Category: Tech news

Digital shopping and fashion empire Like.com wants to solve a problem for anyone who has ever stood in front of their closet and wondered what they should wear. The startup that has brought us visual shopping engine Like.com, shopping personalization engine Covet.com; street style social network Weardrobe, and visual styling tool Couturious, launched its live personal stylist and wardrobe consultant in an iPhone, Ask A Stylist a few months ago. Now, the startup is expanding to the web, with fashion Q&A site, What To Wear, which takes on a model similar to Q&A site Quora.

Similar to Ask A Stylist, What To Wear gives anyone real fashion answers from fashion bloggers and celebrity and Glamour Magazine-trained stylists in real time. For example, you can pose the question; “What should I wear to the Lady Gaga concert tonight?” and a stylist will respond with visual answers of their suggestions. Stylists can explain their recommendations visually through pictures. Of course, these pictures are sometimes linked to products that a user can purchase, and Like will collect an affiliate fee from this transaction.

Users can remain anonymous on the site or can use Facebook Connect to sign in, in which case the site will surface questions from your friends as well as the anonymous questions. Certain sylists wWhat To Wear also has a content partnership. Glamour.com will feature guest blogs by What To Wear stylists, and will highlight the most popular and recently asked questions.

The site is part of Like.com’s CEO and founder Munjal Shah’s strategy of bringing interactive shopping tools to the online soft goods shopping experience. Couturious shows you how to wear styled looks on the web. Weardrobe helps you to be visually inspired with streetstyle looks; Covet helps you to visually personalize your shopping (using celebrity photos), Like.com helps you to visually shop for soft goods and What To Wear and Ask A Stylist add a personalized styling consultant to the mini-empire’s offerings.

Strategy aside, you have to wonder what these verticals are doing for Like.com. The site’s traffic, which according to ComScore, is stagnated. ComScore reports that Like saw 2.3 million unique visitors in April, and has flatlined in growth. And the other sites in the family don’t have nearly as much traffic as Like.com. But Like, which launched in 2006, says that it has generated $150 million of gross merchandise sales per year. And the startup raised $32 million in funding during the implosion of the financial industry, with a valuation just north of $100 million.

The rumors are true: hedge fund Criterion Capital Partners is indeed the buyer of Bebo. As we reported yesterday, AOL is offloading the social networking service for less than $10 million (other media are reporting a purchase price of around $2.5 million).

To remind you: AOL paid $850 million for Bebo back in 2008. Ouch indeed.

In a press release that just went out, Criterion acknowledges that it has acquired the Bebo business from AOL and that it will “assume the rights and complete operating control over the global social platform business”.

The acquisition and financing was led by CCP partner Adam Levin in partnership with business strategist Paul Abramowitz and web entrepreneur Richard Hecker.

Criterion Capital Partners will take over Bebo’s global operations immediately and retain its San Francisco-based headquarters.

Exact terms of the deal are not being disclosed by either party, but AOL CEO Tim Armstrong sent a note to all employees this morning that suggests our earlier reports that the ability to offset almost the whole sum it paid for Bebo as a tax loss played a big role are correct.

A couple of paragraphs from said note (emphasis ours):

In April we communicated the fact that Bebo was among the assets we
would be not be keeping as part of our main portfolio of businesses.
At that time, we indicated that we hoped to finish our strategic
evaluation by the end of May, which we did. Today we are announcing
that we completed the sale of substantially all of the assets of Bebo,
Inc. to Criterion Capital Partners, LLC.

This sale is important for Bebo’s users and for AOL. The deal will
allow Bebo’s users to remain within the social platform that they know
and love, while enabling a new owner to bring new possibilities and
experiences to bear. Criterion Capital Partners are specialists in
facilitating growth plans and turnarounds and are well placed to drive
Bebo’s effort to strengthen its foothold within the highly competitive
social networking arena.

For AOL, the transaction will also create a meaningful tax deduction,
which should allow us to more effectively manage our tax strategy.

When we last wrote about SafetyWeb in November, they hadn’t launched yet. Still, that didn’t stop Battery Ventures from pumping in a $750,000 angel round of funding. Now they’re about three months post-launch and investors are clearly liking what they’re seeing as the service has just raised another $8 million.

SafetyWeb is a services that allows parents to monitor their children’s activity on social networks in realtime. They scan the web for a kid’s activity online and send alerts when something notable comes up — things as mild as negative comments being said, all the way up to a person convicted of a sex crime friending a child on a network. Initially, they’re scanning the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc), but eventually the plan is to scan all sorts of things — including the fast-growing geolocation services.

Obviously, child safety on the web is a big issue and it’s growing bigger every day as networks like Facebook approach 500 million users and consume kids’ time. Facebook in particular is interesting because as they continue to grow, they also continue to open up more user data to the public. And that’s right in SafetyWeb’s wheelhouse because they search the web for this public information (as opposed to logging in to kids’ accounts). For as little as $10 a month per child, SafetyWeb keeps parents up to date on all this stuff.

“We generally believe that the whole security market is shifting away from protecting people, not machines.  We really are the first of a kind service that is not just people search posing as a product.  We are the only ones that do both discovery and retrieval of real-time activity without requiring your kid’s credentials,” co-founder Geoffrey Arone tells us.

He also hints at some “big deals” the service has recently signed, but won’t say what they are just yet. He will say that right now, there are over 1,000 affiliates distributing SafetyWeb.

This new funding round was led by Battery Ventures with First Round Capital also participating. With the funding, Roger Lee from Battery is joining the Board of Directors, and Satya Patel from Battery is being added as an observer. They’re also adding former MySpace Security Czar, Hemanshu Nigam, to the Board. For the past four years, Nigam has been the Chief Security Officer for all of News Corps’ online properties.

SafetyWeb is up to 12 full time employees now — some working out of their headquarters in Denver, and the rest in their offices in Menlo Park.

The Huffington Post has acquired its first company in a small cash deal, and it is not another blog or media site, but a pure technology startup called Adaptive Semantics. The two-person startup provides a semantic analysis engine (aka JuLiA) already used by the Huffington Post to help moderate the 100,000 comments published on the blog every day.

Prior to the acquisition, the Huffington Post was already Adaptive Semantic’s largest and only outside investor, buying a 20 percent stake in April, 2009. Adaptive Semantic’s two co-founders, Elena Haliczer and Jeff Revesz, will join Huffington Post to oversee its social news and community technology R&D. The acquisition price was not disclosed

“Technology is very critical to us,” says CEO Eric Hippeau. “In this case, the technology has implications for our content. It makes moderation hyper-efficient.” With close to 3 million comments a month, the only way to moderate them is through automation tools (as well as a corp of about 30 professional human moderators).

Other companies that license Adaptive Semantic’s technology for online comment moderation include CNN, Newsweek, and Disqus. They might have to start looking for other solutions. “We will honor the contracts, but very likely will not renew them,” says Hippeau, who doesn’t want to be in the business of licensing technology to other news sites and services.

JuLiA uses “supervised machine learning,” according to Revesz, to flag inappropriate comments, spam, and abusive language. Humans manually tag a few hundred comments, which then get fed into the semantic analysis engine and applied across every comment. This is an ongoing process so that the system continually gets better and better. Not only can it detect abusive language or hate speech, but it can also help find commenters who may be topic experts.

Beyond comment moderation and making sure readers behave themselves on the site, the underlying semantic analysis technology can help bubble up the best contributions from readers. “I am very confident that we are going to find all kinds of ways to apply it,” says Hippeau.

The Huffington Post very much sees itself as a social news network, and its success is tied to engaging its readers in a variety of ways, from leaving comments to sharing posts across the Web via Twitter and Facebook. It recently started awarding readers badges. JuLiA could help to feature the best comments or to award specific badges. For instance, if a reader leaves a lot of comments on posts about Afghanistan, Iraq, and Hillary Clinton, they could get a Foreign Policy badge. That is just a hypothetical example, but the technology opens the door to those kinds of features.

It also could be applied to article recommendations. “The Huffington Post talks a lot about their social graph,” says Haliczer, “how people are connecting to each other and connecting to content. We can look at the content graph and recommend content to people.” Whatever the Huffington Post will end up doing with the technology, it is important enough that the company wants to own it in-house.

On January 13, we reported that former AOL SVP of Global Products and U.S. Operations Eric Bosco had departed the company after nearly 14 years to join the comScore management team as Chief Product Officer.

Five months later, he’s out the door, we’ve now learned.

Bosco, who was hired to oversee all of comScore’s global product development efforts, will be departing the audience measurement company at the end of the month.

ComScore CEO Magid Abraham apparently sent a memo to staffers earlier this morning, announcing the “change in the senior leadership team, and resulting organizational structure”.

Full memo:

I would like to take the opportunity to communicate a change in the senior leadership team, and resulting organizational structure. By mutual agreement, Eric Bosco will be departing comScore at the end of the month.

While we greatly appreciate Eric’s efforts and achievements thus far in 2010, we have decided the Product organization’s immediate success depends on a decentralized organization structure. This will bring the Product teams closer to their internal partners, enabling more effective and efficient execution on Product strategy.

The following Product team alignments are therefore effective immediately:

AdEffx led by Joe Lahr, will report to Bridget O’Toole benefitting from tighter alignment with the ARS business

Core Audience Measurement Products, Media Metrix, Video Metrix and Ad Metrix led by Steve Dennen and his team, will report to Cameron Meierhoefer

The Product Design and Planning and Analytics Solutions teams led by Yon Nuta will report directly to me

Mobile Products will continue to be led by Mark Donovan reporting to Serge Matta

CMS products will continue to be led by their respective vertical teams within Erin Hunter and Serge Matta’s organizations, with the exception of CPG which will now be led by Jeff Cox.

Please join me in wishing Eric continued success in his career endeavors. I also want to thank the Product team and their internal partners for their continued flexibility, adaptability, and laser focus on delivering the best products comScore has yet to bring to market.

– Magid

We have an email in with comScore to confirm the authenticity of the memo, but we have no reason to believe it isn’t legit. Update: authenticity confirmed by comScore.

Any comScore folks who know more about this care to fill us in?

Some people dislike April Fools Day. We do not. In fact, we think those who do are wrong. Not to mention a little weird, too.

It’s just damn funny when we post things like Google going nuclear and witness respectable industry blogs like Venturebeat break the news in quasi real time … only to realize we were just kidding later on. Good times. But you know what’s better than a good April Fools joke?

A good April Fools joke that keeps on giving long after April 1 has passed.

This morning, I picked up on a tweet from Opera Software, embedded above, pointing to a PCWorld article on the future of the Web browser. Titled ‘Your Browser in Five Years’, it’s an interesting read on how browsers are undergoing changes that could potentially alter our day-to-day computing lives in the coming years.

Writes PC World’s Jeff Bertolucci:

Meanwhile, Google is building voice recognition and text-to-speech functionality for browsers. And Opera Software’s free Opera browser–which pioneered voice and mouse-gesture browsing–also supports face gestures through your Webcam.

Face Gestures. To control your browser. Next time, better check that publication date, Jeff. 🙂

And I truly hope you didn’t watch that video without wondering if this was actually real.

As you may have heard, Apple completely blew through its pre-order launch day iPhone 4s in less than a day (and that was despite major technical issues with the ordering process). It has now blown through the second wave (due in early July) as well. The current shipping estimate if you order right now is July 14. Ugh. But if you absolutely want one at or around launch day, the Internet, as always, provides an option.

Scanning eBay right now, there are roughly 400 iPhone 4s for sale (between the 16 GB and 32 GB models). Sure, the device isn’t out yet, but people are willing to part with the device as soon as they get it on June 24. The question is: how much do you have to pay to get them to part with it? Currently, the cheapest ones are going for $550 — and that’s the $199 16 GB model. The cheapest 32 GB model? $799 — a full $500 over the $299 retail price.

Both of those are bargains compared to what some people are selling them for. Want the iPhone 4 hand delivered to you by June 27? That will cost you $5,000. Yes, $5,000 for one iPhone. At least 50 other people are offering to sell their’s for $1,000 or more.

And this is just two days after the initial pre-sale. As the expected ship date continues to get pushed back, these prices are going to get much more ugly. By the time launch day hits and people have them in their hands, don’t be surprised if many of these new iPhones sell for thousands of dollars.

Now more than ever, fundraising for charities, campaigns and causes is taking place online. A variety of startups offer simple ways to power fundraising campaigns online, including GoFundMe and Facebook app Causes. Nadanu is another contender in this space, with its Push-K giving solution, offering non-profits a way to power fundraising on the web and mobile devices as well as social networking sites.

Nadanu’s Push-K platform allows register and “drop coins” into a custom receptacle. It is modeled after a traditional charity coin box, and donors can click to drop virtual coins into their eCharityBox and watch it fill up. Once the box reaches a predestinated amount the box is emptied, their credit card charged and an automated tax receipt is sent via email. Payment options include Authorize.net and PayPal.

The interface is sleek and easy to users. On the backend, Push-K allows organizations to deliver content such as video and audio and also serve text messages to users.

Launched a few months ago, Nadanu is already powering e-giving for over 400 charities. Nadanu also has mobile offerings available for the iPhone, iPad, Android and more. And the company has a web offering and Facebook app.

The Playstation Move is just what it looks like: a Wii clone. It feels the same, looks the same, and works the same. That’s a good thing, though. Everyone and their grandmother has played Wii bowling and knows how it works. Sony isn’t reinventing motion control with the Move. They are, however, seriously improving it.

Every few weeks, Google’s Android team updates their Platform Versions page that breaks down how many Android devices are running each version of the OS, based on data from the official Android Market.  Today’s it’s reached a big milestone: exactly 50% of Android phones are running 2.1, the latest officially released version of Android (2.2, or Froyo, went live for a small number of users last month, but has not officially been deployed on a wide scale).

This is a big change since early May, when only 32.4% of phones were running 2.1. Since then, a number of older phones have been upgraded, and the new Sprint Evo and some other newer devices run it as well.

So why does this matter? We’ve written pretty extensively about Android fragmentation, or the fact that there are many phones running older versions of the OS. The Android team contests the use of the word ‘fragmentation’, (one blog post actually calls the term useless because it has been used in so many ways).

But the fact remains that nearly 50% of phones are running older versions of the OS, and if a developer wants to make use of the latest Android features, they’ll leave a big chunk of the Android userbase behind.  Case in point: when the official Twitter application was released in April, it was only available to 27.3% of all Android users.

Still, the tide appears to be turning. OEMs are going to get faster with their updates, and Android upgrades will eventually start coming more slowly, which will hopefully result in fewer phones getting left behind.

Since April, Twitter users have grown accustomed to Twitter’s first ad revenue play: Promoted Tweets. Today, the second phase of that strategy is starting to be tested: Promoted Trending Topics. The first such topic? Toy Story 3, promoted by Disney/Pixar.

As you can see in the right hand toolbar of Twitter.com, at the bottom of the Trending Topics area there is now an 11th topic, “Toy Story 3.” Next to it is a big yellow box letting you know that it’s a promoted Trending Topic. Just as with Promoted Tweets, the functionality for these Promoted Trending Topics is the same as the regular Trending Topics — clicking on it takes you to a search results page to see what people are saying about Toy Story 3.

“As we have always said, we plan to test different advertising and promotional models in these early stages of our monetization efforts for both user and brand value. As part of this effort, we are testing trends clearly marked as “promoted” for an undefined period of time,” a Twitter representative tells us.

And along with buying the Trending Topic, Disney/Pixar gets a Promoted Tweet at the top of the stream, Twitter confirms. Twitter also says that just as with Promoted Tweets, the Promoted Trending Topic “has to resonate” or it will disappear.

Two more things of note here. First, it’s interesting that Twitter is putting these at the bottom of Trending Topics rather than at the top. Still, the yellow badge draws your eye naturally to it. Second, the Promoted Trending Topic appears no matter which city or country you set your Trending Topics to. In the future, you can imagine these Promoted Tending Topics being even more highly targeted to just certain regions/cities.

When Hot Potato launched at our Realtime Crunchup last November it was already a solid app. Then came a new version in March (just before SXSW), and it was even better. Today brings version 2.0 — and it’s the best yet. And it’s also different.

When it first launched, Hot Potato was basically an iPhone app that let you build a social stream around events happening at any given moment. Right before SXSW, the newer version of the app added killer Foursquare integration, and tied everything together with the service’s website. The update today shifts the focus away from events, and makes it about all kinds of activities. Really, anything in the world you may be doing, you can now “check-in” while you’re doing it on Hot Potato. It’s actually pretty cool.

When you load up the app, you’re taken to a screen with six default prompts for what you may be doing. Those six are: “I’m watching..”, “I’m listening to..”, “I’m attending..”, “I’m reading..”, “I’m thinking about..”, and “I’m playing..” After each, there’s a box to fill in the noun that should follow each of those. When you enter that, Hot Potato searches to see if it’s already in the system. So, for example, if you say, “I’m watching Lost”, Hot Potato finds the other people doing that as well and ties you altogether into one activity.

Within this activity page, people can comment and respond to comments about the activity, just as you previously could in Hot Potato. You can also add pictures to this stream.

There’s also a seventh activity option in which you choose your own verb. Hot Potato gives you a list of new options (such as “I’m eating”, “I’m drinking”, “I’m checking out”) — or you can add your own. This reminds me a bit of the service Plurk, which is a Twitter-like service that allows you to organize your status updates around verbs. But obviously, this is more robust.

Just as before, when you fill out what activity you’re doing, you can send it to Twitter, Facebook, or use it to check-in on Foursquare. The way Hot Potato has set this all up is quite seamless. And there is of course an activity stream front and center in the app to showcase all of your friends’ activities.

There’s also a new element: awards. Yes, just as with some of the other location-based services, you can now get badges for doing certain activities. For example, when you share your first activity, you earn the “You’re a Big Deal” award.

Hot Potato 2.0 also brings a revamped version of the website to match this new activity focus. And for the first time there’s an iPad app as well.

We’re already seeing a ton of Foursquare-like services that let you “check-in” when doing various things. For example, Miso lets you check-in around movie, television, and Internet video content. This new version of Hot Potato aims to let you check-in no matter what you’re doing. And it smartly ties in with Foursquare.

Find the new version of Hot Potato in the App Store here. It’s a free download.

This morning, a number of major advocacy groups, including the ACLU, EFF, and CDT, sent Facebook an open letter detailing some of the outstanding issues with Facebook privacy. The groups’ letter acknowledged that Facebook has made strides recently on this front, especially with its launch of new, simpler privacy controls, but that it hasn’t addressed some major privacy issues, like the fact that the controversial Instant Personalization feature is automatically opt-in.Wasting no time, Facebook has just responded with an open letter of its own.

Along with Instant Personalization, other issues addressed in the advocacy letter include the fact that Facebook is able to track user browsing behavior through its ‘Like’ buttons and other widgets (these widgets are served up by Facebook to third-party sites, so it can see which sites you’re visiting). And the letter says that users should have more control over what information third-party applications should have access to. Finally, the letter asks Facebook to give  more control over what information mandatorily made public, and the ability to export data so that users can easily transition to social networks other than Facebook.

Facebook’s response addresses each issue point by point:

• Regarding the so-called “app gap”, Facebook says that it is implementing a new data permission model that will be rolling out in the next few weeks. There’s also now an option to turn off Platform entirely.
• Facebook’s response to the Instant Personalization is pretty weak — it says that the program has been “widely misunderstood” and that partners can only access users’ public information. I understand the program quite well, as do numerous other critics, and, I’m sure, the likes of the CDT and EFF. And it’s obvious that there are still issues with handing over “public” data, especially when some of that data was switched from private to public during Facebook’s privacy transition in December.
• Regarding Facebook’s ability to track users through its widgets, Facebook says that it does not use that information for targeting and that it is deleted after 90 days.
• Addressing the point about giving users more control over what information they can hide, Facebook effectively says that it’s given users more control than they had, but that it finds that users have a “more meaningful experience” when they share more information. In other words, they’re still going to force some of this information to stay public.
• Facebook says that it is currently testing SSL access to Facebook (a good move).
• Regarding the ability to export data, Facebook says that users can already do this via its APIs. It then takes some shots at the advocacy organizations saying that it is “surprised that these groups would advocate for a tool that would enable one person to strip all privacy protections for any information that has been shared with them”. I’m pretty sure nobody is asking for that.

Here’s the full letter from the advocacy groups:

And Facebook’s response:

This morning, news broke of a spiffy, and very powerful new feature on YouTube: a built-in video editor. It’s a feature that I’ve personally been longing for for years, and it’s going to be a huge deal for anyone who uploads to YouTube on a semi-regular basis. This morning I spoke with Rushabh Doshi and Josh Siegel, the lead engineer and product manager for YouTube’s video editor, respectively, about how the feature came to fruition and what users can look forward to in the future.

The JavaScript-based YouTube editor isn’t loaded with bells and whistles, but it can handle the basics just fine: it’s easy to trim and splice together the video clips that you’ve uploaded, and you can replace your video’s audio with any of YouTube’s library of 40,000 approved songs (you can’t upload your own audio yet, but YouTube is working on deals to make that happen).

Siegel says that the core idea behind the video editor is to give users the basic features they need in the cloud. YouTube isn’t out to recreate existing video editors like Final Cut in the browser — he notes that many people aren’t even familiar with them. Instead, it’s taking the core features that have broad appeal and putting them in a lightweight package that’s accessible from nearly any browser.  YouTube has also learned from its experiment with with YouTube Remixer, a mashup feature launched in 2007 that didn’t have a particularly good user experience.

Doshi added that one of the main goals with the project is to keep the interface very lightweight for the user, leaving all the intense processing to Google’s massive infrastructure. He contrasts that with current video editing solutions — even if they’re easy to use, low and medium end computers can struggle at quickly editing content that’s shot in HD. That isn’t a problem when you’re doing your editing in the cloud.

Siegel and Doshi were hesitant to talk too much about what we can expect from the video editor in the future, explaining that it will depend on what users are asking for. That said, they did hint at a few features. First, they said that they’re “really excited” about the opportunities provided by the iPad and other mobile devices, so we can probably count on that coming fairly soon.

They also mentioned some features that are being considered, including video transitions, effects, titles, and audio layers (again, these will be implemented pending user demand). Finally, they said that they’re looking into a way to deal with mashup videos that combine both high and low resolution content (right now if one video in a mashup is low quality, it downgrades all of them).

One other thing to note: YouTube says that the feature is slated to launch later this evening, but there’s a chance that it might slip til tomorrow. When it does go live, you’ll be able to access it at YouTube.com/testtube.

At the risk of pissing off our new office neighbors, I have a confession to make: I loathed the Yammer iPhone app. Don’t get me wrong, I love Yammer, and find it absolutely vital to our work. But the app was easily the least stable of the dozens of apps I have  on my iPhone. It was so bad, in fact, that I’ve been accessing Yammer through mobile Safari in recent weeks. But that’s why I’m happy to announce that today, with the launch of the latest version of the app, 3.0, my nightmare is over.

As they note in the App Store description, Yammer 3.0 for iPhone is a complete re-write of the app. It promises to fix “many crashes,” load “much faster,” and even work on the upcoming iPhone 4. A quick run through confirms all of those things. The app’s UI has also been overhauled and is much more pleasing to look at now (and is actually simplified). This looks to be an all-around win.

It also brings several smaller features such as: autocomplete for @replies in the app, full landscape support, and the ability to mail and call contacts right from within the app. This thing just made my job much easier. Nice job Yammer, you’ve earned your way back on to my main screen of apps.

You can find the new Yammer app here. It’s a free download.

Update: Fine, I’ll change the title to “fewer”.