A couple of weeks ago we reported several rumors of acquisition of Israel-based FoxyTunes a Firefox plugin that allows users to control their favorite media players from the browser. According to several sources the acquisition has been completed for an undisclosed amount of money.

This happens as Yahoo decided to shut down its premium music service and reroute it to Rhapsody. Prior to Microsoft’s acquisition offer, Yahoo was intending to open an R&D center in Israel: FoxyTunes would probably become the intial operation. It is unclear however for now what would happen in the case of an acquisition by Microsoft.

FoxyTunes was created by 2 brothers, Alex and Vitaly Sirota and raised seed money with Yossi Vardi a few years ago.

update: Alex Sirota just confirmed me the acquisition and do not wish to comment on the terms of the deal, of course… Congratulations anyway

While online music startups and most labels are trying to figure new rules for their business models, a small UK based startup has found a smart way to answer that question. Nearly all music services are based on providing access to a catalogue of recorded music whether it is on demand (eg: iTunes or Deezer) or on discovery mode (Pandora/Last.fm). But a big chunk of the quality music is not recorded and is played live in clubs, fashion hotels, restaurants, shops, DJ festivals and other cool places (i leave aside radio music). This music usually ends up in CD collections because of its quality and uniqueness (think of the Buddha Bar collection, the Cafe del Mar and many more). And this is the music Awdio wants to provide you in real time wherever you are, 24/7, as long as you have an internet connection.

Awdio™ revolutionizes the way you listen to music! Real Time Music! What everyone can get now in one weekend is what music addicts would get in a year, touring around world’s best Live music sources… Straight from the sound systems of the most respected clubs, venues, hotels, shops, studios & festivals… from Electronic Music to Hip Hop, from new Jazz scenes to alternative Rock, from Lounge sessions to the most underground Dj sets, wherever you are, whatever you like, Awdio™ provides pure Live music. From San Francisco to Melbourne, New York to Paris, Sao Paulo to Hong Kong, Awdio™ is streaming 24/7 real time music content, from and on worldwide time zones.

Awdio spots the coolest places around the globe where live music is played and makes exclusive agreement to distribute and stream it live in real time. They gathered so far 50 hotspots like the super trendy Colette Shop in Paris, the 1015 in San Francisco or the Favela in London. They have created a technology that enables any live music source to be streamed over the internet with high quality sound. The Awdio Listener simply has to register and browse the selection of audio channels by time zone or by name. A Station on air can be easily noticed with a small ticker. Once you chose your station the music is played directly via a desktop player (for now only iTunes and WMP). But in future versions you will be able to choose alternative players created by Awdio (web based i guess).

The business model is simple and smart. Listeners will pay a subscription for an unlimited access (9 euros/month or 54 euros a year). They become then “Awdio Addict Members” and will also have a personal space with relevant information according to their tastes (will include an electronic program guide) integrated in a social network. There will be a free ad-supported alternative and Awdio has built around their service an advertising platform that will enable brands to easily (geo)target users and offer them free “AwdioTime”. Right Now the music is streamed via your desktop player so i am not sure what kind of ad formats we are talking about. In their agreement with the music sources, Awdio takes in charges all the fixed and variable costs and pays sources 20% of the total income (based on the prorata time of each station) and an additional 10% for the performance of any guest artist. In addition partners will have access to a full dashboard soon available in order to get reporting and better knowledge of their “fans”.

I like the idea and the execution is good. I think this will be a nice additional revenue source for live music sources but also a cool experience for those who enjoy those places right from their living room. I wish one day they will extend the experience to video so you can fully enjoy the moment. I also wonder whether one day they give access to archives which would be great.

Although the project is based in the UK, most of the team is French and has extensive experience both in the music industry and the content delivery business. Awdio is financed by the designer Ora-Ito, you can feel his influence in the slick design of the website. I have tried the service and i must say it is of pretty good quality although this is a very early release. A new version with lots of new features (for streaming, browsing and interacting) will be up by the end of the month.

Special Invitations: TechCrunch readers can already enjoy the service using the registration key TechCrunch (respect the case). You will have free unlimited access until the new version comes up. So hurry up

This is probably the biggest hoax in the history of Facebook. It happened in France and is one of the most discussed stories in the French blogosphere right now. It all started a few weeks ago with a simple third-party Facebook application that was aimed at designating, every quarter, a new “Facebook Worldwide president”. A young 28 year-old French man by the name of Arash Derambarsh decided to run for the presidency believing this was a real election (or faking to believe) and started to invite his friends and even created an official program: stimulate tolerance across religions, fight illiteracy, and promote French culture worldwide. Until then, there was nothing really worth talking about.

But here is the crunch: Arash landed at the top of the application and became “president” (for the record, during the first session the application had been installed 140k+ times and the “candidate” received officially 9k+ votes..). He used that information and got some coverage with French media that started to report the news and really believed that a French man had become the new worldwide president of Facebook without even taking the time to validate the facts or understanding what this title implied.

Then the infernal spiral fired up and very serious TV channels and traditional media covered the story one after the other: TF1, LePoint, L’express, FranceInter, Le Parisien, …They all mentioned the story as if this was real: check it out for yourself. Arash is suddenly becoming a star in France, gets his page in Wikipedia (update: and now a Mahalo entry) and is invited to talk about his presidency and his program for a few days; public opinion is with him. The guy talks well, has some political track record and finally sounds credible.

Of course Facebook has nothing to do with this, but nevertheless in some interviews Arash implies that he has a project with UNESCO and some backup from Facebook; he even declares that he has the power to reach, via a secret Facebook feature, close to a hundred million users, more than the French President himself. No one balks. Everyone buys it although this is really easy to fact check that Facebook does not have close to a hundred million users and even easier to validate the reality of this story with Facebook’s press department. Arash is actually nothing else than the president of FakeBook.

But Facebook users are not fools and a group arises, denouncing the whole thing. ZDnet France spots the hoax, bloggers follow up quickly and the truth comes to light. According to the inquiry made by ArretsurImages many journalists covered the news just because others did and because the “President” looked credible. And then finally a wave of new articles came back to the story explaining this was a fake and that Arash misunderstood the purpose of this election. Of course this is too late and the French press has been fooled all the way.

Many tried to reach Arash for more details and reactions but without success. Did he do this out of pure calculation or was his ego responsible for the whole story? The most important point: A simple user managed to generate the biggest prank in the history of Facebook and the press bought it. Hilarious, ridiculous, but also worrying and sad for the French press (a big chunk of it) whose credibility has been hit hard.

TvTrip is offering a multimedia hotel guide with videos professionnally produced helping users choose better the hotels and even the rooms they will be staying at (read our initial review here). This startup hearquartered in Belgium with offices in Paris London and Singapour launched in June and is backed by 2 european VCs, Partech and Balderton. They are now out of beta (check out the absent mention by the logo) and will be launching tomorrow a brand new version of their hotel search engine although the new site can already be accessed.

The new design is rather nice but the key point of attraction is an advanced video player which enables you to access rich information regarding the hotel without having to leave the player itself including in full screen mode. The execution is really good and it is probably best to give it a try to understand. For example you can launch other videos related to the hotel directly from the player, you can read the hotel basic description details and reviews from other users and even launch a comparison check for the best rate.

I regret a few elements that could be easily improved: the videos cannot be embedded (useful for travel blogs), the sound is set by default to zero and the control is not available in the right position. I think they also urgently need to take that cheap stock music off their videos and replace it with either quality music (hint: local hits would be interesting) or even a sexy voice to accompany the images. After a short chat with the team i understand they will be working on it. The site itself is much richer and has a lot of options for search, filtering and navigation. I like the VideoWall result page (see here in London). They also have a map mashup from where you can run directly the videos.The site has already some good traction with a 100k unique visitors a month accross 5 languages. 600 hotels are covered accross 48 cities and this will soon raise up to 1000. Another 2200 hotels can be added at any time according to users’ votes. Asia will soon be covered too. Another startup based in Paris providing the same service by the name of Trivop, recently launched a new version of their site.Video guides for hotels make total sense from a consumer point of view. The question i still have in mind is whether this is a value proposition strong enough to create a destination site or whether this is a good addition to existing booking sites? Too soon to say

The idea is not brand new, and the name sounds like a french guy learning how to say something in English, but the execution is good enough to catch the attention and maybe even take some bet on the future of this french startup called Zilok. They basically offer a service where anyone can rent anything he/she owns to anyone. The service was launched in France a few weeks ago and opens tomorrow in the US (accessible at us.zilok.com). It has attracted so far a few thousand users and even generated some business. So now let’s see how it will work on the other side of the atlantic.

Here is how it works: Once registered on the website you can add any object you own for rental purposes. You define the price, the area you can cover, and the rental conditions (period, deposit,..). Zilok will issue for you a rental agreement that you will use directly with the renter. A user can use several tools to find what is searching to rent for including a search engine, a category directory or google map mashup. Once he identifies what is searching for (an example with a Wii here), he will contact the owner and the closing is not happening on the website but in real life. Zilok does not provide a payment system or a third party deposit service. But like on standard marketplaces they have created a reputation system to filter easily power-owners or power-renters and to optimize the process.

What is missing for me is a wizard to assist an owner in evaluating the rental price of his goods. If i know how to find a second hand price benchmark on the web (checking eBay for example) i would not know how to find the rental price of a piece of furniture (specially if it is unique). Zilok will not be appropriate for many categories of objects (cloths for example) and in many cases the rental price (even if rented several times) will not be a better bargain than just buying or selling the same product second hand or third hand. But i can see how this could catch with some product categories (some equipments and accessories, or utilities).

The service is open to both private individuals and professionals. I would tend to think that the big chunk of the business is on the second part and i think it will take some time before users get used to this new way of ‘monetizing” their goods. Not mentionning it requires a bit more logisitic than just selling over eBay (since the transaction is manual). The business model is based on the payment of a listing fee by the owner. Until 2008 the service is free.

RentMineOnline is another startup, winner of the Seedcamp startup competition is addressing the same need but building its service on top of social networks (they have a Facebook app) in order to solve the trust issue. Zilok claims that geographical proximity is the #1 trigger to make a decision. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle and that the online rental model is very likely to get a lot of fine-tuning until it finds its way. But it eventually will.

The founders have some good experience with MarketPlaces. Zilok is based in Paris, self-funded and has been created by Gary Cige and Thibaud Elzière, the founder of the online image bank Fotolia.com. For more details here is a full tour and here is their blog

Food and recipes are a big thing on the internet. If you were unfamiliar with that vertical just think of the manyrecipe directories (like Allrecipes), recipe finders (like RecipeMatcher), social networks (Like BakeSpace or OpenSourceFood), user created cook books, and even online video plateforms (CookShow, iFood or Rouxbe) not mentionning the hundreds of cooking blogs some of which attract thousands of readers everyday.

Israeli-based KitchenBug is opening today in private beta a complementary service that will delight all those interested in writing and sharing recipes.

KitchenBug could be described best as a social recipe application. It allows you to create, bookmark and share recipes in a very seamless way.

You can store all your recipes within the website by just adding the URL of a page or copy-pasting the text you wrote in your word processor. The interesting part is what is happening around this process, where the service generates a suggestion of tags for the recipe. The best part is when you write a recipe they automatically suggest ingredients and link them to Wikipedia for further reference. It is also interesting because it brings a sort of semantic structure to recipes which helps in better search and classification. However for now their search engine is would work better with an auto-suggest or advanced search feature for example . KitchenBug has all the usual social features for interacting and sharing content with your friends (rating, comments,…).

You could claim that some of those features are already available in some of the services mentionned above. Yes, maybe. But this all in one approach, the smart editing and the quality of execution brings some elements of uniqueness that will convince many.

KitchenBug is now in private beta, an “appetizer release” as they call it, but many features are on the way like a news feed of your friends’ activities, the possibility to add rich media content, a smart menu-creator, localization in different languages and of course widgets and external social apps. The company expect its service to be viral, which is something they will have to prove very quickly in order to reach some critical size. They also plan to contact online food communities/bloggers to use their service; i guess all the above startups are trying to do the same. But i think KitchenBug has a good service, possibly a better product than some of the startups mentionned above and that could help them win the race.

KitchenBug is based in Israel and has been self-funded so far. It has been created by Ofir Sahar who claims that this service was born out of passion and love for cooking. You can actually feel that on their blog and his own profile in KitchenBug.

The service is in private beta and will open in a few weeks to all but for now we have 1000 invitations for TechCrunch readers. Click here to get it. First arrived, first served.

When it comes to decide where and how to host your files on the web you ask yourself two main questions: Are you ready to pay for it? What is the best service for a the type of file you need. File hosting/sharing is a totally crowded space with both vertical solutions (think Flickr or PhotoBucket for pictures, Scribd or SlideShare for documents, YouTube for videos) and horizontal solutions (RapidShare, MediaFire, YouSendit, Megaupload,…). Most of those services stop being free when you need extra space or extra bandwith. Honestly it is really hard to find out your way in the jungle. But if you are a heavy user or are only interested in hosting and controling sharing options you might want to consider a one-Stop shop like DivShare that has been here a for few months. They are starting to release today a series of innovations that will make the service more unique and attractive.

The whole service is now providing a one-stop solution that will save users the download process, whatever the format of the file is. They offer free unlimited hosting and convert to flash nearly every file type (audio, video, office documents,..) instantly upon uploading with embedding capabilities. This is different from a company like Wixi which is built around a social network and where files are indexed and shared. They have built a universal flash player that makes the access and viewing easy and save you the download process (here is an example).

They are also rolling out a new iPhone and Facebook application as well as an API as of next week. With the iPhone app you’ll be able to view and email easily all your documents. The Facebook application “Projects by DivShare” enables students to create a special wall to add and view documents within Facebook.

They will rollout on Tuesday an API that enables any site including social networks to outsource for their hosting capabilities for any kind of file. Divshare has a premium option that enables you to rebrand totally your player (see below an example). I am not sure what is the level of SLA guaranteed by DivShare but this is a ground explored already by Amazon with S3 and EC2. The difference being that DivShare will be free and will provide viewing capabilities. If you want to rebrand the appearance then you will have to pay and become a DivShare Direct customer.

You can argue that some of those features can be found here and there. And their new player looks a lot like the one Docstoc is offering (for office documents only). But the blend of features and the free unlimited hosting makes it a good option. Will they be able to keep that promise as the service grows specially with a model based on advertising only? Time will tell and the challenge will not be simple.

DivShare has been my personal favourite for a long time and those improvements will help me stick to my judgement. If you guys are blogger they have a great plug-in for file uploading and hosting too. They officially launched in December 06 have over three million monthly visitors worldwide, and 150,000 registered users. The company based in Cupertino, California, has only four employees and is self-funded but is planning to take outside funding.

CenterNetworks has an interview of the co-founder David Altschul back in February

It is very likely that sometime soon facebook will launch a localized French version (and other languages too) just like MySpace did about a year ago. Actually Facebook is starting to be quite popular in France already, even though the interface is just in English. Until today Facebook.fr was even redirecting to Facebook.com and one would have assumed that the company had acquired the fr URL until the roll out happens.

But it looks like someone else acquired the French domain name, since as of today the redirection points to another social network called “FaceBook Paris“. The whois registry does not reveal much of the identity of the owner (registered as anonymous). The provocation goes a bit further since the social network which seems active is hosted on Ning, a service that allows you to create your own social network and that can be considered a competitor to Facebook.

It is unclear what the motivations of the owner are: probably getting a good leverage to negotiate the sale of the domain to Facebook (who should have acquired it long ago), or maybe just getting some attention. What is certain is that Facebook will react in some way (maybe Ning will too) and won’t let that happen. Maybe that will end up with a cease and desist from Facebook? Maybe that will end up with a nice check? The question being, Did Facebook think of registering its trademark outside the US (this seem obvious but many companies don’t do that)? Still, one piece of advice to Facebook (and others): start registering other local domains before it is too late.

update: Facebook.fr is no longer pointing to Ning but has included a video clip that looks like an advertising in French where the author clearly announces he wishes to sell the URL.

How good are you at making predictions? Meet PlaytheDay a quiz game that will entertain those who can predict the future. The game is very simple: you need to answer 8 questions related to a future event. If you get 8 answers right in a row you win. There is one prize to win everyday and several series of quizzes in different spaces (celebrity, music, sport, Internet and finance,…) are available. Each questions come with a tip and link to a website where you can evaluate or find the answer. The fun part is that the games are closed one day before the actual date and on the day answers are progressively revealed along with the list of participants that are still racing for the prize.

To start off they have created a free predictive quiz on web2.0 events taking place next october 14th (you can already participate). You can find questions like “how many votes will the most popular story on Digg have at 4pm” or “How many comments will the top story on TechCrunch get at 4pm”. Honestly answering is mostly a question of luck rather than skill. But the game is free and the upside is not bad: you can win an iPod touch and you have here another opportunity to prove you are a real Web2.0 Guru

This free game is aimed at raising awareness around their site but the main activity of the service will be selling tickets for participations to other quizzes.

Betting games have been around for a while. Gottabet and Bluebet allow you to create a bet on virtually anything. Predicting games have been also around for a while: PicksPal allow you to predict sport event, and other services like SocialPicks do the same with stocks.

PlayTheDay has been around for a while but the official launch takes place this week. This game is operated by FairPlay, a privately held company incorporated in Cyprus and created by team of veterans in the gaming industry including an Israeli entrepreneur previously senior employee at Random Logic (that operates 888.com)

Yesterday at the Digital ID conference in San Francisco, Orange, one of the major mobile operator and ISP with more than 40 million subscribers announced they would adopt the OpenID registration/identification standard. There was already a clear trend from big internet properties to adopt (Digg, Technorati Microsoft and AOL but also Yahoo and WikiPedia already announced that).

But this is the first time that a major TelCo is taking that step. There is already an implementation of OpenID on the French portal available at openid.orange.fr . Orange presents also on the page a list of OpenID providers.

This is a good news for OpenID standard. The question remaining concerns the pace of adoption by the users. I could not find the access to the openID page by navigating from the homepage of the portal. It will probably pushed at later stage after the first tests. I also found the explanation not simple enough to understand for a new user (most of them are not early adopters) and Orange should probably think about a a short visual/demo to explain simply the benefits of such a service. An international roll out will probably come out soon.

(via David Recordon)

We just covered the news on TechCrunch France. The iPhone will be launched in France with Orange at the price of 300 euros. It will be on the market the 29th of November and announced on the 24th of September during the Apple Expo in Paris. There won’t be any unlimited data plan and against all rumours it won’t have 3G capabilities. Here is a first picture of the iPhone provided by Orange with a French menu (operated in roaming mode though). Crunchgear has more

Apple is likely to announce the iPhone for the UK market on Tuesday

Back in September last year Michael suggested everyone check out BlogMusik quickly before it was shut down. BlogMusik is a service born in France that lets you search for mp3 files on the web and listen to them in streaming mode for free. At the time the service was young and had no particular licensing agreements. A few months later, the SACEM, the organization in charge of collecting payments for artists’ rights sent them a cease and desist letter with a view to stop the service. A lot has happened since (beyond a rather nice site redesign and addition of sharing features).

BlogMusik will announce tomorrow that they came to an agreement with the SACEM, clearing the service of copyright infrigement accusations. The details of this agreement are not are not being disclosed, but other deals suggest it is based on a revenue sharing mode. BlogMusik’s business model is relying on advertising and affiliate revenue coming from the sales of songs on iTunes and Amazon. This agreement should cover BlogMusik for any music they host wherever the music is listened from. However they still have to come to an agreement with organizations representing majors and labels (Pandora had to face new webradio rates imposed by the RIAA). This is being taken care of according to the CEO of the company and new agreements should be announced soon.

All in all this is a good news for BlogMusik The company now has an opportunity to become a true free legal alternative to listen to music on the internet. Unlike Pandora this is a music on demand service where you choose the titles you want to listen to (although you have a smart playlist option to generate automatically radios out of a song or an artist).

BlogMusik.net will also change name and become Deezer.com. This is a good thing i had a hard time getting the UR/nameL right with this “k” in the middle (not mentionning the .net).

RadioBlogClub, another popular french service was forced a few months ago to change hosting provider following a complaint sent by the same SACEM. The service was interupted a few days and opened again as fresh as new. To date no official licensing agreement was made with the company.

So the internet looks like a huge cloning jungle? Ideas blossom here and others replicate them there? Often abroad. TechCrunch covered yesterday a German copycat of Geni and the connection was indeed pretty obvious.

Business2.0 just released in its August edition (print magazine) a list of clones per country of 4 star Web2.0 companies: Digg, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. There is just one problem, the information is pretty much inaccurate and even wrong. Let’s take France for example. SkyBlog, the largest french social network, is nowhere near FaceBook, and even so it was there much before (would be closer to MySpace maybe). Scoopeo, supposed to be a Digg clone, is not a French company, but a Belgium company (the service is in French though). DailyMotion was created before YouTube: who is cloning who?

Other local players might have been much more relevant to quote and it seems like their source of information is not bullet proof. And from what I can read here, the same goes for the India selection. I don’t know well enough other countries to detect other mistakes, but maybe you can.There is clearly a case to be made here: clones are everywhere and this is the price to pay in a booming industry; But Business2.0 failed in pointing the right players out.