A Widget That Does Background Checks On Plumbers, Painters, Products, And More.
Khris Loux, the CEO of startup JS-Kit, thinks he’s finally come up with the killer widget. JS-Kit has all sorts of widgets used by blogs and other sites for ratings, reviews, polls, and comments. But the latest one he just launched is not just gee-whiz cute. It’s gee-whiz disruptive.
It is called the JS-Kit Advisor. And it will bring ratings and reviews from trusted sources such as Experian and JD Power to businesses and product listings across the Web. The first data partner to go live is Experian, which is known for its consumer credit scores. But Experian also keeps financial and other background-check information on 22 million local businesses across the country. For instance, Experian powers ContractorCheck.com, its own Website where consumers can buy $10 background-check reports on local general contractors. But now Experian is taking some of that same key information and giving it away for free in JS-Kit’s widget.
A local listings site could install the widget and then anytime someone looked up a contractor, the widget would pop up and show them if the contractor’s license is expired, how much they are bonded for, and whether they have any liens or judgments against them, as well as their credit and bankruptcy history. “In other words,” says Loux, “all of the information that a bank uses to judge you, the consumer—the consumer can now use to judge a business, prior to clicking through.”
A green check means the contractor can be trusted, a red X means keep looking. The widget does not give the full details of a report, but enough for a consumer to know whether to steer clear of a certain contractor. Loux explains the concept:
I want to make sure the guy is not a dirt bag. This will bring more data around the point of the transaction. If a guy has a green check mark, he can grab it and show it off. The guy with the red check will hide the fact that he is a dirt bag and try to do marketing and SEO stuff. Those who are winners will win more and those who are scumbags will die faster.
It’s good marketing for Experian, and maybe it will end up selling the more in-depth reports to banks or those contractors with a red X next to their name who want to see how it got there.
But isn’t all that marketing and “SEO stuff” how directories and local search engines make money, by selling ads to those guys? “Web publishers will start competing using the truth,” responds Loux, always the idealist. Yet business directory sites like MojoPages and Spoke are already working to integrate the background-check widgets into their listings. If bigger sites like Yelp or CitySearch ever followed suit, unscrupulous contractors would have nowhere left to hide.
PO BOX 100
JULIAN, CA 92036
38 MILLER AVE
MILL VALLEY, NV 94941
You can try it here by clicking on each contractor’s name in the simplified listings at left. The top one has a green check, the bottom one has a red check. When the widget pops up, click on the different tabs for more information.
The idea behind this widget goes way beyond exposing Experian’s data, although that is pretty awesome in and of itself. The widget can have many tabs, each with a different source of data. Loux has also struck a deal with JD Power to provide product review summaries, and with FamilyWatchDog to incorporate its health records for restaurants, product-recall information, sex offender listings. He has hopes for convincing more companies to add their data for job listings and other categories.
At this point, Loux’s widget is disruptive only in its potential. But if he can get it adopted by both enough data and listings providers, he argues that it could start to impact everything from search to banner ads.
Everyone wanders around on the Web in a dog pattern. You start at Google, look around, and go back. And every time you go back to Google they go, “Ka-ching!” This is the promise of Web 2.0 that has not been delivered yet—these fine connections. It is a big threat to PageRank and the inefficiency of Internet advertising, because everything you want is at you fingertips.
PageRank will no doubt survive the onslaught of Khris Loux and his widgeteers. But he does raise a compelling point about the power of widgets to distribute information to people where they need it. And the idea of spreading information from trusted sources across the Web to counter the (mis)messaging of marketers and vocal users who might happen to be wrong is also something that more Websites should think about doing.
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Arrington Finally Makes It Onto The Cover of Time (If You Squint Real Hard You’ll See Him)
Time magazine has come out with its annual list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. You’ve got your Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. All the usual suspects. Digg CEO Jay Adelson squeezes onto the list, as does our own Michael Arrington as the token blogger. (See full list here).
The way the list is put together is that Time tries to get one famous person to write about another. So you have Craig Newmark on Zuckerberg, Guy Kawasaki on Steve Ballmer, and Arianna Huffington on Arrington (how apropos).
Congratulations to one and all. Can you find Michael on the cover at right? (Click to enlarge). Neither could I at first, but he’s there. Hint: Look for the profile in silhouette. At least, I think that’s him.
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Adobe’s Open Screen Project: Write Once, Flash Everywhere
Adobe is making a big play to make Flash the de facto viewing environment not only for Web apps on your PC, but also on your mobile phone, your TV, and any other screen you can think of. It is announcing the Open Screen Project to make it easier to develop applications across devices—using Flash, of course. David Wadhwani, general manager of Adobe’s platform business (which includes Flash/Flex, AIR, and Cold Fusion), says:
We believe it is time for an industry-wide movement for a consistent way to develop across the Web for PCs, mobile devices, and TVs.
To help the project along, Adobe is:
1. Opening up the runtime to its Flash player for the first time so that anybody can create their own customized player. Specifically, it is going to open up the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications. In the past, developers had to sign agreements not to create derivative Flash players because Adobe wanted to avoid the fragmentation that Java experienced during its early years. But now it feels that Flash is a strong enough standard to withstand the introduction of some new evolutionary branches.
2. Removing licensing fees for Flash on mobile devices. While Flash is free on PCs, cell phone makers and other device manufacturers must pay a royalty fee. This was a $52 million business for Adobe last year. (Versions of Flash are on 500 million mobile devices already, and that is expected to grow to one billion over the next 12 months). That business (which represents only 2 percent of Adobes overall revenues) is going away. Starting with the next major release of Flash (and AIR) for devices in 2009, it will be free to device manufacturers. That should help Flash spread even more.
3. Publishing the APIs for porting Flash to other devices. This currently also incurs a royalty fee. By opening it up, there is no reason why every device shouldn’t come with Flash pre-installed.
4. Publishing Adobe protocols for pushing content to devices like Flash Cast and AMF. Adobe will also work with wireless carriers on protocols for over-the-air software updating. (This is actually a hard problem because most software downloaded to a mobile phone gets stored in read-only-memory, where it pretty much stays until the device is replaced. Getting mobile software to update as easily as desktop software is the key to making sure mobile apps keep up with the times.
On the application creation side, Adobe increasingly will be adopting a widget approach. There is not much difference between a widget that runs as a module on a Web page and a mobile app that runs on a small screen. Wadhwani explains:
These things can expand up. Developers are looking to optimize for these small screen sizes. Instead of squashing it down from a desktop experience, it is easier to start small and build up.
The same approach can be used for apps on other devices as well, such as set-top boxes.
The promise of the Open Screen Project to developers is the age-old dream of being able to write an application once and deploy it anywhere across any device. Adobe and its slew of partners in the Open Screen Project (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Qualcomm, Samsung, Motorola, LG, Toshiba, NTT Docomo, Chungwa Telecom, ARM, Intel, Marvell, Cisco, NBC Universal, MTV Networks, and the BBC) are not alone in this desire. Notably absent from Adobe’s list of partners is Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Each has its own ideas on how this cross-device compatibility will work.
Apple thinks you should just buy Apple products that work seamlessly together (Mac, iPhone, Apple TV). Steve Jobs also notably snubbed Adobe by refusing to put Flash on the iPhone. Maybe his engineers can now make their own version that satisfies their exacting standards.
Google has never been a big fan of Flash, preferring the speed of Ajax in its Webtop apps. On the mobile front, it is betting on Android, its own open operating system. And it also develops mobile apps the traditional way—one device at a time.
But the company with the most overarching and different approach to Adobe’s in this regard is Microsoft. It is pushing its own alternative to Flash: Silverlight. (Although it has licensed Flash Lite for Windows Mobile as a stopgap measure until Silverlight works on mobile devices). More radically, Microsoft differs on how to make apps work across devices. It’s answer ultimately will be Live Mesh. As I wrote last week when Microsoft officially unveiled Live Mesh.:
The basic foundation of Mesh is this feed-centric programming model. A Web developer can build an app using any programming language or tools he likes (Python, Ruby on Rails, Flex) and then sync it across devices and other applications using two-way feeds as the basic data and communication channel. The promise for developers, says product unit manager Abhay Parasnis: “If you Mesh-enable your application, we will let you extend it to other devices.â€
In many ways this effort is a counterweight to what we are seeing with Adobe Air or Google Gears, which are efforts to take browser-based apps offline. With Mesh, Microsoft is in effect reasserting the primacy of client-based applications. . . . Developers can customize their apps for whatever device they originally reside on—whether it is a PC, a smartphone, or a set-top box—and then Webify them by syncing them to other applications across the Web.
The more competition we get for ways to bridge applications across devices and screens, the more likely that we’ll actually start to see some of our favorite Web apps on something other than our laptops.
(Photo by AMagill).
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Metacafe Founders Ditch, Reportedly Cash Out Their Shares For $5 Million
The co-founders of once-hot video startup Metacafe, Arik Czerniak (pictured with his son) and Ofer Adler, have left the company and cashed out their shares for $5 million, according to an article in the Israeli paper The Marker (in Hebrew). Czerniak stepped down as CEO in February, 2007, when he was replaced by former Electronic Arts executive Erick Hachenburg, but stayed on the board. Adler was always an adviser and investor, and remains at IncrediMail, another company he co-founded long ago. Now both have severed ties with the Metacafe. An autoreply from Czerniak’s Metacafe email account says:
All,
As of 20.3 I’m no longer using this email.
Both Czerniak’s and Adler’s shares together represented only 5 percent of the company, and had fully vested. Each reportedly received $2.5 million, on an earlier valuation of $50 million. The company has raised more than $45 million so far, with a $30 million round as recently as last August. And back in late 2006 it unsuccessfully tried to shop itself around for $200 to $300 million. The article cites conflicts with Hachenburg and the strategic direction of the company. But maybe they just didn’t think anyone would ever buy it.
Metacafe is still one of the top video-sharing sites, with 28 million unique visitors worldwide in March, according to comScore. But it’s growth has been pretty lackluster all year (up 15 percent). Meanwhile, YouTube keeps widening the gap with nearly ten times as many worldwide unique visitors, 288 million, and a faster growth rate (up 78 percent). And in the same period, Veoh’s worldwide uniques have more than tripled to 17.5 million. These numbers do not include embedded videos for either service, but they give a good indication of the overall popularity of each site.
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Blodget Says Facebook Is Only Worth $9 Billion, Hypothetically Speaking
Putting a value on private companies is hard enough for insiders and venture capitalists who have full access to the company’s financial statements. When outsiders try to do it, even well-informed ones, it is nothing more than a guessing game. But it is nonetheless perhaps one of Silicon Valley’s favorite parlor activities.
Today, Henry Blodget & Co. at Silicon Alley Insider try to peg valuations on 25 private Web companies. Facebook is at the top of the list, but it is valued at $9 billion instead of the $15 billion that Microsoft’s investment put on the company. Why? Because everyone knows that the $15 billion is too high, so SIA decided to apply a 25X multiple on Facebook’s 2008 revenue forecast of $350 million. Does that make its valuation correct? Probably not. But in the absence of any true market pricing, anyone can go ahead and make a guess.
The same goes for any of the valuations on the SIA 25 list, which puts Wikipedia’s worth at $7 billion, Craigslist’s at $5 billion, Mozilla’s at $4 billion, LinkedIn’s at $1.3 billion, Ning’s at $560 million, RockYou’s at $325 million, and Spot Runner’s at $250 million. Note that three of the top five (Wikipedia, Craigslist, Mozilla) are essentially not-for-profits sitting on very valuable assets. The valuations for those three are based on what they would be worth if they were run differently with an eye towards maximizing revenues—which, of course, could impact how consumers interact with them, which in turn would impact their valuations.
Another 25 startups make up the contenders list, which includes Federated Media ($245 million), Yelp ($225 million), Meebo ($220 million), Mahalo ($150 million), Digg ($125 million), Etsy ($115 million), Powerset ($80 million), and Twitter ($75 million). A full list that changes dynamically every 20 minutes, based on changes in the Nasdaq, can be found here (although, exactly how the valuations are linked to the Nasdaq is never clearly explained)
Some of these valuations have more merit than others. Some have none whatsoever. For instance, SIA gets at its $125 million valuation for Digg by “splitting the difference” between a $200 million buyout rumor we reported and the $60-to-$80 million that Kara Swisher came up with. Splitting the difference between two rumors is not exactly the height of financial analysis.
But what are you gonna do? At least SIA acknowledges that the list is an imperfect work in progress. Don’t get too caught up in the actual numbers. It is more useful really as a starting point to think about relative valuation between different startups. Is Meebo really worth three times as much as Twitter? Is Ning worth as much as Slide? Let the parlor game begin.
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Presdo, The Magical Online Scheduler
I want you to stop what you are doing right now and go try Presdo. It is a deceptively simple online scheduling assistant that is a prime example of what a modern Web app should be. It only shows you what you need to see at the moment that you need to see it. And it understands what you want to do based on normal (and not-so-normal) English that you type in.
“We actually threw a lot away,” says founder Eric Ly, who previously was a co-founder of LinkedIn and its first chief technology officer. He wrote most of the code himself and bootsrapped the entire site with only $35,000 of his own money. “I left LinkedIn on a Friday, and started Presdo on Saturday,” he tells me. That was back in April, 2006. He had to develop his own natural-language algorithm to deal with events, times, and scheduling, and the words people use to describe those things. The whole site is built with Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and the LAMP stack.
The home page is a plain, Google-inspired box. But instead of typing in what you are looking for, you type in what you want to do and with who: “Coffee with Eric in SF,” “Movie with Nadia Fri night,” “Meeting with Henry at 2:30 pm.”
It then takes you to a page with pre-populated fields based on what you typed in: when, who, where, what. You can refine the details further on this page. If you typed in the person’s email in the first box, it appears in the “who” field. If you didn’t, you can enter it at this point.
Presdo lets you pick a location by searching through local listings on a Google map. You can pick one near you, near the person you are meeting, or in between. (It helps if you first register with your own email and location.)
Or you can look at a list view of nearby places instead.
Presdo guesses what day and time you meant and puts those in as well. But you can offer up alternative times and allow the other party to pick the best one or suggest their own.
When you are satisfied with what you have, you hit “Send Invite.” The other person gets an e-mail with the details and a link back to Presdo, where they can change the time or place. You can also add a message. All the messages back-and-forth are recorded on the event page.
Once everything is set, you can export the meeting to your calendar (Presdo supports Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar).
Every time you schedule an event with a new person, Presdo remembers who they are for the next time. You can also use Presdo as a to-do list. There are some obvious features Ly needs to add, such as support for other forms of messaging beyond email including mobile text messaging and Twitter. But he is off to a good start. The service is free, and he hopes to eventually charge for premium subscriptions. You can try it out now, and tell us what you think in comments.
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Maybe The Fight Against Click Fraud Isn’t Hopeless After All
One good quarter does not make a trend, but there is a glimmer of hope in the fight against click fraud (fake clicks that can nevertheless cost advertisers money). Click Forensics is reporting that the overall click fraud rate was down half a percentage point in the first quarter to 16.3 percent. Although that is still higher than the rate was a year ago, it could be an indication that Google’s and Yahoo’s efforts to filter out bad clicks on search and contextual ads and improve the overall quality of those ads is starting to have an effect.
When you look at the click fraud rate on their respective content networks where the worst offenses occur, AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, the click fraud rate there also dipped slightly to 27.8 percent from 28.3 percent in the fourth quarter. That is still nearly a third of all clicks and needs to seriously go down further.
Perhaps this year the overall click fraud rate can be held steady instead of rising 15 percent, as it did in 2007.
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Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point?
As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data—keyword search—will one day break down in its ability to deliver the exact information we want at our fingertips. In fact, some argue that keyword search is already delivering diminishing returns—as the slide above by Nova Spivack implies. Spivack is the CEO and founder of semantic Web startup Radar Networks and is pushing his view that semantic search will help solve these problems. But anyone frustrated by the sense that it takes longer to find something on Google today than it did even a year ago knows there is some truth to his argument.
“Keyword search is okay,” he says, “but if the information explosion continues we need something better.” Today, there are about 1.3 billion people on the Web, and more than 100 million active Websites. As more people pile on, the amount of information on the Web keeps growing exponentially to accommodate all those seekers, and they themselves feel compelled to put their own personal and social information onto the Web as well.
At a certain point, with billions and billions of Web pages to sift through, keyword search just won’t cut it anymore. It’s a needle-in-the-haystack problem, with the haystacks just getting bigger and bigger every second.
Spivack explains:
Keyword search engines return haystacks, but what we really are looking for are the needles . The problem with keyword search such as Google’s approach is that only highly cited pages make it into the top results. You get a huge pile of results, but the page you want—the “needle” you are looking for—may not be highly cited by other pages and so it does not appear on the first page. This is because keyword search engines don’t understand your question, they just find pages that match the words in your question.
So how do we get beyond keyword search and Google’s PageRank? There are many approaches being tried: social search, tagging, guided search, natural-language search, statistical methods, open search, semantic search, and (way out there) artificial intelligence. They all have their problems. Tags are too messy and inconsistent. Natural-language requires too much computing power, is difficult to scale, and doesn’t deal with structured data well. Semantic search is perhaps the most promising, but it essentially requires every single Webpage to be re-written.
Spivack covered these issues during a presentation earlier this month at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. It was one of the clearest explanations of the semantic Web I’ve heard so far (I’ve embedded his full slide show below). The semantic Web is nothing more than a set of standards that, if broadly adopted, would help computers extract meaning from the flood of data on the Web. But instead of a brute software approach, it puts intelligence into the data. “All you need to use that data is carried by the data itself,” says Spivack. Dumb software, smart data. That is an approach that scales no matter how many billions of Web pages are created.
The point, says Spivack, is:
To do for data what the Web did for documents.
You are turning the Web into a database, and your data becomes a part of it. Your data becomes part of the worldwide database. The semantic Web will let you move from data record to data record, just like you go from Web page to Web page.
There are many obstacles to the adoption of the semantic Web, but its goals are something worth striving for. What is certain is that search needs to evolve, and Google and Yahoo and Microsoft with it. Of course, they can adopt whichever approach or combination proves most effective.
The question is: Will they, or are they too wedded to keyword search to move beyond it?
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CondeNet Tries To Blogify Concierge.com By Buying Two Travel Blogs (SFO Media)
Just as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft regularly by startups to fill in gaps in their technology or business, media companies may be starting to do the same on the content side. Today, CondeNet (the digital arm of magazine publisher Conde Nast) bought SFO Media, which operates two travel blogs: Jaunted and HotelChatter. The first is a travel guide and the second is a hotel-review blog.
The price of the deal wasn’t disclosed, but SFO Media founder Mark Johnson is basically being hired to keep running the sites, which will continue to run separately but be combined with Concierge.com business.
It can use the help. Concierge.com’s worldwide unique visitors (blue line in chart below) dropped from a peak of 2 million last October to 700,000 last March, according to comScore. (Part of this decline can be attributed to the seasonal nature of the travel business). Meanwhile, the combined worldwide traffic of Jaunted (red line) and HotelChatter (green line) in March was about 875,000 unique visitors. So two mildly successful blogs just doubled the advertising inventory that Concierge.com’s sales people can sell.
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And We Have A New DataPortability Logo
After being threatened by Red Hat because its original suitcase logo was too close to theirs, the DataPortability workgroup decided to hold a contest for a new logo, which anyone could vote on. Now the logo contest is over, and the winning design is shown at right. Congratulations to Alex Pankratov, who submitted the design.
In addition to the glory of seeing the logo on all official DataPortability Websites and letterhead, the winner will get an iPhone, a week’s worth of free ad space on TechCrunch and CenterNetworks, and a bunch of other donated prizes.
DataPortability wrangler-in-chief Chris Saad has an update here on the six-month-old effort to create standards that will allow consumers to take their personal data with them from site to site.
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