I recently came across the Jing Project and was a breath of fresh (I mean free) air for screen capture. If you other bloggers and guerrilla marketing gurus have been on the hunt for an affordable and realiable screen capture look no further. I am still on road otherwise I would have taken the time to show you a an example of the screen capture. Until recently Camtasia was my go-to choice, but 30-day trials only last so long and I refuse to pay for these type of services (amazing what we expect for free these days).
The biggest difference (besides being free) between Jing, Camtasia Studio and Snagit is straight from Jings website.
While there’s truth in describing Jing as a SnagIt or Camtasia Studio “lite,” the key difference is about workflow. Jing is designed to be fast-visual communication shared with others in a variety of locations. Capture. Annotate. Share.
Jing Project was #100 on PCworlds top products of 2008 list. It appears TechSmith is behind Jing (also developers of Camtasia & SnagIt) and will allow 2GB of storage for free or you can use other storage mechanisms. What I cannot figure out for the life of me is why TechSmith is offering almost a competing free product with the other two offerings. Ultimately it may lead to more sales, but for the rest of us it means a quality free screen capture project that allows us to share beyond belief.
Crowdfusion is on the move with $3 Million in the coffers from the likes of Marc Andreessen, Velocity Interactive Group and Greycroft Partners. The startup is attempting to be the next standard for “web publishing” (Think what wordpress did for blogging). There is a tremendous amount of buzz on this startup particularly because Andreeseen is involved. If you haven’t noticed his past track record, he basically has the midas touch. After signing up at the holder teaser page Crowdfusion relinquished this information:
Crowd Fusion’s mission is to revolutionize online publishing with a
unique combination of technology and strategy. Our platform is
engineered to help position topic-focused publications as the leaders
in their verticals by providing publishing engines for the entire web
content lifecycle.
The Crowd Fusion’s infrastructure and data-mining functionality equip
publishers with the ability to automatically scale as demand
increases. We provide a set of easy-to-use and dynamic tools that
accommodate a publisher’s needs as they arise.
The jargon laden business model sounds like the executive summaries I use to spew in my VC wars. What I find interesting is buddypress (a social version of wordpress) is right around the corner and with a 4 million plus built in audience. Matthew Mullenweg the founding developer of wordpress stated the following on his blog.
It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape
As this category of more “integrated social publishing” heats up BuddyPress, Crowdfusion and many others are going to wage war on simplicity, monetization and plug&play for the little publisher who could.
PaidContent confirms rumors about additional funding for micro-blogging site Twitter. Spark Capital is behind the $15 million third round of financing placing Twitter at roughly $80 Million in valuation. Spark Capital is a fresh VC firm in Boston founded by Todd Darges who I had the pleasure of meeting when he worked at Battery Ventures.
The funding is timely as Twitter is clearly experiencing a growth spurt in users with constant server outages of late. The interesting trend to watch will be the advertising standard that will be used in micro-blogging services like Twitter. I mean…if Twitter is worth $80 Million it should at least make money right?
CBS has acquired San Fransisco based CNET for $.1.8 billion. CNET has numerous web properties and enormous traffic from the likes of Gamespot,TV.com, news.com and mp3.com. According to Forbes“The deal values CNET at a 44.6% premium to Wednesday’s closing price of $7.95. CBS said that the deal would catapult it into the ranks of the 10 most popular Internet companies in the United States, with around 200 million users worldwide.”
Pre-CNET purchase numbers indicated CBS lagging in 5th at around 23 Million unique visitors as of the middle of March 2008 according to Adage.
1. TimeWarner 123.8 M
2. Disney 48.1 M
3. NewsCorp 86.6 M
4. NBC Universal 51.5 M
5. CBS 23.6 M
Whether the CNET purchase will truly bring CBS to the number one position time will tell. The CBS Internet acquisition rampage puts some plush holdings under its’ belt:
Live Universe continues the acquisition tear by acquiring Pageflakes according to TechCrunch. Many of you may recognize the Live Universe brand from the Revver acquisition earlier in the year for $5 million. Apparently Live Universe is making quite a business model out of companies that have exhausted their funding and burn-rate. It appear Live Universe has acquired its’ second victim in the Web 2.0 space. Reportedly $4 million has been pumped into Pageflakes to date before the acquisition.
Pageflakes is a compelling web property but always played second fiddle to Netvibes (one of my favorites) in the ajax social widget space. Live Universe continues to build momentum with 100K uniques per month to the main site.
How to monetize your eyeballs and the social media craze for your next Internet startup is the clear and present danger of web 2.0. Humans are the most intelligent species on the planet (supposedly). Yet learning from our mistakes is simply not in our business DNA. We are doomed to repeat past mistakes similarly to the inevitable demise of protagonists in Greek tragedy.
Alley Insider has a great post about the current “free” situation that continues to be rampant on the web and is attributed to the usual suspects “VC”. Venture Capitalists have distorted the market by infusing massive amounts of money to massively scale startups and use Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn as the poster children of success (thousands die you don’t hear about). My analysis of blame is less on the VC’s and passionate entrepreneurs and more on the consumer. The consumer aka “eyeballs” aptly named “eyeballs” because that is the only value they lend for their refusal to pay for Internet services. This has left anemic business models scrambling for revenue to find refuge in advertising. The only catch is the web advertising model is based on scale, the more eyeballs, the more advertising revenue. The day subscribers pay $9 bucks a month for web 2.0 services is the day advertisers may mean less.
Or will they?
Take the existing model of television and your cable bill. Let’s use Bravo programming for instance (I use to produce content for). They’re content is subsidized by advertisers and yet consumers still pay $80 - $180 a month to a service provider like Comcast to have the 900 channel universe, HD and DVR services. So what is lost in translation? Web 2.0 is Web 1.0 reincarnate? Is the consumer expectation of the web free? Netflix, Amazon, Ebay and Google all managed to make the consumer/business pay for services. This makes me wonder if we’re all crazy to continue down the social media path when it’s so clear that other Internet business models are more effective. What are we missing in the social media web 2.0 space.
Amazon had a unknown server outage today starting at around 5am and lasting until quarter-past 7am. The reports in main stream media and blogs have been comical based on how quickly people want to throw AWS (Amazon Web Services) under the bus. Granted Amazon does not have a SLA (service level agreement) but, is that really any different than owning your own infrastructure. Unless you are hosting applications on the edge (think Akamai) and other CDN’s, hosting is bound to fail at some point….even SLA’s that offer 99.999% uptime have cryptic legal language that exonorates them from legal damages. I had a webhosting company for 2 years before selling off the assets and referring business to parnters and downtime is inevitable. It’s how well you manage the downtime and your customer service requests that matter.
Startup Addict has AWS in our business plan…although not implemented for 1.0 and 2.0 release it will be incorporated by 2.5 release, it just makes good business sense. The impressive aspect of the downtime was how quickly it came back up and you better believe Amazon will be throwing resources at rectifying and preventing this problem in the future. As I reported on earlier, numerous startups are attempting to compete with AWS and are offering SLA’s but, this practice is limited because the SLA is inevitable for Amazon. The reason one is not in place now is very clear after this event –Amazon is still working out the kinks. A new startup will not find a better economy-of-scale anywhere than at Amazon web services for infrastructure (unless your VC funded and have a high burn-rate).
Google is rumored to be buying Plaxo for $200 million. According to ValleyWag the move may be out of complete friendship between Brad Fitzpatrick at Google and Joseph Smarr, Plaxo’s chief platform architect. Whatever the reason this acquistion does fit in with Google’s OpenSocial plans dispite a heavy price. I might just be frugal but wouldn’t 50M have covered it?
This is interesting news seeing how previous reports stated Facebook was acquiring Plaxo (in the $100 million range…explains the 200M purchase) from VentureBeat and TechCrunch
For those of you out of the loop on Plaxo, the site is allows users to sync contacts through its web site, to create an aggregated universal address book. Contacts and profile information from Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn etc… in one manageable interface.
When a property is hot, it’s hot. Google’s on a social graph mission and Plaxo is a natural stepping stone for the company’s completion of the death star. I guess Facebook was still working out the kinks on Beacon.
The rumors flying around over this past year may very well come true. Microsoft makes a $44.6 billion dollar bid for Yahoo. According to NewYorkTimes that represents a 62% premium to the existing stock prices and places a $31.00 valuation on Yahoo. The stock is already up 59% in pre-market trading for today on the news. This comes two days after missed earnings and a 7% layoff of the work force (roughly 1000 people).
The likely-hood of the transaction consummating is extremely high in my opinion for 3 reasons:
1. Microsoft has a boat-load of cash and can entice Yahoo with more cash than stock in the deal.
2. This offers a truly high premium to existing shareholders and business mantra is still to “maximize shareholder wealth”.
3. Micro-hoo will become the premium destination in terms of traffic on the Internet and a powerhouse in search advertising.
This may cost Microsoft in the short-run but will put them in a dominating advertising revenue position on the Internet. Remember Microsoft purchased advertising companies aQuantive for$ 6 Billion and Yahoo purchased RightMedia for $680 million. Couple that with MSN and Yahoo portal along with all the ancillary services like Yahoo Mail, Answers, Hotmail etc.. surely a lethal combination to compete against the Google-DoubleClick merger.
This will be fun to dissect and compare as we move forward on this news.
You know an industry is over or at least nearing an end when everything is for sale (real estate sound familiar?). We’ve gone from a flurry of “startup acquisition” headlines to a flurry of startup “for sale” headlines.
Spark Networks is looking to unload its’ JDate online dating property to the tune of $185 Million. This time last year, it would have been acquired for that amount not “for sale” for that amount. Spark Networks much like Affinity labs (Monster.com just acquired) and like StartupAddict.com’s holding company HyperActive Media all have multiple web properties that focus on niche verticals. Apparently some properties are getting mature in terms of valuation and need unloading before the web 2.0 craze is completely over.
