Om Malik reported this evening that Automattic raised a $29.5 million Series B venture round led by Polaris Ventures, and including previous investors True Ventures and Radar Ventures. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the news is that the New York Times Company is also joining the round, making a strategic investment in Automattic, who are the creators of the widely used Wordpress blogging platform.
I first noticed eXpresso when they bought a little start-up called Xcellery that had a neat way to collaborate using Excel. I had used the product and it worked pretty well.
eXpresso was named as one of PC World's 25 Most Innovative Products of the Year for 2007. PC World succinctly summed the product up: "[it] allows Excel users to share their spreadsheets, online or off." eXpresso is different from the web office contenders that you normally hear about on ReadWriteWeb for three reasons:
Anyone who has scanned the comments at Perez Hilton would understandably be puzzled by the idea of relying on blog readers to peer review a book. The idea seems especially ludicrous if the book is being published by the MIT Press. But as we're well aware here at ReadWriteWeb, some blogs do have very intelligent readers (*wink, wink, nudge, nudge*). Author Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, thinks so too, which is why he is calling on his blog's readers to peer review his new book.
Blizzard Entertainment, owners of World of Warcraft, announced this morning that the game now has more than 10 million paying subscribers around the world. Online gameplay costs an average of $15 USD per month.
That's a huge number and one that I honestly think signals that with sufficient value delivered, consumers will still pay for software. This might be an anomaly of historic proportions, too, though.
Time Warner needs to work on its internal memo mechanism, because apparently someone at either HBO or Time Warner's Road Runner broadband service didn't get one last week. At the same time that Time Warner is busy planning a trial of usage based billing for web access in an attempt to stem network congestion resulting from the growing popularity of online video, HBO is also readying trials of its streaming video and movie service. Huh?
ReadBurner is an interesting new project that displays the hottest URLs at any given time according to the Google Reader "shared items" feeds users have submitted for tracking. It's a relatively simple concept but it just makes sense and the possibilities for the future are exciting to consider.
One way to describe ReadBurner is that it's adding value by and on top of aggregating explicit attention gestures. Below are some thoughts on ReadBurner and what it could do to be even cooler.
"Pre-roll ads are going the way of popups and other intrusive ads," predicted Fred Wilson a little over a month ago. "They won't be around in a couple years. And the online video services that use them to monetize their audience won't be around either." It seems that consumers agree. Silicon Alley Insider points to a new survey that says that half of Internet users bail at the sight of a pre-roll video ad.
The music industry is in desperate need of new models and an interesting one got some financial support today. We7 announced today that it's raised $6 million from Peter Gabriel and Spark Ventures.
The UK site offers DRM-free MP3 downloads with super-short ads preceding each song - for the first 4 weeks after download. Once a month you can select 20 tracks to remove the ad clips from, any additional ad removal will cost 20 pence (about 39 cents) per song.
Hotmail is credited with inventing online viral marketing. I am sure there were earlier examples, but the whole point of viral is that it's so infectious that it obliterates memory of earlier attempts. I was an early Hotmail user - it was just so simple, obvious and useful.
Most of the Web 2.0 success stories have been viral. Apart from Hotmail, this was not true in Web 1.0. The game at that time - hopelessly flawed in retrospect - was raising tons of money to advertise (online and offline) to get traffic. Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook type services don’t need to advertise to get mass scale.
If you're a blogger who is into covering live events, like keynotes, press conferences, meetings, or sports events, you may be interested in the new, free service from CoveritLive. In development since 2006 and emerging from beta in November of 2007, the CoveritLive platform gives you an easy way to blog events as they happen and it also provides tools to interact with your readers during the event you're covering.
As you use CoveritLive's software, your commentary streams live to your web page or blog. Readers viewing the commentary can ask questions and participate in polls you create, giving them a reason to stay online on your website for the duration of the event, instead of checking in every now and then. Readers viewing the live blog stream don't have to create user accounts to participate or download any software.
