Networking and community sites focused on local markets have not yet produced a major success, (and there have been a few failures) but investors continue to pour money in.
Fatdoor, which we covered here, takes a controversial approach: It mixes phonebook data with maps from Microsoft Virtual Earth to pre-populate its site with basic profiles of everyone in many Silicon Valley communities. You are represented on the site by a pushpin in front of your house, and friends and neighbors can edit your wiki profile without your knowledge. Joining is by invite-only.
This investment is a risky one: the site is still in its initial closed (alpha) phase and has not expanded beyond Silicon Valley. It’s not clear what kind of traction it will get when it tries to extend beyond the tech savvy world. But the team, which includes former high-level employees of Microsoft and has just added a former Yahoo! Executive as CEO, is strong, and VCs like to bet on strong teams.
The company is based in Palo Alto and previously raised $1 million.
Ever wanted to get to know your neighbors before interacting with them in real life? If so, fatdoor, which launches its public beta tomorrow, might be for you.
Fatdoor takes phone book data from companies like infoUSA and mashes it up with Microsoft Virtual Earth, mapping people to their own homes and creating pre-populated visualizations of entire neighborhoods. (see screenshot below). It combines standard social networking functionality and a wiki thats lets you (or your neighbors and friends!) fill out your profile. It registers your immediate geography, and so makes it easy to find like-minded people a street or two away.
Fatdoor will start out covering Silicon Valley and spread outward, so if you live in the Valley, chances are you’re already on the site. In its current form, fatdoor is an opt-out system: If you are in the phone directory, it creates a basic profile for you, and by default, this profile is a wiki that can be edited by your neighbors whether you are aware of fatdoor or not. (You can change this once you’ve signed up) Fatdoor lists the names of anyone who edits a profile, which it hopes will deter users from writing terrible things. But if someone pretends to be you and takes your profile before you, you have to submit proof of your identity — like a driver’s license and utility bill — to get it back.
Individuals on the maps are represented by “pushpins” that look like toy figures from back in the day. Hover over one, and a window with a photograph (if one’s been uploaded) and a link to that person’s profile pops up.
Before you’ve gone to the site and registered, your pushpin stands at your address, which, like the rest of your neighborhood, is crisply rendered in a photographic bird’s eye view. Afterwards, you can move the pushpin onto your house.
Your Fatdoor profile is standard for social networks: personal details, interests, jobs, and so on. You can create neighborhood groups and put them on the map, post shout-outs on a community page and check out listings for local events. Fatdoor also aggregates real-estate information, so you can see whose houses are for sale and for how much. For now, at least, fatdoor does not host videos or photographs. We’re not certain how this site will make money, but perhaps targeted local advertising and real estate information will work.
The interface is clean and simple. The alpha version that we saw in a demo covered only a small part of Cupertino, CA. It had a neighborhood feel, with a page that highlights groups like the “Parent’s Babysitting Exchange,” and the “Kiwanis Club of Cupertino.” That being said, while it looks great for suburban neighborhoods, fatdoor will have serious challenges when tackling cities like San Francisco and New York. I, for example, live in Manhattan and have around 240 neighbors in my building and thousands right next door. It’s hard to imagine how the current interface will deal with this kind of density, but fatdoor’s CTO, Chandu Thota, formerly the Lead Developer of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, knows lots about visualization, so we’ll have to wait and see.
Because of its different approach, fatdoor doesn’t have the same me-too feel that many other networks have. Despite the privacy question, for people inhabiting suburban sprawl it could become a great way to create neighborhood communities where none existed before.
The Palo Alto company has raised $1 million from private investors Bill Harris, former CEO of PayPal and Intuit, and Jeff Drazan of Bertram Capital.
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
Fatdoor, a social networking site for suburban neighborhoods and small communities, has raised $5.5 million from Norwest Venture Partners and KeyNote Ventures.
It combines standard social networking functionality and a wiki thats lets you (or your neighbors and friends!) fill out your profile. It registers your immediate geography, and so makes it easy to find like-minded people a street or two away.
Individuals on the maps are represented by “pushpins” that look like toy figures from back in the day. Hover over one, and a window with a photograph (if one’s been uploaded) and a link to that person’s profile pops up.
