Twitter update

Twitter, you need to do a better job at communicating with the developer ecosystem that has been formed around your API for the past couple of years.

At least, that’s the message the developers themselves seem to be sending out to the startup at an increasing rate. Jesse Stay from SocialToo wrote something about this earlier today on his blog, criticizing the startup over a change it made to its following limit policy without notifying anyone else prior to the tweak actually being implemented.

Now we’re getting more and more incoming from developers who have noticed that OAuth, an open authorization protocol that Twitter’s been testing in public beta for about a month now, has been “temporarily disabled”. Naturally, Twitter is abuzz with angry and confused third-party application developers, some of which started reporting the fact that oAuth stopped working as early as three days ago. That means some of them have been unable to let new users sign up for quite a while, and although some are saying that Twitter knows about the problem and is working on a fix, silence from the company seems to be the key trend here.

Netbase Update

Regular search engines such as Google and Yahoo use statistics to make sense of the Web. They count links, keywords, and other items on a page to determine its rank in search results. Semantic search engines try to actually understand the meaning of the words found on the Web and other documents to bring back the most relevant results to a query. Microsoft bought Powerset for $100 million to gain semantic search expertise, but so far all it can search is Wikipedia.. Hakia, Textwise, and other startups are also working on semantic search. Now comes NetBase, which brings a slightly different approach that its says can scale to the entire Web.

NetBase has been around for a while. Originally called Accelovation, it has raised $9 million in two rounds of venture funding over the past four years, has 30 employees, and counts among its current customers P&G, Caterpillar, 3M, BP, Kraft, BASF, and Goodyear. It is now changing its name and offering its core semantic indexing technology as a platform for other companies to build their own products. Already, scientific publisher Elsevier uses NetBase to power its Illumin8 research tool for searching scientific articles, patents, and Websites.

NetBase takes a sophisticated linguistic approach, actually diagramming sentences to determine the relationship between words and phrases. It does particularly well with causal relationships, allowing it to tease out cause and effect from raw text. For instance, in the sentence, “The calcium, potassium and magnesium found in yogurt can help reduce your risk for hypertension often resulting from stress, obesity, and other factors” NetBase can identify that “stress” and “obesity” are causes of hypertension and that “calcium,” “potassium,” “magnesium,” and “yogurt” can be used to counter hypertension.

The company has already indexed about 8 billion Web pages and processes 100 billion sentences a month through its semantic parsing. Once it identifies causes, effects, and other relationships, it can serve them up in search results along with top-ranked links. For instance, a health-related search could turn up a guide that includes related symptoms, causes, drugs, and treatments. The technology also lends itself to Q&A types of searches. You could ask, “What companies are developing semantic search technologies?” and it will return a list of companies along with the snippets of mention that company and semantic search.

I’ve tried a few demo searches set up to do various things such as provide the pros and cons of a product, the companies in a particular market, or causes and effects of a medical problem. The results were impressive. On the whole, I’d say they were at least 70 percent relevant, compared to the much larger proportion of irrelevant links I get when I do a Google search. But it was slow. NetBase took 5 seconds or more to return results, something it says won’t be as big an issue in a production versions of its technology.

NetBase is not building its own search engine, although it plans to create a health-related search engine around PubMed content as a proof of concept Instead, it is targeting large publishers and companies that want to create their won vertical search tools, which combine data on the Web with their own databases of content. This is definitely an enterprise play. Licensing starts at about $100,000 and goes up from there.

The Netbook Buzzword

In this day and age, with technology, no one works alone — that’s how Soonr sees it. And it’s a key part of the company’s offering: collaboration. Another is portability, and with the launch of the 3.0 version of its software, Soonr is expanding in both of those areas.

And this update comes complete with an attempt to leverage two of the hottest things out there: the iPhone and netbooks. Soonr launched its iPhone app back in January, and despite supporting some 800 phones, the company still touts that one as a key part of its business. And netbooks are a slightly newer phenomenon that the company is now mentioning as fitting in to what it’s trying to do. Sure, Soonr works on netbooks, just like it works on other computers. But buzz-worthy products aside, the key idea is that you can access your documents from a huge variety of devices, no matter where you are.

And version 3.0 offers some updates. One is called “Projects.” It allows users to better organize specific files together in the cloud. Another new feature is an admin interface so that team leaders can better oversee the collaboration going on. Another lets users send faxes from a mobile device with eFax. There is also support for video playback and a completely revamped UI. But the biggest new feature has to be the search functionality. It promises to work not only on titles of documents on your local machine/phone, but also will search text within documents across the entire network of devices attached to the files in the cloud.

For the first time with the 3.0 release, Soonr is offering a premium version of the product itself. Previously, it offered a free version, and premium versions through various partners. But apparently, it’s moving away from the white labeling idea, and trying to make money by selling the product on its own. For the premium version, prices start at $7.95 a month, but users can add a lot of options for higher fees. If you need it, you can get 2 terabytes of cloud storage for your documents.

I’m a little wary of the buzzwords, but Soonr has a solid product, that simplifies working with documents in the cloud. This looks to be a nice update to it.

LogLogic

LogLogic, a security and log management firm that helps companies sort though log data in their IT systems, has acquired security management company, Exaprotect, for an undisclosed amount. Exaprotect’s software monitors and manages companies’ IT security threats and breaches.

LogLogic, a Sequoia and SAP Ventures-backed private company, offers companies a suite of software products that helps IT departments make sense of logs of IT audits, compliance, and threats, other operational data. Customers can also build their own applications and workflow from LogLogic’s log management software. LogLogic has nearly 800 customers. LogLogic is hoping that this acquisition will help the company edge out competitors RSA, IBM and ArcSight for market share in the security management space.

Exaprotect brings to the table 200 big-name customers, which include Visa, Turner Broadcasting and Apple. And Exaprotect’s security breach prevention and management technology will be added to LogLogic’s roster of IT management services.

LogLogic has received $49.2 million in venture funding from Sequoia Capital, SAP Ventures, Focus Ventures, TeleSoft Partners, Worldview Technology Partners and Invesco Private Capital.

The Future Of News Media

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study today that claims bloggers and journalists have an “uneasy” optimism about the future of news media on the web. But, the study says, their optimism definitely trumps that of broadcast and print employees in traditional media industries.

According to the study, most journalists who work in the online news industry believe that the internet is having a negative impact on fundamental journalistic values, including a loosening of standards (45% of respondents felt this way), increased emphasis on speed (25%), and the addition of voices from outside the traditional media institutions (31%). While there’s no doubt that the internet is changing the way journalism is conducted and delivered, I’m hesitant to think that speed and increased diversity of viewpoints from outside the industry is detrimental to journalistic integrity.

Online journalists are cautiously optimistic that their publications have viable business models compared to traditional forms of media. Over 60 percent of respondents reported that their online news units were making a profit. But only four out of every ten online journalists are “very confident” that online news can find a profitable business model for journalism, and are worried about the money-making prospects of internet advertising. Roughly two-thirds of journalists surveyed predicted advertising would be the most important form of revenue for news websites in three years. That in itself might be an overly optimistic projection for online advertising revenues, which today only accounts for less than 10 percent of overall newspaper advertising dollars in the U.S., and actually showed a slight decline last year. Print advertising, however, is diving faster than anyone expected.

Interactive Advertising Bureau Report

In an upbeat report this morning, the Interactive Advertising Bureau reported that internet advertising in the U.S. grew 10.6 percent to $23.4 billion. And the $6.1 billion fourth quarter (up 2.6 percent) was the first time Internet advertising surpassed the $6 billion mark. That said, the rate of growth declined both on an annual and quarterly basis. Even the 4.6 percent sequential growth over the third quarter was the lowest since 2002 (as was the annual growth rate).

The IAB also trotted out some numbers showing that Internet advertising revenues are outpacing TV advertising by some measures. The $23.4 billion in annual internet advertising spending exceeded advertising on cable TV for the first time (which was $21.4 billion), and took the No. 3 spot behind national and local TV ads ($29.8 billion) and newspaper ads ($34.4 billion).

Online Advertising Future

Eric Clemons caused a stir earlier this week with his assertion that advertising will fail on the internet, that “it is going to be smaller, not larger, than it is today.” I disagree. In particular, I disagree with his position that search advertising is “misdirection” where companies like Google are “diverting” customers to places other than where they wish to go unless advertisers pay them. Search advertising, in the way he describes it, sounds like some type of protection racket you might see on The Sopranos.

Clemons provided no proof for the allegations he made against search advertising. He linked to no research nor any studies showing that any of the things he asserted were actually happening. Despite this, he made broad statements such as “misdirection frequently takes the form of charging companies for keywords and threatening to divert their customers to a competitor if they fail to pay adequately for keywords.”

I’ve covered the search space for nearly 15 years now. I’ve covered Google since it first existed. This type of misdirection is what Clemons called “Google’s business model.” But somehow in all my years of covering Google, I’ve never heard of any company being “threatened” in the manner he describes. Not once. If this were commonplace, I think I’d be able to dig up a story or two from over the years that supports the business model he asserts. I cannot.

Certainly there have been lawsuits over the years about Google showing ads that appear in response to terms that are also trademarks. These have produced different rules for different countries. For example, in the United States, you can be prevented from using a trademarked term in the ad copy, but the term can “trigger” an ad to appear. In France, you can be prevented from buying an ad on Google that appears in response to a term that someone has claimed a trademark on.

Somehow, Google has struggled on in France. That it continues to earn money there underscores an important point — not all searches involve brand names. Searches don’t always have the “one answer” that a searcher could potentially be diverted from. Search for “apple,” and what did you want? Apple computers or information about apple the fruit? Search for “fixing a Macbook,” and did you want official advice only from Apple or perhaps third-party resources. If you wanted third-party resources, which among them were the “right” choice that Google might have prevented you from going to by showing an ad? Search for “financial crisis,” and does anyone know which “one” resource was supposedly threatened not to appear unless they bought an ad?

Only a chunk of all searches involve a “one source” answer that would fit into Clemons’s characterization. What percentage that is, I don’t know. I don’t recall stats like this being published, nor did Clemons provide any to base his assumptions on.

Let’s assume it is a large chunk. Let’s further assume that perhaps Google doesn’t need to tell brand owners that they need to buy ads or risk exclusion — they just know that’s how the “game” works. From those assumptions, let’s then look at how it breaks down.

Search for “Yahoo” on Google. No ad, but you get Yahoo at the top of the “free” listings. Search for “American Airlines,” and the same thing happens. So, too, for “Target” or “TechCrunch” or my own site, “Search Engine Land.” Same for “Proctor & Gamble,” “NFL” or “Taco Bell.” Are these companies all ignorant of Google’s shakedown scheme and lucky? Are they carefully crafted pre-positioned exceptions in case this type of debunking was needed?

Search advertising is not misdirection. Search advertisers themselves can attempt to misdirect consumers (and have faced lawsuits and legal actions when they’ve tried). But to say, as Clemons did, “Misdirection, or sending customers to web locations other than the ones for which they are searching. This is Google’s business model,” is a gross mischaracterization that should be obvious for anyone to see.

This also brings things back to his overriding assumption — that internet advertising is failing. Search advertising is the strongest segment of internet advertising, and it has continued to grow. In the midst of the worst economic recession the US has seen in decades, search spending looks to either grow only less slightly than in the past or perhaps have a small single digit contraction. That’s not a failure, not in my book.

Moreover, the downturn in internet advertising seems far more a failure of the economy right now than a failure of existing advertising models. Ironically, while Clemons argues that no one wants to view advertising, there’s plenty of evidence that they will do so in return for things provided for free.

TV viewership is down, yet millions still flocked to watch Battlestar Galactica last weekend because they wanted to see it live — as it happened — and endured the commercials as a result. If they shot over to Hulu to watch it because they lacked a DVR, they again endured commercials in return for the convenience of seeing the recorded show.

Elsewhere on the web, more and more are encountering overlay ads, those ads that appear before you can proceed into a web site. They interrupt the viewing experience. I don’t like seeing them myself. But as a publisher who has used them, I can also tell you they are amazingly effective — nor do they result in mass numbers of people abandoning your web site, where they get good information, free of charge.

Advertising, especially offline, has an issue in that people will avoid interruptions if they can, nor do they particularly trust interruptions. In addition, offline ads are poorly targeted compared to those online and tracking performance is laughable compared to metrics for internet ads. But that advertising still works. On the internet, which continues to grow its audience, advertising is smarter, more targeted, more measurable and ultimately will find a place to be more successful, in my view.

Clemons’ Rebuttal:

Great response. I disagree with parts of it, but it is well-reasoned and in places quite convincing. Mr. Sullivan presents no data and no studies, but some very persuasive stories. Nicely done.

What is the strongest point of disagreement between us? Mr. Sullivan argues that in all his years thinking through and working through issues in internet advertising he has never heard any company or any individual complain about paid search. In contrast, I have been hearing this complaint from senior vice presidents in travel companies for years, and this year the chorus has been joined by retailers and manufacturers.. I am not suggesting that Mr. Sullivan is deaf, out of touch with reality, or in denial; he just does not work with the same executives I do.

As for others who believe that some types of paid search are a form of misdirection, I suggest that interested readers check out the website for Alliance Against Bait and Click, which is funded by several companies, all of them large household names, all of them major players in their industries, and all of them quite angry. Although it did not pass, Utah House Bill 450 sought to criminalize part of Google’s current business model—specifically the selling of trademarks as keywords to trigger paid search ads. Readers interested in more detail on the subject of abusive search advertising can review the blog of Professor Ben Edelman at Harvard; Professor Edelman has a law degree and takes a more formal legal and regulatory stance in his blog than most readers of TechCrunch might enjoy.

I am convinced that at least some major corporations view sponsored search the way I do, in part because my views were informed by discussions with them. Their principle concern, and mine, is not solely the abuse of corporate trademarks in sponsored search and trigger ads, but the entire nature of sponsored search and Google’s monopoly power in the area. And, of course, Google mostly does not misdirect; it is too clever for that. If most sponsored searches were unresponsive to consumers’ needs, sponsored search would fail.

Google’s business model is to threaten misdirection on sponsored search, but actually to engage in it as infrequently as possible. If the company consumers really want (Marriott, Continental Airlines, 1-800-CONTACTS) pays enough then it is listed in the top lines of sponsored search. If it does not, then Google places a competitor there. Obviously, if the sponsored search links never got consumers what they wanted, sponsored search would not work either for consumers, or, ultimately, for Google. Google does not require that the top companies bid top prices, but it does require that they pay. Google knows who to place on top, but will not do so unless the companies actually bid sufficiently high prices for relevant keywords. This was all treated in considerable detail in my previous post.

All of this really has little to do with the main argument of my original article. Regardless of what Google does or does not do it is not the business model that the rest of the net is going to follow. The New York Times, BusinessWeek,, and LinkedIn are not going to fund their Websites by operating search engines. This should not need to be stated. I am arguing, based on discussions with editors, that they are not going to fund themselves with ads either. This is the essential takeaway of the first half of the post.

So, what is left to discuss? Where else do we disagree? I stand by my earlier points:

* Users don’t trust ads

* Users don’t want to view ads

* Users don’t need ads

* Ads cannot be the sole source of funding for the internet

* Ad revenue will diminish because of brutal competition brought on by an oversupply of inventory, and it will be replaced in many instances by micropayments and subscription payments for content.

* There are numerous other business models that will work on the net, that will be tried, and that will succeed.

The last point, actually, seemed to be the most important. It was really the intent of the article, and the original title was “Business Models for Monetizing the Internet: Surely There Must Be Something Other Than Advertising.” This point got lost in the fury over the title of the article and in rage over the idea that online advertising might lose its importance.

I’d like to offer Danny the following wager: I bet that in five years revenues from internet advertising will constitute less than 20% of internet business revenues, excluding revenues from the sale of physical goods. Winner buys the loser lunch and gets to gloat.

Sullivan’s Rebuttal to the Rebuttal:

Many searches are ambiguous about what should be the “one true answer” that Clemons seems to believe exists. If you search for “is Coke better than Pepsi,” who is wrong for buying an ad that appears in response? Coke, Pepsi or both? Trademark owners have reserved rights to a word, not all uses of it. And in a search for “Are diet colas bad for you,” there’s no trademark usage involved. Who is Google supposed to “threaten” about not getting placement, in that case?

As for the bet, I won’t take that one. That’s because I agree, many sites cannot sustain themselves solely on advertising. Mine certainly doesn’t. Our revenue comes from online ads, paid memberships, lead generation and conference attendance. As a veteran web publisher, I know that in my particular space, online ads alone don’t cover the bills.

There are plenty of other examples. Right now, some newspapers are reconsidering whether they should have “opened” their sites to non-paid subscribers, since ad revenues are plummeting. But even when ad revenues were high, the ads alone weren’t covering all the costs that go into producing the New York Times. Other streams such as print ads and print classifieds were helping to keep the online site going.

But that also reflects the fallacy in Clemons’ argument. In the offline world, do advertising revenues generate more than 20% of total revenues outside the sales of physical goods? I don’t know. I suspect not, and I suspect they never have. Even before the web, the New York Times was not covering its costs 100% through ads. In its pure bricks-and-mortar life, it was using multiple revenue streams.

So yes, I agree that many sites need to diversify their revenue with alternatives to display ads. Some of these methods will be alternative advertising models. Some of them won’t be advertising at all but still generate revenue. Ads certainly haven’t been the sole source of revenues for many web sites in the past, and there’s no reason to think that will change. Similarly, there’s no reason to assume that ads would be the sole source of “real world” revenues for a company.

I also agree that ads cannot be the sole source of funding for the internet. Of course, I never said that this was the case. Nor do I know of anyone who has ever seriously suggested this. Clemons seems to be arguing against an idea few people have had.

Just because many web sites on the web or many companies in the real world don’t earn the majority of their revenue through advertising doesn’t mean advertising is failing. In terms of the internet, I think internet advertising will continue to grow as more people come online and the space continues to mature. And I’m happy to bet this will happen with a far better wager.

Clemons wrote that internet advertising revenues will never be as high again as they are now. I disagree. In five years, let’s look at internet advertising spend reports from some commonly accepted sources, such as the IAB. If advertising is above today’s levels, I win. If not, he wins. The loser pays $1,000 to the charity of the winner’s choice.

Clemons’ Final Reply

I offered Danny what I thought was a pretty clear wager, based on the degree of outrage he expressed in his original post.

It appears that Danny actually agrees. That was the real point of my original article. It looks like we have agreement after all. Internet advertising will be a small percentage of internet revenues. The other business models will become more important. At less than 20% internet advertising must fail as the main support of the internet.

Now we can move on and develop those business models.

Lala iPhone Application

Online music may be a treacherous space right now, but there are still a handful of music startups that may be coming close to getting it right. One of our favorites is Lala, a streaming music site that allows users to put their digital music library in the cloud, which can then be accessed from any computer. And soon, they’ll be able to access every song they own from their iPhones too, without having to worry about storage capacity or syncing.

Unlike music sites like http://music.myspace.com”>MySpace Music, which largely revolve around playlists and streaming individual albums, Lala is meant to serve as a web-based music library. The site has forged unique deals with every major record label (and many indies too) that allows users to populate their online library with the music they already have on their computer (legally acquired or otherwise). Users simply install the Lala Helper app, scan their computer for music files, and sign into Lala to find their entire music library in the cloud.

From there, users can browse through Lala recommendations and see what their friends are playing. The site has a unique buying model that allows users to purchase ‘web-only’ versions of songs for a mere 10 cents a pop - a price point that is very addictive, but also gives Lala a legitimate monetization scheme beyond advertising. Users can listen to these web-only songs as many times as they want, but only through the browser - if you want to load it on your iPod, you need to pay an extra 80 cents to download it. So while Lala has been fairly impressive until this point, it has still kept users chained to their desks.

That may change soon, when Lala releases its iPhone application that will allow users to stream any song from their music library, whenever they want (provided they have an internet connection).

While some of Apple’s traditional iPods have massive storage capacities, many people have abandoned them favor of iPhones, which offer more functionality but much less space for the money (most people have either 8GB or 16GB models). And given that these devices are also used to store applications and video files, many of us find us having to pick and choose which songs we want to carry around with us.

With Lala, you don’t have to worry about that. The app streams the songs from Lala’s servers, in much the same way Pandora does. But unlike Pandora and similar radio apps, you can chose any song from your music library whenever you want.

Unfortunately, it still may be a while before everyone can get their hands on the app. Lala says that there isn’t any concrete release date for the iPhone application, explaining that it still needs work on a number of fronts. For one, the app still has obvious bugs (some text fields don’t update correctly, and sometimes a button won’t work). But perhaps more important, it sounds like the company may still have some legal hurdles to wrangle, and it also needs to fine tune its monetization strategy. Hopefully it won’t be too long - this app would be a boon for users with large music libraries, and would also offer a huge boost to the Lala service as a whole.

The AppEngine for Java

Here’s a juicy rumor (if you’re a geek, this is good stuff): A source tells us that Google AppEngine, a platform for building and hosting web applications in the cloud, will begin letting developers write applications in Java in the near future. Until now only Python applications were supported. The announcement should come at the Google I/O conference in late May.

Java applications are extremely popular, particularly for business applications, and it is one of the internally supported languages at Google. In fact, late last year a startup called Stax Networks launched that billed itself as an “AppEngine for Java.” Don’t feel too bad for the startup, however, they’ve said from the beginning that they expected Google to enter the Java market sooner rather than later.

Java continues to be one of the most popular programming languages, and is a natural next step for Google. And AppEngine has been a highly successful product, at least from a press standpoint - the Obama Administration has embraced it along with all things Google.

The Wrong Slide Show

Want to know everything that could possibly go wrong with Google? Well, you can read the risk section of its latest SEC filing, but that’s a snore. Or you can flip through the slides above, which were put together by French consulting firm FaberNovel. They were the ones who gave us the hugely popular slideshow, “Everything you always wanted to know about Google . . . but were afraid to ask”.

This one is titled more morosely, “Why could Google die . . . maybe not now, but tomorrow.” I wouldn’t be picking out caskets just yet, but the slideshow does provide a convenient cheat sheet for most of the major threats that Google faces. It quickly goes through them, including the threat of antitrust and copyright infringement litigation, a massive privacy disaster, hiring and retention issues, disruption from new startups. There is even a nice slide listing Google’s 12 main weaknesses, along with a visual assessment of the probability, timing, and impact of each scenario. Of course, chances are that it doesn’t include the one threat that will get Google in the end. (I don’t know what it is either, but I am a big believer in black swans).

Tesla Car

Innovative electric-car startup Tesla is unveiling the latest addition to its lineup this afternoon in Southern California. The sedan is meant to serve as a more affordable entry to the Tesla lineup that will appeal to the mainstream, with a ticket price of around $50,000 (as opposed to well over $100,000 for the Tesla Roadster). Current estimates peg release of the car in late 2011.

Earlier today Digg’s Kevin Rose leaked a number of photos of the car (which has been kept tightly under wraps until now). The car apparently features a very large touchscreen in the center console, as well as a digital display that is possibly touch-sensitive in the dash. Rose appears to have made the Flickr accounts he originally posted the photos to private, but they have been copied to a number of other sites.

The video feed should be live by 12:45 PM PST

Update: It looks like Ustream had trouble with its feed, but here are some details, via Jason Calacanis’s Twitter stream.

* The car has 3G connectivity, as well as a computer with a 17 inch monitor in the center console.

* The car will allow for three different removal battery packs, each capable of supporting a different maximum distance (there’s a 300 mile and 160 mile version). Partial battery charges take as little as 45 minutes.

* Seats five adults, with two seats in the rear facing backwards

Hotpads

Just because your bank account might be light is no reason to cancel your vacation this year. There are alternatives to expensive hotels. Expensive summer home rentals. Actually, renting someone’s vacation home for two to three weeks is usually cheaper than a fancy hotel and you get a lot more room to spread out. But finding a vacation home to rent out can be a real chore. Sites like VRBO.com have great inventory, but they are not easy to navigate or search. You have to know the exact town you want to stay in because there is no way to search listings on a map.

Enter Hotpads, the real estate site that is all about maps. It just added a “vacation” tab to its site, which lets you search for 20,000 vacation home rentals across the U.S. Results are plotted on a map, which is really convenient when you want to know how far away from the beach or the ski slopes the property is. Results can also be sorted by price and availability, which show up when you mouse over any given house icon. For instance, here is a search for Lake Tahoe vacation homes on HotPads (screenshot above), and here is what you get on VRBO (below). It is just alist of towns. Not very helpful, especially if you are traveling to somewhere you are not familiar with.

I don’t know why all real estate sites don’t just default to a map interface for search results. Sometimes it is an option, but usually you just get a mind-numbing list you have to scroll through. Homeaway, the Austin company which owns VRBO and several other vacation rental sites, should think about adopting a map interface across all of its sites. It has much more inventory—124,000 vacation homes—but they are so hard to find. For a company which raised $250 million last November, you’d think it could do better than that.

YouTube EDU

YouTube EDU launched today, an educational hub “volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities” according to a short blurb on the YouTube blog. The official announcement is apparently tomorrow.

The site is aggregating videos from dozens of colleges and universities, ranging from lectures to student films to athletic events. Some of this stuff is solid gold (the Stanford and MIT lectures are really good). Other content, not so interesting.

Just a couple of days ago we covered Academic Earth, a site that aggregates useful educational content (”Hulu for education”). Both of these sites are great ways to spread learning.

Twitter Restored Full SMS Functionality

Twitter has just announced that it has restored full SMS functionality to customers in the UK who are using Vodafone. While any Twitter user can submit updates via text message, for months only users in North America have been able to receive them (a key part of the service if you don’t have a smart phone). Other countries used to have this functionality, but Twitter began to cut them off after reporting that a single heavy UK user could cost up to $1000 in fees per year.

From Twitter’s blog post:

Vodafone UK has signed an agreement with Twitter allowing customers to send and receive SMS updates at no additional cost. Sending tweets from your mobile will be part of your normal text messaging bundle with Vodafone—there will be no extra fees. In fact, for the first few weeks, sending tweets won’t even effect your bundle. Receiving tweets via SMS on your mobile is totally free. Vodafone loves Twitter!

For more on the new UK deal, check out our post on TechCrunch Europe.

Also worth noting is the latest chapter in the story of Twitter’s mysterious sidebar box that may-or-may-not be an ad, some day. Two weeks ago Twitter introduced an unobtrusive box in the ride sidebar of user profiles, where it began to promote some of its own services (including Twitter Search). Three days ago, it began showing ads for third party services. One of these was for ExecTweets, a recently-launched aggregator of Tweets from high-ranking business exectuives that was built in part by Federated Media. Federated’s John Battelle wrote that the ad network was paying Twitter, but it was unclear if this was directly related to the promo appearing on Twitter’s homepage. And the other two apps being promoted - an iPhone client called Tweetie and a web app called Twittervision - weren’t paying a cent.

Today Twitter appears to have swapped these promos out for new ones, which include Twidroid (a Twitter app for Android), twistori (a social experiment), and march tweetness (a Twitter service that revolves around the NCAA tournament).

Black Cars

The California legislature is considering regulating the color of cars and reflectivity of paint to reduce the energy requirements to cool them. A presentation on the proposed legislation by the California Air Resources Board is below.

The problem isn’t the color per se, but the reflectivity of the paint overall. And dark colors just don’t reflect well, so they are likely out. “Jet black remains an issue,” says the report.

Anyone who’s ever entered a very hot car knows that it can be cooled down immediately by driving a few feet with the windows open, effectively neutralizing any color-caused heat issues before engaging the air conditioner. But whatever, black is evil.

The new regulations would be phased in beginning in 2012, so if you want that black car, you better buy it soon. More on Autoblog and CrunchGear.

And you thought that black Toyota Pious you bought made you such a good person. Think again, you tree hating energy slob. Luckily, black websites are still ok, even though they, too, use more energy.

Manifesto

Microsoft's Steven Martin has ironically blown the whistle on an attempt at an "open" coalition that freezes out certain companies. Ironic in that Microsoft and IBM played this game years ago with the WS-I, an industry standards group that pointedly stonewalled Sun Microsystems' involvement before caving under media pressure. In a Google Groups post Introducing the Open Cloud Manifesto, Rueven Cohen describes an effort involving "several of the largest technology companies and organizations" to "draw a line in the sand."

We are still working on the first version of the manifesto which will be published Monday, March 30th with a goal of being ratified by the greater cloud community. Given the nature of this document we have attempted to be as inclusive as possible inviting most of the major names in technology to participate in the initial draft. The intention of this first draft is to act as a line in the sand, a starting point for others to get involved. That being said this manifesto is not specifically targeting any one company or industry but instead is intended to engage a dialogue on the opportunities and benefits of fostering an open cloud ideology for everyone.

As inclusive as possible? Not targeted at any one company? Engage in a dialogue? What a load of crap that is. It's the same back room cigar-smoke-filled scam of the good old days when Web Services first began its inexorable move to reshape computing.

Onlive

The news on everybody’s minds is OnLive, a games service which is roughly comparable to a streaming movie service like Netflix On Demand or what have you. The hardware is to be free, and it will support any USB- or Bluetooth-compatible controllers. Purchased games are run in datacenters (on state of the art hardware, we hope), which then push the content out to you. But they’re not sending game assets — they send a video image of the game as you play it on their machine. It sounds ridiculous, but with good, local servers they can get the ping under 10-20ms, at which point it is almost unnoticeable that the game you’re playing is actually a few cities away. Not everyone is so optimistic.

We gave it a shot, and (my driving skills notwithstanding) had no trouble in the form of video artifacts, skipped frames, or lag. Impressive, but the proof of the pudding is in the launching, and when they can provide this level of latency and reliability to thousands of people scattered around the country simultaneously, then we’ll talk. After the demo, we spoke with a more technically-orientated booth guy, who said that between 3 and 4Mbit/s is what they’re aiming for with their 720p60 stream, and when I asked about tension with ISPs, he hinted cryptically that they had that under control. I just hope Comcast and the like haven’t “overbooked” their cable and fiber the way airlines do flights.

Both Microsoft and Sony gave developers a boost, Microsoft in the form of a sleek new developer console and kit tools, Sony by dropping its devkit’s price significantly. Nintendo, as at E3, told us how well they were doing, revealed a couple new games, and demonstrated something ridiculous. Adding the capability to use SDHC cards is a welcome change, however.

The 360 will be receiving a motion-based controller soon, bringing it up to speed nominally with the other consoles in that area. The Gametrak Freedom relies on a sort of ultrasonic sonar, with stereo detectors attached to the display. We gave it a try and it seemed to work decently; keep your eye on CG for video of yours truly flailing grotesquely at virtual tennis balls.

Aside from the relatively far-reaching news I’ve mentioned, GDC is primarily a developer’s paradise. Indie game developers rub elbows with greats like Hideo Kojima and there are more talks, panels, and tutorials than we thought possible, or practical. We’re looking forward to E3 to see how some of these new technologies pan out in a more consumer-orientated environment.

As for games themselves, we got to try out the DSi camera, Punch-Out!!! for the Wii, Fat Princess, and a few others.

Lastly, if you or your spouse or young one is in the market for a little more rhythm, we’re running a contest to win a pre-release copy of Rhythm Heaven for the DS.

For those of you reading this at or around GDC, we hope to see you at one of the many industry events that will be going on later.

Capital Factory

While many people in the tech world only make the trek to Austin, Texas once a year for SXSW, the city has a fairly sizable startup community. Now Austin is getting its own Y Combinator-esque program, dubbed Capital Factory.

As with other similar programs, Capital Factory offers entrepreneurs a modest amount of funding in exchange for equity (the program is offering ‘up to $20,000′ in exchange for 5% of each startup). Capital Factory is also advertising ‘$20,000 in free stuff‘, which includes server usage, PR support, and legal help. But the real value from these programs comes from their associated mentors, who work with the startups to help them get on their feet, and help tap into their established networks of VCs and other entrepreneurs.

The ten week long program culminates in a ‘Demo Day’ during which each startup will pitch their wares to VCs, press, and other entrepreneurs.

Capital Factory joins a growing number of programs vying for the attention of eager new entrepreneurs. Aside from Y Combinator, which pioneered the idea, other incubators include TechStars (Boulder and now Boston), Start@Spark (Boston), LaunchBox Digital (Washington, D.C.), DreamIT Ventures (Philadelphia), and Shotput Ventures (Atlanta)

Most of these are regional, but they still draw from the same pool of entrepreneurs (many of whom are willing to relocate temporarily if they get accepted to their preferred program). Recently we’ve heard of some shady tactics like exploding term sheets that are being employed as these programs compete for the same candidates.

Eco-Friendly

I was surprised to see a 5 lb overnight shipment arrive from Pepsi containing three half liter bottles of Aquafina water. The reason for the special delivery? The company is launching a new plastic bottle that contains half the plastic content of the old bottles. Less plastic = less landfill weight, less carbon, less bad stuff in general, they say.

I’m concerned that Pepsi decided to promote its new “eco-friendly” product by proactively shipping, via Fedex overnight, 5 lb boxes of the water to press around the country. And then sending a second batch either in error or to reinforce the message. That’s not very eco-friendly (if anyone knows the carbon cost of sending these boxes, let me know, then multiply it by hundreds or thousands of press). It all seems a little wasteful.

Anyway, after all this carbon spending and the general effort involved in sending me six bottles of water I never requested, I thought I should at least put the product to the test. I don’t drink bottled water myself, since it’s less safe than tap water and way too expensive (see the clip from Bullshit below). But Laguna, my 105 lb chocolate lab, loves bottled water. And she loves to chew on stuff. So we brought her in for a special assignment to test Aquafina’s new Eco-fina water in the TechCrunch Lab. She reluctantly agreed.

First off was the taste test. She doesn’t look particularly enthusiastic in the picture above, but once I started pouring, she was definitely into it. She didn’t even wait for it to hit the bowl:

So Laguna definitely like the taste of Aquafina water (she also eats dirt, and enjoys licking my feet). Next was the durability test. It took her about ten seconds to destroy the bottle, which isn’t good. Pepsi removed about half the plastic from the new bottles, and they clearly aren’t going to hold up to any kind of sustained attacked from a large, well-toothed canine:

Overall I’d say that Aquafina water is absolutely good enough for my dog to drink, and the bottles make fun albeit short-lived chew toys to distract her.

A Twitter Button

Everybody’s doing it. Even YouTube has succumbed to Twitter mania. Below every video if you click on the “Share” link you will find three options: MySpace, Facebook, and now Twitter. You can expand the box for even more sharing options, but those are the main three and Twitter was just recently added.

Clicking on the Twitter button opens a pop-up window that takes you to your Twitter account and fills in a Tweet telling your followers to “check out this video,” along with the title and URL. The URL is not shortened, but YouTube is working on that. (Youtube URLs are short anyway, so it is not a huge issue). Adding Twitter as one of the key sharing options is a no-brainer. Now, if they could actually embed the videos in the Twitter stream like you can on Facebook and MySpace, that would be something.

YouTube announced some other tweaks today as well. The upload status bar is now fully rolled out. You can watch lectures and educational videos on YYouTube EDU, and it updated its mobile landing page and simplified the process of uploading a video from your phone to YouTube.

Google Big Product

Google is holding one of its occasional “Campfire One” events for developers on April 7. These events, which are held outside on the lawn at Google Headquarters, have always included big product announcements in the past. At a May 2008 Campfire One Google announced details of Friend Connect. A month before that, in April 2008, Google announced App Engine.

What will they announce this time? A good bet is Java on AppEngine, which we’d previously heard wouldn’t be announced until the I/O conference in May. But the product would be a good fit for Campfire One. Of course, it may also be something else entirely. We’ll attend (either because we’re invited or because we just show up) and live blog whatever it is that happens.

SendMeHome

In his book Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling imagines a future where objects are tagged, tracked, and all tell their own stories. He calls these objects “spimes.” I read the book years ago, but it was the first thing I thought of when I visited SendMeHome.

The site is wacky but brilliant. It lets you register any object with a unique code, which is printed out on a small sticker that you place on the object. The object can be anything from your wallet or iPhone to a beloved frying pan. Ostensibly, the purpose of doing this is that if you should ever lose the object, anyone who finds it can contact you through SendMeHome. By entering the code on the sticker, they can learn anything you’ve decided to share about yourself or the object, and can contact you anonymously. SendMeHome offers this service for free, but charges $3.99 for a pack of stickers. (It doesn’t get involved in actually getting your item back to you).

The lost-and-found feature is the only practical reason you would use the service. But once you’ve attached a sticker to a favorite object and registered it on the site, there are other things you can do with it. You can tell a story about the object, pass it around, or put it on a mission. It is on its way to becoming a spime,. These spimes are “always associated with a story. . . . they are protagonists of a documented process,” as Sterling once described it.

SendMeHome lets people create a very rudimentary version of a spime. Anyone who enters the code found on the SendMeHome sticker can add to the object’s story in a blog-like format which incorporates Google Maps, YouTube videos, and uploaded photos. For instance, here is the story of a disposable camera that was left on a bench in LA with instructions for passersby to take photo with it. (They did). And here’s another one of a bacon frying pan, which instructs people to cook their favorite bacon recipe in the pan, document it with photos, and pass it along to another bacon lover. Every object has a story which SendMeHome lets you unlock.

There are flavors of the social game Akoha here, with its bar-coded cards and playful missions set in the real world. SendMeHome should be getting more social itself now that it has a Facebook app and has integrated its site with Facebook Connect. To encourage people to use its new Facebook app, it is putting up prizes worth $1,000 for whoever can create the SendMeHome stories on Facebook with the most followers by May 4.

The company has been bootsrrapped with $50,000 from founders Andrew Lee and James Tamplin.

MyID.is

Digital certification platform MyID.is is taking a crack at offering a way for people to claim their real identity online, in order to be able to prevent ID theft and to verify content they publish on their blogs, social networking accounts, photo & video sharing sites, and so on.

Additionally, the site offers (yet another) way to manage your online identity and doubles as a certified OpenID provider. The site has been in alpha testing for the past 8 months and as of yesterday entered into public beta.

This is how it works: you register for a MyID.is Certified account on the website, and enter your personal details, which are later verified by the team (I’ll get to the issues with this later). They do this by cross-checking the name you submitted with the one on your credit card - they’ll charge a fee between $2 and $5 to verify that it is yours, similar to how Google checks your credit card details for an AdSense account - and by sending a 6-digit code to your postal address which you have to enter to verify your identity on their platform. Other than the small setup fee, the service is free of charge.

You get a dedicated MyID.is URL, which looks like this: http://myid.is/charles.nouyrit.id (this is the one of founder and CEO Charles Nouÿrit) and you get some badges which you can place on your blog or social networking profile to show that your identity has been verified by the company (example). The platform also features a number of custom widgets, offering ‘endless possibilities’ to spread your online ID.

It’s an ambitious project, and it’s always nice to see such an initiative coming from Europe.

But the elephant in the room is of course the fact that MyID.is facing the humongous issue of having to convince people to effectively trust them with their private data, credit card details and physical address included (which they explicitly promise never to sell, evidently). I’m sure there are security measures in place, and Nouÿrit says they don’t keep the confidential information and never even gain access to it as it passes through to a sophisticated banking system, but that is really besides the point.

People are still going to need to feel confident about signing up for the service, and I’m not sure how a tiny company based in London is going to be able to reach that level of trust worldwide. Nouÿrit counters by pointing to the fact PayPal needed a couple of years to be widely accepted too, which is a good point but not exactly a wildcard for MyID.is.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of competition for verifying your online identity across the globe, and the solutions we could dig up were fairly expensive. In the U.S., there’s Trufina and BeenVerified.com, and in Finland there’s something like NorthID.com (also see BankID in Sweden).

How do you feel about the concept behind MyID.is Certified?

Youth Bloggers Network

Teens In Tech, a blogging network founded by 16 year old Daniel Brusilovsky, has acquired the Youth Bloggers Network (YBN). YBN consists of a network of over 100 young bloggers, and was founded by Patrick DeVivo, who is also a young entrepreneur. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but given how similar the networks are I suspect that if there was any monetary exchange it was very small - it sounds like the two networks are banding together to help establish traction.

Teens In Tech is meant to offer teenagers a simple way to blog their thoughts in an atmosphere that is both safe and receptive to their ideas. The site launched back in August in a private alpha, and has yet to open signups up to the public (Brusilovsky says that the gates will temporally open this weekend, but that it will become private once more after that). While the company had initially planned to open to the public last winter, it is currently exploring building its own CMS, and is also working to establish an advertising program for its publishers.

As I wrote when the site first launched, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of unique technology behind Teens In Tech - the site is essentially a multiuser WordPress install, with some custom tweaks like an RSS feed that pulls from all of the network blogs. That said, there is clearly a dedicated community of teens keen on blogging. I’m just not sure how Teens In Tech is going to build a viable business out of them - given how many free publishing platforms are available elsewhere, it’s going to be hard to get teens (who aren’t exactly swimming in cash) to pay to blog. And at scale it’s going to be hard for Teens In Tech to ensure that its safe community of teenagers stays a community of teenagers.

Meebo

Meebo, a popular web-based chat service, has announced that it is going to extend its successful advertising platform to include the growing number of partners that are deploying its Community IM product, which launched last year.

Last summer Meebo launched interactive social ads on its main chat portal at meebo.com, presenting users with small icons at the bottom of their chat windows that would display a popup when clicked (users can also share the ads they especially like with their friends). A number of major corporations have run campaigns using the unique advertising platform, and so far Meebo is posting impressive results: the company says that it has seen an average 1% CTR with 10% of chat users sharing ads with their online buddies.

Now Meebo is ready to extend its successful ad platform to its partners that are using Community IM, Meebo’s chat product that allows web publishers to implement persistent browser-based chat clients on their websites (it’s akin to Facebook Chat). Ads will be displayed in the chat bar at the bottom of the browser (see the screenshot below) and will expand when the user clicks on the small icon shown. Community IM sites participate in a rev share agreement with Meebo, and will be able to use ads from Meebo’s inventory or from their own.

Alongside the announcement, Meebo has also revealed a handful of new partner sites that will be deploying Community IM, including CafeMom, StarPulse, IGN, Current TV, CrispyGamer, DailyStrength.org, GGL Global Gaming, and Internet Brands (over 40 partners have now announced plans to integrate the product into their sites, though some are taking their time).

One of the concerns often brought up about Meebo, especially after its $25 million funding round last year, is how the site plans to generate revenue. The initial results of the new ad platform on meebo.com have been encouraging, and if partner sites continue to see similarly impressive results, Community IM could well turn into a very lucrative product for the company.

Exploding Term Sheets Are Nasty

Exploding term sheets are nasty. If you don’t know what they are, it’s a fairly literal definition. Someone gives you a term sheet to invest in or acquire your company (or some other transaction), but they put an expiration date into the term sheet and if you don’t accept by that date, the offer explodes. Investor Y Combinator (recently in the news for taking an investment from Sequoia Capital) posted an advisory tonight that their competitors are using exploding term sheets, and suggesting companies ignore them.

Companies use exploding for a variety of reasons. But the goal is to put additional pressure on the company to accept the terms and quickly, without much further negotiation. In particular, they don’t want to see a deal “shopped,” which is when you take their term sheet and go to other buyers/investors looking for a better deal (which is exactly what you should be doing as soon as you get a term sheet from anyone).

But they are bad news for startups, who can’t take their time to find the best deal possible when presented with one. I’ve received a couple of these in the past and have always ignored the clauses. Generally speaking, the day after the explosion they’re still very happy to do business with you. If they’re not, they weren’t good partners anyway. (there are exceptions, such as when certain financial milestones or other important dates are coming up, but those situations are fairly obvious).

The Y Combinator letter is fairly straightforward in its advice. In particular, competitors (which are mainly TechStars and DreamIT, although they aren’t mentioned) are giving exploding term sheets that expire prior to Y Combinator getting a look at the companies. Lawsuits have also been threatened:

Advice to Summer Applicants

March 2009

If you’re also applying to one of the other YC-like organizations, you may find yourself in an awkward situation. Last summer several of them gave startups offers timed to expire before YC interviews.

At least one made groups who got offers sign something promising not to tell anyone. Another actually threatened to sue a startup if they didn’t show up for their program.

Using so-called “exploding termsheets” to pre-empt other offers is not uncommon in the VC world, though even there it’s considered a slightly dubious tactic. But VC funding happens asynchronously. Using this tactic in a stage where funding happens synchronously is not very ethical. It would be like colleges doing it.

(YC asks people to decide that day whether or not to accept an offer from us, but we do this because at that point they already know all they need to, not to pre-empt other offers. There is no other seed firm that decides after us.)

What can you do if you find yourself being pressured to decide before you’re ready? We advise approaching the situation with confidence. If your startup is going to succeed, you’re going to have to learn how to push back against people who try to take advantage of you. So try negotiating. The better you are, the more willing they’ll be to wait for your decision, no matter what they say about their deadlines or the number of “spots” they have.

If you really get into a pinch, let us know and maybe we’ll be able to figure out some way to interview you early.

Sorry about this. We started YC to make it less stressful to start a startup, not more. We never anticipated this sort of situation would arise.

There’s just one problem with the advisory, though. Y Combinator themselves ask companies to make a decision on the day they get their offer. So it’s somewhat hypocritical to complain about the same actions by their competitors. As they say, though, they are the last to interview new startups in each summer and winter class. So startups know who has accepted them by then, and the Y Combinator deal terms and even the contracts they’ll sign are on the website for review.

I’ve emailed both TechStars and DreamIT for a comment. TechStars Executive Director David Cohen writes:

No, TechStars does not ask the founders that it makes offers to not to disclose the offer. We do ask them to accept it quickly (usually in 24-48 hours) or we move on.

TechStars issues a letter of intent when it makes an offer. Once our offer is accepted and signed by both parties, it includes non-disclosure (but not before).

The reason for this is two-fold. First, we are by definition still making offers and we may have to move down the list if some are not accepted. We don’t make all offers at once - it happens over a period of about a week, usually in personal meetings. So we don’t want other applicants that we’re planning to make offers to thinking they won’t get one, etc. Second, we generally advise our startups not to make a bunch of noise on the way in to the program as this is typically too much publicity too early. So, if they enter into the letter of intent, we ask them for confidentiality until such time that we can coach them on working with the media. Then they decide what they want to do. Again, this only happens upon acceptance, and not before.

TechStars has never once threatened to sue a startup or applicant for any reason. I have heard this rumor about another program (not ours), but I have no idea if it’s true or not.

will also tell you that regardless of lots of random innuendo, we have never once set our application or offer deadlines based upon those of any other program. Our program historically sits in the exact dates of the University of Colorado summer break, in order to maximize the likelihood of available temporary housing. We set our dates completely around this, and not based on anything else. In Boston this year, we simply added a two week offset for logistical reasons.

What would be best is if founders didn’t have to make decisions on any of these small incubators/investors until they’d pitched all of them. That’s unlikely to happen, since Y Combinator carries most of the brand weight and would likely get most of the best startups (like Stanford gets all the best students). My guess is we’ll be seeing more of this, not less, over time.

Vysr

Vysr has launched a new version of its browser extension application, RoamAbout 2.0. The downloadable browser application, which is available for Firefox, Linux and Internet Explorer, allows you to integrate your favorite apps like Gmail, and social networks like Twitter and Facebook within the browser and then interact with the apps contextually while on any web site. We are offering 1000 private beta downloads here.
Launched last year, Vysr strengthened the browser plugin more recently by adding OpenSocial applications to the platform, letting third party developers deploy their applications on the browser extension. Once downloaded, the plug-in’s OpenBar sits at the bottom of your browser. RoamAbout 2.0 is a useful extension to your browser because it lets you see a constant stream of real-time information from social networks, email applications, RSS feeds, the latest and greatest YouTube videos and Google news.
On the bar at the bottom of your screen, you can get custom tailored updates from friends in your Facebook network, tweets from people you follow on Twitter, RSS feeds from your favorite blogs and news sites, and notifications when you get an email in your Gmail inbox. And you can get these non-intrusive updates while browsing on any webpage. RoamAbout basically eliminates the need to constantly switch to different tabs to check email, updates, and tweets. The notifier on RoamAbout OpenBar alerts you to events of interest from your apps such as new emails in your Gmail account, direct messages on Twitter, or status updates in Facebook.
RoamAbout also provides an easily personalized side application platform, called a “tray,” which can easily be collapsed, where you can access a snapshot any of your favorite applications or be led to the main page in another tab. RoamAbout currently has a choice of 46 applications that you can integrate with the plug-in, including Facebook status updates, Twitter, ESPN, Gmail notifications, GoogleMaps and more.The RoamAbout application tray also enables applications to bring you content in the context of your web interest. Similar to the new “Accelerators” in IE8, applications can be launched in the context of the website you are on, or in the context of a word highlighted on the web page. The tray feature lets you do some pretty cool things. For example, if you highlight “Bill Gates” in a TechCrunch news post and then click on the YouTube app, related YouTube videos will be displayed right on the page. Or you can select location information on a web page, click on the Google maps app in the tray, and then share location information with friends on Facebook or Gmail contacts. You can also highlight any location on any webpage (i.e., San Francisco), click on the RoamAbout application “Fetch,” and then the app will return all Facebook friends who live in that location.
RoamAbout seems to be similar in a lot of ways to Flock, a social browser that also integrates email and social apps like Facebook and Twitter, except that RoamAbout isn’t a stand alone browser and is easily integrated into Firefox or IE. Founded by Guda Venkatesh, Vysr has several big-name investors and advisers in Silicon Valley, including investor Ron Conway and Rajeev Motwani, Stanford computer science professor and a member of the founding Google Research Team.