This is my last post at TechCrunch as a full time writer (I may yet do the occasional guest post). It’s exactly 12 months to the day since I started writing here and the date seemed like a good time to go. I won’t bore you with a self indulgent retrospective; if you are interested in my reasons and thoughts I did a podcast with my old site The Blog Herald yesterday - listen to here.

We cover some amazing startups here at TechCrunch, and for every service we cover there’s probably a dozen we miss as well, given the hyper-inflated nature of the second great web boom. You can appreciate a service without ever actually going on to use it, but the better ones can change the way you interact with the web or run your working day. I thought as this is my last major post here that I’d share some of the services that I actually use. I started using most of them based on posts at TechCrunch, so if you like these turned out to be my practical standouts in the sea of noise.

Evernote

Evernote has completely changed the way I deal with paper (yes, old fashioned paper). Its been described as everything from a scrap collection through to a bookmarking service, but at its core its a database service with industrial strength OCR capabilities. To use, you can clip data or a link, type a note, add a photo (with support for webcams) or scan info in. Everything added can be tagged and indexed, and is searchable via the text within each document, for example a wine label with no other information becomes searchable by every word on the label itself. I scan every paper bill or letter I receive, allowing me to shred/ dispose of them cutting down on the need to file things manually. More importantly it cuts out the need to have to go through my filing cabinet searching for the bill later. The service has a desktop client and web interface, so you have the security of knowing that your scanned documents always have a local copy, but if you’re at another computer or on the go, you can easily access the same data.

See Erick’s review here.
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Allen & Co. Managing Director Dave Wehner is out pitching a LinkedIn venture capital round at a whopping $1 billion valuation, multiple sources say. This is a story we’ve been working on and isn’t fully baked yet, but VentureBeat started speculating about a potential buyout and so we’re going with what we have now.

Wehner is one of the senior guys at Allen & Co. and isn’t new to big deals - he supposedly led the sale of Bebo to AOL for $850 last month on behalf of Allen & Co. If it’s accurate that he’s pitching a LinkedIn round at a $1 billion valuation, it will be one of the most expensive private venture deals in recent history.

Like many investment bank led deals, the rumor is that this started off as an attempt to sell the company and moved to a funding round when there were no takers. Late last year TechCrunch UK reported that News Corp. may have been in talks with LinkedIn around an acquisition in that price range.

To date LinkedIn has raised $27.5 million over three rounds. They have said publicly they will reach $100 million in revenue in 2008.

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Putting a value on private companies is hard enough for insiders and venture capitalists who have full access to the company’s financial statements. When outsiders try to do it, even well-informed ones, it is nothing more than a guessing game. But it is nonetheless perhaps one of Silicon Valley’s favorite parlor activities.

Today, Henry Blodget & Co. at Silicon Alley Insider try to peg valuations on 25 private Web companies. Facebook is at the top of the list, but it is valued at $9 billion instead of the $15 billion that Microsoft’s investment put on the company. Why? Because everyone knows that the $15 billion is too high, so SAI decided to apply a 25X multiple on Facebook’s 2008 revenue forecast of $350 million. Does that make its valuation correct? Probably not. But in the absence of any true market pricing, anyone can go ahead and make a guess.

The same goes for any of the valuations on the SIA 25 list, which puts Wikipedia’s worth at $7 billion, Craigslist’s at $5 billion, Mozilla’s at $4 billion, LinkedIn’s at $1.3 billion, Ning’s at $560 million, RockYou’s at $325 million, and Spot Runner’s at $250 million. Note that three of the top five (Wikipedia, Craigslist, Mozilla) are essentially not-for-profits sitting on very valuable assets. The valuations for those three are based on what they would be worth if they were run differently with an eye towards maximizing revenues—which, of course, could impact how consumers interact with them, which in turn would impact their valuations.

Another 25 startups make up the contenders list, which includes Federated Media ($245 million), Yelp ($225 million), Meebo ($220 million), Mahalo ($150 million), Digg ($125 million), Etsy ($115 million), Powerset ($80 million), and Twitter ($75 million). A full list that changes dynamically every 20 minutes, based on changes in the Nasdaq, can be found here (although, exactly how the valuations are linked to the Nasdaq is never clearly explained)

Some of these valuations have more merit than others. Some have none whatsoever. For instance, SAI gets at its $125 million valuation for Digg by “splitting the difference” between a $200 million buyout rumor we reported and the $60-to-$80 million that Kara Swisher came up with. Splitting the difference between two rumors is not exactly the height of financial analysis.

But what are you gonna do? At least SAI acknowledges that the list is an imperfect work in progress. Don’t get too caught up in the actual numbers. It is more useful really as a starting point to think about relative valuation between different startups. Is Meebo really worth three times as much as Twitter? Is Ning worth as much as Slide? Let the parlor game begin.

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LinkedIn is now offering RSS feeds for network updates.

The feature allows users to track updates and connections across their LinkedIn network via their favorite RSS Reader. For example the feed shows when people in your network connect with other people, make recommendations or update their LinkedIn status.

As Ben Barren points out, it’s a handy way of keeping up to date for those who live in their feed readers “because if its not in my google reader it doesnt exist to me, so now I’ll see what people are doing.”

Access to set up the feed on LinkedIn here.

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Bowing to the inevitable, Microsoft took a big step today towards data portability by announcing that Windows Live contacts can now be exported to social networks and other Websites. Its Windows Live Contacts API will work with Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Taged, and LinkedIn to start. Members of those social networks will be able to import their Windows Live contacts (i.e., their Hotmail address book) so that they can more easily find or invite those people into their social networks. Microsoft is also launching a site, Invite2Messenger, for importing social networking contacts into Windows Live. Right now that only works with Facebook.

Although Microsoft is part of the Data Portability Workgroup, this is a separate effort, confirms a spokesperson. So much for industry standards. But this is an important step in allowing people to take their contacts with them no matter where they reside, whether in their email or social networks. Instead of startups scraping Hotmail to ingest contacts, now they have a legitimate way of doing so.

In a way, this is a bit of a catch-up move. You can already import contacts easily from Gmail into services such as Facebook, Friendfeed and others. Maybe Microsoft had a touch of Gmail envy or were concerned about being left behind. At a certain point, an email service that doesn’t let you export your contacts could really be a damper on your social life elsewhere on the Web.

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LinkedIn, the boring social network that won’t find you a date but may land you a job, is expanding beyond people profiles.

On Friday morning they will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve to reveal the connections that members have with them.

These private pages (you have to be signed in to see them) pull in some information from Capital IQ, a sister company to BusinessWeek, such as company descriptions, industries, types, statuses, headquarter addresses, sizes, founding dates, and websites. Many of the companies to which people belong on LinkedIn, however, aren’t big enough for Capital IQ to recognize them. So the bulk of the data shown on these company pages comes from LinkedIn’s own knowledge of people’s careers.

LinkedIn uses this knowledge to display recent hires, related companies, recent promotions, top locations for employees, and so-called “popular profiles” (people who get lots of profile views and mentions in the press). The data has also been used for company comparison purposes. You can see which companies employees usually come from and leave for, as well as which companies the current employees are most connected to.

Additional features include relevant news articles to a company (first discovered on LinkedIn last December) and personalized job listings.

The company says that it plans to wiki-fy these company profile pages in the next few months, allowing employees to edit company overviews, upload logos, and add other custom modules. Some of the information on these pages will also be distributable via widget.

The addition of company profile pages (which, dare I say, remind me of Facebook network pages) and the plans for more user generated content are good moves for LinkedIn, since the company needs to give users better reasons to return and use the site on a regular basis.

LinkedIn says it attracts one million new users each month and plans to have company profiles for a million companies. The social network has raised $27.5M so far.

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New social network traffic figures released by Compete show that Fubar, billed as the “first online bar and happy hour” is the fastest growing social network, having increased its traffic by 3,272,217% over the 12 months to the end of February 2008, placing the network at 14th on the list of top 20 social networking sites (chart as shown).

Year on year MySpace hasn’t grown at all, managing to lose 1% of traffic compared to Facebook with 77% growth.

The other big gainers year on year include Ning at 4803% (sneaking in to 20th place) and Twitter with 4368%.

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Most English speakers won’t know much about France’s Apec, a non profit organization that offers job listings and job resources in France. But they’re big - they employ around 1,000 human resource specialists who work with companies and people. Job listings are free, and they are second only to Monster in France in total number of listings. The site, the company says, has about 1.2 million unique monthly visitors, 600,000 registered users and 35,000 registered companies.

Today Apec is announcing that they’re working with LinkedIn via their API. This is a big win for LinkedIn - they have 5 million registered users in Europe, but no real presence in France at all (French users must use LinkedIn.com, in English). They compete with both Viadeo and Xing in Europe. Apec users will have the opportunity to register for LinkedIn, and can then create a profile, add contacts and research positions (and companies can research candidates), all without leaving the Apec site. The integration will be released on March 11.

The integration goes well beyond what Business Week is doing with LinkedIn. It’s basically all of the functionality of the LinkedIn site pulled into Apec and integrated with their existing account features.

The terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but LinkedIn did say that they are paying Apec a fee for every new registration doing a revenue share for the new customers that Apec brings to LinkedIn. According to Reid Hoffman, “100% of this revenue share goes into a pool that APEC spends on helping their customers use LinkedIn more effectively.”

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Having a page put up about you in Wikipedia is difficult, mostly because of the Notability requirement for inclusion - and you aren’t “notable” unless you’ve received significant media coverage elsewhere. Other services have filled in the gap for the billion or so people online who can’t get onto Wikipedia - sites like LinkedIn, Wink and Spock (as well as most social networks, for the less professional profiles).

New Y Combinator startup Biographicon, founded by CEO Ethan Herdrick and CTO Daniel Terhorst, aims to fit itself somewhere in between Wikipedia and LinkedIn. Anyone can be included. And anyone can edit any page, like on Wikipedia. For now, that’s it. The founders say they’ll add more structure over time, and give dedicated places to add bio information (schools, work, etc). Here’s my page.

Biographicon will have a significant hurdle to overcome - until it gets traction people won’t for the most part bother entering in their information. But like all Y Combinator startups it’s used just a tiny amount of capital to get to launch. We’ll check back in in a couple of months and see how they’re doing.

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Thursday morning LinkedIn will roll out a new site-wide design featuring a tab-less header and a persistent left column with personal, account-related options.

LinkedIn is also adding status updates with which users can broadcast their current activities (professional or otherwise) to their connections and/or networks.

Just as when the company added portraits, these updates feel like an attempt to mimic Facebook. The new design bestows upon LinkedIn a similar layout to Facebook’s, with the page divided into a header, a thin left column, and a wide right one. Facebook has also had featured status updates for quite some time.

There are differences, of course, between the two. LinkedIn has decided to place a box at the bottom of the left column that continually reminds you how many connections you have, how many people have recently joined your network, what your status is, and more. The homepage will also have modules that you’ll be able to drag around to reorder.

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