Home / techcrunch.com rss archive / August-29-2007


SayNow Lands $7.5 Million Series A
SayNow, a service that enables “celebrities to connect to their audience over the phone” will announce $7.5 million Series A funding September 12, in a round led by Shasta Partners. Tugboat Ventures Dave Whorton, a SayNow advisor since early 2006, also participated in the round as did Costella Kirsch. Rob Coneybeer, MD of Shasta Ventures [...]

Crunchyroll Pushes the Envelope On Video Copyright
Crunchyroll is a San Francisco based startup that is a sort of YouTube for anime and other mostly Asian video content. The three founders, who asked to remain anonymous, are all employees of HotOrNot and the company operates our of HotOrNot’s San Francisco offices (although HotOrNot has no financial interest in the company, according to [...]

BrightSpot.tv: Another Twist On The Get Paid To Watch Advertising Model
BrightSpot.tv offers a newish twist on the get paid to watch advertising model.The concept is nearly as old as the internet. Users must watch advertising in some form or another and then receive compensation for their time.BrightSpot.tv model involves users viewing video advertising, often with the occasional question thrown in to make sure that the [...]

Coming Soon: Hulu Branded Panty Hose. Oh, And they Lifted Their Mission Statement From Google
Hulu finally announced its name today after a five month wait. Unfortunately, the name, which has some translation issues, may not have been researched properly before the final decision was made. Now a quick perusal of the company’s trademark application shows very aggressive and somewhat ridiculous merchandising plans. And the Hulu mission statement is [...]

Hulu Translates To Cease and Desist in Swahili. Oh, the Irony.
Congratulations are in order to YouTube-competitor Hulu, which took just five months to come up with a name after announcing itself in March. CEO Jason Kilar says the name “captures the spirit of the service we’re building” in an open letter published today.Just don’t translate that name to certain languages, because the name may capture [...]

Ladies Rejoice, TheFind.com Acquires Glimpse
Shopping search engine startup TheFind has acquired the high-fashion shopping site Glimpse.com for an undisclosed amount. It’s an early deal for Glimpse, which just launched earlier this year.TheFind is a comparison shopping search engine that crawls many shopping sites across the internet (190 million products at over 500,000 stores). Other shopping sites often charge for [...]

PrifileBuilder: Manage Your Profile, Not Accounts
With a plethora of social networks for everything from knitting to dog lovers, managing our long tail profiles and identity is a huge pain. The problem of managing a fragmented identity has been attacked in two ways: creating a new master account (OpenID), aggregating identity through search (Spock, Wink), or aggregating management of all your [...]

Clown Co. Gets Website and New Name: Hulu
This morning news broke about NBC Universal and News Corporation’s joint video venture, hitherto dubbed “Clown Co.”, after a press release was sent out by a Hulu.com representative claiming that “Hulu” was the new name for that venture. Initially, I was a bit concerned that this could be merely a hoax, as no press releases [...]

Farecast Now Provides Data On Fairness Of Hotel Pricing
Seattle based Farecast, a startup that launched about 18 months ago to focus on predicting flight prices and guaranteeing users against increases, just expanded to help people find deals on hotel rooms as well.The hotels area of the site helps users see prices based on a number of travel search engines (Orbitz, CheapTickets and ReserveTravel). [...]

The Apple TV Youre Having When You Dont Own An Apple TV
Not Apple TV has a fairly simple goal: to recreate the Apple TV experience for users who don’t own an Apple TV, via the web browser.The flash based interface feels exactly like the Apple TV interface, with a few changes. Features such as a “History” and a “Favorites” have been included, along with a wider [...]

The Tech Industry Wants You To Support The Fight For Fair Use
Listen very carefully to the copyright statement in this clip. Thinking about discussing last weekend’s game with family and friends? The NFL clearly states that viewers cannot talk about the game to anyone without permissionInsane statements like this, and others, are the target of a FTC complaint by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a [...]

Magnify.net Launches Video Focused Ad Network
Video startup Magnify.net will today invite Magnify.net site owners to participate in a beta test of its new advertising program, the “AdShare Network.”The AdShare Network gives site owners the ability to earn directly from their video channels, both from the network itself and by allowing users to deploy their own ad inventory.We first covered Magnify.net [...]

If You Cant Beat Em, Join Digg
Video sharing site MetaCafe launched a new area of their site today that uses the Digg API to show the most popular MetaCafe videos. Viewers can sort by most dugg, highest rated, most discussed, most viewed, etc. Only Metacafe videos are shown.Digg’s video channel and Metacafe overlap somewhat, particularly for people who just want to [...]