As a European, I’m always happy to see web companies translate their interfaces in other languages besides English. It’s common business sense, since a lot of potential users simply won’t even take a look if the application is not available in their local tongue, and they certainly won’t stay long when all their local friends start trying out a competing service that is. Anyway, FriendFeed understands this too, which is why they’re opening up to a bunch of new users by translating their lifestreaming interface into German (will that be the end of Freundefeed?), French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and simplified...
Not an hour after Google announced the general availability of Friend Connect, Facebook is doing the same for its competing Facebook Connect service. Now any third party website that wants to pull personal data about visitors from Facebook - and send back activity reports to their news feeds - can do so by first filling out a self-service application. The general availability of Facebook Connect comes only a few days later than our anticipated launch date of November 30th. The service was originally announced last May, just one day after MySpace announced its data portability initiative called Data Availability...
3+ year old TechMeme, an automated news site that shows breaking news clustered by topic, has always generated “headlines” by analyzing how news sites link to each other. If a lot of sites start linking to something unique, TechMeme guesses it’s news. That isn’t working, says founder Gabe Rivera today in a blog post: “Only an algorithm would feature news about Anna Nicole Smith’s hospitalization after she’s already been declared dead, as our automated celeb news site WeSmirch did last year.” He’s hired someone to start vetting stories that the algorithm says are headlines, to either push them up or...
Accoona, the highly suspect New Jersey based search/electronics retailer, has suffered what might be its final disgrace - the closure of its last business, Twing. The company, which offered a search product, has a rich history. Founder Marc Armand Rousso has a shady past involving stock fraud, and former President Bill Clinton was a spokesperson for the company. Most of Accoona’s $137 million/year in revenue came from distributing electronics after buying a number of retailers in Brooklyn. In 2007 they canceled a planned IPO. The reason? The underwriter pulled the plug, saying “After completing our due diligence review, we have...
File this one under “Unfortunate Ad Placements.” On a day that the Dow dropped 680 points (7.7 percent), MarketWatch ran the Jack Daniels banner ad in the screenshot above (sent to us by reader Scott Murff). The ad shows the “countdown to the close” of the market in minutes and seconds, suggesting that might be a good time for a drink. Juxtaposed with the headline “Bears Refusing To Hibernate,” it takes on additional meaning. It becomes a commentary on the financial markets themselves: there is not much you can do in a down market but drown your sorrows (so...
It’s the season for top searches, and Ask.com just doesn’t know how to play the game. To compile these, big search engines take all the top search terms for the year and promptly throw the data out. They then compile a list of terms that they think properly reflects key trends that people are looking for, occasionally looking at the actual data for guidance. We saw Yahoo’s list earlier today. Ask’s comes next. And it’s clear they are being way too honest. The top search is Dictionary followed by MySpace, Google, YouTube and Facebook. These aren’t searches, they’re navigation queries....
When Crunchbase, our free database of startup and people information, released an API we started to observe some really interesting applications being built on it. But one of the most interesting could just be Crunchvision which puts on a map the startups indexed in Crunchbase. This service has been created in a couple of days by Mapeed, a french startup who provides tools for creating and serving Google maps that include a high volume of data. If Crunchvision was built on Google maps “manually” it would show an endless number of markers that would make the map unreadable. Mapeed is...
There’s a new version of Songbeat, a simple but powerful desktop application for discovering music online, and I like it. When it was first released earlier this year, the client only enabled you to search for music online using Seeqpod, but the updated version lets you search more engines at once and also lets you easily play, export and download songs. The music industry will be interested to know that the new iteration of Songbeat supports integrated search for Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, iASK ‘and more’. You can use the client to listen to music over the web, or listen...
Joost launched their iPhone application on the App Store this evening, giving users access to 46,000 Joost videos, including major television shows and films. The iPhone has a built in YouTube application already, giving them a serious head start when it comes to video on the iPhone. But archrival Hulu doesn’t yet - giving Joost a little room to maneuver for now. I’m sure it’s a temporary issue, but the application just doesn’t work yet. I tried to play multiple videos, including the full length version of Men In Black, but an error message reads “The connection to the server...
CrunchBase, our free database of startup and people information, continues to grow thanks to countless additions and corrections by the community. The site now has entries on 20,000 people, 10,000 companies and over 1,000 venture funds. The majority of content is added by the community (CrunchBase has wiki features to allow unlimited versioning control to step back if bad entries are made). When an important deal or milestone about a person or startup is reported on any site, people add it to Crunchbase for others to find. We’re starting to see grass roots efforts by local startup communities to make...
There are a lot of Twitter clones out there, often built by companies outside the US trying to steal the company’s thunder by creating local communities with a translated application, something the San Francisco startup has focused little on so far. That this isn’t always a direct road to success, proved German Twitter clone Duduku last year when it put itself for sale on eBay. Not that being inspired is necessarily a bad thing. In the case of Yammer and Present.ly, it’s about taking Twitter’s core functionality and doing something with it that benefits teams in a business environment rather...
RSS readers may make it easy to quickly browse through all of your favorite news sources, but they can quickly become overwhelming - many of the most popular blogs publish dozens of posts a day. Notify.me is looking to help cut through the noise by offering keyword filtering for blogs and other sites that support RSS (like Craigslist), and the ability to send immediate update notifications across a variety of services. Notify.me allows users to create a list of RSS feeds they’d like to monitor for a set of specific keywords. Whenever one of these keywords appears in a...
Technorati just announced on its official blog that the company has decided to lay off six employees as the result of generally poor economic conditions. Management is also taking a 10-15% pay cut, while all other surviving employees are getting their paychecks cut down by 10%. Two of the six departures are from management positions, although no names have been released yet. CEO Richard Jalichandra described those who have been laid off as “high performers who have worked long hours to get us where we are now. They’re also friends, and we’re very sad to see them go. We...
ComScore released its October search-engine market share figures for the U.S. last night. Overall search volume grew 20.1 percent year-over-year to 12.6 billion queries, a decline in growth from the 25.5 percent pace we saw in September, but still quite healthy. Correspondingly, the annual growth in Google’s U.S. search volume slowed from 38.6 percent in September to 29.6 percent in October. Google still managed to eke out an overall market share gain of 0.2 point to 63.1 percent. Yahoo’s market share rose 0.3 point to 20.5 percent, Microsoft’s remained flat at 8.5 percent, Ask’s dropped 0.1 point to 4.2...
YouTube has apparently changed all videos on its site to play in widescreen format. Because most videos on the site were originally uploaded in a ratio closer to 4:3 (the standard size used on non-HD televisions), it seems that most videos are playing with horizontal black bars on the side. Some videos (like this one) seem to be taking advantage of the full space, but are shrunk down to the normal size when they’re embedded elsewhere. It seems that YouTube is either doing A/B testing or that the changes haven’t propagated to all servers (if that’s even possible) -...
It’s cold and dark in November, especially in Finland. But who cares. Following on from yesterday’s “Slush” conference in Helsinki, TechCrunch is hosting some panel discussions on startups in the Nordic and Baltic area of Northern Europe, featuring some of the hottest startups to come out of the region. Tune in for the live video from our Brunch event below, courtesy of Floobs Chaired by TechCrunch UK editor Mike Butcher, the event wil lbe followed by plenty of networking over brunch. The event is run in association with Slush and ArcticStartup and is sponsored by Muxlim. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the...
Revising their previous target of 600,000 HTC G1s shipped by the end of 2008, HTC CEO Peter Chou has disclosed that the company now expects to ship at least 1 million of the world’s first Android handset by year’s end. Of course, these numbers may seem a bit low if you’re still going on the false idea that pre-orders alone reached 1.5 million, a count which blazed across the internet as a result of some faulty calculations in a Motley Fool story. While it’s not quite as mind-boggling as the 1 million iPhone 3Gs Apple sold in just 3...
Pop sensation-turned-tabloid punching bag Britney Spears is ready for her comeback. Britney has just released her new album Circus exclusively on imeem, where you can stream the album in its entirety for free (you’ll also be able to embed the album playlist anywhere you’d like). The downloadable/physical version of the album won’t be available until December 2nd, but you can currently pre-order it through imeem and a number of other stores. The exclusive album launch marks a big win for Imeem, which also recently launched Lil Wayne’s latest record. The site seems to be in a heated battle for...
Microsoft will relaunch Windows Live Search under a new brand sometime early next year, says a source within the company. What we don’t know is what that new brand will be, although a few names have been thrown around. According to our source, a “final” decision has been made, but very few people inside of Microsoft are aware of it, and it could change. Now LiveSide is saying there’s evidence the new search brand will be Kumo, which means “cloud” or “spider” in Japanese. Why would Microsoft go through yet another rebranding effort? Live.com has a lot of different services...
