Home / techcrunch.com rss archive / August-27-2007


Facebook Takes Further Steps To Curb User Abuse; Change In How Applications Are Measured
Last week Facebook updated their developer platform to restrict some of the more egregious abuses of users by application developers - bait and switch profile advertisements and friend spamming. Today they announced additional changes. And Facebook also announced that they are changing the way applications are measured to show user engagement instead of just how [...]

Jaxtr Closes $10 Million A; 1 Million Users
Jaxtr has raised a $10 million A round led by August Capital with Mayfield Fund, Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Luxemburg-based Mangrove Capital participating. They’ve also doubled their registered user base over last month, totalling 1 million users. They plan on getting to a break even point on the investment and to total 20 [...]

SpiceWorks Raises $8 Million; Google Adsense Even Supports IT Software
IT software maker SpiceWorks just closed an $8 million in series B financing. The funding round was led by Shasta Ventures with participation from Spiceworks series A investor, Austin Ventures. Their series A was $5 million. Shasta Ventures co-founder and managing director, Ravi Mohan, and former Dell senior executive, John Hamlin, have joined the Spiceworks [...]

Wis.dm Takes $5 Million
Social bookmarking service turned Q&A style site Wis.dm was taken $5 Million in a round led by North Bridge Venture Partners.Wis.dm was founded by uDate founder Martin Clifford. North Bridge’s Michael Skok will join the Wis.dm board as part of the deal.Wis.dm provides a simple yes/no question service which aims to avoid long answers to [...]

ContraStream To Join Social Music Sites
If you are into the social music scene, bookmark ContraStream, a new music discovery engine, and go back to it on September 3 when they launch.The site promises to help users find good music quickly. Artists upload indie music and others vote on it Digg-fashion to push the good stuff to the top of the [...]

YouTube In The Spotlight For Hosting Racist Material
YouTube is in a spot of bother in Germany for hosting Nazi related material uploaded by users.Clips include scenes from the 1940 Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Suess and music videos German far-right rock band Landser.A German parliamentarian was quoted as saying that YouTube hosting these films “amounts to aiding and abetting incitement of these [...]

MyLiveSearch Not As Completely Useless As I Expected
I’ve been beating up on MyLiveSearch for months now. The startup promises to create the first real time search engine, where results are indexed literally as the search is conducted.It all started back in May when the unknown startup got big press in Australia as a search startup that “Google is keeping a close eye [...]

Who Wants to Buy a Virtual World?
If you felt a little green with envy when Disney bought juvenile virtual world Club Penguin for $700 million in cash and earn out, this could be your chance to grab a piece of the virtual pie.WhuddleWorld, Inc., creator of eponymous online hangout for kids WhuddleWorld, was forced to shut down in April after running [...]

SpiralFrog: Free Music Alive And Hopping
Remember SpiralFrog that free music download service that announced itself nearly a year ago? Well, after slowly releasing invites to Canadians, we received a private beta invitation.SpiralFrog originally made a splash when they sealed a deal with Universal BMG to give away free downloads of some of their songs in exchange for a share of [...]

Interview With Facebooks Joe Hewitt, iPhone God
The Facebook iPhone application was a one-man job. Joe Hewitt joined Facebook when the company he co-founded with Blake Ross, Parakey, was acquired last month. He quickly got to work on the company’s iPhone app, which was released just a month after he joined the company.Hewitt has been one of the key figures in figuring [...]

Facebook Integrates Book Swap Feature into Marketplace
Facebook has developed a book swap feature for its Marketplace application called Marketplace Book Exchange that enables users to buy and sell books from and to each other. Books are identified by buyers and sellers by their ISBN numbers, and curiously it looks as though there is no way to view all of the books [...]

CrowdStorm Revamps, Seeks Wisdom Of Your Crowd
Social shopping site CrowdStorm has launched a beta trial for their new site revision. It’s been seven months in the making. CrowdStorm always had a social bent, with users supplying the listings and reviews for products listed on the site. However, the new version is a significant upgrade that incorporates content pulled from around the [...]

New York Times LaunchesMyYahoo
The New York Times took their personalized home page product out of beta today - see it here. The look and feel is about the same as it was a a year ago when it went into private beta - Think MyYahoo, Pageflakes or Netvibes, with the New York Times logo and without the widgets.There’s [...]

Wikipedia Edits Cause Australian Political Scandal
The Australian Prime Minister’s Office have been caught editing Wikipedia, the latest in a growing line of Wikiscanner entrapments.Staff from the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) edited Wikipedia entries that were damaging to the Goverment, including pages covering the Children Overboard Affair and Mandatory Detention. Other edits included deleting the nickname of “Captain [...]

Why Darwin Beats Danny Carlton
Danny Carlton writes a little known personal blog under the pseudonym “Jack Lewis” at jacklewis.net/weblog. But don’t try to visit it if you use Firefox, because he’s banned users of the popular browser from visiting his site. Firefox users are now redirected here.Why? Because he objects to the fact that some of those Firefox readers [...]

Honesty In Media
Credit where it’s due: Rupert Murdoch’s online news properties are at least now being honest.This post admits that it has no news value other than to note that the MSM has further gone to the dogs…or cats as the case may be. “Meh watching yuz az a takeover target” perhaps? Will the new online honesty [...]

Stat Gaming Services Come To YouTube
The creation of automated friends and general profile gaming has been a part of MySpace for a long time now. The general idea is that by creating more friends and more data you are more likely to gain traffic for what ever it is you are ultimately trying to sell.YouTube has been fairly immune from [...]

Thumbalizr: A Really Good Idea, If It Worked
Thumbalizr is a newish online image tool that allows users to take screen shots of web pages.Users can customize the dimensions of each screenshot taken, from standard sizes through to a custom option. Screen shots can consist of an entire page, or just a standard screen shot. To use Thumbalizr, users simply type the [...]

Google Teases Us, Promises A New Orkut
We rarely mention Google’s three year old social network Orkut these days. Except to point out down time or flawed Alexa stats that suggest it is bigger than MySpace. But now some real news. Take a good look at that screen shot because Google is promising an “updated look” for the site. They are staging [...]

FotoFlexer Raises The Bar On Online Photo Editing
Online photo editors keep getting better and better. For hardcore image manipulation, desktop software like Photoshop or Gimp will always have its place, but online editors are free, easy to use and a lot of fun. We covered most of the online editors back in February (Fauxto, Picnik, Picture2Life, Preloadr, PXN8 and Snipshoot). But a [...]

KickApps Gets iPhone-Friendly with Video, Formatting
KickApps, a platform to build white label social networks, will announce today that it has taken two initiatives to make the social networks hosted on its platform more accessible to iPhone users. First, all videos uploaded to KickApps affiliate networks will be viewable on the iPhone despite the device’s lack of Flash support. Secondly, the [...]

NoSo - Backlash Against Our Always On Culture
“Meet no friends, attend no events and make no connections.”NoSo, short for No Social, is more of an art project and cultural backlash than an actual startup. You join, get a user number (everything is anonymous) and then create and/or join “NoSo’s,” which are held wherever the organizer chooses to have it parks, cafes, street [...]

I Want This In Photoshop Immediately
This image resizing and manipulation demonstration is sort of jaw dropping, particularly as the video goes on. The related paper, written by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan is available here.Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.