SpotCrime is a mashup that plots recent criminal activity onto Google Maps, allowing users to shy away from seedier parts of towns they may not be familiar with. The company has offered a website for a few months now, and has just introduced an iPhone version (annoyingly, you have to manually navigate to http://www.spotcrime.com/iphone.php).

Crimes are depicted as small icons according to the type of incident, and users can filter crimes over a certain date range or time period. Clicking on an icon brings up more detailed information (when available). The site currently supports only a select number of (mostly large) cities, but it says that it is expanding quickly.

SpotCrime draws approximately 90% of its data from local police records, and, in cities where that information isn’t released, they gather it from local news sources. While most of this involves data scraping, SpotCrime says there there is still a human element required - something that will become increasingly problematic as the company grows. Incidents typically take 3-24 hours to show up in the system, so SpotCrime isn’t useful for avoiding crimes in progress. It does, however, provide a nice visual representation of criminal activity.

SpotCrime says that they are offering the service as a free tool to both police stations and the general population. While it’s hard to believe that the police don’t already know about the rougher areas of town, the visual overlays could conceivably held them identify trends. Other potential applications of the data include real estate evaluation, and (for more paranoid users) “safe” driving routes mapped by GPS.

SpotCrime isn’t the first site to do this - you can find similar offerings at The LA Times Homicide Map, UniversalHub, and a number of others. But most of these sites are regional, and SpotCrime is intent on cataloging cities across the country - something that will be hard to do unless they can find a way to fully automate their system.

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Flock, the so-called “social browser” built on top of Mozilla technology, has raised $15 million in a Series D round led by Fidelity Ventures and joined by Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, and Shasta Ventures.

The round (the company’s biggest) more than doubles its total to over $28 million, an amount that has been gradually raised over the past three years even though Flock 1.0 launched only this past November.

CEO Shawn Hardin speaks about Flock’s mission in very sweeping terms: enabling users to express themselves, participate in online communities, have voices, and engage their peers. As he sees it, the web is experiencing a paradigm shift from consumption to participation, and it needs a new type of browser to go along with that shift.

Flock is basically a suite of browser extensions with ties into web services like Facebook and Twitter. A personalized homepage called MyWorld and a special sidebar serve as feed readers and friend update aggregators. You’re given quick access to Gmail and Yahoo webmail accounts and any blogs that you administer. And a media bar along the top makes for quick searching on Flickr, YouTube, and other social media sites.

When asked whether regular browser extensions pose much competition for Flock, Hardin suggests that very few people actually enjoy personalizing things enough to set up the breadth of functionality provided by Flock. Plus, Flock already has a proven revenue model where these do not; it earns money the same way Mozilla does, through search placement deals with the engines (Yahoo and a few others in Flock’s case).

Almost 4 million people have downloaded Flock, and users are said to use it for over 4 hours per day on average.

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On Thursday and Friday (July 10-11) before this year’s Foo Camp in Sebastopol July 11-13, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures will be hosting OATV Startup Camp for 6-8 startups.

The camp will focus on fundraising, PR and viral marketing, working with investors/directors, and other issues relevant to running a young company. There are a number of discussion leaders that will be participating: Caterina Fake (tentative), Mark Fletcher, Marc Hedlund, Howard Morgan and Evan Williams. I’ll also be there, focusing on press strategies for startups. Sessions will be led by 2 startup veterans/leaders in a roundtable discussion on topics important to founders.

Application details are at the main site for the event. And good news - participating companies get to stick around for Foo Camp, which occurs right afterwards. There’s more information about the event here. Applications are due by June 6, 2008.

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We’re fast approaching our super fun CrunchNetwork Prague Meet-up and getting ready for the big night. We’re going to have some surprises coming up so watch this space but until then feel free to RSVP by email or on Facebook.

Remember the event is on Friday, May 23, 2008 from 7pm until ?? at Restaurace Zvonařka.

The program will be fairly basic but I’m planning an elevator pitch face-off, allowing 10 start-ups the chance to do a 2 minute presentation to the entire audience using limited tools. We’ll then pick the best pitch and that team will get an as-yet-to-be-undetermined really great prize (think Macbook). If you’re interested in participating, please contact Jack DeNeut at jack @ nelso dot com.

Start-up folks: If you have something you want to discuss with me for consideration on TechCrunch, MobileCrunch, or CrunchGear, please have a paper presentation handy with a detailed description of your project — powerpoint and business plans are right out. Consider creating a press-release for the event that I can read over and discuss with you later this month.

Special thanks to all these sponsors:

Nelso - Multi-language local search for Europe

Geewa - Multiplayer games for PC and mobile

Newstin - Connecting people through news to create global communities
of interest

Wirenode - Simple-to-use tools that allow anyone to create a mobile website

GoodData - A complete, on-demand business intelligence platform

Ataxo - More from your SEM campaigns!

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Jingle Networks has already captured a six percent market share of directory assistance calls with its 1-800-Free411 service. But, with IPO rumors swirling, that might not be a big enough business. What if Jingle expanded into a voice ad network? I have learned that it is preparing to do just that. Confirms CEO George Garrick:

At this point I’d call it the Jingle Ad Network. We have advertisers that want to get into more environments, and have technology to serve ads. We are talking to publishers about acquiring enough inventory to be significant. We are starting to sign deals with companies that have large numbers of calls. I imagine it will be a few months yet before we bring anything live, probably later in the third or fourth quarter.

Today, Jingle offers free directory assistance calls in exchange for playing two audio ads, one before the caller asks for the number and one before the number is given. Its Free411 service gets 20 million calls a month. That is 40 million advertising opportunities a month. Not every call can be matched with an ad, but a very large number can. Already, Jingle has more than 150,000 advertisers, many of them local. National advertisers include McDonald’s, Earthlink, AMC Theaters, FordDirect, Allstate, Cablevision, Columbia House, Days Inn, Miller Brewing Company, and Travelodge. Its top categories include stores, restaurants, banks, and doctor’s offices.

Jingle can use the call volume and ad inventory on Free411 as an anchor for a broader voice ad network. Any information line, movie line, or call center could hook into the ad network to lay ads while people are on hold. Most companies look at their call centers as a cost center. Being able to generate one to two cents per call in revenue would be significant for many companies. And as voice apps take off on the Web, that could present another opportunity, although Garrick says the call volume is not there yet. As with any ad network, it is a numbers game. The more call volume Jingle can fill with ads, the better its economics.

Does this mean, Jingle is preparing for an IPO. Garrick doesn’t rule it out. He says:

We expect to become profitable before the end of this year. If we look at the public markets, it won’t be until next year.

Jingle is not the first company to try to do this. Already, it faces competition from startup VoodooVox, which is building its own voice 2.0 ad network. VoodooVox claims that it currently powers 320 million ad-supported calls per month, and reaches 30 million consumers. But Jingle does have a leg up in that it already generates a lot of ad inventory on its own, and it is expanding its own free ad-supoprted calls to include driving directions, weather, and other information services.

Of course, there is always the specter of Google, which offers its own free Google411 directory assistance service. Google411 does not even have ads yet, and is treated more like a research project to test voice recognition algorithms. But Google could jump on the voice advertising train any time it wants.

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A group of Swedes has grown tired of emailing documents around when they need editing help. So they’ve formed a company called TextFlow that’s working on a Google Docs competitor of sorts.

Their Flash-based product is still in a very early stage, and there’s quite a bit of discrepancy between what they’ve built so far in private beta, and their vision as laid out in a demonstration video (click through to it from their homepage).

But eventually, authors will be able to drag Word documents right into the browser where they’ll get automatically ported into TextFlow. Once there, they’ll be shareable via email and editable by collaborators. All changes will show up in the original author’s view of the document as suggested changes, which can then be approved or rejected.

If you’ve already received multiple copies of Word document with changes from different editors, you’ll also be able to drag them into TextFlow and have the program automatically combine them into one file with suggested changes.

TextFlow’s certainly not the first company to help users collaborate on documents, and like other similarly-focused startups, it faces an uphill against Google and Microsoft. But it sure looks pretty, doesn’t it?

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Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is now giving the closing keynote at the Advance08 Conference in Redmond, Washington. The big news is Live Search Cashback, announced earlier. The live stream began at about 10:30 am PST.

A big part of the keynote is about applying logic to searches to help determine intent. The main types of search: entertainment, commerce and reference (and navigation). Microsoft’s strategy is to try to simplify key tasks and innovate in the business model. The focus right now is on commercial search.

Commerce represents about a third or all searches, but the “dominant” share of revenue from search advertising. It’s a “very big part of the $20 billion search market.” Microsoft cites eMarketer: U.S. online retail is projected to grow to $335 billion by 2012, and today 68 percent of all those retail transactions begin at a search engine. This translates to 3.7 billion commerce-related queries a month.

Live Search Cashback is today’s announcement around commerce search. Gates says to expect big announcements around search every six months going forward. 2008 is the year, he says, that people will look back and say that search got competitive.

Gates concluded at 11 am, and Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group, took the stage to talk about Live Search Cashback from a product perspective.

Update: Our complete analysis of Live Search Cashback is here.

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More details on Steven Spielberg’s upcoming ghost and UFO based social network, which we first wrote about in early March and followed up with additional details a week later. The site will reportedly be called “Rising” or “The Rising” (our understanding is that they have acquired both .com domain names), and the logo above and animated logo below are at least preliminary versions of the final.

We originally heard that The Rising is being created in partnership with Windsor Media, Terry Semel’s investment firm, but we still haven’t gotten confirmation of their involvement. Windsor was created by Semel before he went to Yahoo, was put on hold during his tenure there, and fired up again after his departure last year.

The Rising will have original video content with a permanent host in addition to the social network where users can share stories and experiences, tapping into serious demand for this kind of thing. There are thousands of forums dedicated to paranormal and UFO topics today - among them is, yes, a Meetup site for ghost trackers.

Rumored launch date is this summer.

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Meet SmallWorlds, a free browser-based 3D virtual world that integrates YouTube, Flickr, and a number of other Web 2.0 services. The site is aimed at the teen and adult markets, and is designed to be more casual than Second Life. SmallWorlds will be entering a public beta on June 2, but the first 1000 users to register herewill be able to start using the site on May 26.
Update: The first 1000 TechCrunch readers to send a request to techcrunch@smallworlds.com will get an invite within the next 12 hours.

SmallWorlds revolves around a characters’s room, which resembles a house one might find in The Sims. Users can furnish their rooms with TV sets that feature YouTube videos, posters of Flickr photos, Twitter messageboards, and stereos blasting tunes from Last.fm and SeeqPod. Then they can invite their friends over to their rooms, where they can view videos, photos, and songs together - a feature that will likely have mass appeal. The site facilitates meeting up with friends by assigning each room with a unique URL that will immediately transport avatars to their destination.

The site has a lot of potential. The virtual world looks impressive, featuring a 3D isometric perspective and highly customizable avatars. SmallWorlds is also releasing an API that will allow developers to create widgets that can be shared with friends (like games or other media offerings). The site was designed with Flex, and the company says it should work in any browser that supports Flash 9.

Users have been clamoring for a service that lets them view and comment on web media simultaneously, and SmallWorlds’ approach may be ideal for their target audience. We’ve seen a recent wave of similar services from the likes of Userplane and Videophlow, but these are basically just chat windows that sit next to a media viewer - there isn’t any of the interaction you get from a virtual environment.

On the other hand, there are already a number of well-established virtual worlds, including IMVU and Habbo Hotel, which may make it hard for SmallWorlds to gain traction.

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Facebook has invited a group of bloggers and journalists to its offices on Hamilton Street in Palo Alto today to discuss the details of its upcoming profile redesign, which we’re told will launch in a few weeks.

Keep checking in here as I share my notes from the event.

Elliot Schrage has kicked things off by saying today will be more focused on Q&A than the last event, which was about Facebook Chat.

Chamath Palihapitiya, VP of Product Marketing, is discussing the vision behind the profile redesign, and the mini-feed/news feed in particular.

Goals for new design:

• For users: Make profiles cleaner and simpler, give users more control over their profiles, and emphasize recent and relevant information
• For developers: Create more meaningful engagement with users, offer new integration points in profiles, and provide distribution for engaging applications

Going to give developers a beta period to step into sandbox and play with new design, so they’re ready when profile gets rolled out in coming weeks.

New design takes advantage of tabs; goal to split up different types of information, make it simpler to navigate.

The basics: feed, info, photos, boxes, and custom application tabs.

Read the rest of this entry »

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