Amazon.com’s web site is down. A message left at Amazon’s PR hotline hasn’t yet been answered. The company’s stock price is also down this morning. It’s not clear why the outage is happening. Readers have noticed it since about 10:30 am Pacific time on Friday. The message that comes up is “http:/1.1 service unavailable.” (as of about 130 pm, the service was back online).
Amazon hasn’t had a big outage for a while. The costs of such outages can be enormous for e-commerce businesses. That’s why such companies have huge, redundant server architectures. That includes having backup data centers in multiple locations and countries. For a company this big, you don’t expect it to happen. But eBay suffers outages as well. In Amazon’s case, the company is leasing out a lot of its data center computing power to small companies. No word yet on whether the Amazon.com outage has affected those vendors too. But the Amazon web services site is also down now.
It’s no surprise that Amazon’s stock is down 3.8 percent, or $3.21, to $81.30 today. But everything fell today and it certainly seems like some day traders are jumping the gun on that. Cnet reported that some Amazon sites outside the U.S. appear to be working. Based on last quarter’s revenue of $4.13 billion, Cnet estimated that a global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute.
Animoto, a company that lets you create music videos out of your photos albums, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Amazon.com.
New York-based Animoto offers a way to create a more advanced version of the sorts slideshow widgets you see on MySpace, made by companies like RockYou and Slide.
Animoto launched last year with a stand-alone site where users could create 30-second videos by uploading photo albums, choosing a song, and letting the company turn it into a sequence of flashing lights, your pictures, and the song you choose.
More recently, Animoto launched a Facebook application, which caught our attention because it made smart use of the photo collections that users have already created for themselves (Facebook is the largest photo-sharing site in the world, remember). This application had a big growth spurt earlier this year, around the time Animoto won the Web Award in the Film/TV category at this year’s South By Southwest conference.
A look at Adonomics shows that the application has since seen its number decline. I asked chief executive Brad Jefferson about this, and he gives some good insight into the nature of building a Facebook application:
For a while we became so focused on viral growth for our FB app that I think we lost sight of the user experience. We were successful in drawing lots of installs through our viral tuning - in fact, we went from 25K installs to over 700K during the week of April 14th - but we weren’t creating raving fans on FB like we have on Animoto.com. We’ve since changed tactics with a renewed focus on the user experience within FB. This change has affected our installs and actives in the short term but we believe it will payoff in the long term. In fact, it looks like we’re starting to see this in the chart you sent in that our daily actives bottomed out on 5/10 and have since started to inch up again.
The company, which is comprised of traditional media producers and technologists, also has a revenue model. It has had more than 160,000 registered users total, with more than 7.5 percent of them paying for a premium service where you can create longer videos and download them in the MP4 file format for further editing.
The company has also introduced a music video production tool designed for YouTube users, and a program for musicians to promote themselves on Animoto. It has also begun launching its application on other social networks.
Here’s a video of Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, talking about Animoto’s usage of Amazon’s developer services.
Here’s a pre-weekend roundup of the latest action:
1) Is the recession coming, or already here?
2) Jaman signs distribution deal with TiVo
3) Amazon buys indie film distributor Without a Box
4) Google probably intends to lose in 700mhz auctions
5) The “UltraBattery” has promise for electric cars
6) China on the verge of becoming largest internet market
7) But they’re worried their citizens game too much
8) Digg’s editing Illuminati
Is the recession on its way, or already here? — While we’ve been snuggled away in our safe world of private investing, Wall Street has been busy crumbling under the psychological pressure of a possible recession. The major exchanges all lost significant ground over the past four days, with the Dow dropping 306 points today alone, leaving it down 14.2 percent from its October high. That, in turn, brought comparisons to the catastrophic drop in 2001, just prior to the last recession. Housing starts also fell, and pundits are saying it’s too late for an economic stimulus package from Washington. But hey, Silicon Valley, look on the bright side — at least nobody will say it’s your fault, this time.
Jaman signs distribution deal with TiVo — Jaman’s catalog of independent and international films will be offered for direct download to TiVo users, under the term of a recent agreement between the two companies. Previous deals inked by Jaman include partnerships with TakeTV and DivX. See the full release here.
Amazon buys Without a Box, an independent film distributor — The Internet Movie Database division over at Amazon.com has picked up a Los Angeles-based film distributor called Without a Box for an undisclosed sum. The company helps independent directors distribute their films to hundreds of film festivals around the world. No official line yet on why, but it’s very conceivable that Amazon will soon be offering a plethora of independent films for download, a move that could conceivably compete with startups like, you guess it, Jaman. (via John Cook’s Venture Blog )
Google may be playing to lose in the 700mhz auctions — Google spent a lot of time and effort trying to impose its own guidelines on the 700mhz spectrum auctions starting in less than a week, going so far as to promise a minimum $4.5 billion bid. However, the company probably has no intention of bidding to win and will likely throw the auction to AT&T and Verizon, according to an analyst interviewed by PaidContent, who goes on to say that the winner “will likely implement the letter rather than the spirit of the open access requirements.”
Combined battery / capacitor could set new standards for electric cars — The “UltraBattery,” a project being run by the United Kingdom’s Energy Transformed National Research Flagship, is an energy storage unit combining a battery and a capacitor. It gets about 50 percent more power than conventional batteries, lasts four times as long, and a test car with one installed just crossed the 100,000 mile mark on a test track. More from ScienceDaily.
China is on the verge of becoming world’s largest internet market — According to a recent announcement by the Chinese government, its population of internet users reached 210 million at the end of 2007, a 53 percent gain on 2006’s year-end number of 137 million. At that rate, it’ll surpass the United States by the end of this month. As it is, only 16 percent of the country’s entire population has internet access of any type.
Next up: The Chinese government hates your gaming startup — Or, at the very least, there’s the potential that they do. The latest target is online gaming, with the government raiding Internet cafes, barring children from entering them and setting time limits on players. This is possible because a good portion of China’s internet users only have access through cafes.
Digg may have secret editors — Social news site Digg, where users supposedly have all the control over which news items make it to the top, actually has editors, says Valleywag. Aside from any sense of betrayal the users might have, though, this probably isn’t a big deal. The point of automation and crowd-sourcing is, at least in part, to keep costs down for startups, something that’s less of a worry for Digg these days. And, judging from the junk content that regularly reaches the top of Digg despite any secret editors, we could almost wish they exercised their powers more.
Amazon.com, continuing its spurt of initiatives to keep up with new technology, has invested an undisclosed amount to music site AmieStreet.com.
This is the first round of financing for New York City’s AmieStreet.com, a year-old online digital music store. The company is different for its radical approach to pricing. All songs are free to begin with. But as more members of the site download a song, indicating popularity, the price of the song goes up, capping at 98 cents.
The site rewards members who recommend songs to their friends on the site, giving them credit for the purchase of additional music on AmieStreet.com. The more popular a song becomes after a member has recommended it, the more credit they receive to spend on music. This drives users to keep and discovering music.
Anyone can upload their music to AmieStreet.com, and all songs are downloadable in DRM-free mp3 format.
Have you ever searched for product reviews online at and come away unsatisfied?
We have. Sometimes we can’t find reviews for a niche product. At Amazon for books, or at Yelp for restaurants, we often get that sneaky feeling a reviewer is biased (written by a friend of the author, or owner). And for cameras or computers at CNET or Yahoo, we’re not sure whether the revenue is targeted to an expert, or beginner. We’re dependent on the reviewer, and don’t know what the masses think.
Enter Buzzillions.com, a new site that claims to rectify these shortcomings. Judging from its stated traction, it is on to something.
Buzzillions gets its reviews from retail clients of its parent company, Power Reviews, a two-year-old Millbrae, Ca. company. Power Reviews gets the reviews in return for offering retailers technology that helps generate reviews. Each retailer sends out a survey after a purchase is made, asking the buyer to rate their product, and to provide other information. If they bought a camera, for example, they’re asked whether they are a beginner or expert photographer. These products are then put on Buzzillions. This way, a person surfing reviews at Buzzillion can search for reviews written people that match their own interests.
See below for partial screenshot. Note the users get to “tag” a product with certain words, and list pros and cons.
Buzzillions makes money charging retailers for the traffic it sends back to them when people click through to products after reading reviews. It charges either by CPC or CPA.
Over four months of testing, Buzzillions.com has generated more than 140,000 reviews on 45,000 products, covering primarily digital cameras, sporting goods, footwear and concerts and theater events. Its customers include Ritz Camera, Abt Electronics, Smart Bargains, Mountain Gear, Journeys. By year end, it expects to double the number sites it pulls reviews from, chief executive Andrew Chen said in an interview with VentureBeat. The company released a launch statement Sunday evening.
By targeting actual buyers with surveys shortly after purchase, Buzzillions’ retailers reach buyers when they are still in a cooperative state in mind. This contrasts with Amazon or other review sites, such as Epinions, where there is little incentive for users to fill out review.
Most retailers have an incentive to maximize the number of reviews they get–even if some are negative–because the assortment builds trust. Studies show that customers are more likely to buy at a site when they see both positive and negative reviews (they’re assured they’re not getting snowed). While Epinions collected two million reviews in eight years, Buzzillions will get a million reviews in a year, Chen said. By also catering to specialty retailers, Buzzillions has a wider a selection of reviews.
Other competitors include comparison shopping engines, such Shopping.com and Pricegrabber.com, which are introducing widgets for their retail partners to collect reviews, though still elementary. Become.com scrapes the Web for reviews, but it collects from everywhere: Some reviews are three stars, others have five, others none, so it has difficulty creating a unified feel. Google could enter the market. Amazon has added product wikis, and expanded reviews.
The company raised $6.2 million from Menlo Ventures and Draper Richards in December 2005, and will be raising another round in July.
Tomorrow, Buzzillions will introduce a feature that lets people add a review to their own blog.
Amazon’s odd and scary patent — First, Amazon rolled out a product called Mechancial Turk (image left), where people do tasks for you that a machine couldn’t perform. Strange name, we thought, but nicely couched in history, and the people still ruled. But the latest Amazon patent puts the machine in charge, breaking down tasks, and commanding the human to do them. According to the patent, just awarded, “the humans perform the subtasks and provide the results back to the server.” Note that the inventors are the guys who have since left Amazon and launched Kosmix, a search engine.
Steve Jobs: Great artists steal — We can’t confirm this yet, but hHere’s a statement reportedly made by Apple’s Steve Jobs. The transcript is on PBS, and the edited version of the video is still at YouTube (see below), and emphasis is ours: “…I mean Picasso had a saying, he said good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.” This airing of this again is notable, of course, because Apple is also in the midst of sparking a revolution in music copyright, prodding the removal of digital rights from its iTunes offerings — and music labels are sensitive about their music getting ripped off. The original video, meanwhile, has been ordered down. (Udpate: This is apparently a well-known quote by Jobs, as pointed out in comments below, so perhaps only relevant in the context of the take-down order).
Viacom vidoes represent just two percent of views on YouTube — Viacom, the large music and video publisher, sued Google for $1 billion for hosting pirated video on its video property, YouTube. But only two percent of views had Viacom-owned music or video, according to a report. That’s more than the other labels and studios, though. See summary by Henry Blodget.
Topix, the news site, opens up to citizen journalists — Topix has been working on local news for a long time, and yesterday opened itself up for citizens to post and edit stories. Question is, why did it take so long? Chief executive Rich Skrenta explains some of this on his blog. Also, note Topix is partly funded by USA Today parent Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune, and so was trying to serve those masters, and lost focus on its own survival. Meantime, though, several other such sites (Newsvine, Backfence, NowPublic, Outside.in etc) have emerged and make Topix a little late to the game. Helps to have your partial owner, USA Today, the nation’s largest newspaper, announce the news, though.
Something fishy with Technorati traffic? — Odd that Technorati, the search engine for blog material, suddenly announces a spike in traffic as rumors circulate it is searching for a new chief executive. Chief exec David Sifry provides the latest details on traffic: Nine million unique visitors over the last thirty days, up from 3.5 million two months ago. At first, we wondered whether the company had hit the wall, and was looking for publicity as it searches for a sale, or a new round of funding. This comes after we stopped using Technorati for blog searches last year — with the emergence of blog material in other engines such as Google. To be fair, though, others are asking the same question, and hearing that Technorati has simply gotten better. Any thoughts?
Capital gains tax on VCs — Venture capitalist Fred Wilson has an good analysis on the debate about the VC tax proposal being weighed in Washington. He criticizes a NYT editorial, which argues the capital gains benefit is excessive. Wilson’s point is that the earlier the stage of investment, the greater the risk, and thus the more justified the tax benefit. Should private equity firms, which invest very late, and take on less risk, enjoy the low taxes they get? Maybe not. But if you tinker too much with VC taxes, the better VCs will leave the industry and become angel investors. The Europeans would love it. They’ve been trying to figure out how to get a vibrant VC industry, and a weaker U.S. industry might push more money over there.
SustainLane gets $3.5 million for sustainable living site — The funding for the San Francisco company is its second round, according to a regulatory filing cited by PE Week. It ranks US cities by how environmentally friendly they are, and provides animated media about people trying to live green and reviews of eco-products.
FatDoor, secretive social network, to launch soon — The Palo Alto-based start-up, backed by Bill Harris, former CEO of Paypal and Intuit, and Bertram Capital, launches April 15, and describes itself as “a wikipedia of people,” with over 130 million people and business profiles at launch. It wants to let you get to know your neighbors, with “…..search and groups based on pre-seeded politics, religion, ethnicity, age, interests, etc.” The site features “three-dimensional geo-spatial visualization of data” and user-generated community publications and “geo-spatial coupons.” Stay tuned
Imagekind is a Web site that lets artists upload their artwork for sale, and gives them the freedom to sell it at whatever price they want.
The six-month-old Seattle start-up has just raised $2.6 million in venture capital, which gives it ammunition to go after the industry’s leading site, Art.com. It will announce the funding tomorrow.
Art.com dictates prices more rigidly — it doesn’t let artists set their own price, and apparently only pays them a 10 percent royalty. Imagekind is more new-school, taking only a charge to cover the cost of printing, framing and shipping and small profit ($8.99 is the base price), but letting artists charge however much they want. Some artists are marking up to $300.
VentureBeat heard rumors that Art.com, of Emeryville, Calif., had expressed interest in buying Imagekind. Amazon.com actually made an offer. However, Imagekind decided to go it alone. Art.com, a 12-year-old company backed by Benchmark Capital and Polaris, has more than 500 employees worldwide and reportedly has $150 million in revenue. Imagekind is tiny in comparison. It struggled to get its first 100 artists last year, but now 6,000 artists have uploaded art. Sales have hit 1,000 pieces a month.
We spoke to President Kevin Saliba, who wouldn’t elaborate on the purchase offers, but said the intent is to carve out a No. 2 position behind Art.com, while focusing on higher quality printing paper than Art.com. To that end, it also does its own printing, and has a partnership with a large frame retail chain, Northwest Framing. The site is built with AJAX and Flash.
Imagekind’s funding comes from some high-profile investors. The round was led by Holtzbrinck, the German publisher that recently bought the German version of Facebook, Studivz, and which has become more active in the U.S. recently. Also participating were Crosslink Capital, the Samwer brothers (early investors in eBay Germany), Erik Blachford (former Expedia chief exec), Nick Hanauer (first investor in Amazon.com) and Bill Trimarco (of Larsen-Juhl, a framing company). Saliba said the 15-person Imagekind raised the money in order to do more marketing and expand to places like Europe.
Rumor is the valuation is in the $5- to $7 million range.
Amazon.com answers Wal-Mart on video downloads — There are so many video download services, it’s easy to get jaded. Wal-Mart just announced its own download service, but the test site looks awful (it still badly garbled as of this writing). A more promising video service is the offering by Amazon Unbox to download movies directly to your TiVo. This is significant: It’s the first service letting people watch regular TV programming and Internet video from the same box. This will be rolled out beginning in a few weeks. Other services, such as CinemaNow, Akimbo and others require buying a new box, setting up a network or other steps that confuse or turn off most people. [Update: Just noticed that Amazon-TiVo consumers will have to order their videos from their PCs, instead of from their TiVO, so this is not as simple as we originally thought.]
News Corp. rethinking ad deal with Google — Google is dragging its feet on filtering copyrighted videos on its new property YouTube, so you’d expect the music and video companies owning the copyrights would play hard ball. No surprise, then, that MySpace parent News Corp. is apparently rethinking the advertising deal it signed with Google last year (see WSJ story). News Corp. is already upset with Google over the copyright issue.
Another RFID company trying to go public — RFID stands for Radio Frequency ID, and refers to the little radio tags retailers and others are placing on goods to track them better. It was supposed to be all the rage two years ago, but the early-bird companies wanting to go public look risky. First there was Alien Technology, which was rejected by the public markets. Now Applied Digital, which a Florida company that owns an implantable RFID unit, is trying for the second time, and still looks risky.
Talking of risky IPOs, Globalstar was always one — We always thought satellite communications company Globalstar rushed its IPO a bit, going public as soon as it got some decent revenues. But it did so after raising a bunch of cash, and not long out of bankruptcy. Were there unknown problems lurking at this company? We couldn’t tell. Now, it turns out all their satellites might just stop working because of technology problems, it discloses. Needless to say, the stock has plunged.
Once high-flying video site Metacafe, imploding? — Traffic is apparently falling for the company, which recently located to Palo Alto from Israel. Company gets a new CEO.
Teliris raises $40 million for telepresence offering - It’s to difficult to understand why companies like Teliris, which is already established, is raising $40 million from Fidelity Ventures and Columbia Capital to build out its “telepresence” offering, when such large competitors Hewlett Packard, Cisco Systems and others have entered the market with similar high-end offerings. With communications costs going down, and more video-conferencing offerings launching for free (albeit perhaps with not such high quality yet), its difficult to know how companies, even large ones, can continue to justify spending several hundred thousand dollars on each room installation. But Fidelity has been a smart investor in the past, so maybe it knows something about the budgets of Fortune 500 companies that we don’t.
Lots of other financings — See VentureBeat’s Newswire for latest deals, including Beceem’s latest funding, to help build out mobile WiMax, Fonality’s funding for VoIP services, Bright Source’s funding for solar power plants, and Baynote’s funding to stave off upstarts like online behavior companies, Aggregate Knowledge.
Wikia, a San Mateo company that allows groups to share information about their interests with wiki technology, has raised a second round of funding — all of it coming from Amazon.com.
It is not clear how much traction Wikia company has gained. The company says more than two thousand wiki sites have been created on its platform, edited by 30,00 registered users. Wikia wants to users do everything outside of Wikipedia’s collaborative encyclopedia process.
It enables “groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions.” Wikis are useful, because they let fans — Nascar fans, for example — find information and express themselves. But they are tricky to manage, and Wikia’s format isn’t exactly elegant. Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales, the founder Wikipedia, which is one of the rare wiki success stories so far. Part of Wikia’s round (amount undisclosed) includes the purchase of the sports community site, ArmchairGM for more than $2 million, underscoring how Wikia is having to reach out to acquire talent and technology. Wikia says it will use the ArmChairGM technology to help it incorporate user-generated news and voting into future Wikia fan sites. With Amazon behind it, Wikia could presumably be used to form wikis around various Amazon product lines. Wikia says it will look for more acquisitions.
ArmchairGM’s four founders, Dan Lewis, Aaron Wright, David Pean, and Rob Lefkowitz, will join Wikia as full time employees and will continue to run ArmchairGM independently.
Last year, Bessemer Venture Partners led a $4 million investment in the company, joined by Omidyar Network, Marc Andreessen, Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman, Josh Kopelman, Joichi Ito and Mitch Kapor.
German competitor rains on LinkedIn’s parade — LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke flew to Germany to manage the opening of a new German Web site there. Upon his arrival, however, LinkedIn’s German competitor, OpenBC announced it plans to go public within the next six months on the German and Swiss exchanges, depending on market conditions. Seemed a coincidence for the company to make the statement, and perhaps an attempt to grab the headlines? The company is reportedly making a mere 6 million euros in revenue per year, not enough for it to go public in the U.S. Guericke, in turn, tells another German publication that the two companies had talked about merging, but couldn’t come to an agreement. (Update: Guericke tells VentureBeat that the reference in the article to “talks” was misinterpreted, and that a merger offer was never made. Moreover, he says OpenBC’s stated traffic numbers have declined, from 1.5 million in a July press release, to 1.45 million in their IPO announcement.)
They both have a similar strategy — letting business people connect with each other through their network. OpenBC has about 1.5 users, compared to LinkedIn’s 8 million.
Google giving bloody noses with “free strategy” – A consistent strategy of Google is to offer things for free — Gmail, video, office apps, you name it — soon, perhaps even phones. Google is offering its online payment feature for free until the end of the year. It’s also offering a new coupon feature and the ability to send customers an invoice by email, all of which are likely to make eBay and its leading payment product, PayPal feel the pain. Now Google’s chief exec Eric Schmidt is probably giving eBay fits by saying phones should soon be free. This comes even as some executives are leaving eBay’s other property, phone service Skype.
The New York Times tries to coin “Web 3.0″ — It has become somewhat trite: Declaring that we’ve moved to Web 3.0.
Web 1.0 was the Web as we first knew it, offering information, but not much way to interact. Web 2.0, the NYT explains, described the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like mapping) and services (like photo-sharing). Web 3.0, the NYT concludes, is the ability to generate semantics, or human-like understanding, so that a Web site can respond intelligently to a question like: “Which American city would be most vulnerable to an anthrax attack during summer?” The story is worth reading, to get a sense of the various efforts underway, but it’s not clear whether we’re getting there anytime soon.
Mentioned are:
– Radar Networks, of San Francisco, which we mentioned earlier here. It is gathering content from web sites, and storing associations it sees between various people and things within its database.
–KnowItAll, a project run by a group of University of Washington, that has been financed by Google. It has created one system called Opine, designed to extract and aggregate information from review sites.
–Cycorp, an Austin company run by Doug Lenat, which is learning by mining the Web and which says it can answer the question posed above about anthrax.
Mark Zuckerberg wearing flip-flops — Lot of brouhaha about Zuckerberg, chief executive of social networking company Facebook, wearing flip-flops at the FourSquare conference, where everyone else — including media moguls — wore perfectly pressed suits. Good for him!
Amazon.com’s web site is down. A message left at Amazon’s PR hotline hasn’t yet been answered. The company’s stock price is also down this morning. It’s not clear why the outage is happening. Readers have noticed it since about 10:30 am Pacific time on Friday. The message that comes up is “http:/1.1 service unavailable.” (as of about 130 pm, the service was back online).
Have you ever searched for product reviews online at and come away unsatisfied?
Amazon.com answers Wal-Mart on video downloads — There are so many video download services, it’s easy to get jaded. Wal-Mart 
It enables “groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions.” Wikis are useful, because they let fans — 