Online learning site Grockit is scaling up its leadership team after raising $7 million last May. Today it is announcing that it is hiring Roy Gilbert as CEO. Gilbert is Google’s director of user operations and policy, in charge of many non-advertising operations. He helped set up Google’s India operations and grew it from 20 people to 1,000, and was the first business manager for Gmail.

Founder Farb Nivi recruited Gilbert, who will also be taking a board seat. Nivi will be president, chief product officer, and chairman. “I kind of look at him as our Eric Schmidt,” says Nivi, who came back getting hit by a minivan last year to keep his startup going and growing.

Gilbert served in the military driving nuclear submarines, and yes, he was a boy scout. But he also comes from a family of teachers, and he and his wife started a school in Hyderabad while he was in India for underprivileged children called the Rainbow Primary School. So he has education chops as well. “I pretty much can’t believe we landed him,” says Nivi.

Nivi also recently hired a chief marketing officer, Chris Strausser, who created the Jamba Juice brand, and previously worked at PepsiCo and Kaplan. Knewton, another online education startup, also recently made a top executive hire. The whole education space is definitely heating up.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Grockit Hires A Badass Boy Scout From Google As CEO

YCombinator-funded Adioso today launches its third iteration as an online destination for adventurous travelers who want to take vacations but are not constrained by specific days or even places. Yes, the online travel space is saturated, but the more mainstay search services like Kayak and Sky Scanner only let you find specific dates and destinations, failing if your desire is more vague.

In contrast, Adioso allows you to search flights with complete flexibility, like if you want to go somewhere in Europe in November but are not committed to specific area or time. Examples of the natural language-enabled broad or open-ended searches specific to Adioso:

Chicago to Boston next week

San Francisco to Europe late September under $800

San Francisco to anywhere

Says founder Tom Howard:

“There are really no other services that let you know where you should go, and what days are the cheap days. You go to a website and you’d spend two hours trying to find the cheap deals, there was nothing that said these are the good days at this location.”

Before Adioso, the only solution to the “What are the good days at this location?” kind of query was to manually do separate searches on different sites until you stumbled across what you were looking for (aka “The Traveling Salesman” problem). Adioso’s model necessitates some programming chops however, as open-ended search is harder to enable than constrained.

Future plans include expanding the service’s airline and destination inventory as soon as the Adioso platform has stabilized, currently Adioso only covers a selection of airlines in Australia (the home country of founders Howard and Fenn Bailey), Asia, Europe and the USA.

Howard and Baily hope that service will create an opportunities both for casual travelers (the most rapidly growing segment of the travel industry) as well for airlines who are looking for ways to best monetize left over seats on undersold flights.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Adioso, Flight Search For People Keeping Their Options Open

Nearly everyone has something to say about BP’s oil spill, and from a public relations perspective, the company is floundering. Both its stock price and brand value have taken a deepwater dive, and it is struggling to make its own voice heard.

When you Google “BP PR” or “BP public relations,” the top organic result is @BPGlobalPR, a parody account on Twitter with more than 175,000 followers. In contrast, BP’s official account, @BP_America, has only 15,000 followers.  The satirical @BPGlobalPR is dominating the online conversation. It is an object lesson in how social media can shape and control a company’s message during a crisis.  The fake account has gone viral for its scathing impersonations of the company with tweets like:

We are doing everything we can to stop the information leaks in the gulf: http://ow.ly/22XTw #bpcares (tweet)

Congrats to BP’s Mother of the Year 2010! It’s just oil people! Take the kids out and enjoy the beach! http://ow.ly/232ua (tweet)

Lightning struck one of our ships! Come on Planet Earth, what did we ever do to you?!? (tweet)

It’s hurricane season now. Don’t worry! We’ve planned for that just as well as we’ve planned for everything else! (tweet)

Some people think it is real.  BP initially wanted to shut down the sardonic account, but Twitter’s policy allows for parody accounts, so long as they don’t mislead or deceive. BP demanded the impostor rewrite his bio, and he did, but not without commentary: “We are not associated with Beyond Petroleum, the company that has been destroying the Gulf of Mexico for 52 days.” It’s since reverted to the original “This page exists to get BP’s message and mission statement out into the twitterverse!”

Meanwhile, anybody can start a Twitter account.  Companies can no longer rely on buying media time to spread their message though well-produced commercials, especially when the disaster your company is responsible for is ongoing.   It doesn’t help when more candid comments like Hayward’s “I’d like my life back” cast doubt on the polished message’s sincerity.  Someone on Twitter or elsewhere on the Web  will find ways to challenge the message, as @BPGlobalPR is doing.  Even mainstream news organizations that are watched by non-tweeters have reported the buzz around the satire account.

Of course, BP’s attempts to bolster its image go well beyond TV spots.  BP also bought paid search terms on several search engines to promote their official site. All of these PR efforts, totalling $50 million by some estimates, are predictable moves to stay engaged in the social media services where BP is being most criticized. The company is using many tools, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to spread their message. Satire aside, independent groups have set up their own sites, like BP Complaints, which chronicles oil spill news and activism.

The problem isn’t a lack of involvement, it’s a lack of credibility. No amount of PR can help it at this point until it stops the leak and starts cleaning up the ocean.  But while BP struggles to find its story, others are telling it for them.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

When Social Media Becomes The Message: The Gulf Oil Spill And…

Piryx, a white-label fundraising platform that helps automate online political contributions is reporting record amounts of money raised in this quarter for political candidates. Piryx says that money raised will exceed $4 billion this political cycle

Piryx attributes the surge in online contributions to the strength of Barack Obama’s online campaign that first showed the power of online fundraising in 2008. Many of the current fundraising efforts are being driven by anti-establishment, insurgent candidacy led by tea party candidates.

The startup deduced the $4 billion data point be evaluating how many political organizations have an online fundraising presence (600K organizations, candidates, political groups), the average donation size ($130) and the average number of donors that contribute to a campaign online (50 donors per campaign). Piryx declined to give us the exact amount its technology has helped raise for political candidates but did say that it was in the “double digit millions” for the 2010 elections.

Piryx also estimates that the $4 billion raised in the 2010 election cycle will be twice the amount given in the previous election cycle in 2008. According to a Pew report, 8% of Americans gave to political organizations from August 2007 to August 2008. Of those donations, 15% were online. With an average online donation of $130, the amount given to political campaigns online during that time was $1.05 billion. Piryx estimates that another $1 billion was raised from August to November.

It may be a stretch to assert that online fundraising to double at this point but it will certainly match what was raised in the 2008 cycle. Piryx has accumulated these estimates and data from its own market and other fundraising campaigns. The startup declined to give us an exact number but said “thousands of candidates in the US” are using the platform to raise money online.

According to the report, some candidates are receiving nearly 30 donations a minute. Piryx is also also predicting that more than 30 million donors will make online contributions to political
campaigns this election cycle. The top states for political giving in order are Texas, California, South Carolina, Florida and New York.

It’s not surprising that fundraising is surpassing the last cycle, considering the primaries that took place a few weeks ago and the upcoming fall elections that will take place this year. And the 2008 elections showed us the power of building an online presence when raising money. Plus with a residential election, I’m sure that the 2012 election cycle will prove to set higher online fundraising records.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Fundraising Tool Piryx Projects $4B In Online Political Donations For…

“Can Tim Armstrong make AOL king of content by 2010?” – Blog headline

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” – Macbeth

There’s something about the idea of “New York Internet Week” that I’ve always found inherently funny; like “Saudi Arabia Bring Your Daughter To Work Day”, or Greenland being called Greenland.

Ironically for a city that’s always been so adept at branding itself, New York has always struggled to articulate its place in the worldwide web, and Internet Week is the clearest manifestation of that identity crisis. Name an industry that the Internet is disrupting: newspapers, publishing, advertising, banking – and you’ll find its heart in Manhattan. Despite the best efforts of Mayor Bloomberg and, uh, Dennis Crowley to paint New York as the place to do business in Web 3.0, the fact is that billions of advertising and investment dollars continue to flood west, never to return. And yet New York, bless it, continues to try to stay relevant – for one week a year at least – to the industry that’s bleeding it dry.

Witness the Webbies – the awards ceremony that congratulates New York based celebrities who have learned to tweet – witness the awkward panels filled with mismatched home-grown personalities (“Julia Alison meets Jeff Jarvis“) and witness (if you can’t avoid it) the week-long parties where thousands of identically unique hipsters cram into lofts to drink booze sponsored by one or all of the east coast’s four successful start-ups.

Even when they invite west coasters to get involved, the effort manages to come off more weird than wired: I was flown to town, on the kind of handsomely subsidised meal ticket only New York can offer, to moderate a panel on “Internet dating in a web 2.0 world” for an audience of feature writers from women’s magazines. This despite the fact that asking me to help navigate the minefield of online dating is like asking Rudolf Hess to give guided tours of Dachau. Nice try, New York.

And yet. While it’s easy for me to mock New York Media’s bewilderment over the Internet (see!), there was a marked change in atmosphere during this year’s Internet Week, compared to last year’s. A definite uptick in confidence, not all of which can be put down to the fact that Dennis made it on to the front cover of UK Wired. No, the change in attitude in New York towards the Internet can more fully be attributed to one word: content.

New York is a content town and, thanks in large part to AOL and Yahoo, content is once again king. Speaking at Disrupt last month, AOL’s Tim Armstrong boasted that AOL “is planning on being the largest high quality content producer for digital media”. Yahoo is taking a similar – if less clearly defined – approach, purchasing Associated Content for somewhere in the region of $100m and now, if rumours are true, eying up the Huffington Post. For the New York media crowd, this is great news – great news for journalists who are being laid off left right and centre, great news for newspapers and publishers who smell lucrative content syndication deals and great news for pro blog networks who might finally see an exit. If content really is king, then New York is its ready-made kingdom.

And yet. And yet.

The way that the likes of Tim Armstrong use phrase “content is king” conjures up a noble image. An image of professional journalists and highly-skilled writers, possibly wearing crowns, slaving over hot typewriters to produce 1000 words of crisp copy for an eager online audience; or perhaps of sharply-written web video, a la College Humor’s original programming, or the New York Times’ daily video podcasts. For ‘content’, New York media folks read a web 3.0 of professionally produced news, analysis, entertainment – the antithesis of web 2.0′s user generated horse-shit. No wonder they’re salivating.

But that’s a very east coast – with its proud history of newspapers and publishing – interpretation of the word. Over on the west cost (and note: I’m using that term in its laziest sense to cover all Internet companies including those who, by accident of birth, have offices back east), “content” means the precise dictionary definition of the term: “something contained, as in a receptacle”; generic filler to pack inside an empty box to make it attractive to advertisers. Low-paid, illiterate swill, commissioned by the ton to provide SEO ad inventory. Just consider Associated Content and how it describes its goals post- Yahoo acquisition…

“Associated Content is now a part of Yahoo! – the world’s largest online company, with more than 600 million unique visitors a month. Yahoo! plans to leverage our content to extend its leadership and build upon their global properties to deliver personally relevant content in a scalable and efficient manner.

I mean, kudos to the company for not using the words ‘writing’ or ‘journalism’ to describe what their crowd-sourced hacks do, but it’s still hard to imagine a more mercenary way to describe the craft of writing. These are not writers, or journalists; these are self-confessed generators of content in the much the same way that horses are self-confessed generators of glue.

At least the Huffington Post employs real writers – assuming your definition of ‘employs’ doesn’t require there to be payment or any meaningful editorial support and if your definition of ‘writers’ includes the authors of stories like “Sex Tapes Of The Past Decade: A Look At The Noughties’ Naughtiest” and “Indonesia’s First Celebrity Sex Tape Scandal” and “Kendra Wilkinson’s Sex Tape RELEASED, NSFW Preview” – all examples from the past few weeks.

Even the web editions of respected offline brands are going the same way. The editorial focus of Forbes Online – a mish-mash of celebrity slideshows and tacky lists of ‘Americas best paying blue-collar jobs‘ and ‘hottest summer convertibles‘ – couldn’t be more different from its print counterpart which still has ambitions to be a serious news magazine. (Truth is, today’s Forbes Online is a pale shadow of even its own glory days: this is the online publication which saw Adam Penenberg break the Stephen Glass story).

Of course, the relationship between editorial content and advertising has always been strained, in a cant-live-with-it-cant-live-without-it way. But in traditional media – for the most part – the lines were respected: editorial staff did their job, advertising staff did their job and somehow the relationship chugged along.

In new media, however, editorial content exists to serve only one purpose; as a hook on which to hang advertising. When an Internet company commissions content, their measure of success is quantitative not qualitative: does the block of words pack in enough high-buzz keywords to rope in a hundred thousand or so Google searchers? And can it be spread out over enough pages to provide half a dozen ad impressions for each of those users? If so, great: now they just need the users to click on one of those ads and GTFO, which probably explains why so much online content peters out within 30 seconds of the headline.

Jeff Levick, president of global advertising at AOL, sums up the company’s editorial policy thus: “we have insights into our audience, and can produce content they want, which leads to engagement, which leads to what advertisers want. Therein we see the critical difference between the old media attitude towards content and the new media alternative.

The old model favoured originality: break a story that no-one else has covered or write a fresh new take on the world and the audience would come, bringing with them advertising and sales. Under the new model, originality and exclusivity are the kiss of death. SEO-driven advertising depends on knowing what people are already looking for, and delivering content that satisfies that desire; nothing more nothing less.  SEO-driven content is the opposite of journalism and creativity, just like New York’s interpretation of the phrase ‘content is king’ is the opposite of Silicon Valley’s.

It’s a depressing truth, but an important one for anyone in New York media – or elsewhere – gets too excited about the idea of a content revival. Before Harry Potter, no-one knew they were looking for books about wizards; before the Washington Post broke their most famous story, no-one knew they were searching for information about a robbery at the Watergate building, or the subsequent money trail to the White House. Put simply: if Ben Bradlee were an editor at one of today’s Internet companies, instead of the Washington Post in the 1970s, he’d almost certainly have spiked the first Watergate exclusive in favour of a slideshow of cats who look like Nixon.

“We know there’s a market for that shit. I’ve seen the numbers!”

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

NSFW: Content Is King! Rest In Peace, Content

It’s Sunday afternoon in San Francisco, and while my American friends are out in the sun, celebrating some holiday or other – is this one Memorial Day or Labor Day or Arbor Day? – I’m confined to my hotel room, finishing the final edits of my book manuscript.

Specifically I’m editing a chapter that begins with me being thrown out of a Starbucks in Chicago for swearing on my cellphone. It was a strange – not unhilarious – episode, and one that caused me to consider the contrasting American and British attitudes towards profanity…

“The concept of ‘appropriateness’ is much more real to Americans than it is to Brits, despite us being the ones who are supposed to be stuffy and formal. I’ve noticed it a lot with swearing: while Brits of both genders will be quite happy, among friends, to use the word ‘fuck’ – as a verb, a noun and adjective or an adverb – a surprising number of Americans blanche at the idea. Rather they’d talk about ‘dropping the F bomb’ as if four letters were capable of levelling Nagasaki.”

And so it was this past week at TechCrunch Disrupt when Yahoo’s Carol Bartz now-infamously told Mike Arrington to “fuck off”. The remark was clearly something Bartz had prepared in advance, and at a British conference it would have been about as notable as a speaker wearing jeans rather than a suit. But in America the idea that a CEO – a female CEO no less – might resort to comedy foul language is headline news. Literally.

The swearing had the desired effect of course; becoming the meme of the conference – full of sound and fury, signifying nothing – and distracting from the real story: that the CEO of the third most visited site on the web was unable to concisely describe what her company actually does.

Mike highlighted this ridiculousness in a follow up post, putting the swearing controversy into perspective and focussing on the  difference between Bartz’ answer to the question “what is Yahoo?” and Tim Armstrong’s much snappier response for AOL. While Bartz rambled, Armstrong simply said “AOL is planning on being the largest high quality content producer for digital media”.

In Bartz’s defence, Armstrong’s answer was just as meaningless, skirting what AOL is and instead describing what he hopes it will one day become. Armstrong’s answer was accurate in the same way that I could accurately answer the question “Who is Paul Carr?” by saying “Paul Carr aims to be the multi-millionaire author of a slew of best-selling books, written between bouts of pornographic sex with Scarlet Johansson.” If wishing could make it so, Tim.

The truth is, while we may criticise her for her on-stage performance, “what is Yahoo?” is simply not a question that Carol Bartz is able to answer right now. No-one asks Google what it is, even though it does a million different things, because it does one thing – search – better than anyone else in the world. No-one asks Facebook what it does, because it does one thing – connecting friends – better than anyone else in the world. Yahoo doesn’t have that one thing – so while it might be everything, it’s also nothing.

So what should Yahoo’s one thing be?

Not search, obviously. That ship sailed long ago. It also shouldn’t be a portal, or a destination, or any other meaningless construction. Yes, a lot of people have Yahoo as their home page, but those people – by and large – simply don’t know any better. Carol can enthuse as much as she likes about her highly-personalised homepage widgets, but the next generation of Internet users won’t care. Facebook – or whatever comes next – will be their homepage; their content destination and everything in between. There’s nothing more personalised than friendships.

How about mobile? The company recently announced a partnership with Nokia, which sounds exciting but really only serves to underline how non-core mobile is to Yahoo’s competences. Also ‘mobile’ isn’t a service, or a product – rather it’s a way to deliver services or products.

Chat? Flickr? Blogging? Forums? No, no, no. Facebook has won that fight: Flickr might be the photo sharing choice of tool for the technorati, but for the vast majority of Internet users – particularly the young Internet users who Yahoo needs to lock in to guarantee its future – a photo simply doesn’t exist unless it’s uploaded to Facebook. Likewise chat, blogging, forums and all other aspects of user generated content are all ground that Yahoo has already lost, and can’t possibly win back.

What does that leave?

Ask any commentator, or entrepreneur or Investor and they’ll tell you that the hot business to be in right now is curation. There’s simply too much information – much of it user generated – flooding on to the web, and users are crying out for someone to sift and package it all in an intelligent and trustworthy way. That’s what Gilt Groupe or Groupon do for businesses, that’s what services like Quora do for information, that’s what our Twitter friends do for everything else. But while Gilt and Quora and even Twitter are still veritable newborns, Yahoo has been curating content – using real-life, professional human beings to sift through information – since the antediluvian days when Jerry Yang and David Filo posted their first link on “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web“

The days of employing humans to curate links are over but  there remains one area in which Yahoo’s legacy of curation, audience, trusted brand and significant human resources could come together to do something better than anyone else in the world…

News.

Seriously.

Yahoo’s news product is excellent. Like Google, Yahoo offers a first-rate news aggregator – but unlike Google, the company actually has its own journalists contributing reporting to the mix. The result is a hybrid between aggregation, curation and traditional journalism, which makes Yahoo News arguably the most balanced online news source there is. Moreover, the company has spent years perfecting the use of online video for both news reporting and analysis. Take a few minutes to watch Yahoo Finance or Yahoo Sports and you’ll see some of the best (in terms of both production quality and content) programming available online; easily a match for the best that traditional broadcasting can offer.

And yet right now news and video languish in Yahoo’s overall portfolio; just one more thing that the company offers.

If Yahoo is seriously looking for the one thing that it could be the best in the world at, then news – specifically multi-media news – is a serious contender. CNN might have been the last generation’s “Most Trusted Name In News” but they just don’t have the innate understanding of the web that a company like Yahoo does. For most traditional broadcast or print news outlets, the concept of mixing together original reporting with aggregated content from other sources and the curational wisdom of the online crowds is utterly beyond their comprehension. The closest CNN has got to content aggregation is The Situation Room, while, when it comes to interactivity, even the mighty taxpayer-funded BBC hadn’t got much beyond reading out the occasional viewer email on screen.

Yahoo on the other hand understand innately how people use the web – they have billions of users whose behaviour they track; they know curation and aggregation; they’ve proved they know news and they certainly know video. By combining these resources, and then delivering the results through their hugely visible platform (yes, including mobile), they could blow CNN – and everyone else – out of the water.

At dinner the other night, I joked with a friend (who happens to work at Yahoo) that we might one day see a Yahoo journalist asking a question in the Whitehouse. That need not be a joke. Yahoo has the resources to hire hundreds of journalists – real journalists, not just the hungry children who churn out posts for Associated Content – and set them to work covering serious stories. Then it can integrate that coverage even more tightly with its news aggregation product, and at the same time expand the company’s flagship finance and sports video programming into politics, global affairs, entertainment and everything else that’s going on in the world. Mix in user-generated curation, courtesy of their billions of annual visitors, and you have the makings of a very large and very trusted online news and content network.

Put another way, Tim Armstrong may say that “AOL is planning on being the largest high quality content producer for digital media”, but Yahoo is in a position to actually make that happen.

But of course that’s just one idea. There are a dozen other possible roads that Bartz could take Yahoo, and thanks to the company’s sheer size she can still afford to take the time to explore them all. The critical thing is that she stops trying (and failing) to explain the dozens of things Yahoo does now, and instead settles on the one thing that Yahoo is going to do next. If she can do that then Yahoo might still be thriving in three years time.

If not then it’s — what’s the word, Carol?

Fucked.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

NSFW: Never Mind The Bollocks – Why Carol Bartz Can’t Say What…

According to this blog post, Google has acquired online travel guide and community Ruba. Ruba is a visual travel guide and tour review site that provides travelers with visual guides written by other travelers. The blog post is embedded below. We’ve reached out to Google for confirmation.

Ruba offer users a way to visually browse through cities and their attractions around the world, offering photo-rich guides and an emphasis on making it easy to quickly discover new locations. The site is headed by Mike Cassidy, who has founded a number of successful companies, including Xfire, which sold to Viacom in 2006 for $102 million.

Guides are all written and submitted by users, with Ruba pulling from Google and Flickr APIs to help pinpoint locations and provide some sample photos (users can submit their own, too). The site, which is similar in some ways to TripAdvisor, features integration with Twitter and Facebook Connect, allowing users to broadcast where they’re headed and ask friends for input.

It’s unclear at this point how Ruba will be integrated into Google’s products. Google has been reportedly making a significant move to enter the online travel business, integrating hotel links into Maps and listing hotels with room rates. The search giant is also supposedly in talks to buy fare shopping software ITA software, according to the USA Today.

Hi friends, fans, and Ruba community members – exciting news from the Ruba team. We are thrilled to announce our team will be joining Google! As of Monday, May 24, we’ll be moving into the Google headquarters. We are totally excited to be joining such an amazing company.

For the past 15 months, we’ve worked to create a unique and fun visual travel site and community focused on guides, photos, maps, and interactive tour listings to improve the online travel research experience. The Ruba community has written amazing travel reviews which have inspired our own journeys and hopefully yours as well.

We want to thank the entire Ruba community (guide writers, local experts, bloggers, and more) for all you’ve done along the way. We’d also like to thank our tour operator partners for sharing their tours on our site. Thank you for sharing your feedback, ideas, and of course your travel tips and experiences with our community.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Google Acquires Online Travel Guide Ruba

Back in the days before Gmail, webmail on the Internet was really, really bad. Inboxes were limited to 10 or 20 megabytes, interfaces were slow and ugly, and the experience simply didn’t come close to matching what most desktop clients offered. This is how I remember Hotmail. I hated it. In fact, since signing up for Gmail in 2004, the only times I’ve checked out Microsoft’s webmail client were immediately after big launches, at which point I would reactivate my account, give it a quick run through, and promptly decide that it still wasn’t very good. So when I say that the new version of Hotmail that’s launching this summer has me excited, that’s saying something.

This morning, Microsoft showcased this new version of Hotmail to a room full of press at its offices in San Francisco. It’s fast, slick, and comes with a set of new features for managing large amounts of email that make it a much better rival to Gmail. Does it look like a revolution? Not really. But it does incorporate some very nice features — things that seem quite obvious once you seem them in action, but aren’t already available elsewhere. And more importantly, they’re features that regular people will actually use.

First, the stuff that Hotmail is really just playing catchup with. The first thing you’ll notice is that threaded conversations are now offered, and it looks like they’re the default (though you can turn them off). The search box now features auto complete. You can flag messages (I can’t believe this wasn’t available before). There’s better spam protection. Gmail users should stop yawning, because there’s plenty of other good stuff.

Perhaps the most important suite of features, at least to people who commonly experience inbox overload, are all the new filtering and message management tools the new Hotmail comes with. My favorite is called ‘Sweep’. If you’ve subscribed to a newsletter but decide you don’t want to filling up your inbox any more, you can hit activate this option to move every message you receive from that sender to a folder other than your mail inbox. Other webmail clients can do this too, but the flow for this looks easier than, say, making a filter in Gmail.

Another feature, called Hotmail Highlights, breaks out your messages according to where they’re coming from. One section shows you at a glance whether you’ve received any messages from people in your address book. Another shows you any messages you have from social networks like Facebook. On the left hand side of the screen, you’ll see a few options under the label “Quick View”. One of these is for photos — click it, and you’ll see all the messages in your inbox that have either image attachments or links to photo albums on sites like Flickr. There’s a similar option for Documents, as well as one that lets you immediately find shipping updates.

The other big features involve reading and composing messages. When you receive a message that has either photo attachments or links to an online photo album, Hotmail will use those photos to build a slick slideshow (it uses Silverlight). The service is even better for sending photos. Most email services aren’t great for sending photos, because they have a limit of 10-20 megabytes per message (and you also have to worry about whether the recipient’s service will allow for messages that large). Hotmail works around this by automatically uploading your images to Microsoft’s cloud storage service SkyDrive, which is free up to 25 GB. The resulting message looks great — Hotmail builds a photo album that should be visible in any mail client that supports rich formatting, and it doesn’t kill anyone’s inbox storage.

Finally there’s Hotmail’s integration with Microsoft’s online version of Office. When you receive a document in Hotmail, you have the option to view and edit it using the online versions of Office, and then save and send any changes back to the original sender. These online apps have strong integration with the desktop versions of Office 2010, but you don’t need the desktop apps in order to use the online versions for free. This is of course Microsoft’s answer to Google Docs, which is itself integrated into Gmail, and it looks well done (I expect document fidelity will be better for Microsoft, which may be a big sticking point).

I should point out that Yahoo Mail offers some of these features already (like the ability to break out messages that were sent by your contacts). And while Gmail doesn’t offer some of these features as part of its default set, you can reproduce some of them using filters. Hotmail doesn’t necessarily need to outdo its competitors in every respect — it’s still the largest email provider worldwide, with 360 million active accounts. But Gmail is growing fastest, and Microsoft is looking to curb that growth.  This new launch probably  isn’t going to spark any kind of mass migration away from Google’s services, it may well draw a few more former AOL users who are now looking for a new webmail provider.

Microsoft expects to ship the new Hotmail in mid-summer.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Meet The New Hotmail: Sleeker & Faster, With Some Powerful Weapons…

With a recent public launch under its belt, OpenSky is adding $6 million in new capital. Existing investors Highland Capital and Canaan Partners invested in the series B financing. A year ago, the company raised $5 million.

OpenSky is a social marketing/e-commerce startup which connects manufacturers and distributors directly with influential bloggers who recommend their products and get a cut from resulting sales. It is much more than an affiliate networks. As I described OpenSky when it launched:

While OpenSky sounds at first like an affiliate network, it isn’t. Instead of sending customers off to other online stores, they send them to their own stores where they can track sales and follow up with personalized messages. OpenSky hand picks the publishers who are allowed to set up shops and sell in its network. It then strikes deals directly with manufacturers and distributors who agree to drop-ship any sold items to readers who click to buy through an OpenSky shop. Instead of the blogger getting a 3 to 10 percent affiliate fee, they split the net profits 50/50 with OpenSky. The economics work best obviously with high-margin products.

OpenSky CEO John Caplan was previously the CEO of Ford Models, and before that the president of About.com. He tells me that “seller conversion rates grow and repeat shoppers buy more frequently” since the launch (before that, OpenSky was in private beta with 250 bloggers). His plans going forward include hiring more people, releasing a distributed cart (for onsite shopping without sending readers off to a store), opening up OpenSky’s APIs, improve the relevance matching between product manufacturers and bloggers/influencers, and better direct marketing support for sellers.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Blogger Commerce Network OpenSky Fetches $6 Million Series B

It will soon be possible to compare the performance of search and social ad campaigns side by side. Clickable, the ad management platform that lets search marketers measure and track the performance of their online marketing campaigns across different search engines and advertising networks, will be adding Facebook Ads as an option on April 12.

What that means is that an advertiser buying pay-per-click ads on Google can test the performance of those search ads against pay-per-click ads on Facebook targeted to particular social demographics. Search ads versus social ads, all in one dashboard. According to this sign-up page on Clickable:

Clickable Pro now empowers you to create and upload pay-per-click Facebook ads in bulk. And with Clickable conversion tracking, you can track Facebook and search marketing revenues and conversions with a simple tag placed on your Web site. You can even produce customized, white-label reports with search and social performance displayed side by side.

Clickable is a Facebook partner which has integrated its service with the Facebook Ads API, which will allow Clickable customers to create, upload, and manage Facebook Ads directly from Clickable. The integration will work with pay-per-click text or image ads, but not yet with regular display ads.

Facebook ads are bringing in real revenues now for the social network. But how will they compare to search ads?

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Clickable Gets Social With Facebook Ads

Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try. It’s time we all just give up on the small fights and become more accepting of the indiscretions of our fellow humans. Because the skeletons are coming out of the closet and onto the front porch.

We’ll look back on the good old days when your reputation was really only on the line with eBay via confirmed, actual transactions and LinkedIn, where you can simply reject anyone who leaves bad feedback on your professional life.

Today we have quick fire and semi or completely anonymous attacks on people, brands, businesses and just about everything else. And it is becoming increasingly findable on the search engines. Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, etc. are the new printing presses, and absolutely everyone, even the random wingnuts, have access.

That picture of you making out with two guys in college up on Facebook. Or perhaps doing a bong hit after winning a few Olympic gold medals. The random slam against your restaurant anonymously left by the owner of the competitor around the corner. The Twitter flame about how bad a driver you are, complete with a link to a picture of your license plate.

And it’s about to get a lot worse. Next week a startup is launching that’s effectively Yelp for people (look for our coverage in a few days). If someone has something good or bad to say about you, they’ll be able to do it anonymously and with very little potential legal or social fallout.

We’ve seen services like this in the past. Rapleaf and iKarma come to mind. But they were flawed – Rapleaf now collects and sells data about people, and iKarma seems to be little more than a realtor focused service. Another service, Gorb, has vanished completely.

But something tells me this new service, or some other one, might succeed where the others have failed. We’re primed and ready now and have lots of experience publishing all those random opinions about people and things on Twitter, Yelp and Facebook already. It’s time for a centralized, well organized place for anonymous mass defamation on the Internet. Scary? Yes. But it’s coming nonetheless.

This has been on my mind for a long while now. Our minds haven’t evolved much over the last few thousands of years, but the spread of quick fire opinions is now moving at the speed of light and forever findable on the Internet. We’re still wired to think of gossip as something that spreads quietly behind the scenes, and relatively slowly. But we’re already in a world where it’s all completely public, there are few repercussions to the person spreading it, and it is easily searchable. No wonder people freak out. We’re fish out of water.

Sure, we’ve evolved a legal infrastructure to deal with libel, slander and defamation. Those laws worked well in an era of the printing press, and sort of stretched to cover radio and television. But they are as ineffective against the Internet as copyright laws are in battling music piracy.

Other services like Reputation Defender have launched to try to help people manage their online reputations. It can be somewhat effective unless your name gets into the press, which doesn’t back away easily from the stuff they publish. It’s relatively easy to bully someone into taking down that Twitter rant, or even that Facebook photo, with an official looking email or letter threatening legal action.

But it’s much harder to get that stuff off of services that exist to publish that information. Businesses freak out over a bad Yelp review but can do little to stop it. Imagine how you’ll feel when the top result for your name is a site that includes “reviews” of you by anonymous people who know you.

Sure, lots of feedback will be positive. But piss someone off at work and you’ll have “Sketchy and unethical in the workplace” pop up about you. And it will be there forever. Heck, your great-great-grandchildren will be reading it long after you’re gone.

So What Happens Next?

We’re going to be forced to adjust as a society. I firmly believe that we will simply become much more accepting of indiscretions over time. Employers just won’t care that ridiculous drunk college pictures pop up about you when they do a HR background search on you.

Anyone who rises quickly in a corporate environment will have people complaining about you all the way up, and it will be easily findable via search. Basically, if someone doesn’t like you, even just for a moment, they’ll have the chance to hit you with an ambiguous but damaging anonymous statement. And it will be vague enough to stop any lawyer dead in her tracks from trying to get it removed, or from even learning the identity of the person who left the comment.

So what will matter? Hard proof of being a bad person. Criminal records. Non-anonymous and clear statements of wrong doing that need to be addressed. Perhaps a picture of you actually committing a violent felony. That kind of thing.

But the nonsense we’re all worried about today? I just don’t think it will carry the same weight in a few years. Because if there are pictures of the person hiring you smoking pot in college online, and there are pictures of every other candidate smoking pot in college online, it just won’t be a big deal any more.

And the kind of accusations that can kill a career today will likely be seen as a badge of honor, and a sign of an ambitious individual who has pissed off a few people along the way.

At least that’s what I hope will happen. Because there are a few pictures of me in high school and college that I’m tired of trying to keep off the Internet. Let’s just get it all out there sooner rather than later, and move on.

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Reputation Is Dead: It’s Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions

The New York Times plans to introduce a metered billing system on its Website sometime next year. The newspaper will begin to charge frequent visitors to its Website along the lines of what the Financial Times does on FT.com, which starts charging people who visit the site more than 10 times a month. But the new model is unlikely to move the needle on the New York Times’ digital revenues.

Details are spare on how exactly the model will work, but it is possible to do some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations. According to comScore, NYTimes.com attracted 12.4 million U.S. visitors in December, 2009, down from 15.4 million in September, 2009. If you include all the sites the New York Times operates, including About.com, Boston.com, and the sites of various local papers, the numbers jump to 52.8 million U.S. visitors in December. But right now the company is only talking about putting up a metered billing system on the NYTimes.com proper. So we are talking about an audience of 12.4 million in the U.S. and about 20 million worldwide.

The average visitor in the U.S. comes to the site 3.7 times a month, a number which has been steadily rising. Let’s say for argument’s sake that the NYT adopts the same policy as the FT, and only charges people who visit more than 10 times a month. Let’s also be super-generous and estimate that 20 percent of its audience comes to the site more than 10 times a month, or roughly 3 million people in the U.S., or 4 million worldwide. Now subtract about a million print subscribers since they won’t be charged anything extra to read the paper online.

How many of the 2 to 3 million loyal readers who are left will actually pay for the online edition, and how much will they pay? Back in 2005 to 2007, when the NYT was offering a partial pay wall through TimesSelect, it got 210,000 readers to pay $50 a year. That added $10.5 million to its top line. The FT.com charges about $25 a month to frequent visitors. But the FT is a financial publication and, like the WSJ, readers are willing to pay more for that information. The NYT appeals to a broader demographic, so let’s assume the pricing will fall within the range of $10 to $15 a month.

If the New York Times gets 10 percent of its frequent readers who aren’t already subscribers to pay $10 a month that would come to as much as $3 million in extra revenue worldwide (300,000 X $10), or an extra $9 million a quarter. In the third quarter of 2009, the New York Times recorded $39 million in Internet advertising revenues across all of its newspaper properties. Adding $9 million would be a significant jump. But what you also have to take into account is that those Internet advertising revenues were down by $8.8 million from the year before due to the advertising recession and the decline in classifieds revenues.

So at $10 per online subscriber, the New York Times would only be replacing the online advertising revenues it lost last year. If it can charge $15 or get more than 300,000 subscribers, the numbers start to make more sense. And if the meter drives more people to subscribe to the print paper, that’s even better for the New York Times (and, in fact, I suspect that growing print subscribers is really what this is all about).

However, there is one last part to this equation. How many of those 3 million readers who hit the meter will simply stop coming to the NYTimes.com and find their news elsewhere? To the extent that the New York Times drives away a portion of its online audience, its online advertising revenues will drop as well. Getting that balancing act right will be crucial to the success of this metered scheme.

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The New York Times’ Online Meter Will Hardly Move The Needle

Are you tired of living in public, sick of all the privacy theater the social networks are putting on, and just want to end it all online? Now you can wipe the slate clean with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. (Warning: This will really delete your online presence and is irrevocable). Just put in your credentials for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or LinkedIn and it will delete all your friends and messages, and change your username, password, and photo so that you cannot log back in.

The site is actually run by Moddr, a New Media Lab in Rotterdam, which execute the underlying scripts which erase your accounts. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is a digital Dr. Kevorkian. On Facebook, for instance, it removes all your friends one by one, removes your groups and joins you to its own “Social Network Suiciders,” and lets you leave some last words. So far 321 people have used the site to commit Facebook suicide. On Twitter, it deletes all of your Tweets, and removes all the people you follow and your followers. It doesn’t actually delete these accounts, it just puts them to rest.

The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine runs a python script which launches a browser session and automates the process of disconnecting from these social networks (here is a video showing how this works with Twitter). You can even watch the virtual suicide in progress via a Flash app which shows it as a remote desktop session. You can watch your online life pass away one message at a time. Taking over somebody else’s account via an automated script, even with permission, may very well be against the terms of service of these social networks.

From the FAQs:

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can I stop the process?
No!

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can YOU stop the process?
No!

What shall I do after I’ve killed myself with the web2.0 suicide machine?
Try calling some friends, take a walk in a park or buy a bottle of wine and start enjoying your real life again. Some Social Suiciders reported that their lives has improved by an approximate average of 25%. Don’t worry, if you feel empty right after you committed suicide. This is a normal reaction which will slowly fade away within the first 24-72 hours.

The light-hearted video below explains the benefits of committing Web 2.0 Suicide and disconnecting from “so many people you don’t really care about.” Unplugging from your social life online will leave you more time for your real life, which you’ve probably been neglecting. With the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, you can “sign out forever.” Not that we are recommending you do this in any way. But you may enjoy the video.

web 2.0 suicide machine promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo.

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Wipe The Slate Clean For 2010, Commit Web 2.0 Suicide

Microsoft's Xbox 360 may call itself the only console to stream Netflix, but all that could be changing -- and soon. As Netflix continues to pull in new subscribers (and cash flow) like it's no big deal, the company is apparently looking to spread its wings even further by integrating its wildly popular Watch Instantly feature into "a device already owned by a large number of consumers." Naturally, the most fitting candidates for that would be Sony's PlayStation 3 or Nintendo's Wii, though the company has yet to come forward with anything concrete. Just so know you, Netflix credits the Xbox 360's streaming integration as the main reason some 2.4 million customers have signed up since late 2008, so it's more than apparent that it loves the game console. Any bets for when this will go down, or are you just plugging your ears in order to avoid potential disappointment?

[Via Joystiq]

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Netflix hints at Watch Instantly integration on 'already-popular device' originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Netflix hints at Watch Instantly integration on ‘already-popular…

LA-based Sometrics has secured a Series B round of venture capital, led by Walt Disney Company-affiliated Steamboat Ventures and joined by previous investors The Mail Room Fund and Greycroft Partners. In total, $4 million was injected into the fledgling company, we’ve learned.

That brings the total invested in the startup to $5.55 million. The first round was raised back in May 2008. It was the first investment made by The Mail Room Fund, a joint venture fund established by William Morris Agency, Accel Parners and Venrock.

Sometrics is one of many companies looking to optimize the way social networks, gaming platforms and virtual worlds are being monetized. The startup markets tools that allow publishers and brands to manage ad inventory across social web platforms, optimize campaigns through audience analysis and targeting, as well as gain ’social intelligence’ about the performance of those campaigns through detailed analytics.

The latter part is what the company started out with, by giving social app developers a way get an overview of the number of page views and unique visits, installs and uninstalls, age of users, gender of users, number of friends, location of users and more for their Facebook and MySpace apps.

The company has since diversified and broadened its offering, and now does a little bit of everything that publishers and advertisers can tap into to get more ROI from advertising campaigns on social gaming sites, community sites and from sales of virtual goods across the board. Sometrics appear to be gravitating towards a focus on game developers, particularly with their Virtual Currency Manager product. The startup already boasts a number of partnerships with players in the online gaming industry, such as Playdom and Outspark.

Virtual goods and social advertising are an interesting field that’s poised for growth, but there’s a lot of competition in the space, with companies like SocialMedia.com, Lookery, OfferPal Media and Pubmatic offering services similar to what Sometrics markets. Maybe the pedigree of co-founder and CEO of Sometrics, Ian Swanson, can help the company stand out among them; Swanson used to run business development for AOL-owned Userplane and was an executive at Sprint before that.

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Sometrics Raises $4 Million For Social Analytics And Advertising…

OnLive, the gaming company trying to reinvent the Games On Demand service, has announced a Series C round of venture financing from AT&T Media Holdings, Inc., Lauder Partners, Warner Bros., Autodesk, and Maverick Capital. Warner Bros., Autodesk and Maverick Capital have participated in previous rounds of financing as well. OnLive did not disclose the size of financing.

OnLive has been working on the launch of its cloud-based OnLive Game Service, which delivers the latest games instantly through the MicroConsole TV adapter. Unveiled in March at the 2009 Game Developers Conference, the OnLive Game Service recently went into beta testing and is speculated to officially launch this winter.

Palo Alto-based OnLive raised $16.5 million in previous funding.

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OnLive Raises Series C Round from AT&T, Warner Bros. and Others

Y Combinator sees no shortage of startups that apply to be a part of their funding cycles. But they don’t always see all the ideas they’d like to see come out of the classes. So starting with the upcoming Winter 2010 cycle, they have a new idea called RFS, Requests For Startups. Basically, Y Combinator will issue some ideas of what they’re looking for in any cycle, and will accept the ones that pitch the best way to do the idea.

Now, to be clear, Y Combinator will not be forgoing its usual method of combing over any and all startup pitches outside of the ones they lay out. “We don’t expect responses to RFSes will ever be more than a fraction of the applications we accept. We wouldn’t want them to be. Most good ideas should be ones that surprise us, not ones we’re waiting for,” Paul Graham writes on the site today. The hope is that this will help guide some new startups without solid ideas in the direction of something that is missing in the market. Or encourage ones that already have a similar idea to apply.

Y Combinator’s RFSes won’t describe exactly what Y Combinator is looking for, but rather will give a general idea, with the hopes that the startups can come up with even better plans than Y Combinator is thinking of, Graham says.

So what is the first RFS? Well, it’s something near and dear to our hearts: The Future Of Journalism. Y Combinator is wondering what the online content sites will look like in the future when print publications are gone. Certainly some, like TechCrunch, have gotten large enough to support themselves now, but most content sites are still built on the notion of content first, monetization later. Y Combinator notes that in the heyday of print media, the approach was often the opposite, there was a business plan in place before the launch. It believes that approach can still work, and has laid out a rough outline of what it’s looking for from startups that want to do this:

Groups applying to work on this idea should include at least one writer who can write well and rapidly about any topic, one or more programmers who are good at statistics, data mining, and making sites scale, and someone who’s reasonably competent at graphic design. These functions can of course be combined, and in fact it’s even better if they are. Xooglers would be particularly well suited to this project.

This RFS is just the first of 3 to 5 that Y Combinator hopes to get out there before the October 26 Winter 2010 class application deadline, Graham tells us. Startups applying specifically for these RFS ideas will be able to indicate that on their applications.

Graham notes that Y Combinator has sort of passively given ideas to startups in the past, like this, but thinks this new explicit call will lead to some interesting things.

We asked Graham if this new approach means these types of startups will get different financial deals from Y Combinator. “Not significantly,” Graham says. “Execution matters so much more than the idea that even if we supplied the entire idea we wouldn’t be entitled to more than 10% of the company,” he notes. On his post he gives a bit more:

We might ask for a little more equity from startups responding to an RFS, because we’d expect to contribute more to them. But at most a percent or two, and often nothing. Ideas count for something, but execution matters far more.

[photo: flickr/eran finkle]

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Y Combinator Starts Seeding Ideas To Startups

OLX and hi5, both challengers to dominating juggernauts in their respective fields (online classifieds and social networking), have teamed up to expose each others’ admittedly vast but geographically spread audience to one another. OLX says it currently boasts 70 million unique visitors each month across 90 countries, largely thanks to existing partnerships with services that have historically seen most of their growth in Latin-America and Asia (Friendster, MySpace Lat-Am, Fotolog etc.), while hi5 claims 60 million monthly unique visitors from 200 countries.

Even with a reasonable amount of overlap accounted for, these are significant numbers, albeit in countries where potential advertising income is generally much lower than it is in the U.S. and Europe.

OLX (a competitor to Craigslist in the United States) and hi5 (a competitor to the likes of Facebook and MySpace on a global level) claim the fresh partnership serves to consolidate both companies’ hold on the Latin American market, while making way for accelerated growth in the rest of the world.

As part of the agreement, hi5 will implement OLX features that include the ability to display ads on a user’s profile page and to see friends’ ads, as well as a feature to tell friends about their own ads via newsfeeds. OLX will also allow users to include videos and pictures in classified listings, comment, post/view listings in over 39 languages and 90 countries, and access the site from mobile devices. The latter two features are clearly meant to appeal to a large international user base.

Oodle, another major player in the online classifieds space, has been scoring similar deals recently with social networking services and portals like Facebook, MySpace and AOL.

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OLX And hi5 Join Forces For International Expansion Plans