TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever used Tumblr or Posterous in the past. I hate the term “micro-blogging,” but that’s essentially what this is in the eyes of some people. That is to say, it’s a platform that makes it easy to quickly post items you find that you enjoy from around the web. You can certainly use it to write more traditional blog posts if you want, but the clear emphasis is on sharing links, photos, music, and other quick-share items from around the web.

Of course, some people also consider Twitter to be micro-blogging, but as it lays out in its post, TypePad considers the new Micro product be fit in between what people do on Twitter, and what they do on regular blogs.

TypePad’s goal with Micro is pretty straightforward: Get more people using their platform, product manager Leah Culver (formerly the creator of Pownce, which TypePad parent Six Apart acquired last year) tells us. The idea is that if users like using TypePad Micro enough, maybe they’ll pay to upgrade to one of the Pro accounts which offer more options such as being much more customizable, adding other blogs, and giving you the option of placing ads on your site. Thankfully, if you stick with the free version, TypePad doesn’t plaster your blog with ads that they’re making money from.

And with more people using TypePad in general, it benefits the users who are already paying to use it, since the ecosystem will get larger and their posts will have more potential reach.

With the free version there are some options you get, such as the ability to set a site banner and change your sites’ colors. A nicer feature is the ability to see all your stats. And since Twitter integration is built in complete with Bit.ly links, you can also easily view those stats. Facebook integration is built-in as well to easily auto-posts your post to your Wall. And there is already an iPhone app.

But the most important element of these micro-blogging sites is the bookmarklet. And TypePad Micro has a very nice one. Rather than being of the bulky, pop-a-new-window variety like Tumblr, TypePad Micro’s pops up as an overlay on whatever site you are on. And if that site contains a picture, it will auto-populate it in the input fields for you. The same is true if you’re on a page with a video. And the bookmarklet makes it easy to share to Twitter and Facebook just by clicking checkboxes.

The TypePad Micro sites themselves will bring the most comparisons to Tumblr. After all, there is an easy, one-click re-blog button attached to each post, just as there is on Tumblr. And there is a way to “like” or “favorite” posts. And there is a social element that allows you to follow other TypePad users and showcase that on your site — which again, is like Tumblr. But unlike Tumblr, TypePad Micro is also a way to comment on each post. You can do so using a TypePad, Twitter, or Facebook account, or OpenID. In that regard, it’s more like Posterous.

So will people actually start using TypePad Micro over Tumblr or Posterous? If they don’t mind the lack of customization offered, they might. While most users are never going to do something like edit the CSS, it would still be nice to see more options for themes. That is definitely one strong-suit of Tumblr. Those may come down the road for TypePad Micro as well, we’re told.

One upside to TypePad Micro versus the others is that it’s built on TypePad’s own long-existing backbone, this makes the service is pretty fast. And thanks to Facebook Connect, setting up a new account takes just a few clicks and a few minutes before you’re ready to go.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Last August, the Tumblr team shared some growth statistics and claimed 50 million visitors and a healthy 255 million impressions in July 2009. This month (which I reckon is not actually this month but rather October), Tumblr self-reports 20 million unique vistors and 420 million impressions.

This means either Tumblr lost about 30 million unique monthly visitors in the past few months, or there’s some mix-up about what’s being measured exactly and shared publicly (visits vs. visitors, perhaps?). But third-party measuring services like Compete acknowledge that traffic numbers are definitely heading in the right direction.

According to Karp, Tumblr is currently seeing 2 million Tumblr bloggers publish about 40 million new posts per month. About 10,000 new people sign up for Tumblr every day on average, and the retention rate is very high: close to 85% remains active after registering for the micro-blogging service (note that Tumblr, besides drop-dead simple, is free of charge).

And as you can tell from the picture I took of one of his slides, 35% use Tumblr on Facebook, while only 15% connects the service to Twitter. The bookmarklet is relatively popular too, with about one third of Tumblr’s users installing it. About 15% downloads the company’s iPhone application (which is admittedly really good).

I had a brief chat with Karp last night about the company, which counts only 10 full-time employees today. Karp told me Tumblr is still not all too worried about its ability to generate revenue with the service, keeping its options open and trying to come up with innovative ways of making money rather than merely adding standard premium features or advertising.

What they are experimenting with, however, are imminent paid features that would basically give Tumblr users a way to promote their content in ‘new ways’. Sounds rather vague, so we’ll just have to wait and see what they come up with.

Also on the roadmap: localization. The Tumblr team is currently considering translating the service and offering customer support in more languages besides English.

Karp said Tumblr, which raised about $5.25 million in venture capital to date, has about two years of runway left before running out of cash.

So the main question for Tumblr is: can they continue on their growth path and find a way to turn all those eyeballs and all that activity into cold hard cash, or is it destined to fade out as more and more publishing platforms add micro-blogging features to their applications?

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Posterous is launching the the feature with five built-in themes, including one designed by well known Tumblr theme creator Bill Israel. Posterous is also allowing users to change their blog header and to custom modify any colors on their site.

Beyond basic visual changes, Posterous has bigger plans for its theme engine. Widgets, for one, will have their own open API so that anyone can write widgets that can then be embedded into Posterous users blogs. For more technical folks, the site will also be introducing more features that will gradually turn Posterous into a content platform. Examples of this are the PostLocation block that Posterous added recently internally so that they could support GPS / Geocoded locations for posts.

People often compare Posterous to Tumblr due to the simplicity of the way to upload content, but Posterous is leveraging Tumblr’s set of themes. This is a huge step for Posterous, considering Tumblr has thousands of beautiful themes that exist out there, and it’s a matter of changing just a few lines of HTML to convert them to full-fledged Posterous themes.

Posterous has seen enormous growth over the last 12 months. The site is doing 10 times the traffic they were doing one year ago, and over the last 30 days alone, traffic has gone up to 4.1 million unique visits worldwide, according to Quantcast. Posterous is proving that they are a force to be reckoned with.

In June 2009, Posterous acquired Skinkset and brought on Brett Gibson on board to the team of 3 people. Posterous has taken $740K in funding from investors like Guy Kawasaki, Tim Ferriss, Mitch Kapor, Satish Dharmaraj, Eric Hahn, and of course Y-Combinator.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The selections are random and photo-heavy, but it also highlights text in a big, fancy font. The whole interface seems, um, highly-influenced by enjoysthin.gs. But it’s a good, visual interface (see also, WeAreHunted), and I hope to see more of it. It makes you just want to sit and watch all the Tumblogs go by. There sure is a lot of soft porn on Tumblr.

Tumblr is also launching Tumblr Projects, a marketplace that matches designers from the Tumblr community with professional publishers and companies who want a slick Tumblog. Designers need to be certified by Tumblr, but it’s a smart way to get higher quality Tumblogs created. Up until now, Tumblr has been designing many of the high-profile Tumblogs itself, so now it can offload much of that work and help its community make money at the same time.

Finally, the terms of service on the site was changed to make it clear that members own any content they put on the site and can remove it at any time. Glad that’s cleared up.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

What is it with all the toolbar copycat craziness lately. First, there was Digg going after StumbleUpon with the Diggbar. Then StumbleUpon, which already had a toolbar, introduced a new toolbar/URL shortening service called Su.pr.

Now, micro-blogging service Tumblr is getting in on the act with its own toolbar which it is calling TumbleUpon. Could they try to be more blatant in ripping off StumbleUpon? The toolbar has a random Stumble-like shuffle button which randomly takes you through different Tumblogs in a similar way that StumbleUpon’s toolbars do. On the right there is a heart button if you want to “like” a page, a reblog button and a button that takes you to your own Tumblr dashboard.

StumbleUpon’s Su.pr toolbar, in comparison, also has a random shuffle button for discovering pages Websites other people have Stumbled, and a “like” button. But Su.pr is a URL shortener with powerful analytics on the backend, while TumbleUpon is not. It is just a discovery tool which surfaces other Tumblogs of people who have overlapping “likes.”

So is this a joke? Yes, and no. Tumblr founder David Karp tells us:

It was really an experiment to see how a tool like StumbleUpon would work for Tumblr content. Based on the feedback, it seems to be doing a pretty good job. We really like that it’s the first Tumblr discovery tool that shows off all of the pretty user created themes while exploring content. . . .

We might wind up changing the name when we start promoting it in the Dashboard

In a blog post today, Karp also shares some growth stats. He claims that in July, 2009, Tumblr had 50 million visitors, 255 million impressions, 650,000 new posts per day, and 5,000 new users per day.

Tumblr is definitely growing, but comScore estimates a much smaller number of users: only 3.9 million uniques worldwide in June, 2009 and 68 million pageviews. That is a 3X increase in unique visitors over a year ago and a 12X increase in pageviews, but a far cry from the numbers Karp is putting out.

I asked Karp what could explain this disparity. He pointed out that 15 percent of Tumblr’s blogs are on custom domains, and that the 50 million number is for visitors per Google Analytics. The same person can be a visitor more than once. Google counts 20 million unique visitors, and Quantcast counts 13 million worldwide. The site is verified by Quantcast, so I’d go with that number. Any way you count it, though, the service is showing strong growth.

But really, TumbleUpon?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

New York based betaworks, an incubator/VC, is also right in the thick of things. They invested early in Summize and gained a sizable chunk of Twitter stock when that company was acquired in 2008 to become Twitter Search.

betaworks’ list of investments is a who’s who of the real time world. Twitter, StockTwits, TweetDeck, Twitterfeed, Tumblr and bit.ly are examples. And they also own a piece of what may be my favorite content site on the Internet – someecards.

Anyway, things seem to be rocking at betaworks based on the email to investors from CEO John Borthwick and COO Andrew Weissmanthat was sent out a couple of weeks ago and forwarded to us. bit.ly, for example, now has a 50% share of the URL shortener market and 130 million weekly clicks on links.

The full email is below.

From: Borthwick John
Sent: Sunday, May 31, 2009 11:23 AM
To: Schilling Mathias; Thomas Blondet; Smith Richard; Jean-Charles Charki; Herbert Allen III; Vigil Hank; Tarek Abdel-Meguid (Terry) Meguid; Ellman Stuart; Jaffe Bruce; Lisa Belzberg; Gillian Munson; Pittman Bob; Dominic Becotte; Joshua Stylman; Peter Hershberg; Stan Pantowich; Ron Conway; David Singer; Cappuccio Paul; Jean Marie Messier; Heiferman Scott; Howard Lindzon; Peretsman Nancy; Brad Reifler; Peter Borish; Brian Gottlieb; Strauss Zelnick; Taavet Hinrikus; Eric Martineau-Fortin; Ted Barnett; Robin Transport; Jon Brod; Russell Andrew; Ken Lerer; Gordon Crovitz; Goldstein Seth; Hilary Bergman; Shen David; Armstrong Tim
Cc: Andrew Weissman
Subject: betaworks / quarterly investor update / June

betaworking
Once again a busy quarter at betaworks — and a good one to boot. We now have 22 companies in the network. They are listed here http://bit.ly/beta-network. We are still in the early days of building betaworks into a new type of media company – one characterized by a loosely coupled network of companies. A network that is connected by shared data services matched with a bottoms up structure. Chris Anderson wrote last week that “the .. new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small … distributed-information networks would do the same outside the walls of a single company. The Web would be globalization taken to the extreme. Projects would be open to the best of breed anywhere, creating virtual flash firms of suppliers and workers that would come together for one product and then re-form for another. “Small pieces, loosely joined” was the mantra.” Its only eighteen months but this is betaworks. We did a revision to our web site and included a interactive presentation on what is betaworks and how we believe what we are building is in essence a new kind of media company. You can find it at http://betaworks.com On to the update. Over the past quarter we spun out our first project, took a majority stake in one company, made two new investments and made solid progress on our other internal product.

bit.ly
Eight weeks ago we spun bit.ly out of betaworks into bit.ly Inc, and raised a seed investment round led by OATV (O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures), Social Leverage, Ron Conway, TAG, Chris Sacca, Mitch Kapor and the Founders Fund.

bit.ly has been on a tear since we launched it last summer — let me sketch out what it is, why its useful and offer some data points on progress. bit.ly is on its surface a link or URL shortener, helping people take long and unwieldy links and make them short and easy to share via email, Twitter, Facebook etc. But once you shorten a link with bit.ly the fun begins. You can put a simple “+” on the end of any bit.ly link and see, real time, the pace at which that link is getting shared and clicked on as it moves around these social distribution networks. The pace of growth at bit.ly has been astounding to say the least. Its been a real lesson to us here at betaworks — when you hit a vein things can grow extremely fast. I have had the fortune to work with fast growth products before, bit.ly growth has been like walking up a wall. Some data points. We launched bit.ly late last summer. The growth curve below illustrates the trend. Nine weeks ago when we closed the funding of bit.ly approx. 18m bit.ly links we getting clicked on every week, about 3-4 m per week day (the chart below shows daily clicks through the first week of April). In a little over 6 months we managed to earn a 30% share in the URL shortening market via organic, viral growth.

By the first of May we were doing approx. 50m decodes a week. Last week 130m bit.ly links were clicked on. Three weeks ago we rolled out bit.ly as default within Twitter. Twitter has added 20-30% on top of the viral growth – a great partnership that holds a ton of potential. Closing in upon bit.ly’s nine month anniversary it has over 50% market share. The betaworks / bit.ly team has done a phenomenal job scaling the systems and making sure that not once has a bit.ly link been unavailable. And the real time metrics distinguishes bit.ly from all of its competition. Scaling real time metrics is a huge challenge — one of those things that you only hear about when you slip up. Please if you come by the office mention this to the team of ex AOL engineers who run bit.ly — they are doing a great job. Business model wise we are starting to figure out where the money is. My sense is that there should be some very interesting monetization opportunities we can un-pack.

Three new things …
Partnered with TAG, betaworks took a majority stake in Twitterfeed a content router for publishers to Twitter. Twitterfeed has 150k publishers pushing out a quarter of a million updates daily. It’s a very interesting business — for some background see http://bit.ly/U2QM3. And we did seed investments in two new companies — Uservoice and GDGT — two wonderful companies, both of whom fit right into the betaworks thesis.

Other updates …
- Tweetdeck is doing very very well. The most recent version, out for less than a month, has received approx. a million downloads. Over the past quarter Tweetdeck has continued to pull ahead of its competition. Tweetdeck is the preferred way to access the Twitter stream for over 14% of all users and they send more messages from Tweetdeck than from Twitter.com or any other service.
- Tipjoy opened up an API to power payments for social applications. User and payment growth have both been strong. This is the first social payments API we’ve seen, excited to see how it grows. Stocktwits is doing very well — premium (paid version) is getting rolled out and they closed a series A in the past quarter.
- IILWY — who we told you last time had hired a CEO — rebranded itself to OMG POP. The service is doing great, they closed its B round led by Bessemer.
- Some e Cards is rocking. Last October (@betaday) the announced break-even– they have been cash flow positive ever since then, sold out till the fall. They have approx. 600k followers on Twitter and as I outlined in an essay I wrote 2 weeks ago they, and other betaworks, are leading a transformation in distribution (see: http://bit.ly/UWNtS).
- Lastly, we launched Chartbeat in the spring — we now have 500 paying customers, modest but solid start. Phew — I said it was a busy quarter.

Press roundup
Business Week included in its round up of the Twitter ecosystem five betaworks companies:
Tweetdeck http://bit.ly/4sLvnH
Stocktwits http://bit.ly/Oyukm
Tipjoy http://bit.ly/1911Z1
bit.ly http://bit.ly/10q3FP
Twitterfeed http://bit.ly/U2QM3

GigaOm mused about how we could “upstage Digg” at http://bit.ly/3IfpUO (laying out an interesting roadmap for bitlynow). Jenna Wortham from the New York Times http://bit.ly/4fol1L, Chartbeat press: Better Homes ‘n Garden! http://bit.ly/11YCEz “chartbeat is metrics porn” http://bit.ly/f48j5 “I recently stumbled upon Chartbeat and I’m already addicted.” http://bit.ly/6empP

And someone @ the LA Times is loving our work product!

Thats it for the quarter, onward and best regards to you all

best regards

JB, AW and our small crew

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Tumblr, one of the companies that significantly lowered the bar for starting a blog, has just raised $4.5 million in a Series B round led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, the same investors that put in $750,000 in the first round. CEO David Karp says the investment will give the startup a runway of at least two and a half years, and is introducing paid features at the same time.

Furthermore, former Time Warner technology SVP (and current CEO of Betaworks) John Borthwick is joining the board, while former CNET director John Maloney will act as the New York-based company’s President.

Tumblr serves zero ads on its pages, and generated an equal amount of dollars so far. Now, Tumblr will have premium services to make up for that, although it’s unclear what the services will be exactly. Karp did mention they were gonna be ’sexy’, so we’re moderately curious now.

In a release, Tumblr is claimed to have over 15 million monthly unique visitors, but those numbers sound a bit inflated if you ask us. ComScore measures 1.5 million global unique visitors in October, a 300 percent increase from a year ago (see chart). Nonetheless, it had great momentum from the moment it launched in 2007, and there’s still a lot of potential users out there. If they will continue to come, and if they will be able to make the company profitable, remains to be seen.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Here’s how you create a blog on Posterous – email something to post@posterous.com. You’re done.

Here’s how you post something new on Posterous – see paragraph above. The subject line of the email is the post title, the text area is the content. You can also email photos, videos and sounds files, which will be displayed in a custom Flash player on the site. My new Posterous blog, for example, is here.

Is this a lot like Tumblr? Yes, although account creation by a single message to a generic email is a great way to help this spread via mobile devices (you have to create an account on Tumblr’s website first, then you can start emailing to a unique email id). Posterous also has comments on posts, something Tumblr is just starting to roll out to some users.

Another great thing about Posterous – you can choose to have comments emailed to you, and you can reply to the comment by simply responding back to the email (I wish Wordpress had that feature). If you choose to register your account at Posterous (which means creating a password), you can also follow other Posterous bloggers.

The services are otherwise somewhat similar. Both are excellent for simply emailing in vacation photos and videos.

One problem Posterous may have is fake posts via masked emails (it’s relatively easy to mask emails so that they appear to be sent from anyone you like). Posterous says they’ll watch header information like IP address, email client and other data points to sniff out fakes, and users can also request a unique email. We’ll see how they do with that – and we’ll give a free TechCrunch Tshirt to the first person who manages to do a fake post on our Posterous blog (but it can’t be off color, disgusting, or NSFW in any way) (Update: ok, we have a winner).

Tumblr is a lot more feature rich than Posterous, which make sense since Posterous is only two months old and has two employees. But Posterous is dead simple to use and does the mobile blogging thing very well. New features will be launched over the summer, says co-founder Sachin Agarwal, including customized CSS and the ability to cross post to other blogging platforms.

Both Posterous and Tumblr compete with services like Twitter, Friendfeed and a slew of mobile/photo blogging platforms like Mobog and others mentioned here.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Google has added support for Notes to Google Reader, allowing users to share notes or add notes to shared stories.

The add a note feature is located in the “Your Stuff” menu at the top of the Google Reader sidebar. Tumblr style, the feature allows users to share with friends “whatever pops into your head (for better or for worse) by typing anything into the text box at the top of the Notes page,” according to Google.

The share items with a note gives users the ability to add a note with any shared Reader item. Google explains:

If you are like me, you might want to share something in Reader, but think your friends might not “get” why you are sharing it. Use the “Share with note” button on the item toolbar to create a copy of that item with your own note attached to it. Now your friends won’t have to wonder if the B-movie about an evil floor lamp you shared was intended to be funny, sarcastic, ironic or the real motivation behind your next movie night.

Users can also add notes from the browser with a Reader Notes bookmarklet. Minor changes include the choice of new styles from the shared items page, and the Google Reader list view will now highlight when an item is being shared by a friend.

The new additions will provide additional appeal to Google Reader’s sharing feature, which has slowly grown in popularity over the last 12 months (least I see more and more friends sharing this way). The ability to have a discussion around shared feeds is still missing, but as we noted back in September is being developed by Google.

thanks to Bowrd for the tip

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

It’s not a good day for tumbleblogging. Someone over at Hacker News just noticed that users can access an admin panel for the site by entering a simple admin URL after signing in.

Among the capabilities exposed is the ability to search for users and reset their passwords. You can also change their email addresses, view their activity logs, and change other miscellaneous settings like daily limits on post types.

According to the person who posted the exploit on Hacker News, Tumblr has already been notified of the security hole but apparently has yet to fix it. Update: They’ve just fixed it. It was a known exploit for about an hour. Update 2: Tumblr’s security notice.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The list was clearly put together with students in mind. And while I’m pretty sure that the average student can get to graduation with little more than Wikipedia, Delicious and perhaps an occasional stolen term paper to help them along the way, I’m glad to see someone highlighting tools to help students learn and present their work.

The list is a good start and includes startups like Footnote, Fleck, Bookr, Sketchcast and others.

Tumblr is, inexplicably, named the top learning aid. “It’s a great place for students to easily post a whole lot of their work” Ferlazzo says.

But here’s what I really want to know – If you are a student, what applications are you actually using to complete your courses? And here’s a second question – if you combined all of the time you spend on all of those sites, would it even come close to the attention you give to Facebook?

(and before you say it in the comments – yes, it is obviously a slow news day with the holidays)

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is varied string of media ranging links and text to pictures and videos that takes very little time and effort to maintain.

Having just celebrated its one month anniversary (it launched on March 1), Tumblr is already used by a growing legion of over 50,000 users — and the numbers get more interesting from there. For every five users on Tumblr there is one post per hour. Although a Tumblr is conducive to mixed-media posts the creators were initially fearful that Tumblr would be heavily weighted toward only one or two of the available mediums. What they’re finding, however, is a healthy spread of all of the flavors currently available to tumblrs, with photos currently owning 34-percent of the posts and other formats tagging along in close succession.

Tumblr utilizes intuitive proprietary web publishing software that offers unparalleled simplicity. In fact, in all of my years online, I’ve never encountered a more transparent publishing utility. There is absolutely no learning curve, just sign-up and start posting. I’ve been running one at Wasteoid.net for about a week now and I’ve tumbled a considerable collection of entries due entirely to its instant gratification posting dynamic.

Because of its simplicity, Tumblr finds itself in a doubly strong position. It is poised to gain the attention of the less web savvy masses who have been wondering for some time “what that blogging stuff is all about.” There is no small value in clinching that demographic — the success of MySpace is a resounding testament to that.

Perhaps more interestingly though, is its ability to fill the wide gap between social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and community sites like Flickr, Delicious, etc. Beyond simply posting directly to Tumblr, users can have Tumblr aggregate feeds from many of the other sites on which they propagate. On Wasteoid, for instance, I’ve set my Tumblr to draw my RSS output from Twitter, Digg, Pipes and other sites. The result is something akin to my digital stream of consciousness, consisting of a homogeneous flow of status updates, links of interest, pictures, text, quotes, conversations and practically anything else that crosses my path during the day.

And there is still a lot more in the works for Tumblr. In April, it will roll out a collection of Tumblr features designed to fuel its expanding community, including additions to connect tumblrs around content and friends, and transparently interact with users outside the Tumblr network. Continuing down the calendar, their goal for May is to begin offering premium account subscriptions for a nominal fee. While Davidville founder Dave Karp assures me that, “[They're] committed to continuing to offer free accounts that are more robust and powerful than any of the other web publishing services,” premium accounts will fulfill a fundamental place for the fledgling network.

In addition to receiving a suite of premium services, pro tumblrs will serve as the primary testbed beta testers for new Tumblr features. This is a keen route as it adds incentive for users to purchase premium accounts and because it provides Tumblr with an expansive testbed of users that not only are familiar with the service, but also have a personal interest in its outcome. Furthermore, there is the boon of adding money to the company coffers for continued expansion — but Karp and crew aren’t banking on just one invention

Back in Feb. they launched Senduit, a web-based utility designed to assist in the sharing of large files over the Internet. Since its launch two months ago, site usage has expanded to 250,000 unique monthly visitors. Over 65,000 files are uploaded each month and downloads are in the ballpark of 500,000. The service manages its bandwidth usage through smart throttling measures used to ensure that its not abused or used for spam and warez.

All of that said, Davidville, Inc. is a company to pay attention to in the coming months. It has in Tumblr a product that any company would froth wildly at the mouth for, a trendy service that is capable of vast mainstream appeal across the demographic lines. Its products have entered my current stable of web tools and aren’t likely to leave anytime soon.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors