VentureBeat

(Update: CEO Matt Brezina tell us the response has been so strong that he’s closing open access and will make it invite-only this evening.)

Xobni Insight, a new email service that sits on top of your Outlook, launches today at Techcrunch40.

It’s extremely useful and we’ll make a bet now it will win the show here, after the two-day competition between 40 companies finishes (we’ve yet to see half the companies, but it blows away the competition so far. Update: Indeed, Mint, which presented later, has since edged out Xobni to win the prize). We’ve downloaded it, and are playing with it, and find it truly impressive.

We’ve covered the company before as it readied for launch (this link takes you there). It allows you to better organize, search, and navigate your email. It’s key feature is a sidebar in your inbox that shows you profiles of the people you’re corresponding with. It gives you an entire history of your correspondence with them, and much more. There’s a tour here: www.xobni.com/learnmore, and screenshots below. The sidebar profile gives you an overview a person’s email habits (for example, when they are most likely up and doing their most correspondence, according to past usage), their phone numbers, how they rank in terms of frequency of correspondence, past conversations (in threaded form), and files exchanged.

So what? Well, it gets better. Outlook drives me nuts, when I’m trying to find past correspondence on the fly, such as attachments I’ve sent people, or the name of someone’s assistant that I’ve forgotten. Xobni lets you search for someone, and their profile pops up in the sidebar, along with all that information. Xobni has it all sifts through incoming email automatically, lifting phone numbers from people from the signatures at the bottom of their email. You don’t have to do anything. You can replay to email right there, within the sidebar — instead of having to toggle back to the Outlook inbox. The constant toggling between Outlook calendar, inbox and the to-do list is a serious hassle, and Xobni removes all that. Xobni lets you look for stuff within the sidebar, and correspond with people from it — all without leaving the email you were originally working on.

There’s more. There’s an organize feature that lets you manage appointments within the sidebar profiles, manage to-do lists and “stay-in-touch” with close friends or contacts you haven’t emailed in a while. There’s an analytics portion too, showing your own email habits, by things like volume and time. The site says the product is only available by invite, however we downloaded it fine from the site just now. Try it out.

[Disclosure: Satisfaction is led by Thor Muller, who is an advisor to VentureBeat. ]

Satisfaction, a San Francisco company that aims to improve online customer service by letting the customers effectively take over the process, has raised $1.3 million seed funding.

VentureBeat reviewed the company two months ago. Satisfaction creates customer support pages for companies and their products. But it goes beyond the standard customer support pages. It gives companies a way to provide answers — but also lets customers answer the questions. The more popular answers get voted to the top of the pile. If a newcomer asks a question that is similar to one already asked, Satisfaction gives the answers already provided.

The funding comes from First Round Capital, O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, and others including Jeff Clavier, Adaptive Path, Mike Brown, Jason Schultz (EFF)

The company also opened up the site so that anyone can create a customer service site for a company or product (until now it had been in testing, and you had to apply).

The company also has two other new offerings. First, it has released a widget of the customer service page for companies to embed if in their own support pages.

Second, it also lets companies embed a more dynamic FAQ page. Satisfaction assesses the questions that are most frequently asked, and updates the FAQ page in real time — as the issues being asked about change. See below for an example of this being done at a handbag site, Timbuk2.

Bazaarvoice, which incorporates product reviews into e-commerce sites, has declared a $9 million second round of financing, one day after its primary competitor, PowerReviews, announced $15 million in financing.

Despite the fact that the companies provide a similar service, they are quite different. PowerReviews gives its service to e-commerce sites for free and aggregates the reviews that get written in on its own Buzzillions site. It makes money when consumers visit Buzzillions, find a product, then buy it from one of the partner sites.

Bazaarvoice, based in Austin, Texas, is entirely a business-to-business company. It charges its e-commerce sites a fee to add product reviews, starting at $2000 per month for small sites and scaling upwards from there. The company declined to disclose how much they charge its marquee clients, which include QVC, Home Depot, HP, and Wal-Mart, among others. See screenshot of Wal-Mart example below.

Unlike Power Reviews, it does not have a destination site, and chooses instead to syndicate its reviews to 25 shopping portals, including MSN, Smarter.com, and Pricerunner.

This strategy is apparently giving the company an edge. Bazaarvoice’s founder, Brett Hurt, claims that when his company and PowerReviews go head to head with a major retailer, Bazaarvoice is winning 90 percent of the deals. He also says that the company has been profitable since March of this year. He raised the round to expand beyond retail and into financial services, health care, travel, and even manufacturing.

Bazaarvoice intends to double the size of its sales force from 16 to 32 over the next few months.

He also plans to go global, opening offices in Europe and Asia, where the number of e-commerce sites with product reviews lags far behind the U.S.

Finally, Bazaarvoice will build more products. It is currently implementing an “Ask and Answer” feature, where unsure customers can ask questions about products and informed customers can answer. Brett says that this feature has generated significantly more user-generated content than reviews alone.

Battery Ventures led the round, which included Austin Ventures and previous investors First Round Capital.

Photobucket, a Silicon Valley start-up, has quietly become the third largest video hosting site after YouTube and MySpace — reporting more than 35,000 videos uploaded every day.

Next Tuesday, it announces some extensive image and video editing tools it hopes will help keep bringing people to the site. These users can post the edited versions to any of several popular sites, such as MySpace, Faceboo or Bebo.

These Photobucket editing tools, to be announced in a partnership with Adobe (the company that makes the popular Flash technology used for video editing), could take the wind out of the sails of smaller competitors.

Photobucket will let you edit by adding captions, bubbles, frames, transitions, music, and other effects — and by dragging and dropping the resulting content to a “sceneline” (you can get a sense of the editing dashboard in screenshots below). The service goes live shortly for paying Photobucket users, and then to the other regular 35 million users in March.

Techcrunch reported on some of this earlier.

You may have heard of other video editing sites, such as Eyespot, Jumpcut (bought by Yahoo), MotionBox and MovieMasher. The average user wants to edit videos easily, and without being shut in the proverbial “walled garden.” Some of these sites let you upload a video and edit it, but can be limiting if you want to edit a video you see somewhere else.

Cuts.com, a new start-up, is trying to push things forward. It lets you grab video from any site — with help from a bookmarklet — and lets you edit it at Cuts.com. You can then post the edited version on your blog, or send it on to friends with some html code. Cuts.com plays the video from within a player (see examples here; lots of farting). Additionally, Cuts.com doesn’t change the video’s underlying code — so when you send it to a friend, they can erase your edits, accept some or all your edits, and then tweak it with their own edits, and pass it along again. You can sign up for a testing version now. This verson lets you ad captions, sound effects (farts have become popular), skipping of sections, and looping (which is where a portion of video is repeated).

Cuts.com wants eventually to let you edit full-length DVDs, and then offer the editing tools to cable companies, to add to their DVR boxes, for example to allow parental controls, says chief executive Evan Krauss.

Cuts.com is a team of five, hailing from Yahoo, Yodlee, eBay and Half.com. It has raised $800,000 from First Round Capital and other investors, most of it raised earlier this year.

It wants to make money with advertising on the site, and may try to license its software to video sites.

Updated

Attributor, a Redwood City start-up, is scanning the Web to fingerprint pages for copyrighted audio, video, images and text, to give publishers a way to request that Web sites take down priated content — or pay for it, at least.

The company’s statement is here; there’s a good summary in the WSJ today.

This service has an obvious market, highlighted by YouTube’s continued hosting of pirated video and music. Publishers need tools to find that content, in order to request YouTube take it down.

The company has just raised a second round of venture capital, bringing its total to $10 million. Led by Sigma Partners, the latest round includes Selby Venture Partners, Draper Richards, First Round Capital and Amicus Capital. Ron Conway is also a seed investor.

It is the latest company of Jim Brock, formerly a Yahoo senior vice president of Yahoo, and Jim Pitkow, former chief executive of Moreover, who has done extensive research in information retrieval.

Its also the latest company with a name ending with the active/aggressive suffix, “-tor,” as in termina-tor and. Another product, Xcavator by CogniSign, is also looking at ways to help publishers find copyrighted ads online.

Indigo Stream Technologies, based in Gibraltar, offers a free service called Copyscape that does something similar to Attributor — it assesses a Web page and then uses Google’s search engine to look for a pirated copy elsewhere the Web.

Attributor is still in testing mode, but should be released next year. We first mentioned Attributor in June.

(Updated below with comments from chief executive George Garrick)

Jingle Networks, a Menlo Park start-up which provides free phone directory assistance, has raised a whopping $30 million more in venture capital — upping the ante in what is now a crowded field.

This area has become popular because people find this an easy way to avoid the $1 to $3 they get charged using regular DA service.

Jingle, which markets itself as 1-800-Free-411, supports the free service by injecting advertising snippets in it responses. If you call them at 1-800-Free-411 looking for a particular local pizza company, for example, you may be offered a voice ad from a competing pizza company.

Competitors (see our early stories here and here), include San Diego’s 800ideas.com, which provides different 800 numbers depending on the city you are in, and Palo Alto’s 1-800-411-Save. (Update: InFreeDA, a San Francisco start-up that went live earlier this year with 1-800-411-METRO, has effectively closed shop. Thought he company told us in August it hadn’t closed down — and was just doing a major restructuring — we just tried using it, and got an “all circuits are busy” message, twice.)

The venture round is significant because it brings the company’s total funding up to about $30M over the past year (it got $26 million in April, and $5 million in December, three months after launching).

This latest third round was led by Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Hearst Corporation. Previous investors Comcast Interactive Capital, First Round Capital, IDG Ventures Boston and Liberty Associated Partners also participated.

Jingle says it now enjoys three percent of DA calls in the U.S., accounting for more than 13 million inquiries from more than four million consumers each month.

Among its advertising customers are CBS, which promoted its fall lineup with audio spots in the DA responses, and 1-800-flowers.com and 1-800-Mattress.

Chief executive George Garrick told VentureWire in a story (sub required) this morning that the company’s post-money valuation was “about $150 million.”

[Update: We just got off the phone with George Garrick, who confirmed the valuation was "slightly higher" than $150M. The large amount of cash is needed, he said, to build out the service. Advertisers come later, because they don't take a company seriously unless it can show five to ten million calls a month, he said. And he says Jingle has hit the tipping point, with about 450,000 calls daily. He expects revenue of between $1 and $5 million this year -- he wouldn't specify further -- and "ten times" that next year, he said. He said Jingle is the clear leader in free DA service, in part because of its more recognizable number. InFreeda has shut down, in part because of its less memorable name, he added. Palo Alto's 1-800-411-Save, meanwhile, is only placing between 5,000 and 10,000 calls a day, he said. We've reached out 1-800-411-Save for comment. No one else has raised close to this $30M, he pointed out. His real fear (he corrects; he did not say he feared them) assumption is that the carriers will unveil an ad-supported free DA service, he said.]