate).
Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire says in an e-mail:
Japan is an outstanding market for Brightcove, with exceptionally high broadband penetration rates and the 2nd largest media market in the world. Amazing, online video (commercial, monetized online video) in Japan is a nascent industry
We have majority ownership and control over this subsidiary, and will be hiring a general manager as well as a staff of technical, sales, marketing and operational staff to build the business.
However, Brightcove K.K. also has several significant strategic partners who are collectively investing about $5M into Brightcove KK, and who are also going to act as sales and marketing agents for Brightcove in Japan. We don’t plan to build a lot of direct selling infrastructure in Japan, instead leveraging the robust sales teams and customer footprints of our partners.
J-Stream will be offering Brightcove video streaming as a service to its customers, while Dentsu and Cyber Communications will be selling ads across the Brightcove K.K. network.
Everyone has an opinion on today’s move by Microsoft to shake things up in the search space. Their new Live Search Cashback product shifts search advertising from cost-per-click (CPC) to cost-per-action (CPA) and give a lot of the revenue back to users. Most writers are negative. Some excessively so. After hearing Bill Gates give the pitch and trying the service myself to make a couple of purchases, here’s what I think: It’s a bold move that goes for Google’s throat, and it will likely have a material impact on their search market share.
Our complete analysis is below. The key takeaway: Google’s search dominance is growing, and everything Microsoft has historically thrown at them has done nothing to slow them down. This new approach is both desperate and brilliant. Desperate because Microsoft is giving away most of the search revenue to get market share gains. Brilliant because they have such a small share of search revenue today that they have little to lose, and they are hitting Google hard in their core business.
The Numbers
Microsoft had to do something fairly drastic to get back in the search game. They’re third in U.S. search market share with under 9.1% of the total pie. Just six months ago they had 9.8% market share. Google, by contrast, has 61.6% and is growing steadily:
Without search market share, Microsoft can’t get search revenue market share. And it isn’t just a matter of splitting up the pie. This is a winner-take-most market: Having 9% of search doesn’t mean Microsoft has 9% of search marketing dollars. Far from it – publishers go to Google to partner on ads, which means advertisers must go there to get inventory, and a very healthy auction system pushes up prices. So not only does Microsoft (and Yahoo, and everyone else) have much fewer queries than Google, they are also generating much less revenue per query as well.
So how much revenue are we talking about? Today the worldwide online advertising market is somewhere in the $40 billion range, and there are estimates that it will grow to $80 billion by 2010. The search piece of that is big – about 40%. So $16 billion or so today, growing to $33 billion by 2010. Google gets the vast majority of that search revenue today.
Microsoft’s core revenue is derived from Windows and Office, and the future doesn’t look to be very bright for desktop software sales. Google’s revenues, currently at $20 billion a year, could someday surpass Microsoft’s (Microsoft is currently at about $50 billion/year in revenue) if nothing is done to change the game.
Remember how everyone feared Microsoft’s dominance in the OS and Office worlds in the late nineties? That’s Google today in the search advertising space, a much bigger long term market.
Twitter has closed their third round of financing, says Om Malik. He pegs it at a $15 million raise at around an $80 million valuation, but doesn’t know the investor. We (and others I’m sure) have been tracking the same story, and it’s pretty clear the new investor is Spark Capital.
A source says Twitter signed a term sheet with Spark Capital a couple of weeks ago, and Spark partner Bijan Sabet was in San Francisco today visiting “a very special company.” Other hints on Twitter: cofounder Evan Williams remarked that he was walking down Newberry Street in Boston late last month – my guess is he walked right into the building at 137.
Spark Capital also tends to work closely with Union Square Ventures, one of the existing investors in Twitter. See the investors, for example, in Tumblr, Covestor and Bug Labs.
Nothing is confirmed yet by the company, but I suspect it will be shortly. And it certainly explains the good mood they’ve been in lately, despite the increased downtime (see update here).
It amazes me that people actually talk to Loren Feldman’s puppet and treat it like a real interview. Example above: this interview with Kevin Rose starts off innocently enough, but goes down hill from there. The only real news value in the story is that Digg’s still working on that recommendation feature. The high entertainment value, including a few seconds about Kevin’s dating life, make for the lack of actual news though.
