Minti: Parenting Advice For The UGC Generation

Minti offers a collaborative parenting advice service that ignores the one-to-many we know best style service that is the norm in this space, and instead empowers individuals to share their stories and experience.

As Michael Arrington wrote his initial review of the site in March 2006, the overall concept of Minti isn’t entirely new. As a service it sits somewhere between an advice site such as BabyCentre (a site I visited regularly when I was on the road to parenthood) and a forum. The difference is in the implementation.

Weighing User Generated Interactions

Minti is powered by the Vibe Engine, a custom built CMS owned by Vibe Capital (the majority shareholders of Minti) that also powers sites such as Refurber.

Minti has over 20,000 active registered members (as opposed to inactive or casual visitors, they are doing 7 figures in traffic) who comment, vote, tag, and contribute advice. Consider something like Breastfeeding; Minti has many user generated advice articles on the subject but it’s how they are weighed that makes the service usable and perhaps something different.

minti1.pngThe Vibe Engine weighs votes on an article based on a number of factors. Anyone can vote, but an unregistered visitor’s vote is not weighed as heavily as a registered user. Users themselves fall into ten member categories based on the amount of activity the undertake on Minti itself. Each level has a higher weighing meaning that users who are more active have a stronger vote than those who aren’t. It should be noted that none of this is evident to the user; these are all primarily backend levels, although at certain levels users get extra privileges including the ability to mark a contribution for review/ deletion is it is not of a reasonable standard. Users at higher levels also get to vote on reviews/ deletions as well in a truly distributed management model where regular users have ownership in decision making.

Overall the model delivers user rated results that serve to filter lots of information in a more accessible fashion for all readers.

Rocketboom Moves to Blip.tv

The popular daily videoblog Rocketboom is joining online video network blip.tv, which will now host all of Rocketboom’s videos and sell ads for the show. Rocketboom joins a growing crowd of other top videoblogs that can be found on Blip.tv, including Wallstrip, TreeHugger TV, Alive in Baghdad, and Goodnight Burbank. As with most of those shows, the relationship between Rocketboom and blip.tv is not exclusive. For instance, Rocketboom will continue to sell ads on its own site. But the more top-quality shows that blip.tv can sell ads against, the stronger its position becomes in the embryonic world of Web-only video.

rocketboom_screen.pngWith its launch this morning on blip.tv, Rocketboom gains a new sponsor in Comedy Central’s The Sarah Silverman Program. And blip.tv is concurrently launching a new ad unit, an Flash-like overlay that can be seen on Quicktime downloads (the kind you get off iTunes). According to blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack, these ads will be viewable on iTunes even though Apple generally prefers the paid-download model to ads. Blip.tv has offered pre-roll and post-roll ads on video downloads for about a year, but this is the first time a mid-clip overlay is available. Overlays, which usually look like a banner that pop up during the video, are preferable because, Hudack tells TechCrunch “pre-rolls have the potential to turn off viewers and post-rolls don’t get watched.” Eventually, blip.tv will have the capability to track how many times each ad is viewed or clicked on as well. Up till now, such metrics have been more common for streaming videos than for downloads.

ThePudding: Targeted Advertising Comes to Phone Calls

ThePudding provides free, PC-based phone calls to anywhere in the US or Canada. The big catch: computers in Fremont, CA will eavesdrop on and analyze every word of your conversation so they can serve up advertisements tailored to the topic at hand.

Users initiate a phone call simply by visiting ThePudding’s website (currently in private beta) and entering a phone number into the browser. After the call begins, advertisements tailored to the conversation will begin to appear on screen. The NYT has a good screenshot of what these advertisements will look like here.

Phone conversations are monitored only by computers, not actual human beings. The company also does not record any of the conversations or log any of the topics discussed. Therefore, advertisements are tailored to each particular phone call and not to trends in users’ calling behavior.

ThePudding has already experienced a fair amount of backlash, with some calling it a terrible idea because users will not be comfortable enough with allowing their phone conversations to be monitored. There is also the concern that niche users will not be swayed by this completely free offering, because they already pay very little for services like Skype. However, ThePudding may be a potential acquisition target for Skype itself, which may be interested in developing an ad-based revenue model.

Despite the criticism, ThePudding does not seem all that different to me from a privacy perspective than Gmail. If users are comfortable with letting computers analyze their email messages and display targeted advertisements alongside them, why won’t they be comfortable with allowing the same thing with their verbal communications? Perhaps there is an important psychological factor at play here that will always make people unwilling to let strangers monitor what they actually speak. But consumers are caring less and less about how much information they provide online about themselves to unverified companies, so it doesn’t seem implausible to me that with time many people will overcome their anxieties about this type of service.

While ThePudding is currently only available through the web browser on PCs, the company has plans to expand into mobile (and to display advertisements on the screens of handheld devices).

ThePudding is a service of Pudding Media, which was founded by two Israelis with experience in military intelligence and telecommunications. The company is based in San Jose, California.

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Sketchcasting - Another Weapon In The Bl

Eventvue Grabs Angel Round Over The Weekend

The firstTechStars startup has gotten funded over this weekend. Eventvue has closed a round estimated to be about a quarter million dollars from Brad Feld, David Cohen, Dave McClure, Wendy Lea, amongst others. See our earlier coverage of them here.

Eventvue brings social networking to the context of conferences, helping conference goers re-connect or follow up with business they couldn’t follow up with in the limited span of a conference. Networking at a conference is a fairly inefficient process, left up to chance encounters and stacks of business cards. Anything that can help optimize the limited conference time that thousand dollar ticket bought you is an easy sell.

Confabb is the most direct competitor in the space, but has focused on being a comprehensive directory of the who, what, and where of industry conferences rather than on the palm greasing that goes on at the events. More social competitors include Meetup.com and Eventwax. Eventvue is set for a public launch later this year.

PlanHQ Still Tiny, But Getting A-List Attention

PlanHQ, a Wellington, New Zealand startup that launched in April 2007, has just 180 paying customers and $6,000/month in revenue. But their product, which allows companies to create and track business plan and other goals and objectives, is getting rave reviews from some well known venture capitalists. That’s good news for the tiny startup.

The product is an easy to use business plan builder and project manager - set up goals and projections (financial, product or customer related) and then track those goals with the software. It’s not free - PlanHQ costs between $9 and $45 per month. Half their customers are choosing the high end plan.

It’s proving to be a useful tool for keeping the executive teams of startups focused on their primary goals (the ones the stockholders and board of directors care about) by providing constant feedback on the status of those goals.

The funny thing is, CEOs may not be the best people to market the product to. Sometimes more transparency into how they and their teams are doing is the last thing they want. But PlanHQ is hoping that venture capitalists will push it on companies. First Round Capital, a very well known early stage venture fund, is testing PlanHQ (they are not an investor). Other VCs are testing it as well, says company founder Tim Norton.

For VCs, it provides a single interface for monitoring all of their investments and holding companies to their projections. PlanHQ is evolving to serve VCs more fully by launching a board member reporting feature on Wednesday. The company is also working on having the product integrate seamlessly with well known accounting software to import financial data.

The company has raised just $250,000 in capital from angel investors and has six employees. To the extent they can get VCs to make this mandatory for their portfolio companies, Norton may find himself running a profitable, if niche, business.

Australian Government Proves Why Blogging Is Best Left To Everyone Else

The Australian Government has released an official consultation (white) paper on whether it should launch a “consultation blog.”

According to the paper, the Special Minister of State the Hon. Gary Nairn states that the purpose of the paper is to discuss the provision of the consultation blog and “sets out to balance the opportunities provided by the new online environment against the challenges and very real threats emerging to the identity and privacy of individuals.” The blog itself “is
envisaged as a website that lists consultations and allows people to post responses, comments and feedback against each consultation.”

Now whilst it’s great to see a sovereign nation officially consider a blogging strategy, I want what ever it is the soon-to-be former Government is smoking; the irony of launching a consultation paper on a consultation blog seems lost on them. Certainly deciding to run a blog based on a lengthy consultation process by itself seems to me to prove that they shouldn’t be blogging at all; after all, if the purpose of having a consultation blog is to gain feedback from the public, wouldn’t they just be better off launching the blog and taking feedback from the public via the blog rather than launching a consultation paper that probably cost six figures to come up with by a committee of high paid public servants who love nothing more than creating papers like this as a means to avoid real exposure to the will of the public? A little cynical perhaps, but reading a paper that describes blogs like 2002 called again can do that to you.

The PDF in all its glory can be found here.

Disclosure: I’m a former Australian Government staffer.

TV Coverage For Dancejam, Realius and Gizmoz At TechCrunch40

Three TechCrunch40 demo pit startups got local bay area television coverage last week - Dancejam (note: I’m an investor), Realius and Gizmoz. It looks like the reporter did the easy thing - a swing by the demo pit to film the best looking startups. Congrats to all three.

Demand Media Takes $100 Million Series C

Domain holding company Demand Media has taken $100 million Series C funding in a round led by Goldman Sachs that included 3i Group, Generation Partners, Oak Investment Partners and Spectrum Equity Investors. The new round takes Demand Media’s total funding to the rather extraordinary figure of $320 million and values Demand Media at $1 billion.

Demand Media is primary a domaining company that is focused on building a profitable domain portfolio which includes everything from generic names through to typos. Like a number in this business lately, Demand Media has started a value adding program for their domain portfolio, having launched social network Me.TV in May. Demand Media is headed by former MySpace CEO Richard Rosenblatt.

Whilst often being tarred with the domain hijacking brush, domaining has become a big business with serious money over the last couple of years. The sale of Business.com for $350million has seen renewed interest from tradition investors who are looking for similar flipping opportunities.

But Demand Media is also buying other online properties, including pure content plays. They have new competition from Ross Levinsohn and Jonathan Miller, who recently created their own fund, backed by General Atlantic, to acquire some of the same properties that Demand Media will be interested in.

Meebo Adds File Sharing To Webchat

Web chat startup Meebo, still basking in the glow of bringing instant messaging to the iPhone, is releasing a much requested new feature tonight: file sharing.

There are dozens of web based file sharing applications, such as YouSendIt and DropSend (we reviewed four P2P solutions here), but users often want to simply send a file to a friend while chatting with them. This is easy with desktop based chat, which usually allows for drag and drop file transfers. But there was no equivalent with web chat until now.

The back end of the service is hosted at Amazon S3. Meebo is eating the cost of the service, but limits file transfers to 10 MB each, with a 30 MB/month send limit per user. Look for a new “send file” button when chatting with someone on the Meebo website.

Meebo has raised a total of $12.5 million from Sequoia and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They say 6 million people use the service monthly and spent around 2 hours per day, several times per week, on the site.

The Holy Grail For Mobile Social Networks

We’ve been tracking emerging mobile-only social networks such as ZYB and Mocospace and Mig33. All have unique selling points (Mocospace is dead simple to use, ZYB has a rich set of potential users from their address book backup service, and Mig33 has a VOIP tool that has attracted over seven million users), but there’s one solid gold feature that none yet have: physical presence detection and information exchange with other users.

This is the Holy Grail of mobile social networking, and one of the main reasons for taking the networks off the desktop/laptop environment in the first place. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting - quick LinkedIn type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

Knowing when your friends are around, and having the ability to meet new people who share your interests (even if it’s just that you are both single), will drive massive usage of networks. But, as with many new services, a chicken and egg problem looms. Until everyone is using this, there is no real reason for anyone to use it. Meetro, an instant messaging service that finds friends based on location, has struggled to gain users over the last couple of years for this reason.

Technical barriers aren’t an issue - cell phone tower triangulation and bluetooth solve a lot of the problems of locating users and transmitting information between phones. What’s harder is just plain getting a critical mass of users.

The Failures

There is a trail of failed attempts at getting this right. Nokia released Nokia Sensor nearly three years ago. It broadcasts information about yourself to others via bluetooth. Never heard of it? Neither has anyone else, although it is still available for download. Google’s Dodgeball is another example that’s fallen flat - it tells friends (and friends of friends) who are within 10 blocks of you where you are and what you are doing.

The New Experiments

A bunch of new startups are giving this a shot, too. In a post yesterday TechCrunch UK mentions Germany’s Aka-Aki, Paris-based Mobiluck and MeetMoi (the lone U.S. startup). Another startup is Copenhagen-based Imity. It’s not surprising that most of the innovation is occurring in Europe. The current approach is to get java-based software on the phone - very few U.S. carriers and handsets allow user-based installs of java apps.

Aka-Aki

Aka-Aki, based in Germany, is just a couple of weeks old. Create a profile and download the java app to your phone. You can also create and join groups that say things about your life, job, etc. When you are near other people who are members, data about you is transmitted to them via bluetooth, and vice versa. Users have control over data flow with privacy settings. And the groups supply another layer of privacy. You may transmit that you are single only to other singles, for example. Or share your sexual orientation only with others with the same orientation.

After a silent launch, word is getting out. Thousands of people in Berlin are using the software, and there is a chance for them to get critical mass there with proper marketing. The company has raised a small seed round from FoundersLink and is currently looking for a larger round.

Imity

Copenhagen based Imity, which launched in April, has also been flying under the radar. Like Aka-Aki it detects other members via bluetooth and send basic profile information to your phone. It also keeps track of people on its website, so you can check that out periodically from your normal computer. It’s bridges mobile and traditional social networks, which may help it gain critical mass. Co-founder Nikolaj Nyholm is also behind Polar Rose, a facial recognition and image tagging service.

Imity went open source in February 2007.

MeetMoi

MeetMoi, the only U.S. based service, is most like Dodgeball - it uses text messaging to help connect people. It’s dating focused - text your location to the service and it notifies other users in your area that you are there. If they are interested, they can contact you. The company has raised $1.5 million from Acadia Woods Partners and is based in New York.

MobiLuck

MobiLuck, based in Paris, is another bluetooth solution similar to Aka-Aki and Imity. Download the software to your phone and it vibrates when other users are nearby. You can then chat with them, send photos, etc.

Update: Per a comment below, we’re adding Britekite to the list. We actually covered them briefly last month as part of the TechStars event.

Yahoo Lands Bebo Advertising Deal

Good news for Yahoo, which until now didn’t have an advertising deal with any of the big social networks. They just announced that they will handle advertising for the UK and Ireland sites of Bebo, one of the large social networks (articles here and here).

The deal will see Yahoo selling the majority of display and video advertising to an audience of 11.6 million members. Yahoo was previously rumored to be in talks to acquire Bebo for $1 billion in May.

This at least gets them in the game. Last year Google snatched up Myspace advertising with a nearly $1 billion deal. Facebook went with Microsoft, and then Friendster announced a multi year deal with Google earlier this year.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Google guaranteed revenues to Fox, MySpace’s parent company, pursuant to their deal. And Microsoft was largely rumored to have done the same to win Facebook’s business.

More coverage at TechCrunch UK

Facebook Apps Are Pointless If They Don’t Work

Surj Patel is discussing an important issue about Facebook applications over at The Future of Software.

Facebook applications deal with the same, if not greater, scalability issues as regular websites. As usage of any online service grows, developers must provide enough storage and computational power to keep up with the demand. Otherwise, pages take forever to load, error messages begin popping up, and frustrated users vow to never use your product again.

Scalability problems have plagued Facebook’s developer platform from the start. I can’t tell you how many times I have tried to test a Facebook app only to wait impatiently and finally succumb to screens like the one below:

There seem to be two primary reasons why Facebook apps have a particularly bad time with scalability. First, Facebook’s news feed serves as a powerful distribution network that can cause applications to spread virally between friends at a rapid pace. The hockey stick can come very quickly and very unexpectedly for Facebook developers. As a consequence, many of them are caught off-guard and left dealing with victims of their own success.

While I don’t have any statistics on how many Facebook developers are amateur rather than professional, it also seems as though many casual programmers produce Facebook apps that they never seriously intend to scale successfully. The Facebook development environment is such that a skilled programmer can build an attractive application within a very short time. Such casual programming sets these applications up for failure when they receive serious attention by users. Unfortunately, many users (including myself) are left with a bad impression of Facebook apps in general when casually-built apps fail them.

So what is to be done? Patel mentions Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services as good processing and storage solutions for developers who need extra resources on demand and perhaps cannot afford to pay for excessively-sized hosted or in-house scaling solutions. He also names WeoCeo and RightScale as other “meta services” that make it easier for developers to hook up their applications to resource providers.

And yet, it seems unnecessarily inefficient to me that developers have to work with both Facebook and a 3rd-party meta service to deploy successful applications. I’d like to see Facebook itself step in and fill this need for developers so they don’t have to scrounge around for extra computational and storage capacity (after all, there is a waiting list for Amazon’s services now).

If Facebook were able to ensure the success of applications on its platform by providing all the requisite resources for a marginal fee, we would have a win-win situation on our hands. Developers could sleep more easily and so would the execs over at Facebook, because the company wouldn’t have to worry about slow 3rd-party applications tarnishing the brand and overall social networking experience. The service might also provide a healthy revenue stream for the company.

Such a move would take the idea of a platform to another level and demonstrate to potential developers that they really do care about the success of applications within its garden.

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Revver: $1 Million In User Payouts In First 12 Months

Social video site Revver has paid $1 million to video producers and their affiliates over the past year, the company says (pdf). Today also marks the service’s one-year anniversary. Revver generates revenue from pre and post roll advertisements that play in video content in their embeddable player.

Revver splits revenue 50/50 with video creators after paying 20% off the top for video distributors (sites that embed the video become distributors). This implies total revenue of $2-2.5 million in the last year depending on if there are distributors to be paid. Of course, if they have sweatheart deals with some content providers, that revenue total could be lower, even significantly lower.

Revver was one of the first and currently is one of the few hosted video sites helping monetize social video for independent publishers. Metacafe currently has a producer rewards program where they pay $100 per 20,000 views. Dailymotion and Youtube are expected to pay their users through advertising revenue as well.

Google To Present At TechCrunch40

We just got permission to post this - On top of everything else we’ve got planned, Google will present something at TechCrunch40 next week. Like the AOL and Yahoo product launches, it will not be eligible for the $50,000 top prize awarded to the best new startup product. But they will present it in front of the main crowd, and audience comments and questions will be part of the show.

Odeo (Formerly SonicMountain) Acquires FireAnt

If you know who FireAnt is, you either love podcasts or you’re a long time reader of this blog. The company built up a cult following in 2005 and 2006 as the podcast directory and player, and competed head on with Evan Williams’ Odeo for mindshare and users.

FireAnt’s assets were acquired by Odeo for $400,000, they companies will announce today. Not the old Odeo, but Sonic Mountain, which renamed itself Odeo after acquiring it earlier this year. For less than $2 million, Sonic Mountain has now put two of the more well know podcasting brands together under one roof.

The acquired assets include FireAnt’s technology, particularly their desktop media player for Windows and Mac, as well as FireAnt’s database of feeds and metadata. Founder Josh Kinberg joins Odeo to lead product development and integration of the Odeo and FireAnt technology.

Everything will be branded Odeo from here on out, so take a good look at that screenshot. If you are a FireAnt user, it will be changing significantly soon.

Diigo to Launch Website Slideshow Feature Next Week

Website annotation tool Diigo will officially announce its new WebSlides feature next week.

The new widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format, complete with full page content including links, comments, and ads. The widget can be sent to friends and colleagues or placed on websites, blogs, and social networks. A bit of good news for publishers: every slide view will actually register a page view for the content owner.

WebSlides also enables Diigo users to highlight important sections and annotate pages on the fly with sticky notes. Users can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders.

To set up a WebSlides presentation, you simply enter a feed or list of bookmarks, add background music or voice narration, and click “Play”.

There is a lot of competition in the website annotation space, but Diigo’s WebSlides is the first slideshow widget to preserve total page content. Combined with Diigo’s research capabilities, WebSlides makes for a great product. The company will be presenting in the TechCrunch40 demo pit next week.

Our previous coverage of Diigo is here.

Firefox Isn’t Bloated, DRM Will Die: Mozilla Europe CEO

TechCrunch UK’s Michael Butcher has an exclusive interview up with Mozilla Europe CEO Tristan Nitot that covers Firefox, DRM and Microsoft.

Nitot certainly doesn’t appear to be shy in his views on a number of topics. On DRM:

“I don’t think DRM has a future. Treating your customers like thieves is bad business practice. Today the customer is not ‘king’, they are considered thief first….It is stupid to think that the key to a DRM system won’t leak. So if it becomes more painful for a legitimate customer to use a product than it is for the pirates then that’s a problem.”

Nitot also states that Firefox isn’t becoming bloated: “No, Firefox is getting speedier and speedier;” whilst he is correct that Mozilla has held back from adding lots of extra features into Firefox, I’m surprised that he is claiming Firefox is getting speedier…perhaps it is, in between its memory leaks and intermittent crashes.

Full interview here.

RockYou Integrates Like.com Image Search Into Slideshows

Last November, Munjal Shah made a fairly tough decision and did an about face on his startup, Riya. Instead of continuing to focus on Riya’s existing product - facial recognition and tagging of photos - the company took its core technology and launched an image search engine called Like.com.

Unlike other image search engines, Like.com uses photos as the query, returning similar images as the results. The company focused on ecommerce, particularly fashion items like handbags, watches, shoes, etc.

Fast forward to nearly a year later. The company is generating real revenue from sales on the site - Current gross merchandise sales are running at about $12 million per year (Like.com gets a small percentage of that as an affiliate fee in revenue). 1 million or so unique visitors come to the site each month.

This weekend photo widget startup RockYou started to integrate Like.com results into slide shows shown on the RockYou site (example). For now, results are limited to showing shirts on sale that are similar to the ones being worn by people in the photographs. Viewers can click through and purchase a shirt that look similar to the one their friend is wearing in the photos.

So far, so good. Shah says they are seeing an $0.80 CPM on slide show pages and sharing the revenue wtih RockYou. Other partnerships are ready to roll out.

Slide shows with Like.com results are only being shown on RockYou.com currently - due to issues with advertising on social networks (particularly MySpace), they are not included in the embeddable widgets. It’ll take a whole new round of negotiations before we start seeing them there, too.

Cuill: Super Stealth Search Engine; Google Has Definitely Noticed

The murmurs about new stealth search engine Cuill (pronounced “cool”), which were barely a whisper earlier this year, are gaining strength and are starting to reverberate through Silicon Valley gatherings. Expect Powerset-like hype to begin forming around Cuill in the next few months. The company just recently put up a landing page with very basic information.

The company’s main claim is that it can index web pages significantly faster and cheaper than Google can - Cuill has told potential investors that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods. In some ways Cuill is the polar opposite of Powerset, which has huge indexing costs because it does a deep contextual analysis on every sentence on every web page. Powerset’s indexing costs, therefore, should be much higher per web page than Google’s.

Cuill was also founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are ex-Google search experts, and Google must be fuming that their inventions were not added to Google’s intellectual property library. Costello was the founder of Xift.

Cuill met with venture capitalists, but we’re hearing that Costello and Patterson eventually self-funded the company with a $5ish million injection of capital. They now have 10-15 employees and offices in Menlo Park.

Another rumor circulating is that Google already took a shot at acquiring the company with a very healthy offer, showing that they take this potential threat seriously. And the company may have enticed at least one other senior search scientist from Google to join them recently.

Cuill is supposedly set to launch some time in 2008, although they very well might be acquired well before the public gets to see what they are up to.

Dodos To Business 2.0: Welcome To The Club

Business 2.0, the magazine established in 1998 with the lofty goal of chronicling the rise of the New Economy is to close.

According to a NY Times report, Business 2.0 staff were told today that the publication will close next week after the completion of the October Edition.

There previously has been some rumors that Business 2.0 would be taken over by a new publisher, however it appears that Time has decided to kill the magazine (as the NY Times suggests) so as to not provide a ready made magazine and subscriber list to a competitor.

Business 2.0 was founded by Chris Anderson and journalist James Daly and served as a launching pad for a number of well known writers over its 10 years, Om Malik among them.

Nirvanix Launches To Compete With Amazon S3 Storage Service

As anticipated earlier this month, San Diego based Nirvanix has launched and will offer an alternative to Amazon’s S3 storage service, which is growing rapidly.

The company is positioning itself against Amazon by saying it’s easier to integrate than S3 and they offer a service level agreement to guarantee 99/9% uptime (Amazon does not offer an SLA).

Pricing is $0.18/GB/month for storage and $0.18/GB of data transferred. By comparison, Amazon charges $0.15/GB/month for storage, and $0.10/GB of data transferred in and $0.13-$0.18/GB of data transferred out.

The lack of a service level agreement at Amazon has led many startups to use it for backup purposes only, keeping primary storage under their direct control. They may find Nirvanix as an attractive alternative (and this may also give Amazon an incentive to add an SLA soon).

Nirvanix, however, is affiliated with MediaMax, which has recently gone through a hellish transition that left customers offline and furious. The connection between the two companies is going to create some marketing stress for Nirvanix as it rolls out its new service.

The company has raised $12 million in funding.

Lulu To Hulu: Cease And Desist

Online self publishing company Lulu has filed suit against the NBC/ News Corp joint venture Hulu for trademark infringement, unfair and deceptive trade practices and for federal cyberpiracy.

Lulu alleges that Hulu have intentionally attempted to create confusion in the marketplace in that the name Hulu represents a definitive encroachment on Lulu’s name. Lulu also claims Hulu’s trademark filing of August 22 identifies various products and services, many of which are related to, and even identical to, the services that Lulu provides under its Lulu marks.

Lulu CEO Bob Young said in a statement that the legal action was about defending Lulu’s brand; for everyone else it’s yet another part of the ongoing trainwreck soap opera that Clown Co (Hulu) has been since pretty much day one. The ultimate irony of course is that Hulu, which translates to cease and desist in Swahili, may never get off the ground due to someone taking the meaning of the name seriously.

Zoho’s Business Suite Taking on Google Apps

Zoho has been a busy company. Over the past two years they’ve launched 12 applications along with 4 utilities, nearly all with APIs. Last October Zoho tied these programs together for individuals with a single sign-on feature. Today they’re releasing a similar bundling for businesses that takes on Google’s own business productivity suite.

The new release is called Zoho Business, and will bring multiple Zoho applications under a single roof along with an administration console to manage users, domains, and groups. Zoho business will feature multiple user accounts with varying security levels, single sign-on across all Zoho applications, domain name control, remote backup, telephone support, and a variety of other features to be announced.

The suite will will come in a Free and Pro version, mirroring Google’s offer. However, Zoho is expected to price their suite around $40/user/year, $10 less than Google Apps. Zoho’s offering will also consist of more applications than SMBs get with Google Apps, which consists of calendaring, email, Docs & Spreadsheets, Page Creator, and Start Page. Zoho will include all 12 of their collaboration programs (chat, email, planner, wiki, crm, project manager, etc.).

Zoho has yet to finalize the service differences between the free and paid version. It is currently available in private beta, will go into public beta next month, and exit public beta during the first quarter for next year. You can apply for the beta here.

Internet People

The Meth Minute 39 reminds us of the fickle nature of internet celebrities. I’m still trying to find out what happened to Ze Frank, he doesn’t reply to emails. Rocketboom gets a mention as well.


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