Ash K. Gilpin

Israeli Startup Aniboom has raise $4.5 million in an initial round of financing. The round was led by Israeli venture firm Evergreen.

The site has very good user generated animated videos presented in a Flash player and embeddable in other websites.

Aniboom is neck and neck with newcoming MyToons in the race to become the “YouTube of Cartoons.” Both sites are excellent, although MyToons is still in private beta.

Video sharing site Bolt.com is being acquired by GoFish - a smaller but richer rival, in order to pay the settlement the company has agreed to with Universal Music Group for copyright infringement.  The New York Times broke the story.  Bolt will go for an estimated $30 million in GoFish stock; the three year old GoFish was the first video sharing site to go public last October.  Though it has just begun to bring in revenue from licensing deals, GoFish stock closed Friday just under $6 per share with a market value of $134 million.

The settlement was for “several millions of dollars” in cash, stock and advertising credits - presumably much less than the original demand from Universal of $150,000 per infraction.

The acquiring company GoFish, not to be confused with the wildly successful singles’ site PlentyofFish, has recently seen a huge spike in traffic.  It was at 1.4 million monthly unique visitors as of December but reports more than 6 million uniques last month. Bolt sees more than 5 million unique visitors monthly (according to Comscore) and turned that traffic into $7 million in revenue last year.  GoFish has reported no revenue but has deeper pockets.  It was given birth to by Palo Alto investment firm Global Asset Capital.

Source: TechCrunch

Starting today, millions of online photo service users will have an easier time uploading and sharing their pictures thanks to KODAK Gallery and Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser. The Firefox Companion for KODAK Gallery combines the award-winning Firefox browser with the world’s number one online photo service making it easier than ever to upload, share and print your digital photos and create amazing photo gifts like books, calendars, collages and more. The Firefox Companion is available today for free download at www.firefox.com/kodak.

Kodak and Mozilla’s release of the new companion will provide a seamless online experience for this growing group of photo enthusiasts making it easier to:

• Drag and drop images from their computer directly to the companion
• Easily create a new photo album or add to an existing one
• Add captions in the browser that will be uploaded with their pictures to KODAK Gallery’s online site

“We want to provide consumers with easy and convenient ways to do more with their pictures and thanks to the Firefox Companion for KODAK, they can now upload and share faster than ever before,” said Madhav Mehra, general manager, KODAK Gallery.

“The Firefox Companion for KODAK Gallery makes uploading large numbers of photos fast, easy and reliable,” said Christopher Beard, vice president, marketing and product management, Mozilla. “We’re excited to offer an online photo solution that combines the ease of use of Firefox with the quality and convenience of the KODAK Gallery experience.”

By 2010, nearly 83 million people in the U.S. will use online photo services annually, according to market research firm InfoTrends.

PriceProtectr is a neat new tool that helps you take advantage of guarantees by many online retailers to refund the difference on purchased items if the price drops in the 30 or 60 days following your purchase (example - Best Buy’s policy). Those guarantees are great, but few people go to the trouble of following up and checking on any price changes for items they’ve purchased.

The company has put together a very simple website, even using a vowel dropping name and the generic web 2.0 logo generator that we’ve previously written about. To use it, you simply paste in the product URL from an ecommerce site (example) and your email address. The company will notify you if the price drops within the time period allowed by the retailer.

The site claims to have found over $57,000 in savings, with few people aware of the service. This might be something someone just put up for fun, but it is a useful tool. Frankly, retailers should email you themselves if the price drops, and if a service like this gets popular enough, they may start doing that. Supported sites include Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Backcountry.com, BestBuy.com, BestBuy.ca, Bike Nashbar, Circuit City, Cooking.com, Costco, Future Shop, Jenson USA, Office Max, Sears, 6th Avenue Electronics, Staples.com, Staples.ca, and Target. See Thrillist for their review as well.

Source: TechCrunch

Over the past few months, Google has been hard at work making it easier to find and compare local businesses and services right from the standard web results page.

In addition to providing the basic contact information and map locations for several choices at the top of the page, they will also show ratings and provide one-click access to reviews on the search results page so that you can make more informed decisions about where you want to go.

Here are a few specific examples of how you can use Google to search and compare local businesses and services.

 

• Find the location of and driving directions to the Googleplex (or any specific address).
• Find and compare Mexican restaurants in Pasadena, CA
• Get directions to and read reviews about a local eatery in Pittsburgh.
• Find movie showtimes for films that are playing in your neighborhood.

In 1993 Adobe published the full specifications for its Portable Document Format, or PDF, granting royalty free license to those who chose to build PDF tools into their applications, and helping PDF to become a de-facto standard for document creation.

Tomorrow they will announce that they are relinquishing control over the PDF format to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

One of the primary reasons for this appears to be hesitation by many governments to embrace proprietary formats, including PDF. With this change, Adobe hopes to sell many more copies of Acrobat, the primary software used to create and edit PDFs.

Zimbra is an Ajax Microsoft exchange competitor with a webmail service that thousands of businesses and organizations use to handle email, contacts and calendaring. They also offer a great mobile solution. The core product is open source, and Zimbra has a higher end version that sells for $25 per person per year (with various discounts).

Since their launch they’ve grown. And grown. They had 4 million “paid mailboxes” in October 2006. Next Monday they will announce that they now have more than 6 million paid mailboxes over 1,300 customers, a growth of 50% in three months. Sixty percent of their customers are being serviced through resellers.

They have lots of help with the product, too. They’ll be announcing version 4.5 of their Collaboration Suite (which is already available). 6,300 developers and administrators have contributed to Zimbra. The open source version of Zimbra has been downloaded “hundreds of thousands” of times.

The company has raised $16 million in funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Capital.

Source: TechCrunch

Today, the reputation network Rapleaf is releasing a new service called UpScoop, which joins a number of startups trying to add a meta layer above social networks. There are a lot of these networks, and a lot of people belong to more than one. Keeping track of your own networks, and those of your friends, is complicated.

Upscoop is designed to help you figure out which networks your friends belong to, based on their email address. You give Upscoop your email credentials (including the password) for your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo email account. Upscoop grabs your contact list, and then searches across a number of social networks and tries to find profile pages of people that you know among the 10 million profiles they’ve indexed across the major social networks. The process of searching is not instantaneous - it actually takes a few hours.

Clicking on any result will (sometimes) bring you to the profile page for that person. You can then add them as a friend or otherwise interact with them.

Asking people to give Upscoop their full email credentials to complete the search is going to be a tough sell. But this is a lot easier than searching for friends one-by-one on Wink. For people serious about connecting with friends, Upscoop may be for them.

Source: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide, announced that it will launch its new search marketing ranking model in the U.S. on Monday, February 5. With the new ranking model, all Yahoo! search marketing ads in the U.S. will be ranked by quality in addition to keyword bid price. As a result, Yahoo! will be able to provide a more relevant search experience to users, more valuable customer leads to advertisers, and additional opportunities to its distribution partners.”Yahoo! is very excited to introduce our new, more quality-focused ranking model because it has the power to significantly enhance the experience we deliver to our users and unlock the full potential of Yahoo!’s search marketing network,” said Terry Semel, chief executive officer, Yahoo! Inc. “With this important piece in place our new search marketing system will allow Yahoo! to more effectively connect people with the businesses, products, services and information they are passionate about.”

To date, search ads on Yahoo! and its distribution partner sites have been ranked solely by bid price - the higher the bid, the higher an ad appears within the search results. When the new ranking model goes into effect, both bid and the ad’s quality together will determine where an ad appears in the search results. The quality of an ad will be determined by its historical performance in the new system and its expected performance relative to other ads displayed at the same time. Ads of higher quality will generally receive better placement on the results page.

Google has decided that only allowing certain users to run AdSense and IntelliTXT on the same page is not fair to all the other AdSense publishers. Therefore, Google has ruled that AdSense can be used with other contextual advertising services, provided they do not look like Google ads. That means everyone can now run AdSense and Vibrant Media IntelliTXT on the same page!This new rule applies to all contextual advertising service. Therefore, if you’re using Kontara, or any other contextual ad network, you can run them as long as they don’t look like Google ads. It is good to see Google finally give some good news after releasing their latest TOS update. The only problem I can see for new publishers is Vibrant Media requires 500,000 page views per month in order for a site to run IntelliTXT. But at least you can run it on pages with Google ads now!

With this ruling, Google is really putting the screws to Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN). If you wish to run YPN, it cannot show up on any pages with AdSense ads in them and the YPN ads must not use the same color scheme as the AdSense ads. Given that choice, many publishers will either give up YPN or give up Google. Google feels most will give up YPN because of AdSense superior ad targeting technology.