Home / techcrunch.com rss archive / August-30-2007


Yahoo To KickStart Social Networking Efforts
Yahoo is reported to be working on a new social networking service that matches college students to employees.Yahoo Kickstart give users profile pages which are focused on the user’s resume, LinkedIn style, as opposed to a Facebook or MySpace profile. Corporations and wannabe employers are then provided with groups that users can join, but with [...]

NBC Bails on iTunes
The New York Times is reporting that NBC will not renew its contract to distribute television shows via Apple’s iTunes service. The agreement was set to autorenew at the end of 2007, but includes a provision that allows NBC to terminate the agreement at the end of the first term with 90 days notice. Disagreements [...]

Microsoft Launches Art Of Office - Mac Users Pissed
Here’s a strange new social site that we just got a tip on - ArtOfOffice is a Microsoft site that launched yesterday. It is a place for people to upload artistic content made using Office applications. The community then shares, rates, remixes and discusses the content with other Mac users. See here and here for [...]

PeekYou: Spock Has Competition
PeekYou is a fairly new site that competes in a growingly crowded people search space.The site offers the standard features we’ve come to expect from people focused search sites. A general user profile includes tags, which are divided into three categories (life, work and school) for context, web links including social network profiles, bio and [...]

New Twitter Visualization Tools: Twitter Blocks On Friday Morning
Twitter is launching a new area of the site on Friday called “Explore” where they’ll list some of the tools people can use to interact with Twitter off the site itself. Along with Explore they will also be releasing a new visualization tool called Twitter Blocks - “an abstract way to navigate your Twitter neighborhood [...]

DailyMotion Raises $34 Million; Another Copyright Infringing Success Story
French social video site DailyMotion has raised a $34 million round from Advent Venture Partners LLP and AGF Private Equity, a division of Allianz AG. The new round comes on top of $9.5 million in previous financing from Atlas Ventures and Partech International. The round puts DailyMotion’s total financing beyond that of their competitors, even [...]

DesignMyRoom - A Useful Tool For Virtual Interior Design
DesignMyRoom launched this afternoon - It’s a new product from a company called Swatchbox Technologies that allows people to decorate a real room virtually via a photograph of the room and DesignMyRoom’s library of stuff. Previously the company, which has been around for 11 years, sold 2 million copies of desktop software that has similar [...]

Image Resizing: Third Party Online Working Demo
The image carving/resizing video we posted last week has sparked quite a conversation. Most people have been very positive, although there has already been at least one response saying its a bad thing for the web (which seems a little dramatic to me).Patrick Swieskowski emailed us this afternoon to say he’s created an online demo [...]

SocialMedia Opens Self-Serve Facebook Advertising For All
There are several startups gunning to be the top Facebook ad platform: Lookery, FBExchange, RockYou, and Cubics. SocialMedia also became one of the early players when they launched their Appsaholic advertising network soon after F8. Previously only a select group of developers were able to sell ads through the service. However, they’ve now opened [...]

MicroSoft Execs Very Active on Facebook. Plus: Is Bill G. Hot, or Not?
Microsoft employees and even executives are very active on Facebook - over 13,000 of them have a profile on the service.By comparison, Google has 5,000 employees with profiles, although Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt are noticeably absent (Marissa Mayer does have a profile, however, and actively adds friends). Yahoo has just 3,500 employee [...]

AdMob AdMonitor: Watch Where Mobile Advertising Is Displayed In Real Time
AdMonitor, a Google Maps mashup from mobile ad serving company AdMob, provides real time data on who is viewing mobile ads worldwide, including the network they are on and the phone they are using.San Mateo based AdMob has seemingly slipped under the radar in terms of attention whilst competitors have been acquired; Third Screen Media [...]

TellThem: MySpace Kills Another Startup
MySpace has put the axe to yet another startup. Last night they mad a call threatening legal action against freshly launched TellThem.mobi, a service that lets you message all your friends from your mobile phone.TellThem’s site simply reads: “On Wednesday August 29th, 2007, we got a call from MySpace threatning to take legal action if [...]

SeedCamp Finalists Chosen; Battle To Final Five Next Week
Seedcamp, a European Y Combinator-like seed fund and mentoring program, has announced the final twenty candidates for funding. Next week, five of the twenty startup ideas will be funded, each receiving 50,000 to build out their business. We are one of the media sponsors of the program.In all, 240 applications were received from 40 countries.SeedCamp [...]

Microsoft Acquires Enterprise Group Chat Company Parlano
Microsoft has announced that it has agreed to acquire Chicago-based Parlano, the maker of the enterprise group chat platform MindAlign.Microsoft said that it would use Parlanos group chat functionality to improve Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Office Communicator.Parlano’s platform provides group chat technology “that enables people to carry on topic-specific, multi-party instant messaging discussions [...]

If A Car Launches In Second Life, Will Anyone Notice It?
Scion, a division of Toyota that sells “trendy” cars targeted at Gen Y in the United States, was one of the earliest companies touting its wares in Second Life.In 2006, Scion became the first car maker with a Second Life presence, offering residents customizable versions of the Scion xB. Fast forward nearly 12 months and [...]

Jaiku Adds Instant Messaging
Microblogging platform Jaiku has added Jabber-based instant messaging capabilities to its service.The new feature will allow Jaiku users using Jaiku’s Web, iPhone, and Nokia Series 60 smart phone clients to communicate with users on Jabber-based IM networks including Google Talk. Functionality includes the ability to instantly add and read new posts, comments, channel messages, and [...]