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You’ve heard the term “betting the company,” but have you ever known anyone who has actually done that? I mean literally. As in, they’re playing poker with shares of the company on the line. Because that’s exactly what Yammer founder David Sacks and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis are doing at The World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.

When Calacanis first tweeted about it, I thought it was a joke. He wrote, “Got a sick @WSOP Main Event Prop bet with @DavidSacks: 10,000 shares of Mahalo vs. 10,000 shares of @Yammer–whoever lasts longer #poker“. But I emailed Sacks to confirm, and sure enough, the bet is on. “Of course. Sucker born every minute,” Sacks wrote to us. He continued, “To be clear, these are personally-owned shares we’re betting.”

Of course, you have to assume they’re not betting the entire company. I asked Sacks exactly what percentage of Yammer 10,000 shares constitues. Not surprisingly, he declined to answer that. But you’d have to think it’s a relatively small share or the Boards of the two companies might have something to say about the deal. Can you imagine if Calacanis took a controlling stake of Yammer because he lasted longer in the World Series of Poker? That’d likely be worth a lot more than the grand prize if he won the entire tournament.

Obviously, this isn’t an official bet for WSOP, it’s a side bet the two men are making. This is a much more interesting way to trade shares than SecondMarket.

Some may recall that Yammer had a bad spell of downtime while Sacks was playing in the tournament last year. Calacanis has played before as well. Yes, it’s a little ridiculous.

Zohi Wiki, which originally launched in 2006, is getting an upgrade today, with additional collaboration features, access controls and more.

Zoho has added workspaces within Wiki to allow teams to have their own groups within organization wikis. Each workspace has its own administrative and customization options and can serve as a separate portal. Zoho has also added more in-depth access controls to wikis, which allows administrators to set permissions for Workspaces, multiple groups, individuals, domains, public, and for users within an organization. Admins can also assign separate permissions for edit, view, create and delete functions.

We know that Verizon is launching Droid X on the 23 – at least when it comes to press access – but it looks like they’re announcing to the rest of the world as well, right now, via a Flash-rich teaser site that allows you to pop in your email for more info.

Read more…

Mobile advertising company Apptera has raised another $10 million in VC funding, we’ve learned via an SEC filing. The startup’s previous financing round dates back to November 2008, also totaled about $10 million and came from investors such as Alloy Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Walden International.

The company has yet to publicly disclose the new capital injection, but these types of follow-on rounds typically come from existing backers, with maybe one or two additional investors.

Founded in 2001 in Silicon Valley, Apptera operates what it refers to as a ‘Voice & Visual Mobile Advertising Network’, enabling the company to dynamically serve voice ads to callers and enhancing those calls with interactive visual engagements. Callers can opt in to voice ads and have special offers such as coupons and promotional codes, videos, even maps and directions sent direct to their phones, straight away or at a time scheduled in the future.

Publishers in its mobile advertising marketplace include movie ticketing services (such as Movietickets.com, Moviefone and Fandango), free-411 services (e.g. Jingle and AT&T), social voice services and blogs, and widgets on social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

At the help of Apptera we find Henry Vogel, the former eBay exec that was previously chief revenue officer of Quigo Technologies, the ad network company that was acquired by AOL in December of 2007. The rest of the members of the management team have a ton of experience from a variety of positions at companies like Yahoo, Overture, eBay, Meraki, Spot Runner, ESPN, Sony Pictures and iPass under their belts.

For any e-retailer, product search is the foundation of a commerce platform. Many times, a consumer goes directly to the search box to find the object they want. And the ability to easily find products on a retailers site affects the consumer interaction and experience with their site and produces higher conversion rates. Google began powering search platforms for retailers last year, with the launch of Commerce Search, a hosted enterprise search product to power online retail stores and e-commerce websites. Today, Google is launching the next iteration of Commerce Search which offers retailers a more powerful and less-expensive version of the product.

The first version of Google Commerce offered a variety of features that are optimized for retail and product search, such as parametric search, sorting of results, spell checker, stemming, and synonym suggestion. The newest version builds on these features, by offering a more in-depth search experience for users and merchants. As Commerce product manager Nitin Mangtani tells me, version 2.0 focuses on enhancing navigation and the user experience.

The Merchandising Dashboard: A new merchandising dashboard gives merchants more options within their search portals. Retailers can now rank products, so that certain products rank higher in search results than others. Additionally, retailers can feature promotions and sales within search portals within a given timeline. And retailers can add customized filters or ‘facets’ to search, and Google’s technology will present the appropriate results accordingly. All of these features can be implemented through a rules wizard that requires no custom code so a marketer or merchandiser could easily implement changes.

Search Improvements: Google is adding realtime query autocompletion, which is a necessary element of any retail site. And Google will customize auto suggestions for each site, depending on the product indexed. Google has also improved speed of search results in Commerce search, and claim that search results are returned to shoppers in less than a second.

Price Drop: Google is dropping the price of Commerce search to a pricing model that starts at $25,000 per year. Previously, Commerce search pricing started at $50,000 per year. Pricing is based on total volume of queries and items indexed.

Google Commerce search also integrates Google products like Google Analytics and Google Product Search. Using Commerce, retailers can measure clicks, conversion rates, number of transactions, average order value and other data via Google Analytics. And e-commerce vendors can provide a single feed of products and catelogue items that will power Commerce and indexing of their products on Google Product Search.

Retailers using Commerce search include Birkenstock, Smart Furniture and Coveroo. Google declined to release the exact number of retailers who are using the Commerce search product, but did say that Google is powered enterprise search for 30,000 sites currently. Google also offers a general hosted search product that is used by organizations that want to add customized Google search functionality to their websites.

I’m curious if Google dropped their price because of a lack of retailers adopting the search product. As the retail industry steadily climbs out of the hole caused by the recession, I still think $25K is a lot to pay for search for smaller retailers. But it’s good to see that Google is dropping the price to allow for more retailers to use the product. And Google is pushing its product as an easily deployable, user-friendly way to integrate powerful search into a retail site. Google faces competition from Omniture, IBM, Endeca and others.

The tablet era has just begun, but Forrester Research is already predicting tablet sales in the U.S. will overtake netbook sales by 2012, and desktop sales by 2015. At the Untethered conference today in New York City, Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps laid out her projections comparing tablet sales to netbooks, laptops, and desktops. She expects 3.5 million tablets (including the iPad and other tablets) to be sold this year, growing to 20.4 million in 2015. Meanwhile, she expects desktop sales to drop from 18.7 million units in 2010 to 15.7 million units in 2015.

As a percentage of overall PC sales, tablets will grow from 6 percent this year to 18 percent in 2012 (when netbooks are estimated to account for 17 percent of sales. The next year, in 2013, tablet sales are projected to outstrip desktop unit sales, 21 percent to 20 percent. By 2015, tablets will make up 23 percent of PC sales in the U.S., while desktops will be 18 percent and netbooks will be 17 percent. Only laptops will sell more in the U.S., with a 42 percent market share.

The big question is how much of the tablet market can Apple capture? It has already sold 2 million iPads, and could easily blow past Forrester’s 3.5 million estimate for this year all by itself. It is not stretch for it to get to 20 million by 2015 either. So is there room in this market for other tablets, or will Forrester need to increase its estimates?

These projections are for unit sales, not total revenues, but still the expectation that there will be more tablets sold in five years than any other type of computer is stunning. By 2015, the cumulative number of people using tablets will be 59 million, according to Rotman, which will be larger than the installed base of netbooks (but still just a fraction of the installed base of desktops and laptops). On a global basis, IDC also sees tablets and e-readers driving more growth than netbooks. Looks like it is time to stick a fork in netbooks.

What’s this, a European startup thinking global? TVLinks, an Internet TV guide and video search engine, exits stealth mode today, and says it wants to battle the big US search engines and TV listings sites.

It currently houses a database of over 30,000 movies, and 2,000 TV shows consisting of 80,000 episodes. In total it indexes more than 2,000 content provider websites, some of which it has formal partnerships with – US-centric Amazon VOD, Netflix and Google – while others are, presumably, being scraped or spidered via open APIs. The result is that a lot of content that shows up in search results is likely to be housed on their respective video sharing sites with or without the permission of copyright holders and/or geo-blocked.

From Microsoft Bob to Edubuntu there have been a number of attempts at making computers of various sorts easier and more useful for young people. Another participant in this space is Kiddix, “a complete operating system and software environment for children, built from the ground up with your family’s needs and safety in mind.” Kiddix is built upon Linux, and aims to present things in a very “kid friendly” way. Through the end of June, Kiddix is running a “Pay What You Want” promotion, allowing you to pay any amount to buy their OS.

Read more…

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.

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 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.

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.