Category: Tech news

Yesterday MasterCard announced a definitive plan to open up its credit cards payments platform to developers to build innovative online and mobile apps. Of course, this has been the territory that PayPal has basked in, thanks to a much hyped launch of its API, PayPal X. PayPal senior director of PayPal X, Damon Hougland was quick to defend its place in the arena, saying that since its API was released last Fall, “thousands of developers have signed up, hundreds of apps have been built, and millions of dollars have transacted over our platform.”

While this is at the forefront of innovation for MasterCard, PayPal says that the developers who are building off of its platform are ahead of the curve. The company cites Bump, a technology to swap information between smartphones by tapping them together, which is used in PayPal’s iPhone app, allowing people to “bump” iPhones to transfer money (the app was downloaded more than one million times in the first three weeks it was out).

PayPal, which cites Facebook, Salesforce and IBM as users of its API and technology, says that next month it will offer developers the ability to collect credit card payments from within their PayPal X based application.

So is MasterCard a real threat to PayPal? Of course, MasterCard has not been known as the most developer friendly in the past, whereas PayPal has spent the past year reaching out to the developer community, even holding a conference completely for developers. But it also may come down to the revenue share numbers. PayPal said last year that it charges developers a $0.50 cents flat free per transaction or 0.75 percent of transaction depending on user cases. MasterCard hasn’t yet released numbers on revenue share (the platform won’t be released until later this year).

When it comes to billing headaches, there are few industries that can rival the cable companies: from the dizzying array of channel packages to actually figuring out which services you can get at your house, ordering cable or satellite service is often a major pain (and you inevitably walk away from the experience feeling like you’re somehow getting ripped off). Now BillShrink is launching a new feature that looks to make these headaches a thing of the past, putting its cost-cutting engine against a huge database of television service options to help you pick out the best one.

Using the new feature is simple: enter your address and how much you currently pay for your television service. Next, tell BillShrink what categories of channels you’re interested in; options include entertainment, lifestyle, movies, and sports. If there are some channels you absolutely have to have, you can list those too (you can even enter the name of your favorite TV shows, and BillShrink will figure out what channel they air on).

Finally, you tell BillShrink how many TVs you will be hooking up (you can designate options like HDTV and whether or not you want that TV to have a DVR). The whole process takes around two minutes.

Once you’re done inputting your information, BillShrink will look through the TV services available in your area (including both cable and satellite) and tell you what the optimum plan is for you. The site makes it easily to quickly look up which channels are included in each suggested package, and BillShrink shows you how much each option in the plan costs, both during your initial signup period (when the cable companies give you a steep discount) and once your rates jump up to the “normal” (read: gouging) prices. Once you find a plan you like, BillShink gives you a phone number to call and tells you what plan to ask for.

This is a great addition to the BillShrink lineup, but it’s still missing a few features. For one, the site doesn’t currently show the prices for bundle deals that cover multiple services (e.g. Television service + Internet). Fortunately it’s not hard to add Internet service to the packages BillShrink suggests — just ask for it when you call the cable/satellite company — and CEO Peter Pham says that bundles are on the way. He also says that the site will soon offer a way to sign up for these cable/satellite packages online, without having to call the companies.

This is BillShrink’s sixth vertical, and Pham says more are on the way — its other cost-cutting tools include  support for savings accounts, gas stations, credit cards, and phone bills. The site also recently scored a deal with Walmart, which features Billshrink on its in-store cell phone kiosks.

Traveling around the world, learning, networking, sharing – that’s what GeeksOnAPlane (GOAP), a field trip of sorts (which takes place a couple of times a year), is mainly about. This time, the tour is leading a group of 30+ geeks (mainly from the US) to no less than five tech hot spots in Asia: Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo. I am joining the trip as an embedded blogger, exploring the current trends in Asia’s web and mobile world, and the implications of the Asian tech revolution for the industry in the US and elsewhere.

The GOAP already got a first crash course on China’s Internet landscape from a number of local VCs, entrepreneurs and tech journalists we met in Shanghai, the first leg of the tour (which ended yesterday). This part of the tour included Silicon Valley-based investor Dave McClure (who brought GOAP to life) pitching the StartupVisa movement to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the Shanghai Expo 2010 (see picture above), an “East meets West” blogger meetup, witnessing the first ever “Ignite” show in Shanghai, taking part in a Mobile Monday event, and networking at a Startup2Startup Dinner/Fast Pitch event in downtown Shanghai.

One of the main takeaways is that the web and mobile market in Asia is not only huge already, but that it’s poised to become even bigger in the future. The spectacular growth is fueled by a large reservoir of entrepreneurs, a huge potential customer base and both local and international investors looking for the next big thing to come out of Asia.

Everybody the GOAP met in Shanghai was bullish about Asia’s online future – for a good reason. Take some recent web usage statistics, for example. Asia already boasts the most Internet users in the world (764 million out of a global web population of 1.8 billion people at the end of last year). And while North America has an Internet penetration of around 76%, many Asian countries are still largely offline: according to some sources, the Internet penetration for Asia as a whole stands at a mere 20%.

There is little doubt that China in particular will continue to play the biggest role in the region. The country has 400 million (and counting) Internet users and a whopping 770 million cell phone subscribers. In other words, China not only boasts the world’s largest Internet population (the US is second with 248 million web users), but it’s the world’s biggest mobile nation, too – by far (there are 585 million handsets used in India, and 285 million in the US).

And even in China, there’s still a lot of room for growth. Take the mobile market as one example. According to some pundits the GOAP met in Shanghai, many Chinese people with low income (especially those living in rural areas) skipped buying laptops in recent years but access the web through their cell phones instead. Yet, “just” 200 million people access the web through their cell phones, and just 20 million Chinese users are on 3G currently (that number is said to balloon to 150 million next year).

But enough with crunching numbers. Check out this (excellent yet slightly dated) presentation from Shanghai-based consultancy and incubator Web2Asia for an overview on China’s Internet and how it differs from the rest of the world:

Make sure to check out the rethink: Shanghai homepage for substantial information about what’s currently happening in China’s tech scene. I’ll be summarizing what the GOAP learn in Beijing (the next stop of the tour) and the other cities over the next few days here on TechCrunch.

For information in real-time, follow the adventures of the GOAP via the #goap hash tag (the official Twitter account is here). GOAP pictures are being uploaded regularly over on Flickr.

Photo credit: Kris Krüg, Static Photography

Hello, Chair, the company that develops a social app recommendation engine within an iPhone app, has raised $850,000 in funding from Harrison Metal Capital, Mitch Kapor, Chris Sacca, and Wilson Sonsini. The startup previously raised money from Y Combinator and David Parker.

Hello, Chair’s Appsaurus competes with the Apple Genius feature, serving as recommendation service for mobile apps on the iPhone. Here’s how it works. After launching the application, you’ll be presented with a handful of semi-popular apps from the App Store and asked to pick the one you like best. Once you pick your favorite, it shows you another round of apps. After four rounds or so, the app begins to learn your preferences, and you keep ranking more apps to help fine-tune its recommendations. In essence, it’s trying to build a profile based on your entire library of apps, not just one. If you’re presented with an application that you’ve never heard of, you can hit an arrow to read its summary and see screenshots.

The startup is also releasing a new version of the app that now recommends iPad apps, helping users discover which apps they want. The App Store has not yet switched on the Genius feature for iPad apps, so this functionality is definitely compelling. The new version also includes Lists, a comprehensive library feature for organizing your apps. Appsaurus will also serve you recommendations based on any of your lists.

One of our pain points with the App was that it didn’t have a syncing functionality to import your current apps, making you manually have to input your apps. The new version of the app includes Cloud Sync, which allows users to sync their phone’s apps from the Appsaurus Sync desktop app directly to their “Installed” list in Appsaurus for instantly relevant recommendations.

Hello Chair has considerable experience in developing mobile app recommendations. In 2008, they launched Appalanche, which shared some similarities with Appsaurus in that it was meant to help surface interesting apps, but was a web app rather than a native download. The precursor to Appalanche is an ad voting engine called Adpinion.

The BBC’s video on demand service, iPlayer is introducing social networking features which should further boost the uptale of Twitter and Facebook in the UK – as if they needed any boosting. The new iPlayer Beta is set to go live officially at the end of June.

Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger will be linked to a user’s “BBC ID” which they get when they register on BBC.co.uk. Users will be able to share what they’re watching over social networks (queue lots of “Watching Britains Got Talent” updates) while Windows Messenger will show in real-time how many minutes a user is in to a program on iPlayer and allow them to sync viewing with friends and chat about the show in realtime. The features will also work for BBC radio stations.

TechCrunch Nordic – Copenhagen – 26th May 2010
TechCrunch Europe is hosting its 3rd TechCrunch Nordic event – joining the Seedcamp startup programme on their European tour in Copenhagen.

Below you’ll find our live stream from the event which kicks off at 2.30pm Copenhagen time.

A hundred startups lined-up the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt. Here’s just a small taste of some of the interesting companies that over 1,700 attendees were able to see:

6rounds

6rounds, which we wrote about in a previous post can be best described as a snazzy one-on-one video chat product.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, 6rounds announced a new API for developers of game, entertainment and collaboration-based apps. With the API, developers can easily integrate all the rich and interactive functionality of 6rounds, including gifting, video effects, and the ability to add multi-user functionality to single player games and videos.

AppFirst

AppFirst provides real-time visibility into the performance of individual applications within application stacks. The idea behind AppFirst’s SaaS-based performance management is to provide visibility into the performance and operational characteristics of applications regardless of language, application type or location (cloud, physical or virtual servers).

With this type of visibility organizations can flag changes before they become problems and have a negative impact on internal users, or external customers.

AppFirst is NYC-based with backing by FirstMark Capital and First Round Capital.

RankAbove

Seven months after we wrote about its closed beta, RankAbove is pushing its automated SEO analysis product, Drive, into open beta.

Drive is intended for sites with a minimum of 1000 pages, up to several million. It performs everything from keyword research and on-page analysis, to link building and acquisition.

For the open beta, RankAbove made some product improvements such as new backlink analysis tool, daily updated competitive analysis, opportunities to find organic relevant backlinks and a new UI. If you’re at Disrupt, stop by their booth for a free site analysis.

sProphet

sProphet (Sports Prophet) lets fans share sports knowledge by predicting outcomes of real sporting events. For example, they can predict which baseball batter will have the longest batting streak in the MLB this week.

Users play with virtual money to challenge their friends and arrange group prediction tournaments.

sProphet is offered through a destination site, via a Facebook application and soon through a widget which will be offered to partners such as sports sites and portals.

We were fortunate enough to witness a lot of fascinating startups strut their stuff here at TechCrunch Disrupt, not just on the main stage but also in the Startup Alley and beyond.

But of course the event is and remains a competition, so the experts have been working hard to select those startups with the most potential to be genuinely disruptive, and vote them into the second round of the pitching contest. Just ten of the original twenty startups have been invited back to round two.

The final few startups will be announced tomorrow, and they’ll be back on stage for the final round of demo and rapid-fire Q&A with our experts.

Appbistro

Appbistro is an application marketplace for Facebook pages. At Appbistro, page administrators can quickly find applications that they can easily plug into their pages and quickly increase the engagement and reach of their pages. The applications within the marketplace are built by known and vetted Facebook developers, and feature applications for Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and more.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

Betterment

Betterment is the replacement for your savings account. It’s a smart investment that’s easy to use, and you have access to your money at any time. You invest in our two portfolios—a diverse basket of stocks and a portfolio of ultra-safe bonds—in a blend of your choosing. There’s no minimum balance, no transaction fees, and no investing experience required. So you earn more from your savings with fewer hassles.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

Compass Labs

Compass Labs is a social e-commerce company, which increases the effectiveness of social networks for both users and advertisers. Users obtain timely, highly relevant information, and advertisers to precisely reach users at the right moment. Compass Labs’s solutions are effective in extracting precise meaning from social media communication, and leveraging that for timely and precise ads targeting, and for enabling content/user discovery.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

LiveIntent

LiveIntent‘s mission is to help you create meaningful connections on social media. It helps answer the question: “Who do I follow?”. For publishers, having a LiveIntent window on your site is opening the door to let in engaged and repeat users to your site, significantly increasing pageviews, ad impressions, unique visitors, and revenue.

For advertisers, it’s an enabling technology that builds stronger and longer lasting relationships between brands and consumers in social media.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

MOVIECLIPS

MOVIECLIPS.com is a premium online video destination offering audiences the largest and most diverse collection of movie scenes. It allows fans to find, watch and share more than 12,000 movie clips. Each clip is tagged with up to 1,000 pieces of data (dialogue, actor, director, action, mood, etc) to make the most searchable collection of movie scenes on the web. Users can also compete in movie trivia games and create hilarious movie mashups.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

Plantly

Plantly is a risk-aware investment tool. They use a lot of advanced tools to show users exactly what will happen to their investments based on various scenarios. “We want you to touch this to get a feel for what will happen to your money,” is the way they put it.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

Publish2

Publish2 is an ambitious new project trying to find a fix for the Associated Press nightmare that newspapers are forced to deal with because of a lack of any viable alternative. It is the easiest way to share and distribute news for print and web publishing. Publish2 News Exchange enables newspapers to create a comprehensive, customized newswire for print, combining content sharing networks with the highest quality free and paid news sources. Publish2 Link Newswire captures the collective editorial judgment of journalists, based on what they read every day, to create engaging news aggregation features for multichannel distribution.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

Soluto

Soluto brings an end to the frustrations PC users encounter, with transparency, honesty, killer technology, and your help. Its software combines advanced technology with collective wisdom, to detect PC users’ frustrations, reveal their cause, learn which actions really eliminate them and improve user experience. Soluto is mapping the PCGenome, a knowledge base of frustrations and solutions built automatically through the usage of Soluto software, for the benefit of all PC users.

Here’s our review + CrunchBase profile + video.

UJAM

UJAM (CrunchBase) is a cloud-based platform that empowers everybody to easily create new music or enhance their existing musical talent and share it with friends. Like Jason wrote: “it can turn your humming, whistling, kazoo-playing or not-so-in-tune vocals into something people might actually want to listen to. And it’s really, really cool.”

Here’s our review (there are links to other coverage from around the Web in there).
Bonus: a video of Chris Sacca singing.

WeReward

WeReward is a mobile incentive platform that rewards consumers for actions they take in the real world. Consumers earn points for photo-verified location check ins or performing tasks. Each point is worth a penny, consumers can cash out directly from their mobile device. Businesses utilize WeReward’s self service platform to incent customer purchases and drive loyalty. The platform lets them see who their customers are, what their experience was and how often they purchase.

Here’s our review + video.

It’s been no secret that LinkedIn has been steadily trying to make its platform more social and interactive with users. LinkedIn integrated with Twitter last fall, allowing users to Tweet from the platform and pull Tweets into the network with a #in hashtag. In fact, over one million users have tied their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. And this year the network added the ability to “follow” companies, taking a page from both Twitter and Facebook. Today, LinkedIn is furthering its Twitter integration by allowing members to easily find and keep track of their LinkedIn connections on Twitter and more, essentially becoming a full-fledged client.

Once you’ve installed the Tweets application, the “Overview” tab on your homepage will allows you to see everyone you currently follow on Twitter, view their Twitter feed, and Tweet from your own account. A new feature, Connections to Follow, has been added to recommend new people for you to follow, based on your LinkedIn connections. You can easily see all of your LinkedIn connections who have added Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn profiles and allows you to see who you are and aren’t following on Twitter.

You can also see the Twitter information for any of your connections, follow or unfollow them, and even see a sample of their last tweet by hovering over their Twitter ID. And now you can save your LinkedIn connections as a dynamic Twitter list. When you choose to save your connections as a Twitter list, LinkedIn will create a private Twitter list for all of your LinkedIn connections that have added Twitter accounts. LinkedIn will keep this list up-to-date, adding and removing Twitter accounts to the list daily based on your LinkedIn connections.

Clearly LinkedIn has added much more functionality to its Twitter platform, which seems to be popular. Of course while one million out of nearly 70 million users is still only a portion of its userbase, it still represents a large portion of members who have downloaded the app. LinkedIn is making a strong push to encourage users to share content on the site, and becoming a full-fledged Twitter client will only increase sharing on the platform. The obvious next step would be to integrate with Facebook in some way, but we probably shouldn’t hold our breath.

Interesting. Despite all the brouhaha about Facebook seizing control over the entire Web and putting an end to privacy as we know it, publishers are – still – fast adopting the “like” button and other social plug-ins.

Latest to apparently add Facebook “like” buttons is Yahoo, which as we’ve written before seems to be happily outsourcing all that social nonsense to Zuckerberg & co lately.

To see the integration in action, go to any MLB team on the Yahoo Sports website (e.g. the Cleveland Indians).

On the right, right below the Teamtracker frame, you can “like” the team, after which your status will be updated with a link back to the page you’re on. Also shown is the number of people who have clicked the button before you.

As far as we can tell, the deep integration of Facebook Connect buttons was publicly announced but the addition of like buttons to Yahoo Sports was not, or at least not yet.

That quote in the title is completely from Plantly, not from me. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, the company won the audience award to get on the stage and give their pitch.

Title aside, Planty is a risk-aware investment tool. They use a lot of advanced tools to show users exactly what will happen to their investments based on various scenarios. “We want you to touch this to get a feel for what will happen to your money,” is the way they put it.

They are not a broker, this is just a tool. If you have a broker, you can put their fees in the tool to add those into the system as well. The whole idea is to put a plan in place — it’s not about rushing to invest.

The business model mainly resides in the follow-up services. For example, you can use other tools to see how your investment is actually doing versus how you thought it would do. They also charge $10 for access to the system — but that’s just a one-time fee.

But again, the key to all of this is the design and simplicity of the service. Plantly wants to make what’s going to happen to your money obvious. They don’t care if you invest or not — they just hope that by showing you this info, that if you do choose to invest, you’ll use some of their more advanced (paid) tools.

———-Q&A With The Judges—————-

Jason Calacanis, CEO & Founder, Mahalo
Brad Garlinghouse, President, Consumer Applications Group, AOL
Tolman Geffs, Co-President, JEGI
Megumi Ikeda, SVP, Peacock Equity Fund
Shervin Pishevar, Founder & Chairman, SGN

Q: This is great. It’s like the good things about Mint. You expressed it well.

Q: It was a very nice product. Very easy to use. Who is your competition in this market.

A: We’re learning about more and more of them — like Betterment, which launched here yesterday. But we’re not brokers, they are. We’re about our interface design.

Q: Is this only ETFs?

A: Yes, only ETF.

Q: How it’s different from something like MorningStar.

A: The information is different and we’re heavily involved in the plan for the future. The information in advance is important. MorningStar has too much information. This is about just the right amount of information. Smart decisions are the key.

Q: I think these are the two best product guys we’ve seen all day. At the end of the day it’s clear what your proposition is. I love the product.

Q: You guys didn’t earn your way onto stage — but you were the best presentation of the whole group. You guys were elegant with how you think about the space. Where are you guys from?

A: Originally from Israel. Now in Brooklyn.

Q: What’s your qualification in the financial space.

A: No, it’s all from my MBA and working at Proctor & Gamble.

Q: This is about protecting people and protecting their money.

——– The Monetization Plan —————–

They’re still in beta so they’re figuring out the monetization strategy. They’re thinking about some 40% of investors in the longtail. $10 is cheap enough for people to get into this, they think. Again, the idea isn’t to push people to invest, but if they do, give them more tools.

“Affiliating through need is the wrong thing for our customers,”

—————– Second Q & A —————

Q: How will you acquire customers?

A: Again, around 40% of people first go to friends and family. And being here is a good start.

Q: What wealth level are you talking about?

A: $5,000 for a single investment. For the middle class small investors.

Q: So you should go to Walmart or get people through 401k.

Q: Protecting wealth is a great message, you could do all sorts of things — make videos.

Q: Plantly in some ways reminds me of a social game. Maybe as you’re managing it, a plant grows. The leaves represent your financial life.

A: Thank you, we are having discussions about game mechanics.

Q: You guys are brand-able too. Make videos!

This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt, AOL cofounder Steve Case sat down for an interview with our own Michael Arrington to discuss an array of topics, including his current venture Revolution, his motivation to stay involved in entrepreneurship, and even a story about AOL’s offer to buy Yahoo for $2 million back in 1995 (they turned it down, but Case said Jerry Yang and David Filo probably would have agreed to $3 million).

One of the more interesting topics to come up during the conversation was whether or not Case thought the Time Warner merger was a good idea. Case hasn’t been directly involved with AOL for years — he left his role as CEO when AOL merged with Time Warner in 2000, and left the board of directors in 2005 — but he didn’t shy away from speaking about the company. Case said it was obviously clear in hindsight that the deal has been a disappointment. But he said that it’s hard to say whether he would have done anything differently with the merger, as AOL was at its peak at the time (Case and AOL shareholders did quite well). He also said that he thought the merger might have gone better had he been more involved with the transition.

“It’s hard to say given the dynamics of the time particularly as Mike mentioned, the market cap of the company — it was really the peak of the Internet boom, and it felt like a good time to trade what we had for what we would get. So I can’t really say I regret that. I’d like to think but it’s probably arrogant and presumptuous that if I had played a more active role on driving integration maybe it would have been better. But part of the deal was that I stepped aside as CEO and was Chairman without any operating responsibility.”

Here are my notes from the talk:
Arrington: What keeps you going?
Case: I love building stuff. For 25 years I was focused on AOL. Now instead of playing a direct operating role working with entrepreneurs, I’m funding around a dozen companies, and they’re all interesting to me.

Arrington: You’re not doing it for the money, so it’s almost a hobby for you?
Case: Yes. Our mission is to invest in people/ideas that can change the world, sometimes through philanthropy, sometimes entrepreneurship.

Arrington: Last night we were talking about early days of AOL. You were talking about the number of users AOL had..

Case: We started in 85, went public in 1992, when we had 184k users. 7-8 years later it was like 25 million customers. And the nice thing was that each of those customers were paying 25 dollars a months. We like to say, those were the good old days.

Arrington: Let’s talk about Revolution. What exactly is it?
Case: The genesis really was… I stepped down as CEO as AOL almost a decade ago and said, “so what do I do next?”. Revolution is a holding company. It has three parts. One part is Revolution Capital (30-40 million bets each). As for the fat vs lean startups, I think both are right. Our sweet spot tends to be fatter companies. Companies with higher barrier to entry. We also have Revolution Ventures which are smaller ventures. LivingSocial, ClearSpring, TweetUp.

Case: Zipcar has 7000 cars. About 200 cities. It’s crazy to own a car in cities. Relying exclusively on taxis doesn’t work either. Instead of going to Hertz you can just walk a block away.

Arrington: Of all the companies you’re invested in, which do you think about most?

Case: LivingSocial is really on a tear. There were companies doing this 10 years ago, and it was mostly right but they didn’t have the right context. I think social media is changing that.

Case: About three years ago a company wanted to do Facebook apps… LivingSocial. They tried figuring out how to monetize that, and about a year ago they pivoted. Went from being a thin to a fat ‘speedup’. 30 employees to 130 in the last six months. I think ‘grouponing’ will be an important segment. Probably a few big companies built.

Arrington: Is the idea at all relevent to Amazon?

Case: I don’t think it’s irrelevant. I think they probably look at it as more an opportunity than a threat. These companies are really picking a deal or a market. Interesting business or interesting business model. Merchants like that it generates new customers and zero risk.

Arrington: What do you think about Tim Armstrong as CEO for AOL?
Case: So far so good. But I’ve been out of AOL for ten years. Everybody gives AOL up for dead because they have so many challenges over the last decade. But if you put the past aside it still has 100 million users in the US, 250 worldwide users. That’s a pretty good hand to be dealt with. Seems like he’s doing that.

Arrington: Yesterday on stage John Doerr talked about the ‘third wave’. What do you think, does that ring true?

Case: I think what we’ve shifted to is that having spent a lot of timing building core infrastructure and platforms, now you can shift to different things. Embedding these things in other areas. ZipCar for example, it’s enabled by the internet and couldn’t make it without the internet. These companies don’t have to be on the Internet itself, but how you build on it in other industries. Healthcare will probably be a big thing here.

Q&A:
Q: Since the start of your career what do you consider your greatest failure/mistake?
A: I’ve had a lot. Obviously merger has been a disappointment. It was smart, but was disappointed with how it played out. But AOL was like many other companies. There were a lot of ups and downs to it. perseverance was key. Today… isn’t focused on enough. There’s too much tendency on moving to next big things. Too many companies built to flip vs built to last.

Q: Looking back on merger what would you have done differently?
A: Hard to say. Felt like the peak, so I can’t really say I regret that. I’d like to think but it’s probably a bit presumptuous. That if I played a more active role it maybe would have gone better… but part of the deal was that I would have less of a direct role.

Arrington: If you hadn’t merged where would the company be today?
Case: We recognized broadband would be big, we recognized having ownership of cable would be important. But the key lesson, which Edison said, is that vision without execution is hallucination.

Now more than ever, marketers are using tools to monitor and keep track of the conversation about brands taking place on sites like Facebook and Twitter. While many of these tools monitor sentiment around Tweets and updates including a brand’s name, Keenkong takes a slightly different approach. Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt today, Keenkong seg­ments the con­ver­sa­tions taking place on Facebook and Twitter by topic (what), by inten­tions (why), by net­work size and more.

So when you click on a seg­ment in Keenkong, you can see the related con­ver­sa­tions according to a particular topic. Keenkong’s linguistic processing engine extracts live why people are talking, what are they talking about, who they are and it segments messages accordingly. Keenkong automat­i­cally cap­tures, parses and groups incom­ing mes­sages from Twit­ter (includ­ing lists and searches) and Face­book. For example, Keenkong will segment Tweets about users choosing between your brand and another into one category. Or Keenkong will create a segment of Tweets and updates where a brand should thank the consumer for highlighting a positive aspect of a brand.

It essentially allows marketers to break down conversations by actionable insights vs. sentiment or even topic. And the categorization of these actions makes it fairly simple to marketers to prioritize actions. Plus, Keenkong provides users with analytics around engagement and interaction with a brand on Twitter and Facebook.

The social media monitoring space is crowded-with a number of worthy competitors in the space, including Scout Labs, PeopleBrowsr, ViralHeat and more. But, Keenkong’s application seems to provide a unique approach to the monitoring space, so many brand marketers are sure to find the application useful.

Q&A

TG: What’s different about what you are doing?
KK: We are breaking down the conversation into actionable segments.
TG: Still not hearing how it’s different than other dashboards out there.
BG: What is your marketing, sales strategy?
KK: We want this to be a open model, want marketing, PR agencies to use it.
SP: I invested in Klout, which would be interesting to integrate in this. You should also integrate with Rapportive.
JC: Great job with the presentation.Sentiment is hard to track. This has existed and has been expensive and wrong. The CRM piece is what people want. You should make this free and let everyone have it. Maybe you can be the person who cracks sentiment.
KK: We built this fore custom metrics and segments.
JC: It was good that you have visual stuff.

I’ll admit that I know nothing about fine art. It actually somewhat interests me as an idea, but I’m never going to go to a gallery. Basically, everything I do is now online. But finding fine art online seems hard. A quick Google search brings up sites that look to be the exact opposite of fine art. Art.sy wants to change that.

The new social site, started by Carter Cleveland, is “the place to discover and share original fine art online.” Okay, it’s easy to say that. But Art.sy’s approach is to make it easy to discover this art through searching. Their custom search engine allows you to find art by period/style, the portion of their career that the artist is in, or the regular stuff like size, color, and, of course, price.

They’ll also recommend new art to you based on preferences from your social graph. And there’s a Facebook application to leverage the largest social graph. Plus they believe the Art.sy domain will be key for sharing art on Twitter. They also hint that an iPad app is coming.

“Although art is best viewed in person, you can’t fall in love with it unless you’ve discovered it first,” they write on their site.

Obviously, this is a niche site, but fine art = money. And even if you’re not looking to buy, you can visit to learn more about artists or particular works of art. It’s culture online.

And once you’re ready to buy a piece of art, you can talk directly to the artist or gallery to negotiate a fair price. Or you can arrange a viewing if you’re not sure about the piece. And, of course, you can share your purchases on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

———-Q&A With The Judges—————-

Jason Calacanis, CEO & Founder, Mahalo
Brad Garlinghouse, President, Consumer Applications Group, AOL
Tolman Geffs, Co-President, JEGI
Megumi Ikeda, SVP, Peacock Equity Fund
Shervin Pishevar, Founder & Chairman, SGN

Q: How does this not exist already? And do the art galleries want to give it to you?

A: The key to this is deals with art houses. The competitors is Art Net — which is a great resource if you know the artist you’re looking for.

Q: Are the auction houses part of your system?

A: No, just the galleries.

Q: Will regular people be able to put art on there?

A: Not at first, because we want to make it about fine art only.

Q: There should be a feedback system — Q&A system in here.

Q: Is there a consumer demand in this? Isn’t inefficiency in this?

A: We got our initial funding from people who were frustrated by this.

Q: I didn’t think it was too original. I remember nextmonet.com — this is well done, but exclusive access to art isn’t huge.

A: You have to be more like Steve Jobs during the presentation. You had one, but the tech fucked it up. You missed the “wow.”

Everyone loves movie clips. But, unfortunately, they’re often hard to find online in one centralized place. There’s a simple reason for this: licensing. If someone could just solve that, they’d have a pretty killer website, right? That’s what Movieclips has. And now they’re trying to extend it with Movieclips Mashups.

The key to this (beyond a killer domain name, movieclips.com) is that they have partnerships with six major Hollywood studios to provide them with clips from films. How many clips? So far, over 12,000. Imagine if the studios could make some older clips relevant again? And what if users could do it themselves? That’s what this new Mashups products is trying to do.

Movieclips went to the studios, pitching them directly about the idea. Co-founders Zach James and Rich Raddon had two key selling points: “How do you make movies more social?” and “How do you make movies more relevant?”

The first question is nothing new (you make it easy to share the clips on the various social networks). But the second questions is interesting. For example, how do you take Top Gun – a movie which is 25 years old — and make it relevant to a 15-year-old? There’s a way — it’s a great movie — they just have to provide context with something relevant today. That’s where the mashup component of their service comes into play.

For example, on stage, they showed a bunch of clips from a bunch of movies to play out the Tiger Woods sex scandal — think: The Ladies Man.

You can also make e-cards of sorts for friends. Is someone sick? Just make them a mashup of a bunch of vomiting scenes from movies! What fun!

And it’s not just quantity. Movieclips also believes its product is superior to the others out there because they tag each of these clips with up to 1,000 pieces of metadata (dialogue, actors, moods, etc). This makes the clips very searchable — and they’ve had 30 part-time employees working on this, so it’s more reliable than machine-tagged data.

Last year at TechCrunch 50, AnyClip debuted with a similar idea. But there’s one key difference: they didn’t have the licensing agreements yet. They still don’t. Movieclips does, and that could make it a killer product.

Movieclips launched its main product (the clip search engine) in beta this past December and released an API in March.

———-Q&A With The Judges—————-

Jason Calacanis, CEO & Founder, Mahalo
Brad Garlinghouse, President, Consumer Applications Group, AOL
Tolman Geffs, Co-President, JEGI
Megumi Ikeda, SVP, Peacock Equity Fund
Shervin Pishevar, Founder & Chairman, SGN

Q: That was a perfect presentation.

Q: Yeah, the movie clip idea is difficult. But how do you make it unique?

A: The domain is important (movieclips.com). We can also syndicate our player out. We have 2 dozen portals we’re talking to right now. Yes, the clips we get aren’t only ours.

Q: What are the three revenue streams?

A: We’ll give one now — subscription revenue.

Q: It’s a pretty thing, but technically it’s not that difficult. This is won on distribution.

A: Yeah, when we launched we decided distribution was key. We need to make all these deals — like AOL.

Q: You had great video source material. But the clip is derivative. This isn’t anything that innovative. One excellent thing: you bought a great domain name. Two: you got the clips. How did you get those?

A: We were stealth and working on getting the deals before we did anything. So pre-launch we had 5 deals in place. AnyClips was the opposite. We do ad-rev split.

———- The Monetization Portion ————

It was really hard to get these deals. No one has ever done this before. We were able to give them both a piece of the ad revenue and analytics.

Our plan to make money:

1) We’ll have a subscription plan across our distribution. There’s a lot of upselling on our site too.

2) Advertising — You can get a good CPM on these.

3) Transaction — This isn’t our focus, but we did this anyway. In a few weeks time we’ll have a “buy” button. That’s an exclusive deal. It’s for businesses — if you want to use a clip in a demo, you can do it.

It’s all about our great tags. We have 30 people doing it. And we’ll crowd-source it too.

———– Second Q&A —————–

Q: You guys need to be more direct about the issues. Terrible presentation. I wouldn’t invest.

A: We’re working on a round right now.

Q: How much traffic do you need to hit?

A: 3 million uniques is what we want to hit. And I think we will.

Q: In the first presentation you killed it, but you were tired here. I think you should talk about micro-transactions too. This could be a huge app on Facebook. Think JibJab. An iPhone app too. I would also knock on Microsoft’s door everyday. Tell them they need to use your clips.