Faketown 2.0 - The Next Habbo Hotel? Annotated
California-based Faketown is a 6-year old “social game” that quietly relaunched in mid-August, although they’ve yet to announce the change publicly. The site centers around a virtual chat room, and allows users to create, buy, sell, trade and share virtual products, services and real estate - it’s broadly similar to Habbo Hotel, Cyworld and Gaia Online, but with much more freedom to develop your own content. And as it happens, it’s also very, very cool.
Most of the interaction happens within a Flash window, wherein your pixelated pal can explore the sprawling virtual world. You can drop into different locations using the world map, and each town is governed by an elected major. Towns also have their own economies, social systems and varying levels of tax - there are definite echos of Sim City here. Other activities include buying land, furnishing your virtual abode, playing games, creating drawings and animations, uploading MP3s and photos and a whole lot more. It goes without saying that chat is the most used feature, but there’s also a “mobile chat” option for contacting friends who aren’t in your immediate vicinity. And unlike the elevator music that accompanies most of these games, venues in Faketown play mainstream rock and hiphop, uploaded by the users themselves. Just like the new TuneFeed widget from Faces.com, I’ve no idea if it’s legal to broadcast your music collection in this way. That said, it certainly makes the experience more fun.
NewTeeVee » Pluggd Makes Bold Claims, Takes Funding Annotated
Pluggd Makes Bold Claims, Takes Funding
VentureBeat reports Pluggd, a Seattle-based audio and video search startup, has raised $1.65 million from Intel and a group of angels. Pluggd, which we first met at DEMO this year, is trying to use speech recognition tools to help make sense of audio and video podcasts. VentureBeat runs the company’s claim it has “‘perfected the user experience’ for audio and visual search.” While we like what Pluggd is doing, that’s a bit of an overstatement.
First, “visual” is probably a typo for “video”; to our knowledge Pluggd does not have an image recognition product. It’s possible that visual search is in the works, but it’s not even at the demo level yet.
VentureBeat » Pluggd “perfects” audio and video search, raises $1.65M Annotated
Pluggd “perfects” audio and video search, raises $1.65M
By Matt Marshall 12.6.06
Declaring it has “perfected the user experience” for audio and visual search, Seattle start-up Pluggd has raised $1.65 million from Intel and angel investors to help it start distributing its technology.
If you haven’t played with Pluggd, you should. It provides that “wow” experience, giving you what you intuitively want when searching video: a way to skip forward to the exact part of the audio or video file you are looking for. We’ll be hearing more about Pluggd next year, as it begins to cut partnership deals with major publishers, and comes out of the testing phase it launched two months ago.
EXCLUSIVE Q&A with Flock: 19 questions for a startup (because 19 is a good looking prime) (SocialComputingMagazine.com) Annotated
ompany: Flock Web Site: http://www.flock.com Blog: http://www.flock.com/blog Location: Mountain View, CA Size: 32 Funding: Series C closed in Nov. 05. See below |
Summary
Flock is an amazing new web browser that makes it easier to share media and connect to other people online. Share photos, automatically stay up-to-date with new content from your favorite sites, and search the Web with the most advanced Search Toolbar available today.
bunchball - TechCrunch Annotated
I originally wrote about Bunchball
during the Web 2.0 conference last fall. They relaunched their product on February 1, 2006
The core technology is the same, but bunchball has changed their interface, focus and messaging. From their profile request:
We’re a place for users to come play multi-player Flash “games” with small groups of friends, or easily take them and put them into their own web pages and blogs, to play with their visitors.
This is the important new thing about Bunchball that we added after the Web 2.0 conference (along with a completely new, 100x better UI) - the ability to take any game and put it into a web page.
Games can be anything from arcade type games to chat, to photo and music sharing.
For developers, we provide quick deployment of existing games (minutes), and an API to our multi-player platform - giving them more opportunities to have their games be viral and the ability to create multiplayer games faster than ever before.
The focus is now on allowing people to easily create flash games, and syndicate them to the edge on blogs and websites. I’ve embedded a version of Asteroids below, which is playable on this site. Games can be multi-player, and chat is integrated. I hope bunchball doesn’t pull an “ajchat” on me and break down.
Bunchball was founded by Rajat Paharia and Sunil Singh and is based in silicon valley.
MySpace Games from Bunchball Annotated
is shaping up to be a nice product. The service allows you to place Flash games on your blog, your MySpace page or virtually any website. That’s a nice idea, but when I tested the service a few months back it just didn’t work right. I returned again today and things are looking better. From the site:
Have a web page somewhere? Take any of our games and put the game directly into your page! Play games with your visitors, or let your visitors compete for the best high score, or chat with them about whatever you want, directly from your page. Once you have an account at Bunchball, all it takes is a couple of clicks to get the code you need. Copy and paste it into your MySpace, TypePad, Piczo, Xanga or other page, and start playing! Check out some examples on our blog and click the “get one free” link on any game to get one for yourself.
Social games on blogs is an idea I tried to pursue last year and ultimately dropped in favor of less taxing projects. So here’s what I’d do if I was in Bunchball’s shoes. First, don’t develop the games. Why bother when you have a whole army of peer producers at your disposal? They’re asking developers to submit games, and I think that’s a good way forward. I don’t know whether this is within their grasp, but I think there’s definitely a market for the Ning of games - a service that makes it easy not only to share games, but to create your own with virtually no effort. Right now you have to be a Flash developer to build a game - it shouldn’t be so. (Admittedly, Ning isn’t delivering on its promise yet, but you get the idea).
MediaPost Publications - Brightcove Partners With Video Analytics Start-Up - 03/19/2007 Annotated
INTERNET TV COMPANY BRIGHTCOVE THIS week is expected to announce a partnership with Visible Measures, a start-up Web video analytics firm that just closed a $5 million round of venture funding from General Catalyst Partners.
Eric Elia, Brightcove's vice president of programming and design, said that one of the company's goals is to bring Web-style analytics to TV content.
"When we started this business, it was our belief that the Internet provided a whole lot of benefits to television and video producers that wasn't available in traditional media," he said. "One of the key pieces that's broken in traditional TV is the reporting and analytics."
Brian Shin, CEO of Visible Measures, said the analytics product allows publishers to track not only videos on their own site, but when their videos are embedded and streamed elsewhere.
"What we're trying to do is create an objective set of metrics that apply in terms of audience engagement, video virality, the distribution of video as it's embedded throughout the Web--if it's watched on a blog or on Facebook, we want to be able to track all of these things," he said.
Elia said that Visible Measures' technology, which monitors user engagement throughout the entire video stream, will help its publisher customers get a better idea of what parts of their videos work, and what parts don't.
"They're not just tracking how many people are watching, they're tracking the full engagement within a video experience," he said. "Visible Measures is going to help our partners better measure what their users are interacting with, and track that engagement over time."
Brightcove hopes that Visible Measures' analytics package will help raise the bar for video analytics. "Ten years ago we tracked hits with Web analytics--that's where we've been as far as online video experiences go," he said. "Visible Measures may help us enrich the tracking around video experiences just as we've seen traditional Web analytics grow over the past 10 years."
Visible Measures will be running a beta test of its analytics package with several of Brightcove's clients, Elia said. In addition to Brightcove, Visible Measures is also partnering with PermissionTV, and has received an endorsement from YouTube's chief marketing officer, Suzie Reider.
Visible Measures Management Team
Live: Brave New Web - Where do I get my Web 2.0? - CenterNetworks - News, Reviews, Insights and Interviews Annotated
Moderator: Is there a Web 2.0 business philosophy?
David: It's about giving up control and giving users ways to engage with your products and services.
Scott: Web 2.0 is hard to define with a great definition. They can adopt ways on a business purpose or a tactical purpose.
Brian: It's about the user centricity. We talk about the new technologies but its about redefining interfaces.
Phil: It's defined as the web talks back and you gotta pay attention to it. Transparency is key.
Moderator: Don't solve easy problems, solve expensive ones. How much does it take to start a web-based business?
Brian: Look at Digg starting for $200.
Moderator: How much can you actually spend if vc wants to give you money?
Phil: When your business is successful, you need money like there is no end. Audit trails, better servers, compliant code, etc. You need to scale out technically and managerially.
Scott: I think you need to bring in some kind of braintrust and you need smart people.
Phil: The challenge is differentiating yourself. Do it, do it well, pick your targets and get people on board.
David: The importance is to catch a wave of opportunity and ride that wave through your execution.
Attendee: It seems the Web 2.0 business model is all or nothing bet because its based on advertising.
David: In the consumer world that is more the case. Think about the enterprise!
Attendee: Do you have any strategies for virality in the enterprise?
Rafe: I don't think of the enterprise as being viral.
David: The enterprise is now about what the employees are using vs. the CIO demanding what they use.
Moderator: Monetization with freemium services comments?
Phil: gotta find the revenues - spread the risk
Brian: if you look at LinkedIn it is an example of this
Attendee: Could panel comment on technical side of Web 2.0? Do you see what technologies are fueling Web 2.0?
Phil: We stand on the shoulders of giants. The key to success is how you package the technologies together. And it has to be able to scale.
There was a bit of talk about security and reliability for Web 2.0 services. There is also talk that Web 2.0 apps can be completely secured.
David: Make your business a viable business without needing a post on TechCrunch.
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