http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/20/japans-mixi-a-social-network-as-a-purely-local-phenomenon/ (5)
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Serkan Toto (156)
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Japan’s biggest social network is called Mixi, launched in February 2004 by the company of the same name. Drawing in one in five web users in the country, Mixi now boasts over 15 million members. The site ranks sixth on Alexa Japan and racks up over 14 billion page views monthly. Google Trends for Websites shows the Japan-focused service attracts than Bebo on a worldwide basis (about 2.3 million daily, see chart below). Compared to ...
Startup Job Site Gets Backing From Y Combinator, Relauches As Startuply (11)
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Michael Arrington (4151)
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New Y Combinator startup Startuply launches today. It’s a free job listing service aimed squarely at small startups, which have a lot of trouble getting the attention of new engineering graduates over the noise of the brand recognition and recruiting efforts of larger companies like Google and Microsoft. Startuply is actually a fresh relaunch of Jowba, which originally launched in 2007. Founders Luke Groesbeck, Ben Wong and Loc Ngo took Y Combinator funding, rebranded (they ...
Tesla Motors Unveils Jaw-Dropping Menlo Park Showroom (34)
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Tesla Motors, the automobile startup with backers that include Sergey Brin and Larry Page, held a party tonight to mark the launch of its Menlo Park storefront. The store, which is the company’s second, will be open to the general public beginning this Tuesday. Despite Tesla Motors’ well deserved reputation as a high-end car manufacturer, it is still very much a startup - the company’s $150 million in funding pales in comparison to coffers held ...
Finalist In McDonalds/MySpace Contest Former McD Robber (27)
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Michael Arrington (4151)
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Well, here’s something that’s so ridiculous it couldn’t be made up. McDonald’s teamed up with MySpace to create a new jingle for the 40th anniversary of the Big Mac. The original song (two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce…) was created back in 1974. Over 1,000 user created songs and videos were submitted - the winner’s jingle becomes the official Big Mac song and will be featured in a McDonald’s Big Mac TV commercial. Enter ...
Edopter Attempts “Social Trendcasting” Through Crowdsourcing And Internet Buzz (10)
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Calley Nye (677)
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Edopter is a unique concept that attempts to combine crowd-sourcing with internet buzz to predict new trends. It’s called “social trendcasting.” The way it works, is by allowing users to generate “trends” according to what they think will catch on. Some trends are “cewebrities” (pictured below), “Batman: The Dark Knight,” and “tap water.” The user who makes the trend writes a “pitch” - the reason they think it will catch on. Then the Edopter system ...
Pressflip Is A Belly Flop (15)
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Michael Arrington (4151)
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Pressflip is a new blog search engine (it’s actually a relaunch of a site called Persai, which launched earlier this year). The idea is you do a search, train the engine by telling it which results aren’t interesting to you, and then wait for new results to come in over time. The search results aren’t very deep compared to established blog search engines, there’s no RSS for the future search results that I can find ...
VC Deals In Charts (Q2 2008)—Exits? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Exits? (26)
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Erick Schonfeld (2229)
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Second quarter data is out on venture deals from the National Venture Capital Association and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Despite the IPO market drying up completely, the What-Me-Worry crowd on Sand Hill Road keep pumping money into venture deals at a steady pace. Venture capitalists invested $7.4 billion last quarter in 990 deals, compared to $7.5 billion in 997 deals during the first quarter (a number that looks like it was revised upwards from the $7.1 billion the ...
Greystripe Monetizing iPhone Games With Ad Platform (10)
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Calley Nye (677)
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The current iPhone App Store revenue share model - a 70/30 split for the sale of apps, generally in the $0.99-$9.99 range - doesn’t exactly reward developers for producing addictive games. Greystripe, an advertising network for mobile games, has stepped in to compensate developers for every time their games are played, not just for when those games are initially sold. Greystripe has actually been distributing free games and applications for about 1,400 handset models since ...
Facebook Sues German Social Network StudiVZ (45)
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Nik Cubrilovic (662)
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Facebook is pursuiting social networks it believes have copied their design or features by suing German social network StudiVZ. The Financial Times has reported that Facebook have filed a suit in the Californian Supreme Court against the German company for what it claims is an infringement of Facebooks “look, feel, features and services”. StudiVZ claims to have 10 million active members, and is the largest social network in the German speaking world, covering Germany, Belgium ...
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jon|k said:
it's about time!!!
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Bill said:
so when will they sue oak pacific over xiaonei.com?
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Josh said:
Ouch. But wasn't Facebook developed in the UK?
Amazon Takes on Oracle and IBM With SimpleDB (1)
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Companies can now go ahead and fire their expensive database administrators—those engineers who keep the Oracle or IBM databases humming. Amazon has just added an enterprise-class database called SimpleDB to its suite of cloud-based IT infrastructure, which also includes storage (S3) and computation (EC2) available by the drink. Today, Amazon is taking sign-ups for the SimpleDB beta, which should start in a few weeks. As it points out on the new Simple DB page: Amazon ...
More Information On Google’s Social Networking Plans (1)
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Michael Arrington (4151)
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Business Week has a long article expanding on the Google Social Nework Platform story we wrote about last month. Key facts from the article: Orkut is 1/4 the size of MySpace (Comscore shows a much closer race), but they’ve recently taken the lead in the Asia/Pacific region. Orkut is also very strong in Latin America, with double the traffic of MySpace and Facebook combined. Business Week also confirms our estimated November 5 launch date for ...
This Week on TechCrunch Elevator Pitches (5)
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Peter Sauer (76)
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A few weeks back we launched Elevator Pitches, our community video project that allows entrepreneurs to pitch their startups through 60 second YouTube videos. Since then we’ve received a number of of pitches covering everything from a fandom portal to a site focusing on group based text messaging. Above, we’ve embedded the most popular of the videos submitted this week. If you don’t like it, don’t blame us (it was voted on by the community). ...
Mint Adds Support For Mortgage And Loan Tracking (23)
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Jason Kincaid (1759)
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Mint, the popular personal finance site that won TechCrunch 40, has further expanded its services by introducing support for mortgage and loan tracking. Users will now be able to keep tabs on their loans from over 1,000 supported institutions. In addition to the mortgage and loan tracking, Mint also monitors users’ savings accounts, credit cards, and investments. Mint doesn’t deal with any actual fund transfers. Instead, it monitors users’ spending habits, producing coherent graphs that ...
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noattention said:
Yeah, and it's awesome.
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Danielle said:
Woo hoo! Going to update my account right now.
Twiddla: Simple Collaboration Software That Works Almost Anywhere (30)
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Jason Kincaid (1759)
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Twiddla, a free service that lets users draw and annotate webpages with their peers, has launched a new version of its site that introduces a number of new features. Compared to enterprise-grade collaboration software, Twiddla falls a little short - there’s no screen sharing or video chat, and the software seems a little buggy. But for ease of use and compatibility it can’t be beat: the browser based AJAX software is platform-agnostic, requires no plugins, ...
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Kerry said:
thats a brilliant site
Does Google Know How To Count? Some YouTube Views Don’t Seem To Register (13)
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Erick Schonfeld (2229)
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A large portion of YouTube videos are watched on other sites in embeddable players (like the one below of Erepublik CEO Alexis Bonte giving us an Elevator Pitch). But if someone watches a YouTube video on a site other than YouTube, does it count towards the total views of that video? Apparently not, or at least not always. One TechCrunch reader had a video of his picked up by a popular site, where it generated ...
Evite Gets A Much-Needed Facelift (8)
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Erick Schonfeld (2229)
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Evite is getting long in the tooth. Every day it seems there is some new startup ready to take it down: Pingg, Socializr, Center’d, MyPunchbowl, Presdo. Well, today the IAC-owned invitation juggernaut is fighting back. Or at least, it’s stirring. Evite is launching a new design in beta today. (On a Friday afternoon—interesting choice of timing). The new site, which is simplified, and has more of a tabbed and modular approach, was built by a ...
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romerotron3000 said:
Holy $hit ... it only took them 8 yrs to update their site ... Sayonara eVite, Facebook has eaten you!
Microsoft Searches Jump 15% After Live Cashback Launch (16)
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Michael Arrington (4151)
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This isn’t enough data to declare Microsoft’s much derided Live Cashback search product a winner, but the first full month after it launched (June) shows a 15% gain in search volume v. the previous month, according to Comscore. This erases the previous month’s losses, bringing Microsoft up to 9.2% overall search share. Live Search CashBack gives advertisers the option of offering users a direct rebate for purchases made after searching on Microsoft. The product shifts ...
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tobias said:
pay 'em, win 'em
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Nate said:
Percentages are great, aren't they? A large percentage of a small percentage is an even smaller percentage. I'm curious how things will pan out in future months. Can Microsoft and/or Yahoo turn the tide?
Twitter Plays Nice: XMPP Firehose Data Feed To Gnip (50)
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Michael Arrington (4151)
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Twitter is living up to its promise to open up its data stream as much as possible to developers. While I was negotiating with Twitter cofounder Evan Williams to sit down and do a video interview at Foo Camp last weekend, Gnip founder Erick Marcoullier was hitting him up to give Gnip, and therefore everyone, Twitter’s XMPP “firehose.” Williams was obviously in a good mood, because I got my interview and, as I just found ...
What Will Facebook Announce at Its F8 Developer Conference Next Week? Let the Speculation Begin. (11)
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Next Wednesday is Facebook’s F8 developer conference, and speculation is swirling about what Facebok might announce at the event. Last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the Facebook Platform for Web app developers, which is now its own mini-industry. So what will Facebook announce this year? We’ve suggested that Facebook might take the opportunity to expand its open source offering, new profile product, or launch Facebook Connect. My vote is for a payments system (confirmed ...
Samsung Instinct Haiku Contest Continues (2)
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John Biggs (1242)
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To recap: Every week we’ll be giving away a cool Samsung phone culminating in the Samsung Instinct! This week gunning for the Samsung Ace. The haiku should focus on sight and must be tweeted to UseYourInstinct. We will close entries for this week at noon on Tuesday, July 22. If you entered the previous contest and didn’t win, feel free to re-enter. Visit CG for full rules. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered ...
