Wave Lab

I came across two iPhone YouTube videos this morning. The first one is serious - Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer scoffing at the iPhone in a way that makes it seem like he’s actually a bit nervous about it. He pushes the Motorola Q as a mobile Windows device that he says is a better choice for business users - “It will do Internet.” I don’t know what Motorola Q he’s using, but mine barely makes phone calls in between crashes. The second video is pure humor, and very relevant given all the hype around this yet to be released device.

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A couple of days ago I wrote about Spinvox, a startup that converts voicemails to text and sends them to you via email and/or SMS. They are just launching in the U.S., and Spinvox gave us 100 accounts to give away for free (the service is fairly expensive). Over 300 people responded in the comments saying they’d like one.

Since the company itself follows up, the easiest way for us to manage these account giveaways is by asking commenters to leave their email address in the comment itself. The harvesting risk is obvious, but people are willing to take it since it’s the only easy way for us to coordinate things. It’s something we’ve done multiple times in the past successfully.

What we didn’t expect is for one of Spinvox’s competitors, SimulScribe, to harvest the emails and spam those people directly and without their permission. But that’s exactly what they did. At least some people who left their email in the comments to receive a free Spinvox trial got an unsolicited email from the CEO of SimulScribe, James Siminoff, urging them to try their service. Simulscribe even used the subject line “Free Trial from TechCrunch” - a misleading (and trademark violating) message.

This was a bold marketing move, to be sure, but a very questionable one. Potential customers will think about how cavalier SimulScribe is with personal information before doing business with them. For our part, I apologize. And we’ll find a better way of giving accounts away in the future.

To Spinvox - here’s a terrific marketing opportunity. You should give every commenter to that post a free account. They’ll be loyal (and talkative) customers.

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Google’s RSS reader was nothing to write home about when it first launched in October 2005. But the new version, released late last year, has won it accolades and legions of new fans. More than a few people have recently called it the best RSS reader, hands down.

But it’s hard to know exactly how popular it’s gotten. Feedburner doesn’t track it yet, so we can’t compare the subscriber numbers to other readers. We’ve noticed a significant jump in referrals from Google Reader, though. Enough to suggest that it is as large or larger than Bloglines already.

Hitwise says different. In a post tonight comparing the web based readers, they put Bloglines and Rojo firmly ahead of Google Reader. Generally Hitwise seems to be on the money, but something doesn’t add up.

One semi-obvious explanation is that Google Reader requires far fewer page refreshes than Bloglines. This would decrease their page view numbers, but not visits, which is what Hitwise tracks. We may need to wait until Feedburner starts tracking Google Reader directly as well to triangulate its true popularity.

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MOG, a great music site that somehow we’ve never covered, is a social networking site for blogging music aficionados. It’s a little bit Last.fm, a little bit iLike, and a little bit something else.

The existing MOG service is centered around a bit of software that you download to your PC (Windows or Mac). Like iLike, MOG tracks all of the music you listen to. However, where iLike just monitors iTunes, MOG tries to track all the music you listen to on your computer or iPod.

Each user has their own MOG page (Example - Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie) showing the music they are listening to. Other users can comment on the page, etc (normal social networking stuff). MOG also compares your listening habits to others and suggests new music you might like. Each album and song also has it’s own MOG page, along with links to purchase the music.

This morning MOG is launching a new feature - an embeddable Flash music player, making them a little bit like iJigg, too.

The new player will allow bands and fans to upload songs to their MOG page and syndicate them across the web with a few lines of code. It also provides a new revenue stream for MOG through song tags that link to music purchases on Amazon and iTunes. However, the new feature comes with a few requirements: the player only plays one song at a time, and the MOG post they upload the song to must have some written commentary in it. The new player can only play a single file at a time, fast-forward, and reverse. The lack of a playlist is a bit of a let down.

Here’s the embeddable widget:

The new player is clearly an attempt to further take on the MySpace Music and the other major music communities like myStrands and last.fm. This is a battle on the mind of MOG founder David Hyman, who cites the depth of user interaction, particularly artist-fan interaction, as their main distinction.

MOG has an extensive database linking songs and artists, using Gracenote’s wave-matching and text matching to map the song you play to the one they’ve got on file. The tracker updates your MOG in real time with the contents of your library and what your top played songs are. Each song also has a 30 second sample for your MOG’s visitors.

All the song updates, blog posts, and other widgets, are displayed in drag-n-droppable AJAX boxes. If you don’t want your friends to know you listened to Celine Dion, you are free to manually edit each of the boxes, adding or deleting items.

MOG claims 20,000 users, 200,000 uniques/month and is currently privately funded to the tune of $1.4 million. For a small site, they’ve done a very good job of attracting some big name bands to participate.

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Tags: mog, techcrunch, web2.0

Seattle-based Shelfari is a book centered social network that launched last fall. There’s lots of competition in this space, including Library Thing, Listal, Delicious Monster and others. The basic idea is to tell Shelfari all of the books you own, and have an online visual representation of your library. Book fanatics and book clubs are the target audience.

Shelfari isn’t as big as Library Thing (key Library Thing stats here), but it is a better designed site and they have a great looking widget to show off the books you own. Shelfari also allows users to insert their Amazon affiliate ID and make money off of any books sold from people clicking on the widget.

Library Thing sold 40% of itself to ABEbooks last year, so they have essentially taken themselves off the market. An acquisition or further financing would have to be approved by them. But the space is interesting enough that venture capitalists and bigger companies are starting to take note, and Shelfari is a good platform.

There are rumors that Shelfari will be acquired or raise a round of financing soon. Perhaps then they’ll be able to hire someone to write those pesky FAQs.

Shelfari was founded by former RealNetworks employees Josh Hug and Kevin Beukelman. John Cook wrote a good launch article about them last year.

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Tags: librarything, listal, deliciousmonster, books, amazon

There was a mysterious outage on MySpace this morning. It lasted just 2.5 hours, and the site itself performed mostly as it should. All that happened was this: Anyone trying to add a Flash widget to the site, or show an image via an inserted link, or otherwise embed any sort of code, couldn’t do it. Existing widgets worked fine, but none could be added. And if a MySpace user edited their page, any existing embedded code produced an error.

So far, MySpace hasn’t returned our request for a comment on exactly why this happened. But executives at some of the countless startups that are building their businesses on the back of MySpace, now the largest Internet site, in the hope of a YouTube-like success sure are talking. All off the record, of course. A common comment is “I don’t want MySpace to single us out.”

What they’re saying is that MySpace just made its first move in an upcoming big stakes game of “chicken,” and that a senior exec there is making a career-defining bet that everyone else will blink first. MySpace is still prickly over the YouTube acquisition (they wanted it), and rumors are that they weren’t happy that PhotoBucket didn’t ping them about an acquisition before taking their last round of financing, either. Perhaps the recent $20 million Slide funding was one straw too many. All of these companies rely heavily (understatement) on getting their content onto MySpace user pages.

People have been predicting this for some time, but until now MySpace hasn’t taken any drastic steps to cut these services off. Today may have been a test to see how easily they could cut these widgets out, and to see how people would react. Or, it could have just been a bug.

If MySpace does start to permanently ban widgets and other embedded code, they’ll almost certainly say it is for security reasons. But they’ll continue to push their own competing services, and allow only “certified” partners back in. And my bet is that the certification process may have a fee involved.

Update: MySpace is now unofficially telling affected companies that this was a “developer error” and not intentional.

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SixDegrees is a new site that urges users to donate to celebrity charities and then place a widget on their sites promoting those charities. It’s not explained very well, and it appears to be little more than a wrapper for Network for Good, a really excellent charity social network. It’s also, of course, a shot in the dark to revive Kevin Bacon’s flatlined career.

Users are urged to add a celebrity widget to their site which is tied to a donation page for a specific charity or charities. Donations made through the widget are tracked and the total is displayed in the widget. Users can also create their own custom widget, sans the celebrity photo.

Bacon goes into detail in the video below about the Six Degrees of Separation movie and the subsequent game making fun of the fact that he’s appeared in so many films. However, the connection of all that to this service isn’t really explained, although it can be assumed that since we all are so close in the global community, giving to charity is good.

We’ve created a widget to test it out. Donations go the the Red Cross.

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Late last year Google fired a few shots at PayPal when they waived merchant fees at Google Checkout for the rest of the year. Today they hit hard, using their biggest gun to promote the service: the Google homepage.

Google has added a link to Google Checkout along with a $10 coupon to use with Google Checkout merchants. Hitwise predicts we’ll see a big spike in Google Checkout traffic. I agree.

Small merchants overwhelmingly use PayPal to take credit card payments (we use them on CrunchBoard). But Google’s Checkout product is superior in a lot of ways. And the fact that they are promoting it on the Google home page and in search results is a real competitive advantage. Whether it is enough to overcome PayPal’s own big gun - their lock on eBay - isn’t obvious. But everyone loves a good fight, and the word is Checkout has more interesting stuff coming.

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Oliver Starr over at MobileCrunch has dished out a thorough review of the new Nokia N800 tablet phone he’s been testing under NDA over the past month. Oliver contrasts the 800 with the 770, saying it has a nicer form factor, with larger stereo speakers. The N800 features an 800 x 480 color display screen, two memory card slots (Micro SD, MMC, SD, and Mini SD) for cards up to 2 GB each (4GB by user experience), a faster processor than the 770, plenty of battery-life for a day of use without charging.

Check out Oliver’s post for his detailed review.

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Tags: mobilecrunch, nokia, n800

iJigg is a new, easy-on-the-eyes music site that launched a couple of days ago - we first saw it on the TechCrunch Forums.

Think Digg for music, plus lots of Flash functionality. Songs are presented on the home page and can be “jigged” by members. Songs can also be embedded into web pages (I’ve done so with one of the popular songs below), commented on, etc. Songs are tagged for easy browsing, and there are most popular and recently posted areas as well.

As a music discovery service, it’s compelling. And the Digg way of having massive numbers of people vote on stuff to make the cream rise is a good way to sort stuff. Others are giving glowing reviews.

But it’s also subject to gaming, and iJigg has already, just a couple of days after launching, taken counter measures to stop that gaming. This will be a constant battle, as Digg has seen, to keep the spammers out and the quality in.

Another problem with iJigg is that they don’t provide any way to get your hands on the music. No downloads, and no links to buy the music. You can listen to it all day on the Flash player, and embed it on other sites, but you aren’t getting this on your iPod.

All this may limit adoption, and any friction could be fatal when ultimately these new indie-music startups are competing with MySpace Music, which has 7 million band profiles. In December 2006, MySpace music had 16.2 million unique visitors and 475 million page views. It will be hard to pull eyeballs away from MySpace.

And at the end of the day, I still like the Amie Street (our coverage here) model best for indie music. People can download songs without DRM. Songs start out free, and as more downloads occur the price starts to edge up. If a song gets above $0.50, its really popular. Anyone trying to game the system will be paying money to do so, which cuts down on fraud significantly. In my opinion, it’s a much purer voting system than the one iJigg has launched. And you can put the music on your iPod. I wouldn’t be surprised to see eMusic, the popular DRM-free music download site, adopt an Amie Street music model down the road. And perhaps others will too.

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Tags: music