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Redesigning For A Reason: Towards Better Conversion Rates

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 05:07:20 -0700

Mint, an online personal finance site, has gotten a facelift. The new site sports a much cleaner design than the previous iteration, and appears to be focused on describing what Mint actually does rather than presenting pretty (but somewhat overwhelming) graphics. For now the improvements are mainly on the external portion of the site (for non-members), with the members’ portion switching to the new design in the next few weeks.

That normally isn’t big news, but what caught my attention is that Mint has been bucket testing various redesign formats with some users and is seeing conversion rates increase by 20% over the current site.

That equals “hundreds of thousands” of more registered users over the course of a year given their current growth rates, says CEO Aaron Patzer. When we last checked in with them, they had 350,000 registered users and were tracking $11 billion in assets. Those numbers are likely substantially higher now.

Most startups have very limited resources and are so busy building and maintaining core features that they can’t spend too much time doing user testing on various concepts. Sometimes it makes sense to just take a step back and think about usability, though. It can pay off in the end.

Since the site’s launch last year, it has added a number of new features including loan tracking and investment tracking. However, most of these functions haven’t been readily apparent to most users - something the new design is looking to remedy.

Mint allows users to keep track of their finances, presenting spending history with attractive graphs and typically requiring much less effort compared to programs like Quicken. Unfortunately, while the site serves its purpose well, it is currently unable to actually transfer any funds to pay bills - you’ll have to go to your bank’s website to do that.

As part of the update, Mint is also releasing a handful of new guides to personal finance, ranging from “reducing credit card debt” to the seemingly obvious “saving money while dining out”.

Mint, which has now raised $17 million in venture capital, was the overall winner of the TechCrunch40 event in 2007.

The new designs are below. In the first image the old is on left, new is on right.

CrunchBase Information

Mint

Information provided by CrunchBase

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CG’s Live at the Dell Business Unusual Press Conference

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:06:07 -0700

CG’s Brian Krepshaw is live at the Dell press conference in San Francisco. What will Dell reveal today? Perhaps a couple netbooks or ginormous workstations. Hop on over to CrunchGear and find out for yourself.

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Nesting: A PageFlakes For Moms

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:05:47 -0700

Back in 2005, Michael wrote that the user-configured AJAX homepage space was getting crazy crowded, with prominent competitors including Netvibes, PageFlakes, and iGoogle, along with a host of others. Each of these services offer an array of widgets that allow users to tailor their homepages to suit their tastes, but for the most part they do it exactly the same way and do little to differentiate themselves.

Nesting, a new startup that launched this week, is taking a shot in the crowded space by combining the traditional AJAX homepage with a basic social network. To further separate themselves from the rest of the pack, they’re going after one audience: moms.

The site sports a very soothing look that is well suited to its target demographic, with lots of pastels and rounded corners. The widgets themselves are also well designed, presenting an adequate amount of information without becoming overwhelming or cluttered. At launch, the available widgets include weather, news, and a photo-sharing “Memory Manager”, with a calendar on the way in the next month.

Beyond the widgets seen on other homepage services, the site also includes some basic social networking functionality, including support for Friends and Groups. Data from the social network can be drawn into the widgets - for example, your child’s soccer team could create a group, which could then automatically update your calendar wiget with game dates and information. For the time being calendars can only pull data from within Nesting, but the site plans to support importing from iCal and Google Calendar soon.

In terms of customization, Nesting can’t compete with the likes of PageFlakes and iGoogle - there simply aren’t very many widgets available. But many moms may not care if they can’t embed the latest Digg posts or sports scores, provided they have access to more personal content like their child’s soccer schedule. Nesting may fill this role well, but there is no shortage of sites geared towards mothers that it will have to compete with, including Maya’s Mom and CafeMom.

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CG’s John Biggs Signs a Big Boy Book Deal

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:05:36 -0700

Wow. I’m completely speechless right now. Our very own Editor-in-chief John Biggs has himself a real book deal. That’s not to say his previous foray with “Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age” was anything to scoff at, but Biggityboo’s (that’s what I like to call him) ” book was the object of an intense two-day auction involving six houses, including Collins and The Penguin Press.” Dial Press came out on top with an offer that’s said to be over $300,000. Watch out, folks, someone’s big time now.

So what’s Biggs going to be writing about? Read all about it at CrunchGear.

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Regator, The Social Blog Aggregator, Launches To The Public

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:06:04 -0700

Regator, the blog aggregator that acts like a mix between a standard RSS reader and Digg, has launched in public beta.

We initially covered Regator in July when the site launched in a limited private beta. At the time my biggest concern was the inability to add your own RSS feeds to the site, which restricted you to the approximately 3,000 blogs handpicked by Regator. CEO Scott Lockhart says that the site has been updated to allow users to upload their own feeds, but these won’t be visible to other users until they have been approved by Regator’s editors.

The site has also expanded on its sharing functionality to include Twitter and Facebook, with plans to introduce further integration with social networking sites in the future. There are a number of similar sites that combine news aggregation with social voting, including Socialmedian, which we covered last week.

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Delta Outfitting Entire Domestic Fleet With Aircell’s GoGo In-Flight Wi-Fi Service by End of 2009

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:06:39 -0700

It’s the dawning of a new age, folks. In-flight Wi-Fi is slowly rolling out across domestic airlines in the US and Delta is looking to capitalize on it by outfitting their entire domestic fleet of aircrafts with Aircell’s GoGo service.

American Airlines and Virgin America have been on-board for some time (though they have yet to launch the service) and this is pretty big news coming from an airline that’s been struggling lately. Having filed for bankruptcy on more than one occasion in recent years, Delta is positioning itself to get back on top of the domestic heap.

In April they announced a merger with Northwest Airlines that would make them the largest domestic carrier in the country and the addition of in-flight Wi-Fi makes them even more enticing for would be travelers.

The first half of 2009 will see 133 of Delta’s MD88/90 airplanes equipped with the service with another 200 Boeing 737, 757 and 767-300s to follow suit. Delta hopes to have more than 330 airplanes equipped to provide the Wi-Fi service by the end of 2009 making it the only major US airline to offer the service across its entire domestic fleet.

GoGo will cost Delta flyers $9.95 on flights of three hours or less, and $12.95 for flights that are longer than three hours.

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Apple Pulls Another Innocuous iPhone App

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 09:05:21 -0700

Another day, another capricious decision by Apple to pull a fairly innocuous application. This time it’s BoxOffice, a diabolical system for finding and displaying local movie times. Quoth the developers at Metasyntactic:

Apple pulled the app yesterday without giving my any notification that they were doing it, or what their justification was for removing it.

I’ve tried to contact them about the issue, but it’s been a complete dead end. If anyone has a useful contact number for apple, please let me know.

I’m in regular contact with all my data providers, and none of them have had an issue with my app. Indeed, the response was the exact opposite. They like my app and have even asked if i would do custom application work for them in the future. Furthermore, all the data i use is licensed by the owners as ‘free for non commercial use’. i.e. precisely what BoxOffice is.

So i’m stuck here not knowing what has happened, or what i can do about it. If any of you have any ideas, please let me know. You can respond here, but i’d actually appreciate a reply at cyrusn@stwing.upenn.edu since i probably won’t check back here that often.

We Know How Many Kindles Amazon Has Sold: 240,000

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:04:44 -0700

Ever since Amazon launched the Kindle last November, we’ve been wondering about just how successful it’s been. The electronic book initially sold out and supplies have been tight. The Kindle is such a small part of Amazon’s overall business that the company does not break out how many it’s sold. But we found out anyway: 240,000 Kindles have been shipped since November, according to a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the numbers.

Doing a little back of the envelope math, that brings total sales of the device so far to between $86 million and $96 million (the price of the device was reduced to $360 from $400 last May). Then add the amounts spent on digital books, newspapers, and blogs purchased to read on the device, and you get a business that has easily brought in above $100 million so far. (Each $25 worth of digital reading material purchased per Kindle, add $6 million in total revenues).

These numbers gel with what Wall Street analysts have been predicting. And if a new Kindle comes out targeted at the textbook/school market, sales could ramp up higher.

Scott Devitt, an analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., predicts that Amazon is on track to sell 500,000 to 750,000 more Kindles over the next four quarters (including this one). He estimates that Kindle owners will buy an additional $120 to $150 worth of books and other content for each device, bringing the total revenues over that time period to somewhere between $225 million and $355 million. Based on that, he values the Kindle as a $1 billion business for Amazon.

Back in May, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney was estimating that total sales of Kindle’s this year would only reach 189,000. That number may have already been surpassed (depending on how many of the 240,000 units Amazon sold before January). His estimate called for 467,000 units to be shipped next year, and 2.2 million in 2010, resulting in total revenues going from $60 million in 2008 to $741 million in 2010. It might be time for him to revise those numbers upward. (Below is his model from May):

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Apple Releases Push Notification Services Developer Kit, Background Apps FTW

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:04:42 -0700

I think it’s safe to say that iPhone OS 2.0 is far from perfect and anyone saying otherwise must be on Apple’s payroll. Other than the horrendous battery life (on the iP3G), what else do we all hate about the OS? The inability to run background apps! Sure, Apple’s argument against a Windows Mobile-like task manager makes perfect sense, but the ability to run background apps is something we’ve all grown accustomed to and it would be the ‘killer app’ as they say around these parts, right?
Read More

Oh, and is anyone’s white iP3G starting to crack?

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Google To Launch Venture Fund

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 23:04:21 -0700

The WSJ is reporting that Google is set to launch a venture fund to give it the option of investing in startups instead of just flat out buying them. The fund will be led by Google’s SVP Corporate Development David Drummond and Bill Maris, a long time business friend of Anne Wojcicki, Sergey Brin’s wife. Maris is a tech entrepreneur with a degree in neuroscience and worked with Wojcicki at a San Francisco-based for-profit company called Catalytic Health.

This hasn’t been confirmed by Google, and it’s clear they’ve been thinking about a fund off and on for years. From the article:

The move would make Google the latest technology giant to take on a more-formal role in seeding start-ups. Intel Corp. has had a large venture-capital arm for years, as have Motorola Inc., Comcast Corp. and many others. In the consumer-Internet area, Walt Disney Co.’s Steamboat Ventures has invested in a number of Web start-ups. So has Amazon.com Inc., which has funded a number of young companies without structuring a formal fund.

Their track records have been mixed. Corporate venture-capital arms have been hampered by challenges that traditional venture-capital businesses don’t face. Venture capitalists invest in private start-ups at an early stage, usually in hopes of a big payout if the company is sold or if its stock goes public.

Many start-ups fear that taking corporate money limits their options and comes with strings that could turn away other potential investors — such as a right to buy the company at a later date. Some funds with less competitive compensation have struggled to retain managers, and corporate venture funds often don’t allow senior employees to invest personal money in their funds, while other venture funds typically do.

This wouldn’t be the first time Google started a fund to invest in other companies. In June 2007 they launched Gadget Ventures, a pilot program that, in part, invests seed money in companies looking to develop for the gadgets platform. They have also previously invested through Indian VCs.

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Moondo Fuses Casual Gaming With Massively Multiplayer Games

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 21:48:04 -0700

One of the biggest draws for massively multiplayer online games (MMO’s) is the satisfaction that comes from earning in-game items and abilities. Unlike simple Flash games where your accomplishments vanish the moment you step away from your computer, MMO’s allow you to acquire virtual goods and work your way up a skill ladder, in the hopes of eventually becoming powerful enough to dominate over everyone else. Unfortunately, many people simply can’t spare the hundreds of hours a game like World of Warcraft takes to finally reach this leet status.

Today sees the launch of Moondo, a new gaming “world” that is trying to merge the best parts of MMOs and the casual games that litter the web. The Moondo world is comprised of a number of multiplayer minigames that feature 3D graphics that rival those seen on most MMOs. Each minigame is intended to require only about 15-20 minutes, though they include multiple levels that should keep gamers satisfied for hours at a time.

What differentiates Moondo from most other multiplayer minigames is the introduction of persistent goods and a leveling system. For example, a shield that a user might acquire during the course of a shooting game could later be used on the platform’s driving game. As gamers continue playing, they progressively acquire more goods and skills, and the platform’s matching system ensures that they are only pitted against players of comparable experience. At launch, there are two games available (an FPS and a racing game), but that number should grow quickly, as Moondo says that the platform is designed so that it can pump out a new game every 8 weeks.

Moondo’s biggest challenge lies in making the powerups and levels acquired by each gamer seem worthwhile. It’s one thing to be known as a powerful wizard or knight in a persistent world like World of Warcraft - everyone knows you’ve earned it. But when such advantages are carried over to smaller minigames, it might just make them unbalanced and less fun.

For the time being Moondo is only available as a standalone client on Windows, but the company plans to roll out browser support (so that it should be platform-agnostic) by October. The game is the first product from Funtactix, a Benchmark and JVP-funded company that has spent the last eighteen months developing the platform that powers Moondo. Another company that is introducing persistent accomplishments to casual gaming is CasualCafe which we covered here.

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Redlasso Shuts Down In Response To Fox/NBC Lawsuit

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:47:11 -0700

Redlasso, the video site that allows bloggers to post clips of television content, has shut down its beta in response to a recently filed lawsuit by Hulu-backers Fox and NBC.

In May, Fox, CBS and NBC issued Cease and Desist notices to Redlasso for copyright violation, which the company largely ignored. In June the company established a “Media Advisory Board” headed by a number of ex-studio execs that they hoped would help smooth things over with the networks.

Since its launch eight months ago, Redlasso has seen exponential growth amongst bloggers, and can be seen on a number of top news, gossip, and political blogs. The site allows users to watch recorded feeds of a number of television shows, and “clip” potions of them for playback on their sites. Among the channels available are ESPN, Fox News, and CNN.

Redlasso records and serves all of this content from its servers, without legal license for any of it. The company has long held to the belief that it is protected by the first amendment, and that the snippets that bloggers distribute qualify for fair use (the embedded clips can only be 10 minutes long). Fair use may apply to the snippets, but the site is still hosting entire episodes, even if they are only available to approved bloggers.

The site will continue to operate for its Bussiness and “Radio to Web” clients.

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Zimbra Releases Version 3 Of Open Source Email Client, And It’s Awesome

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:48:16 -0700

Yahoo’s Zimbra launches version 3 of its open source desktop email client this morning that is designed to compete with Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mac Mail, etc. This is a new iteration of their browser-based offline product announced in March 2007.

Zimbra Desktop, which is built on Mozilla Prism, is available for Windows, Mac and linux machines. It weighs in at 40 MB, about double the size of Thunderbird. The product promises the robust features of Outlook, which are lacking in Outlook Express and Thunderbird. Users can access Yahoo mail accounts, Zimbra accounts, or any Pop/IMAP supported email boxes. Zimbra Desktop also includes a calendar, contact list and other features.

Based on limited testing (I set it up with Yahoo Mail only for now), the product is a winner. It’s responsive and quick, which is the most important feature for a desktop email client. I like the ability to tag items, collapse conversations, and perform web and local searches via the search bar in the top right corner of the app. If I wasn’t all Mac across the board to keep things synced properly, I’d use Zimbra permanently. Screen shots below.

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MedPedia Is Wikifying the Medical Search Space

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:47:19 -0700

The medical industry is one that thrives on innovation and evolution. New procedures, medicines, diseases, and theories are released practically every day. In such an environment, the need for a website to reflect and allow for documentation is apparent.

MedPedia is a new project, currently in development, that will offer an online collaborative medical encyclopedia for use by the general public. In order to keep the content accurate and up-to-date, content editors and creators have to have an MD or a PhD. Several highly-esteemed medical colleges will be contributing content to MedPedia, including Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School. Medpedia is also receiving support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) and many other government research groups. The content from these organizations will then be edited by MedPedia’s community of medical professionals.

MedPedia is currently in closed beta with a live preview site, where contributors can apply to be included, and users can submit feedback and suggestions. They plan on opening up their beta in late 2008.

The site will feature content about diseases, anatomy, procedures, medications and medical facilities in two ways. The topic front page will be written in easy-to-understand language for the general public, but there will also be a more technical page where medical professionals can discuss more in-depth with a clinical tone. With more than 30,000 known diseases and conditions, more than 10,000 drugs prescribed each year, thousands of medical procedures being performed and millions of medical facilities around the world, they have their work cut out for them.

There is obvious competition with established medical resource sites like WebMD and MayoClinic. Those sites have done really well, but there’s always room for disruptive technology like this. Look at what Wikipedia did to Britannica, a 250-year old encyclopedia publisher. The advantage MedPedia has is its large range of medical professionals who create content based on their specialties, rather than having several in-house doctors creating content on a range of topics they aren’t formally familiar with.

This system is advantageous both to MedPedia and the medical professionals. MedPedia benefits from their knowledge and experience, and the doctors are able to promote themselves in their specific field of expertise. MedPedia contributors will also be able to form committees and boards in specific areas like “Childhood Obesity” and “Skin Cancer.” Each professional that specializes in that field will be able to join the committee (five of whom will make up the board) and will oversee the content generated and edited in that field.

MedPedia was founded by James Currier, a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Currier founded Tickle, a quiz and personal test site in 1999, which sold to Monster in 2004 for about $94 million (though it recently lost a hefty portion of its staff and was said to be shutting down). After taking some time off to spend with his family, he started an incubator called Ooga Labs. He is also known for singing in the Here Comes Another Bubble video, from the group The Richter Scales. Currier is one of three co-founders for the group, which was surrounded by some controversy (they also performed the song live at The Crunchies). He got the idea for MedPedia when he found himself constantly searching for medical information online, like if his three-year old son needed to go to the emergency room for a fever.

The Advisory Board includes Gilbert S. Omenn, M.D., Ph.D., Professor University of Michigan Medical School; Linda Hawes Clever, M.D., M.A.C.P., Clinical Professor University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical School; Joseph B. Martin, M.D., Ph.D., former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University; and Mitch Kapor, philanthropist and founder of Lotus Development Corporation, designer of Lotus 1-2-3, Chair of Board of Directors for Linden Lab (creator of Second Life), Chair of Mozilla Corporation, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Wikimedia Foundation.

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Apple Launching App Store Beta Program

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:46:39 -0700

Apple’s App Store has seen an unprecedented amount of success and exposure since its launch, with millions of total downloads and 909 applications already available. Unfortunately, Apple has been unable to keep up with the influx of submissions from developers (each app must be approved before it appears on the store), leaving many companies frustrated and confused as their apps sit in limbo.

Adding to the frustration has been the difficulty associated with testing an application. As Craig Hockenberry, one of the people behind the popular app Twitterific explains:

The big problem here is that the only way to install software on an iPhone or iPod touch is with the App Store. There are also no provisions for beta testing… The only way to “test” a fix is to release the changes to tens of thousands of users. It’s the developer equivalent of playing Russian roulette.”

Now we’re hearing from an app developer that Apple ~~is finally going to start rolling out a new beta program in the next few days~~ has released an Ad-Hoc program. Details are slim, but it seems like Apple is capping the total number of beta participants at 100 per app. In order to download a beta app, users will need to submit their iPhone’s UDIDs number to the developer, ~~who will then need to flag its eligibility in the store itself. All betas will still be distributed through the App Store - you won’t be able to download one on an external site.~~ The apps will be directly distributed by the developer.

It sounds like developers that haven’t had their apps approved yet will still be able to participate in the beta program. This should alleviate some of the developers’ anxiety (at least they’ll know their app will work once it goes live), but it still doesn’t address the the delays and lack of communication that many developers are complaining about.

Update: Our source was misinformed. This program, as a number of commentors have said, is Apple’s Ad-Hoc program that is already operational. Erica Sadun of TUAW writes:

Developers and users need not use the App Store for testing. Ad Hoc distribution goes directly between the developer and the user. The user needs to supply their iPhone’s unique device identifier. The developer then sends a specially compiled version of their app along with a mobile provisioning file. Users drop these into iTunes and they’re good to sync.

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Favtape: Full Playback For Your Favorite Last.fm And Pandora Songs

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:46:31 -0700

One of the most frustrating things about online music services like Last.fm and Pandora is that they don’t allow users to play back songs in their entirety on demand. The sites have made some progress in the last few months (Last.fm introduced full-song playback for some labels in January and iLike implemented it this morning), but for the most part these features are still limited by the agreements each site has forged with record labels.

Today sees the launch of Favtape, a new mashup that mixes Pandora, Last.fm, Seeqpod, and Slinkset to offer full playback of your favorite songs on demand, without any limitations. The site was created by Ryan Sit, one of the developers behind blog/lifecasting service Swurl.

Favtape pulls your Favorites (or “Loved”) list from Pandora and Last.fm and generates a playlist that contains full versions of each song. The interface is overly basic at this point - you can start and stop the song by clicking on its title, but there’s no way to rearrange them to create a new playlist. Below each song is a list of related links that allow users to purchase the song, view lyrics, and see a list of similar artists. Favtape will initially generate revenue through the links to iTunes, Amazon, and Ringtones displayed under each song.

The site also features a Digg-like “Discovery” option that allows users to vote on the best playlists. Unfortunately, there’s no way to actually tweak your playlists to make them more appealing without modifying your “Favorites” from Last.fm or Pandora. This lack of playlist customization is frustrating, but will likely be added soon.

Favtape makes heavy use of the Seeqpod API, which it uses for song playback and recommendations. While this presumably will help Favtape avoid any legal trouble (it isn’t actually hosting any music), it is also making it totally reliant on a service that is on shaky ground. Seeqpod isn’t hosting any music either (it crawls the internet searching for files hosted on other servers), but that hasn’t stopped the lawsuits from coming. For the time being, though, Favtape offers a great way to listen to your favorite songs without paying a cent. A simialr site that relies on Seeqpod (but doesn’t auto-generate playlists) is Streamzy, which we covered earlier this month.

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Minted Launches Competitive Stationery Store

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:49:30 -0700

Mariam Naficy, co-founder of failed beauty startup Eve.com (which went belly up when the bubble burst in 2000), has launched her latest venture: Minted, an online stationery store with a competitive marketplace reminiscent of the one found on custom t-shirt store Threadless.

The site offers graphic designers a community to showcase and (hopefully) sell their designs, which are voted on by customers. The best designs are printed and sold, with about 5% of the retail price going to the designer (this may sound small, but Naficy says it is near double what a designer might get from a traditional card company like Hallmark). On top of the revenue sharing, the site will also hold regular competitions, with winning entries winning on the order of $1000. To further sweeten the deal for the designers, all cards have the artists’ name emblazoned in fine print on the back (another thing you won’t see on typical greeting cads).

The store will sell a mix of designer-submitted cards and cards from established independent card companies. While Minted is starting with stationery, it will likely expand to other products in the future. Minted will initially only sell its cards through its online storefront, but Naficy says that there ample opportunities for partnerships and alternative distribution channels down the line. If the site is going to succeed, it will need to establish these ties quickly - few people are going to buy from a stationery store they’ve never heard of, giving designers little reason to submit their designs in the first place.

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Start Streaming: Qik Opens To The Public

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:48:41 -0700

Qik, the video service that streams live feeds from your mobile phone, has finally launched its public beta. The site has also introduced a number of new features to the service, including support for restricted group access to videos, self-service event streams, and a new embeddable player.

The beta will support a wide variety of phones on AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint, including support for software on the Windows Mobile platform that began testing in June. Qik says that it will be continually adding new phones to the supported list, which you can view here.

The site has also implemented support for Groups, which allow users to select who can upload and view selected clips. Among the included privacy options are allowance for public groups, which anyone can post to, restricted groups, which allow anyone to view (but only select users to post), and a private view, which restricts viewing and uploading to a specified group of users.

Qik has also introduced support for special Event sites, which are essentially temporary groups that are focused on a single event or conference. In the past users who wanted to create specific event pages would have to go through the company itself. Now, users will be able to create self-serve pages with custom logos where they can aggregate all of the content from a single event.

We’ve been using Qik for the last few months, and for the most part we’ve been pleased with the video quality and the convenience that comes from having a portable video camera that can stream directly to the web (although there have been some troubles with upload speeds that are largely the fault of network carriers). There are a number of very similar services in the space, including Kyte and Flixwagon. You can see a general comparison of some of the services here.

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Tesla Motors Unveils Jaw-Dropping Menlo Park Showroom

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:46:28 -0700

Tesla Motors, the automobile startup with backers that include Sergey Brin and Larry Page, held a party tonight to mark the launch of its Menlo Park storefront. The store, which is the company’s second, will be open to the general public beginning this Tuesday.

Despite Tesla Motors’ well deserved reputation as a high-end car manufacturer, it is still very much a startup - the company’s $150 million in funding pales in comparison to coffers held by large automobile companies like Ferrari. As a result, Tesla has strived to create a atmosphere of style and sophistication at its showrooms without breaking the bank.

The new dealership is situated in Menlo Park, about 5 minutes away from downtown Palo Alto and Stanford University. The interior of the building is designed to be “industrial chic” - a strange mix of luxurious furniture (white leather sofas, marble tables) and the trimmings of a basic garage (concrete walls, exposed wooden ceilings). It works surprisingly well, keeping the store’s high-end customers at home without distracting from the showroom’s main attraction: the cars.

Ah, the cars. Tesla has half a dozen of their Tesla Roadster electric car on display, and they don’t disappoint. It’s hard to put into words how ridiculously sexy the Tesla Roadster is in person, so we’ve grabbed a lot of pictures. Suffice to say, as soon as you walk in the store, you’re going to want one.

Unfortunately, actually buying a Tesla Roadster is an involved and lengthy process. To reserve a car, first you’ll need to make a $5,000 deposit, which is mostly just to show you’re serious. To actually get a place on the 1,100 person long waiting list, you’ll need to pony up another $55,000 - making a grand total of $60,000. Of the 1100 people on the waitlist, 600 are for the 2008 model, which had a base cost of $98,000. The remainder of the list is for the 2009 model, which has been upped to a $109,000 base value, mostly to account for the weakened dollar.

Tesla is currently telling customers that the waitlist is one year long, but production is only just ramping up so that time frame may slip a bit. By weeks end there will be around 12 cars on the road, most of which are owned by company boardmembers and investors. For the time being, cars are being assembled at a rate of about 4 a week, with expectations that the company will be able to finish 40 a week early next year.

Unsurprisingly, you won’t be able to just waltz in and test drive a Roadster. To get the keys to one of these beauties, you’ll need to prove that you’re serious (namely, pay the initial $5000), or otherwise convince the dealership that you mean business. At least you have these pictures.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

YouTube Coming to a TiVo Near You

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:46:28 -0700

Putting YouTube on something is like a gang initiation for Valley companies. “Sure,” VCs say, “You’ve made a plastic robotic drink coaster with social networking capabilities. But does it have YouTube?”

That said, Series 3 and HD TiVo owners will soon be able to stream YouTube content through the TiVo dashboard. Series 2 owners, however, are out of luck because the H.264 used in the service can’t be added to Series 2 hardware.

TiVo users should notice the update by the end of the month as the 9.4 software update hits machines.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The Ultimate iPhone App: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:46:47 -0700

You want an iPhone app? We’ll give you an iPhone app. Take a look at Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for the iPhone which uses the accelerometer for game play. It should be available in September but we have some cool video over at CrunchGear. Peter Ha writes:

As far as we know and to THQ Wireless’ knowledge we’re the first with any sort of footage for the upcoming release of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and here it is for all of you readers. It’s a very cool game and an ingenious way of using the touchscreen. The accelerometer is only used to switch gameplay from landscape to portrait at any time. It’s still a work in progress and won’t be released until September 16, but we didn’t notice any glitches. I can say without a doubt that this is going to be a hot, hot game for the iPhone/iPod platform.

Kindle 2.0 Coming Around October 2008

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:46:25 -0700

Our rendering

An insider let slip that two new Amazon Kindle models will hit stores this holiday season, with the first coming as early as October.

The first is an updated version with the same sized screen, a smaller form factor, and an improved interface. The source told us that Amazon has “skipped three or four generations,” comparing the old Kindle to the 1st gen iPod and the new version to something like the sexy iPod Mini.

The second new model, which is shaped like an 8 1/2 x 11-inch piece of paper, is considerably bigger than the current model and should be available next year.

Both models should come in multiple colors and may be aimed at younger readers.
Read more…

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Joi Ito, Chad Hurley and Loic LeMeur Join TechCrunch50 As Startup Judges. Early Bird Pricing Ends on July 15th.

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:48:21 -0700

Its hard to believe, but TechCrunch50 is less than two months away. We’re knee-deep in the applications right now, and I can tell you it is hard to cull them down. It is really impressive how many good new startup ideas are out there.

Today, we are announcing our latest line-up of TechCrunch50 Experts: Joi Ito, Chad Hurley and Loic LeMeur. They will join Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Cuban, Chris DeWolf, Marissa Mayer, and others on our panel of experts in judging and advising the presenting TechCrunch50 startups.

If you want to come to the conference (and, admit it, you do), I’d encourage you to buy tickets now, as we are expecting this year’s conference to sell out as it did last year. Here are some details:

EARLY BIRD PRICING ENDS ON JULY 15 (this saves you $1,000). Visit the TechCrunch50 web site for information on all aspects of the conference. We are hearing that hotels are starting to fill-up for the second week in September. Planning ahead will save you from having to ask to sleep on Mike’s couch . . . (anyway, that’s probably where I’m sleeping).

For companies that do not meet the criteria of a TechCrunch50 entrant (basically, your company is already launched), we are offering Exhibitor Packages. These are interactive sponsorships for relevant companies or products that want to showcase their brand and services to the TechCrunch50 attendees and media.

We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco, September 8-10.

Joi Ito
Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons, and founder and CEO of Neoteny, a venture capital firm focused on personal communications and enabling technologies. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time ranked him as a member of the CyberElite. In 2000 he was ranked among the “50 Stars of Asia” by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT. In 2001 the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 “Global Leaders of Tomorrow” for 2002.

Chad Hurley
Raised near Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, Hurley received his Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, he joined eBay’s PayPal division, primarily focusing on user interface. It was there that he met Steve Chen and Jawed Karim with whom he founded YouTube, a video sharing website, in 2005.

YouTube quickly became one of the web’s fastest-growing sites, and was ranked as the 10th most popular website just a year after its launch. There are reportedly 100 million clips viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded every 24 hours.

Hurley currently serves as Chief Executive Officer and was voted 28th on Business 2.0 magazine’s “50 people who matter” list in 2006. That year, he and Chen sold YouTube to Google, Inc. for $1.65 billion in stock.

Loic LeMeur
Loic is the CEO and visionary behind Seesmic, founded in 2007, with the goal of transforming online video into a medium for threaded, interactive video conversation. Prior to Seesmic, Loic incubated several other start-ups including four French companies: Ublog, (merged with Six Apart in 2003) and RapidSite, (acquired by France Telecom in 1999) two popular blog companies, B2L, an interactive agency in 1999 (acquired by BBDO) and LeWeb, one of Europe’s leading web conferences for businesses and web 2.0 innovators in 2005.

Loic serves as a board member on the RSS Advisory Board. He is also an active investor and mentor to entrepreneurs and contributes to the World Economic Forum blog, which he founded. Originally from the South of France, Loic lives in San Francisco, California.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

AOL Implements Vidoop’s OpenID-Based Authentication

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:45:57 -0700

As of yesterday afternoon, AOL has implemented Vidoop’s visual authentication system as part of its OpenID initiative, which was formally launched in February 2007.

Vidoop, a startup that replaces usernames and passwords with image grids, partnered with AOL to provide its OpenID users with an extra layer of security. This delivers Vidoop a potential user base of about 100 million users.

Unfortunately, AOL is still just an issuer of OpenID accounts - not a relying party. So users can’t actually use the same Vidoop-protected OpenID accounts that AOL has given them to actually sign into AOL services. AOL and other big internet players have yet to step up and become relying parties, a move that will be necessary to push OpenID into the mainstream.

Vidoop offers an alternative to the traditional username/password login system by displaying images in a grid with associated letters. Upon initial registration, users define 3-5 image categories (cars, dogs, flowers, houses, etc). When they sign into a site, a variety of images appear in a randomly-generated grid, and users enter the corresponding letters to their pre-defined categories. Because this visual system requires a higher level of intelligence, it’s harder to steal someone’s login information and use it to access all OpenID-enabled sites with it.

The implementation of authentication security can be cost-prohibitive, but Vidoop actually tries to help its partners make money. Advertisements are randomly dispersed throughout the image grid, and revenue from them is split in two ways.

Vidoop has also partnered with Charles Schwab Retirement and hopes more financial organizations will follow suit. Clickpass, a popular OpenID initiative covered here, partnered with Vidoop this past March. The startup brought Scott Kveton, the Chairman of the OpenID foundation, onboard in February.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Epic Fail: Six Million iBricks… and Growing

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:45:44 -0700

Well this is a fine kettle of fish. iPhone activations have essentially gone down and everyone - from folks updating their old phones to new 3G activators - are stuck with bricks until traffic dies off. Reader Brent reports:

Hey Just a heads up…my iPhone, and looking at their forums, everyone else’s iPhones are bricks because the last step of their update process is to connect to the App store which can’t handle the traffic of people updating…looks like everyone is just in a holding pattern with bricked phones until the traffic goes down…wonder how many users are effected…their are a lot of pissed people, including me and apple says, do not disconnect or try to reboot the phone and keep trying until it works…this means everyone with an iPhone is either out of a phone today or has to sit home and keep trying to connect…fun stuff

What is happening is that users are trying to upgrade to the 2.0 firmware and then when the system tries to activate their phones they go into a reboot or restore more, thereby disabling the phone and forcing another update and, with the current traffic, causing the system to fail again.

Our own Peter’s Ha’s 2G is bricked right now as well. Do not update.

Visit CrunchGear for a possible fix.

UPDATE - You think a bricked iPhone is bad? I stood in line for 5 hours and got bupkus. My reaction:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Live iPhone 3G Unboxing and Review

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 04:45:18 -0700

Sorry about the delay. I embedded the wrong code. Old video is after the jump. Live video is above.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Browse Del.icio.us Bookmarks Visually With FavThumbs

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:45:02 -0700

While we’ve waited with bated breath for the release of Delicious 2.0 (Yahoo’s been teasing us for months), Ryan Sit, the creator of Swurl, a recently launched startup that offers a lifecasting aggregator for web activity, has been toying around with the Del.icio.us API to bring us FavThumbs. FavThumbs offers a visually-pleasing web application to view screen shots of your bookmarks.

Through the site, users can input their Del.icio.us ID, and then browse their bookmarks in a grid or a coverflow-like display. Sit hopes that the site will offer a much better alternative to the out-dated Del.icio.us list. A similar app that was we covered last year is Fichey. Fichey acts like a microfiche for headlines from social bookmarking sites. Users can flip through the pages like a magazine, but they are only the headlines, not user-specific.

Another similar service is SearchMe, a visual search engine we covered in June. SearchMe offers the ability to drag and drop sites to bookmark into “stacks.” The bookmark stacks are shown in a coverflow-style display, similar to FavThumbs. A similar Del.icio.us coverflow display is seen with the Fluid Del.icio.us Site Specific Browser plug-in (mentioned here).

Sit says that he was inspired by the desktop client Delish, a graphical bookmark desktop client. Another app created by Sit is ListPic, an application to browse local classified pages through a calendar-like display. Both ListPic and FavThumbs are both experimental applications from his company Freestyle Labs.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Before the App Store “Opens”, it has already made Apple $55,000

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:47:35 -0700

Tucked away on the iPhone 2.0 version of Apple’s Application Store is a counter for the number of times that each application has been purchased . When this information is combined with an application’s price, and the uniform 30% that Apple pockets on each download, it is possible to know how much Apple is making from the App Store. As of 4PM (PST), that number hovers around $55,000. This is pretty incredible given that the iPhone 2.0 software is not officially available and App Store does not officially open till tomorrow, that bloggers have only been able to access the Apps Store for less than 18 hours, and that the 3G iPhone, with the App store built in out of the box, is not even on sale yet in the United States. If sales of applications stay at the current pace, which they won’t, because they are going to speed up dramatically, the Application Store would still provide Apple with an additional twenty million dollars of revenue per year.

Embedded in the post is a simple revenue model for the App Store, using the fifty most popular applications. We will update this regularly, hopefully including all of the 100 most popular Apps, so stay posted for more data points and more revenue models. That is, unless Apple disables the counter in order to stymie bloggers and stock analysts eager to know how much incremental income Apple is going to make from selling Applications in the App Store.

A few notes on the data are necessary. I stopped updating the data at 4PM (PST), but it was affected by sales that occurred over the ten or so minutes that I spent collecting the data. Also, Apple’s counter has some bugs. In the Application Store, the number of sales does not always correspond to an Application’s position on the Top-50 list. My list is a correct ranking based strictly on the number of downloads. And, while collecting the data I noticed that sometimes the counter would go down, something that makes no sense in an Application download store. However, this is still the best and most accurate data we have on the impact of the Application Store on Apple’s bottom line.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.