TechStars is doing something similar to what YCombinator has done – they’re funding 10 teams with up to $15,000 in seed capital and providing office space, operational support, and mentors from business leaders (and potential follow-on investors) in Boulder, CO. In exchange for the investment and everything else, the teams give up a meager 5% equity position in their companies. Our previous profile of them is here.

Ten startups ideas have now been selected out of 300 applicants.

All start-ups move to Boulder on May 15 and the program starts May 21 for 3 months. There will be 3 evening sessions each week that’ll give the teams access to 40 mentors for personal meetings and panel discussions. They’ll also have extensive meetings and access to the four founders of TechStars – notable VC Brad Feld, David Cohen, Jared Polis (founder of BlueMountain and ProFlowers) and David Brown.

Information is vague at this point on the selected start-ups, but two of them are Socialthing! and Intense Debate. Socialthing! is going to be doing something in the social networking space and Intense Debate has something to do with real-time debating online.

YCombinator’s model is similar – they give $5,000 plus another $5,000 per founder and take 2-10% of the start-ups’ equity. The model has worked – one of their investments, Reddit, went on to be acquired by Condé Nast last Halloween.

Of the selected teams, founder ages range from 20-36 with median age at 25. Seven of the teams are B2C (social learning, social networking, social media, mobile, social media sharing, alerting/messaging, local/community) and the other three are B2B (SMB/new media, infrastructure / VOIP response, enterprise social networking). One team has a partner coming from Sweden, while the other teams are all from USA (NYC, Philadelphia, St. Louis, South Carolina, Denver, Seattle, Jacksonville, LA).

Of the applicants, 80% were between 20-30 years old – youngest was 14 and oldest was 62. Of the ideas, 75% were B2C, 20% B2B, and 5% “public good”.

Editor’s Note: This post by Steve Poland, co-founder of WeBothLike.

Earlier this year we talked about the usefulness of a simple command line to query multiple web services via a set syntax. Yubnub, one of the web services we discussed, does just that. Enter “Weather 90210″ into Yubnub and get the weather from Weather.com. Or query thousands of other services with that single command line.

A subtle upcoming change to Twitter’s API will allow this kind of functionality, too. Twitter, which is a kind of social network around sms/text messages, has a rapidly growing community of users that spend hours each day sending text messages about what they are doing or thinking. To post a message, a user simply texts the message they want to post to “40404.” Anyone who cares to follow the meanderings of another user can do so. All messages from people you follow can be seen on your Twitter page and, optionally, delivered to your mobile device via SMS.

A popular feature with Twitter is a “direct” message that you send to just a single friend. The syntax is simple – you type “d [username] [your message].”

Until now, Twitter’s API hasn’t allowed you to access those direct messages though. With today’s API addition, you can now retrieve Twitter direct messages. What does that mean? A lot, quite frankly.

Users can now send a command (”direct message”) to a username which is just a name for a web service like weather.com. For example, there could be a Twitter username “weather”, which I could send a Twitter message of “d weather 14202″ by text, web, or IM. The Twitter username “weather” could get this command (er, Twitter “direct message”) via the API, run a process on a web server to retrieve the current weather forecast for 14202, and send that as a direct message back to me ( i.e. “d TechCrunch Currently: Partly Cloudy, 50F. Tomorrow’s Forecast: AM Clouds/PM Sun. High: 55 Low: 40″).

Or there could be a username “score”, which you could send “d score Yankees”, to immediately request the score of the Yankees game. Or another example could be “d 411 Starbucks 14202″ to retrieve the phone number of the closest Starbucks to zip code 14202.

Currently, it costs a lot of money to launch a start-up in the SMS/mobile space — you have to license a shortcode monthly ($500-$1000/mo), pay a SMS gateway provider, and then pay anywhere from $0.03 – $0.05 per inbound or outbound text message. It adds up. But now, if a start-up chooses to use Twitter as a command line to their web service, it’s free (until Twitter starts charging for it).

As you can tell, the one thing that is kind of annoying is prefacing messages with “d”, but Twitter is internally discussing use of “@” as possibly becoming the equivalent of “d” — I hope they do this. Currently, people are using “@(username)” to publicly reply to other Twitter messages — which can be annoying if you’re a friend of a user that is replying to what another user said (and you don’t even know what was originally said).

The updated Twitter API code should be posting live by morning and accompanying API documentation should be posted by the end of today as well.

Editor’s Note: This post by Steve Poland of Ringside Startup, where he’s blogging his own web start-up journey with advice along the way from VCs and seasoned entrepreneurs. You can follow Steve’s life on twitter.com/techquilashots, and Michael Arrington’s at twitter.com/techcrunch.

I’m at SXSW and Ben Brown, co-founder of CNET-owned Consumating, just announced that they will be releasing “every single line of code” for Consumating within the next month.

Consumating is a dating and social networking website for “geeks” that CNET acquired back in December 2005.

Ben said that the community is the true value of Consumating and that the community has really built Consumating into what it is — and basically that he’d like to give it back to the people. He continued to say that since Consumating.com is focused around a specific niche community, he’d like to see other communities embrace the open-sourced code and use it.

There will be a new position at Consumating called an ‘Open Source Manager’, whom will manage all of the open source — and roll good changes back into Consumating.com itself. Ben said the code will be licensed under The MIT License.

My initial thought was whether Consumating would be offering a hosted solution of their back-end for websites to easily implement — such as allowing the music blog Pitchfork to create their own dating / social network for their passionate music readers. Ben said they aren’t planning to do that, but that anyone could take the source code and create that solution — “maybe I’ll do that.”

Editor’s Note: This post by Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas. Steve is at SXSW and would love to chat with anyone — feel free to email him.

The Amazon/TiVo partnership announced last month has officially rolled out. Nearly 1.5mm TiVo subscribers can now buy or rent digital movies (and buy TV shows) from Amazon’s Unbox service and download / watch those movies on their TV via their TiVo. Nearly 600,000 of the 1.5mm compatible TiVo boxes are connected to broadband Internet connections. Amazon/TiVo are offering $15 in free movies and TV shows to get users to try the service.

This is the second time that Amazon has beaten Apple to the punch — you’ll recall that Amazon rolled-out their Unbox service one week prior to Apple rolling out their own service for selling digital movies / TV shows. That didn’t seem to matter, as Apple has rolled over Amazon with digital movie and TV show sales.

This might be another one-week head start that Amazon has to gain some ground with their digital movie / TV show downloads service to the TV, considering the much-anticipated Apple TV is expected to release later this month. However, Apple has all their passionate iPod users (60 million strong) and have also sold millions of digital movies / TV shows that users will easily be able to watch on their new Apple TV device instantly.

Amazon also offers movie rentals, whereas Apple still does not, despite rumors. Amazon appears to offer nearly 1,000 videos for sale and nearly 500 for rental. A movie download to the TiVo appears to take an hour (from one perspective), whereas consumers can still get pay-per-view or video-on-demand movies instantly — however they offer a limited selection of titles.

Competitors loom, with Wal-mart entering the digital movie downloads market last month and others have existed for awhile — Guba, CinemaNow, and Movielink.

Editor’s Note: This post by Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas. Steve will be at SXSW this weekend if you want to chat about web start-ups.

Google has a hefty lead in getting small publishers to put Google-powered ads on their websites. There is no negotiated deal – advertisers agree to take whatever Google decides to give them. Revenue share terms are not disclosed to these small publishers. The publisher simply places a piece of JavaScript code in the code of their website, the ads appear, and a check comes in the mail. For some, this is easy — for most, they don’t know the first thing about getting code into other code; so they likely hire someone to do this for them, then just leave it alone.

So there’s a large base of small (and some not so small) websites out there that now use Google AdSense to make some money. Plus, Google has a stranglehold on the pay-per-click (PPC) text ad market (just look at their earnings), which means increased advertiser competition, which drives cost-per-click (CPC) up on ads, which provides publishers with maximum revenue potential — well, assuming the rev-share % Google provides is the same as Yahoo!, Microsoft, or AdBrite. But no one really knows how much Google provides (99% of) the publishers using Google AdSense, which is really kind of a shocker — we’re all just trusting that Google is compensating us well, when really they could be taking 70% of the ad revenue and only giving publishers 30%. Google doesn’t disclose the rev-share to publishers.

Yahoo! was slow to the contextual ad game, but they are here now. They finally rolled out Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN), but it’s still in beta — you can’t actually get an account immediately, but rather only be considered for the program. Publishers have been using Google AdSense — why would they switch? Plus, publishers don’t want to mess with their code — removing Google and replacing with Yahoo code.

One way Yahoo can compete is on price and transparency. Simply giving publishers a higher percentage of the total pie, and actually disclosing what that percentage is, would convince many publishers to switch. But not all – the fact is that Google’s AdSense code is embedded on many websites and the switching costs are enough that they just won’t change to Yahoo.

Enter MyBlogLog

However, many publishers are finding the value in MyBlogLog — a distributed social networking platform that allows readers of blogs to learn more about each other and communicate with each other. Publishers — mostly bloggers — have been adding this code to their websites. Once you can get a publisher to add code to their website for your widget, they typically aren’t going to take it down.

I’m sure Yahoo! has plans for taking advantage of having this MyBlogLog widget code on many websites, to somehow edge their YPN code on to these websites — or simply integrate YPN into the MyBlogLog widget that already exists, so that publishers wouldn’t have to touch a thing. Coincidentally, MyBlogLog (Yahoo) is also tracking information on Google AdSense — how many clicks Google AdSense ads are receiving (on webpages that have both MyBlogLog and AdSense installed), the ad unit size, and what webpage those clicks occurred. Yahoo doesn’t know the CPC for each of Google’s ads, but they do know the click-through rate (CTR) — and can specifically target high CTR publishers first, with their YPN offering.

But even with the MyBlogLog widget access, publishers are looking for more money at the end of the day — the YPN offering would have to practically guarantee much more money to the publisher, in order to spur adoption and convert AdSense customers. Considering Yahoo doesn’t have as many advertisers as Google does, I imagine that 9 times out of 10, Google is able to compensate publishers more per click (once again, depending on the rev-share percentage back to the publisher).

Editor’s Note: Post by Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.

Update (Arrington): MyBlogLog has responded, apologized and reinstated Shoemoney. Caterina Fake of Yahoo (MyBlogLog’s parent company) has written her thoughts as well. It’s time to move on – and Shoemoney should accept this apology.

Yahoo!’s recent addition MyBlogLog is making news again — and not for another security exploit (that was last weekend) or spammer gaming. Well, it is related to those two topics — Shoemoney, a notable blogger in the affiliate marketing world with a fairly large following of readers that like his insight on all things related to online marketing, has been banned from MyBlogLog.

The real funny thing is that the security hole Shoemoney blogged about had been discovered and posted publicly (in French language — translation here) over a month ago by eMich — yet as of this writing, that user hasn’t been banned. Founder Eric Marcoullier responded to this:

That is truly amazing and embarrassing that someone sent us details of this hack a month ago. I’ve checked my historical email (I receive all the incoming emails) and cannot find it, so it either got spam filtered or lost during my transition to a new laptop. Neither is really no excuse. As you may have heard, we’re hiring a community manager who will help ensure that this sort of oversight will not happen in the future.

There is no policy on MyBlogLog’s website to state when they would ban a member — ironically they stated earlier this week that they plan to create a Terms of Service (TOS), so that users would be accountable for breaking the rules.

Shoemoney has posted various exploits in the past, but it wasn’t til this latest one that Yahoo! decided enough was enough. The exploit he posted about was how you could surf the web acting as another user. Thus, you could change some code on your computer and visit a website with the MyBlogLog recent reader widget installed, and the avatar/profile of any MyBlogLog user you want to be, would appear in that widget. Shoemoney posted the IDs of some notables such as MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer, Jason Calacanis, and TechCrunch. By doing this, you could continue surfing your own website using Jason Calacanis, and then after 10 visits to your community (if that default option was still set in the user’s account), Jason Calacanis would be joined to your community — and that would give you some clout.

Getting the IDs isn’t hard — it’s referenced in every user’s avatar image filename (note: this was changed within hours of the Shoemoney post). However, MyBlogLog felt Shoemoney was exposing people’s data and then “urging readers to spoof them.” I wouldn’t say he was urging them, but more that he was showing off.

Shoemoney has been a fan of MyBlogLog — supporting the service with their widget on his website and recently posting a list of 10 things he wanted to see that would help improve MyBlogLog and reduce spam. A couple of these ideas have been implemented as a result of this past weekend’s exploits. Shoemoney isn’t the only user to publicly exploit flaws in MyBlogLog — Michael Jensen showed how easy it was to keep your avatar (which could easily be a marketing message or your logo) on webpages of a website — he did this to TechCrunch (we have since removed the MyBlogLog widget). Jensen wasn’t banned.

The backlash has begun with Internet marketing consultant Andy Beal boycotting MyBlogLog until they reinstate Shoemoney’s profile. He argues that anyone could have looked up the MBL data and that it was hypocritical to expect an email from Shoemoney first (pointing out that notable Yahoo! blogger Jeremy Zawodny didn’t email Andy prior to publicly accusing Andy of being a spammer). Photographer and CEO of Flickr competitor Zooomr Thomas Hawk and SEO blogger Graywolf have both removed their accounts in boycott as well.

Since being acquired by Yahoo!, the once loved independent darling of the blogosphere has been feeling the heat — and now gets lumped with any Yahoo! angst. MyBlogLog is no longer the independent underdog start-up it once was — that role has shifted to the new blood in competitors OthersOnline and Explode.

Editor’s Note: Post by Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.

XM and Sirius have confirmed their merger plans. The companies have a combined 14 million subscribers. The merger depends on shareholders’ consent, as well as approval by antitrust agencies and the FCC. I can’t imagine there’ll be a hold-up on this — despite the creation of a “monopoly” on satellite radio programming.

As wifi starts to heat up (and eventually lace the country), that will open up access to Internet radio stations to broadcast to a much larger audience. The satellite monopoly won’t matter at that point. Right now with Sprint and Verizon Broadband mobile services, if a hardware device existed, you could plug your wireless broadband card into your car stereo and connect to your favorite Internet radio stations and podcasts. Aside from the Howard Stern fans — who will need XM / Sirius at that point?

Internet radio stations being broadcasted to vehicles via broadband cell providers will help those stations with profitability — and think of the kick that it could give Google’s radio / audio advertising initiatives.

Editor’s Note: Post written by Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.

Atomic Moguls has reportedly raised nearly $1 million in first-round funding from VC firm Second Avenue Partners and Amazon.com. Atomic Moguls has launched FantasyMoguls.com, which is essentially a fantasy league for movies. You can draft movies and earn points based on how well they do at the box office, number of weeks in the top 5, per-theater average, and their IMDb review score (IMDb is Amazon.com owned). Traditional fantasy sports leagues allow you to draft players and earn points for how well they perform in games.

Fantasy sports leagues have about 15 million participants and the Fantasy Sports Trade Association predicted more than $1 billion is spent annually on publications, league fees and other services. Many companies are trying to get in on the fantasy league dollars — PicksPal has a fantasy league for sports betting (you use the lines on the games and pick your winners; earn points). FleaFlicker is your traditional fantasy sports league website, but is free and relies on advertising revenues.

Atomic Moguls has spoken of likely expansion into other entertainment areas such as music, television shows, and celebrities. Fafarazzi has already established a fantasy league for celebrities that awards points to users based on how many times a celebrity’s name is used in popular entertainment blogs, websites, and articles. There’s even a fantasy league for fashion.

Fantasy Moguls should breathe some new life into IMDb (make it more social). I’d also like to see some widgets that I could embed into my blog or MySpace page (this type of functionality appears to be lacking — and would be great for inviting people to join a league, or for posting standings to a blog / MySpace page).

Editor’s Note: This post was written by guest contributor Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.

Neat video by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University.

The video presents a broad overview of the difference between 10+ years ago on the web and the social web of today (”Web 2.0″) — focusing on how HTML was used for defining structure and stylistic characteristics (”form”), whereas XML has separated form and content, facilitating data exchange for all kinds of mash-ups.

We’re seeing today with the “widgetizing” of the web that all kinds of content is being made available to be plugged-in to webpages — allowing for wider distribution of content.

Michael’s video asks the question of who will organize all this data — and tells us that we will. He brings to light that with every link we click and webpage we visit — we are teaching the machine.

It makes me think of the movie “I, Robot” or “The Matrix” — humans not working for “the man,” but rather working for “the machine.” In the movie “I, Robot,” robots eventually start learning how to feel, react, and eventually take us over.

I don’t know the current status of artificial intelligence (AI), but I do know that there are over 2mm blogs created every month — most of which are people spewing about life in a wide-open journal format. Eventually, I would think AI will be able to sift through all this information and methodically sort it, understand it, learn from it, and possess their own thoughts and feelings — possibly even take us over!

I’m sure there’s data to back me up on this, but today compared to 10 years ago — people are way more comfortable with the Internet and have less privacy concerns. Or at least the younger generations that have grown up with the Internet aren’t as concerned with privacy — and spew what’s on their mind to the entire world via the web.

Maybe someone will be smart enough to learn / organize people’s thoughts / ideas / feelings and search will revolutionize from the poor “search results” experience we are complacent with (and have come to expect) — and instead we will each be empowered with the exact answers / information we are seeking at any given moment (using the collective information mass on the web).

Editor’s Note: This post was written by guest contributor Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.

The folks over at eSnips have created a simple website for tracking “Web 2.0″ traffic trends. The website uses Alexa data. I’d love to see someone create a similar website that ranks these Web 2.0 websites (or rather, these ones) by using various other measurements, such as # of backlinks in Technorati and # of mentions on blogs indexed by Technorati.

Editor’s Note: This post was written by guest contributor Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.

On the same day that Walmart launched a competing movie download service and then fell flat on their face over simple browser compatibility issues, Amazon announced an incredibly cool, long rumored new partnership with Tivo.

After several months of rumors, Amazon and TiVo have partnered to make Amazon Unbox content available from user PCs to their broadband-connected TiVo units.

The service hasn’t fully rolled out yet — a few hundred users are testing now. Plan is to roll-out the full service to all consumers by year end. Also, not all TiVo units work for this ( e.g. DirecTV or Comcast) and not all Unbox content either (e.g. Sony and Disney, yet). Other restrictions include: Mac users still can’t watch Amazon Unbox films on their computers, but are able to download them to TiVos; and limits cover two PCs, two TiVos or one of each — PCs can link with two portable devices. Still, this gives Amazon a horse in the race against Apple, which just started selling their Apple TV product. Now both Apple and Amazon have a way of getting their content into your living room even if you don’t have a PC connected to your television.

TiVo owns a coveted spot in millions of living rooms and has terabytes of aggregated viewing data on millions of consumers — when is someone going to wake up and buy? Could you imagine the targeted ads Google could deliver to the TV based on all that mined data? Or does Yahoo / Microsoft want to get that first-mover advantage and have instant ad inventory on the broadband-connected TV?

Editor’s Note: This post was written by guest contributor Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.

Steve Jobs has stepped up to the plate and written an open letter to the music industry in the fight against DRM. We wrote our thoughts on the eventual demise of DRM just last month. Bill Gates gave his own thoughts on DRM back in December.

Despite Apple’s near monopoly on legal digital music sales, he discusses how they got to where they are now with DRM and options moving forward. The record labels then and today demanded protection of their songs — and thus Apple created their internal DRM called FairPlay.

Jobs speaks about how DRM is an ongoing fight — there are a lot of smart people in this world that have spare time on their hands, and like to discover the “secrets” that keep the songs protected. As soon as the DRM is hacked, Apple works to update the DRM by updating the iTunes software, as well as the software found in their hardware devices (iPod). He says that if their DRM is compromised, they have only a few weeks to fix it, or the labels are able to exit their agreement with Apple entirely. Rolling out these security updates is a difficult task with just one company, but if they were to license out their DRM to multiple software and hardware vendors, it’d be a nightmare — this is not an option that Apple will consider.

Another option is continuing the same course — software/hardware vendors writing their own DRM and consumers purchasing songs that only work in certain software/hardware. He brings up that Microsoft decided to ditch their own ‘PlaysForSure’ DRM technology and create a brand new (proprietary) one for their Zune.

The third option that comes as a bit of a shocker is Jobs promoting DRM-free music. He discusses how 90 million iPods have been purchased and 2 billion songs — equating to an average of 22 songs per person on iPods that hold 1000 songs. Internal research at Apple shows that the average iPod is full — meaning that only 3% of songs on an iPod are DRM-protected, with the remaining 97% unprotected (ripped audio CDs; illegally downloaded tracks).

Jobs discusses how 90% of record label sales revenue comes from the billions of CDs sold — CDs that are not DRM-protected (consumers can go home and rip their CDs). In 2006, 2 billion songs were sold DRM-protected, while 20 billion were sold unprotected (as audio CDs).

He makes a good point — and he likely feels Apple could sell more digital music than the mere 3% that occupy iPods, by selling unprotected songs. The question on everyone’s minds is whether the music industry would sell more than the 20 billion total songs in a year if they opened the DRM-free floodgates online. Emusic has been the poster-child for the DRM-free sales of straight MP3s by the Indie labels. Amie Street is another model we like.

Editor’’s Note: This post was written by guest contributor Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.

In a quirky move, Amazon.com has launched their own independent shoe and handbag niche website, Endless.com. Shoes and handbags will still be available on Amazon.

Endless really hides the fact that Amazon owns them — you have to dig into their ‘About Us‘ page, and even then you won’t see Amazon.com’s logo. Amazon.com offers an API that allows etailers/developers to integrate customer reviews of Amazon.com products, but this isn’t even integrated into Endless — here is a shoe on Amazon.com with 9 customer reviews, but 0 reviews on Endless.com for the same shoe.

The only other noticeable Amazon associations are that the product images are hosted at Amazon.com and Endless is powered by Amazon.com, meaning you login with your Amazon account information.

The Endless website provides an enhanced browsing experience for shoe buying, compared to what Amazon.com does. For example, the visual search is real nice — you can keep refining your search by price, style, color, size, or brand. Endless.com’s search experience reminds me a bit of Like.com’s browsing experience. Endless.com’s focus is on free overnight shipping — they have a countdown clock on every page letting you know the next delivery date.

The question is — did Amazon really need to launch an entirely new brand for this new shoes/handbags shopping experience? I understand people are use to the consistency of the standard Amazon.com shopping experience, but what about launching an enhanced shopping experience option in each product category on Amazon.com ? Or maybe Endless was launched with this focus on free overnight shipping and thus it’ll expand to carry as much from Amazon.com that would allow for free overnight delivery — however, the Endless logo clearly specifies shoes and handbags, so I doubt this will be the case.

Amazon.com has been diversifying their business lately into a variety of initiatives that seem to branch away from their core competency. Endless seems to be more in-line with their core — will it be the first of an endless list of niche websites they launch in an effort to improve (”web 2.0′ing”) the buying experience for each of their product lines?

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor.

Microsoft’s latest operating system, Vista, which went on sale to corporate customers November 30 — can not run the latest version of Microsoft’s corporate database product, MS SQL Server. Microsoft is working on a SQL Server upgrade (SQL Server 2005 Express Service Pack 2), but it’s in beta and available for testing purposes only.

Last month I commented on the lack of internal talks at Microsoft, discussing how their Zune device isn’t compatible with Vista — TechCrunch commenters felt this didn’t matter, considering the consumer release of Vista was months away and that “Microsoft probably does not give a sh*t that some twelve year old cannot use Zune on his pirated copy of Vista yet.” Fair enough. But Vista not working with their corporate database product, SQL Server? That’s not smart for a company trying to grab their piece of the $14 billion database pie.

Update: I should have better researched this prior to posting. Business 2.0 broke the story and their article simply references “the current version of SQL Server,” but they were merely referring to “MS SQL Server 2005 Express.” Given that’s the case — this isn’t a gift to Oracle or IBM, and this shouldn’t have any effect on Microsoft’s position in the database market. My apologies for this.

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor. Steve is the founder and web strategy consultant for Vested Ventures, a firm specializing in website consulting, internet marketing, and high-end custom web development.

Google has entered the domain business with partners GoDaddy and eNom. An already crowded industry, Google has begun allowing people to register ‘.com’, ‘.net’, ‘.biz’, and ‘.info’ Web site addresses. Web sites that register their domains directly with Google for $10/year will automatically be setup to use Google Apps for Your Domain, which includes Google’s Page Creator (for easily making a Web site), Calendar, Email, and IM.

With this move, look for Google to tap more into the domain parking business using their Google AdSense for Domains product a bit more. I’d also imagine their Blogger product will integrate this announcement and allow you to easily setup a blog with your own domain for $10/year.

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor. Steve is the founder and web strategy consultant for Vested Ventures, a firm specializing in website consulting, internet marketing, and high-end custom web development.

As 2006 closes in, my favorite web service of the year is MyBlogLog. Despite Yahoo! acquisition rumors a few weeks ago, the company is still privately-held. If I were in the web M&A business, they’d top my list along with music social networking service Last.fm.

MyBlogLog has built the next generation social networking service. If Friendster/MySpace/etc are v1.0 of social networking websites, this is v2.0. The service has created a distributed social networking platform — allowing websites and blogs to enable social networking amongst their community of visitors.

Today, MyBlogLog has added support for MySpace profile pages. This is a way for them to infiltrate the MySpace market. MySpace pretty much offers what MyBlogLog has, except MyBlogLog has 2 things MySpace lacks:

1. MyBlogLog will show you who recently visited your webpage (only other MyBlogLog users) — this comes in handy for the curious cats that like to know who’s viewing their profile.
2. MyBlogLog is a distributed social networking system that allows you to communicate with not just users of MySpace, but users visiting thousands of other blogs/websites on the web.

How it works is that you create an account with MyBlogLog, grab a snippet of code, place that code in your MySpace profile, and then you can see what other MyBlogLog users visit your website.

The only qualm I have with the MyBlogLog service is the company name — it pigeon holes their business to blogs. In all reality, they should have partners such as NHL.com, NYTimes, and Slashdot — websites with communities of users that would love to learn more about each other and message each other. In my opinion, every website should have MyBlogLog — it allows your users to interact with one-another and builds community. I’m waiting to hear about the first marriage that happens as a result of MyBlogLog enabling two users to meet each other on a website that both had regularly visited for years, but never had a means of learning about each other (or other visitors of that website).

A couple months ago, I exchanged messages through MyBlogLog with CEO Scott Rafer, whom told me they have been looking for an alternative domain — do you have a suggestion Scott and his team?

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor. Steve is the founder and web strategy consultant for Vested Ventures, a firm specializing in website consulting, internet marketing, and high-end custom web development.

NYC-based Indeed.com, a niche search engine, has announced a partnership to power Mamma Careers. I’ll be the first to admit, this specific instance isn’t big news, but they are on a partnering spree, alongside their primary competitor, SimplyHired. SimplyHired powers MySpace Jobs, as well as LinkedIn Jobs (to name a couple). Both Indeed and SimplyHired are securing as many partnerships as possible to power the job search functionality on various websites. Employers can submit URLs to job listings, but can’t directly post jobs on Indeed or SimplyHired — that is still left to the established job sites including Yahoo’s HotJobs (insert link here), Monster.com, and CareerBuilder (insert link here).

Newspapers have long been the place to go for jobs — then the job sites (and Craigslist) popped up to provide an online version of the same service electronically. Now specific vertical job search engines (including Google Base) have evolved to aggregate and index job postings from online listings.

Enter social networking. The next evolution of online job searching would seem to be within social networking websites where users could refer friends to a job. As of now, Facebook and Friendster don’t have job searches yet. Look for partnerships in the future.

Jobster is a start-up that is heavily funded and focusing on adding some social networking aspects to the job hunt process. Another stealth start-up looking to “revolutionize” the online job search is itzBig, which we are told is backed by an investment bank and is being run by CEO Hank Stringer (founder of Hire.com) and Chairman Jim Hammock (former CEO/Chairman of Hire.com).

Online job websites have been around for 10 years now — they haven’t made much change since originally launching to improve the process of candidates looking for jobs, and recruiters looking for candidates. Recruiters have to paw through tons of resumes (that lack format consistency), and candidates have to search through multi-level marketing scams and other spam.

In all honesty, finding a job online sucks. Indeed and SimplyHired have taken it to the next level by aggregating all jobs into one search, but I want to see a company come out and eHarmony-ize the job market. Make it so candidates go through a 15- to 30-minute application process that might include various tests related to their claimed skillsets. Allow recruiters to specify what skillsets are required and make them somehow rank the importance of the required skillsets.

I’d also like to see some social networking aspects along the lines of LinkedIn — allow people to refer their friends to jobs. Yahoo! could integrate HotJobs with their 360 service. Monster.com could integrate with the Facebook API to add some social networking. IAC has put a hault on acquisitions, but a jobs website seems like a good addition to their extensive consumer portfolio — their own Ask.com search engine doesn’t offer a vertical job search. Possibly an Indeed or SimplyHired acquisition?

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor. Steve is the founder and web strategy consultant for Vested Ventures, a firm specializing in website consulting, internet marketing, and high-end custom web development.

Maybe my “Microsoft’s Entertainment Domination” theory was a bit premature. Apparently, the Zune MP3 player isn’t flying off shelves and now it turns out that the Zune is incompatible with Microsoft’s latest Windows Vista operating system. Amazing how a disconnect like this can occur within an organization. Software start-ups are taking advantage of the lowered development costs and the speedy development time — and forcing large software organizations to speed up their own development cycles, but in the process, the large organizations are fumbling to communicate effectively amongst their departments.

A disconnect is happening over at Google as well. Their policy of allowing employees to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them, mixed with rapid headcount growth, and pressure from Wall Street to keep up their impressive growth, has led to an obvious lack of conversations internally.

Last month, Sergey Brin began leading an initiative at Google focused on “Features, not products,” because the 50+ products in various development stages available at Google.com were beginning to lead to user confusion. One of Google’s top priorities is trying to replace desktop applications with web-based applications and tap into Microsoft’s $12 billion annual revenue stream from Office-related software. That initiative started with Gmail (for email), and has led to Google Docs (formerly Writely), Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheets, and the rumored GDrive (for file storage, code-named “Platypus“). But if I’m pulling reports from Google Analytics, Google AdSense, or Google AdWords, I can only export them to Excel — not save (or open) directly into Google Spreadsheets. If I’m in Gmail, any ‘.doc’ attachments should open in Google Docs — they don’t currently.

Thanks to Eric Nagel for the Google observation.

Forget the fact that Microsoft is being overshadowed by Google and that Google is looking like the 800lb gorilla beating down Microsoft. Microsoft has other plans they’ve been working on — plans that have been really coming together the past few weeks and that quite frankly, I’m sitting here in amazement.

Earlier this week, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 division announced partnerships with CBS, MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures, Turner Broadcasting, UFC and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment to “Digitally Deliver TV Shows and Movies to Gamers.” This is Microsoft’s first move into digital movie and TV show sales — and is also another move towards turning their Xbox gaming system into a full-fledged digital entertainment system (note: they want to become the center of your living room). These digital movie and TV show partnerships for their Xbox 360 unit, will likely turn into sales through their future digital media sales service Zune.com and playback on their upcoming handheld Zune device. Xbox 360 up until this announcement has only let users download select music videos and movie trailers. Last week, Microsoft sent a major update to Xbox 360 consoles that now allows users to now stream video from a PC or portable device (note: their handheld Zune device has wireless capabilities built-in) — previously, only users with Windows XP Media Center Edition installed could stream video to the Xbox 360.

Last week, Microsoft launched the website for their handheld digital music/video player Zune, which comes out next week (November 14) — Microsoft is taking on Apple’s iPod with their Zune device. And less than 2 weeks ago, Microsoft launched the latest version of their Windows Media Player (WMP), version 11, which takes over for Windows Media Connect and allows users to manage connections for sharing media (between PC, Xbox 360, Zune) within the new WMP player. One shocker is that Zune is not using Microsoft’s own “PlaysForSure” framework that other digital music etailers and manufacturers embraced (Napster, Musicmatch, Wal-Mart, URGE, MSN, FYE, etc) since Apple has not let etailers sell to iPod owners (due to Apple’s proprietary DRM, which DVD Jon recently cracked) and Apple has not let other manufacturers make devices that can work with iTunes-purchased media. Zune will be proprietary as well (like the iPod) and won’t be allowing etailers to get their media on it — Zune will not support PlaysForSure.

Since September, Apple has been selling movies online via iTunes, which iTunes at the time had 40-60 million copies of their software installed on user machines. Less than a week after launch, Apple announced $1mm in digital movie sales (125k purchases).

What does all of this mean? Microsoft has a serious strategy to dominate digital entertainment. Microsoft already has a very successful gaming console (Xbox 360) that allows users to play games, watch movies, buy movies, buy TV shows, stream video from their computer, stream music from their computer, and I’m sure buying music from URGE is in the gameplan — not to mention the social networking features that allow Xbox 360 users (and maybe Zune users, considering the wi-fi built-in?) to chat with each other in games, send messages to each other, add users to their friends list, etc.

The other device that has entered millions of homes over the years is the DVR. Microsoft has already been using DVR-related technology in their Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 operating system (OS). In fact, if you own this OS, you can login to Microsoft’s online TV listing guide and setup their MSN Remote Record service, which then allows you to browse TV listings from any computer and click a button that will set a TV program to record to your home PC. I’d guess that in the future, there will be an accessory for my Xbox 360 that plugs into one of the Xbox 360 USB ports, hooking my cable TV into my Xbox 360, and allowing me to easily record TV shows to my Xbox 360 (note to self: short TIVO).

Apple may have millions of users using iTunes and millions of owners of iPods, but they lack a gaming console (which PriceWaterhouseCoopers predicts the gaming market will be $54.6 billion by 2009), they lack a DVR unit, and they won’t let manufacturers and etailers sell to their users. Currently, Apple’s strategy for getting into your living room is the anticipated iTV, which is rumored to be a set-top box for your TV and will allow you to stream movies, TV shows, and music from your iTunes software. Apple is also planning to sell basic games through iTunes, which iPod owners will be able to play. Could there be a gaming console (Nintendo WII? Sony Playstation 3?) purchase or partnership in the future for Apple? Could there be an Apple purchase of TiVo? (note to self: long TIVO)

This strategy by Microsoft is impressive and we’ll begin seeing how it all plays out over the next couple months of the holiday season — as buyers put up their money for an Apple iPod or a Microsoft Zune and/or Xbox 360.

No plans this week? Or, ever found yourself with an extra ticket to a concert or sporting event, but didn’t have anyone to go with? In the past, your solution was wading through Craigslist postings or calling all your friends. Well now there are two web-based services that allow you to find others to do things with — Who’s Going and MatchActivity.

Who’s Going is the one that impressed me the most, although it lacks users and activities (they just recently soft-launched). The site is simple and very well thought out. The business model works like this: Posting activities are free and then people that “want to go” to an activity, pay an amount ($1 as of this writing) if they are chosen — if you aren’t chosen, you get your money back. Thus, if I had 1 extra ticket to a concert, I could post (for free) that I have a ticket and ask who wants to go — I might get 4 responders (who each put up $1 to Who’s Going). I then go through their profiles and choose who I want to go with — that person’s $1 goes to Who’s Going and the other 3 people get their $1 back. Note: Your friends can apply/attend for free. The site has social networking features — allowing you to browse profiles, add friends, message people, add people as favorites (to learn of any activities they post), post photos to your profile (people can comment on them if they are a friend), and post photos/comments to actual activities. They also provide widgets that you can embed in your blog or MySpace profile to promote a specific event or all your events.

There’s not much more to say about this site – I love it. It just needs users and activities. I encourage you to go post an activity and use ‘TC’ in the title somewhere, so you can connect with some fellow TechCrunch readers in your area. So go ahead and find a TC activity or post an activity — a poker game, or a happy hour gathering, or fishing. Who’s Going is founded, coded, and designed by John Wehr. He is also the developer of the (now stagnant) Tagalag, which we profiled last year.

MatchActivity has a dating spin to it — focused on finding activity partners for singles (but anyone can respond to any activity, whether they’re seeking a male or female). By becoming a premium member ($7.99/month, but free as of this writing — everyone is a premium member), you achieve 3 things: 1) You are able to post Private Activities that only go out to buddy’s in the system that you select; 2) You can send specific 1-on-1 invites to other members; and 3) You get 3 points added to your Reliability Rating (no other info found on this, but it seems to speak for itself — people likely rate your reliability in actually attending activities).

What I like about MatchActivity is that you can post an activity OR an availability — that way I could say that I’m available Thursday night, list some interests, maybe post a few ideas, and see if someone wants to do something. I also like that it has Activity Ideas — this lists upcoming events in cities (only 3 cities as of this writing – LA, NYC, SF – and about 5 ideas in each; but there’s potential here for an automated system where restaurants/bars/sporting events/concerts could post their own activity and be a featured Activity Idea). To spark some more “activity” on the site (no pun intended), I would integrate more Activity Ideas, possibly from the Eventful API (as Who’s Going is planning to do). I also like their ‘temporary zip code’ function, which allows a user to specify a different city they will be traveling to in the future, and thus open to activities in that location — this is somewhat similar to a feature that Google’s dodgeball.com service has (you switch your city, so that friends in that city know your whereabouts). The one thing that needed some clarification was the search — I wasn’t sure whether to input a zip code or city name, and it only provides listings within 50 miles (no option to change the distance). I also didn’t go through an activity post, but I’m hoping they have their Reliability Rating implemented, allowing users to rate their activity experience with the other person — this lacks in Who’s Going and could likely become an important feature for these sites (much like eBay’s rating system). Who’s Going feels social transactions are much harder to quantify (”I thought he was a dork”), than financial transactions (”He didn’t ship the package”) and is hoping that users will comment on each other’s profiles to demonstrate a relationship — i.e. “Hey, I had a great time!”

It’s tough to say whether either of these sites will make it — they need participation. The widget offerings by Who’s Going could virally spread the word a bit faster. I believe the simplicity and focus of these sites could allow them to take-off — I definitely feel there’s a need for this. It should be noted though that there’s a ton of indirect competition from “social event sites.” Friendster-founder Jonathan Abram’s long-awaited Socializr is a prospective competitor (but still yet to publicly launch). Others in the event space include Yahoo’s Upcoming.org, Zvents, $7.5m funded Eventful, $3m funded Renkoo, Skobee, Involver, Israel-based ILCU, Boston-based HeyLetsGo, Weekendr, MySpace Events, and not so much MeetUp, which typically holds regularly scheduled gatherings on specific topics.

We briefly profiled MatchActivity back in July, along with 12 other online dating sites.

More from John Wehr regarding Who’s Going:

Who’s Going was designed from the ground up to help its users meet new people. In comparison, MySpace and Evite events are targeted to friends you already know. Eventful and Upcoming.org are largely event listings – you probably wouldn’t find someone to go to an event with.

Who’s Going’s functionality is more like Craigslist or a dating site. As an aside, MatchActivity.com has a similar model and targets the dating market exclusively.

The (Whosgoing.com) site is designed and tested in an effort to cater to a broad audience and to be nimble enough to meet the demands of its users. The project was bootstrapped and developed with a long term perspective.

Steve Poland is the founder and web strategy consultant for Vested Ventures, a firm specializing in website consulting, internet marketing, and high-end custom web development. He can be reached by email via steve@vestedventures.com.

Google Accounts were integrated into dodgeball.com — a company Google acquired back in May 2005 that allows users with cell phones to notify their friends via text messages (SMS) as to what bar or restaurant they currently are at (and thus where their friends can meet them for a drink).

Earlier this week, Google Mobile, which is Google’s search engine for cell phones, revealed public testing of Google Ads in their search results. Google is obviously getting all their ducks in a row as they get serious about tackling local advertising and expanding their advertising services to other platforms, particularly mobile devices. dodgeball.com is the perfect service for both local and national advertisers to get in front of people at the point of purchase (whether it’s beer, liquor, local bar happy hour specials, or local Italian restaurants).

Since purchasing the company, Google has done relatively nothing with dodgeball.com, other than provide it with its own 5-digit SMS shortcode. Prior to the shortcode, they were operating using cell phone email addresses, which is a cost-effective (free!) method that a mobile-based start-up can use to get off the ground. Alternatively, text messages being sent through a SMS gateway can cost a mobile-based company anywhere from $0.03 – $0.05 per inbound (”MO”, mobile originated) and outbound (”MT”, mobile terminated) text message. Unfortunately, most users don’t understand that they can send/receive emails as text messages using their cell phone and only incur standard text messaging fees, without any added data fees from their cell carrier. I believe the high costs required for a company to operate a standard 5-digit SMS code has attributed to why the U.S. has lagged in mobile text messaging adoption behind Europe and Japan. I am unsure of how many cell phone models and cell carriers can send/receive emails as standard text messages, but would sure be curious to know.

Marshall Kirkpatrick reviewed a number of other SMS services last month.

More on this story at TailRank and a very interesting post by Chris Messina.

Google’s momentum was echoed publicly by both Microsoft and Yahoo today. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, stated that Google is making it difficult for them to recruit top talent. Also, in a move to likely earmark more dollars towards acquisitions, Microsoft increased their research and development budget for 2007 to $7.5 billion, which is $1.3 billion more than they stated in May. Update: Reuters just corrected its original report – $7.5 billion has in fact always been the 2007 allocation, the $6.2 billion number was last year’s R&D budget.

Yahoo made an acquisition and an investment today, which didn’t overshadow the fact that their quarterly profits took a 38% decline. They acknowledged that they face increased competition for online advertising dollars and thus announced plans to further invest in social media, Internet video and mobile access. Last month, Yahoo was reportedly in talks to acquire social networking website Facebook for $1 billion, but those talks went cold with speculation that Facebook is holding out for a higher offer.

Google’s recent YouTube acquisition is just the latest in a series of stings to both Microsoft and Yahoo, leaving many to wonder whether they can compete with Google in the future. Google is everyone’s darling right now — companies would rather be acquired by them (News Corp. sent a letter to YouTube seeking to start talks, but never received a response) and individuals would rather be hired by them (Google recently nabbed Yahoo India’s CTO).

On the day of the Google/YouTube acquisition, YouTube announced a licensing deal with Universal Music. Apparently, Grouper and Bolt.com didn’t get the memo. Universal Music has come out swinging in their first online video-related lawsuit against two of the lesser-known online video sharing websites, Bolt.com and Sony’s recent acquisition, Grouper.

The lawsuit takes aim at the websites’ ability for users to swap pirated versions of its’ musicians videos and seeks as much as $150,000 for each incident of copyright infringement.

Bolt.com operates much like YouTube, allowing users to only view Flash versions of the videos in their web browser without any ability to copy the video to their physical computer. Shutdown Bolt.com or remove any materials from the website, and they are no longer accessible by anyone. Alternatively, Grouper users can download the videos to their computer, iPod, or PSP. Thus, similar to how the old Napster operated with music, if a user downloaded a physical copy of a Grouper video to their computer, then the user will be able to view it indefinitely, even if Grouper were to shut down or remove the videos from Grouper.com.

Surprisingly, other websites weren’t mentioned in this lawsuit. Metacafe is larger than both Grouper and Bolt.com (according to Alexa data) and a search for Universal Music artist Mariah Carey resulted in several music videos of her, along with a pre-roll video advertisement for CareerBuilder. Another that wasn’t named in the lawsuit is Guba, which has blatant copyright infringement occurring on their website as a result of their indexing pirated videos from Usenet. Despite teaming with the MPAA and supposedly cracking down on piracy with software called “Johnny,” users can easily view tons of music videos on Guba’s website or download them to their computer, iPod, or PSP. A search on Guba for Universal Music artist Mary J. Blige, returned several of her music videos.

According to comScore, Bolt.com had 8.1 million unique visitors in August and Grouper had 1.8 million — whereas YouTube had 72.1 million.

LinkedIn, a social networking website primarily focused on business connections has added a section to their site that allows users to recommend service providers — a yellow pages based on user referrals. From web designers to doctors, users rate service providers in a thumbs up, thumbs down voting system similar to Digg.

LinkedIn has continued to gain members, increasing membership to 7.7 million as of September. Their specific focus has allowed them to compete with MySpace and Facebook’s younger audiences, as well as start-up CollectiveX and the ailing Friendster.

Idealab-founded InsiderPages.com has been amassing their own yellow pages that relies on the user community to provide rants and recommendations on businesses — ditto with start-up Judy’s Book. Yelp, which just raised another $10 million this month, is doing similar with restaurants and shopping, but their next logical step would be service providers. IAC-owned Citysearch is the “old dog” in this category, focusing on restaurant and shopping recommendations, but also has many service provider categories that just aren’t featured very well.

There are 23 million businesses in the U.S. and by 2010, local businesses are estimated to spend $10 billion in online advertising. Yellow page print books might seem archaic and wasteful to the tech-savvy, but they are still widely used and the industry is valued at more than $26 billion worldwide ($14 billion in the U.S.).

We wrote earlier about News Corp’s unease with the Google-YouTube acquisition. For the last few weeks News Corp has been engaging in a one-sided PR war with YouTube – from News Corp. COO Peter Chernin’s recent comments that 60-70% of YouTube traffic comes from MySpace (YouTube says this is incorrect and that MySpace only refers about 5% of total video traffic to YouTube) to Wall Street Journal articles that state News Corp. made a last ditch effort to acquire YouTube before the Google deal closed. Given the importance of video clips (both user generated and copyrighted works), News Corp. is uneasy that their biggest competitor is also their biggest source of revenue on MySpace.

This weekend, a subtle change occurred on MySpace’s homepage and MySpace user pages that makes MySpace Videos much more prominent and accessible. The top-left of the homepage now has 4 videos that entice users to start viewing videos at MySpace. The user profile pages now have a section called Video Space that automatically displays a video if the user has one uploaded. Under the video in the Video Space, viewers have the option of adding the video to their profile, just like users can currently add music from any of the MySpace Music artists to their profile – further individualizing themselves. Viewers also have the option of commenting on the video with text remarks (YouTube allows both text and video comments).

These changes should have a significant effect on the MySpace video usage. Until now, MySpace hasn’t really focused on engaging users to use their video service. Users that didn’t know about MySpace Video will almost certainly see it now. Plus, MySpace Video is so easy now — users upload their videos and the videos automatically appear on their MySpace profile page; whereas with YouTube, you have to upload the video, grab the HTML embed code, and paste that somewhere in your MySpace profile.

MySpace could at anytime block YouTube videos from displaying on MySpace user profiles (just as they blocked javascript and outbound linking in flash widgets) — forcing users to use the MySpace video upload system. Of course that wouldn’t come without risk — a backlash from users could occur, similar to what Facebook recently experienced. Given that MySpace users have invested so much time in creating their profiles and building up their friends lists, the majority of MySpace users would likely end up using MySpace’s video system, rather than jumping ship for an alternative social networking website.

According to recent HitWise metrics based on market share of visits, YouTube is the #1 online video website with 45.46% market share and MySpace.com Videos is #2 with 22.99%. Whereas comScore reports that MySpace is #1 based on video streams and unique users.

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor. Steve is the founder and web strategy consultant for Vested Ventures, a firm specializing in website consulting, internet marketing, and high-end custom web development. We hope to have Steve write for us on a regular basis.