“Evite sucks” is not a revolutionary opinion. The online invitation company has been the subject of substantial vitriol for how much their site design feels like it’s from 1998, when they launched. It would be impossible not to respond to this overwhelming criticism, and the newly re-launched Evite attempts to address many of its user experience problems. “It should feel snappier than it has in the past,” says Evite CEO Hans Wooley. Yes it should, with hipper clones like Pingg , Socializr , and Crush3r fast approaching. Even the moms have moved their PTA bakesale announcements over to Paperless Post. But the MySpace of online invitation services refuses to take any lessons from these smaller, scrappier startups, something that even MySpace, to its credit, is now starting to do. It’s still slow (according to Alexa 76% of sites are faster than the old Evite.com) and it’s still full of ads. This latest Fantasy Interactive -designed version boasts a much cleaner UI designed to take you straight to the invites, a marked improvement. Glomming off the socialized content trend, it has a new Facebook Events-like feature imaginatively called “Event Conversation,” where hosts and guests can comment and post pictures. The site also added hundreds of new still cheesy looking invitations and small functionality changes like being able to seamlessly add guests from past events to an invitation I tried sending out an invite earlier today and the new site loaded “sending” and timed out before it told me that I needed more information to complete the process, even though I had all the fields filled out. Then, despite the fact that the prompt was telling me I couldn’t send an invite, I got two successive emails in my inbox thanking me for sending an invite. Twenty minutes later I still hadn’t received my actual invite. So I’ll post what I did receive below. That is not attractive anyway you slice it. Compare this with the welcome email I received and the invite I created on Pingg , which both arrived at the same time. Look ma, no Wolverine (or any) ad! When I finally did receive an Evite invitation after trying three times, it looked like this, with no party information visible. There was absolutely nothing at all to aid a user in the decision of whether or not to attend. In stark contrast to Pingg, you’re basically forced to click though.  When asked why the emailed invite was not at all informative, an Evite representative responded: “We try to encourage RSVP and interaction with the invite, that is why event hosts love Evite, they get to track RSVPs and easily communicate with guests. Also, our business model is built on the invitation view, there is no advertising in the invitation email.” The “Also, our business model …” aside speaks volumes. The new Evite can add all the social sharing and conversation functionality it wants but unless it pays attention to how people are actually inviting other people to things, it’s just another platform with the fatal flaw of refusing to understand that user experience should trump advertising revenue always. But especially when people can just use Facebook. Links to their promo video and screencaps below. Evite Sizzle from Creative Asylum on Vimeo . CrunchBase Information Evite Information provided by CrunchBase

Google has quietly (secretly, one might say) invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in social gaming behemoth Zynga , we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The company has raised somewhere around half a billion dollars in venture capital in the last year alone, including $150 million from Softbank Capital last month and $180 million late last year from Digital Sky Technologies, Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. The Softbank announcement was never officially confirmed by the company, however, and the Google investment was likely part of that deal as well. The investment part of the deal closed a month ago or so. A larger strategic partnership is still in process. The investment was made by Google itself, not Google Ventures, say our sources, and it’s a highly strategic deal. Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga’s games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see PayPal being replaced with Google Checkout as the primary payment option. Zynga is supposedly PayPal’s biggest single customer, and Google is always looking for ways to make Google Checkout relevant. And there’s more. These same sources are saying that Zynga’s revenues for the first half of 2010 will be a stunning $350 million, half of which is operating profit. Zynga is projecting at least $1.0 billion in revenue in 2011, say our sources. This blows previous estimates out of the water. Zynga continues to work on high level strategic business development deals. The reason these deals are so attractive to companies like Yahoo and now Google is this – Zynga allows them to rebuild the massive social graph, currently controlled by Facebook. For whatever reason people love to play these games and get passionately addicted to them, coming back day after day. That’s helped Facebook become what it is today. Google, Yahoo and others want some of that magic to rub off on them, too. We’ve reached out to both Google and Zynga for comment. Neither have responded. There will be lots more news on Google Games in the near future, we’re guessing. Here’s a job opening for a Product Lead for Google Games, for example: Product Management Leader, Games – Mountain View This position is based in Mountain View, CA. The area: Product Management One of the many reasons Google consistently brings innovative, world-changing products to market is because of the collaborative work we do in Product Management. With eyes focused squarely on the future, our team works closely with creative and prolific engineers to help design and develop technologies that improve access to the world’s information. We’re responsible for guiding products throughout the execution cycle, focusing specifically on analyzing, positioning, packaging, promoting and tailoring our solutions to all the markets where Google does business. The role: Product Management Leader, Games The Product Management Leader, Games will be a flexible, results-oriented, and experienced senior leader who will be responsible for developing Google’s games commerce product strategy and partnering to build and manage the business with a cross-functional team. You will have visionary product insight, combined with experience in the online content business, significant technical expertise and extensive leadership and business skills. The Product Management Leader, Games combines a great instinct for developing compelling products with a strong focus on users and technical aptitude to work with a world class engineering team and the business sense to drive product goals and strategies. Responsibilities: Identify market opportunities and define product vision and strategy. Develop and launch new products and enhance existing products. Lead and mentor a team of Product Managers. Engage closely with the engineering team to help determine the best technical implementation methods as well as a reasonable execution schedule. Establish partnerships as necessary to drive the growth of Google’s products. Requirements: Technical degree or equivalent experience. Masters or PhD preferred. Experience building an online gaming business both on the web and on mobile devices. Deep understanding of the game business and how to create hits. Proven success in driving product strategy and product design for a successful game. Solid product management experience with a track record of creating innovative and winning Internet or software solutions. Significant people and organizational management skills. A natural leader and mentor. Demonstrated ability to gather user requirements and convert them into a winning product vision. Strong quantitative and analytical abilities. Strong communication skills with the ability to evangelize the merits of Google’s products internally and externally. CrunchBase Information Zynga Google Information provided by CrunchBase

The Australian government just found the infrastructure for its A$43 billion national broadband project and eliminated its largest competitor in one fell swoop — pending shareholder and regulator approval, Telstra will receive A$11 billion of that money in exchange for its entire landline network. Telstra will decommission its monopoly of copper cables to make room for the government’s fiber and migrate its customers to the resulting 100Mbps National Broadband Network (NBN) as those light-bearing threads roll out. While Telstra might become a smaller player in the internet and cable business without a land network of its own, it may get even larger in the wireless space — the company says it’s received “written confirmation from the Prime Minister” that it can bid on a chunk of precious LTE spectrum should the deal go through. Press release after the break. Continue reading Australia to pay Telstra A$11 billion for entire copper network Australia to pay Telstra A$11 billion for entire copper network originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 20 Jun 2010 15:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink    |   |  Email this  |  Comments

Fresh on the heels of the launch of Yext Rep last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, Yext just signed up its first major distribution partner. Superpages will make an online, co-branded Dashboard which includes Yext Rep available to its 300,000 local business advertisers across the country. The Superpages Dashboard will roll out in the coming weeks. Yext Rep is a way for local merchants to manage their reputations online. In one central place, it shows them how to claim their business on sites like Yelp, Citysearch, Foursquare, Twitter, or Facebook, and what consumers are saying about them on the Web. All of this gets shown in a feed, along with local advertising data from Yext’s main pay-per-call advertising product , Yext Listings. With the new Dashboard, Yext Rep and Yext Listings are treated as enterprise apps for small businesses, and Superpages now also has an app in the Dashboard for managing Superpages ads, which can also be added to the main feed. “Our vision is to ultimately be the UI for all local businesses,” says Yext CEO Howard Lerman. In fact, one of the tabs on the Dashboard is a Store where businesses can add different apps. Yext Rep is free, but Yext Listings, Superpages, and email marketing tool iContact are available for a monthly subscription. Yext wants to create a platform for simple business apps targeted at local merchants. It is pursuing very much a Salesforce model, where business owners can pick and choose whichever apps they want to use, and then the resulting data gets published as events to their feed, much in the way Salesforce Chatte r is attempting to mix CRM and other enterprise data along with Twitter streams for mid-tier and larger businesses. Salesforce Chatter has its own Chatter Exchange for third-party apps, but Yext is going after smaller, local businesses which a much simpler product. Lerman is modeling his store more after iTunes: a central place where local business can find and buy all of their online business apps. Yext is working on other apps as well, such as a Yext Sites, all targeted at local businesses. Yext Rep is the free anchor app which Lerman hopes will entice small businesses to sign up and expose them to all the other apps in the Dashboard. “We woud allow a competitive reputation management product into the platform,” he says. Yext collects a commission on every paid app sold, and distribution partners such as Superpages also get a cut of the revenues for apps purchased by their customers through the co-branded sites. Below is a video of the Yext Rep launch demo at Disrupt Watch live streaming video from disrupt at livestream.com CrunchBase Information Yext SuperMedia Information provided by CrunchBase

Kudzu Interactive , which ownes and operates online and mobile ordering and e-commerce service Snapfinger.com , has closed a $7 million Series B funding round. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with additional but undisclosed investors participating. The company, founded in 2004, has now raised $11 million total to date. The funding news was announced by the company this morning, but the New York Times profiled Kudzu Interactive extensively over the weekend, reporting that the Snapfinger.com owner is already profitable and growing revenues fast. Jim Garrett, founder and CEO of Kudzu Interactive, says revenues grew 420% in 2009 and that it has more mobile applications and more restaurants integrated into more point of sale systems than “all of its competitors combined”. Snapfinger enables users to access more than 28,000 restaurants in over 1,600 cities from chains like California Pizza Kitchen, Outback Steakhouse and Boston Market, as well as local independent restaurants currently in its network. The Series B funding round is aimed to support Kudzu Interactive’s sales and marketing initiatives and expand the business in a number of different areas, including mobile and iPad product development and real-time transaction based marketing features. Josh Goldman and Jeff Crowe, general partners at Norwest Venture Partners, will join Kudzu Interactive’s board of directors. CrunchBase Information Kudzu Interactive Information provided by CrunchBase