Roundup: TrenchMice, Pheedo's new ads, and more
The latest roundup of tech stuff:
TrenchMice, a nice F***ed Company? — TrenchMice is a new site trying to mobilize people to submit and edit comments about businesses and employers. Let us know what you think. We tried using it to look for info on Google, and not much there yet. It is based in Seattle.
Pheedo‘s new ad platform — The Emeryville start-up, which specializes in inserting ads within RSS feeds, has unveiled a new product. Called “Feedpowered” advertising, it lets advertisers write small articles for their ads, and then feed that text to any site via a little widget (see image). Alternatively, these ads can be fed directly to people subscribing to them. Expedia, for example, has locally relevant feeds, and some people may want to subscribe to keep an eye on good deals, Pheedo says. Moreover, Pheedo has added little social buttons, for Delicious, Digg and other sites at the bottom of the ad — so that you can use Delicious to save the ad to your bookmarks, for example.
Tough week for Google — First, a court rules in favor of Belgian newspapers that sued Google, demanding the search engine remove links to their stories. Second, Google complies with a court order to disclose to Fox the identities of two individuals who illegally uploaded episodes of 24 to Google-owned YouTube. This follows orders from Viacom to take down 100,000 clips. YouTube is slowly becoming a very different sort of place than it used to be. Wonder how its users will take this. Finally, a bunch of media companies are accusing Google of aggressively placing advertising on sites that Google reportedly knew were showing pirated movies. Not good.
MySpace lets media companies block unauthorized video clips — The biggest social networking site said yesterday it is offering a filtering/blocking technology provided by Silicon Valley company Audible Magic, for free. It helps identify the digital audio signature in a video file.
Veoh‘s new look — The video sharing site, out of testing mode, has launched a site using peer-to-peer technology (a technology that users the computers of regular users) to distribute DVD-quality video, or better than the standard YouTube video. People upload videos and then can syndicate them to other popular sites including MySpace and YouTube. The company is backed by Michael Eisner, former chief exec at Disney, among others.
Intel’s new chip, with 80 processing engines — This is apparently a model of chips to be used within five years. Details here.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
