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Microsoft’s Live Search Cashback Scheme Fails To Move The Market Share Needle

Posted: 28 Aug 2008 08:33 AM PDT

When it comes to search, Microsoft is trying everything it can to become a serious player. It tried to acquire Yahoo, its latest version of Internet Explorer attempts to steer Web surfers away from Google, and then there is straight-out payola to search advertisers. I am talking, of course, of Microsoft’s Live Search Cashback promotion, which lets advertisers offer rebates to consumers who make a purchase after doing a Microsoft search.

After Live Cashback launched in May, Microsoft saw an initial one-month boost in its share of the U.S. search market (from 8.5 percent in May to 9.2 percent in June). But in July, its share slipped again down to 8.9 percent, according to comScore. Although we only have two months of full data (June and July) since launch to evaluate, it doesn’t look like Cashback is having any effect.

While two months worth of data is far from conclusive, it does suggest that in search you can’t buy market share. You have to earn it.

During the same period, this is what happened to Google’s and Yahoo’s U.S. search market share:

U.S. Search Market Share
———-May, 2008——June, 2008—–July, 2008
Google——-61.8%———61.5%———-61.9%
Yahoo——-20.6%———-20.9%———-20.5%

Click on the table below for a market share figures for all the major search engines going back to July, 2007

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JamLegend Takes On Guitar Hero On The Web (1,000 Invites)

Posted: 28 Aug 2008 06:20 AM PDT

One of the most promising startups to come out of the LaunchBox incubator is JamLegend, a music site with mass appeal. JamLegend takes the familiar anyone-can-be-a-rockstar model made popular by videogames like Guitar Hero and Rock Band and puts it on the Web. The site is in private beta, but we have 1,000 invites for the first people to sign up at the site with the invite code “TechCrunch.”

Once you sign up, you pick a song from a variety of genres (although right now there are only songs in rock, alternative, and acoustic) and a difficulty level. Once the song starts playing, notes come down as dots on a guitar fret, and you have to press the right buttons on your keyboard and “enter” as they pass by. You can play “Jam Style,” holding your keyboard like an air guitar, or “chill style” (see illustration.). I’d recommend chill style—you never know who might walk into the room and catch you geek rocking with your keyboard. The game will will also support game guitars plugged into our computer for serious faux fretters.

JamLegend is not connected to any video console, it’s free on the Web, and you can play against any of your friends in turn-based duels or simultaneously in showdowns (which can support thousands of simultaneous players). A small green dot at the top right of the screen alerts you when your friends are online and what they are playing. The startup is working on Facebook and MySpace apps as well.

Music artists are invited to upload their songs to the site. The biggest drawback right now is the absence of a full catalog. There are only 20 songs from three indie artists (Blue Judy, Double Stamp, and the Stolen cars), but that should grow to about 30 artists within the next few weeks. That’s about how many songs you get with Guitar Hero, and these are free. The company is still figuring out how to make money in the future, but options include some combination of charging for major-label songs just like Guitar Hero and Rock Band do, affiliate MP3 sales, advertising on the site, or a freemium subscription service to gain access to all the songs on the service.

JamLegend Trailer from JamLegend on Vimeo.

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SpeedDate Scores $6 Million For Matchmaking In A Hurry

Posted: 28 Aug 2008 03:30 AM PDT

Online dating site SpeedDate has raised $6 million in a Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures. SpeedDate offers users a series of 3 minute mini-dates, during which they can converse through video, audio, and a chat box. If both partners decide they were a good match when prompted at the end of the date, they can continue communicating through the site until they make the jump to real life.

When we first wrote about SpeedDate, the site had a small userbase, which made it difficult to conduct a series of dates (there simply weren’t enough potential matches). Since then the site has grown substantially (claiming 100,000 dates daily), so you can hop on and hope to find a reasonable match within a few minutes.

I decided to put the site to the test once again now that it can reliably serve up a stream of potential prospects. Unlike most dating sites, there was no lengthy signup process - the site leaves the real matchmaking to your video chats. And while SpeedDate seemed to totally ignore the interests and personality traits I entered anyway, the experience was still surprisingly fun. I typically only had to wait a few minutes between each session, and girls I spoke to during my “dates” told me that their general experience on the site had been quite positive.

SpeedDate is a direct competitor to Woome, a similar speed-dating site that offers quick video sessions.

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What The Veoh Decision Means For YouTube And Others

Posted: 28 Aug 2008 02:24 AM PDT

Attorneys representing online video sites around the country are salivating today over the Veoh summary judgment decision (I know this because I’ve spoken to a few of them). In a nutshell, here’s what we learned today: If you take reasonable precautions against copyrighted materials on your service, you may be ok. And oh yeah, if you are going to get sued, try to get sued in federal court in northern California, because the judges there are a lot more Internet-friendly than some other federal judges we’ve seen.

Specifically, the court said that online video sites are protected under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA if they do the following (my interpretation of the decision):

Provide adequate notice to users that uploading copyrighted material is prohibited
Swiftly comply with DMCA takedown notices “on the same day the notice is received (or within a few days thereafter).”
Use fingerprinting and other technology to detect copyrighted material, even if the methods are flawed.
Take measures to control infringing users. Specifically, infringing accounts need to be terminated and the email banned from any new accounts. The court held that IP address banning was not neccesary: “…Io has presented no evidence suggesting that tracking (or verifying) users’ actual identity or that blocking their IP addresses is a more effective reasonable means of implementation.”
Transcoding files to Flash format does not put the files in the site’s control; they are still protected by the DMCA safe harbor (see previous post).
Sites are encouraged to spot check videos, and if they do, to remove content that is likely infringing.
Sites are NOT required to check every video. The court said “this court finds no reasonable juror could conclude that a comprehensive review of every file would be feasible. Even if such a review were feasible, there is no assurance that Veoh could have accurately identified the infringing content in question.”
It’s important to have lots of non-infringing content. The court noted that Veoh had received DMCA notices on only about 7% of its content. This helped its argument that it was different than Napster, which “existed solely to provide the site and facilities for copyright infringement…the sole purpose of the Napster program was to provide a forum for easy copyright infringement.”

YouTube, which is obviously thrilled with the decision, emailed us the following statement to us from Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine:

It is great to see the Court confirm that the DMCA protects services like YouTube that follow the law and respect copyrights. YouTube has gone above and beyond the law to protect content owners while empowering people to communicate and share their experiences online. We work every day to give content owners choices about whether to take down, leave up, or even earn revenue from their videos, and we are developing state-of-the-art tools to let them do that even better.

The statement by the court that checking every video for infringement isn’t realistic is an important one for Google/YouTube, which has said 13 hours of video content is uploaded every minute on YouTube. If it’s impossible for Veoh to monitor all content, YouTube is going to have an order-of-magnitude larger problem.

Before the parties break out, it’s important to note that this is a district court decision and will very likely be appealed. I imagine YouTube may be lending one or ten of its lawyers to Veoh to assist in that appeal in any way possible.

But this is still a key ruling and one likely to impact the YouTube-Viacom $1 billion ongoing litigation as well as a slew of other cases.

The full order is included below.

Veoh v IO Group - Free Legal Forms

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Bungee Labs In A Freefall

Posted: 28 Aug 2008 12:41 AM PDT

Bungee Labs, a well funded Utah based startup that left private beta only six months ago, laid off 15 employees today to give themselves more runway on their cash burn rate. The last we checked they had 38 employees, so this is nearly 40% of their total headcount.

CEO Martin Plaehn explained: “This change had less to do with the rate of technology development and more to do with actual versus anticipated rates of adoption. Our Platform-as-a-Service, Bungee Connect, has achieved the level of robustness and capability we envisioned and we are committed to its continued regular advancement and support. As with most new breakthrough offerings, Bungee Connect will require longer incubation time to become broadly accepted. As a start-up, our action yesterday extends our operating plan well into 2010 to more deeply establish Bungee Connect in the marketplace.”

The product is somewhat similar to a whole bunch of competitors - platform as a service application development. We’ve mentioned a number of them in our previous posts, including DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks, among others. Salesforce’s Force.com is also a competitor. So, in a nutshell, the market may well mature, but there is no guarantee they’ll end up at Bungee Labs.

At least one employee says he has no regrets. Alex Barnett wrote: “No regrets, none at all. When I considered the opportunity of joining Bungee Labs (and by doing so leave a relatively safe harbor in order to do so) I knew of the risks involved. Bungee Labs’ mission was - and still is - of the kind that aims to “change the world”. To have been a member of the team tasked with realizing the company’s hugely ambitious mission has been nothing short of an entirely worthwhile and educational pursuit.”

Sounds like someone has vested on some stock to me. I’d be pissed off if I was laid off.

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FYI, None Of Us Can Go To The Google/Vanity Fair Party Tonight

Posted: 27 Aug 2008 11:35 PM PDT

From: Vanity Fair / Google
Date: August 27, 2008 9:06:32 PM PDT
To: Michael Arrington
Subject: IMPT: Google/Vanity Party Status
Reply-To: demconventionparty@google.com

Thank you for your interest in the Vanity Fair / Google Party.

We have reached full capacity for this event and are unable to accommodate additional guests.

If you have NOT received a Confirmation email–separate from the automated RSVP response– and a Party admission card with your name on it, you will not be admitted to the party. No exceptions.

If you HAVE received a confirmation email but have NOT picked up your admission card, you must reference your confirmation instructions and pick up your card by 4:00pm on Thursday.

Admission cards will not be distributed at the door.

If you use the shuttle service you must have your party admission card to board. No exceptions.

Thank you in advance for your understanding,

Vanity Fair & Google Events team

Google and Vanity Fair took the time to email me this evening to let me know I wouldn’t be able to attend their big party tomorrow night in Denver for the Democratic National Convention. The only problem is I never asked to attend. Actually I never even heard of it until tonight. But I asked around and lots of other people are getting this email as well. Is this their way of letting everyone know that they’re holding a really cool party and hanging out with the Vanity Fair Hollywood crowd? Or just some mixup in the email list? Who knows. But suddenly I feel kind of left out.

In the future though, Google, please wait until I actually ask to get into something really cool before you kick me off the list.

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Transcoding Is Not A Crime, Says Court In Veoh Porn Case

Posted: 27 Aug 2008 06:56 PM PDT

Update: More analysis of the decision here.

Finally, a judge who may have actually visited the Internet once or twice before deciding a case. Judge Howard Lloyd, a judge on the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, threw out adult entertainment company IO Group’s 2006 copyright infringement case against Veoh today. At the time Veoh had some user-uploaded porn on its service that belonged to IO Group. Despite quick takedowns from DMCA notices, IO Group sued anyway.

A key issue of the case turned on whether or not Veoh should lose DMCA safe harbor protection because they transcoded user uploaded videos to the Flash format, something every online Flash video site does as a matter of course.

IO Group argued that the transcoding made Veoh a direct infringer and that the materials were under their direct control. Lloyd disagreed, saying “Here, Veoh has simply established a system whereby software automatically processes user-submitted content and recasts it in a format that is readily accessible to its users. Veoh preselects the software parameters for the process from a range of default values set by the thirdparty software…ButVeoh does not itself actively participate or supervise the uploading of files. Nor does it preview or select the files before the upload is completed. Instead, video files are uploaded through an automated process which is initiated entirely at the volition of Veoh's users.”

In other words, nice try but no dice.

Viacom-YouTube and a host of other Internet video related lawsuits continue to rage on, but the good guys won this one. But those of you thinking you’ll find a little adult content on Veoh now that they’ve won the case will be dissapointed. Veoh banned it permanently back in 2006. This case was about nothing but money.

The full order is included below.

Veoh v IO Group - Free Legal Forms

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We Need To Kill The Business Card Once And For All

Posted: 27 Aug 2008 06:42 PM PDT

The business card needs to die, and everyone knows it. They’re clumsy, easy to lose, and virtually useless as one of the last bits of information that we pass non-digitally (they kill trees, too). The cell phone market could easily put business cards out of their misery, but instead of conforming to a single standard for contact exchange, handset manufacturers offer proprietary solutions or none at all.

FriendBook, an iPhone application from Tapulous, looked like it might hold the answer. The app uses a physical “handshake” to swap information - users simply put their iPhones next to each other and shake them. Granted, this would only work on iPhones, but it could have paved the way for similar apps on other phones. But as of yesterday the fate of FriendBook is now in jeopardy due to the departure of its lead developer (and Tapulous cofounder) Mike Lee. So is all hope lost?

Gabe Zichermann, CEO of rmbrME (”remember me”), thinks that his startup holds the answer. The service uses standard SMS or a web app to initiate the transfer of contact information, so it should work on nearly any phone. rmbrME initially launched last spring under a paid model (you’d have to pay around 50 cents every time you wanted to add a new contact). But because of an immediate poor response to the model, rmbrME is now free, though it plans to offer a premium service in the future.

To begin using the rmbrME, you first set up a profile including your standard contact information as well as links to your presence across various social networks. After meeting a potential new contact, you send a text message containing either the contact’s email address or phone number to a designated rmbrME shortcode. rmbrME then sends your new contact a SMS or email message with a link to your details, and asks them to create their own profile so that you can receive theirs.

Zichermann says it only takes about 3 seconds to initiate the process - just send your contact’s email to rmbrME, and you can complete the rest later. That may be the case, but each user still needs to create an account, logon to the site, and download the contact information from there. People may be willing to jump through a few hoops for essential contacts, but the process is still too involved, especially when meeting a large number of people at once. rmbrME is a step up from the antiquated business card, but at this point it isn’t the ultimate solution.

So what is the answer? Handset manufacturers need to agree on a format for proximity-based exchange over the air between devices - whip out the phones, detect nearby acquaintances, and hit accept. Palm was doing this a decade ago (albeit with a proprietary format), yet we’re still fumbling with Email exchanges and workaround solutions.

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BackType, A Twitter For Comments

Posted: 27 Aug 2008 04:10 PM PDT

BackType is the newest YCombinator startup to launch from their summer program. They’re a blog-comment focused startup - founders Christoper Golda and Michael Montano are for the first time aggregating all comments from millions of blogs into a single, searchable, parsable stream. Think Twitter for all comments on the web.

They are not like the recent barrage of startups focusing on cleaning up the comment experience on blogs - see Disqus, SezWho, JS-Kit, etc. Blogs (and even commenters) don’t have to actively participate to be included. Instead BackType is grabbing all comments from millions of blogs (via feeds and scraping) and adding them to the site.

Like Twitter it’s a gold mine of information. I tried searches for TechCrunch50, Obama and Olympics and got back all kinds of content that I would normally miss. RSS feeds for searches are also available.

You can also track by commenter. BackType aggregates comments made by a name that matches to a linked URL. So if you, like most people, leave comments with the same URL across multiple blogs, they will be aggregated. You can also claim an account, like i did, and have your comments aggregated even if you use different URLs. Since there is not authentication other than what people type into comment boxes, there’s a big fake comment problem. That can be fixed by turning moderation on so that you have to approve anything that goes under your name.

I like this one a lot.

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FriendFeed Releases New Set Of Customizable Widgets

Posted: 27 Aug 2008 03:06 PM PDT

FriendFeed, the social activity aggregator, has released a set of customizable widgets that will allow bloggers to make sure their readers can follow all of their activities across the web. While the site has provided some widgets in the past, this set includes some new widgets to facilitate story sharing and allows for more tweaking than was offered before.

Among the widgets offered are a new profile badge, a list of the most recent items in your feed, and a “Share on FriendFeed” chiclet that allows users to add an item to FriendFeed without leaving your site. You can grab the widgets here.

Here’s an example of the badge:

The new status widget:

The new features come only two days after FriendFeed rolled out support for photos and Friends List which have enabled the “Fake Follow“.

For more details, check out the FriendFeed blog.

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Mark Cuban Joins TechCrunch50 for a One-On-One Interview with Jason Calacanis

Posted: 27 Aug 2008 02:52 PM PDT

Mark Cuban will be joining the TechCrunch50 program on Tuesday, September 9 for a one-on-one interview with Jason Calacanis from the main stage. You probably know Mark as both the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Broadcast.com with Todd Wagner. They then sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo in July of 1999 for $5.04 billion. Before Broadcast.com, Mark co-founded MicroSolutions, a leading National Systems Integrator, in 1983, and later sold it to CompuServe.

Mark has continued his work with Todd Wagner in another venture, 2929 Entertainment, which provides vertically integrated production and distribution of films and video. Additionally, Mark is a co-founder (with Philip Garvin) of HDNet, the first high-definition satellite television network.

Even with all of his entrepreneurial, sports and corporate experience, Mark recently found time to participate as one of the 12 contestants on the 5th season of the ABC Show Dancing with the Stars. Mark and his partner, Kym Johnson, were the fifth couple to be voted off of the show after welterweight boxing champion Floyd Mayweather and professional partner Karina Smirnoff.

You will not want to miss this live interview with Mark Cuban from TechCrunch50. Stay tuned for additional content updates – as we have a number of surprises yet to announce.

TechCrunch50 is right around the corner. Please register for your tickets before we sell out!! You will not believe what we have planned for you this year (September 8, 9 and 10).

As we move closer to the conference, we are encouraging everyone to book their hotel reservations (many hotels are already sold out) and register for the conference before we sell out. For companies seeking to launch and showcase products at TechCrunch50, please take a look at our Exhibitor Package. If you have questions about sponsorships, please reach out to Heather Harde or Dan Kimerling. All media inquiries should be sent to Sarah Ross.

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More Yahoo Senior Exec Defections: Steve Boom and Todd Teresi

Posted: 27 Aug 2008 02:09 PM PDT

The mass exodus of both execs and rank and file employees at Yahoo continues. In fact the real defections may just be getting started at a high percentage of employees vest on lucrative restricted stock units this month.

Yahoo’s head of communications Jill Nash continues to try to keep the resignations as quiet as possible, and suggests informally to press that most of the high level departures are really just a cleaning house procedure.

What a housecleaning.

Two more SVPs are bailing out. Previously reported was Todd Teresi (pictured left), SVP of Network Business. Teresi is now the Chief Revenue Officer at Quantcast.

Now we’ve heard that the number 2 exec at Yahoo Mobile, ten year Yahoo’er Steve Boom (pictured right), has resigned as well. Boom started in Yahoo’s London office in a business development role. More recently he oversaw Yahoo’s broadband partnerships with AT&T, Rogers, BT and Verizon.

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Google Expands Its Wiki Approach to Map Making (India Edition)

Posted: 27 Aug 2008 12:48 PM PDT

When it comes to the availability of good mapping data, not all parts of the world are created equal. That’s why Google is taking a wiki approach to filling out the white spaces on its maps, particularly in developing nations. Back in June, it launched Map Maker for a small group of island nations where there isn’t great existing cartography data. But now it’s added India to the countries that can be modified on Google Maps. As Google gains more experience with this experiment, more countries may be added in the future. Although it is starting in regions that have poor map data, hopefully it will figure out a way to add this capability for every region of the world. (Even in the U.S., which is not yet editable in this fashion, Google Maps is not perfect).

Map Maker lets anyone add or edit roads, points of interests, and other features on Google Maps. You can mark tourist destinations (like the Taj Mahal), restaurants, factories, helipads, even shrubbery. There is a drop-down list of dozens of feature types to choose from for consistent tagging and easy searchability. Map Maker also lets you define particular regions and neighborhoods by drawing or tracing them using the satellite imagery as your guide. Unlike Google My Maps, any changes to Map Maker are automatically added to Google Maps for everyone to see (although Google reserves the right to moderate contributions).

Here is a video from Google India explaining the service and a list of the 57 countries that can now be edited in Map Maker (image below) .

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Yep, We Redesigned

Posted: 27 Aug 2008 12:45 PM PDT

As many of our readers have noticed (and noted) already, we rolled out a new design for TechCrunch yesterday evening.

We’ve been watching as the initial feedback has rolled in through Twitter and in the comments to our other posts. And while we’re still making lots of small changes, we wanted to take a second to write a proper post explaining our intentions and soliciting your feedback.

Our overarching goal was to clean things up, both on the surface and under the hood. TechCrunch had become bloated in many ways, with the homepage taking way too long to load and the scroll bar going on forever and ever.

So the first step entailed switching over to an “excerpt” format with which readers could get a taste of our posts on the homepage before diving in to read them in full. By cutting down on the amount of content on the homepage, we’ve reduced load times and made it easier to skim our headlines for the news and editorial you care about most.

We’ve also taken a minimalist approach to design that uses lots of whitespace and gives priority to our main content with a wider post width and a larger font size (no more squinting on that high resolution monitor).

As far as particular features go, a new “featured posts” box sits adjacent to the second post on the homepage and in the sidebar of every single post page. It’s intended to highlight some of the content you might otherwise overlook, with a tab for the most recent posts and another for those that garnered the most comments in the past few days. We’ve also started to measure the traffic to our individual posts more closely and will add a tab with the most popular posts as well.

So what’s next? We plan to roll this design - with minor customizations - across most of the other blogs within the TechCrunch Network (CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, TechCrunch UK, etc). We’re also going to launch a new search implementation using Yahoo BOSS Custom that lets you search by keyword across our entire network of blogs, plus CrunchBase.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let us know what you think in the comments below.

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ESPN Helps The Active Network Raise $80 Million More

Posted: 27 Aug 2008 11:22 AM PDT

The Active Network, a network of sites focused on getting people involved in sports and other activities, has raised an additional $80 million in a Series F round led by ESPN and joined by Canaan Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Performance Equity Partners.

The round brings San Diego-based company’s total to over $275 million since its founding in 1998 as a registration site for endurance races (we’re still tracking down all the rounds for CrunchBase).

While its main property, Active.com, delivers the bulk of its traffic with 17 million registered users and almost 1.3 million uniques per month (according to internal stats), network properties also include Eteamz, LaxPower, and CoolRunning.

We’re told that The Active Network’s total revenue in 2007 exceeded $102 million. Since the beginning of 2007, the company has made 11 acquisitions intended to help it branch out into new markets such as camping and education.

This is not the first time ESPN has invested in The Active Network, which focuses on the participatory side of sports rather than the spectator side. In 2006, ESPN invested more than $20 million in an attempt to diversify its business away from news and editorial. As part of its relationship with The Active Network, ESPN runs advertising campaigns and places its logo on the network’s sites.

The Active Network makes most of its money through transaction fees for event registrations. The network facilitated over 10 million transactions in 2007 alone.

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CrunchGear Featured Review: Palm Treo Pro

Posted: 27 Aug 2008 10:45 AM PDT

So we return to the Palm Treo Pro, a $549 unlocked Windows Mobile Treo aimed squarely at the business set. It’s been about a week and I’ve used this guy off and on. It kept a nice charge - two days, for the most part, without much data use - and fit nicely in the pocket. But is it the Treo of which we all incessantly dream? Is it the Treo that will bring us closer to world peace and better burritos on the East Coast? Is this the Treo for you?

Yes, it is the Treo for you if you are a business professional forced to use Windows Mobile and you travel quite a bit and hardware price is no object. This is also the Treo for you if you’re buying a few cellphones for the CEO and the CFO and you want them to be productive without having to change your Windows-based IT and communications infrastructure. If you are neither of those people, think of the Treo Pro as a vision of Palm’s future.

The Treo Pro is one of Palm’s most attractive Treos to date. Gone is the lumpen plastic of the Centro and the low-gloss ho-hummery of the 800w. Whereas the Centro and the 800w took design cues from the lower end of the market, Treo tapped HTC to design this new looker and for good reason. The RIM, in a general, sense, was eating their enterprise lunch and the Centro was doing just fine.

So we have the Treo Pro. As its name implies, this isn’t for amateurs. Because it’s unlocked and unsubsidized you’d better have a damn good reason for going Windows Mobile. This could mean IT departments buying in bulk for their executives or a mobile professional who wants a messaging phone but still likes ActiveSync. Europe loves them some Windows Mobile, so their unlocked model is a good move. The US market, sadly, looks at expensive phones and then looks elsewhere. The Blackberry Curve didn’t get where it is on its good looks.

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