Category: Tech news

Web-based productivity suite Zoho is getting into the search game today. The startup is adding an “actionable” search tool to its productivity suite, allowing a user to do a keyword search across an organization’s entire suite, across multiple applications including email, documents, forums, contacts, and more.

The search portal acts much like any search engine within a content site. Users can search by keyword or contact, and view results from multiple apps. Zoho Search indexes data from multiple Zoho Apps, including Zoho Mail, Docs, Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook, Discussions, Accounts and more. Search results are grouped based on applications and filters are provided to view additional results from each category. From within search, users can reply to emails, edit documents, comment on forums, or update contact information.

I’ve long been a fan of Shop It to Me, a site that was early to the personalized shopping and promotion wave when it started back in 2004. It was a beautifully simple idea: Email newsletters that let you know when your favorite brands in your size were on sale. After some-six years of quietly building a business, Shop It To Me is finally invested in a new front end, back end and new retail categories. The users will start seeing changes today.

This is a site that execution-wise got everything right, which is why it has out-grown and out-lasted a few dozen companies that have had a near-identical approach. First off, it has great inventory—all the biggest designers and department stores. The site allows you to enter your size info on a brand-by-brand basis, recognizing that we all wear different sizes for different designers. The email newsletters contain all the information you want, you only click through if you have an intent to purchase. That means there’s no bait-and-switch or overly goosed click-through rates for retailers.

You can even set how many times and what day you want to get the newsletters,and set whether you only way to see items that are, say 50% off or more.

A lot of Web sites either don’t solve a big problem (ie, Plurk, Friendfeed in a post-Twitter world) or solve a problem in a far too complex, over-featured way. Shop It to Me fell into neither trap. It sought the simplest solution to solving the tricky problem of apparel discovery that the first generation comparison shopping sites like Shopping.com never came close to solving. It’s comparable to Kayak, only better because Kayak was replacing the pain of going to four or five sites to find the best deal—Shop It To Me replaces the need for going to hundreds of sites.

The site has 3 million subscribers, which puts it the range of peers like DailyCandy, Groupon and others. It has only raised one round of funding and won’t say how much, but this is a lean company with less than 20 employees. It doesn’t hold any inventory or a large salesforce, which is one reason it has been so quiet—the only barriers to entry are size, scale and execution. I read it religiously twice a week and must have bought hundreds of items at huge discounts of the past two years.

But while Groupon and Gilt have been getting loads of press for novel demand generation sites, Shop It To Me has been pretty quiet. Its product has been featured on the Today Show and InStyle but not so much on sites like TechCrunch, where let’s face it, the core audience isn’t exactly teaming with stylish women. That will start to change this week as the company rolls out the first of a series of changes that will take it from an in-the-know tool for stylistas to—it hopes—more of an ecommerce powerhouse ala Zappos. Today, it is launching a more modern and less-femme redesign, within six months a new back end will allow it to make better personal recommendations, and by the end of the year, it will be in at least one more new category—possibly housewares or even travel, says the founder Charlie Graham.

The curation aspect will be tricky. What’s made Shop It To Me so great is that you say exactly what you want and you get it. The problem is too much of a good thing. The site offers up some two billion recommendations over email per month. During the recession the site got more stores on board and more sale inventory and users who loved the service, just didn’t have the time to go through the pretty lengthy emails. People need a five-minute solution, Graham says.

There is a risk here the site veers off track by trying to be something more than it is now. Can the purchases of other women who also like Diane Von Furstenberg dresses and Tori Burch shoes really help inform what other brands I may like best? I’m dubious. But Graham says the site isn’t straying from the approach of individually personalizing each newsletter, and after all, it only makes money when we click or buy, depending on the contract. If the changes don’t result in more purchases, they won’t last. Whether you’ve heard of it before or not, this is a site big enough it has something to lose at this point.

My biggest problem with the site is still unsolved. While Shop It To Me compresses demand generation into an easy, consolidated experience, buying items still require you to go to each individual site, each requiring its own separate checkout process, user names and passwords. That is a huge friction point. It’s a hard problem to solve since most retailers want to own the customer relationship, but Graham assures me they are working on a solution. The ideal would be some sort of one-click “ShopItToMe NOW!” purchase button, ala the Digg or ReTweet buttons. But nothing like that is in the offing anytime soon.

Back in January, we noted that Loopt was sending around a deck to advertisers showing off a new product. The product was focused on check-in specials (the kind popularized by Foursquare) and was entirely built on top of Facebook’s social graph. Finally, nearly 6 months later, that app is here.

Loopt Star is in some ways a simplified version of Loopt’s regular location-based service. Rather than being a service that is continually updating your location in the background, the focus here is only on the idea of the check-in. And naturally, those check-ins take place at specific venues — some of which Loopt has deals in place with to coincide with the launch of the new app. We’re talking big, national brands such as Gap, Burger King, and Universal Music.

Loopt Star is sort of like a “virtual loyalty card,” is the way co-founder Sam Altman describes it. “As you go about the world and check-in, you get discounts and free stuff,” is the simplified way he puts it.

The way Loopt pitched it to advertisers is interesting. Those guys are familiar with the “cost per impression” model of advertising, so Loopt described this as being a more valuable “cost per visit” model. This is basically the same idea that another location-based service, Whrrl, has been trying to sell to advertisers (pay-per-visit). It’s about “driving foot traffic,” Altman says.

Along with foot traffic in stores, retailers get to brand themselves their way in the app, with their own logos. These can be used to reward Loopt Star users with special achievements — similar to the Foursquare “badge” model.

Loopt Star will launch with four brands Altman says, but the service will add about two a week after that, so the company can put a special system in place to ensure there’s no fraud or gaming of this system. Obviously that’s a concern when these partners are giving away free and discounted goods.

The most interesting aspect to all of this though may be the use of Facebook Connect. Altman says Loopt has used several features from the new Open Graph to build this app. And that the plan is to use Facebook’s social structure for all Loopt products going forward. The new ability for third-parties to cache data was the key to Loopt switching over, Altman says.

While Facebook has clearly been working on its own check-in based solution, Altman expects it to be more of a basic feature, and believes the social network will be more interested in federating check-ins from all the other services already out there. If true, this should help Loopt and its competitors gain even more users.

Loopt Star will be iPhone-only at first, but it will eventually roll out to all the other major mobile platforms.

Update: And below, find a video Robert Scoble took of Altman showing off Loopt Star.

Yahoo will soon be changing the way they handle status updates and social aggregation to make it easier for users to follow other people. But the PR fiascoes that have hit both Google (via their Buzz launch) and Facebook (via their most recent privacy changes) aren’t lost on Yahoo – they are taking particular care to explain exactly how changes will affect user privacy right up front, before the changes take effect.

Here’s the product expansion in a nutshell – currently to see status updates for others in Yahoo Mail, you have to have a mutual follow, meaning both people have agreed to be “friends.” You can then see that user’s Yahoo status updates as well as updates on third party services that they have added to their Yahoo profile as well. In the new version there will no longer be a requirement for a mutual follow. So, like on Twitter, users can follow whomever they choose.

This isn’t actually a dramatic change for Yahoo, since users can follow others in this way already on Yahoo Messenger. But Yahoo Senior Director of Project Management Cody Simms tells me that based on data that Yahoo has collected so far, they think they’ll see a massive increase in user adoption.

Yahoo will also suggest that you auto follow some users up front based on an algorithm that looks at your behavior, who your friends’ friends are, etc.

But Yahoo Chief Privacy Officer Anne Toth, who has been with Yahoo since 1998, says that there will be no privacy surprises for users, who can choose to turn sharing on, turn it off, or make more granular settings. One thing users will have to get comfortable with is the fact that most of this data is by definition public anyway. The privacy settings simply allow those users to decide whether others can follow you, and get notifications on new content you’ve created.

It’s not clear to me that users would suddenly revolt based on the changes. AOL implemented a similar product, Lifestream, earlier this year and there wasn’t a peep in the press about privacy. But Yahoo is implementing Updates deeply into the Yahoo Mail inbox, which is what got Google in trouble with Buzz.

One feature Yahoo left out is the ability to see who is following someone, and who you are following, which should ensure additional privacy, says Toth.

I’m not sure Google has ever come out and said that they hope the future of computing doesn’t involve Windows. But we all know they’re thinking it. However, while they may think that way, it’s been hard to take that too seriously since most of the computers they do their work on likely run Windows. In the near future though, that may not be the case.

A new report tonight in the Financial Times suggests that Google is steering its employees away from using Microsoft’s dominant operating system in the workplace. In fact, the reports says that, “New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system.” And it states that getting a computer running Windows may require permission as high up as Google’s CIO.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some of this downplayed by Google over the next few days (the sources are all anonymous employees rather than spokespeople). But I also wouldn’t be surprised if it’s entirely true. Google does believe that it was vulnerabilities in Windows that lead to the infamous Chinese hacking incident earlier this year (which subsequently led them to pull out of China). They undoubtedly know that while they may have closed one hole, many others exist, and it’s only a matter of time until another incident happens again.

That is, unless they switch to one of the OSes much less popular with both users and hackers alike (and generally thought to be more secure): OS X and Linux. So that’s apparently what they’re trying to do.

Obviously, they’ll still have Windows machines around to test their services on. But what will be interesting to see is if Google continues their fairly standard PC-first, Mac/Linux-second roll-out strategy for new services (Chrome being one example). Google still needs their products to reach the most amount of eyeballs, and that still means Windows.

Google has been taking aim at Microsoft for years now. Google Docs, Gmail, Chrome, are some of their most obvious shots at Microsoft products. But even Android was originally sort of a way to attack Windows (by way of attacking Windows Mobile, and ensuring Microsoft didn’t maintain a foothold in the mobile space). And then, of course, there’s the upcoming Chrome OS.

Chrome OS will be Google’s most direct attack on Microsoft’s soul yet. It’s an operating system that you can run your computer off of without needing Windows at all. In Google’s mind, this is the future. Everything will be run through the browser, and besides a few locally stored things, everything will be in the cloud. There is no traditional software.

Such a future isn’t feasible for most users yet, but as Macs continue to gain popularity, a move to OS X increasingly is. By embracing OS X (and Linux) for work, Google seems to be leading by example. The message is that the alternative OSes are the preferred hold-overs until the Chrome OS dream can be fully realized.

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, some of New York City’s most notable investors and entrepreneurs took the stage to talk about New York City’s seed funding situation. The title of Startup Mecca still clearly belongs to Silicon Valley, but as panel moderator Erick Schonfeld noted, the number of startups making their way to the Big Apple is on the rise and dealflow in New York is quickly heating up.

The conversation touched on quite a few subjects, including what kind of companies tend to do best in New York. Betaworks CEO John Borthwick posited that many of the startups doing well in NYC — Tumblr for example — tend to focus largely on the UI and user experience. He says that many of the web’s building blocks (AWS, etc) are already in place, and many of the services that will do well are building off of those.

Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack agreed with this, saying that we no longer have to classify all web companies as “technology companies”. Rather, they can be media companies leveraging online content. Jalak Jobanputra, SVP at the New York City Investment Fund, says that while a lot of the infrastructure has been built, there is still much work to do in mobile. She also noted that many people were coming out of Wall Street to start their own ventures.

Chris Dixon, who has blogged extensively on raising money and other topics, says he doesn’t like to think about investing in terms of NY vs Silicon Valley (though he does wish there were more startups instead of lawyers in NYC). Rather, he wants to bring an SV-like ecosystem to New York. He also said that the notion that finding real estate in NYC was an issue was a red herring (Hudack added that if you can’t handle the real estate, you shouldn’t be doing a startup).

Regarding the trend of taking seeding funding from large VCs, most of the panelists seemed to think that it was a bad idea, namely because it could lead to issues down the road if your VC does not decide to follow on.

For more, check out my live notes below and the video of the talk.

Here are my notes from the talk:
John Borthwick, CEO, betaworks

Chris Dixon, CEO, Hunch & Angel Investor

Mike Hudack, Co-founder & CEO, Blip.tv

Jalak Jobanputra, SVP, New York City Investment Fund

Erick – Percentage of companies we’ve covered that were from NY increased in the last 18 months.

JB: Betaworks is a holding company. We’re not a fund. We biuld stuff and we invest. Everything we’re doing is focused on the social, realtime web. This concept that there’s an emerging connected set of companies — we view it as a loosely coupled network of companies. We think a lot of the groundwork has been lain – AWS, etc. We think lightweight apps — they can  be huge — where a lot of the emphasis is on front end, UI, initial experience. A lot related to media business, advertising business and the like.

Why in New York?

CD: I think if you look at the 90′s, the big heavy companies were actually in Boston.

JB – We learn so much from the west coast.

MH- To the point about building blocks being bulit… A lot of businesses that are interesting are media, publishing, and communications.You don’t need to think of every company as web as technology company. Blip doesn’t think of itself as a tech company, it’ s a media company.

JJ-I think that with mobile, there is still a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built. I do think New York’s hard technology scene is still growing.

Erick: What about recruiting, office space in NYC? What are the things you need to know about balding a startup in NYC?

CD — I think the real estate thing is a red herring. Basically all these expenses are salaries for smart people. I think NY is similar to Silicon Valley in that almost nobody working there actually came from there. We recruit a lot of people MIT, CMU, Penn.

MH- Real estate is relatively easy. We found our first office on Craigslist.

JB – We went to a startup that had taken a space that was bigger than their existing capcaity and just rented some desks. If you can’t sort out real estate you shouldn’t be entrepreneur.

JB – We’ve been inspirred by West coast investors who understand value of syndicates. The value of of bringing in great investors, people who will help you at different times, different stages.

Erick – Is seed funding really challenging venture model?
CD – I think venture firms freaked out back in the 90s. Yale/Harvard was really succesful, and then everyone copied it, and there were a ton of bad funds. People really dont need that much money. These days we have more educated entrepreneur. They think about net dilution over time. There’s tons of issues with taking early money from big VCs. Biggest is that if they dont follow on you’re basically toast. Because if Sequoia gave you 500k, and they aren’t involved later, people wonder what’s going on — it’s the same signal is if I just got fired and want to find a new job, people are wondering what went wrong.

MH- I wouldn’t take that money.. Similar issues if you take a strategic investment and then aren’t acquired. People are asking what your strategic is doing.

Let’s talk about what each of you guys are doing .

JJ- I’m with the NYC investment fund. About a third of what we do is venture. I joined two years ago. We’ve set up our seed fund in response there being a dearth of seed money. We’d looking to help seed the entire ecosystem.

CD- The Founder Collective is a $40ish million seed venture fund. There’s about $15 million from entreneurs in the local area. Our thesis is that we’d rather have entrepreneurs betting on entrepreneurs rather than bankers. The advantage is that they can probably see the value better.

JB – Our model is a little different. We aren’t a fund, we’re a holding company. From investment standpoint, what we’re looking at has to be in beta — we want something we can look and feel and touch. I don’t like the abstraction of ideas, I like the real product. We love to see data, even if it’s from 50 users.

What about the second, third tier areas? Say, Pittsburg with CMU. Do you invest in any startups in those cities?

CD- Thing is, you need the critical mass.

MH- When we started Blip people had the same complaint about NYC. They said we had to move to Sf. That was only a few years ago. I dont see any reason why can’t happen in any of these cities. but it does take time.

JJ- I’m seeing a lot of entrepreneurs from secondary cities who actually are thinking of moving to NY, which does have critical mass.

JB – There’s a lot of great stuff happening in NY. Great stuff in London, Asia, and even out in the Middle East. What is happening is the wave of innovation from the first 10/15 years of Internet, which is washing through the rest of the world.

What do you think about if a VC will follow-on if they do participate in a seed round?

CD – I’ve sat in VC meetings, listened to the LPs. We’re doing this to get options.

MH-With the amount of money sunk in a seed round, your company is an option, but it isn’t a major sunk cost. They can drop you.

CD- That said, if Fred Wilson does a lot of diligence and invests 500k i think he will want to follow on. It’s the VC who meets an entrepreneur for 5 min and gives 20k — that’s bad.

Erick – If you have a first time entrepreneur, what are you looking for?
JB- At the end of the day, a lot comes down to the individual’s passion for what they’re building. Their belief in it, and understanding of the product and market. There’s a difference between someone who has had and is solving problem vs someone who comes top down, decides to look for a problem based on marketsize without having had it themselves.

Entertainment media company BUZZMEDIA (formerly known as Buzznet) has just announced the addition of 6 music sites to its ever-growing list of properties, namely PureVolume, PopMatters, Gorilla vs. Bear, The Hype Machine, Concrete Loop and RCRD LBL.

The news was just released, but it looks like industry blog Hypebot.com jumped the gun, deeming the addition of the 6 sites an outright acquisition of the lot.

After contacting BUZZMEDIA we’ve learned that in reality, the deals with The Hypemachine, RCRD LBL and PopMatters are advertising partnerships while the others are straight-up purchases. Update: in the case of Gorilla vs. Bear, it concerns an acquisition in the form of an investment, with right to buy the remainder. All sites will retain editorial control, we were also told.

Digging a bit deeper, it looks like the acquisition of The Hype Machine for one had been rumored for a while, based on the mentioning of BUZZMEDIA in the site’s footer. But the site’s founder, Anthony Volodkin, responded to blog posts spreading that rumor in comments, saying they needed to be corrected because BUZZMEDIA does not in any way own but merely sells advertising on The Hype Machine.

From what we can gather, there are similar arrangements in place with PopMatters and RCRD LBL, the site that was started as a joint venture between Downtown Music and Peter Rojas of Engadget, Gizmodo and GDGT Web fame.

BUZZMEDIA’s current music properties include Lyrics.com, Stereogum, Buzznet, Idolator, Absolute Punk and the official websites for Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian and other celebrities such as Nicole Richie.

Together, these Web publications are said to reach more than 50 million pop culture, music and celebrity enthusiasts worldwide on a monthly basis, according to BUZZMEDIA’s website.

Here’s how they pitch the portfolio on there:

Its influential and authentic social media properties afford brand advertisers unique access to impassioned and engaged audiences through a blend of professional editorial, expert opinion, user contributions and customized marketing solutions.

Reads like a “targeted content at large scale” play to me (think Glam for entertainment).

BUZZMEDIA says the addition of the aforementioned music sites cements its Music division as the largest independent publisher of music content on the Web, as measured by comScore Media Metrix last month.

The company provides a surprisingly low amount of details about its business on its corporate website, but from what we can gather they’ve raised over $35 million in four rounds, from investors like Focus Ventures, Anthem Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Redpoint Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. Earlier this month, the company put out a press release announcing the recruitment of four sales & advertising people, all relatively notable people with backgrounds at Yahoo, MySpace, Fanscape, Time Inc. and other familiar names.

Earlier press releases tout the appointments of former founding general manager of TMZ Alan Citron as President, Mike Porath, former AOL News Editor-in-Chief as SVP of Programming and Alex Blagg, founding editor of MSN Wonderwall and Best Week Ever as Executive Editor of portfolio site Celebuzz.

This is a company steadily building a financial foundation while continuously adding experienced and savvy staff to its most important divisions as well as new sites to its publisher portfolio either through acquisition, joint-venture or advertising agreements.

In other words, one to keep a close eye on.

Earlier this month, we reported that Yahoo’s Director of Geo Engineering, Gary Gale, was the latest to leave the company. He declined to say where he was going at the time (except to say that it wasn’t Google), but how he has. In a blog post today, Gale has announced that he’ll be the Director of Ovi Places for Nokia.

What’s interesting about this is that Yahoo just announced a deal a week ago that aligns them with Nokia in the mobile space — which will obviously include geolocation. Gale notes this coincidence, but says he’s been talking to Nokia long before Yahoo was. Regardless, even though Gale is leaving Yahoo, it appears he’ll be working closely with his old co-workers on some projects.

Gale also used his post to say a few things about Yahoo. Having spent nearly 4 years at the company, Gale writes that “you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the media about working at Yahoo! It’s been an amazing experience and one I would willingly repeat if I had the opportunity to go back and do it all again.” Of course, he also notes some of the negative things about the experience — 3 of his “lows”:

• People leaving the company as a result of the Microsoft bid; the unsuccessful Microsoft bid, something that never actually happened.
• Reorganisations and new VPs; far too many of them. Six reorganisations in the space of twelve months and six VPs in the space of four years is too many by my reckoning and meant you sent more time rewriting your strategy than you do actually delivering and shipping product.
• Teams that ship successful products in spite of the company not because of the company.

The second point in particular seems to go along with our recent post wondering what exactly Yahoo is now? Judging from the various answers from the top over the years, it’s a very fluid thing. That also seems to show in the fact that Yahoo was one of the early players thinking about the now red-hot location space, but doesn’t have much to show for it (at least from a front-end user perspective).

Following the news Gale was leaving Yahoo, another key player in Yahoo’s location plan, Tom Coates, announced he was leaving as well.

Hopefully Gale won’t experience the same sort of top level confusion and frustration at Nokia — even working with Yahoo again.

[photo: flickr/vicchi]

Let’s clear the air right away: The Evo 4G isn’t the second coming. It’s not the iPhone slayer. It might not even be the best Android phone available to date. But it is a solid phone with amazing hardware running the consumer-friendly HTC Sense Android release. That’s a good thing.

Something that I loved about TechCrunch Disrupt last week is that the top two startups that launched in the competition weren’t from the U.S. – winner Soluto is based in Israel, and runner up UJAM is a German startup. In our previous events we had lots of non-U.S. startups, too, but the winners have always been U.S. based teams. So to have startups from Israel and Germany win was a real treat for me personally.

The judges selected Soluto, which is software to make your computer run better, as the clear winner. The company has a proven team, lots of funding and has been working on the product for two years, they say. We take audience voting into account as well, and we will also put in our vote. But at the end of the tallying there just wasn’t much of a discussion. You can never tell how a startup will do until it actually launches (see, for example, Cuil, which had massive funding and a killer team but flopped on launch), but everything we saw suggests that Soluto is likely to go on to do amazing things. And they have a terrific business model. They deserved to win the Disrupt Cup.

But a lot of people watching from the audience and the livestream thought UJAM, which lets anyone create music, was much more exciting, and potentially very disruptive to the music creation process. If you haven’t seen their demo yet, which had a number of spontaneous breakouts of applause and yelling, you should. I’ve embedded it above.

At one point judge Chris Sacca even got up and tried it himself, and the audience loved it.

The judges also liked UJAM and there was some discussion about them winning. But the product is just so early, not even in public beta. And they haven’t quite nailed down their business model yet. There are lots of ways for UJAM to still blow it, however unlikely that is.

The whole Soluto v. UJAM situation reminds me of our TechCrunch50 event in 2008. Yammer, which gives businesses a private twitter-like service within the company, took the top prize. And a startup called Swype, with launched a new way to do text input on tiny mobile touchscreens, took a runner-up spot.

Yammer, like Soluto, isn’t a company that is all that exciting to talk about. But both startups provide a much needed service, and Yammer is ramping up their business nicely with revenue doubling every quarter. They’re likely to have a really nice liquidity event.

And like UJAM, Swype stole everyone’s hearts. People wanted to try Swype themselves, and you can see all the judges getting up from their seats after the demo to try it themselves. People were jumping up and down in the audience. Etc. Watch it all here.

Swype also had amazing founders, and since TechCrunch50 has gone on to do amazing things. Their software is now being built into tens of millions of mobile handsets a year, and they collect a fee for every install.

But at the time they just weren’t far enough along to win the show. Their first big licensing deals were ahead of them, and the judges felt more comfortable with Yammer as the winner. And like UJAM, a lot of audience members were really angry that Swype didn’t win it all.

The real frustration some people have at TechCrunch Disrupt is that there are startups with two years of development and $10 million in funding competing head to head with startups with no funding and less development time. Some people have asked that we limit the amount of funding or put in other rules to level the playing field.

We’re not going to do that.

The real win for companies is to simply launch at the event in front of so many people. TechCrunch Disrupt had 1,700 attendees in person, and another 100,000 people watched on the livestream. There’s just no other place in the world that can give a startup so much mainstream attention so fast.

The fact is that people are watching, and all the press is there, because of the way we hold the event. They want to see hot startups that are well funded and a little more full baked. Take those away and fewer people are interesting. There are separate discussions with popular technology leaders and investors, for example, which draw in the crowds and press. They stay to watch the startups launch. If we mess with that formula too much, or add too many more filters to the types of companies that can launch there, that careful balancing act could be thrown off whack.

So we do other things to help really young startups get going. Like holding the hack day before the event which lets people get stage time for their projects and get into the event for free. There were 300 engineers at the event that almost certainly wouldn’t have been there otherwise because of the Hack Day. And some of those engineers are going to be launching their startups in future TechCrunch Disrupt events.

Also, the awards are more of an audience pleaser than anything else. The audience seems to be uncomfortable if you don’t name someone the winner, even if, really, it’s just too early to be calling any of these companies winners and losers. So we ask the judges to do their best, and make a call. Sometimes the company that got everyone out of their seats doesn’t win.

But in the end, they really do.

Yoono, a nifty browser plug-in and desktop application that serves as both a social network aggregator and media hub, is upgrading its offering today with YouTube integration, additional language support, and further Twitter functionality. Yoono aggregates and centralizes your online profiles, including IM tools like Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk and AIM as well as a wide variety of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, and more. The app also includes real-time search capabilities powered by OneRiot.

The new YouTube integration allows you to see all of your YouTube updates (new videos, comments) in your stream; access your Channels (subscriptions, playlists, favorites, uploads); search YouTube videos; playlists and channels directly from Yoono; and share, favorite, comment on and even download videos directly from either the plugin or desktop application. And Yoono now allows you to favorite tweets and reply all from the application.

Via a crowdsourced translation project, Yoono now has versions in Spanish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish and Polish in addition to English and French. Yoono says that 22 additional languages are actively being worked on by the community.

Yoono, which has seen 4.5 million downloads, has also launched an alpha version of Yoono for Google Chrome, and is expecting the beta version of the browser plugin to hit the Chrome extensions gallery very soon. Given the popularity of Yoono on Firefox (the plugin is the most downloaded social networking add-on for Firefox), the extension should be popular among Chrome users. Yoono says that the next step is entering the mobile market with iPhone, iPad and Android apps in the works. And the startup plans to add more services to its hub, including Google Buzz, Foursquare, and Yammer.

Siguler Guff & Company, a US-based private equity firm with over $8.5 billion of assets under management, is investing $250 million in a high-tech hub outside Moscow that is often referred to as Russia’s ‘answer to Silicon Valley’, according to various reports.

Siguler Guff, owner of a subsidiary called Russia Partners, has made the investment public right after a visit to innovation center Skolkovo.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently invited a group of US venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to visit the high-tech hub, which is located in Moscow’s woody suburbs, in an effort to convince them of his plans to spur economic modernization and reduce its dependence on oil and gas by giving birth to a local ‘Silicon Valley’.

Siguler Guff will be pumping a quarter billion dollars in digital infrastructure and IT services for Skolkovo.

The private equity firm this becomes the first foreign investor in Skolkovo, but according to Russian business newspaper Vedomosti, there are currently talks with a number of companies in the United States, Asia and Europe – some names that are dropped include Cisco and Nokia.

Thanks for the heads up, Yakov.

(Images are sketches only, more are available here)

SimilarWeb, which will henceforth be known as SimilarGroup, has raised more funding, bringing the total of capital injected into the company to $1.1 million.

The fresh funding is considered to be the company’s Series A round and will be used to expand its line of products, based on the core technology we previously wrote about:

The backbone of SimilarWeb’s technology is based on multiphase analysis, which in plain English means that there are several engines running in the background, analyzing websites based on different mechanics, metrics and workflows. These include: user browsing trends, user ratings, tag analysis, ecosphere analysis, semantic breakdowns, and automated background research.

The company claims to have mapped millions of sites, and adding tens of thousands daily. This means that it will always suggest other sites, regardless of whether the site the user is currently on is a popular one, or one much further down the tail.

The change of the company’s name to SimilarGroup is meant to package all three web plays it now operates: SimilarSites.com, which the company claims to have millions of unique monthly users, SimilarWeb.com, a Firefox add-on, and TopSite.com, a search engine that’s still in beta.

Investors in the new round include Docor, Naftali Investments, Dr. Yossi Vardi, Omer Kaplan & Liron Rose (founders of AfterDownload.com), and a number of private investors.

It looks like Mark Zuckerberg would not have got Facebook going if he’d started it at a British University. The founder of a UK site integrated with Facebook and Twitter allowing students to flirt has been fined £300 for bringing his university into disrepute. FitFinder only started last month but rapidly expanded to universities across the country.

But founder Rich Martell, 21, a final-year computer sciences student at University College London, has been forced to take the site down. UCL said it had been contacted by a number of other universities unhappy about FitFinder. It’s fined Martell £300 under UCL’s “Disciplinary Code of Bringing the College into Disrepute” and told him that failure to pay the fine would put his degree at risk.

About a week ago, word started getting out that Facebook is beta testing a new “killer app” called Facebook Questions. For beta testers, the Questions feature appears in the left-hand column just below Events and Photos. It lets you ask and answer questions to and from your extended circle of friends.

A few days ago, Facebook opened up the private beta further and is now taking applications for anyone who wants to enter the beta. Facebook is taking its Questions product very seriously. “Help us build the future of Facebook,” reads the title of the page.

It puts the Questions product on par with Photos and Events.

As a beta tester, your job will be to ask great questions and provide great answers about your favorite topics. Economics? Skydiving? Relationships? Mexican Restaurants? It’s up to you. You’ll be the first person outside of Facebook to use this product. Your expert writing will be seen by tens of millions of people — including job recruiters. And we’ll bring our best beta testers out to California to tour Facebook headquarters and meet the team.

All you have to do to become a beta tester is submit three sample questions, such as

• What are the main differences between Google Chrome and Internet Explorer?
• What are women looking for in a relationship?
• What methods has BP tried to clean up the oil spill?

In one fell swoop, Facebook is about to take on Yahoo Answers, Google (via recently acquired Aardvark), LinkedIn (notice the reference to job recruiters?), and Quora.  Q&A sites drive massive pageviews. It is an area Facebook can no longer ignore.  People already use Facebook informally to ask questions across their social network from time to time.  It is a type of status update, if you think about it.  The Questions feature will bucket all of these together, spread them across your friends and their friends, and make them searchable.

The advantage Facebook could have in the Q&A space is that to the extent that you find answers from your extended social network, questions can become the start of deeper conversations and spur new relationships. But breaking it out as a separate feature raises some new questions. Will every major type of status update now become its own feature on Facebook (like Photo and Event updates do)? And, if so, what’s next?