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Grooveshark Launches Web Media Player

Posted in news, Last.fm, seeqpod by Duncan Riley @ Apr 16, 2008

P2P music sharing and sales startup Grooveshark has launched Grooveshark Lite, a flash app that provides access to all the songs in Grooveshark’s P2P library.

For those unfamiliar with the company, Grooveshark allows users to upload and share their music collection with friends, but with a twist: every song uploaded can be purchased DRM-free with the uploader getting a cut of each sale (the rest goes to the record companies, and the service is 100% legal).

The new Grooveshark Lite player is not dissimilar to what Last.fm offers, but without the silly restrictions like being able only play the single five times. It also helps that Grooveshark has a huge selection of music; I don’t have comparable numbers but Grooveshark returned better results on a couple of more obscure searches, where as Last.fm failed or only had 30 seconds of the song. Unlike Seeqpod, another service that allows you to search for and play music uninhibited (and until now my music service of choice), the music on Grooveshark is of a more reliable quality as it’s vetted for sale, although unlike Seeqpod you cant illegally download the track, if that’s how you like getting your music.

The player offers music by artist, album and song title, and is free to use and doesn’t require registration, although registration is required to use Grooveshark services such as playlists and sharing.

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AdRoll Emerges From Private Beta With Co-Op Economics For Blog Advertising

Posted in news by Erick Schonfeld @ Apr 15, 2008

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When it comes to advertising for blogs, there is Federated Media for the biggest ones, and for everyone else there is AdSense (or some other low-paying ad network). Jared Kopf thinks there is room for a better alternative in between the two. His startup, AdRoll, (see our earlier coverage) brings together niche publishers into self-selecting communities that, when rolled up, are big enough to attract brand advertisers. Today, AdRoll is coming out of private beta and introducing new economics for bloggers who join.

Blogs who join AdRoll can set their own bare minimum price that acts like a private reserve on eBay. Advertisers bid for that ad inventory, and whenever the AdRoll price is higher than what the blog can get from AdSense, AdRoll swaps in one of its ads in the same spot normally occupied by AdSense (or Glam or Pubmatic or whatever ad network the blog uses). But AdRoll only gets to show its ads if it can beat the price that the blog is getting from AdSense (after AdRoll takes its 30 percent cut). And the pricing decays with time as ad inventory gets closer to expiring, so that an ad for tomorrow is cheaper than an ad for next month.

But where AdRoll becomes interesting is when blogs join communities of like-minded blogs. For instance, there is a community for surfing blogs, car blogs, sports blogs, and book blogs. By joining forces, 6 to 12 blogs with similar readerships can offer half a million to a million readers a month that share a common interest. During the private beta, about 600 publishers created 140 different communities. In order to motivate blogs to join a community, AdRoll only takes a 20 percent cut from ads that run across these groups, leaving more ad dollars on the table for the blogs. Says Kopf:

It is really about designing the right compensation structures and incentives to encourage sites to work together and sell more.

This is co-op economics at work. The idea is that small blogs should be able to band together to command a higher price for ads than they would be able to on their own. The effective CPM (cost per thousand impressions) that blogs are getting on AdRoll is about $1.50 (which is much less than the $10-plus that Federated Media is getting for the blogs in its network, but it is better than AdSense).

Anyone can create a blog community. That person becomes the leader of that particular community, and he or she can set the minimum price for ads on that community. The leader can also set a commission rate for participating blogs who bring in their own advertising to the group. That way, the bloggers themselves can sell ads for their network. (More details on Adroll’s economics here). Kopf hopes all of these incentives will be enough for community leaders to assemble the best audiences possible.

This is a classic Long Tail business. Roll up the niches and sell targeted advertising. Repeat 10,000 times.

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Six Apart Launches BlogIt Quick Post Application For Facebook

Posted in news by Michael Arrington @ Apr 15, 2008

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Blogging startup Six Apart launched BlogIt tonight, a Facebook blogging tool application that lets users quickly post to their blogs and then send notifications of the post to various social networks.

Use the tool to write a very basic blog post (no rich text or image uploading available yet), and then publish it to a supported platform - Typepad, LiveJournal, Vox, Wordpress (org/com), Moveable Type or Tumblr. By clicking one or more boxes, the title of a post and a link to it will be sent to Facebook, Twitter and/or Pownce as a status update.

The idea is to allow Facebook users to very quickly share something they like on their blog, without leaving Facebook. The application can be added here. Here’s a screen shot of the user interface, and a screencast of the product is immediately after the image:

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More Money for Collective Intellect to Keep Fingers on Pulse of Internet

Posted in news by Mark Hendrickson @ Apr 15, 2008

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Collective Intellect, a service that can be used to track what people are saying around the net about certain topics, has raised an additional $6.6M in a Series B round led by Grotech Capital Group with participation by Appian Ventures, Croghan Investments, and Crawley Hatfield Capital.

The service is most useful for marketers who need to understand how well their brands are being received by the media and general public. It tracks discussions about particular topics being posted on news sites, blogs, and message boards. For instance, MTV could decide to check out what people think about “The Hills”. Collective Intellect will use graphs and lists of discussion items to show how sentiment has changed over time, and where the bulk of discussions come from. The analytics can be refined by choosing narrower topics, such as actress Audrina Patridge, to see what people are saying about her in particular.

Collective Intellect also provides widgets that can be used to measure community sentiment and find related content on niche sites. Yahoo Finance has deployed one of these widgets for tracking how bullish and bearish their message board dwellers are for certain stocks. O’Reilly ONLamp has one that displays blog posts related to open source software.

The company previously raised $2.6M in February 2006 from Appian Ventures and other investors, so it has raised at least $9.2M so far. Hopefully they can use some of the new money to spruce up their user interface because it’s quite dated.

There are many competitors including Buzz Metrics, Radian6, and Buzz Logic. We covered Scout Labs, another competitor, late last year.

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2,100 People Party In LA With PopSugar And TechCrunch, Raise $13k For OpenId And DataPortability

Posted in news, Events by Michael Arrington @ Apr 15, 2008

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The PopSugar/TechCrunch Geek Goes Chic party in Los Angeles is over. The final count - over 1,300 paid attendees plus another 800 on the private guest list. In all, over 2,100 people attended the event last Thursday.

It was our largest event to date, twice as large as the thousand-person events we normally have. And based on feedback, it was a lot of fun for everyone. The only problem was that there were so many people, distributed in three main areas, that it was nearly impossible to find anyone that you were specifically looking for. We’re hoping to have a messaging system on a big screen at the next party to help people find each other.

$13,250 Being Donated To OpenId And DataPortability

As always, we’re donating 100% of the proceeds from ticket sales to charity. We charge $10 to get in the door primarily to reduce no-shows, but we’ve been able to donate tens of thousands of dollars to charity from the gate fees from previous events as well. This time we’re splitting the proceeds between the OpenID Foundation and the DataPortability WorkGroup. Each will receive $6,625 to further their goals of opening up identity and data on the Internet.

Event Wrapup

Thank you to everyone who attended. At one point I looked around and saw nothing but a sea of people, and took the picture to the right (and that was just 1 out of 3 main areas of the venue). I wasn’t able to meet everyone, but I tried. And the people I did meet came from a fascinating mix of backgrounds.

Photos for the event can be found at the TechCrunchMeetup12 tag and on our sponsor site PicApp here. I also want to thank all of our sponsors for the event. Many thanks to our platinum sponsors MySpace, Engage, Global Grind, Velocity Interactive Group, The Rubicon Project, and Geni. We also thank e.factor, CoComment, DimDim, DocStoc, Mahalo, This Next, PicApp, Meebo, ArtistForce, Media Temple, EventBrite, LotusVodka, PerkettPR, Mo’jiva and MailChimp. See more on all of the sponsors on the official party page.

Brian Solis and the Bub.blicio.us team captured lots of photo and video highlights for us. We’ve posted official MeetUp photos, videos and other evening highlights on our dedicated MeetUp page

Lastly I want to thank the whole team at PopSugar for co-hosting the event with us. Let’s do it again next year!

PS - If you’ve written about the event, leave a link in the comments and we’ll add it to the post.

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AllYouCanUpload Slips Quietly Into Deadpool

Posted in news by Jason Kincaid @ Apr 15, 2008

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AllYouCanUpload, the registration-free image hosting site with few restrictions, has quietly been taken down. The site was launched in May 2006 by CNET without much fanfare, but was praised for shedding the bandwidth limits seen on other photo sites like Photobucket and ImageShack. The site was part of the Webshots photo service, which was sold by CNET to American Greetings in October 2007.

The site has apparently been shut down for over a week. It offers no explanation for the departure, but it is likely tied to the change of ownership. It appears that images that have already been posted to the site will remain available for the time being.

AllYouCanUpload has been added to the Deadpool.

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Googolopoly

Posted in news, google by Mark Hendrickson @ Apr 15, 2008

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Earlier today I wrote about my eagerness for Google GDrive, a cloud-based file management service that has been rumored for years now.

The idea that Google could swoop in and dominate the online storage market certainly doesn’t help the founders of several startups sleep better at night. But they aren’t without their arguments for why a Google solution would be bad for consumers.

Box.net has come up with the following clever response to the idea that Google should control all of our information, including our files (click for a bigger view).

As the company describes it:

The goal of the game is to use Google shares to buy as many properties as you can without landing in the deadpool and losing your stock. As with any great board game, there’s a very real metaphor to what’s going on…. What happens when the Google monster gobbles up all that is left in the web world, is present on your cell phone, desktop, and even controls your health information? For all their product excellence, the threat of amassing this much data is too serious to ignore.

So the real question is, does placing Box.net on the board (between none other than LinkedIn and Facebook) mean the company sees itself as Google acquisition bait? And how do fellow startups Loopt and Scribd feel about being placed on Mediterranean and Baltic?

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Your Chance Of Becoming A Mahalo Millionaire With Mahalo Idol

Posted in news by Duncan Riley @ Apr 15, 2008

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Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo has borrowed from the Simon Fuller Idol franchise in its search for the new host for Mahalo Daily by announcing Mahalo Idol.

Potential hosts are asked to respond to the above video on YouTube showing their best side, or turn up to a casting call in Los Angeles April 19. Idol style host wannabes will be purged until there are five finalists, who return one week later to pitch to the celebrity judges with one person being picked to become Mahalo Idol, the new host of Mahalo Daily. The site doesn’t give specifics but it would be a safe bet that the entire process, complete with judging, will be filmed and shown on Mahalo. Men need not apply, Mahalo is seeking female hosts only.

Jason’s embrace of quality television such as Idol is classy, but copying everything down to the logo is a lawsuit waiting to happen, unless he used the Mahalo millions to legally purchase the rights.

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Cuill Secures $25M More For Next Generation Search

Posted in news, google by Mark Hendrickson @ Apr 15, 2008

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Cuill, a stealth search engine company we first covered in September, has raised $25M in a Series B round led by Madrone Capital Partners and joined by Tugboat Ventures and Greylock Partners.

Not a whole lot is known about Cuill except that it apparently can index the web at 1/10th the cost of Google. The startup was founded by search experts, two of which came from Google. It has been rumored that Google itself has looked at acquiring Cuill even before it launches.

We previously heard from sources that Cuill had raised $4M in a Series A round from Greylock Partners. That wasn’t exactly true - it had raised $8M from both Greylock and Tugboat. That raises Cuill’s total to at least $33M, with another $5M maybe from self-funding.

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Where Have All the Bold VCs Gone?

Posted in news by Erick Schonfeld @ Apr 15, 2008

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As startups become cheaper to launch, more and more venture capitalists are finding themselves left out in the cold. Either angel investors are beating them to the punch in funding new startups, or Google buys them before any VC even gets to hear the company’s pitch.

In fact, angels invested $26 billion in startups last year, nearly as much as the $29 billion invested by venture firms. However, there is growing gap between the $20K to $100k most angels will put in and the $2 million to $3 million that a venture firm will commit. Paul Graham, chairman of the Y Combinator investment incubator, argues that what startups need are more investments somewhere in the middle to fill that gap. Most Web startups don’t need $2 million. They need $300,000 or $500,000. But most venture capitalists don’t think those types of investments are worth their while.

In a post about why we are not seeing any more Googles, Graham is scathing in his criticism of venture capitalists, who seem stuck in their old ways of thinking. According to him, most venture capitalists wouldn’t know a good idea if it landed on their head. Excerpt:

I used to think of VCs as piratical: bold but unscrupulous. On closer acquaintance they turn out to be more like bureaucrats. They’re more upstanding than I used to think (the good ones, at least), but less bold. Maybe the VC industry has changed. Maybe they used to be bolder. But I suspect it’s the startup world that has changed, not them. The low cost of starting a startup means the average good bet is a riskier one, but most existing VC firms still operate as if they were investing in hardware startups in 1985.

They’re terrified of really novel ideas, unless the founders are good enough salesmen to compensate.

And yet it’s the bold ideas that generate the biggest returns. Any really good new idea will seem bad to most people; otherwise someone would already be doing it. And yet most VCs are driven by consensus, not just within their firms, but within the VC community. The biggest factor determining how a VC will feel about your startup is how other VCs feel about it. I doubt they realize it, but this algorithm guarantees they’ll miss all the very best ideas. The more people who have to like a new idea, the more outliers you lose.

So where have all those pirate investors gone? I’m sure there are still a few of you out there hiding in the coves.

(Photo by Midnight Creek).

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

Grooveshark Launches Web Media Player

AdRoll Emerges From Private Beta With Co-Op Economics For Blog Advertising

Six Apart Launches BlogIt Quick Post Application For Facebook

More Money for Collective Intellect to Keep Fingers on Pulse of Internet

2,100 People Party In LA With PopSugar And TechCrunch, Raise $13k For OpenId And DataPortability

AllYouCanUpload Slips Quietly Into Deadpool

Googolopoly

Your Chance Of Becoming A Mahalo Millionaire With Mahalo Idol

Cuill Secures $25M More For Next Generation Search

Where Have All the Bold VCs Gone?

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