February 9th, 2010
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Scrapblog, a photo sharing site for scrapbook fans, is launching a Facebook app dubbed Share the Love today. The cool thing about it is that is an example of “game-ification,” where a non-game app incorporates game-like features.
Scrapblog was, until recently, a Miami-based company that operated a stand-alone web site dedicated to scrapbook fans. It launched a very interesting virtual goods application. Users could post their photos and incorporate them into online scrapbooks that they could share with friends.
That was pretty standard. But the company went a step further, allowing users to purchase cool decorations for their scrapbooks using a virtual currency known as credits. You can purchase a virtual credit with a credit card and alternative payment systems such as special offers from Trial Pay.
Scrapblog also kept stats for its most-active users and created a leaderboard where they could compete with each other. The more they “leveled up” as power users, the more decorations they could buy for their online scrapbooks. That’s all pretty cool.
Now Scrapblog is transforming itself again. It recently hired Jill Braff, an executive at mobile game firm Glu Mobile, as its chief executive. She moved the 20-person firm to San Francisco and is driving the company further into social networking. Today, the company is lauching Share the Love on Facebook.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the new app lets people do the equivalent of Scrapblog within Facebook itself. The app lets them create their own scrapbooks with cool designs and share them with friends. It automatically collects photos that are hosted on Facebook and allows a user to paste them into a photo collage or other things. The virtual currency also works, allowing users to pay real money for decorations.
The Share the Love app takes advantage of Scrapblog’s QuickMix technology to instantly generate a photo collage from available photos. Users can edit the automatically-generated collage or design a custom look with the free or purchased digital content. The scrapbook designs use art from established artists, who get to share in the revenue in some fashion. Braff showed the app to me today and it takes just a few clicks to create something like a birthday card. Users don’t have to leave the social network to use the Scrapbook photo services.
“The whole idea is to let people do their own storytelling,” Braff said in an interview.
Scrapblog’s research showed that people are taking more photos than ever and that Facebook has become the largest photo repository in the world with more than 10 billion photos. Photo enthusiasts are posting photos on the social network about nine times a month. The goal for Scrapblog is to create simple tools that allow everyone to create scrapbooks and cards and see just how large the mass market can grow.
Braff says the next step is to cut deals with brand companies such as Disney to enable users to use branded content in their scrapbooks. About 50 percent of Scrapblog’s business is overseas.
The three-year-old company has raised $10 million to date from Steamboat Ventures and others. It has more than 2 million registered users on its web site. Rivals include sharing sites such as Flickr or Shutterfly.
Written by Dean Takahashi on February 9th, 2010 with no comments.
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Naturally, which you launch a new product with a huge amount of hype, like Google Buzz, you’re going to want to own the .com domain name for it. And Google obtained googlebuzz.com just in the nick of time, according to a document from the National Arbitration Forum.
On November 13, 2009, Google, represented by Meredith M. Pavia (presumably, a Google lawyer), filed a complaint that BuzzNews Network was using the googlebuzz.com domain in bad faith. Further, they argued that it was “confusingly similar” to Google’s trademark on the company name. This was an easy one for the forum to rule on since BuzzNews Network never responded to the complaint.
The presiding panelist also cited Google as being one of the most recognized brands in the world, and clearly that part of the name overcame any claim to “buzz” BuzzNews Network might have had. It probably didn’t help that BuzzNews bought the domain from GoDaddy in 2004 and had parked it with links ever since.
On December 23, 2009, the panelist ruled the name had to be turned over to Google. And though it doesn’t yet forward anywhere, you can bet Google will soon set up googlebuzz.com to point to the service, just as googlewave.com points to Google Wave. While Google launched the service today, it originally planned to do it at a later time, we hear. That had to be moved up for some unknown reason, so they’re lucky they got the domain when they did.
Of course, it looks like someone else just registered buzzgoogle.com and is parking it. The fight continues…
[thanks Shmuel]
Written by MG Siegler on February 9th, 2010 with no comments.
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In less than six months, online restaurant reservation site OpenTable has seated an additional one million diners via its mobile apps. In late October, OpenTable had reached the milestone of seating one million diners via its mobile offerings, a year after its iPhone app launched. It took only four and a half months to seat another million diners. Additionally, the site says that based on an estimation of a $50 average check per diner, OpenTable claims that diners using its mobile applications have generated more than $100 million in revenue for its restaurant partners.
OpenTable allows diners to find and book reservations at more than 11,000 different restaurants in multiple countries via mobile applications for the iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android. Other smartphone users can book reservations through OpenTable’s mobile-optimized Web site.
The company also reported strong earnings this afternoon, with Q4 2009 revenue coming in at $19.2 million, representing a a 32% increase over Q4 2008 revenue, which was $14.5 million. OpenTable’s total revenues for 2009 were $68.6 million, up 23% over 2008 revenues of $55.8 million. In 2009, OpenTable increased its number of participating restaurants in North America by 17%, with a total of 10,850 partners by the end of 2009. The number of international partners also increased, rising by 44% to 1501 participating establishments. Total number of diners in North American were 11.8 million, a 39% increase from Q4 2008.
Last year, OpenTable filed for a healthy IPO, despite recessionary conditions in the markets. OpenTable is a solid internet company that has a viable business model. On the restaurant side, OpenTable delivers reservation management software to establishments through a Web browser and collects monthly subscription revenues, similar in theory to the offerings that software companies like Salesforce sell to clients.
Written by Leena Rao on February 9th, 2010 with no comments.
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In a big victory for a new kind of memory chip and the little startup making it, Micron Technology announced today it is buying Numonyx in an all-stock transaction valued at $1.27 billion.
Boise, Idaho,-based Micron is the largest U.S. maker of main memory chips used in PCs and other electronics. Numonyx, meanwhile, is a flash memory chip maker that has been working on a universal memory chip — which combines the best features of multiple types of memory chips.
Micron plans to issue 140 million shares to Numonyx shareholders. The deal is a big win for Numonyx investors Francisco Partners, Intel, and ST Microelectronics. Micron will issue up to 10 million more shares to Numonyx shareholders, depending on Micron’s average share price for the next 20 trading days. The deal is expected to close in three to six months.
Numonyx was formed in 2007 through the combination of the flash memory businesses of Intel and ST Microelectronics.
Back in December, Intel and Numonyx announced they had accomplished a breakthrough in a new kind of memory chip dubbed “phase change memory.”
They showed a prototype of a 64-megabit phase change chip that can be stacked three dimensionally on the same chip. That means the chip has multiple layers of memory cells, allowing it to be densely packed with storage cells. It can also be used for both random access (DRAM) functions and non-volatile memory (like Flash, where the memory is retained even without power). And it doesn’t consume a lot of power. The initial chip has just one layer, but future chips are expected to be stackable.
Memory chips need to be fast, dense in terms of storage capacity, and need to hold their data even when the power is off. Nothing has fit the bill yet. Dynamic random access memory chips used as main memory in personal computers is fast, but it loses data without an electrical charge. Flash memory is dense and holds data even if the power is turned off, but it is slower. And disk drives hold data when the power is off, but they’re slow compared to DRAM.
This new prototype chip, called a PCMS for phase change memory and switch, has a storage cell layered with what Numonyx calls an Ovonic Threshold Switch, which allows the cells to be stacked vertically yet accessed easily. The prototype uses a material that is an electrically-charged form of glass. This same kind of material is used in CD-ROM drives and non-volatile memory today. At the time Intel and Numonyx said they could not predict when they could commercialize the chips. But apparently Micron is confident they can do so.
There are other kinds of new memory technologies under research. One of them, magnetic random access memory, is in production now, but it isn’t a stackable memory.
Written by Dean Takahashi on February 9th, 2010 with no comments.
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Real Networks is spinning off digital music service Rhapsody by the end of the quarter. While it will still own a significant stake in the new, independent entity, it won’t have more power than the other major interest Viacom. (They didn’t specify their exact share except to say that it was below 50 percent.)
The move is intended to lighten the load on Real Networks while simultaneously freeing up room for more investors in Rhapsody.
Even Rhapsody can raise more money, the music service’s prospects appear dim. It actually lost about 300,000 subscribers over the course of 2009. Plus Apple’s iTunes and companies like Europe’s Spotify may soon be competing against it in the U.S. with a subscriber model.
Rhapsody had the distinction of being the first service to offer streaming access to a full digital music library on-demand, but it’s proved too expensive for mass adoptio. Its iPhone subscription launched last summer for $14.99 a month. It’s uncertain whether Rhapsody has plans to diversify or focus on a more niche audience.
Real Networks, on the other hand, is more stable. Off-loading Rhapsody will give it breathing room to grow the user base for RealPlayer, its digital media player. In fact, it just launched a new beta version of its RealPlayer for Mac. It will also focus more on the gaming side of its business, which could prove more lucrative than music. While the change comes shortly after CEO Rob Glaser decided to step down, the company says it has been in the works for a while.
Along with an $18 million infusion of cash from Real Networks, Rhapsody has a pledge from MTV Networks to run $33 million worth of ads on the service. Both companies will also retain seats on Rhapsody’s board.
Written by Camille Ricketts on February 9th, 2010 with no comments.
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Fisker Automotive, maker of the luxury hybrid Karma, says it will probably receive its $529 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy by the middle of March, according to Dow Jones VentureWire. This follows the company’s announcement that it will shutter its research and development center in Michigan (PDF) — bad news for a state that needs all of the automotive dollars it can cling to.
Even though the DOE gave the loan guarantee to Fisker back in September, the company had a hard time scraping together enough private investment to actually receive the money. Finally, in January it announced a $115.3 million round of equity (PDF) from A123Systems, Ace Investments and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
The equity and loan (given through the DOE’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program) will be used to launch both the Karma, which it plans to sell for $87,900 a piece, and jump-start progress on its more affordable family sedan, probably called the Nina. That latter vehicle, still in development is expected to sell for $47,400 before a $7,500 tax credit from the federal government. If the company can move fast enough, the Nina could be released in time to compete with Tesla Motors‘ similarly-positioned Model S.
Fisker already has 1,600 people on a waiting list for the Karma; each has paid a deposit of $5,000. But it has a long way to go before it sells the 11,000 cars it pledged to hit by the end of the third quarter in 2011. That was one of the major conditions of the DOE’s loan, but it could be adjusted considering how long it took Fisker to raise the necessary capital.
Even though it’s set for a big payday here in March, the company has still been tightening its belt. To do so, it’s chosen to consolidate its operations in California, where it is headquartered in Irvine, by closing its 34,000 square-foot facility in Pontiac, Mich. It’s a shame that it plans to go on a hiring binge once everything is solidly in California. The Detroit area could definitely use the employment.
While it will be taking some local investment and 30 jobs with it, the company will be maintaining partnerships with several automotive supply companies in the state — including A123Systems, the battery maker it recently struck a deal with, which maintains an office in Ann Arbor, Mich. and has plans to build major manufacturing operations near Detroit.
The plan to make Irvine its hub excludes the Fisker plant being developed in an old General Motors factory in Wilmington, Del. In fact, that will be the primary manufacturing location for the cars rolled out under the banner of Project NINA once it comes to fruition.
Including the government loan, Fisker has raised $817 million to date, and is also backed by Palo Alto Investors, Qatar Investment Authority, and Eco-Drive Capital Partners.
Written by Camille Ricketts on February 9th, 2010 with no comments.
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Tiny Speck, a company started by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, has just opened a massively-multiplayer, browser-based game called Glitch to alpha testers, giving the world a taste of what Glitch might look like.
There are essentially two schools of multiplayer gaming right now. Massively-multiplayer games, most notably World of Warcraft, have been popular for a long time. They typically have huge worlds, tons of players, and a never-ending number of things you can do and explore. On the other side of the coin are the social games like Farmville and Petville, which are so popular on Facebook and the like. They’re typically simple, run in the browser, and aren’t particularly in-depth.
Glitch appears to be somewhere in the middle. It’s a browser-based game, meaning there’s no software to install or special computer requirements—more like Farmville. But i has huge levels and long quests, will require a lot of thought, multiplayer coordination and strategy, and as co-founder Stewart Butterfield told CNET, is for “people with above average intelligence and sophisticated tastes…the intersection of NRP listeners and game players”—point WoW. Glitch is walking the line between casual social games, and intense, multiplayer, life-consuming games.
The only thing already available as far as the game itself goes is a short preview video. It’s a little cryptic, but appeared to me to be one part Mario, one part acid trip, and one part something completely other. The website offers more of an explanation, describing a journey back to the distant past, to fix the glitch that caused the terrible future that’s coming to us: “This results in a time-traveling effort at saving the future, going back into the minds of eleven great giants walking sacred paths on a barren asteroid who sing and think and hum the world into existence…”
The way the game is built is equally exciting. It was built mostly in Java and Javascript, meaning that it can run in any browser, it can be easily maintained and updated by Tiny Speck, and that new content can be deployed without forcing users to buy new discs, and spend more money. If this works, building a huge, massively-multiplayer game into the browser, it could change how people play games over the Internet.
Tiny Speck is releasing Glitch into private alpha, but it’s looking for testers. The company is letting people into the alpha slowly but steadily, so sign up, but be ready to wait a little while. If you’re not one of the lucky ones, don’t worry. The game will be released to the general public sometime in 2010.
Tiny Speck was started by Butterfield and three members of the Flickr team, and has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Accel and angels like Marc Andreessen and Jeff Weiner.
Written by David Pierce on February 9th, 2010 with no comments.
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Today, Google’s social strategy took a big step with the launch of Google Buzz — a new FriendFeed-like feature that’s integrated into Gmail, mobile search, Maps, and more (you can see our live notes from the announcement here). Shortly after the event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin fielded questions backstage from members of the press. Our own Steve Gillmor was there to record the conversation (and ask a few questions himself). We’ve embedded the footage below, and have transcribed some of his answers.
In the video, Brin answers questions covering a broad array of topics, including Google Buzz, Google’s current situation in China, and the company’s research in clean energy. Among the revelations: Brin hopes to eventually remove the task of having to choose between Email, Buzz, and IM, so expect those to converge more in the future.
Note: The video starts off with some loud music in the background, but it gets turned down after a few minutes
Regarding the appeal and potential of Google Buzz, and the company’s ability to make it useful:
“Extracting signal from noise is one of our core competencies, it’s one of the key things we do in our web search product every day. And I think that now peoples’ personal communications are getting to be on a scale comparable to that of web search, so those technologies are becoming far more critical.”
On getting relevant results, and internal use of Buzz before now:
“I think there is huge potential. Right now if you look on the recommendations, there is some ordering that we do that uses these signals. We’ve been testing this internally, and even there, there’s quite a lot of noise internally, you’d be surprised. But I think that to really get the algorithms large scale we needed to wait for today and we need to have noise, people using this. That’s when the relevance technology is really going to come into play… ” [On the signals Google will be paying attention to] “We’re going to see which articles you like, which ones you comment on, which posts you read, things like that. And I think we’ll be able to try to tailor things to you that you’re likely to be interested in.”
Brin says that he’d like to make the recommendation technology more transparent (as opposed to a black box) but hasn’t yet discussed those details with the Buzz team.
On integrating real-time into Buzz in an accessible way, and possibly working that into Wave:
“I think we want to see what the experience with Buzz is in the wild and then make decisions from there. I know we’ve learned a lot, we’re very happy with internal testing. Actually that’s why I am very excited for the Enterprise product. But before we make plans like that I want to see how Buzz gets used from today on out. I think the integration [into Gmail] has proved valuable, and that’s definitely something we’re going to be looking into for Wave.”
Why he thinks Google Buzz might work, when other social services integrated with Email haven’t made much of a splash:
“I think if you look at the history of technical products, there are a lot of details that matter. It’s not just the general idea, oh I have Email and social. And you know maybe, maybe we got the details right, maybe we didn’t, we’re going to see from today on out. Internally I’ve been very happy with the result. There are a lot of detailed things. If you look at the success of the world wide web, you look at Xanadu (an ongoing Hypertext project founded in 1960) for example by Ted Nelson that had a lot of these concepts yet it wasn’t so successful. There are a lot of details, perhaps chance and timing. I wouldn’t discount something because it’s similar to something in the past…”
On his experience using Buzz:
“It’s been internally, probably half a year I’ve been testing it internally, with an increasing number of other people, the whole company has been on it for a while now. It has really enabled me to communicate, you get far better information about what’s going on in the company. Now if I have a question about something I don’t have to dig up who is the person who is particularly responsible for this, I can just throw a question out there, I know there are enough people out there who pay attention to my posts, and also now with the recommendations it should get recommended to the right person anyway. And I don’t worry that I’m disrupting people because the social expectation on Buzz is different than on email.”
On users having to make the choice between Email, IM, and Buzz:
“I think it is stressful today to have to make those choices. And I’d like to move to a situation where people make that choice less. You have to decide what medium you’re using, you have to decide to whom you’re sending it to, and sometimes you have to decide what is the heading going to be? There are a lot of decisions you have to make. And Google Buzz at the very least you do have to choose Buzz as the medium today. Though I would like to simplify that in the future. But you don’t have to decide to whom to send it. You can always type an @reply in the mid stream. You don’t have to necessarily pick a heading. Those lower the barrier a lot. But I agree that there is definitely room left to further simplify it. Because the very act of choosing Buzz to do that is in itself a bit of work.”
The conversation then changed to the situation in China. Brin was asked about this topic repeatedly and directed reporters to read the company’s blog post on the matter (which he says reflects the consensus view of the company). Eventually he did explicitly say, “We have not pulled out of China”, going on to give a general timeline of Google’s initial steps to launch in China in 2006 and how things have progressed since then (you can see this start around 15:45).
Finally, the interview closes out with a few questions and answers about Google’s initiatives in energy, and how the economy is affecting the company.
Written by Jason Kincaid on February 9th, 2010 with no comments.
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One of our Motorola connects just hit us up with some Android info, and it should get people excited. We’ve been told that an Android 2.1 OS update will be coming for the Motorola CLIQ next month, sometime in March. Drinks all around?
Written by Boy Genius on February 9th, 2010 with no comments.
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As soon as Google Buzz was released earlier today, all the early adopters piled in to give it a spin. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail and a founder of FreindFeed, was among them and his initial reaction was: “This seems vaguely familiar . . .” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “There’s a FriendFeed in my Gmail. Sweet! 
“
It is vaguely familiar to him on various levels. Like FriendFeed before it (which was acquired by Facebook), Buzz acts as a way to bring together different social streams together—Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader shared items, status updates, shared links and videos. It presents them all in a single stream from everyone you follow from you Gmail contacts. Each item can be commented on, “liked,” or taken into a private email or chat conversation. You end up getting comment strings around a single shared link, photo, or video, just like on FriendFeed, except FriendFeed can import items from many more social websites. (Although FriendFeed is not enabled as a connected site for most users, strangely enough it is enabled for Buchheit’s account.).
But the other reason Buzz is vaguely familiar to Buchheit is because it lives right inside Gmail, which he launched when he was a Google engineer. It appears right under your “Inbox” link, and takes over the entire window where your 10,000 unread emails usually stare you in the face. It replaces it with a living, breathing, never-ending social commentary. My first reaction when I saw Buzz was to wonder what happened to all my mail. I didn’t miss it.
Unlike Google Wave, which lives in its own silo, the fact that Buzz is a feature of Gmail makes me want to use it, despite it’s deficiencies. Right now, Buzz only consumes communications from outside Google in a one-way fashion. You can see other people’s Tweets, for instance, but you can’t Tweet back to them. And those Tweets definitely don’t come in realtime either. There is a noticeable lag.
Buchheit agrees. When I asked him via email how he feels about Google channeling him, he responded: “It seems nice. Integrating into Gmail is the right way to go. It’ll be interesting to see how much activity it gets.” The fact that I was sable to gather his thoughts from Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter, and Gmail speaks to the disjointed nature of our communications. Back in November, I had the opportunity to interview Buchheit on stage on whether he thought that email is dead. He defended email and admitted he had not yet tried Google Wave. But he’s already jumped into Buzz.
The question is not really where email is dead, but whether it will continue to be the primary form of electronic communication, or merely recede to the background as convenient dumping ground for archiving our realtime conversations. Whether Buzz puts more people at ease with using a realtime communication mode as their primary communication mode remains to be proven. But it points towards the inevitable direction that all Web communications are taking: more realtime, intermingled, disjointed, and multimedia.
Written by Erick Schonfeld on February 9th, 2010 with no comments.
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