30 Million

I’ve written several posts about the innovation, entrepreneurship and promising Web audience I’ve found over several weeks of reporting in Indonesia. As such, friends in the venture capital business are peppering my inbox asking round-about-questions that all go back to the same central query: Should we be investing in Indonesia?

The seatback pocket on my flight from Jakarta to Surabaya seemed to think so. A pamphlet blared “INVEST IN REMARKABLE INDONESIA,” and included some testimonials from companies like Coca-Cola and Unilever, and some charts showing Indonesia’s economic stability. This was the second time I’d heard the words “Remarkable Indonesia” in as many days. Dino Patti Djalal, the spokesperson for Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and soon to be Ambassador to the US said they’d trademarked it as the country’s new marketing tagline. It called to mind the “Incredible India” push of a few years ago which even included purchasing ads during the Oscars.

Compared to “Incredible India,” “Remarkable Indonesia” seems to express muted praise for the country—especially considering the infrastructure in Jakarta was far better than the infrastructure I found in most major Indian cities, the food cooked with some 30,000 locally grown spices was amazing, the cultural heritage and diversity was just as rich, and Bali has some of the most beautiful beaches anywhere in the world. Only remarkable?

The biggest reason for Valley-types to think about investing in Remarkable Indonesia wasn’t in that pamphlet. It’s the fact that for all the promise and nascent bubbling growth in technology and mobile, almost no one is there. Indonesia has 240 million people and a Web audience around 30 million to 40 million people, not including the surging mobile Web. It’s curious how little venture capital is going after that, given that in the first quarter nearly $1 billion in US startup funding flowed to India, China and Israel, with each country reporting surges in capital from between 20% to more than 100% over the last year.

This post is one that many people in South Africa, India and China have begged me not to write, because they are having a field day expanding mobile and Web services in Indonesia. In this age of global venture capital and emerging markets hype, how many markets this big is the US mostly ignoring? In this age of globalization and outsourcing, how many markets this big have so few multinational jobs driving up employment and developer costs?

But all of this opportunity doesn’t necessarily mean Indonesia is a market where US venture capitalists can do well. Recently Indonesian tech blogger Rama Mamuaya was cold-called by a Valley venture firm and asked if he had a million dollars to invest in one Indonesian Web startup, which one he should pick. He thought about it and answered: None. It’s not because they aren’t promising, but because the costs of building a company are still so low in Indonesia—as opposed to markets like China and India where a flood of multinational jobs have pushed up salaries and rents—that any company would have a hard time putting that much money to good use.

There are concerns about politics, stability, the banking system and, of course, how to get liquidity as there are with most emerging markets. There’s especially a visceral fear in Indonesia—a country that was brought to its knees by the late 1990s Asian financial crisis, and one that most Americans know very little about. These are not waters to be navigated from thousands of miles away.

I think what Indonesia could use is something in between the current state of no high-growth capital and the money that goes to countries like India and China: A Y-Combinator-style incubator that could help Indonesian entrepreneurs make sense of the pitfalls of modern startup life, including things like recruiting and managing talent, how to deal with Silicon Valley giants, how to make money online and when and when not to raise outside funding. The funding amounts and exits would be small, but a Yossi-Vardi-style angel could clean up where many classic VCs might crush startups under the weight of millions. Someone to coax these entrepreneurs as they develop organically, but not bind them to a Western-way of building companies. Someone local–or at least transplanted fully– who understands when all those Valley rules need to be modified or broken.

In the Valley, the ecosystem for starting companies grew organically over several decades, a luxury that China and India didn’t have. Those countries have entrepreneurs, they have tons of venture capital and big market opportunities—but when they got flooded with American cash in the last decade, the ecosystem’s natural development accelerated, and the step of developing local angels and mentors was largely skipped. That’s the single biggest complaint I hear from entrepreneurs in these countries. Indonesia has a rare opportunity to develop a huge startup ecosystem in the right order.

The question is who will fill this void, because someone will. Will it be an American who moves and becomes embedded in the market? Or will it be a branch of a firm that’s sprung up in recent years in China or India, places that understand emerging market economics and risk better than we do? It’s not going to be easy, but Indonesia is too big and too untapped—too “remarkable”–to stay undiscovered forever.

Foursquare and Farmville are among the world’s worst inventions, at least according to TIME.com’s list of “The 50 Worst Inventions.”

The list of “the world’s bright ideas that just didn’t work out” included both the location-based social game Foursquare and Zynga’s Farmville, among other items that ranged from tanning beds to spam e-mail. Foursquare, which Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove just reported is nearing 1 million checkins per day, made the list for promoting narcissism. Time.com’s Kristi Oloffson acknowledges its potential for being useful with coupons, such as Starbucks’s recent promotion for its mayors, but dismisses it as “another layer onto a generation living virtually.”

Farmville made the list for being a time-suck and an addicting game that Dan Fletcher says is “hardly even a game,” but instead a “series of mindless chores.” He’s quick to point out that the game has captivated the interest of millions. Farmville has 30 million farms created with 2 million in the U.S., according to Zynga.

Because Farmville is quite popular and Foursquare is gaining steam, we’re curious if you agree. Let us know what you think in the poll below.

Tags: farmville, foursquare, poll, social gaming, social networking, starbucks, Time.com

30 million Windows Phone 7 devices sold by the end 2011? Microsoft says yes originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 May 2010 17:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

PaidContent’s Rafat Ali, who turned a one-man Web site and into a must-read hub for digital media news, is leaving the company he founded eight years ago.

Sources said Ali has told co-workers he will leave the company in early July, which will be two years after he sold ContentNext, PaidContent’s parent company, to the London-based Guardian Media group.

The deal potentially worth up to $30 million, based on various earnout goals. But Ali and his investors only took home a portion of that. My best guess is something closer to the $12 million range.

Ali didn’t tell staff what he intends to do next, but he recently moved from Los Angeles to New York.

It is not clear who will take over leadership at the sites.

Mobile marketing firm Adenyo has acquired MoVoxx, a US-based mobile advertising company that counts multiple Fortune 500 companies as clients and reaches millions of users on both smartphones and more basic ‘feature phones’. MoVoxx was founded in 2006 and had previously raised money from Greycroft Partners, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital and BV Capital. Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed.

MoVoxx CEO Alec Andronikov says that the company has grown to reach 40 million unique users though in-app display ads as well as SMS, which can reach a much broader array of devices. The company recently launched a new GeoSense platform that sends location-based ads to users, even on devices that don’t come equipped with GPS.

Adenyo offers a SaaS mobile ad platform that serves over 1 billion ad impressions a month. It includes an analytics engine to determine which ads to serve to which users, as well as a system to handle payments and coupons. Adenyo CEO Tyler Nelson says that the company has built up a strong presence in the European market as well as Canada, but that “feature phones” in the United States are around 3-4 years behind, and that Adenyo hasn’t yet addressed them. MoVoxx already has a large base of users on these feature phones, and will give Adenyo a strong foothold in the United States. This, Nelson says, is important as clients look to launch global campaigns across North America and Europe.

Canada-based Adenyo recently raised $30 million in funding, and it sounds like it has more acquisitions in the pipeline.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SlideShare, the popular service for sharing presentations, just announced a major update to its platform. Starting today, SlideShare users will be able to upload videos of their presentations, screencasts and other business-related video content. Thanks to SlideShare's LinkedIn app, LinkedIn's users will now also be able to share video on the popular social networking site for professionals.

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Adding Video: A Natural Progression for SlideShare

Adding video feels like a natural move for SlideShare. After all, more and more business content is already moving towards video and adding video adds an extra dimension to a presentation that a basic set of PowerPoint slides simply can't convey. As SlideShare's CEO Ramshi Sinha told us earlier this week, the company is mostly targeting marketers, teachers, doctors and other professionals with this new service. Currently, there are only a handful of dedicated video sharing services for professionals and platforms like YouTube don't really lend themselves for targeting the audience that many of SlideShare's users are trying to reach.

The video pages look almost exactly like regular SlideShare pages. The only real difference is that these pages now display a video instead of basic PowerPoint or Keynote slides. SlideShare uses can embed these videos on their own sites.

The closest competitor to SlideShare's new offering is probably BrainShark's free MyBrainshark service, which also allows professionals to sell their presentations. SlideShare's big advantage, however, is that is already has a large user base. Indeed, as Sinha told us today, the service now reaches close to 30 million unique visitors per month (including sites that embed SlideShare content).

Upload Limit: 500 Megabytes per Video

For now, SlideShare is officially calling this new video service a beta product. The company plans to gather feedback over the next two to three month and then iterate on the current version. The upload limit is currently 500 megabytes and uses can upload up to 5 videos per month.

Hard disk drive maker Western Digital has agreed to buy Hoya’s magnetic media operations business for $235 million in cash.

The purchase of the Singapore-based Hoya’s operations (as well as Hoya Magnetics Singapore) deal will ensure that Western Digital will have access to a key component for its 2.5-inch hard disk drive business. Irvine, Calif.-based WD said the deal will help the company finish components faster and provide it with cost advantages, geographic diversification, a new pool of employee talent, and a more secure supply line.

The agreement includes a commitment from Hoya to continue to support the glass substrate supply for this business for multiple years. WD said that the deal will augment the company’s existing media operations as it prepares to meet demand for hard drives in the years ahead.

WD is buying Hoya’s media sputtering factory in Tuas, Singapore, where it expects to employ the entire work force. Certain equipment at Hoya’s Nagasaki, Japan-based research and development operation is included. The deal is expected to close in the current quarter. Hoya’s Singapore operation was created in 1995 as a subsidiary of Japan-based Hoya. WD will spend $30 million in the next year as it streamlines the operation.

I sat down with Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman and investor/board member James Slavet to talk about the continued success of the Seattle-based company. Warning in advance – the interview was done at the end of the day and we were drinking beer from our new kegerator, and we rambled at times. Perfect for a Sunday afternoon viewing, in my opinion.

Kelman announced in the video that Redfin is now on a $30 million revenue run rate, up from $15 million last summer (and at that point they were profitable.

The company cuts real estate fees dramatically, by about half, for both buyers and sellers. Kelman called real estate “by far the most screwed up industry in America” on 60 Minutes a couple of years ago, But Kelman has cooled somewhat since then, and some of the death threats and hostility by realtors has now calmed down, he says.

We also brought up the age-old Seattle v. Silicon Valley debate again – something we’ve been arguing about since 2008. And we touched on his recent guest post about the need for founders to share the love with employees when it comes to distributing equity.

Side note: Slavet was also in our studio recently to talk about his investment in TellApart.

Salesforce.com has just announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Jigsaw, which provides crowd-sourced data services in the cloud, for approximately $142 million in cash, plus a performance-based earn out of up to 10% of the purchase price.

The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal year 2011, subject to customary closing conditions.

The enterprise cloud computing company in a statement touts Jigsaw’s Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model, which it says delivers the world’s most complete, accurate and up-to-date business contact data. When the company launched back in 2006, Michael Arrington deemed it a really, really bad idea.

Jigsaw has changed its model since then: people can now see if their personal information has been uploaded, and there is a process to have it removed, at least temporarily. And users are no longer paid cash to upload contacts. Instead they receive points that can be used to download contact other people’s contact information. Revenue is rumored to be around $30 million/ year.

As for Arrington, he went from calling the company evil to simply amoral.

Going back to the acquisition: Salesforce says the deal will allow the company to combine its suite of CRM applications and enterprise cloud platform with Jigsaw’s model for the automation of acquiring, completing and cleansing business contact data. Jigsaw’s data cloud platform, it adds, also creates an enormous opportunity for developers and independent software vendors to deliver new applications that leverage the business contact data found in Jigsaw.

Looking ahead, Salesforce seeks the creation of new partnerships with information services companies like D&B, Hoover’s and LexisNexis.

Jigsaw’s community is said to consist of more than 1.2 million members. Over the last six years, community members have built and maintained a contact database of more than 21 million professionals at nearly 4 million companies, according to the press release. Jigsaw currently has 800 corporate customers.

Jigsaw had raised $18 million in venture capital to date.

Groupon, the social buying site that has become one of the hotter start-ups of late, has gotten a giant round of funding from the same Russian investors who backed social networking powerhouse Facebook and game phenom Zynga.

Digital Sky Technologies is the main funder of the round, but Battery Ventures is also participating.

The money, the company said would be used to grow the business–and to speed far ahead of numerous rivals–as well as cash out employees and early investors.

Groupon is profitable and has about 270 employees.

In December, Groupon nabbed $30 million in its second round of funding, led by Accel Partners.

The innovative Chicago-based service, which launched only a year ago, had previously received $4.8 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates, as well as $1 million from an angel investor.

Groupon features a daily deal with a huge discount on a wide range of things–from spas to skydiving–in 26 U.S. cities, including Chicago, Boston, New York and San Francisco, for large groups of potential buyers on the Web, through email or via social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Using social tools, Groupon–which is a mashup terms for “group” and “coupon”–tries to use collective buying power to get low prices and to push customers to local businesses.

If it reaches the number of buyers it needs, which can be in the thousands, Groupon sells coupons to the consumers and collects a hefty fee for the sale from the businesses it sends customers to.

At the cost of discounting and paying off Groupon, small businesses get a crack at a lot of new customers–think of it as social networking lead-generation or, perhaps, the “Social Shopping Network.”

Groupon grew out of a project of The Point, an online community launched in 2007 for organizing group action.

This kind of thing has been tried before, of course, centering on consumers who group together to get discounts on items by purchasing them in bulk.

In Web 1.0, there were many group-buying sites, most of which failed badly. One of the more high-profile ones–Mercata–got $90 million in funding from investors, including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures.

But now the group-buying space has been reinvigorated, with a spate of competitors, some of which are clear copycats of Groupon.

Here’s an interview BoomTown did with its CEO and Founder Andrew Mason, who is one of the more affable and level-headed entrepreneurs around–at least until this mega-funding.

I have been quite interested in Groupon, as I said in that post in March:

“The last time I really was truly bullish on a start-up and its founder–BoomTown’s motto is wait-and-see rather than hype-it-up–was AdMob’s Omar Hamoui. That turned out pretty well, with the sale of the mobile advertising site to Google (GOOG) for $750 million last fall. My 2010 start-up that passes the slightly-less-raised-eyebrow test is Groupon.”

Here’s the video interview:

Here’s the official press release:

GROUPON RECIEVES $135 MILLION FROM DST AND BATTERY VENTURES

Investment to Support Rapid Growth of Social Commerce Globally

Chicago/Moscow, April. 19, 2010–Groupon, the leading social commerce site, today announced that DST, a leading global internet investment group, will lead an investment round of $135 million in the Company. A portion of the investment will be used to fuel Groupon’s global expansion, and the rest will be used to facilitate liquidity for employees and early investors.

DST comprises the majority of the investment, with participation from Battery Ventures, which is also a new investor in Groupon.

Groupon leverages group buying and social media to provide its millions of customers big discounts on the best local businesses in more than 50 cities across the United States and in Canada. To date, customers have purchased over four million Groupons on deals ranging from spa treatments and golf outings to fine dining and skydiving and have collectively saved over $150 million on these deals.

“Our growth is a reflection of the positive impact Groupon is having on consumers and businesses at a very early stage of the market development,” said Andrew Mason, founder and CEO of Groupon. “We are very pleased and excited to welcome DST and Battery as shareholders and we look forward to benefiting from their vast knowledge and experience of the social media sector as we continue executing on our growth plans in North America and globally.”

“This investment underscores our view that social networking and community based activity will drive, shape and define the web’s evolution in the years ahead,” said Yuri Milner, Chief Executive of DST. “Groupon, with its strong management team, offering and vision, is pioneering social commerce and is redefining the local advertising space. We look forward to being long-term partners of a company that is on a path to becoming a global Internet leader.”

“We’ve followed the social commerce phenomenon for many years, and are thrilled to have the chance to back such a visionary management team,” said Roger Lee, General Partner, Battery Ventures. “They saw a massive opportunity very early, and have executed flawlessly to define it and take the leadership position. We think there is a lot of runway ahead, and are energized to support the team in their quest.”

Founded in November 2008, Groupon has been aggressively expanding to cities throughout the United States, with plans to be in 100 cities by the end of 2010. Earlier today Groupon announced that it has launched its service in Orlando, Fort Worth, Tucson and Toronto, its Canadian city.

Fast growing Groupon, fresh off a $30 million round of financing that valued the company at around $250 million, is back raising new money. They have closed or are in the process of closing new venture money at a $1.2 billion valuation, say multiple sources (one source says that’s not exactly correct, but close).

The company expects revenues this year to hit $350 million, says one source. Last December, the company raised $30 million from Accel Partners and New Enterprise Associates, at the time, valuing the daily deal site at roughly $250 million. 

We interviewed Groupon CEO Andrew Mason last week about a number of clones that have popped up recently. He declined to speak to us about this story, however.

Last summer we’d heard that the Digg board of directors was considering terminating Digg cofounder and CEO Jay Adelson. But everything was fine, said senior Digg employees, and the fact that the company moved Adelson out to California from New York at about that time was shown as evidence that the rumors were false. But one ominous conversation I had with Kevin Rose a couple of months later stuck with me. “One of us will leave the company,” he told me, venting some frustration he had with Jay.

But since then things have quieted down, most people we spoke with chalked Kevin’s somewhat erratic behavior up to the friction. But Digg continues to be shadowed by the massive growth of Twitter and Facebook, and clearly the board of directors was just biding its time before making its move. Today the company announced that Jay has left the company, and Kevin Rose is taking the acting CEO role.

It’s an odd move. Even though Digg is clearly not on the same trajectory as Twitter and some other companies, they are profitable and are on track to hit $30 million in revenue this year. So whatever happened at Digg seems to be largely a personal issue between Kevin and Jay, and the board had to make a decision. They apparently made the decision they had to make. Digg without Kevin Rose isn’t really Digg any more. But it may be hard for the company to find a high quality CEO to take Jay’s spot, knowing that Kevin is really the guy who runs the company.

Here’s are the official statements from Digg, which have no useful information at all about what really happened:

Update from Jay:

Hey all,

Got some news. After five years, forty million users, and an amazing
ride, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of Digg. With the new Digg
getting ready to launch, Digg Ads doing well, our sales force growing,
our hiring ramping, and the company maturing well beyond its startup
phase, I feel that now is the right time.

The entrepreneurial calling is strong, and I am ready to incubate some
new business ideas over the next twelve months. As the economy exits
a very deep recession, I believe that it is an excellent time for new
companies to develop. Of course, I will continue to serve as an
adviser to Digg. In the interim, Kevin has agreed to step in as
Chairman and CEO.

I’d like to thank Kevin, the Digg staff and the Digg community for
their support, insight and, most of all, their loyalty in turning Digg
into the force that it is today.

-Jay

Update from Kevin:

I want to be the first to thank Jay for the last five years of amazing
work. You’ve been a great friend and mentor, we wouldn’t be where we
are today if it wasn’t for you.

While I’ll miss working with Jay day-to-day I am excited to be taking on
the role of Chairman and acting CEO, driving Digg forward on our
promise to enable social curation of the world’s content and the
conversation around it. We’ve been super busy on the product side
getting ready for the upcoming Digg redesign and delivering our mobile
apps for the iPhone and Android.

Thank you very much for your on-going support of Digg, I’m truly
excited about the next five years, big things coming!

-Kevin

Once you get beyond the most basic map mashups, you’ll run into a problem with data storage and access, because you can’t hard-code hundreds of markers. It’s a problem that SimpleGeo wants to fix. And from the looks of their new platform, they’ve gone beyond expectations.

SimpleGeo launched its highly anticipated geographic data platform (our SimpleGeo API profile) and announced a data marketplace. The platform allows developers to store up to 1 million points of their own data for free. Once the data is on SimpleGeo, you can do lookups, such as finding the closest points.

The service is similar to what we were hoping to eventually see from Google My Maps, as we wrote last summer in Let Google Be Your Geo Database. Near the end of 2009 Google added spatial search for radius and boundary queries.

SimpleGeo’s Matt Galligan says point storage is only the beginning. Along with “nearest point” lookups, SimpleGeo will soon be able to grab points by neighborhood. And, once the service store polygons, it will be able to perform advanced spatial queries to extract points from dynamic areas (such as developer-defined zones or those drawn by users).

The SimpleGeo data marketplace has received the most media attention. It lets anyone share data with other developers–for free or for a price. Developers keep 70% of any revenue, according to Mashable. Galligan officially launched the service at the Where 2.0 conference (video embedded below):

Shares from the marketplace is only one revenue stream for SimpleGeo. For heavy users of its platform (over 1 million calls), there’s a steep initial pricepoint of $399, with two more levels capping out at 30 million calls nearly $10,000 per month.

If you’ll pardon the pun, SimpleGeo has positioned itself well.

With a frenzy of activity surrounding location-based services, more and more startups are launching ideas that rely heavily on location. But implementing location is still a relatively complicated process. And that’s where SimpleGeo comes in.

We’ve written about the service a number of times over the past several months. Basically, they provide the infrastructure and tools to allow other services to add location elements with ease. In fact, since they launched in beta late last year, they already have some 5,000 developers on board using their service. And tomorrow at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, CA, they’re opening up their platform for all to use.

Alongside the launch, SimpleGeo is introducing two new products: the SimpleGeo Marketplace and the SimpleGeo Storage Engine. The Marketplace will make it easy for developers to see a range of different geodata and pick what they want to use. This store allows developers to get in touch with the geodata providers who are serving up the data (names you know like Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, etc).

The Storage Engine is a cloud-based system to allow developers to store location and do queries on it. Think of it as Amazon S3 for geodata.

So how much does it cost to use SimpleGeo? It’s free for up to a million calls, after that it’s $399 for 2 million calls (and additional support), $2,499 for 10 million calls, and $9,999 for 30 million calls. The pricing model is based on how much you’d need to pay for an engineer to handle that much data. Seeing as SimpleGeo curates this data and provides the servers needed for it, it will be a big value to most companies.

DeCarta, ESRI, Localeze, MetaCarta, Quova, Stamen Design, and Weather Decision Technologies are a few of the big partnerships SimpleGeo recently signed. There was also a Skyhook Wireless deal that went live during SXSW. And you’ve probably heard of some of the startups already using SimpleGeo, such as StickyBits and BumpRadar.

Since its $1.5 million seed funding in November, SimpleGeo has been hiring like crazy and hopes to open a San Francisco branch soon (they’re currently based in Boulder, CO).

And despite the launch, SimpleGeo’s work is far from done. The plan is to launch a couple new features in relative short order, co-founder Matt Galligan tells us. One is called “Pushpin” which will let developers send in a coordinate and get back all sorts of data from SimpleGeo such as country, state, city, neighborhood, zip code, etc. And using other data, you could get the names of buildings on college campuses, for example, Galligan says.

Another new feature called “Polygon” will let developers send in the name of an area such as “The Mission” in San Francisco, and SimpleGeo will return a list of everything in that area.

Look for SimpleGeo’s new website and new admin interface to launch tomorrow after Galligan takes at Where 2.0 around noon PT. You’ll be able to sign up to get in on the location action at that time. Then you can go build your own version of this.

A U.S. judge is ordering Isohunt, one of the world’s leading BitTorrent search engines, to remove all infringing content. Isohunt’s operator said Tuesday that the decision would likely shutter the site, which has 30 million unique monthly visitors.

The injunction targeting Isohunt follows similar rulings against competing pirate sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay, although the Bay has thus far eluded compliance.

A federal court sided last year with the MPAA, ruling that Isohunt was an unlawful avenue to free movies, music, videogames and software — the first U.S. ruling on the legality of a BitTorrent site. Hollywood’s legal tactics shuttered TorrentSpy in the United States in 2008, but the merits of the case were never decided.

Gary Fung, the 27-year-old Canadian who runs Isohunt, said he and the MPAA are now haggling over how to comport with March 23 injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles.

“It is axiomatic that the availability of free infringing copies of plaintiffs’ works through defendants’ websites irreparably undermines the growing legitimate market (.pdf) for consumers to purchase access to the same works,” Wilson wrote in support of his injunction.

The judge added that “upwards of 95 percent of all dot-torrent files downloaded from defendants’ websites” return infringing material or works “at least highly likely to be infringing.”

Wilson ordered Fung to comply within his order within 14 days of the MPAA providing Fung a list of content to be removed.

And therein lies the dispute.

The judge is demanding that Isohunt cease “creating, maintaining or providing access to browsable website categories of dot-torrent or similar files using or based on infringement-related terms.”

That’s jargon for keyword searching. “Filtering against keywords. It amounts to nothing less than taking down our search engine,” Fung said in a telephone interview.

Fung’s position is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires Hollywood to provide links to files to be removed. Keyword searches, he said, could scoop up non-infringing works.

“We’re discussing the mechanics, the process that is reasonable for an injunction,” Fung said. “We’re still trying to hope that the judge will do the right thing.”

The MPAA was not immediately prepared to comment.

The sites included in the judge’s ruling include ISO Hunt, Torrentbox and Podtropolis.

See Also:

• Android App Scans DVD Bar Codes, Starts BitTorrent Download
• BitTorrent Spam Seeding Trojan Virus
• Comcast Discloses Throttling Practices — BitTorrent Targeted
• Comcast Sued Over BitTorrent Blocking - UPDATED
• Pirate Bay Retires World’s Largest BitTorrent Tracker
• Apple Rejects iPhone BitTorrent App
• MPAA Secretly Tells Court Why BitTorrent Tracking Sites Violate Copyrights
• Comcast Makes a Deal with BitTorrent

I believe you have already heard of Chatroulette, the new video chat platform that has attracted the attention of millions. In February there were 30 million unique visitors to the site. That's 1 million new users each day. The site made quite a buzz on the news media, blogs, and Twitter. Comscore reports 1 million U.S. visitors in February with a predominance of 18- to 24-year-old males.

The platform looks premature (it might be part of its charm) as it comes with one feature only: the next button. (By clicking it you are skipping from one user to another.) The next feature is vital as it gives the user a sense of control. I would even consider naming the hype around its users the "Next" Generation.

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Guest author Dr. Taly Weiss is a marketing trends researcher with a PhD in Social Psychology, a digital research expert, and the founder of TrendsSpotting trends agency. Her digital trends insights are presented at The TrendsSpotting Blog and she follows consumer trends at TrendOriginal.com. Taly's academic work contributes to the field of Behavioral Economics. TrendsSpotting offers customized and syndicated research reports, published at top market research databases. She can be contacted at talyweiss@trendsspotting.com.

What a powerful (yet dangerous) tool that can be for people who seek to experience the control they lack in their personal life. The Next Effect is well embedded in the whole Chatroulette random experiment.

What social needs does such a platform serves?

Psychologically speaking, these random experiences can teach us on few important needs about social interactions.

1. the crave for peeking
2. (online) face to face
3. control (and at the same time - lack of control)
4. The no commitment effect.

Combine the four together and you understand the power and the addiction potential of Chatroulette.

We are all well familiar with the above needs:

• Peeking into strangers' lives is what brought popularity to the reality TV shows. We humans receive instant gratification from the arousing feeling that comes when we are allowed inside private personal places.
• Face to face interactions are certainly not new experiences on the Web. But they are getting to an extreme when you personally encounter strangers in their natural surroundings.
• As to control, Chatroulette can well imitate an act of meeting strangers on the street. You can choose between two acts: you can play active or passive. They are both highly addictive. You can actively approach, and they might not get interested in you. You keep on trying. At the same time, you can choose to be the one who turns down interactions. That can be satisfying don't you think?
• The no commitment part is achieved by users' anonymity. Chatroulette doesn't require any identification or user subscription. You don't have to work hard and fake your identity.

Finally, there is something new in these sets of random acquaintances that leaves you unprepared. This surprise element can never be achieved offline. While Twitter and Facebook let you follow strangers you choose to, Chatroulette adds more dimensions to these interactions. It is no longer about your friend's whereabouts or images, nor about reporting what's going on now. It's live and you get a chance to play with an imaginary sense of control. While in real life you hardly talk to strangers, here you get it as a social norm.

The future of random interactions:

I can think of several ways of making these interactions more intriguing - mobile interactions on the move (following people wherever they go) would definitely be hot, as well as the option to filter the people you meet by their location, age or gender.

PowerReviews, a company that provides customer review technology for retailers and e-commerce sites, has raised $6.1 million in funding led by current investors Menlo Ventures and Tenaya Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to over $30 million.

The additional funding will be used fuel customer acquisition and for new product development. The company’s original products let retailers include Amazon-like product review features into their websites, for free. Last year, PowerReviews launched two more social technologies for retailers to integrate: BrandConnect and Social Megaphone. BrandConnect tracks what consumers are saying about a company and/or brand on the social web and Social Megaphone allows customers to post their reviews to Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Last fall the company also brought on a new CEO, Pehr Luedtke.

PowerReviews, which launched in 2007, also powers a consumer-facing site, Buzzillions.com, that aggregates reviews from its partners retailers. The site includes over ten million product reviews. Customers include Staples, Drugstore.com, Walgreens, Diapers.com, Callaway and Jockey.

The creator of Chatroulette has revealed that he is working on a way to preserve user’s privacy, following the launch of Chat Roulette Map, a Google Maps mashups that pinpoints the location of users of the service.

Andrey Ternovskiy, speaking in an interview with the New York Times Bits blog, stated, “There is a certain level of anonymity on the Chatroulette that Chatroulette Map takes away, but I plan to add something to my site to allow them to still hide their whereabouts.”

Chatroulette Map highlights a Chatroulette user’s location by looking at his or her IP addresses, which is revealed via the peer-to-peer nature of the webcam connection. As well as placing a marker on a map, users are screengrabbed, offering anyone in the world a brief sneak peak through a stranger’s webcam.

This has drawn criticism from privacy advocates, although those behind Chatroulette Map say they will remove an image and marker on request if emailed a matching photo to ensure the authenticity of the request.

17-year-old Ternovskiy, a Russian student currently visiting the U.S., says of ChatRoulette Map, “I enjoy it”, but obviously realizes his users — some of which appear to have a penchant for public nudity and masturbation — might be less likely to use the service without the anonymity it previously offered.

However, this does not mean Ternoviskiy is green-lighting the use of the service for such NSFW activities. He has introduced a “report” button, which will see someone “reported” three times banned from the service.

Other points of interest from the interview are the fact that Ternovskiy has yet to collect his Google AdWords earnings as he’s is still under 18, that he’s been offered a $1 million buy-out, and that last month 30 million unique visitors hit Chatroulette, which is averaging one million new users a each day.

Tags: chatroulette, chatroulette map

Vodafone has shuttered Wayfinder — just 16 months after spending $30 million to acquire the Swedish navigational software firm. The move underscores just how drastically the mobile navigation market has changed in the last year thanks to the emergence of free services from third-party developers. It’s also a sign that U.S. operators won’t be able to continue charging customers extra for navigation for much longer.

Navigation has been a lucrative space for carriers such as Verizon Wireless and Sprint, both of whom continue to offer GPS-based services for $3 a day or $10 a month. Vodafone had acquired Wayfinder in an effort to create a suite of new location-based services and keep pace with third-party developers such as Google and Nokia. But both Google and Nokia have made their offerings free in the last few months, giving consumers turn-by-turn directions and other goodies for no charge beyond the cost of mobile data. So Vodafone will ditch its effort to develop its own products and look to partner with third parties for location services that it can offer for free. And that’s a clear indication that U.S. carriers looking to monetize their branded navigation services will have to find a way to do it without dinging their customers for additional monthly charges.

Image courtesy Flickr user KhE 龙.

We know there are lot of entrants in the group deals space — see my recent piece, Groupon and the Wannabes — but now the competitors are seriously bulking up. LivingSocial — which has more than a million daily email subscribers — is today announcing it’s raised a $25 million Series B round led by U.S. Venture Partners and including Grotech Ventures and Revolution Capital, bringing the company to a total of about $35 million raised. That follows Groupon’s $30 million B round from Accel Partners and New Enterprise Associates announced in December.

Setting up group deals does require capital, because you need salespeople on the ground to find desirable venues and negotiate with them — and given the now tens of competitors in some cities, elbow out your rivals’ salespeople. LivingSocial is currently in 13 cities (it launches four more today), still quite a bit behind category leader Groupon, which is in 40. But armed with this new capital, LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy said the company hopes to rapidly expand its business.

O’Shaughnessy said LivingSocial’s angle, beyond deals, is to help small businesses grok social media in order to keep in touch with their customers. The Washington, D.C.-based company, which has been around for two and a half years with products like online book reviews and drink coupons, launched the deals product last summer. “We’re basically creating marketing budgets for people who never had marketing before,” he said. “There are not a lot of ways to guarantee customer foot traffic like we do.”

LivingSocial, which is not currently profitable as it expands (again, regret the incessant Groupon comparisons, but they say they have been turning a profit for a while), takes a 30-50 percent split of revenue collected from its deals, but it only pays out if its customers spend money, so there’s little financial risk for participating businesses. It primarily brings in customers through daily emails, but it also has an iPhone app with push notifications and a Facebook presence. O’Shaughnessy pushes off the competitive angle, saying many more merchants want to work with his company than they have space for, but says he’ll work to stand out from the crowd with the launch of an affiliate program today and soon launching more personalized subscriptions.

P.S. For those of you who are skeptical of group buying and competing in such a jam-packed space, I should say I’m a total believer. In the course of writing this article, I happily bought a half-off coupon for my neighborhood sushi joint, which happened to be LivingSocial’s San Francisco deal of the day. Speaking from personal experience, group deals totally spark spending and loyalty.

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Hardly a week goes by where we don’t receive a company pitch from a hopeful startup trying to crash the group deals scene. And for good reason, since venture capital firms seem happy to throw cash at well-executed takes on the business model.

LivingSocial is the latest to score a large amount of funding. It raised $25 million in a round led by U.S. Venture Partners, with Grotech Ventures and Steve Case’s Revolution, LLC. That’s fresh on top of a $5 million round announced only two months ago and all of Living Social’s existing investors made sure they got in on this round too.

How does group buying work? It’s pretty simple: Get a local business to offer a deal only if a certain number of people sign up. Send it out on Facebook and if the crowd can round up enough people, the deal is on. There are extra little incentives built in to make it more viral. If a Facebook user can recruit three others to back the deal, they get the offer for free. LivingSocial gets a cut of the business it generates for the local merchant if the deal goes through. The company also opened up additional viral channels today by launching an affiliate program — so if blogs or other sites happen to funnel extra customers through LivingSocial’s deals, they’ll get a revenue share too.

The Washington D.C.-based company will use the new funds to open up in four new markets including Chicago, Denver, Raleigh Durham and San Diego.

LivingSocial’s best-funded competitor is Groupon, which raised $30 million in December. There are scores of other companies with different takes on this business model including Cherry Deals, Compra3, Likebees, luxury-focused SocialBuy and Scoop St. There’s even a Kayak-styled search engine for group deals called Yipit. Unlike other fields we cover, many companies can probably co-exist in this space since it’s not a model that takes a lot of work to make financially sustainable and there’s probably tons of room for niche-focused competitors. (Think Groupon for moms or LivingSocial for athletes.)

The major risk is that one of these competitors breaks out of the pack by offering a self-serve system, where small businesses can sign up automatically to offer group discounts. Most of these companies have a ‘Deal of the Day’ model where there’s a single offer that has to be negotiated between a salesperson and a business. Finding a scalable solution that allows hundreds or thousands of deals to be run simultaneously may be the key to the big bucks.

Tags: group buying, group deals

Companies: Livingsocial

Back in October, Yahoo revealed that Yahoo Answers sees 30 million questions and answers per month, with users contributing 2.4 questions and answers per second. Although Yahoo Answers sees a significant amount of traffic, its design and layout has been outdated. Now Yahoo is rolling out a much-need upgrade and redesign to Answers, which will be implemented over the next few days.

Navigation: The homepage’s navigation bar has four new tabs: Home, Browse Categories, My Activity, and About. Each of the tabs stays on every page you visit in Yahoo Answers. “Home” brings you to the homepage which includes a rotating Best of Answers feature, the link to the Answers Blog and more. “My activity” lets you access your Answers profile, and view your activity on the site. “About” features the Community Guidelines, answers leaderboard, Suggestion Board, and links to the Answers blog.

Browse Categories: Yahoo has redesigned the feature to browse answers by categories. On the previous version of the Answers homepage, all of the categories were displayed on the left hand column, which Yahoo says took up prime landscape on the homepage. Now, Categories is featured in a navigation tab within a hide-away menu. So you can always see the categories on any page via the drop down feature of the “Browse Categories” tab. And you can also lick on the tab j to be taken to the “All Categories” page. From this page, you can access all the questions that are open, resolved or in voting on the site.

Aesthetics: Yahoo has slightly changed the background color of the Answers page; toning down the green and replacing the white background with a light blue palate. Even the smiley icons have received a facelift. With the removal of the categories section, the homepage is a bit more cluttered and roomier. Yahoo says that the backend of the site has been fixed to eliminate a few bugs. Answer category leaderboards will now be updated on a daily basis instead of weekly.

While Yahoo Answers is still one of the leaders in the Q&A space, the site is now facing competition from startups who are innovating in the space, including Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake’s Hunch.