Evri Vs. Ensembli

At this week’s DEMO conference, two products are launching that are aim to make memetracking easier for everyone. The first one is UK-based Ensembli, which lets users enter any keyword, and it returns articles about that topic. The second is a new feature from semantic search engine Evri called “Collections” which lets you follow any term that it has categorized. Both are new twists on an old idea: prospective search. (You enter a company name or topic and any time a new article about that subject appears, it populates a custom feed to track that meme). I’ve tried out both, and compare my experiences below.

Neither one was as comprehensive or up to date as they should be. Searches for news about major companies such as Google or Facebook missed headlines that other memetrackers such as Techmeme do a better job of capturing. But both have merits as prospective search tools and are examples of how search is increasingly becoming more of a navigational tool.

Evri’s Collections feature lets you “follow” any concept that the semantic search engine has categorized. The Collection page brings up not only recent articles, but also images and videos for the topic you are tracking. It also provides a handy list of related topics and concepts. For instance, my “Google” collection offers links on the side to “Eric Schmidt,” “Twitter,” “Microsoft,” and the lost city of “Atlantis.”

Evri’s collections pages are basically saved searches, with different entry points to navigate to other entries on Evri and across the Web. Topics can be merged in the same collection, so you can follow Google and Facebook on the same page. For some reason, Evri chose to show only the latest three articles for each topic, which is much too limited. It certainly doesn’t capture all the news you’d want to see. And if Evri’s semantic search engine has not categorized what you want to track, you are out of luck. For example, it doesn’t recognize the DEMO conference as a separate topic.

Ensembli, in contrast, provides a much simpler interface. Once you sign up, you type in the topic you want to track, and then Ensembli uses artificial intelligence software to generate a feed of articles about that keyword. The fed updates as new articles appear. You can follow as many topics as you want, but there is no way to browse topics or find related topics. You are presented with a blank search box and either know what you want to track or you don’t. Each headline can be expanded to provide a summary of the article, and you can share each headline, but only via e-mail.

When you click through to a story, you can also share it directly via an Esnembli toolbar at the top. (You are actually sent to an Ensembli link which frames the underlying Webpage, much in the same way Ginx and Digg’s upcoming toolbar present shared pages). Integration with Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and other social sharing services is sorely lacking.

I have a few other issues with Ensembli as well. There is no way to combine topics into a single feed. You have to click on each term you are following to see the respective headlines. There is no way to see them all together. The biggest weakness, however, is that the headlines are not always as comprehensive or up to date as they should be. For instance, tracking “Google” turns up one article from yesterday as the most recent one, and then before that is an article from February 18. There are enough things going on at Google and enough coverage that Ensembli should be able to produce multiple headlines every day. Finally, Ensembli even had trouble identifying articles about itself. (I got a bunch of articles about “ensembles,” a forgivable error, but you’d think the startup would have at least properly categorized itself).

All in all, Evri wins this faceoff.

Twilio Closes Funding Round

Twilio, the powerful API for phone services that allows developers to quickly integrate telephony functionality into their apps, has closed its first institutional investment round, which was led by Founders Fund and Mitchell Kapor. The company plans to use the new funding to increase its efforts in sales and marketing, and to enhance the infrastructure of the service (likely to cope with increasing demand). The amount of the round was not disclosed.

In conjunction with the funding announcement, Twilio has also announced some of its early customers, including Cheetos, Earth911, and Tumblr, which used the service to launch its Call-to-audio feature last month. Sony Music has also been using Twilio to promote some of its album releases; musicians have been recording phone messages, which can then be sent to fans of the band (you can hear a sample recording below).

The Twilio service allows developers to integrate common phone actions (like placing calls or playing back a recording) using a small set of basic API commands. Building basic projects, like this Rick Roll app, takes only a few lines of code, though developers can create far more advanced applications (Earth911 used Twilio to replace the systems behind their 1-800-CLEANUP recycling hotline).

With a solid business model and a growing customer base that includes Fortune 500 companies, Twilio seems to be off to a great start. While some commenters in my original post noted that there are a number of enterprise solutions that offer similar functionality, it’s clear that Twilio’s simplicity and use-based pricing structure has a strong appeal for many developers.

Unofficial Desktop App

Everything comes around full circle. First we had Joost, Babelgum, Veoh, and others create standalone client software for watching online videos, but the ease and ubiquity of watching directly in the browser trumped whatever technical benefits a standalone client provided. The rise of YouTube, and more recently Hulu, proved that. But now that watching videos on the Web is something many of us spend an increasing amount of time on, the idea of a better viewing experience through a download client may now be making a comeback.

Hulu, in particular, now has an upgraded, if unofficial, desktop app in MyMediaPlayer2. Developed by Paul Yanez, this video player is more of a demonstration app than anything else, but it is still quite functional. MyMediaPlayer2, which was recently released, is an Adobe Air app which features 400 TV shows and 208 movies from Hulu. You start with a grid view, which resizes depending on the size of your screen and the window. The larger you make the window, the more thumbnail TV show icons appear in the grid dynamically. When you click on a show or movie, it then takes over the top half of the screen, with a list of other episodes below with the date, description, run-time, and a thumbnail. There is also a full-screen mode that works with a remote and allows for a ten-foot viewing experience. The app also includes Twitter integration. Now the whole world can know every time you are watching an episode of The Hustler.

But Yanez is not married to the idea of watching videos outside the browser. The app also works natively in Google’s Chrome browser. Simply go to this URL: http://www.paulyanez.com/labs/mymediaplayer2/app/. That link seems to work in Firefox as well. And Yanez even has a version that works inside Microsoft Outlook. I am not sure why yoou’d want to watch videos in Outlook, but you can.

Yanez has bigger ideas about what a media player should do, and has created an overall framework for what a Web media player should be. Many of these ideas are realized in MyMediaPlayer2. Before you go ahead and download the app, though, you should know that it regularly becomes disabled every time Hulu makes a major change to its service. If this happens again, Yanez suggests that you email Hulu CEO Jason Kilar to complain.

Tap Tap Revenge

The sequel to Tap Tap Revenge, the iPhone’s most popular game ever, is hitting the App Store tonight. The original version(iTunes link) of the game has been downloaded over six million times and spawned a number of spinoffs featuring licensed music from Weezer and Nine Inch Nails. You can learn more about the sequel here, and we’ll update the post as soon as it goes live on the App Store. Update: You can download the app here.

Created by iPhone development house Tapulous, the TTR series is akin to a ‘Guitar Hero’ for the iPhone, asking users to tap their fingers on a flurry of scrolling blobs that are presented in time with the music (it’s fairly easy to get started, and very addictive). Tap Tap Revenge 2 will include a new game engine with a revamped look and feel, along with some gameplay additions that include new moves like the “Tap & Hold” and “Multi-Tap”. The game will feature over 150 free songs (downloaded after installing the app) including music from Death Cab for Cutie, an exclusive song by The Cyrstal Method, and another by Stroke 9.

The game is expanding its social options, tapping into the iPhone’s network effect to create a ‘Challenge’ system that lets users face off with friends, who attempt to beat each others scores. The game will also include an ‘achievements’ system, and a complimentary new feed for alerts, allowing users to keep track of their friends’ accomplishments. There’s also a “Kids Mode” that offers a more basic version of the game for younger children.

TTR2 is sure to be another hit for Tapulous, but the game is still hindered by the App Store’s ban on allowing developers to include in-game transactions. Whenever Tapulous wants to release a premium song on the TTR platform, it has to do so through an entirely new game - it can’t sell premium songs through an integrated store in Tap Tap Revenge. If Apple ever does remove the restriction (and it should), Tap Tap Revenge and its sequel could well become some of the store’s most lucrative titles.

Crowded Online Commentary

Why do online commenting start-ups keep beating their heads against the same wall? Kutano, a browser add-on that lets users read, write and search comments side-by-side with any webpage, launched at DEMO today. With over one-third of the 1.574 billion internet users worldwide participating in online commentary and forums, Kutano is joining a slew of other start-ups hoping to capitalize on this growing trend by providing a free and open stage for online discussion.

As we wrote about last fall, there have been many online discussion add-ons and services developed to allow users to share unmoderated commentary on webpages, but very little traction for most of them.

Kutano’s technology doesn’t appear to be vastly different than its predecessors. Once Internet Explorer and Firefox users (Safari and Linux versions will be rolled out in Q2 2009) download the free add-on, a Kutano, collapsable “window” will be displayed to the right of the browser, which will show the discussions and information related to the specific subject (not by URL) of the web page that is being viewed. The add-on lets users comment on the website and also allows users to search and exchange information on any related commentary on the web (much like Reframe It). This serves to broaden the discussion, but also risks showing disjointed conversations.

Kutano, which means crowd or gathering in Swahili, integrates with Facebook and Twitter, giving users the ability to broadcast commentary on social networks. While Kutano offers users the ability to create specific subject-based commentary, competitor Reframe It provides many more social-networking features, including the ability to follow comments in a RSS feed and upload Gmail and Facebook contacts into the application.

Kutano will undoubtedly confront similar roadblocks that other commentary and Web annotation applications have experienced. The chance of coming across a website with commentary from Kutano users is small, making the side-panel somewhat useless. Like Reframe It, Kutano’s comments can only be seen by users who have downloaded Kutano to their browsers. And as free and open commentary becomes a staple of blogs and media sites, users tend to look and read comments and discussion sponsored by the blogs and news sites themselves. I’m skeptical that users will be looking for yet another open forum for comments and discussion relating to, for example, articles on The New York Times website.

Companies Honest With ReputationCheck

Social evaluation platform Vanno launched a widget application of its real-time company reputation index called ReputationCheck. Vanno’s platform allows customers and others to share stories about their personal experiences with a particular company, submit news articles they’ve read about companies, fill out surveys and comment on companies. Vanno then quantifies this dialogue and information into an index using Bayesian algorithms (the same statistical methods used to filter spam and detect credit card fraud). The company’s index measures the reputation of more than 5,800 companies worldwide.

Vanno’s reputation index was recently brought into the public light when Vanno quantified the damage Kellogg’s brand sustained after the company pulled the plug on Michael Phelps’s sponsorship following the swimmer’s marijuana photo fiasco. Vanno’s data suggested that Kellogg’s reputation plummeted after its decision, falling even further on the index than when the company had to recall products after this year’s peanut butter salmonella scare.

ReputationCheck, the index’s embeddable widget, shows a company’s real-time reputation rank and compares the rank to the best and worst companies relative to customer and employee satisfaction, community involvement, the environment, patriotism and social responsibility. The widget can be used in a post or in the sidebar of a site. Considering all of the various inputs of the index, the ranking system cannot be deemed as 100 percent authoritative. But it certainly is a measure of the public’s perception of a company. (Contrast to Glassdoor, another reputation service from employees’ point of view). While the index widget could be useful to bloggers and writers to show one measure of a reputation of a company, its probably best not to rely upon ReputationCheck as the final arbiter of a company’s standing.

Startup2Startup Tackles Web Design

Last Thursday over 140 entrepreneurs, investors, and startup rookies came together for Startup2Startup, a monthly invite-only dinner built around fostering the startup community. This month’s featured speaker was Adaptive Path founding partner and ex-Googler Jeffrey Veen, who walked the audience through some of the key aspects of website design and how to deal with associated communication issues.

Following Veen’s presentation, the attendees shared their thoughts and experiences related to design in intimate round-table discussions. The event’s co-founder Dave McClure painstakingly creates seating arrangements to ensure that each table has an array of attendees ranging from startup rookie to veteran, ensuring that discussion is both lively and informative (and strictly off-the-record).

The evening was an overwhelming success, highlighted by Veen’s engaging presentation that was both accessible and entertaining (you can see an intro video and his slides below, and we’ll post the full video of his talk shortly). As a bonus, Veen introduced the audience to one of his newest projects.

Dubbed Wikirank, the site tracks the popularity of Wikipedia articles, sifting through hundreds of gigabytes of Wikipedia’s publicly available traffic data and presenting it in an intuitive and attractive interface. With this data, the site can generate an at-a-glance view of what the world is interested in at any given moment. The site also allows users to create embeddable charts comparing the popularity of different topics over time. If you’d like to try it out, the first 30 TechCrunch readers to enter their Email addresses here will have access to the site’s private beta.

Next month’s Startup2Startup event will feature Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO of Zappos, who will be offering tips on building a great company culture and customer service (for which Zappos is widely acclaimed).

Oodle on Facebook

Oodle, too, has been a long slog. As founder and CEO Craig Donato told me last week, had he known how hard of a slog classifieds would be, he might have chosen a different startup idea four years ago. I’m sure he was (partially) joking, but Oodle has long been the question mark in David Sze’s otherwise stellar Web 2.0 portfolio that includes Digg, LinkedIn and Facebook. (Now, some see Digg as the question mark, but that’s a different post.)

Oodle has done two things well to combat the local trap. One is deals with huge properties like MySpace, Facebook and AOL that really juice distribution and listings. As a result, before it even goes live with Facebook or AOL, the site has 40 million listings with 500,000 new ones added each day. Second smart move: Making classifieds social, not local.

Increasingly, the social Web has created more meaningful communities than just geographical proximity. Sure, we are more likely to know and regularly interact with people near us, so you can’t ignore geography. But think about how many times you’d rather sell something or buy something from someone you know or someone who knows someone you know, than someone whose only commonality is living in your city.

The Oodle app is coming about just at the right time for Facebook. Not only is the site huge, but it’s so focused on the Wall that distributions of listings and conversations around items for sale will be natural and organic. And unlike eBay or Craigslist, it’s just a few clicks to post something. You fill in what it is, why you’re getting rid of it, how much you want and designate whether you’re giving it away, selling it, or want the money to go to charity. Can you imagine if posting something on eBay was that easy? My dining room of boxes would be empty.

That’s not to say Oodle replaces Craigslist or eBay. You can reach a wider audience, and hence conceivably make more money on both of those. And Facebook could be too tied into your social graph for some transactions. Do you want your boss to see your old Playboys are for sale? Lastly, if you’re setting up a small ecommerce business, I doubt Facebook marketplace is the right fit. But if you’re just a regular person who has something they want to buy or sell for a fair price from a reputable dealer whose reputation they can trust– it’s going to be a stiff competitor.

And come to think of it, wasn’t that the original eBay community?

Sequoia Pumps More Funding

srael-based search engine marketing (SEM) automator Kenshoo has received another capital injection from its existing backers Sequoia Capital and Arts Alliance.

As with the Series A round, this second round of funding remained undisclosed, although our contact person at the company ensures it that this was an “up-round” financing and that the valuation was “50% higher than the last time” it attracted outside capital.

The startup, based out of Tel Aviv but active worldwide, says it will use the funding to further fuel its expansion and explore new business opportunities in the search marketing space.

Kenshoo’s flagship product, Kenshoo Search, is billed as an end-to-end SEM platform and essentially automates most if not all of the work usually carried out by marketing consultants (who are of course much pricier than automation software). In that regard, Kenshoo also competes with bid-management software from all the online advertising giants (DoubleClick, aQuantive’s Atlas Solutions, and Omniture) but at the same time goes a step beyond that by taking a look at the quality of the campagns. Kenshoo is able to find relevant keywords across different search engines, and automatically changes campaign specifics to maximize their returns.

In the economic downturn we’re in, marketers should be focused on building or maintaining decent levels of Website traffic and drive better conversions. Search marketing is still the best customer acquisition tool in the online space, so it’s not a surprise that eMarketer predicted continued growth from 2008 to 2013 in a very recent report on the state of SEO spending in the U.S.

If Kenshoo can keep winning customers over by cutting out the middlemen and maximizing campaign ROIs, it definitely has potential to continue riding that wave and keep / make their investors happy.

Investor Deadpools Jooce

Funny how we receive tips sometimes. Yesterday we covered the latest Startup2Startup meetup, and a certain ChrisATSo33t commented on the story pointing to the latest quarterly report (PDF) of Luxembourg-based VC firm Mangrove Capital Partners in which they state that Paris-based portfolio company Jooce would be “closing its doors” during the month of February.

We’ve now entered the month of March, and the Jooce website is still alive, people can still sign up, and their blog has been silent since October 2008. No notice of shut-down anywhere to be found, and e-mails are not bouncing (we hope they’re still being replied to since we contacted the Jooce team for comment). But since Mangrove was the company’s only investor, having injected seed funding into the startup in 2007, we’re pretty sure we can deadpool the startup.

Update: wow. Jooce got back us with a completely different story:

I think the gun was jumped just a bit, Jooce is not closing. In fact, Jooce has been recently been in talks with an undisclosed buyer within the internet cafe world wishing to acquire Jooce. Doors don’t shut so easily on great technology.

When I asked why the VC would possibly claim such a thing about one of their portfolio companies, they made me laugh out loud by saying that “VCs are apparently not omniscient” and that “God can rest easy for now”.

We covered Jooce, which operates (operated) a web-based OS, a couple of times before starting with its launch in August 2007. It offered a virtual online desktop that provided a Flash platform for communication services like chat and e-mail combined with a custom way to play games, listen to music, etc. so you could essentially have the same user experience when you go online on any computer anywhere in the world.

I’ve always had doubts about this kind of concept, which is similar to what startups like Goowy, Cloudo, eyeOS and others are up to, given the current evolution of the web.

See, I already have a web-based OS. I just refer to it as my browser

Socialtext add Twitter

In yet another sign that this will be the year of the activity stream, Socialtext is adding a Twitter-like message stream to its enterprise wiki/workspace service, The new feature is called Socialtext Signals, and it appears both as a widget in the Socialtext dashboard and as a standalone desktop app built on Adobe AIR.

Socialtext Signals is essentially an enterprise version of Twitter, much like Yammer. Employees within a company can micro-message each other without competitors or the rest of the world snooping. They will see only the messages of the co-workers they are following. In addition to the 140-character messaging between co-workers (the “signals”), there is also an “activity” tab. This generates a micro-message every time a person you are following takes an action inside Socialtext, such as creating a wiki page, writing a blog post, or making a comment.

The activity stream which Socialtext makes visible is very particular to its products, and in fact is designed to keep employees engaged with those products. Any time someone changes a page that you’ve created or edited in the past, it shows up as an activity. So constant updates from Ralph in engineering about the progress of a project serves as a reminder for everyone else to do their part as well. Unlike Yammer, there is no ability to create subgroups within Signals, or upload files. But then, you can always create workgroups elsewhere in Socialtext, and upload files directly into linked wikis. Signals just ties it all together. There is no mobile support either, however, which is a more serious gap.

Socialtext is used as a collaboration tool by 5,000 companies (subscriptions are as much at $15 per employee per month). Signals and the desktop app should go far towards increasing employee interaction with the service. Each update serves as a prompt to follow up on a project or keep it moving along, while Signals can also serve as the new watercooler. Companies that don’t need Socialtext’s other apps (the workspace and the dashboard, primarily) might want to check out a simpler enterprise micro-messaging service such as Yammer or WIzeHive.

Expand Web Video Empire With Obsessed TV

Gary Vaynerchuk is going after the Oprah set. The wine wholesaler who launched a career as a Web video celebrity talking about wine and marketing just launched Obsessed, a new video talk show hosted by Samantha Ettus. With Obsessed, Vaynerchuk hopes to move beyond niche programming on the Web to appeal to a mainstream audience.

The format of the show is an in-depth 30 to 40 minute interview with guests that appeal to 25 to 55-year-old women. The first interviews on the site right now are with food writer Mark Bittman and floral designer Preston Bailey. Future guests will include Today Show travel editor Peter Greenberg, TreeHugger founder Graham Hill, and BlogHer founder Liz Stone. (They are working on some bigger names as well).

Ettus will host the show and be the main star, while Vaynerchuk will come on at the end for 3 minutes to talk about wine, which is his thing. He is the host of Wine Library TV and also serves up regular videos on gary vay•ner•chuk, mostly about marketing. “There is only so much content I can pump out,” Vaynerchuk say. “I need to own as many media properties as possible.”

Vaynerchuk and Ettus are co-producers of the new show. Each owns half of Obsessed TV, the production company behind the endeavor. Vaynerchuk’s other projects include a T-shirt search engine and Corkd, a wine rating site he promises to pay more attention to this year.

Mufin

Mufin, an automated music recommendation engine that actually works (most of the time), has released a new native media player in public beta. The player includes a powerful recommendation engine based on technology developed at the Fraunhofer Institute, allowing users to quickly generate playlists similar to any song they have in their library. The player is for Windows only at the moment, but Mac users can still try out the recommendation technology at Mufin.com, which launched to the public in November. You can see a full list of the new player’s features here

Mufin’s core technology is based on finding recommendations based on knowing a few songs that you like. Unlike Apple’s Genius feature, which creates recommendations based on aggregate data compiled from user listening habits, Mufin actually analyzes the sound file itself, ‘listening’ to 40 audio characteristics as it tries to recommend similar songs. In my testing the service has usually worked surprisingly well, though there are sometimes a few bizarre results. Oftentimes these apparent errors actually do share characteristics with the original song I used to gather recommendations, but they are very obscure and sometimes in a completely different genre (which is both the blessing and the curse of using such audio-based recommendation engines).

Mufin’s new player incorporates this recommendation technology, alongside a standard set of features that you’d expect from a modern audio player. Beyond creating the recommended song playlists, Mufin’s Player also brings a new twist to music management by allowing users to sort their songs by the way they sound (versus by song title or artist name). But aside from that I’m not sure if there’s a compelling reason to use it over iTunes at this point, especially since you can download a Mufin plugin to integrate the site’s audio recommendations into Apple’s music player (though the plugin is limited to creating playlists, and doesn’t allow users to sort by sound).

Future Of The Web

When I was a kid one of my favorite parts of Disney World was Tomorrowland’s Carousel of Progress. It was steeped in 1950’s futurism: Why, of course! Every family will have their own electric paint mixer in the future! And I only wish I’d been old enough to see this gem before it was torn down and replaced with a souvenir stand: The Monsanto House of the Future, a house built entirely of plastic.

Disney likes to talk up inventions the house featured that wound up becoming commonplace, like the microwave oven. What it leaves out are all the ones that never did. You know, the type of things we saw on the Jetsons: flying cars, our food in pill form, robot butlers and maids. Sadly, as it turns out the “future” looked a lot like the past, just more streamlined. Had Tomorrowland stayed in tact, it would have looked more like the Tomorrow-that-never-happened-land.

I’ve been thinking about Tomorrowland for about three days. It started when I read Farhad Manjoo’s excellent piece on Slate about the “Jurassic Web.” He painted a picture of what the Web was like in 1996. It was mostly a place you went and then thought, “OK, I’m here. Now what?” He reminded us of the sheer wonder the first time you could search on Amazon by author or browse through Yahoo’s hand built “directory” of Web pages.

The note Manjoo struck at the end of the piece was pure Silicon Valley: If all this happened in just 13 years, what will the next decade of the Internet hold? Will we look back on YouTube, Facebook, Hulu and iTunes as primitive?

This is where Tomorrowland and the Jetsons come in. There seems to be a pattern of diminishing innovation the longer a new technology is on the market. The early years—even decades— of, say, the plane, the car, the telephone, television, computers all saw rapid innovation, such rapid innovation that people would look back with the same kind of wonder that we do thinking of the Jurassic Web. “Can you believe you used to have to crank a car engine?” “What do you mean TV was only in black and white?”

But at some point, the innovation gets more evolutionary than revolutionary. Sure there are advancements in digital filmmaking and editing equipment but has anything in movies yet transformed the medium as much as the change from silent pictures to talkies? At some point, the technology stays the same while the cultural importance of it, or the way it is used is what changes. Put another way, the technology that was used to film a movie like “Deep Throat” wasn’t what changed society and the industry, it was the content of the movie itself.

I know it’s heresy to write this on a site that entrepreneurs and technologists read: But what if the bulk of technology innovation on the Internet is, well, done?

Already, if you think about Web 2.0, the successful companies are building off the technology that was pioneered before—whether it’s the browser, broadband, or the open source stack. Sites like YouTube and Twitter may be technically hard to scale, but are they really technical leaps in innovation, or more of a creative, cultural leap in how existing technology is being used?

Of course, the Internet is still very young. It certainly took technologies like the mobile phone more than 13 years to go from that embarrassing brick that took up half of a briefcase to the iPhone. Some could argue the mobile phone is still ripe for as much game changing innovation, as new models like the Palm Pre promise to integrate the browser experience throughout the user interface. Is it simply too early in the Internet’s lifecycle to even raise the question of whether Internet innovation has peaked?

As someone who writes about the Web for a living, I certainly hope so. But then again, everything has happened faster on the Web. No other technology has been so rapidly adopted by such a large number of people. Is it possible this is it?

Buzzable Creates Twitter Groups Around RSS Feeds

One of the most requested features for Twitter is the ability to create groups. While users wait (and wait and wait) for Twitter to add this feature, a number of startups are going ahead and showing how it should be done. The latest of these is a LaunchBox Digital startup called Buzzable which just launched today. Buzzable lets you create Twitter groups around RSS feeds, and does so in a very compelling way.

Right now anyone can browse public groups, but you need an invite code to create a new group. Anyone with a twitter account, however, can join a public group and post a message. We have 500 invites. Just use the promo code: techcrunch.

You sign in using your Twitter ID, which lets you join and create both public and private groups centered around different topics. Some of the public groups right now include Android, Kindle, the New York Knicks, and the White House. There is even one for TechCrunch.

Groups are built around RSS feeds. So the TechCrunch group is simply our feed. But you can set up topic-specific groups which pull from a number of feeds, including Google News, Eventful, Digg, Yahoo Finance, Twitter itself, blogs, and so on. You can set it up so that the feeds are filtered by keyword (such as “Android,” Kindle,” “Knicks,” etc.). Members of the group can then discuss any headline by commenting in-line. Each comment can be pushed out to Twitter proper as well. Both RSS headlines and comments can be “Buzzed” up by popular vote. The result is a combination of RSS content and Twitter conversation, all in the same stream.

By priming the pump with the RSS streams, Buzzable hopes to stimulate conversation, even among people who don’t normally Twitter twenty times a day without prompting. In addition to micro-messages, images and YouTube videos can be added to each comment. And since Buzzable uses your Twitter ID, every time you create a group, it asks you if you want to invite all of your Twitter followers. Every Buzzable member can also be followed on Twitter simply by clicking a follow button on their Buzzable profile. Buzzable groups can also be republished as their own Twitter account. In these ways, Buzzable tries to take advantage of the viral nature of Twitter itself to create as many entry points as possible for new users. Each group can also be republished as a separate RSS feed or as an embeddable widget

The Cloud Of A Fraction The Cost

At today’s TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable event, a new storage company called Diomede launched in private beta with the goal of offering low cost cloud-based storage that is also very energy efficient. The basic premise behind the service is that not all data in the cloud needs to be immediately available, but that most people still pay for the immediate access anyway. While most data centers have their servers and disk drives operating 24/7 with near-immediate access, Diomede allows customers to designate files that they don’t need instant access to, and places them either as ‘nearline’ or ‘offline’. These files have an access time of five minutes or four hours, respectively, but cost only 1/12 as much as standard cloud providers to store and take as little as 1/60th the amount of energy. If you’d like to try it out, go to this page and enter the invite code ‘tcrunch’.

The service offers a full API to developers, and also allows them to view metrics like the power consumption of each individual file. Possible applications include allowing developers to set their redundant file backups (which rarely need to be quickly accessed) to ‘offline’, where they can be stored at only a fraction of the normal cost.

Friendfeed For Online Video

Sometimes it’s hard to remember which video you have seen, left a comment on, rated, or who recommended it to you. And it’s getting harder to cut the noise in the heavily crowded online video space (YouTube users alone are uploading 15 hours of new content every 60 seconds). This is where Mitter, a service provided by Tokyo-based Metacast comes in (the site is available in English).

Mitter wants to do for video what recently introduced Dutch startup Twones does for music. The service tracks viewing patterns over multiple video services and generates a social feed based on that information. And much like Twones, Mitter doesn’t make much sense without installing an add-on for Firefox or the Internet Explorer (there is also a browser-independent bookmarklet available). To date, the Mitter toolbar has been distributed 1.5 million times. It’s now being actively used by more than 150,000 people, mostly in Japan.

Mitter is all about aggregating metadata of online videos and using the information to let users socialize around it. Once the tracker is installed, you will see a Mitter button next to every video accessed on 14 different sites like YouTube, Veoh, Seesmic etc. After pressing the button, you can tag, rate and comment on the video (the service calls this activity “mittering”), which will be then added to your history on the website (this happens even if you don’t mitter the video). In addition, the activity can be posted to Twitter and several Japanese blogging platforms.

Your history can be set to private or shared with friends. Other users with a similar taste can follow you, receive updates on your video viewing log and possibly find new content that’s of interest to them (Mitter->Twitter, get it?). It’s also possible to join discussion groups, view rankings of popular videos and dig up videos that are similar to the listed one (and share the relevant video, too).

mitter_screenshot

Mitter does fill a gap in the rapidly growing web video space but there are some drawbacks. Even though the site wants to let you share “experiences” (and not necessarily the videos themselves), it would make a lot more sense if users didn’t need to navigate away to watch videos. The English version still lacks Non-Japanese members who may find it hard to connect to the Japanese usership (and its taste) and there are hardly any comments or tags in English to be found at this point. This can obviously only be overcome through increased participation of Non-Japanese users.

CEO Kengo Ito says in its current form, Mitter is just covering a snippet of one’s life log. The company’s ultimate goal is to build a “social lifestreaming service” that automatically keeps track of a person’s complete online media consumption behavior. Think FriendFeed for media.

This is a big plan and just yesterday, Mitter broke out of the video geek community by following what you watch on TV (Japanese only for the time being). Music, movies, video games and other media will be added to user feeds in the near future.

Heated Bidding War

In a heated bidding war, ToysRUs bought the domain name Toys.com at auction for $5.1 million. ToysRus really wanted the domain, for obvious reasons. Everyone except ToysRUs and domain holding company National A-1 (owner of domains such as free.com, boys.com, girls.com, and divorce.com) bowed out of the auction at $3 million. The last $2 million was just those two companies going back and forth for hours.

ToysRUs really didn’t have much choice. If it wants to be the first thing people associate with toys it really couldn’t afford to allow anyone else to own that domain, even in this economy. Who says real estate is dead?

Personello Photo Gift Service

Photo gift service Personello has launched a simple but useful web service dubbed DAZZ that lets you preview a wide variety of goods with uploaded photos on them, completely automated and with both custom images and video clips.

It seems like a no-brainer for any personalized photo gift service provider to offer a similar functionality, but to the best of my knowledge DAZZ is currently the only one of its kind.

What you do is create an account on the DAZZ website and upload a photo that you’re considering printing on things like mugs, mousepads, t-shirts, teddybears, snowglobes, jigsaw puzzles etc. to give away as a gift. The startup’s ‘DAZZigners’ will then strip out the background and create a collection of so-called photostyles (e.g. Flowers, Heart, Sepia, Pop Art, etc.) centered around the main subject of the photo.

DAZZ subsequently lets you preview a bunch of items and also put together a video that shows a number of items in a sequence which should help make up your mind. For each type of item, you also get to see a separate animated video clip showing you the personalized gift in question in a relevant setting. (screenshots embedded below)

The biggest downside of DAZZ is that it takes several hours to get your photostyle previews ready, so it’s not the most ideal way to trigger impulsive purchases (although you are notified by e-mail once the previews are ready for your evaluation). Also, the video player inexplicably doesn’t offer a way to embed videos in your own website or blog so you can only play them when logged on to your account on DAZZ.com.

I think Personello, a startup based in Germany, was right to execute on this idea and offer a way for potential customers to visualize personalized photo gifts prior to purchase. Many people are not aware of the fact that photos can be printed on a slew of regular things, and this could open their eyes to the possibilities of giving away personalized gifts and significantly lower the threshold for them to actually start buying stuff.

Yahoo Add Facebook Profile Action

Yahoo just embedded some Facebook functionality directly into its search results via SearchMonkey. When you search for a person on Yahoo, if they have a public Facebook profile, a link to that profile will appear in results, along with a photo and several actions you can take. these include adding them as a friend, “poking” them, sending them a message, and viewing their friends.

You can see how it looks like in the image above, which shows results for Yahoo marketing VP Raj Gossain. The blue links under his name are the actions you can take. These are similar to the deep links SearchMonkey added to Yahoo Search for Wikipedia results.

The links save you at least one step. But I’ve also noticed that the Facebook profile is often far down the results page. I wonder if this will help to change that. By all rights, Facebook should be the default people search, whether on Facebook or on search engines like Yahoo and Google.

Yahoo Clean Up House

Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz is streamlining the company and picking which executives will remain on her team and which ones won’t. Chief Financial officer Blake Jorgensen will be departing, as will the head of Yahoo Mobile, Marco Boerries, among others. Getting a bump up are Ari Balogh, now CTO and head of all products, and Hilary Schneider on the advertising side, now head of North America. David Ko will be taking over mobile, reporting to Schneider interestingly enough rather than to Balogh. In her first blog post, Bartz writes:

So today I’m rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo! a lot faster on its feet. For us working at Yahoo!, it means everything gets simpler. We’ll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer. For you using Yahoo! every day, it will better enable us to deliver products that make you say, “Wow.”

In addition to getting rid of unnecessary layers of management (and, oh boy, does Yahoo have plenty of that), Bartz also says that she is going to get the company to pay more attention to its customers and to burnishing its brand. To that effect, she is creating a “Customer Advocacy” group to speak for the customer inside Yahoo, and she promises to clarify “what the Yahoo! brand stands for. . . . Look for this company’s brand to kick ass again.”

In a note that just went out, Barclays Capital analyst Doug Anmuth says of the CFO’s departure:

We are not surprised by Jorgensen’s departure given that he was largely brought into the company by Sue Decker who left YHOO upon new CEO Carol Bartz’s recent appointment. However, we are increasingly concerned about Yahoo!’s thinning management ranks & about who internally will help guide new CEO Bartz as she moves deeper into the Internet space & soon makes critical strategic decisions for the company.

In other words, where are the star hires? (Note that Bartz has hired a new Chief marketing officer in Elisa Steele).

Facebook Term of Service

After the uproar that ensued when Facebook tried to change its terms of service a couple weeks ago, along with its subsequent backpedaling and public assurances that users own their data, the company is trying a different tack. It is inviting users to comment and contribute on proposed changes to its terms of service.

Facebook has posted a proposed set of Facebook Principles (reprinted below) and proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Members can discuss these proposals in two groups dedicated to each set of statements (here and here, respectively).

During a conference call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained:

Today we are going to talk about a set of documents that will be the governing documents of Facebook from here on. . . . We feel this is fairly unprecedented, giving users this much involvement into the process.

He also reiterated:

We do not own user data, they own their data. We never intended to give that impression and we feel bad that we did.

Here are the statements:

The Facebook Principles

We are building Facebook to make the world more open and transparent, which we believe will create greater understanding and connection. Facebook promotes openness and transparency by giving individuals greater power to share and connect, and certain principles guide Facebook in pursuing these goals. Achieving these principles should be constrained only by limitations of law, technology, and evolving social norms. We therefore establish these Principles as the foundation of the rights and responsibilities of those within the Facebook Service.

1. Freedom to Share and Connect

People should have the freedom to share whatever information they want, in any medium and any format, and have the right to connect online with anyone – any person, organization or service – as long as they both consent to the connection.

2. Ownership and Control of Information

People should own their information. They should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service. People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices. Those controls, however, are not capable of limiting how those who have received information may use it, particularly outside the Facebook Service.

3. Free Flow of Information

People should have the freedom to access all of the information made available to them by others. People should also have practical tools that make it easy, quick, and efficient to share and access this information.

4. Fundamental Equality

Every Person – whether individual, advertiser, developer, organization, or other entity – should have representation and access to distribution and information within the Facebook Service, regardless of the Person’s primary activity. There should be a single set of principles, rights, and responsibilities that should apply to all People using the Facebook Service.

5. Social Value

People should have the freedom to build trust and reputation through their identity and connections, and should not have their presence on the Facebook Service removed for reasons other than those described in Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

6. Open Platforms and Standards

People should have programmatic interfaces for sharing and accessing the information available to them. The specifications for these interfaces should be published and made available and accessible to everyone.

7. Fundamental Service

People should be able to use Facebook for free to establish a presence, connect with others, and share information with them. Every Person should be able to use the Facebook Service regardless of his or her level of participation or contribution.

8. Common Welfare

The rights and responsibilities of Facebook and the People that use it should be described in a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which should not be inconsistent with these Principles.

9. Transparent Process

Facebook should publicly make available information about its purpose, plans, policies, and operations. Facebook should have a town hall process of notice and comment and a system of voting to encourage input and discourse on amendments to these Principles or to the Rights and Responsibilities.

10. One World

The Facebook Service should transcend geographic and national boundaries and be available to everyone in the world.

Facebook Conference Call Live

We’re live blogging this morning’s Facebook conference call, during which Mark Zuckerberg is planning to “announce the new steps Facebook is taking to improve user understanding and ownership of the Facebook terms of service and, more generally, the policies of the Facebook service”. The call begins at 11 AM PST.

To coincide with today’s call, Facebook has also announced that it is Opening Up Its Terms Of Service To Input From Users.

After a brief delay. Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s VP Communications and Public Policy, is introducing the call.

Mark Zuckerberg:

Today we are going to talk about a set of documents that will be the governing documents of Facebook from here on. . . . We feel this is fairly unprecedented, giving users this much involvement into the process. The purpose of Facebook is to make the world more transparent and open. The governing documents are the framework of how we want to move forward with this. Last week we put up an old set of terms after we got feedback from a newer set of terms that we put up. What we are talking about today are things we’ve discussed at Facebook and our principles for a long time. We took last week as a strong signal that people care about Facebook. These are the foundational policies. The policies, principles, rights and responsibilities are really the foundation for the things we are going to build. The rules for how we want to govern the site.

What we’re talking about today is policy, not product.

We are open to putting the documents up to a vote. The rules people must do when on the site and what we must do, a two way thing. There will be Comment periods, a council that will help on future revisions.

” We do not own user data, they own their data. We never intended to give that impression and we feel bad that we did.” This document is a foundation that we’re going to use our decisions going forward.”

Q: How did you go about changing the terms of service last time?

Zuckerberg: The terms were similar to what other sites have. We actually shortened our terms from 15 pages to something much smaller. But we made some mistakes, and the complaints were completely fair. But what we’re doing now is totally unprecedented.

Q: Who decides what the vote determines? What if you disagree with them?

Schrage: We feel confident they’ll make good decisions..

Q: You’ve been here before. Did you not learn from Beacon that people will rebel against changes in Terms of Service?

Zuckerberg: Beacon wasn’t a change in Terms of Service. This was a dialog around the governing terms of the site. People use a lot of services on the web, but this is one of the only ones where they’re sharing their information.

Schrage: Part of the challenge is that what was proposed with new ToS is remarkably consistent with what other sites have their ToS. Some of the blogs criticizing our ToS had Terms that were just as broad, but Mark’s point is that people share so much more on Facebook so we have to be held to a higher standard.

Q: You mentioned that the amount of user involvement here is unprecedented. As an increasingly international organization, some of these continents like Europe have more stringent laws. What are your considerations for international laws?

Ted: We of course pay attention to the laws…

Q: Can you comment on steps Facebook is taking to determine phishing, malware?

Schrage: That’s not really the purpose of the call today, feel free to contact us about that later.

Q: You were already asked about Beacon. What could you have learned from the News Feed response? How do you manage expectations to people Twittering that you’re allowing users to write your ToS?

Zuckerberg: We’re going to build product according to the goals we’re laying out. We should have been communicating about these products more broadly.

Q: Is there not a need for contract language somewhere?

Ted: I encourage you to look at the statement of rights and responsibilities. We have not just what you see as the ToS for users, but also for advertisers and developers. We have shrunk 44 pages of material to around 5.5 in this document including all three of those terms.

AIM for iphone

While there may still be a lot of confusion surrounding the future of AOL, that didn’t stop the folks in Northern Virginia from recently overhauling their popular AIM instant messaging app for iPhone (and iPod touch).

Available in two tasty flavors, free (”AIM Free”) and paid (”AIM Paid”), AIM 2.0 for iPhone now provides SMS notifications, has location-aware services, and supports multiple accounts (among other updates). It appears as though all of the application updates have been included in both the free and paid versions, with the major (and obvious) difference being the inclusion of ads in the buddy list of the AIM Free app.

So, what’s the big deal here? What do all the changes mean? Well, for one thing, now when you first sign in, the app will ask you if you want to share your current location:

Want to see where your friends are hanging out? You can share your location with your Buddies (or everyone) and see Buddies who are sharing their location.

Users are given three options: 1. No, don’t share location (default); 2. Share only with people on my Buddy list; or 3. Share with everyone. Once you’ve made your selection (let’s say we pick option 2 or 3), a new Group will be added - “Near Me” - showing other contacts within your vicinity. As Ars Technica points out, “there is no control over how large one’s nearby radius is” and thus, it is not exactly clear how near or far any of your contacts may be from your current location. What you can control, is the frequency of your location updates by navigating to: My Info > Preferences > (scroll down) Frequency. Here, you can select between 3 options: 1. On Startup; 2. Every 5 min. (default); or 3. Every 2000 feet.

aim2cBeyond location-awareness, AIM 2.0 also features SMS capabilities. Users now have the option to send an IM to a screen name, or alternatively, can send an SMS to a contact’s phone number (works on both iPhone and iPod touch). The app now includes both a buddy list and a contact list, to take advantage of these new features. Also, you can now stay logged-in for up to 24 hours, even if the AIM app has been closed. This allows you (iPhone users only) to get notifications via SMS when you receive a new IM and offers a work-around until Apple enables real Push notifications.

Other notable new features include the ability to use photos (taken with an iPhone) as buddy icons and the option to configure/switch between multiple screen names at any time. Are these new features enough to take down competing IM apps such as IM+, Fring, Truphone, and others? Only time will tell.

AIM Free (2.0.1) is currently available for download, while the cleverly named (but as yet unpriced) AIM Paid is still pending approval (at the time of this writing).

Digg Toolbar

A super-secret Digg toolbar has been spotted in the wild. We tracked down a beta tester who gave us the skinny on its features. The toolbar lets you Digg or Bury the page you are on, and shows how many Diggs it has already received. There are also links to show related pages, as well as more pages from the same source voted highly by the Digg community or marked as up and coming.

Then there is the “Random” button which works like StumbleUpon. It takes you to a randomly-generated page based on your past input and overall Digg voting. By the prominence of this button, it appears that is a feature Digg will be trying to highlight. Users can also share the page via Facebook, Twitter, or email via icons at the top. A drawer slides down to expose additional functionality.

Now, here where it gets interesting. For each page, the toolbar creates a shortened URL similar to TinyURL or bit.ly that starts instead with http://digg.com/. . . followed by a six-character code such as “http://digg.com/d1gVha.” When you share a page via Twitter or Facebook, it is that shortened URL which is used. And in fact, for the beta testers, the toolbar can be wrapped around any page simply by sticking “http://digg.com/” in front of any URL, which then gets converted into a shortened version. This technique works for pages that have never been Dugg as well. I could see this feature eventually showing up as part of a browser add-on so that Digg URL’s could be created with one click.

The toolbar is not an add-on to existing browsers. It is actually creating a large i-frame around the original Webpage and delivering it on the Digg.com domain. Users can click on an X to get rid of the toolbar frame and be taken to the original page, and the original page gets the hit as well. (This is a similar technique to what Ginx does with its Web-sharing Twitter client). But by running all of the recommended pages through its own domain, Digg can run all sorts of analytics on each page such as how many people viewed it, where people clicked to next, and so on.

It is amazing that Twitter has single-handedly created this need for shortened URLs and that a relatively large player like Digg now wants a piece of that market.

Persistent Chat Future with Ning

Tonight Ning will introduce new chat functionality, giving Ning network administrators the oft-requested ability to integrate a rich chat environment similar to the one launched on Facebook last April. Ning’s new chat system is Flash-based, presenting users with a persistent chat bar along the bottom of their screens as they browse through a Ning network. Users have the option of chatting through an interface at the bottom of their screen, or can ‘pop-out’ their chats into their own windows. While the interface will remain consistent across each network, users won’t be able to chat with members outside of the Ning network they’re currently browsing.

Ning originally introduced a more basic chat feature last summer, but that version uses either dedicated chat pages or sidebar iFrames, which means they aren’t always visible as users navigate through a network. But even the basic version has proven to be very successful - Ning’s chat traffic has skyrocketed, as seen in the Compete graph below pitting Ning’s IM domain against Meebo’s homepage. To be fair, the graph probably doesn’t take into account Meebo’s traffic that occurs offsite (Quantcast reports that Meebo’s entire network sees more like 12 million uniques), but it’s clear that Ning Chat is rapidly gaining traction.

Aside from its growth in chat, Ning has also been posting some impressive stats recently, growing to 4.8 million uniques in January (a 368% growth year over year) despite the fact that the site recently banned porn networks, which some believed were responsible for a significant amount of Ning’s traffic.

Redesign of Facebook Pages

Facebook launched Facebook Ads in November 2007 to give brands and businesses a way to create a presence on Facebook and interact with users. Starting next week, says a source with knowledge of the new product, those pages will be substantially redesigned.

Today there are countless pages (example) that highlight brands. These pages are free to set up, and the Facebook sales team then encourages those brands to buy Facebook ads that point back to the pages. The brands get users who become fans of the page and maybe leave a wall comment. Facebook gets ad dollars, and users never leave the Facebook site.

Those pages include standard Facebook features like a Wall for user comments, a News Feed showing changes and updates to the page, and places for photos and videos to be uploaded. Many advertisers also spend a great deal of money customize the page with applications and widgets showing off various products as well.

Look for a much more streamlined look to Facebook Pages next week though, with a multitab interface very similar to what Facebook launched to users in 2008. The default view will show the Wall (which may include negative comments unless they are routinely deleted). All the custom apps will be pushed to a second Boxes tab. The Pages will also likely mirror the look of normal user profiles, with an image in the top left corner, etc.

The Facebook sales team is soft selling the concept to advertisers now, some of whom aren’t pleased with the changes, we’ve heard. Many of these advertisers have spent significant money designing the pages, and lots more on top advertising the Pages through Facebook. Now the Pages will be changed. Users may love the changes and interact more with the pages. Or they may not. As usual with changes at Facebook, people (in this case advertisers) will scream bloody murder, and then likely settle down.

The timing on the change doesn’t seem to be a coincidence - MySpace recently announced that they’ll be launching their own business profile product in the near future. As with last year’s stacked announcements on data sorta-portability, both companies want to be first with new products and features.

Link Cacher for Twitter

It used to be that if a link was worth sharing, people would bookmark it for all to see on del.icio.us. Now, they just Twitter it (with a shortened URL). Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to separate out all the Tweets with links in them, and sort them by time or popularity? That is what MicroPlaza does in a nutshell.

MicroPlaza is still in a very limited private beta, but I have 100 invites for TechCrunch readers. Once you log in, you are presented with a stream of headlines, along with everyone who Twittered the link to that page. You can see a personal timelime made up only of links from people you are following on Twitter, or a public timeline to see what everyone is linking to. Each timeline has its own RSS feed.

The headlines can be sorted chronologically or by popularity. The more people who Twitter about the same link, the more popular it gets. Each time someone Tweets a link, it becomes more popular (although there is a time-decay function so that you only see the most recently popular links and associated headlines.

Since most of the time these links are articles or blog posts, MicroPlaza distills the headlines for you and gives you a sense of what is capturing everyone’s attention on Twitter. Any headline can be bookmarked, and you can group the people you follow into different “tribes,” and then keep track of each tribe. MicroPlaza also lets you look at everyone you are following and see their most recent links.

Print Your Favorite Wiki as Book

Did you know that you can assemble your own wiki pages from Wikipedia and print them out in book form? You can, for a while now, thanks to a partnership between Wikimedia Foundation and a German startup called PediaPress. Last week, the wiki-to-print feature was activated for six more languages besides German but as of yesterday the functionality is also being tested on the regular English Wikipedia (restricted to logged-on users only for now).

You can check it out here, but you might want to visit the help pages first.

The books can be created with a table of contents or category lists and can be downloaded as free PDF files but also ordered as a printed book from PediaPress. PediaPress books are bound in dimensions 8″ x 5.5″ with a color cover and black & white interior, and the prices are reasonable. The cost of a book depends on the number of pages contained in addition to a base fee (starting at $8.90 for 100 pages) and worldwide shipping that’s charged extra.

As indicated by the Foundation, the roll-out for English Wikipedia users will be gradual out of fear for scalability issues, so it’s currently still in test mode. We’re trying to find out when the organization will open it up for non-registered users and will update this post if we learn more.

You can find a sample book on the fascinating subject of ‘Amphibious Aircrafts’ here (PDF).

And if you’re wondering if PediaPress got a sweet deal out of the partnership, the answer is yes. The Wikimedia Foundation receives (only) 10% of the gross total for each book sold. Another part of the agreement is the development of open source software with the goal to ease the reuse of wiki content in other media or applications.

Domain Leasing Focuss

Domain leasing I feel will continue to be one of my main focuses this year while others tick over, I am either having more luck or business owners are more receptive to new ideas in challenging times, either way I feel after a year or so of working quietly I am beginning to reap some of the rewards.

The premise for domain leasing for me for the most part is to buy a good product based generic UK domain, build it out as much as can be justifiably done to get it indexed and possibly ranking and then offer it as a second storefront to existing businesses, show them the advantage of a generic, high recall & recognition value especially when advertising, easy to spell, niche dominance and market credibility as well as some traffic.

The first year was mostly working on getting some good domains and after a great early lease it’s been odd pickings here and there to finally end up at £775 per month in income at the end of last year for a business built literally from scratch.

This year needs to be the year I take this side of my business up a notch, the basic strategy which I have detailed on the blog is sound and I’ve tested it out enough times to feel happy with the principle. I decided in January my goal for this year will be to get up close to around £2000 per month from leasing which will be a pretty decent sideline, you have to remember that if I get it up to £24k annual income by the end of this year then not only is it a business earning pretty much £24k net passively, it also has assets that amount to far more than that, the lease itself increases the value of the domain hugely.

I’ve been asked once or twice to list domains for others and lease out for others but that’s not on the cards just yet, for now I need to ensure I’m getting a decent payoff for investing the time & effort needed to see a domain through from purchase to lease and that means ignoring the £15-£45 per month price bracket. One of my better domains was leased out this week for £500 per month, it was 2 long months of waiting to conclude the deal but it’s done and I’m very happy to have it wrapped up, I’m happy to say that for the most part I’m still working on the general rule of trying to get my capital invested back in around 12 months on a lease of 2 years+

Already done some more research and bought 2 domains, one for £600 & one for £800 which I feel are good candidates for leasing out at around £100 per month and I feel I have the inventory here to push on. Like I mentioned earlier I have had good feedback in the last few weeks when approaching companies, one agreed to lease 3 domains for £360 - not sure if it will come off and I can’t include it until the paperwork is done, I’d really like to get a few done this year around £100-£200 as they would add up quickly, however for now the confirmed passive leasing income stands at £1275 per month.