Category: Tech news

The TechCrunch staff has been pretty busy these last few days, what with throwing and covering a conference and all, but our excellent event photographers (Dave Getzschman, Max Whittaker, and Aaron Morris) have been even busier. They’ve taken hundreds of shots, all far better than those I could manage during the panels and chats, and they’re all collected at the TechCrunch Flickr page.

I’ve sifted through them and collected a few of what I felt were the best. Click for a slightly larger version, or head over to Flickr for the originals. Feel free to use these in any way you see fit, as long as you give credit to TechCrunch and the photographer.

Thanks to all our attendees, speakers, panelists, startups, and support staff, congratulations to Qwiki, and thanks again to our readers and viewers; we’ll see you again in the summer.

While the main focus was center stage on Monday for day one of TechCrunch Disrupt, there was plenty of action backstage— or rather just a few yards to the right to the stage, where our ad-hoc TechCrunch TV studio is located.

Throughout the day, we ran follow-up interviews with a string of Disrupt notables, like KPCB’s John Doerr and Bing Gordon, Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel, Greylock’s Reid Hoffman, David Sze, GE’s CMO Beth Comstock and Intuit’s Scott Cook. If you didn’t catch the action on our live feed, there are all available on demand after the jump. A plethora of videos ahead.

Interviews

John Doerr and Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers on Zynga’s potential, the challenge of sustaining growth and disruptive trends in gaming.

Chris Dixon, Co-Founder of Hunch & Chris Sacca, Founder of Lowercase Capital on putting Angelgate to bed, the trends their following and Sacca’s advertising analytics play.

David Sze and Reid Hoffman of Greylock on the firm’s new micro-VC fund, how Sze lured Hoffman and how Hoffman screens entreprenuers.

Peter Thiel, Managing Partner of the Founders Fund on why betting on China is wrong and his new initiative to fund young entrepreneurs.

Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit on mobile payments and managing innovation.

Beth Comstock, CMO of GE on surfacing innovation in a company like GE and why the company is creating solutions for local markets.

Babur Habib and Osman Rashid, Founders of Kno, discuss their latest announcement with Devin Coldewey.

Shervin Pishevar, Founder SGN and Sarah Lacy.

Dan Rosensweig, Founder of Chegg on the rise of e-books, the latest funding round and the challenge of anticipating his capital needs.

To come. Will update when video becomes available on demand.

Sarah Lacy & Paul Carr
To come. Will update when video becomes available on demand.

Startup Alley

Mike Butcher’s highlights.

Disrupt Battlefield: Reviews

Session 1 Break: Jason Kincaid & Leena Rao
To come. Will update when video becomes available on demand.

Session 2 Break: Devin Coldewey, Alexia Tsotsis & Cyan Banister (founder, Zivity)
To come. Will update when video becomes available on demand.

The App Store review office at 1 Infinite Loop has officially frozen over: we’ve gotten word that the official Google Voice application is on its way to the iPhone in the next few weeks. In fact, we’ve heard from a source close to Google that it’s already been approved — Google just needs to revamp the application to work with the iPhone 4 and iOS’s multitasking capabilities. If you’re a Google Voice user and you’re on an iPhone, this is great news.

It’s been a long, long road to get here. Last July, we broke the news that Apple had blocked the official Google Voice application, which eventually sparked an FCC inquiry into the matter. Apple claimed that the application “duplicated existing functionality”, which didn’t do much to convince anyone as it subsequently accepted similar apps. Nothing happened for well over a year, and the odds of Google Voice ever making its way to the iPhone, at least as a native application, seemed bleak.

Everything changed on September 9, when Apple published a set of guidelines telling developers which applications would not be allowed into the App Store — and none of the rules seemed to apply to Google Voice. Rumors started swirling that third-party Google Voice apps might soon make their way to the App Store, and sure enough, a handful of applications have since been approved.

But the existing applications, nice as they may be, are all provided by third parties. We haven’t gotten the chance to use the official Google application, but it’s possible that it will include functionality that the others don’t. Namely, push notifications for inbound SMS and voicemail messages (Google doesn’t provide an API for these, so third parties would have to route these messages through their own servers to offer push notifications).

Reached for comment about the upcoming iPhone application, Google offered this non-answer of a statement:

“We currently offer Google Voice mobile apps for Blackberry and Android, and we offer an HTML5 web app for the iPhone. We have nothing further to announce at this time.”

The battlefield companies have finished their demonstrations, and video of the first session is processed and ready to watch. You can just hit play and watch the whole thing from start to finish, or you can refresh your memory with the summaries and links below, then jump directly to any presentation that piques your interest.

My opinions don’t count, by the way. These were just my personal thoughts on their products and presentations. Hit the links for more in-depth descriptions of the companies as well as rough transcriptions of the Q&A portions.

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Qwiki

This was a really great way to kick off the battlefield. Whether you think it has merit or not, it was a fun presentation. Qwiki makes looking things up interactive and beautiful, though not strictly speaking efficient. My advice: find a way around the computerized voice. Get some people mining archives of factual and literary references to the item, spoken by real people. Quotes from local people and mayors from cities, interviews and news coverage for other media. It’ll be like algorithmic NPR. Jump to Quiki at 5:00.

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Storify

This social media quoting tool looks very convenient to use, and that’s what scares me. When you make these “frankenstories,” as one judge so aptly called them, so easy to make, I feel you really encourage the dangerously self-amplifying tendencies of the web even further. While it makes original configurations of non-original material easy, it also makes avoiding any real expression easy. Jump to Storify at 16:00.

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Gunzoo

It’s… Cool Iris for videos. I suppose it was inevitable, since the only things that separate these two ideas are really processing power and bandwidth. Not even remotely disruptive, but I get the feeling it’s going to be in demand by companies craving flashy presentations or websites. And certainly these guys have some coding chops, so I doubt they’ll go hungry. Jump to Gunzoo at 28:30.

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Datasift

Deep social web analytics is a competitive field, and I don’t claim enough familiarity with it to do this startup justice. But they seem to have a powerful and useful platform, and their honesty in not trying to launch a straw product just to demonstrate their service (as we often see) is refreshing. It seems to work best with huge amounts of data, though; noise may prevail with the average user’s inputs. Jump to Datasift at 38:30.

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We’ll try to get the rest of the sessions up as soon as the streams are ready. Thanks for watching.

If you’ve had a guitar sitting in your closet collecting dust, now may be the perfect time to pick it up again and start learning some new tunes: Miso Music, an upcoming iPad application from Miso Media, looks like one of the niftiest guitar training applications I’ve seen. And it just won the People’s Choice Award at TechCrunch Disrupt, after receiving the most votes from conference attendees browsing the Disrupt Startup Alley.

The real meat of the application lies in its learning mode. First, you choose a song; Miso has licensed music from Sony/ATV, which gives them rights to include music from The Beatles, Justin Bieber, Carrie Underwood, and more. After picking a song, like the Beatles’ Black Bird, you’ll see a series of colorful dots scroll across the screen representing each note you’re supposed to play (this is called tablature, or tab for short, which is a simplified form of music notation often used for guitars). Tabs aren’t anything new. But Miso will actually listen to what you’re playing.

Every time you pluck a string, Miso will use its polyphonic note detection to hear what you’ve played — play the right note and the tab appearing on the screen will scroll a bit, which means you can keep playing continuously without having to turn the page. It’s quite slick. And while I’m sure there are other applications available for the PC with similar note detection, the fact that Miso is on the iPad makes it much more convenient (and the app looks very nice to boot).

The application also includes an array of virtual instruments, the sounds of which have been licensed from Fender guitars. That’s cool, but there are plenty of virtual instruments already available for the iPad — the learning mode is definitely the draw here.

Miso Music isn’t available just yet — you’ll have to wait two weeks or so until you’ll be able to buy it in the App Store — but once it goes live it will be free for a basic version. A pro application will be available for $2.99, which includes more virtual instruments. And songs will be sold as in-app purchases ranging from 99 cents to $2.99, with packs of songs available at a discount.

Q&A: Chi-Lua Chien, Keith Rabois, Sandya Venkatachalam and Lior Zorea weigh in on Miso Music:

CC: I’ll definitely use it.

SV: How did you figure out a good way to teach people how to learn the guitar.

MM: My dad was a guitar and we both come from a musical background. There are a lot of features included that help users learn the skill.

LZ: You talked about subscription revenue for the software; are there other revenue streams?

MM: You can purchase other instruments on the store and added features. We also have a strobe tuner you can purchase.

KR: How do you plan to market this?

MM: Cross-promotion.

CC: Is there a way to bring in social features? You might want to consider an achievement system.

MM: That’s something we’ve talked about as well.

Okay, we know now that Amazon is on the verge of releasing an Android-based app store. But last week, before we knew that, we got an interesting tip that such a move was coming soon — this week, actually. And that tip came with a bonus attached — the tipster also heard that Amazon was going to be releasing an iPad competitor alongside the store.

Now, unlike the app store, we don’t have any further information to verify this tablet. But again, this tipster nailed the app store part of this news — and knew a couple other tidbits that turned out to be true. So it certainly seems possible that they’re right again.

There have been plenty of rumors that Amazon is hard at work on hardware beyond its Kindle device. But the Kindle runs Amazon’s own software — presumably this new tablet would run Android (for the app store to work). Others have speculated about this possibility in the past. No word on what this would mean for the up and coming Kindle apps.

We’re digging for more information about this. Stay tuned.

[photo: flickr/torley]

We’ve written about Namesake, a stealthy startup founded by former MySpace execs Dan Gould and Brian Norgard, that aims to match opportunities with people in your network. Today, Namesake is launching its professional community at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Namesake, which aims to create a better way to match and route opportunities that come across your desk everyday, is part LinkedIn, part Twitter, and part Facebook. You essentially create a network on the platform by importing your Twitter and Facebook contacts (the sites doesn’t allow integration with LinkedIn contacts yet). You can then post jobs, recommend people for opportunities, connect people with each other and more.

Gould says that traditional search doesn’t work for professional match making opportunities, which is why Namesake can fill a gap in the market. You can get real-time opportunities routed to you from people you trust on the network, recommend others for jobs, endorse people as experts in certain subjects, post jobs and more. You can send messages to specific people in your network or route an opportunity outside your network. And you can simply post and update on what your working on professionally, similar to the way you would post this on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Gould and Norgard sold their company Newroo to MySpace in 2006 and also founded Ad.ly, an in-stream advertising network for Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Q&A: Chi-Hua Chien, Keith Rabois, Sandya Venkatachalam and Lior Zorea weigh in on NameSake:

CC: How do you compete with LinkedIn?

DG: We are trying to blend the value that LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter provides in one platform.

SV: How do you make money?

DG: Performance matching (people only pay if the match was consummated on NameSake); premium subscriptions and Premium advertising will be key. We can offer highly targeted advertising.

SV: But I’m not sure I would want people to sell my private information for ad keywords.

KR: Who is this optimized for?

BN: This is built for someone who is building out their community.

LZ: Why would I come to Namesake if LinkedIn solves this problem?

BN: We are wrapping structure around your professional and social network, to route opportunities to Twitter, Facebook and more.

DG: The Algorithm is a custom routing algorithm.

CC: Job Search might be a hard place to start as opposed to perhaps expertise.

LZ: Perhaps you could work with enterprise CRMs.

KR: What’s your benchmark for a vibrant community?

BN: I think it’s about engagement; whether it be on other networks.

The act of DNA sequencing results in massive amounts of data around the human genome. Currently, this data is housed in standalone super computers, which doesn’t allow for collaboration between scientists. SeqCentral is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today as a way for human genome scientists to match their data with publicly available data sets.

SeqCentral offers highly-scalable genetic sequence alignment in the cloud. The service allows you to upload your sequencing data in the clouds, and then compare your data with other scientists genome sequencing on the platform.

SeqCentral will allow scientists to compare their data to others to see if their sequencing is new or if it is “known.” The startup will bring in public data from universities, research organizations, and companies and allow you compare your sequencing to this existing data.

And SeqCentral, which costs $99 per year for scientists, wants to help you do more than just be able to find additional data, but also aims to connect members of the genomics community, encouraging collaboration around sequencing.

Q&A: Chi-Hua Chien, Keith Rabois, Sandya Venkatachalam and Lior Zorea weigh in on SeqCentral:

LZ: What’s the market for this?

SC: There’s a big market of individual scientists who will use this. Market is around 1 million individual scientists.

SV: What’s the value proposition for the scientists?

SC: Scientists will be able to do analysis more easily. The amount of time it will take to produce results will be significantly less.

CC: I think the company with the most data will win. There are a bunch of players in this space.

SC: There are few other players, but we believe we’ve simplified it.

Within businesses, employees can share information over email, and through collaboration platforms like Yammer, Salesforce’s Chatter and others. But Q&A platforms like Quora have recently taken off as a centralized knowledge repository for a vast number of topics that is easily searchable. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Opzi is launching a Q&A platform designed specially for businesses.

Opzi, which was incubated at Y Combinator, is essentially a white-label Q&A site that any organization can use internally to store questions and answers about their business processes. The site was founded by 25-year old Euwyn Poon, who graduated from Cornell University at the age of 18 and then received a J.D. from Cornell Law School in 2007. Poon worked as an associate in a law firm after school and found that it was difficult to sort through knowledge and instructions from his fellow associates online. Poon says that a Q&A-like site for business information within a company could help fill this gap and increase efficiency within an organization.

Similar to Yammer, users sign in with their corporate email address and can then search for information by keyword. You can also ask questions, and answer directly from the platform. There are a variety of uses cases for the platform. For example, an engineering firm could use the platform as a way to sort through commands. And because most companies are tied to email as a main communication platforms, questions and answers can be distributed and answered by email as well.

You can also post questions anonymously, and follow questions to receive updates to certain queries. Unlike a wiki, all the content on the platform is organized around the questions. Opzi is also working on ways to route questions to certain users if they could be experts in answering the question.

Opzi charges for the platform via a per seat licensing model. Even in stealth, Poon has already raised $1 million in funding from an impressive roster of angels, including SV Angel, First Round Capital, Naval Ravikant, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Paul Buchheit, Fritz Lanman and Raymond Tonsing.

Q&A: Chi-Hua Chien, Keith Rabois, Sandya Venkatachalam and Lior Zorea weigh in on Opzi:

KR: WHat’s the value proposition for the first user at the company?

EP: It can work for only two users as a communication platform or a reference point. We want to build something that feels like a consumer software but is for the enterprise.

CC: One of the things that impresses me about Quora is the density of the network. Here it will be smaller groups-need a lot of participation?

EP: We’re not trying to compete with Quora; were just trying to add a centralized knowledge base within businesses. We are looking at organic growth but open to whatever makes sense.

SV: Our approach is to build a layer on top of a company. This a light and easy way to add that layer. And it can integrate with other silos of information.

KR: What about Yammer?

EP: Yammer seems to be trying to build a social network for the enterprise. This is more of a knowledge base.

SV: This would compete for time spent on email, Yammer and other communication platforms.

LZ: How do you get the word out?

EP: Here, today.

CC: I think the biggest issue is that some companies want to have their classified information on servers.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom will be bringing himself, his hair and his smile to TechCrunch Disrupt tomorrow, Tuesday, to speak on a variety of topics. This is now officially a TechCrunch Disrupt tradition – at our last Disrupt event in New York Mayor Bloomberg made a surprise visit and spoke about efforts to bring more startups to New York.

Newsom will discuss the startup ecosystem in San Francisco, and will probably touch on Zynga’s massive new 270,000 square foot office lease. He may also mention that he’s running for Lieutenant Governor of California this year.

Attendees can see Newsom live. Everyone else can watch for free on the TechCrunchTV live stream. We’ll update the agenda shortly with details and timing.

It’s no secret that performance can play a significant factor in a website’s success — keep your users waiting, and they’ll get impatient and head somewhere else. There are solutions available to help keep things speedy, like CDNs, but most smaller websites don’t use them. TechCrunch Disrupt finalist CloudFlare wants to bring these speedy load times to the masses, and it’s offering some other benefits too, including robust security protection against online threats.  CEO Matthew Prince says that, in short, CloudFlare takes your average web admin and terms them into a full-fledged Ops team.

Prince says that speed issues can have a big impact on your site — one study showed that for every 100 milliseconds of time spent loading, you lose up to 2% of your visitors. He says CloudFlare offers an average of a 30% increase in speed and can “stop virtually all web spam attacks”. And he says that you can integrate it into your site in around five minutes. Oh, and it’s free, at least for its basic service.

Prince says that CloudFlare operates on the network level, so it supports any platform. Setup involves changing your DNS to route to CloudFlare’s servers. After setting up CloudFlare on your site, you can head to a control panel that shows how many data requests have been served to users, and how much bandwidth CloudFlare has saved for you. It also makes it easy to drop in Google Analytics

CloudFlare will also be offering a ‘Pro’ plan, with added features like SSL, better page optimization, and object pre-fetching to further enhance speed gains. The company has set up five data centers across three continents. It’s been in private beta until now, and has been tested on 1,000 websites that have served 6 million unique visitors.

Q&A: Chi-Hua Chien, Keith Rabois, Sandya Venkatachalam and Lior Zorea weigh in on CloudFlare:

SV: It’s a great idea, and you articulated the value proposition well. How do you make money?

MP: We have a pro plan where users are charged for usage.

CC: Seems like a great value proposition.

MP: We think we’re on to something really big. At South By Southwest, they used CloudFlare. We think individual sign ups will help drive traffic but the real opportunity could be with hosting companies.

KR: How does the technology work?

MP: We use a technology from Cisco called AnyCast.

LZ: What’s the difference between the free and paid service?

MP: The pro service has a more advanced security, with realtime lookups.

Peanut Labs, a company that has creates embeddable surveys for social media sites like Facebook, has been bought by online research panel E-Rewards. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Peanut Labs creates the surveys that are used in online offers you see on Facebook within games. For example, on a Zynga game you may see an offer that will allow you to earn Facebook Credits if you fill out a survey. The surveys are used by companies to gather data for market research. Users complete a preliminary profile questionnaire that enables Peanut Labs to target their respondents with the most appropriate survey invitations.

Peanut Labs, which has raised $3.2 million, partners with over 200 of social media applications to include these offers in games and apps on social and gaming networks such as Facebook, Zynga and MySpace. Peanut Labs’ respondent pool hovers around 240 million consumers to date.

Similarly, E-Rewards is an online research company that allows companies to conduct and market research surveys to panelists. Peanut Labs will be able to expand E-Rewards’ survey platform to social networks.

Earlier today, after several tips, we guessed that Amazon may be close to launching its own app store for Android — yes, another Android app store. Sources we reached out to weren’t sure about what exactly Amazon was launching, but many had been asked to sign NDAs about something. Now we seem to know a bit more. And yes, it appears that Amazon is on the verge of launching its own app store for Android.

We’re still going over the details, but if the information we’ve obtained is accurate, it appears there are a number of interesting tidbits around payments paid out through this store. And a number of new restrictions. Ugh.

Amazon’s entry into the Android app space follows Verizon’s move into the area as well with the forthcoming V Cast apps. I can’t wait to hear what Google thinks about all this competition on their devices. Hopefully Google CEO Eric Schmidt will talk about it tomorrow at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Update: Okay, some details:

• For each sale of an App, we will pay you a royalty equal to the greater of 70% of the purchase price or 20% of the List Price as of the purchase date (70/30 is standard, this 20/80 split is somewhat odd and confusing)
• The List Price is apparently in place so that you can’t sell your app cheaper on other “similar services” — meaning other app stores, presumably
• The “similar services” should also include the forthcoming Chrome Web Store, if I’m reading this correctly
• There is a $99 fee to be a developer in this program (the same as Apple’s iOS developer program)
• It seems like if your app is available on other platforms, you have to make sure to update it at the same time on Amazon’s store that you do in any other store (this will piss off a lot of developers)
• Apps will have to be laced with Amazon DRM — meaning they will only work on devices they approve (obviously)
• Amazon has the right to pull any app for any reason (obviously)
• Apps can also be shown on amazon.com (this is up to Amazon)
• You can offer free apps
• The app store is U.S.-only (at least for now)
• This part is interesting too: “We have sole discretion to determine all features and operations of this program and to set the retail price and other terms on which we sell Apps.”

Those are the details for now. It’s not entirely clear how closed or open this store will be. Also not clear is what Android devices this store (and its apps) will run on. More to come, I’m sure.

Update: Rumor: An Amazon Android Tablet May Follow The Amazon Android App Store

Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco today, Scott Cook, the founder and chairman of Intuit, and Beth Comstock, the chief of marketing and vice president of General Electric (GE) traded notes on innovation, investing and acquisitions.

Intuit’s best-known products include Turbo Tax, Quickbooks and Quicken, software that helps consumers, the owners of small and medium sized businesses and large financial institutions save or manage their money. The company’s more recent releases include the Intuit GoPayment mobile app and Mophie credit card reader, the latter of which began sales at Apple stores about three weeks ago, and Turbo Tax SnapTax, a mobile app which allows users to “snap, prepare and file” their taxes with a smart mobile device.

GE’s business encompasses: power generation from traditional and renewable sources, hybrid and electric vehicle technology, financial services, health care solutions, and television programming among others. The company recently committed to spend $10 billion on clean tech research and development in the next five years via its Ecomagination initiative. Ecomagination includes a business competition for smart grid technology startups.

Comstock said more competitions focused on specific clean tech and health concepts would likely follow (and would help build GE’s portfolio). GE is also investing, over a six year period that commenced in 2009, $6 billion in healthcare ideas and businesses that decrease costs, improve quality and increase global access to healthcare.

For Intuit, Cook said, acquisitions are part of an approach to innovation and growth that starts with growth from internal talent and resources. Over the long term, Intuit expects double-digit organic revenue growth and revenue growth that exceeds expense growth. Whether Cook is reviewing a business idea that was hatched internally, or was pitched from an external source, he doesn’t apply a rigid hurdle rate, he said:

We look for…the deep and abiding problem that consumers and small businesses have that has not been solved. [We ask if] we can cobble together technologies that will solve that problem, and delight people in doing so to build competitive advantage. If we can do business there, it doesn’t matter what’s on a spreadsheet.

In the last few years Intuit acquired Homestead, Paycycle, Mint.com (which launched at the TechCrunch 40 in 2007) and more recently, MedFusion. Intuit spends its cash on high-yield opportunities, targeting risk-adjusted returns of 15-20 percent, generally.

Of its acquisition of Mint.com and others, Cook said:

You either disrupt or you get disrupted. If you’re not engineering, and somebody else is, you gotta get on the bandwagon. We bet on them, they also bet on us. [After we acquired Mint] we gave them our Quicken business, and now they manage both! They’re bringing invigorating new thoughts there.

Comstock said that GE has a “hole in its pocket” now, where great clean tech and health ideas are concerned. She emphasized that the company has been more open of late, investing in promising startups through competitions and more, and striking joint ventures with companies that complement GE’s existing lines of business:

We have great battery technology relating to electric vehicles. Our lab is great at sodium science! So we’d created this battery, and we had to make them. Our marketing team then asked: what other markets can I take this to? Auxillary power for planes? Cell phone towers? That is like a virtual startup. It could make $200 million in the first couple of years. At the same time, we invested a couple of rounds in A123. They have lithium capabiltiites. We brought them into our R&D lab, and its the first time we’ve co-created like this. So now, we’re backing the A123 battery, too.

Comstock advised founders wanting to attract GE as an investor, buyer or partner:

We have a whole combo of things we’ve grown and invested in, both…We are always asking ‘Does it scale?’ All the time… Technology is the thing that we do. But business model innovations are really important, especially when you lok at the data that’s coming out of everything! Jet Engines. Medical [devices]. You name it. Don’t just think: ‘I have to have a thing.’ It’s also software, algorithms and business models that we haven’t had experience with that interest us.

Cook advised founders more generally:

Select your team very carefully. Get the right people on the bus and pick the very best for each slot. Have a mission, a big dream, go out and change the world. The big dreams make a difference. But get there one successful experiment at a time. If there’s something I’ve learned in the last 4 years, it’s the power of iteration. Rapidly create, test, change… Run experiments with customers, let the customer vote, don’t rely on the boss to vote.

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According to a company blog post, social bookmarking and search tool Xmarks is shutting down in 90 days.

Following a rebranding from Foxmarks last year, Xmarks, a social bookmarking and search tool, had been growing steadily in users. After the addition of its search feature last March, Xmarks now had 2 million active users and had bookmarked 1 billion URLS. Xmarks is free as a plug-in to users (and was available on IE8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari).

In the blog post written by Xmarks co-founder and CTO Todd Agulnick (other co-founder is Mitch Kapor), the startup simply didn’t have enough users and couldn’t monetize the service. In the Spring of this year, the startup started looking for potential buyers of the company with funds running low. The company tried turning on revenue channels earlier this year for its sync features, but these features are already included for free in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Xmarks CEO James Joaquin tells me “We made an impressive attempt to monetize our 1 billion bookmark corpus with several innovative search products, but ultimately we didn’t find a scalable business model. With Firefox and Google building sync into the browser, it’s the end of the road for Xmarks.”

We’ve added the startup to the deadpool.