Dash Navigation is opening up its in-car GPS device to outside developers through an API program. The Dash already lets consumers create Yahoo map mashups on teh Web which theycan then send to their car. (Read my earlier review). Now, companies that want to create specific applications for the device, which includes a two-way data channel through GPRS as well as WiFi, can join the API program.

The company’s API launch partners include:

—Coldwell Banker (real-estate listings application)
—Funambol (personal calendar access)
—Mediaguide (identifies names of songs playing on the radio through the Dash’s microphone)
—Trapster (shows drivers speed traps and lets them warn other Dash drivers)
—WeatherBug (live weather condition)

I have a feeling the Trapster app is going to be a big hit. Companies or developers who want more information about the APIs can send an e-mail to developer [at] dash [dot] net. (I guess putting the APIs on a Website is too advanced for them). But opening the device up as a platform should get a lot of cool apps on there.

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Before Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, he launched Facemash, a short-lived HotOrNot-like site that almost got him kicked out of Harvard. Now Facemash is back as a Facebook app called ULiken. Written by two developers in New Jersey , Sam Bensalem (22) and Mike Woods (23), ULiken was inspired by Facemash—in particular from parts of Zuckerberg’s diary that came out during the UConnect lawsuit that describes how he came up with the idea of Facemash. Excerpt (full journal entry embedded below):

9:48pm.I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10pm and it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland facebook is open on my computer desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive. It’s not such a great idea and probably not even funny, but Billy comes up with the idea of comparing two people from the facebook, and only sometimes putting a farm animal in there. Good call Mr. Olson! I think he’s onto something.

11:09pm. Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going to fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals…), but I like the idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very Turing feel, since people’s ratings of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to represent each person’s hotness like they do on hotornot.com. The other thing we’re going to need is a lot of pictures. Unfortunately, Harvard doesn’t keep a public centralized facebook so I’m going to have to get all the images from the individual houses that people are in. And that means no freshman pictures…drats.

Uliken let’s you compare people, celebrities, cars, colleges, sports teams, pets, politcal candidates, Websites, or YouTube videos and vote for which one you like best. It also works a standalone site, but if you log in through Facebook you can put your friends’ pictures up for a challenge and any faceoffs you submit are sent to you and your friends’ feeds.

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Crowdsourcing sounds good in theory—pull together a bunch of smart, motivated individuals from across the Web to create a new product or business—but in practice it is not so easy to pull off. One of the first major casualties of the crowdsourcing movement looks like it will be Cambrian House, the Calgary startup that tries to organize the crowd around creating new ideas for Websites and software products. After unsuccessfully trying to raise a new round of capital, it is our understanding that the startup has negotiated a fire sale of its intellectual property, assets, Website (and whatever community remains after the sale) to Spencer Trask, an old money, New York venture firm that originally backed Thomas Edison.

The deal is structured as an asset purchase, after devolving through various stages from initial talk of a new investment to a joint venture to a buyout. The more Spencer Trask looked, the less it offered. Spencer Trask is basically buying the Cambrian House platform and its community for a fraction of the $7.75 million that investors have already put into the company. We cannot yet confirm an exact figure, but one source speculates that it could be less than $1 million. Spencer Trask plans on taking the assets and rolling it into VenCorps, a Cambrian House project in development that wants to apply the crowdsourcing concept to venture capital. Sean Wise, a Canadian “venture consultant,” is heading up VenCorps and (presumably) whatever is left of Cambrian House. A Cambrian House spokesperson contacted confirms that the sale has gone through and that the site will “dissolve” in three months. We are placing Cambrian House in the deadpool.

So far, 6935 ideas have been created on the Cambrian House site. Some of them must be worth pursuing, no? Perhaps. In addition to VenCorps, Cambrian House itself will be keeping some of its more successful projects alive, including desktop fighter game Gwabs, independent-film funding service FilmRiot, Digg-like charity Greedy or Needy, and virtual gift-wrapping app Prezzle. It will also retain rights to its source code and try to license it to others through an application called Knottle and a platform called Chaordix, both yet to be released. Many of these ideas didn’t gain traction until they were invested in and championed by Cambrian House itself, which again makes you wonder whether any good ideas can actually grow into full-fledged products from an unaffilated crowd.

To be charitable, maybe Cambrian House just suffered from poor execution and Spencer Trask thinks it can do better. But crowdsourced venture capital? If the crowd cannot even make a decent Web app, the chances of its being able to allocate millions of dollars more efficiently than seasoned pros does not seem terribly great.

The imminent demise of Cambrian House is a cautionary tale for other startups, such as Kluster, CrowdSpirit, CrowdSpring, and FellowForce, trying to cut their teeth in the nascent crowdsourcing industry. They all have their own approach, and experimentation is necessary to find the right one.

The fall of Cambrian House won’t deter them from trying. For instance, Kluster takes a more structured approach by breaking down projects into manageable stages and has thought through the incentives a little differently. And CrowdSPRING, which focuses on designs for Website and marketing materials, is formally launching tomorrow after picking a winner for the $5,000 contest to design its own Website.

Some of these will survive, and some won’t. The key is attracting the right community of active contributors and structuring the rewards in such a way that makes it easy to participate. Or is crowdsourcing simply a bad idea that should be put to rest?

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Editor’s note: The press release is the least loved document in the media universe. We get way too many here at TechCrunch, and some bloggers equate them to spam. But they do have their uses. In this guest post, Brian Solis explains how the press release has evolved, and sheds some light on why it may be so difficult to kill off. Solis writes this from the perspective of a PR professional. He is Principal of FutureWorks, a PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley and also blogs at PR 2.0.

Press releases come in different flavors and serve different purposes. Well-written press releases are far from dead. In fact, when developed strategically, their opportunities, appeal and benefits are only expanding in conjunction with the groups of various influencers and consumers who rely on them for relevant information.

The disruption of the Web has splintered press releases into a variety of formats to serve different audiences and different purposes: Traditional releases for media, SEO (search engine optimized) releases for customers, and Social Media Releases for press, bloggers, and also customers.

Customer-Focused News Releases
Companies and marketers can use distribution services to complement releases written for journalists and bloggers to reach customers directly through traditional search engines as well as news aggregation services such as Techmeme.

Over the course of the last several months, BusinessWire and PRNewswire have consistently ranked in the top 100 sources for news in Techmeme’s Leaderboard.

And, according to a recent Outsell study, over 51% of IT professionals reported that they get their news from press releases in Yahoo and Google news over trade journals.

And it’s not just tech. When implemented with calls and links to action, and if they read in a way that’s compelling to people aka customers, you’ll find that they’re usually compelled to act.

The trick for this new breed of press releases is to write it as the article you want to read. Keep it clean, clear, pseudo impartial, but definitely focused on benefits for specific customers. Basically, humanize the story.

Here’s a rundown of the different formats of press releases:

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loco

If there’s a particular user that’s uploaded a bunch of cool stuff, you can subscribe to his or her stuff. Arrows on the map change color the more popular they get. Very cool.

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Sometimes the only way to get new products out the door at a big company like Yahoo is to launch it far away from HQ. That’s what happened with Yahoo Glue, a new way to present search results more visually that Yahoo is experimenting with on its Yahoo India site. Much like Google’s Universal Search that brings in results from images, videos, maps, news, or other sources as appropriate. It is also similar in appearance to Ask since its redesign last summer.

Yahoo Glue only works for certain categories of searches (sports, travel, entertainment, health, stocks, and tech), but it does produce a more satisfying experience than the traditional list of blue links. The only issue is that the results take a little bit longer to load. But humans are visual creatures and we respond better to the visual display of information. Yahoo Glue brings in results in three different panes, both from Yahoo and elsewhere. They can be images, videos, Wikipedia entries, HowStuffWorks entries, sports stats, and news, and results from other sources.

Search for the “Taj Mahal” and you get pictures and videos of the Taj Mahal, and a link to the Wikipedia entry. Search for “Halle Berry” and you get a bio, pics, YouTube videos, news, and results from Yahoo Answers. Search for “soccer” and you get league tables. The traditional link results are still available in the narrow left-hand column, but you almost ignore them.

This is not just a random project in India. Expect to see Yahoo Glue imported to the U.S. sometime this summer, says one industry source.

Combine it with Yahoo’s SearchMonkey project, which allows developers to change the way search results are displayed, and Yahoo Glue starts to get interesting. Yahoo doesn’t have to create the templates for every single search category. Developers can do that and, in the process, make Yahoo Glue a truly sticky app.

(Photo by Will Fuller).

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It’s hard to find a place to research food—the kind that you buy at the grocery store and put into your body every day. As people become more aware, and concerned, about what thy eat, a site like Zeer makes more and more sense. Zeer, which launched earlier today, is a product review site for food. It contains nutritional information for 114,000 food products, and each one can be rated and reviewed.

Founder and CEO Michael Putnam used to work at the Markem Corporation, which makes the machines that print nutritional labels on food packages. He thought, “Wouldn’t it be better if all of that information was online in one easy-to-search place?” He raised $1 million in angel funding last August, and started to put the site together.

On Zeer you can find out the nutritional content of any packaged food, write little product reviews like on Amazon, and vote the reviews up or down. You can search by calories, nutrients, vitamins, or ratings. You can also join or search specific food communities—ones for people allergic to milk peanuts, or gluten; ones for people with diabetes or heart problems; ones for parents, vegetarians, or the organic-obsessed. This categorization allows you to talk about food within the context of your specific gastronomic needs and interests.

The site is organized by products, people, and communities and is targeted at women between 20 and 32. The most-discussed or highly-rated products pop up to the top of each relevant page each week. And each member’s profile page shows what products she loves and hates the most.

There is definitely a need for a neutral food review site. And when Zeer turns on advertising, there are obvious targeting opportunities in both search results and on specific product and community pages. But Zeer also definitely is missing some major ingredients. The site is screaming for a mobile version members can check on their cell phones while in a grocery store. Vocal members also have no way to spread their expertise or ratings across the Web with widgets. (Fortunately, both mobile and widgets are on the product roadmap).

A harder problem to solve is that Zeer only has information on packaged foods, not on less processed foods like meat, fish, fruits or vegetables. So it does not cover everything in your fridge. And while it does a great job on nutritional data, it doesn’t have other relevant data, such as how much energy went into making each product. People are hungry for this sort of information, and the site that can give it to them all will keep them coming back for more.

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While about a 30 percent of the headlines are hogged by the top ten sources on the Techmeme Leaderboard (see table at left), another full third come from blogs and sites that don’t even rank in the top 100. That means that if you have something interesting to say, it doesn’t matter who you are, other blogs will find you and link to you. Right now that would include the post on Statbot, which is written by a self described “17-year-old wannabe geek from India” named Yuvi. Welcome to the conversation, Yuvi. A sure-fire way to get on Techmeme is to . . . write about Techmeme. But there are plenty of other ways to get there as well.

Personally, I think the distribution shown in the graph is what makes Techmeme so compelling. It always includes a pretty steady list of trusted sources, but mixed in with those are plenty of wild cards who can, in turn, become dominant voices in their own right. That’s how I like my news: a third from relatively well-known sources, a third from sources that are a complete surprise, and the rest to be from somewhere in between.

See the top individual bloggers by the TechMeme Leaderboard as well.

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Social News, like Grouptivity, is a combination feed reader/social bookmarking service. (Grouptivity raised a $2 million angel round in May, 2006, mostly from Kumar, who previously sold two staffing startups to Kronos and Monster, respectively). Rather than responding to an explicit thumbs-up or thumbs-down, news headlines get voted up every time they are bookmarked, e-mailed, or shared on your News Feed in Facebook. Any kind of sharing is counted as a vote, and when you e-mail an article through the app it automatically gets saved as a bookmark.

The app is pre-populated with news feeds from the BBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other sources (including TechCrunch). Readers can delete or add and blog or news feed they like, and any action taken (bookmarking, e-mailing, sharing) shows up in your Facebook News feed and is shown to all of your friends on Facebook. The problem, for many users, is that it does not save the bookmarks to Digg or del.icio.us, but rather to Grouptivity.

One way Kumar hopes to gain users is by recruiting readers directly from partner blogs and news sites. He is basically offering a way to turn any news feed into a Facebook app. For instance, he’s already struck deals with Hearst to add this functionality to the sites for its regional papers. And he has created a plug-in for WordPress that creates a “share” button so that feed can be read through Social News on Facebook. For new users who come in through publishers, only that Website’s feed will be appear on the app at first—although others can be added.

Blogs that want to create a Facebook presence that goes beyond merely republishing their feeds might find this appealing. It is an implicit recommendation system that shows someone’s entire Facebook network what news stories they are bookmarking and sharing. But will this be enough to get people to start using it?

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Today, it is taking a step to make that easier by introducing the Popfly Game Creator. Microsoft launched Popfly last year as an easy way to create widgets and mashups using Silverlight. With Popfly Game Creator, it is adding a simple Web-based authoring environment for creating casual arcade-style games.

The tool is built for non-programmers so that anyone can create a game, and is particularly aimed at kids and teenagers. It is entirely browser-based. You create a game using predefined templates that can be modified, and when you are satisfied, you hit play to run the code. The games run in Silverlight and will be hosted at Popfly, but are embeddable anywhere on the Web. Here's a game Microsoft created for us with Michael as the main character.

The Game Creator starts off with templates for about 20 different types of games—from space invaders and breakout to racing games and shooters. Game makers can populate their games with hundreds of characters, background scenes, sound effects and objects, or create their own from scratch. More details can be found on the Popfly wiki.