VentureBeat

There are already a few models out there for helping groups collaborate, including wikis and more complex conceptualizations of project management software.

Into this competitive area of web software steps Grou.ps, a sort of group-focused web software service. The company is trying to combine blogs, wikis, aggregated rss feeds, live chat and other key components of web communication into one, coherent system. One person creates a group and invites more members. Each member has their own profile and sees a dashboard with tabs for each of these features. So you click on the wiki tab, for example, once you’re logged in, and you’ll see a wiki that you and your group members can use together.

Grou.ps also supports photos, links, calendars, forums, maps, user profiles, subgroups — you can mix and match whatever you want — and add third-party services into, such as photos from Flickr.

The core advantage Grou.ps has over its competitors is that it can combine a few key functions on a given page, in a way that’s hopefully just right for a group. Check out this screenshot of a stream of RSS feeds pulled from various sites, coupled with a live chat window, that I set up for the VentureBeat team. The idea is good: Right now, members of VentureBeat read RSS feeds from other sites within Google Reader, Bloglines or another RSS reader service, then chat about them together on a freestanding IM service. Grou.ps would let you do it all at once, in one place.

The problem for Grou.ps, so far, is that the interface is confusing. For example, the VentureBeat team needs to be able to do things like see which feed is coming from where, perhaps to see if a member of VentureBeat broke a story or if a competitor broke a story. In Grou.ps, you can’t get to that level of granularity unless you go into a rather detailed submenu to adjust that setting.

(Note: Check out this more established site, based in Turkey.)

The site has the feel of many carefully-planned interface features like that. In fact, so much forethought has gone into the site that sometimes general use cases have been sacrificed to make sure that edge cases are served. The reason for not showing which feeds are from where when you first start using the feature, the company says, is to create a more holistic feeling of reading a stream of feeds from various sites without having to see where they’re from. In other words, the company assumes that most of its users won’t want to see where a given feed is coming from.

The site is going into public beta now, already has more than 150,000 total users. It has raised funding from Golden Horn Ventures.

Our good friend Mike Arrington of TechCrunch has news on the impending launch of Flickr Video. While it’s a little hard to take an announcement seriously when it’s done via video blogger Loren Feldman playing Shel Israel as a puppet (embedded below), the details of the post seem legitimate.

Whereas market leader YouTube exploded in popularity thanks at least in part to its ease in distribution of copyrighted material, Flickr Video will look to cater to a different audience by limiting videos to 90-seconds in length and/or 150 MB in size (this could change in the future according to Yahoo). Perhaps more notable is that only Flickr ‘Pro’ (paying) account holders will be able to upload videos, though anyone will be able to view them.

The decision not to create yet another direct YouTube online video competitor is a smart play, especially given the predicament Yahoo is currently in with Microsoft (our latest coverage). Yahoo simply did not need to enter another war it could not win.

The amateur photographer and hobbyist audience that enjoy Flickr should appreciate that many of the features such as tagging will be available for videos as well.

Since the aforementioned Microsoft proposal, Yahoo has been releasing new products at a blistering pace. Flickr Video follows Yahoo Live (our coverage), Yahoo Buzz (our coverage), Shine (our coverage) and FireEagle (our coverage), among others. One would hope Yahoo isn’t simply shoving these projects out the door to try and showcase its potential strength to investors going forward — after all, Yahoo Live did have a lot of uptime problems following its launch.

As Arrington notes, the embed player looks very clean and should flow nicely on Flickr pages where these videos will reside next to images.

The new functionality does not appear to be live yet, so we’ll update with more when we see it.

update: While I don’t see the feature on my Flickr account yet, based on the embed code, this video does indeed come from Flickr.

Of note: This has to be one of the worst embed processes I’ve ever seen for a video. There is no option to copy until the video plays all the way through and when you copy it from the player, it does so in a way that makes it nearly impossible to embed correctly in something like WordPress without first copying it to a text editor. You might want to work on that Yahoo.

update: Flickr now has its own silly video quasi-announcement of Flickr Video on its blog as well.

Here’s the latest action:

1) Super Tuesday looks good for McCain, Obama in California
Update: But California went to Clinton / McCain
2) AOL acquires affiliate network buy.at
3) Blue Frog Media files for bankruptcy
4) Google Apps adds security from Postini
5) Solar panels that work even when the sun’s down
6) Baidu sued for linking to pirated music
7) Middle East cable break speculations
8) Flickr users still hate Microsoft

Super Tuesday looks good for McCain, Obama in California — According to the third and last Reuters / Zogby poll, Romney leads the Republicans with 40 percent support in California, while Obama leads the Democrats with 49 percent. However, a more recent WSJ article suggests that while Obama has seen a surge in popularity, Romney’s chances of winning the state have dropped to only 37 percent. Sarah Lacy comments on a poll purportedly showing Hillary in the lead in the Valley: “Based on my personal polling, that’s horsesh**.” We’d tend to agree, but any Hillary supporters out there can feel free to let us know if we’re wrong. For a quick recap of the various candidate’s stances on tech issues (because that’s all we care about here, right?), go to this CNET article and scroll down to the table. Finally, if you can’t get enough of the election happenings, check out the Google/Twitter Super Tuesday Map, mentioned in a VentureBeat article earlier today.

Update note on the above: At midnight, it looks almost certain that Hillary Clinton has won California, along with three other big states. Perhaps it was those quiet Silicon Valley supporters chipping in. McCain performed as expected here, taking the state. The overall race for both parties is still an open field, with McCain front-running for the Republicans and Clinton looking just slightly ahead for the Democratic nomination.

AOL acquires affiliate network buy.at — AOL has picked up an affiliate marketing network called buy.at for an undisclosed price (although TechCrunch UK reports that it was probably around $150 million). Buy.at offers pay-per-action advertising, rather than paying based on other standard measurements like page impressions or click-throughs. The company was founded in 2002 and funded by DFJ Esprit. See the press release for more.

Blue Frog Media files for bankruptcy — Blue Frog Media, an “interactive TV music channel” funded to the tune of $16 million by Canaan Partners and MK Capital, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, according to John Cook at the Seattle PI. The company has a slew of creditors and liabilities up to a million dollars, but the back story is even more complicated, with investors fighting for control and some uncertainty over whether the bankruptcy filing is official. None of that is likely to change the end scenario for Blue Frog, though, with one of the company’s creditor’s telling Cook “We have pretty much written it off.”

Google Apps adds security products from Postini – For $3, $12 and $25 respectively, Google has begun offering message filtering, security and discovery powered by a company it acquired, Postini, to its Apps package (Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar and Docs). The additions show that Google is serious about trying to make its online products more palatable for enterprise use.

Solar panels that generate electricity even when the sun’s down — Researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory have developed a prototype solar panel that could absorb infrared radiation, which is present even at night. Their innovation is using highly efficient “nanoantennaes” embedded in an inexpensive material. More at the INL website.

Baidu sued for linking to pirated music — Baidu may have captured the majority share of the Chinese search market, but part of its appeal may be a certain lax attention to copyrights, according to a lawsuit filed by the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry. The suit points to Baidu’s practice of linking directly to pirated material, a practice the IFPI already won a judgement against Yahoo China for. More at Ars Technica.

Middle East cable breaks a frightening possibility for the future? — The four undersea fiber-optic cables cut near the Middle East have presented a mysterious case: Most serious media outlets have declined to speculate on the how or why of the breaks, but it seems unlikely that four breaks in as many days could be accidental. Thus, we’re forced to turn to Global Guerillas for some nuggets of Ludlum-esque theorizing. Our two favorites: “Disconnection from the global communications grid is very likely to become a form of economic/social coercion in the future,” and, from the comments, “Somebody wanted to (gently) make sure the Iranian oil bourse didn’t open for business until after Super Tuesday.”

Flickr users still hate Microsoft — Appalled at the idea of Microsoft inheriting their precious service from Yahoo, some 1,855 members (at last count) have joined an anti-Microsoft group on Flickr. If unending election coverage isn’t wasting enough of your time today, the resulting Flickr gallery should help. Via TechCrunch.

Here’s the latest action:

Google’s fireworks — This has been an impressive week for Google, and it shows in the 4 percent-plus jump in Google’s stock price earlier this morning (though it has tapered in the past hour). The main driver was its stellar earnings report. But here are the side-shows:

Video: It announced a video-conferencing product acquisition this morning (see our story).

StumbleUpon lookalike: Google also released a tool that looks a lot of like StumbleUpon, the site that delivers Web sites for you based on what you’ve told it you find interesting. Google’s tool centers on a recommendation button on its Toolbar that looks like a pair of dice:

Google explains: “Click on the dice, and we’ll take you to a site that may be interesting to you based on your past searches. If you want another, just click the dice again and we’ll show you a new one. We’ll give you up to 50 new sites per day that might be of interest. If you prefer to get your information at a glance, we’ve added a recommendations tab that you can add to your personalized homepage….We’ll give you a page of recommendations that are updated daily.”

Froogle tossed — Google has relaunched its shopping engine, changing its name to the bland Google Product Search. (We think Froogle is a cool name, and should be kept for a discount version of Product Search.) Google didn’t do much marketing of Froogle. With the relaunch, they’ve changed that: In your main search results, Google will sometimes feature an item from its Product Search if it matches your search query exactly (contained atop the regular results in a so-called “onebox” area). Notably, however, there’s no change from the prior policy of using only products submitted to Googlebase. So Google is forcing merchants to play in its system — unfortunately, not trawling the Web for items objectively, the way that made Google so popular in the first place. (See our story here on this). Google is also prioritizing merchants using Google Checkout, thereby penalizing those relying on PayPal. This is another Big Company move that undercuts its image of impartiality. Too bad. (See more thorough analysis at CNET and SearchEngineLand), which obviously got previews before it was released.

Google phones will be out by the end of this year — Apparently, they’re launching with Orange and HTC, featuring Google search and email built in. They’ll sport the Texas Instruments 3G platform and EDGE, but not GPS. (Details here)

There is, however, some non-Google news:

Twitter spun out — Evan Williams, who runs Obvious, the parent of Twitter, they messaging company that is all the rage lately, says Twitter is being spun out into its own company, Twitter Inc, with a CEO in Jack Dorsey.

Mitt Romney gets private equity support — The former Bain Capital chief, Mitt Romney has raised about $257,525 from buyout professionals in the first quarter, way more than anyone else, according to PEHub.

Web 2.0 Pyramid Watch — Cambrian House, a Canadian company creating a place for people to sell their business online, is moving to Mountain View, Calif., and its latest scheme is to give a share of stock in the company to anyone who signs up for his service, according to the SF Chron. He plans to ultimately sell the company or have a public stock offering. “We really are built to flip,” he said. “I’m the only guy who says that out loud. I don’t know why everyone lies.”

Digg releases API, an answer to MySpace News — News-ranking site Digg has released its API, which gives developers tools to build other products around Digg’s data, and also to integrate it into existing sites. You can use the API to request very specific information about news stories and videos submitted to Digg, digging activity, comments, and users. This comes just as MySpace has unveiled its own Digg-like news service (see our previous coverage), built after acquiring Newroo.

Flickr has integrated Imagekind — This gives Flickr users a way to create prints of their photos, or sell them to others online. Techcrunch has story.
(Our coverage of Imagekind.)

People — especially young people — are spending more time online, and they’re developing loyalties to certain social networking sites.

Many young people have profiles and friends at multiple sites (Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, etc), and it takes effort to keep click through friends’ profiles to see what they’re up to. Spokeo is a new Mountain View start-up that tries to solve that problem.

It is another one of those things that seems so obvious, and helpful: It gives you a way to import, into one page, all of the postings your friends have made at about 20 popular social networking sites. In other words, it combines Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and all the others into one.

See image below. Our left arrow shows where the user has imported all their buddies from the other sites listed on the sidebar. These are imported by pressing an “add” button (a menu lets you pick which site to go to, and then which buddies to import). The right arrow points to the main area where the posts scroll from the other sites, from the user’s buddies.

It also offers a “recommendation” feature. If your friend wants to recommend something they see, they push a recommend button, and the item shows up on your page — even if the source of recommended post wasn’t from one of your direct friends. Higher on the sidebar is a control panel, where you can do things like toggle between your own profiles (”Me”) and those of your friends.

There are a few bugs. We clicked on some of the content, and it appeared MySpace and YouTube were blocking access to some of the content. Also, there are some bugs when creating and pulling in your own profile from some of these sites. But it is early days, and the idea is a good one. And its not like these sites being pulled from will be bending over backward to help. We’ve written before about how MySpace, in particular, has tried to block efforts to draw attention from its site.

Ray Chen, a Stanford student, and two roommates, launched a testing version of the site in April. At the time, they raised an angel round from undisclosed investors in the “low hundreds of thousands.” They officially launched two weeks ago.

They are now six engineers and are looking to hire their first business development person, Chen told us earlier Wednesday. They’re crammed in a 600 sq foot office on Shoreline, enough space for the six people and three plants.

It plans to make money from advertising, but hasn’t started yet.

Zooomr, the photo start-up that has galloped ahead of everyone else in offering edgy photo tagging and sharing techniques, is about to release its latest feature: Zmail.

Zmail, an internal messaging system for the site, will let users notify their friends or groups of the photos they have taken — letting users avoid having to jump to an email client like most photo sites require. Zmail may not be a remarkable invention by itself, but is the latest in a series of features that makes Zooomr stand out for the sheer amount it has been able to do over the past year, on the backs of one and a half people. Its “Portals” feature is intriguing, and we’ll get to it shortly.

Founder Kris Tate (pictured here), who is 18, gave us a tour of the site’s latest goodies yesterday, and our head was spinning. He and ace photographer Thomas Hawk, who works part time at Zooomr, pushed geo-tagging early, have raised a mere $50,000 from angel investor Ron Conway. Lean and low-burning, they have mobilized a bunch of loyal tech fans who are helping translate Zooomr’s site into other languages — giving Zooomr strong momentum in places like France and Japan. That has helped Zooomr surge ahead in areas like geo-tagging (geo-tagging is a feature that lets you stick your photo on a map so that you and your friends, and others, can see it — letting you follow your friends’ activities during the evening, for example, or while on vacation). Zooomr uses Google Maps, which is more advanced in France or Japan than Yahoo Maps — which is the map system industry leader Flickr has to use because it is owned Yahoo.

Kris will likely announce the Zmail system later today on his blog

If you are new to Zooomr, we recommend you sign up and stroll through it. Everything bespeaks of new, even the sign-up system, which lets you sign up with “openid” — a URL identity system worth a look in itself. And this is the challenge Zooomr faces. Will it surge so far ahead of where people are today that it will alienate regular users like you and me who are now only beginning to appreciate the full beauty of Web 2.0 leader, Flickr? Will it take a couple of years before it fully figures out how to make money off of these features? We don’t know, perhaps. But check out some of the features:

Thomas Hawk (pictured here), who was an avid user of Flickr — and still is, for many of his featured photographs — said he got frustrated by little things, such as Flickr’s refusal to provide something as basic as “trackback” information on photos. An accomplished photographer, Thomas wants to know who on the web is linking to his photos. His concern is less for copyright reasons, more about the joy of wanting to know who is appreciating his photos, he said. Flickr wouldn’t do it. One day, Kris Tate asked Thomas what dream feature Thomas would like to have. Thomas suggested trackback, and while they chatting some more, Kris fiddled on his computer, and built a trackback feature within an hour, Thomas said.

Our featured image above is of the Golden Gate Bridge, taken by Thomas. The photo is hosted on this page within Zooomr. You may have to be registered to see the full features on the page, but you will see trackbacks on the bottom. Other features let you see pictures taken of the bridge by other people, because Zooomr clusters photos according to tag and location. It has 50,000 such markers around the globe, such as airports, ocean buoys, and so on — all user generated, and the number is growing.

Kris’ vision is to let you discover and share the details and other data within an image. Take, for example, Kris’ new “Portals” feature. If you click on the image below, you will be taken to Zooomr’s demonstration of a way to embed photo images within images, so that others can see more details than they otherwise would. These embedded images are outlined in a box within the original, and you can see them as you hover over a photo. Here you will see he has taken a picture of a freeway. Within that picture, he has a box, or portal, that lets you enter another image of the freeway sign details, letting you pan around on those details and see them clearly even though they are too far away to see in the initial image.

He has added audio to these “portal” embedded images, and you will see in the demo an example of a soft-drink machine humming at the Googleplex — within the photo.

Zooomr also gives you a way to leave advanced “notes” on images, color-coded according to friend status (green for a friend, blue if it is yours, etc) and tagging photos with a person’s Zooomr username if you hover over them with your mouse.

There is much more, such as a way to build “smartsets” that is in many ways more sophisticated that Flickr’s organizer and sets technology. You can select “Thomas Hawk” and “Golden Gate Bridge,” and then create a smartset that searches for all of the photos with those two tags, and then you can label it say, “Thomas Hawk’s photos of GGB.”

With several hundred photo sites existing today, there is no doubt this company will have a hard time finding a business model in the short-term. But its features are fascinating.

Here’s a roundup of relevant Silicon Valley action, after the long weekend:

Yahoo employee sets up Flickr on his phone, and “captures” thief — Yahoo Web designer Ben Clemens, of Berkeley, said his phone was stolen, but that a program he’d installed made the phone automatically take pictures and upload them to Flickr. And so the phone took photos of the thief, and their Chihuahua. Here is an example (see photo). This is a pretty amazing story, indeed some people believe it must be concocted. Here is the full story. Clemens says he is too simple of a guy to have made up such an outrageous story — even if it does give favorable publicity to Flickr, which is owned by his company Yahoo.

Sequoia’s latest company called “loopt,” but sounds familiar — In Paul Graham’s interview with Techcrunch, we find that his firm’s next company to launch, called loopt, is a “mobile presence” service also funded by Sequoia. Looking for more info, we found the following: Based in Palo Alto, California, loopt is a Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates-backed startup “building a revolutionary service to change the way people use mobile phones to keep in touch with close friends. Using new location-based technologies, loopt lets you know where friends in your private network are by automatically updating maps on your mobile handset and the web.” You know, this sounds very much like that start-up once called Radiate, but which switched its name to Flipt. Now loopt. Third time lucky?

MySpace offers music store to sell MP3s on MySpace; more sophisticated than it appears — MySpace will use Snocap, a start-up founded by Napster’s Shawn Fanning to deliver a competing service to eMusic, an online music store that also offers MP3s. eMusic already has the second largest market share for downloads, behind iTunes.

NewsCorp, MySpace’s parent, may also make an investment into Snocap, acccording to a story in the NYT. The MP3 format allows for the music to be played on the Apple iPod, though the format doesn’t offer any copy protection. It’s therefore unlikely the major labels will want to participate in this system any time soon. The MySpace plan lets artists sell their music at any price they want. MySpace will charge a band or label a fixed fee of around 45 cents, which it will share with Snocap, according to Snocap’s chief executive, Rusty Rueff, in an interview with the NYT. The iTunes store, by contrast, keeps about 35 cents from each purchase, apparently from a willingness to sacrifice some profit in exchange for increased demand for the iPod.

Snocap’s back-end, though, is more sophisticated than most media coverage so far would have you believe, or at least that’s we’re led to believe from a briefing with Gary Little, a venture capitalist at Morgenthaler Ventures, a few days ago. Gary is an investor in Snocap, and he said the company has developed a sophisticated video and audio fingerprinting technology that can identify songs on the Internet. It has also created a registry for digital content and the copyright that governs it. No other service does this, Gary told us. An artist on MySpace can then register at Snocap and define the rules by which their music can be bought — for example setting a track at 19 cents, or an album at $2. He said the format is simply pasted — in the form of HTML — at the MySpace store. The music can be sold directly from a member’s profile page.

Meanwhile, check out reports that Apple will start selling full-length movie downloads on iTunes by mid-September, apparently for $14.99 for new releases and $9.99 for older movies. That could hurt Walmart, which is reportedly paying more for the DVDs it sells. And iTunes users could burn a DVD, thus undercutting Walmart pretty badly. However, looks like Apple has so far only signed up Disney.

The “cheap” Barbarians — Noteworthy story in Forbes about all these start-ups that are offering chips and software at ridiculously low prices, and thus threatening to sack the walled fortresses of Sun, Microsoft, and BEA. It focuses on Bill Coleman, former chief executive of BEA, who is always refreshingly vocal. He recently called Network Appliances’ Warmenhoven to task for calling the stock-options investigation a “witch hunt.”

Video company YouTube is poaching Yahoo employees — YouTube has just hired Yahoo Treasurer Gideon Yu to join the startup as its first chief financial officer, according to the WSJ. Earlier this year, YouTube hired Tony Nethercutt from Yahoo to build its ad sales team.

Mywavez count down — The secretive Menlo Park company, which we mentioned here, is now launching in three weeks, according to its site.

Video site Guba will pay you 25 cents for every new account that is created via your embedded video — (Ok, this news is a bit stale, but merits a mention as it wasn’t covered at SiliconBeat/VetureBeat during our two-day switchover). The offering by Guba may seem like a scam, but it is one more example of the scrappy style needed for survival in this competitive area. Basically, if someone goes to your site, sees a video, and then is inspired to register for a Guba account, you get 25 cents.

Google’s badly named Google Image Labeler made us scratch our head this weekend. The clunky title is one more reminder that Google remains vulnerable despite its invincible image — something that start-up expert Paul Graham also points out in a recent interview.

One advantage that big companies have is leverage. Google, with its many millions of users, is now attempting an end-run around other Web 2.0 photo search sites, by launching a game (Image Labeler) that might end up getting a good portion of Google photos “tagged.” In this game, Google pairs you with another random user, and asks you both to label a photo it shows you both. If you both select the same word to label it, it is a good sign that the label is accurate. You get points, and you move on to the next round. Now, Google isn’t using the conventional word “tag” for this project, perhaps a sign that it fears being sued for using the term (popularized by competing photo site, Flickr, now owned by Yahoo).

But what a name. Google has had a problem building an interactive “community” around its features, and this name reflects that weakness. It may come as no surprise, then, that the game is licensed from outside of Google — specifically, from Luis von Ahn, the inventor of the “ESP Game,” which the Google game is modeled after. Ahn says the game could tag all of Google’s photos within a couple of months. So this game may work.

So where are Google’s blind-spots, if it can simply license technology from outside to do the sorts of things it can’t do internally?

Paul Graham, who leads Y Combinator, a incubator that invests in start-ups, had a noteworthy answer in an interview with Techcrunch a couple of days ago.

He said one of his companies, calendar start-up Kiko, failed in going up against Google, because Google Calendar is the kind of application that Google hackers use at work. Another application that they use is GMail. But other, social networking companies, such as Orkut aren’t used by Google’s internal folks, and so they tend to not to do well.

So a startup could compete with Google if they had an idea so wild that it would freak out the internal [Google] gatekeepers, no matter what area it was in.

And the more wild and freaky, the better, which is why Graham says he is funding an “insane” idea to be pursued by the same Kiko team.