Today Particls, billed by many as an RSS feed manipulator/organizer, came out of invitation-only testing with a host of tools for users. Particls essentially serves as a proportioning alert filter that notifies the user via news ticker, pop-up alerts and mobile SMS messaging prioritized according to user needs. The service has many refined consumer side tools, but there is a publisher/developer aspect that adds another dimension to what CEO Chris Saad terms "an attention management engine."
Particls was launched in January of 2006 by Chris Saad, Co-Founder and CEO of Faraday Media, and Co-Founder Ashley Angell. The company has been in private alpha with over 2000 testers and now public beta promises to further refine Particls.
Yesterday venture capitalist Josh Kopelman unleashed a diatribe ripping into MySpace and praising Facebook for the recent move to open up and become a platform for widget developers. Kopelman estimates there there has been $250 million dollars invested into widget companies over the past year and a half, but because of MySpace's tepid relationship with widget creators, he says, it's a no-brainer to choose Facebook as a focus for your development efforts.
Think about it. If you ran a venture-backed company and had to decide whether you wanted to focus your effort on: (a) a property that welcomed you in and let you keep 100% of the revenue you generate or (b) a company with a vague policy that doesn’t let you generate any revenue, which would you choose? I don’t think it’s even a decision. It’s an IQ test.
We've all seen CAPTCHAs, those automated pictures of letters and numbers meant to foil spam bots. Some are more diabolical than others, but most are annoying. Now a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have figured out a way to put them to use beyond aggravating users and confusing robots. Their idea: use them to help digitize books.
People decipher over 60 million CAPTCHA images per day, spending over 150,000 hours in an attempt to stem the tide of spam and keep automated bots from wasting the resources of web sites. That's time the team at Carnegie Mellon thinks can be put to a good use. They've figured out a way to use CAPTCHAs to help digitize old books using a program they call reCAPTCHA.
The Semantic Conference was held last week in San Jose. I went along to check it out. In the keynotes, Oracle's Robert Shimp noted that the attendance has never been so great and remarked that this as a clear proof that the semantics industry is growing at a tremendous pace. Half of the attendees were from high-tech startups that we've never (or barely) heard of. But we will probably hear of them in a few years! The other half were from huge organizations like NASA, Department of Defense, US Air Force, Stanford University, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Ford Motors, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Google and Walmart. In other words, the audience was very diverse.
The Times of England reports that founders of UK dot com 'star' Lastminute.com, Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, have teamed up again with a new business called Mydeco.com, which aims to help people decorate their homes. The new website is still in 'enter your email address' mode right now, but it will no doubt be some kind of wisdom-of-crowds site for interior decoration. The Times quotes Hoberman as saying that Mydeco.com will help users "make the right choices and get taste validation" for their home decoration jobs.
Lastminute had a rollercoaster ride in the dotcom days, but was eventually acquired for £577m two years ago. Mydeco seems to have equally grand plans, as it has already raised about £5m and, according to Hoberman, Mydeco aims to be "one of the largest technology start-ups in Europe."
Check out Don Dodge's recent article, entitled 'Why 1% of search market share is worth over $1 Billion'. His math concludes that each search query produces $0.12 ad revenue, which gives a value of $1B for just 1% of total search market share. Don is from Microsoft and this post was a response to the latest ComScore search market share numbers, showing that Google increased its market share lead to about 50%. Yahoo has about 27%, Microsoft 10%, AOL 5%, and Ask.com has 5%. So let's look closer at the numbers...
Fact #1 - Don Dodge's math implies a $2B valuation in 2.5 years
The graph below is from a Forrester research document published in May, 2005. According to this, the total online ad spending is expected to jump 50% in 2.5 years, from $20.3B to $29.4B.
Yoono CEO Pascal Josselin has announced the public beta release of a new Web clipping feature called Buzz it! - available as a plugin for FireFox (it can also be download in Internet Explorer). Yoono has consistently appeared in The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines (ASE) list on Read/WriteWeb. Actually, there are several members of the "Top 100" club that relate in various ways to what is commonly known as "Social Search."
The initial assumption is that while using a search engine to surf the Internet, a user (or "yooser" in Yoono speak) will naturally come upon material that is so wonderful that they want to save it for themselves to return to later, and most likely share with their friends as well. The first step is to click on the "favorites" tab in IE, or the "bookmarks" tab in FireFox and add it to your own personal collection of special sites. But now what? In prehistoric times, we would a) copy the URL, b) open our email, then c) paste the URL into an email and send it to our friends with a quick subject line like, "Check this out!!" Of course, if the site was any good, our friends would then save it in their favorites, and the whole process would begin again.
I've been thinking a lot about the Facebook Platform (who hasn't?), and about who is in the best position to take them on. The obvious answer is MySpace, still the giant of the social networking world with about 4 times as many users as Facebook. If MySpace created an API and opened up its user base to third party developers, there's no doubt that developers would jump at the opportunity. But MySpace would likely require a significant redesign in order to be able implement something like the Facebook Platform as fluidly as Facebook has.
The next logical answer is Google or Yahoo!, both of whom have huge user bases, extensive developer APIs and the resources to pull off. But Google and Yahoo! lack the cohesion that Facebook has -- there's nothing really tying their users together. Then I had a crazy thought: What about Netvibes and Pageflakes?
The R/WW Weekly Wrapup is sponsored by:
Another busy week of Web Tech, including big news from Facebook and rumors of a Feedburner acquisition. 
This week also marked the launch of the first Read/WriteWeb Network blog, last100 - which will provide news, reviews and analysis on the digital lifestyle. last100 is edited by Steve O'Hear, a London-based Internet consultant and journalist. Highlights from the first week of last100 include posts on AppleTV Hacks and Pandora for Mobile and Living Room.
Here now is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the weekly wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email (see form in the sidebar on the website).
Editor's note: Sramana Mitra is currently running a series on her blog reviewing the photo sharing industry. Her previous Read/WriteWeb post discussed Flickr and in this post she looks at Photobucket, using her Web 3.0 framework.
Photobucket, founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal, is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo-sharing site. VCs including Insight Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures funded the company.
According to comScore, January 2007 report, Photobucket has 17.6 million unique monthly visitors in the U.S. and over 27 Million unique monthly visitors worldwide. The site has over 40 million registered users. According to Reuters, Murdoch's Newscorp (owner of MySpace), is all set to acquire Photobucket for an estimated price of $250 million. Photobucket, with close to 3 billion photos, is the # 1 photo site in the world.
