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Google Blogger gives itself a touch-up with template designer
Google Blogger, a venerable player in the space after celebrating its 10th birthday last fall, is giving itself a touchup. The company has launched Blogger Template Designer, which gives users a lot more freedom to design the look and feel of their Google-hosted blogs. Users can change colors, titles, background images from hundreds of stock photos and there’s a drag-and-drop interface to shuffle pieces of the layout. There are 15 templates to start with and custom blog layouts with one, two or three columns. “Blogging is about self expression and that an important part of expression is creating a custom design that expresses your unique voice,” said the company in a statement. It’s a much-needed overhaul for the service, which attracts 300 million readers a month. Younger upstarts in the microblogging space like Union Square Ventures-backed Tumblr gained traction in part they’ve focus on elegant design. Tags: blogs, design, google blogger Companies: Google
Daily Show’s Jon Stewart gives ChatRoulette a spin
Daily Show host Jon Stewart did a take on ChatRoulette, the video chat phenomenon started by a 17-year-old in Moscow, and ran into its two main kinds of users — reporters and, er, body parts. We’ve tried ChatRoulette here at VentureBeat and the site has grown to hosting more than 50,000 anonymous chat partners simultaneously on busy nights. ChatRoulette is a site where you get paired with a random video chat partner from somewhere around the world. It attracts lots of curious users and inevitably, perverts. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Tech-Talch – Chatroulette www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform Tags: chatroulette People: jon stewart
Round-up: Topeka, Kansas dubs itself Google, Slide has a resurgence
Here’s the latest action: CereProc helps give Roger Ebert his voice back: The company used old recordings of the film critic and text-to-speech technology to help recreate Ebert’s voice after he lost it to cancer surgery. Key Intel exec has stroke and takes a leave of absence: Sean Maloney, one of Intel’s top three executives below CEO Paul Otellini, suffered a stroke at home and will take a leave of absence. Hot diggity! $156,000 in annualized revenue makes big headlines: TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb say that Edward Kim’s Car Locator Android app is proof that you can make riches off Google’s mobile platform. The developer said he’s earning about $13,000 a month from the app, making for $156,000 in yearly income if he can keep up the pace. Topeka tries to woo the search giant by renaming itself Google, Kansas: In a bid to bring Google’s experiment with ultra-high speed broadband networks to the city, the government decided to temporarily rename itself after the company for a month. Slide posts a strong February: The early leader in social apps before Zynga started hogging the spotlight looks like it may be having a Renaissance. In the last two weeks, the company has doubled its monthly active users to 40 million users, according to Inside Social Games. Facebook’s recent redesign helped while Slide’s new focus on virtual goods helped its users earn $160,000 in January. Google tries to assuage privacy concerns around Chrome: The company highlighted incognito mode, which lets users surf the web without recording their browsing history and deletes all new cookies once incognito windows are closed. Companies: cereproc, Google, Slide
Strings: A recommendation engine that’s transparent about its data mining
It’s no secret that companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google study our behavior to recommend products or push advertising our way. A Bellevue, Washington-based company called Strings is trying to do the exactly that, but with very explicit user permission. Users can track the books they buy on Amazon, songs they enjoy on iTunes or other types of behavior on hundreds of other web sites. Combined with aggregated, anonymized data from other users, Strings can suggest products a person might like using a combination of techniques including collaborative filtering. The product is designed to passively follow online activity like products you browse on Neiman Marcus’s Web site, provided you’ve activated Strings to track you on that property. You can fine-tune Strings to follow different kinds of behavior, whether it’s passive browsing or active behavior “starring”, “liking” or buying items. Users pick the online sites they want to monitor themselves on, and Strings doesn’t reveal information to advertisers. The company earns revenue through affiliate fees when it successfully recommends products that consumers later buy. Strings also has FriendFeed-style sharing, so you can send a feed of items you like to friends on the site. There are also granular privacy controls to manage who sees what. “We believe that we’re an advocate for consumers. That’s precisely the reason we’re being upfront about tracking and why we offer people control over their data,” said Edward Balassanian, Strings’ chief executive and founder. The company has been self-funded to date. Strings is part of a wave of companies like Blippy and Foursquare that try to incentivize and make users feel comfortable sharing their behavior. Provided you feel safe with this type of sharing, Strings might offer useful recommendations for books, music and all sorts of other products. If you’re privacy paranoid, then most online services have some sort of risk, and Strings tries to
New interactive ad format launched for Alice in Wonderland
Sprout, a San Francisco-based startup that has worked on Facebook apps for Disney before, has come up with a Web-ad version of their Alice in Wonderland app. The ad, which teases fans to upload photos of themselves, is interactive, and remembers if you’ve personalized it already. The ads, running on IGN, Fandango, Movietickets, YouTube, and Addicting Games, can contain multiple pages and are designed like an app, all interaction takes place in the ad. “There is no need to leave the site,” Sprout VP of Marketing Michelle Wohl wrote in an email. “Branded engagement experiences are no longer limited to social networks and the brands’ sites. Sprout Engage Ads can live on any site where display ads are run.” The video below shows the ad in action. Sprout — sproutinc.com — is based in Honolulu, Hawaii and San Francisco. The company was founded in 2007, and has collected $8.3 million in two rounds of funding, most recently a $5 million round in May 2008 led by = Polaris Venture Partners. Tags: advertising Companies: Disney, Sprout
Video: Never fear, your beer-serving robot is here.
Maybe if there is a utopian future where humans and robots live in peaceful co-existence, those robots would serve lots of beer. That was the loopy idea behind BarBot 2010 last week, where inventors showed off mechanical creations that could mix a stiff Long Island iced tea or serve a cold one. Some were expectedly silly. But others had a potential business model behind them, with the ability to mix dozens of complicated drinks and relieve packed bar counters. It seems like there could be a market for cocktail-mixing or beer vending machines, barring alcohol restrictions for minors and the violent nature of intoxicated humans. We’ll see! Tags: barbot, beer, beer-serving robots, cocktails, robots
A laptop app for students who can’t stop typing
Knowledge Notebook is a $39 Windows application (free 30 day trial) designed to enable copious note-taking, organizing, and review for students. Colleges are worrying that students spend too much time on the Internet in the middle of lectures. They’re hitting Facebook instead of taking notes. One proposed solution is to turn off wireless connections in the classroom. Bentley College allows profs to choose one of five settings from fully-off to email-enabled to full access. Or they can restrict students to campus sites only, for access to course materials. The cool thing about Knowledge Notebook is, it has both offline and online modes. You can turn off your WiFi to pay attention, or fire it up to add online research. Don Li, a veteran of big-tech firms Booz Allen Hamilton and SRA International, started his own company, Virginia Web App, two years ago. Knowledge Notebook, his own creation, is designed specifically for taking notes in class, connecting them to previous and future notes, and optimizing both the in-class offline and back-at-the-dorm online experience for studying and reviewing. KN’s look is as plain as Windows 3.0, but it’s the concepts that matter, not the graphics. Jarred Milich, a senior marketing major at Virginia Tech, emailed me to say he uses Knowledge Notebook instead of Microsoft OneNote for his note-taking. “Taking notes is only the first step,” he wrote. “There is a feature that allows me to easily export my notes into flash cards. Also, the Concept Mapping feature allows me to link my related notes and see all of them on one screen. This is very convenient because I am a visual learner and like to see all the info on one page, in one place.” The demo video below shows how that works. Knowledge Notebook also has shortcuts for, say, looking up topics or words in Wikipedia, and to import content from PowerPoint slides. That sounds trivial, but wait until you’re pulling an all-nighter on an overdue paper. Every click counts.
Facebook critics’ profiles restored after press uproar
After an uproar in Latin American media, three Argentines involved in a book that portrays the social network in a cynical and satirical light had their Facebook profiles restored today. The author of the book Faceboom, Juan Faerman, had his profile deactivated for nearly an entire month without explanation. Finally today, after inquiries by Latin American journalists and VentureBeat yesterday, the company reactivated the profiles of Faerman and his partners, saying that it made an error. The case has generated a lot of regional Spanish-language media coverage in the past week. Argentine daily La Nacion called it “censorship.” The Buenos Aires Herald, Argentina’s only English daily, read by many diplomats and business executives in Argentina, titled its story, “Got Facebook? No, they shut me down.” As in much of the world, the social network has taken off in Argentina, reaching 95 percent of Argentines who use web-based social networks, according to local technology analyst Enrique Carrier. The book, Faceboom, was released in Argentina late last year without controversy. It’s a fairly smart, satirical take on the site that pokes fun at some of the social network’s hypocrisies and the masses that flock to join it. The promotional video below, which is worth watching if only for its oddness, gives you a flavor of its tone. But in January, Faerman launched the book in Europe and drew a lot of attention after appearing on Buena Fuente, a popular night-time talk show. Within days, his profile vanished. The same happened to Guillermo Otero and Fernanda Gaitan Broun, both involved with the book and its’ marketing. In addition, a Facebook group of fans of Faceboom was deleted. The trio claims it had 30,000 members at the time. I spoke to Faerman and he showed me emails he sent to Facebook going back to January 27, requesting an explanation. Here’s a YouTube video showing him trying to sign in with his old login and receiving the message “c
Google acquires reMail, founder Cselle joins Gmail team
Google has acquired e-mail startup reMail, and founder Gabor Cselle will join Google’s Gmail team as a product manager. reMail will be removed from the Apple’s app store, but it will continue to work for users who have already downloaded it. The San Francisco startup was incubated by Y Combinator and raised funding from Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, who worked on Gmail and co-founded the newly-acquired FriendFeed. Cselle declined to comment further on the acquisition or its price. Like Google’s acquisition of Aardvark last week, reMail was also founded by an ex-Googler. Cselle is returning to his old employer, where he worked on Gmail before leaving to become VP of engineering at Xobni and then later chief executive of reMail. Cselle writes: “Gmail is where my obsession with email started as an engineering intern back in 2004, and I’m thrilled to be coming back to a place with so many familiar faces. reMail’s goal was reimagine mobile email, and I’m proud we have built a product that so many users find useful. Still, I feel like we’ve only seen the beginning of what’s possible. Google is the best place in the world to improve the status quo on how people communicate and share information. If you have what it takes to make these changes happen, I encourage you to reach out and come join me.”
Hey bloggers, do you wish for Tumblr Pro? Try ZooLoo
When pushbutton-simple free blogging site Tumblr launched in 2007, friends of mine with a lot to say but no interest in tinkering with HTML jumped onto it. Not only did they create their own personal blogs, they spun off temporary joke blogs for topics of the day. A coworker of mine at Valleywag created fakepaulboutin.tumblr.com, where she posted my wisecracks from Valleywag’s private chat room. But if you want your own personal domain rather than _____.tumblr.com, you have to set it up yourself. It’s a multi-step process: Buy domain. Get domain’s A record registered in DNS, whatever that means. Deal with technical problems. Deal with more technical problems. Forget to renew domain. Lose domain to squatter in Ukraine. Wouldn’t you pay to have someone else deal with this stuff for you? ZooLoo sells subscription blogging services for as little as $1.99 that includes a custom domain and backups, email for the site, plus a dashboard for managing your blog. ZooLoo’s Graffiti blog platform is a lot like Tumblr: Simple, attractive, easy to use because it’s not complicated. For $4.99 a month you can remove the ads from your ZooLoo site and double your storage capacity to 2 gigabytes. (There’s no limit on image uploads, which aren’t stored on your personal space.) For $8.99 monthly, you can run your own ads and use ZooLoo’s search engine optimization (SEO) tools. You can use ZooLoo for free, if you’re happy with just a blog, a dashboard, and the ability to check and update your status on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Linkedin. The company, founded in Scottsdale, Arizona in May 2008 by CEO Jeff Herzog, is privately funded. The one-minute video below shows how ZooLoo works for beginners.
