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Tiny Speck Gives Birth To Glitch, A New Flash-Based Massively Multiplayer Game

2010-02-09T10:28:31+00:00

Last July, we reported that the new company by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield had received a name, and was looking to hire. Tonight, Tiny Speck’s first project has revealed itself to the world: Glitch.

So what is it? As we suspected, it’s an online game in the vein of Game Neverending, the gaming project that eventually became Flickr (weird, I know). It’s a Flash-based massively multiplayer game that revolves around solving puzzles. While the game itself will be free, there will be some level of in-game purchases. Or as it’s described on the site:

This is not something you’ve seen before. Glitch is a neverending feast of imagination, a celebration of creativity, a labor of love, and a monument to play.

Or, in English:

Glitch is a massively-multiplayer game, playable in the browser and built in the spirit of the web. It is currently in development and will launch late in 2010. Private alpha is beginning shortly and a public beta period will begin this summer.

We’re told that the alpha testing will begin in the next week or so. And the there’s an interesting way Tiny Speck is thinking about doing it. “We’re going to try something we made up called ’strobe testing’ where we open the world up to testers for, say, 24 hours during a given week, then wipe it and start again. Some of the tests will be cumulative (so everyone invited to the last round will be in) and some will be fresh batches of people. Since most people who sign up to test give us some basic background info, we can do one strobe with all women, one strobe with all people older than 35, one with all hardcore gamers, one with maximal network density (via facebook connect), etc., and see how different groups of people react and what patterns of play emerge …,” Butterfield tells us.

CNET has more about the genesis of the project, and we’ll be meeting with Butterfield tomorrow for more details. For now, be sure to watch the trippy teaser video on the site.

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Back to the Future: How Apple is Becoming More Like a Carrier Every Day

2010-02-09T10:28:31+00:00

Editor’s note: Is Apple going too far with its restrictions on developers? Alistair Goodman thinks so and explains why in this guest post. He is the CEO of 1020 Placecast, a location-based mobile advertising startup.

Apple’s recent behavior bears an increasing resemblance to carriers with respect to the walled garden they are creating around the iPhone. Restricting applications, restricting the use of location on the device, blocking Flash, and now potentially taking advertising in house—these moves are taken from the carrier’s playbook with the hope of locking out meaningful competition. Ironically, Apple may very well become the barrier to open innovation in mobile in much the same way as carriers have been before the iPhone came along.

What is clear from the announcement to developers last week about plans to deny some apps that deliver location-based advertising is that Apple intends to control the flow of marketing dollars on the iPhone. Less clear are their plans for sharing the wealth with the ecosystem—but if you look closely at acquisitions like Placebase, key hires and patent filings, what emerges is a potentially more ominous view of a company that can only compete in the direct advertising business head-to-head with Google by seizing control of location-based advertising.

Location is now widely understood to be the key to successful mobile advertising because where a consumer is in the physical world and at what the time they are there is such a strong predictor of consumer behavior and intent. “If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store,” says Apple. While they have yet to entirely exclude developers and ad networks from the equation, their broader strategy around location-based programs certainly has the potential to do just that.

Consider the following:

Apple’s acquisition of Placebase was not just about replacing Google Maps (with their Pushpin product). Placebase also is an aggregator of location-based content like neighborhood boundaries, census data and business listings, just like Navteq. These are the initial building blocks of a platform that indicates points-of-interest to a consumer when they are on their iPhone in a specific location. (Apple, like Google, has not yet cracked the problem of “location intelligence” – but this is just a starting point… more on that later in this piece)
Apple’s $275 million acquisition and staffing up at Quattro is a clear signal that they are ramping up mobile advertising sales to go head-to-head with Google. In Europe, for example, Apple has just hired former Microsoft sales manager Theo Theodorou to lead their sales effort, and Todd Tran, previously a senior executive at WPP’s Group M, to be general manager. Integrating Quattro into Apple gives it the ability to target audiences and deliver mobile ads, and provide the analytics to media buyers about the effectiveness of their programs.
Apple has filed (and widely publicized) patent applications in location-based marketing which are clearly designed to stake a claim in the space. Several patents are particularly interesting indicators of their strategic intent. This one, Location-Based Services, is like Google Goggles, which enables visual search based on a picture, and covers a host of location-based use cases such as understanding the proximity of businesses to enable the ability to trigger messages via “…information corresponding to one or more relevant businesses in a vicinity of the determined current geographic location.” A second one covers proximity-based ads, and a third is quite specific, “Graphical User Interface with Location-Specific Interface Elements,” covers the ability to monetize mobile messaging by enabling consumers to make purchases based on promoted items nearby. (Note to both Apple and Google beginning to stake out their ground in the future patent war: you will likely need this patent and others as well which were actually issued years ago.)

So what is missing from Apple’s strategy? Location intelligence —meaning the ability to return content (and advertising) on a consumer’s iPhone that is always correct, and always relevant for where they are and when they are there. As others have noted, just because a phone has a GPS on it that can locate a user does not mean that what is returned to them is meaningful. Location intelligence is the problem of returning relevant information based on place and time. It is actually pretty complex—this is something that both Apple and Google are only discovering as they begin distributing their apps to millions of consumers. And doing it at scale—meaning always returning customized content and advertising to millions of consumers in real time—is an extraordinary challenge because it requires managing location data and content at a level of accuracy that today’s online search algorithms are just beginning to grasp.

Apple’s continued march down the path of the walled garden will become harder and harder as Google’s open Android ecosystem grows and the mobile ecosystem as a whole moves towards the more open Internet-like model. Meanwhile carriers will continue to use SMS to deliver location-based marketing across any open smartphone device or any feature phone. If Apple thinks the carriers are going to lie-down and settle for nothing from a new revenue stream in location-based advertising, they should think long and hard about the implications of this choice. Because as much as they are acting like the new carriers, they don’t actually own any wireless bandwidth or cell towers to carry all that data going to and from their phones.

Photo credit: Flickr/Paul Englefield.

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Foursquare Signing Mainstream Partnership Deals Left And Right

2010-02-09T07:00:38+00:00

Foursquare continues to sign interesting deals with major players in a wide range of fields. Following the service’s Bravo deal a couple weeks ago, they’ve reached a deal with restaurant rating guide Zagat, according to The New York Times. And AdAge has some details about deals with even more partners, including HBO, Warner Brothers, and the History Channel.

The service has been on a roll lately. They’re now seeing over a million check-ins a week, with that rate doubling in the last month alone. And these new deals can only help them as they bring the type of mainstream appeal that it took services like Twitter so long to find.

While Zagat is an obvious partner thanks to its restaurante recommendations, the entertainment partnership appeal may not be immediately apparent. But as you can see on the Foursquare page for the movie Valentine’s Day, those promoting the movie have added 50 “Romantic Tips” around the cities that the movie takes place in, New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston. Any Foursquare user that checks-in at one of these places will unlock a special badge for the movie.

The new HBO show, How To Make It In America, meanwhile, has four special badges that you can unlock: Culture, Living, Cocktails, and Nightlife. Each of these is obtained by visiting venues from the show.

And the Zagat deal is interesting in that it goes beyond simply offering food and restaurant recommendations. The service plans to have a weekly web video series entitled “Meet The Mayor” in which they interview the Foursquare “mayor” of a restaurant in their guide.

Another deal that Foursquare recently signed was with Harvard.

These types of deals are crucial to Foursquare not only because they point to an eventual money-making opportunity, but also because they give the service a way to fend off attacks from Yelp (which just launched a check-in feature on its own iPhone app), and soon Facebook. Meanwhile, these deals give brands a fun way to interact with the public. It’s advertising, but it’s interactive.

Now Foursquare just has to solve that douchebag problem…

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The Value Of Online Buzz For The Top 20 Brands

2010-02-09T07:00:38+00:00

Nowadays, buzz around brands on the news, blogs, tweets and other social media that spreads through product launches, PR campaigns, earnings reports are as valuable as traditional ad campaigns. But buzz and social dialogue on the web is tough to quantify. General Sentiment has released a report that calculates the dollar value of the buzz, content, and conversation taking place online. General Sentiment’s technology evaluates the volume of mentions and sentiment value regarding a brand, company or person. The algorithm combines this data with website traffic and online news readership figures to determine the purchase-equivalent dollar value of the brand exposure across more than 30 million sources by gauging sentiment, frequency, and exposure of news mentions and social dialogue.

Google topped the rankings, with value of its “buzz” itemized at $669.6 million. Google’s social media reach costs $402 million, with its Twitter reach alone valued at $22.8 million. On the other hand, Apple came in fourth with total buzz reaching $293.2 million; social media buzz valued at $223.7 million; and Twitter reach valued at $5.6 million.

Here’s the list of the top 20 brands according the the value of their “Buzz”. Numbers are measured in thousands. The report is embedded below.

	Company	News Media	Social Media	Twitter	Total
1	Google	$244,593	$402,279	$22,756	$669,629
2	Microsoft	$184,473	$452,006	$12,252	$648,732
3	Sony	$80,574	$207,907	$5,825	$294,308
4	Apple	$63,947	$223,657	$5,632	$293,237
5	Yahoo	$50,324	$236,087	$5,354	$291,766
6	Intel	$93,665	$189,880	$2,139	$285,685
7	Ford	$145,369	$39,082	$1,453	$185,905
8	IBM	$62,683	$85,957	$1,740	$150,381
9	Citigroup	$105,614	$24,961	$749	$131,326
10	HP	$46,249	$67,222	$2,423	$115,896
11	eBay	$50,179	$56,889	$4,672	$115,740
12	Oracle	$43,413	$70,838	$1,435	$115,686
13	McDonalds	$80,579	$32,842	$1,840	$115,263
14	Disney	$67,166	$35,811	$4,411	$107,390
15	Nokia	$28,560	$71,843	$2,369	$102,772
16	GE	$75,452	$24,536	$885	$100,864
17	Dell	$34,491	$43,990	$1,553	$80,035
18	American Express	$56,576	$19,803	$648	$77,028
19	Cisco	$41,579	$25,273	$735	$67,588
20	Blackberry	$22,706	$41,678	$2,038	$66,422

brand –

Foursquare Signs a Deal With Zagat

2010-02-09T06:17:02+00:00

Foursquare, the hip social network whose software is on the phones of many young urbanites, is branching out.

The Long Tail Of Video Sites Capture Half Of All Viewing Minutes

2010-02-09T07:00:38+00:00

YouTube might be streaming more than 13 billion videos a month, or nearly 40 percent of total individual streams, but when you measure by time spent YouTube only accounted for 26 percent of all viewing minutes on the Web last year. It is not surprising that it commands a smaller share of time spent watching videos than number of streams watched, since most YouTube videos are so short. But what is surprising is how fragmented the Web video landscape remains once you go out past the top 25 sites.

According to comScore’s 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, more than half of all time spent watching videos on the Web (52 percent) last year was on Long Tail video sites beyond the top 25. What you see is a real barbell distribution, with Youtube on one end and the Long Tail sites on the other. Total video views more than doubled between December, 2008 and December, 2009, from 14 billion to 33 billion streams. So there is hope yet for niche video producers.

The Nos. 2 through 25 sites account for the remaining 22 percent of video minutes. This group includes No. 2 video site Hulu, which just hit 1 billion monthly video streams in December, and fast-rising Netflix (no. 19). Hulu’s 1 billion streams accounted for 5.8 billion minutes of viewing time, up 140 percent from a year before.

For more from comScore’s report, see my earlier post on Ten Biggest Advertising Publishers On The Web or download the entire report here.

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blueKiwi Rides the Freemium Wave

2010-02-09T07:00:38+00:00

With the continued success of Twitter and other social networking tools, any criticism (or praise) of products and companies is becoming increasingly public. Finding a way to manage these external communications in the internal decision-making process is an ongoing challenge for many businesses. Today, in an effort to help marketers and community managers better deal with such outside correspondence, blueKiwi, an Europas shortlist finalist, has announced the introduction of a free version of its Social Business Platform aimed at integrating outside conversations into daily internal communications to improve the decision making process.

Instead of community managers simply engaging with outside audiences via social networking tools, blueKiwi pulls outside conversations into internal discussions in order to leverage the thoughts and ideas of its user base, much like Salesforce aims to do with Chatter or Bantam Live. It is social CRM. Bluekiwi combines a slew of web 2.0 capabilities: such as collaboration, document sharing, blogging, event posting, and polling, into a single, unified solution. The use of social analytics tools ensures that the most pertinent conversations reach the eyes of the community managers.

The blueKiwi dashboard allows the community manager to integrate outside feeds—be they RSS feeds, Twitter, or Facebook—in order to stay on top of external chatter. The “Notebook” shows anything and everything in the blueKiwi community which involves the user. Any chatter which involves the user is threaded in a Facebook status-esque interface, making it simple for users to stay up-to-date on conversations in which they are directly involved.

To ensure the product is being utilized most efficiently, the product has an automated personal assistant, Alice, programmed to make recommendations to community managers in order to keep them on top of important tasks. If part of an online community seems to be slacking in a certain department, Alice will make recommendations to try and increase efficiency. The homepage of blueKiwi also gives suggestions based on analytics to further this goal.

The free version of blueKiwi supports one external community, which can range from customer forums, to channel programs, to developer groups—basically anything where the majority of the users are outside the internal network—but allows unlimited internal groups and external members. Within the community, admins can vary the access privileges of individual members. Internal and External members can see everything which goes on in these groups, or admins can restrict access to only internal members. As conversations continue to grow, admins can change access privileges as well.

blueKiwi was founded in 2006 by Carlos Diaz and Christophe Routhieau. They have raised a total of $12.3 million in funding from Sofinnova Partners and Dassault Systemes.

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StreetView added to Norway and Finland; many other updates elsewhere

2010-02-09T07:40:33+00:00

Google has just pushed out a ton of new imagery in StreetView, including:

Norway: All new
Finland: All new
Canada: More added, primarily in Saskatchewan and Alberta, possibly more in Quebec and Ontario.
Mexico: Various locations
USA: Alaska

It's quite likely that other imagery has been added as well, but we haven't discovered it yet.

A couple of highlights from the imagery so far:

Helsinki Cathedral, Finland

The Grieg Hall, Bergen, Norway

If you find any other areas that have new StreetView imagery in this update, please leave a comment and let us know.

Nod to 'Munden' at Google Earth Hacks for being the first to discover the new imagery.

Video: “Parisian Oops” Mocks Google’s Super Bowl Commercial

2010-02-09T07:00:38+00:00

It actually took longer than I would have expected for someone to come up with a good mocking of Google’s “Parisian Love” commercial that played during the Super Bowl yesterday. But today brings us just that.

The video comes compliments of the Upright Citizens Brigade Beta Team “The Brig.” They’ve named their video “Parisian Oops” and have given it the tagline, “Romance, Consequences, Awkwardness. Search on.”

Update: We’ll embed the video in a bit when it goes up on YouTube (their embed is throwing fits). For now, watch it here. Funny stuff.

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The Ten Biggest Advertising Publishers On The Web

2010-02-09T07:00:38+00:00

Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions.

Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads)

Here’s the full ranking:

Top Ten Publishers Of Display Ads

Yahoo! Sites: 521 billion
Fox Interactive Media (MySPace): 368 billion
Facebook: 330 billion
Microsoft Sites: 218 billion
AOL: 192 billion
Google Sites: 7o billion
eBay: 36 billion
Glam Media: 25 billion
Amazon Sites: 22 billion
United Online: 20 billion

Obviously, the biggest sites with the most visitors serve up the most display ads. This year, Facebook doubled in size to the point where it is well past MySpace and catching up to Yahoo in audience size. It is already bigger than Yahoo in terms of pageviews.

Facebook has more advertising inventory than it knows what to do with, although not all of it is desirable. But Facebook is now selling all of its display ad inventory itself after it renegotiated its ad deal with Microsoft.

Biggest doesn’t mean most profitable. Facebook might be serving up more ads than almost anyone else, but they are still selling at very low ad rates because they perform poorly for the most part. If Facebook can figure out a way to make the ads on its site become more relevant and useful, it has a lot of room to boost its ad rates.

You can download the entire comScore report at this 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Reviewlink.

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Posterous Importer

2010-02-09T04:42:22+00:00

Posterous is a blogging system that launched with an interesting twist — everything happens via email from signup to posting. Since the launch of our post by email features in addition to things like email comment replies and blog subscriptions we’ve been receiving more inquiries from people wanting to graduate from Posterous to a full blog with the features, flexibility, and reliability of WordPress.com.

It was actually easier than we thought: Posterous has a very nice API for reading from and writing to their service.

After logging into your WordPress.com Dashboard, click on Tools -> Import.

Click on the Posterous importer.

Type in your Posterous host name, user name, and password and click the Submit button.

The importer will validate your user name and password. After starting the importer, you can sit back and watch the status counters tick away.

You can also safely leave the importer page or close your browser. The importer will keep running.

Currently, the importer can import posts, tags, comments, and image attachments.

We will send you an email when the import finishes. Easy peasy!

There are a few things still on our roadmap, like more auto-post functionality, but don’t worry it’ll all be ready soon.

Google Launches Phone Support For The Nexus One, Lowers ETF By $200

2010-02-09T03:11:58+00:00

Since the launch of the Nexus One, early adopters have likely had one question lurking in the back of their minds: who to take the phone to if it broke. You see, when the phone was first launched, Google was directing people to either T-Mobile or HTC depending on the problem, which could lead to an endless circle of hold times and few results. Today, Google has just rolled out its solution: it’s launching its own phone support line specifically for Nexus One customers. Call 888-48-NEXUS (63987) and within a few minutes, you’ll be talking to a real live Google support tech (the line is open from 7AM to 10PM EST).

This is, of course, a fairly major departure from Google’s standard protocol of making it incredibly difficult to reach anyone for phone support for most of its products. It doesn’t come as a total surprise though — last week there were reports of a Google job listing for “Phone Support Program Manager, Android/Nexus One” to be based out of its headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

The news was first reported at TMO News, and we’ve gotten a response from a Google spokesperson explaining the company’s logic behind the support number:

By design, we focused initially on providing the best possible customer support through our on-line channel, and our experience in the four weeks since the Nexus One launch enabled us to significantly enhance that on-line support offering. We have been able to address a large majority of customers’ inquiries successfully through on-line support, in combination with phone support from our partners, HTC and T-Mobile. That said, our approach with our new consumer channel is to learn fast and continue to improve, and we have, therefore, also been developing our capabilities to provide a number from Google, 888-48-NEXUS (63987) for live phone support for the Nexus One. Live phone support from Google, combined with an optimized on-line support experience, enables a superior Nexus One customer experience.

In other words, Google probably would have liked to have gotten away with online-only support, but it quickly became clear that wasn’t going to cut it.

In other news, Google has also announced that the ETF charge for the phone is down to $150 from $350. But that’s still on top of T-Mobile’s $200 fee. The drop may have well been spurred by the ETF inquiry recently launched by the FCC.

Still No Native Comments, But Tumblr Toys With Photo Replies

2010-02-09T03:11:58+00:00

Probably the most controversial thing about the blogging service Tumblr is that it doesn’t have a built-in way to comment on posts. You sort of can do it now if you reblog an item and add your own note (which then shows up under the original post), but it’s not the same. And while they still haven’t added comments, tonight they’ve temporarily turned on a new feature: Photo Replies.

While it doesn’t appear the feature is working just yet, Tumblr notes that they’re going to turn it on for the next 48 hours as an experiment. When it is on, you will presumably see a new photo icon in your dashboard which will allow you to upload a picture in response to a Tumblr post. So yes, basically it’s a photo comment.

To enable it on any post, simply check the box that reads “Let people photo reply” in the Tumblr backend for your blog.

While Tumblr itself doesn’t have a native commenting system, many users choose a third-party commenting option. The Tumblr Staff Blog, for example, uses Disqus.

[top photo via]

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The Richter Scales Debut Animated Video Of “I’ve Got Mail And I’ve Got It Made”

2010-02-09T03:11:58+00:00

We’re big fans of The Richter Scales, the musical group that have brought us Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Here Comes Another Bubble, and gut-busting songs at the 2008 Crunchies and most recently the parody of Silicon Valley at the 2009 Crunchies a few weeks ago. The group is releasing an animated video of its song ‘I’ve Got Mail and I’ve Got it Made,’ which was one of the two songs The Richters sang at the first Crunchies in 2007. As you may remember, it’s about what happens to a guy when he follows the instructions in all the spam email he receives. Enjoy!

Facebook, Tesla And Solyndra Dominate SecondMarket Transactions In January

2010-02-09T03:11:58+00:00

Last month SecondMarket published data on private company stock sales that they helped complete in 2009. They’ve now released last month’s data as well.

A total of a little more than $13 million in sales occurred, with the average transaction size of around $2 million. There continues to be very strong demand for consumer products and services startups (which includes companies like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, etc.). But the sellers are spread out more evenly across all categories, particularly consumer, IT, Healthcare, energy and cleantech.

36% of the transactions were sales of Facebook stock, and we’ve heard from independent sources that sales are being completed for as high as $40 per share (or a $17.6 billion valuation). That’s a substantial price increase from less than a month ago. Tesla took 29% of the transactions, and sales of Solyndra stock were 28% of the total. Gridpoint rounded the group out with 7% of the total.

The complete report is below, and you can download the pdf here.

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Pretend that Google Maps has Cycle Routes

2010-02-09T07:01:31+00:00

Transparent Map ComparisonsImagine a world where Google Maps had cycle routes!This map mashup allows you to compare Google Maps with OpenStreetMaps. It is possible to select from Google Street maps, satellite imagery, topographic maps and Yahoo Maps as a base layer and then view various OpenStreetMap layers superimposed on top.The map includes a transparency slider so it is possible to adjust the

SPONSOR MESSAGE: Drive more traffic with Bing

2010-02-09T03:44:49+00:00

Want to improve traffic to your site? It’s easy! The BingTM Toolbox provides everything you need to get started to optimize your site for increased traffic and an improved user experience. The all-inclusive set of tools makes it easy to get started. Learn more in the Bing Toolbox.

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Two Property Sites Relaunch

2010-02-09T02:02:43+00:00

US portal apartmentfinder.com and UK search engine accommodation2let.co.uk have both been relaunched over the past week.

apartmentfinder.com, which launched an iPhone application in December, says the release of version 5.0 has had a huge impact on leads.

“[O]ur e-mail lead conversion rate more than doubled, and we experienced 235 percent improvement in advertiser URL click-through conversion and a 49 percent increase in lead generation, creating more high-quality leads for our customers during an especially challenging time in the business cycle,” said apartmentfinder.com president Marcia Bollinger.

Key features of the apartmentfinder.com redesign include the addition of nearby apartments to listing details pages and a cleaner layout to drive visitors’ focus directly to listings. apartmentfinder.com says it has also ramped up its investment in print by adding 21 new chains in 65 markets for over 1,150 new locations.

In the UK, rentals search engine accommodation2let.co.uk has released its second version after a complete rebuild. The website says ease of use was the main goal from both the user and agent perspective.

accommodation2let.co.uk is now offering agents unlimited property uploads on a pay per genuine lead basis or monthly fee model. The search engine is part of the UK Property Lets Limited Group, which includes offices2let.com and studentpropertylets.co.uk.

zillow.com Turns Four

2010-02-09T02:02:43+00:00

Yesterday marked the fourth birthday of zillow.com, the real estate marketplace that now says it has data on 96,013,458 US homes and sees over 8 million unique visitors per month.

The past year has been big at zillow.com. The website recently reported a 57 percent increase in unique visitors over 2008 totals. In fact, chief operating officer Spencer Rascoff was so optimistic about zillow.com’s audience figures he told businessinsider.com that the website was “closing fast” on realtor.com, and that he hopes to be able to confirm zillow.com’s place at the top of the US market “within short order”. That was before the November Hitwise results were published, showing zillow.com had slipped back to third place.

As we pointed out this time last year, traffic does not necessarily equal revenue. Rascoff told businessinsider.com that zillow.com’s revenue is up 65 percent year-on-year, but didn’t name an exact figure. When asked whether profitability was in reach in 2010, Rascoff said, “I think that’s within reach. I think it depends on how the stars align.”

Rascoff has also revealed he is hoping for an initial public offering for zillow.com in 2011. However, one industry commentator described the IPO talk as a “stalking horse” for an acquisition.

With the possibilities of an IPO, an acquisition, and the title of top spot amongst US real estate websites all on the table, the only thing we can safely predict for zillow.com is that their next 12 months will be anything but quiet.

Ask.com Puts Its NASCAR Sponsorship Back In Garage

2010-02-09T03:44:49+00:00

Ask.com has ended its NASCAR sponsorship after one year. That’s according to The Sporting News, which reports that the sponsorship was actually fairly successful for Ask.com. Jared Cluff, Ask’s senior VP of marketing, says the deal produced some measurable results in 2009: “We saw double-digit increases in usage among NASCAR fans. With the fan cards that our [...]

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Report: Google To Announce A More Social Gmail

2010-02-09T03:44:49+00:00

There are several reports today that Google is set to announce a new social feature inside Gmail, allowing users to see (and add to) a stream of status updates from friends and connections. While Twitter is all abuzz over the news, this is something that Yahoo Mail has offered its 300 million users since last [...]

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Winter Weather Storm Watch Gets Streamlined On New Accuweather Site

2010-02-09T03:11:58+00:00

With the East Coast and Midwest awaiting a monster snowstorm, popular weather forecasting site Accuweather, is rolling out a timely relaunch of its site. The site, which provides up-to-date local information on weather in the U.S., is launching a beta version of the site that includes a complete redesign and a few extra user-friendly features. The new version of the Accuweather is still in private beta but will be publicly launched to the public on February 15.

On the content side, the general theme for the new version of the site is “weather for your life,” with specialized and interactive weather forecasts for Weather and Health, Weather and Travel, Weather and Home and Garden, Weather and Outdoor Activity in your area. The health-related weather interest sections include Arthritis Pain Forecasts, Asthma Forecasts, Common Cold Forecasts, Flu Forecasts, Pollen Level Forecasts and more

In terms of everyday weather forecasts, the new site features hour-by-hour, 15-day forecasts, and next month forecasts. The site also has upgraded its multimedia offerings, with detailed videos fro meteorologists and a wide range of weather maps – including radar, satellite, severe weather, forecast maps, and more. The site will be adding 600 weather-related videos every day, with local video forecasts for over 100 U.S. cities.

The layout and design of the site itself is a lot cleaner and less cluttered. The older version of the site was a virtual mash-up of information, content and advertisements. The new version has larger numbers and text, is more spaced, and is all-together more friendly on the eyes. And I’m sure Accuweather is getting better feedback from advertisers on the layout, as the streamlined version is more complimentary to serving ads on the site.

In comparison to competitor and rival Weather.com, Accuweather’s site wins the contest in my opinion, with a nice balance of content and easy-to-use web features. According to Compete, Accuweather site saw 8 million unique visitors in December whereas Weather.com saw 33.5 million unique visitors in December. While Weather.com received more traffic, Accuweather’s forecasts are syndicated to over 175,000 media sites. And with the new redesign, Accuweather could become a more attractive destination for weather forecasts.

Apple Surveying iPhone Developers’ Happiness With The App Store

2010-02-08T22:14:37+00:00

Last year, there was no shortage of developers who were complaining about Apple’s App Store. The situation got so heated that no less than Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, got personally involved with a number of developers having issues. Since then, the complaints seem to have died down quite a bit, but Apple is still on the case.

The company has started sending out a survey to iPhone developers asking about their experience with the program. While the long survey covers a range of things, the majority of the questions are about the application review process, and developers’ overall happiness with the program.

Examples of questions asked include:

Please rate your level of satisfaction with each of the following aspects of the Application submission process (using iTunes Connect).

Please rate your level of satisfaction with each of the following aspects of the application review process (using iTunes Connect).

Please rate your level of satisfaction with the length of time it takes to get updates available on the App Store.

Apple asks you to answer with: “Very dissatisfied,” “Somewhat dissatisfied,” “Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied,” “Somewhat satisfied,” “Very satisfied,” or “Don’t know.”

They also ask, “What one thing could Apple do to make the iPhone Developer Program better?” and give you a text box to write anything you want. A few months ago they certainly would have gotten some interesting responses there.

Sometime around the first of the year, Apple made some changes to the App Store approval process that drastically sped things up for many developers. In fact, a number of developers noted that approval process wait time went from two weeks (or worse) to just a couple of days in some situations. There have also been reports of improved communication from the app review team.

It seems likely that Apple staffed up its app review team and also provided them with better training and instructions over the past few months. Still, if the App Store continues to grow at its blistering pace, it’s hard to imagine that things won’t get bogged down again. So during this time of relative peace, it’s smart for Apple to survey its developers to fine tune the system.

CrunchBase Information

Apple

App Store

iPhone

Information provided by CrunchBase

New Theme: Steira

2010-02-09T00:13:45+00:00

Full of character yet minimal, we bring you the wonderful “Steira,” bursting at the seams with detail and functionality.

Steira in all its glory!

Available Soon at a Barnes & Noble Near You: The Nook

2010-02-09T02:00:48+00:00

Want to do more than look at a Nook? Starting Wednesday, Barnes & Noble will finally have its e-book reader available for sale in its bookstores.