When I first saw this I thought "Where have you been all my life?" Then I realized the answer: In 1.x iPhone and iTouch firmware. iMobileCinema is a homebrew app for 1.1.1-1.1.5 firmware and must be installed on jailbroken phones. This tool is all but useless to early adopters who are already into the 2.x version of the firmware but a version that should work with 2.1 is coming soon, according to the website. The question, then, is whether this app breaks the terms of use.

Local review site Yelp is not going to sit around and let competitor CitySearch have even a day to celebrate their new beta launch.

CEO Jeremy Stopellman, noticing our Comscore comparison of the services - “According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques)” - emailed us with some of their internal traffic numbers and stats.

Yelp’s Google Analytics stats for the past thirty days show 15.8 million unique visitors, way above the six million Comscore records. And Yelp also shows other interesting stats in the chart below: 4 million reviews, with 34% restaurants, 23% shopping, 8% beauty and fitness, etc. Users are 51% male and 49% female, and 65% have a college degree.

Not bad for a company that was born just four years ago.

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If you don’t know what being RickRolled is, go look it up because you don’t want to be the last person to figure it out. YouTube even RickRolled its own users as an April Fools joke.

Anyway, tonight I get a call on my mobile phone. And it’s that damn song. Apparently it’s some new startup called Twilio, and according to a Facebook message it was initiated by Dave McClure, who is probably advising them.

Congratulations Dave, you’ve found a unique way of bugging me. Hope there’s more to the business than that. Did you get my text message thanking you?

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Jeff Bonforte never met an API he didn’t like. The CEO of Xobni, a startup that makes an outlook plug-in that makes your e-mail smarter, has been busy getting his team of engineers to integrate every possible API they can think of into the service. Xobni already added LinkedIn last June. Today it is adding integrations with Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, and Hoovers. Data from all of these services appears in the Xobni sidebar in Outlook. Let’s take them one by one.

Xobni has been working on its Yahoo Mail integration since last April. Now in the sidebar, users can search their Yahoo Mail messages and see contacts and attachments. To send or receive email through your Yahoo account, however, you still have to click through to Yahoo Mail in your browser, which is sub-optimal.

Every time someone sends you an email who is also a Facebook member, you can see in the sidebar their current Facebook status message, general profile information, their Facebook picture, and recent updates made to their profile.

The Skype feature lets you send instant messages, SMS messages, and make Skype or regular calls to contacts who are also Skype users. Again, as with Yahoo Mail, actually making a call or sending an IM automatically launches the Skype application.

Finally, the Hoover API brings up Hoover company information for each contact. That provides some helpful context when responding to business emails, although I find the LinkedIn data more useful.

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Citysearch is finally coming around to replacing its creaking site design with something a little more contemporary. Today, it is launching in a major rethink of its entire site in beta that drills deeper into neighborhoods, uses Facebook Connect as an optional identity system, and lets users vote reviews up and down. The beta will quickly become the default Citysearch experience. During a demo at IAC headquarters yesterday, Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti told me:

We’ve been working on it for 10 months and built everything from ground up. In Q1 we will be turning off every system that operates Citysearch today, and running everything in the new environment.

Citysearch’s engineers stripped out the decade-old proprietary code that runs Citysearch and replaced it with open-source code. By replacing what’s under the hood, they were freed up to make some major improvements that are immediately apparent. The main changes are:

1. Hyper-local content. Citysearch is currently organized by city, so no matter what neighborhood you are looking at you get the same city guide. With the beta, Citysearch has mapped each city by neighborhood and placed each restaurant, bar, hotel, theater, or other local business in a specific neighborhood. So now when you are looking for things to do in a given neighborhood, Citysearch can dynamically create a neighborhood guide complete with restaurants, shops, and other businesses. With this one change, Citysearch is going from 140 cities to 75,000 neighborhoods by the end of the year.

2. Hyper-social content (Facebook Connect). This is one of the biggest changes. Citysearch has only 4 million registered users, but it will now adopt Facebook Connect as an optional identity system. That means anytime someone wants to submit a review or rating who isn’t already a registered Citysearch user will be able to simply type in their Facebook username and password. Any review or rating can then appear on your in Facebook feed, just like with the old Beacon program, except with Facebook Connect it’s all opt-in. (Citysearch was an original Beacon partner, but it shut that down long ago). “Friends love to talk to other friends about local businesses,” notes Herratti.

Even better, anytime you see reviews for a particular restaurant or business,reviews from your Facebook friends will show up first. We were wondering when Facebook Connect partners would start announcing their implementations.

3. Rebalancing the power between reviewers, merchants, and editors. Instead of highlighting Citysearch’s editorial voice, the design has been tweaked so that underneath each entry thereare now three columns representing the voice of the business owner, the Citysearch editor, and the user reviewers. Citysearch reviews have become so crucial for many restaurants and bars that they’ve also become suspect in that many businesses try to game the system. Herrati says:

We are looking to restore the balance of content in the local space. By that I mean we feel UGC has been so powerful in this arena, but it also comes with a bag of issues.

So not only do business owners now have their own more prominent column to promote their business, but the reviews are now voted up or down so that the community can self-moderate the most obviously abusive comments.

4. A better mobile experience Finally, since everything has been remapped by neighborhood, Citysearch is well positioned for mobile apps. But Citysearch is also working hard to optimize the experience for mobile browsers. It is using the geo-location API in Google Gears to surface nearby results for anyone using a phone running Windows Mobile 5 or higher. For everyone else, it remembers the last destination you specified by typing into your phone. t is also working on specific apps for phones with GPS chips. An iPhone app will come later this quarter, and Android and Blackberry apps are also in the works.

Overall, Citysearch is taking some big steps in the right direction. Facebook Connect is going to be huge for the site. With the turn of a switch, it now has social features it would have been nearly impossible to build on its own. Who wantsto become someone else’s friend on Citysearch? But if you can find your existing friends there, that is one more reason to use it.

In practice, it still has a ways to go in terms of bringing up the best results at the neighborhood level. At least that was the case for my neighborhood in Brooklyn. The top result for dining brought up a restaurant that went out of business a long time ago. Too bad you can’t vote search results up and down.

In terms of Citysearch’s business, though, the hyperlocal results will really help with its local search business. The one part of the new Cityseearch that is not open-source is Citysearch Pay, its pay-for-performance ad engine that turns up sponsored results on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level. In teh future, it will introduce “event variable price per lead.” Basically, that means businesses will be able to bid on how much they are willing to pay for different types of leads. Viewing a geo-proximate ad on a mobile phone could be one type of lead, texting an address to a friend could be another, as could playing a video profile of a business or making a reservation.

And these types of ads would not be limited to its own site. Citysearch also operates an ad network for partner sites looking to bring more local content. Herrati explains:

Between a quarter and at third of revenues comes from the ad network. If you look at impressions and uniques, it crushes our network.

The ad network’s reach crushes it by ten to one. According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques). By doing abetter job mapping all of its data on local businesses, Citysearch should be able to boost the relevance of its search results and therefore how much it gets paid for them. Maybe Barry Diller should start breaking out results for Citysearch now that IAC is a smaller entity.

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Earlier this year we watched as Redlasso, a very popular video service that allowed bloggers to clip portions of television content, got beaten into submission (at least temporarily) by a flurry of lawsuits. The company’s platform gave bloggers access to content spanning popular channels including CNN and ESPN almost immediately after it aired, and was a favorite across blogs like The Huffington Post and others. Unfortunately, Redlasso didn’t secure any rights to the content it was distributing, and it wasn’t long before the networks started to crack down. Now 1Cast, a new startup launching today in private beta, is looking to fill the void left by Redlasso by offering similar clips of recent television footage with one key distinction: it has all been fully licensed. TechCrunch readers can grab one of 1000 invites here.

At launch the site is offering content from Reuters, CNBC, CBC, AP and the AFP, and plans to have more content partners by the end of the year. Footage is sorted into categories including Sports and Headlines, as well as by individual network. Unlike Redlasso, which used its own recording system, 1Cast receives its content directly from its partners. At this point it sounds like some of the networks are slower than others in getting their content distributed (quick turn around was one of the things that made Redlasso so appealing), but they are expected to speed up over time.

Instead of appealing exclusively to bloggers, 1Cast is trying to serve a more general market by allowing users to create frequently updated video ‘channels’ on topics they’re interested in, which can be embedded on blogs and are also viewable on the iPhone/iPod Touch (it’s sort of like your own personal news network).

In practice the service seems to work adequately well, though I have some problems with it. For one, searching for a specific clip is difficult - videos are all broken into ‘channels’ and grouped with other videos on the same topic, but it’s hard to tell what each clip is actually about without watching it. And it seems that every time you want to watch a clip you need to sit through the ads attached, which gets really annoying when you weren’t interested in it in the first place.

1Cast may catch on with the general public, who may be more interested in the ‘personal news channel’ aspect of the site rather than being able to embed a breaking news clip on their blog. But until the site has a larger collection of content and a better way to search through it, it probably won’t appeal to the same blogger audience that Redlasso did.

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Each month, AdMob, a mobile advertising network, rounds up the data from over 6,000 mobile websites and applications, analyzes it all, and releases their findings in their Mobile Metrics Report. In the September report, AdMob determined that the iPhone had become the #4 handset worldwide by count of ads requested. In the October release, the iPhone has skyrocketed all the way to #1.

Note that these rankings are not directly representative of sales numbers; while AdMob’s ad network is wide enough that these numbers can provide an accurate picture of usage trends, they don’t necessarily prove that one handset is outselling another.

September vs October Worldwide handset rankings:

Within the Top 5, the only major change is the iPhones sudden surge. Below that however, notice the BlackBerry 8100s sudden disappearance from the list - it has shifted down to #11, sitting just below the BlackBerry 8300. Why might this be? Well, the 8100 is a good half year older than the 8300 - chances are, more 8100s are reaching retirement.

September vs October US handset rankings:

In September, we were a bit surprised to see the iPhone sitting all the way down at #7 in the US while it managed to snag the #4 spot worldwide. In October, the iPhone’s rank seems a bit more well aligned with it’s worldwide status, coming in at #2. iPhone requests have more than doubled, allowing it to knock the KRZR down a notch. The rest of the list moves in relation, though as with the worldwide rankings, we see the BlackBerry 8300 climb as the 8100 sinks.

One thing to note with all of these statistics, however, is that AdMob advertisements embedded into iPhone applications are counted alongside web site statistics. If these same advertisements are not embedded into applications on all of the other platforms, wouldn’t the numbers be skewed in favor of the iPhone? Even if they were given the same real estate across all platforms, third-party applications are a far more significant part of the iPhone than they are of the vast majority of devices; if you own an iPhone, chances are great that you’ve installed (and regularly use) a handful of applications. Can you really say the same about the KRZR, or the Kyocera K24? Wouldn’t this, too, skew things a bit? I’d be interested in seeing how the data changes when limited to any website accessible by smartphone.

Other interesting tid bits from the report:

• 29.5% of the traffic that AdMob saw in October came from a smartphone - 59% of that was from devices running Symbian, while 15% ran the iPhone OS
• 77.7% of devices AdMob saw in October supported Polyphonic ringtones, down from 79.5% in September
• As in September, the Danger Sidekick II is the only Sidekick device to break the Top 20, though it has slipped down from #15 to #16.
• 62.8% of iPhone requests were from the US.
• Most popular manufacturer by carrier: AT&T: Apple, MetroPCS: Motorola, Sprint: Samsung, T-Mobile: RIM, Verizon: LG

If you’ve got a couple hours to kill tearing through page upon page of statistics (now including stats for Latin America!), you can find the full report here.

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Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe finally got approval on their iPhone application - it appears to have been sitting at Apple waiting for approval for over two months.

Well, it was worth the wait. Like Google’s voice recognition app, it’s a much better search experience than the default Google search built into the iPhone browser. The app gives you a visual preview of all search results, which is a noticeably better way of searching on a small screen with a small virtual keyboard.

It isn’t in the app store yet directory yet, but you can download it here.

As an aside, will an iPhone developer please send me a screen shot of the “review pending” page that you have to look at day after day as you wait weeks, or possibly months, for Apple to get around to approving your app?

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For years, people have been turning to the web to ask perfect strangers for advice. But while largely anoymized services like Yahoo Answers have proven to be hugely popular, there’s something to be said for getting advice from people you actually know. Last month we wrote about Aardvark, a social search engine in private beta built by The Mechanical Zoo that distributes your searches across your social graph for quick, highly accurate results that are likely more credible than what you’d get from Yahoo Answers or a normal search engine. Today sees the public launch of another social advice site called Mobspin that is also leveraging the social graph, though in a slightly different manner.

Mobspin CEO Roy Goldman says that while Aardvark is a good service for questions that need near-immediate answers, many questions aren’t that urgent, which is why Mobspin is taking a more passive approach.

To use the site, you first submit a question that you’d like your friends’ help with. But rather than sending out an immediate alert to your friends letting them know that you’d like some help, the site instead sends them sporadic Email digests at intervals they’ve set. Goldman says that friends are generally eager to help anyway, and don’t need to be hit over the head with obnoxious and frequent requests. To help build up your friends list, the site has deep support for Facebook, allowing you to import your friends list as well as syndicate your questions to Facebook News Feeds.

You can also get an overview of the questions you’ve been asked at the Mobspin homepage, which allows users to filter questions by the people who have asked them (you can choose to view questions only from your friends, friends of friends, and so on). The site is also looking to serve as a repository for questions and answers - all submissions will be searchable by keyword, but will be stripped of any identifiable personal data. You can also leave reviews on the site, which are also included in the index.

Mobspin’s biggest obstacle will lie in obtaining critical mass - there isn’t much point in searching the database or submitting a question if you can never find a relevant answer. But it’s a quick way to ask your friends questions, and, unlike Aardvark, it’s publicly available. The site will be going up against a few other similar services, including Ruba, GigPark, and Yotify, which we covered here.

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The big three automakers are clamoring for a piece of the hypothetical $25 billion auto-bailout fund. And newcomer Tesla wants a piece of that too, apparently. The startup auto-maker has requested $400 million in low or no-interest loans to fund two upcoming projects (likely their new $70k electric sedan and a low priced third car).

Tesla has raised nearly $200 million in capital since 2004, including a recent $40 million convertible debt financing. Prior to the debt round, Tesla unsuccessfully tried to raise $100 million in new capital.

But forget the private capital markets. You can’t beat cheap loans from the government. Of course, the entire bailout is far from certain at this point, so don’t count those chickens yet.

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Ocarina, the second iPhone application from Silicon Valley based Smule, has surged to the top spot on the iPhone App store just a little over a week after launching (you can download it here for $.99).

Why? Just like Smule’s first application, a social virtual lighter (yeah, I know), People are fascinated by interacting with others. With the lighter it was competing geographically for the brightest light. With Ocarina, it’s listening to the music of others.

Ocarina, named after an ancient flute-like wind instrument, lets people play haunting, flute-like songs by blowing into the iPhone microphone and hitting the virtual buttons.

Yay. But the cool thing is you can hit a button and listen to what other Ocarina users are playing around the world. It’s social music, and strangely compelling. The company says Oscarina users have have listened to more than three million melodies. You can listen to some of them here.

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When the SEC charges someone with insider trading or any other crime, most lawyers will advise them that the best course of action is usually to keep their mouth shut and fight it in court. But some people just can’t help themselves. Martha Stewart, for instance, tried to fight her insider trading case in the court of public opinion, and it didn’t do her much good. Now another high-profile billionaire, Mark Cuban, is in the SEC’s sights. He knows that from a legal standpoint he should save his arguments for the judge, but he just can’t help himself. Cuban is fighting this case on his blog.

Or rather, he is letting his lawyers fight the case publicly on his behalf by printing their memos on his blog. Yesterday, he posted a response from his lawyer to the SEC complaint in which stated:

This matter, which has been pending before the Commission for nearly two years, has no merit and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion. Mr. Cuban intends to contest the allegations and to demonstrate that the Commission’s claims are infected by the misconduct of the staff of its Enforcement Division.

He prefaced that with the single line:

I wish I could say more, but I will have to leave it to this, and let the judicial process do its job.

Yet today, he kept at it, posting another memo from his lawyer, hinting at how he plans to defend himself:

The SEC knows their case centers on one telephone conversation between two individuals- 4 years ago. The SEC claims there was an agreement between these parties to the conversation to keep certain information confidential. We interviewed Guy Faure, the former CEO of Mamma.com Inc., with whom the SEC claims Mr. Cuban made an agreement. We had a court reporter transcribe the interview. There was no agreement to keep information confidential.

The case revolves around 600,000 shares Cuban sold in 2004 after being alerted by the CEO of search-engine Mamma.com that it was planning an offering that would dilute Cuban’s stake in the company. Cuban was not a board member or corporate officer Momma.com, but that doesn’t really matter. As far as the SEC is concerned, insider trading occurs whenever anybody trades shares based on information about a company that is not yet public.

It appears that is exactly what Cuban did. But there is also a rule that would seem to apply here that it is only insider trading if the “person agrees to maintain information in confidence.” Judging from the questions Cuban’s lawyers asked the Mamma.com CEO at his deposition, his argument will likely be that he never made such an agreement.

The SEC might counter that he is sophisticated investor, he knew it was insider information, and he traded on it anyway, adding to his immense wealth while all the poor schlepps out there who also owned the stock had to take the hit.

There seems to be enough wiggle room here for a court to decide either way. And if it does go to court, there is one more factor that complicates matters in Cuban’s favor. According to an e-mail obtained by Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times, an SEC staffer unaffiliated with this investigation harangued Cuban for being “unpatriotic” because he funded the conspiracy-theory documentary Loose Change, which was critical of the Bush White House.

Cuban’s lawyers might argue that this lawsuit is politically motivated retribution against Cuban in the dying days of the Bush administration.

So if this ever goes to court, the choice presented to jurors could be of a greedy billionaire versus a vindictive President. Either way, Cuban doesn’t want to end up in court. If he keeps laying down his cards in public, maybe he can bluff the SEC into folding.

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Barcelona-based 3scale Networks has just announced on its blog that it made the switch from private to public beta for its API infrastructure management system, which enables Web API providers to set up and manage developer and client relationships for their Web Services, monitor usage and enable payments.

3scale features an online marketplace where resources are provided for developers who use Web Services to discover relevant services and set up usage agreements with providers. 3scale’s Quality of Service monitoring keeps track of actual uptime and quality of the contracted Web Service.

3scale launched earlier today with an initial collection of 14 services ranging from search engines and mapping to translation services including Corank, Crawlerinfo, DataNibble, Happenr (full disclosure: I’m a Partner with Oxynade, the company behind Happenr), Ipoki, ISBNdb.com, MaxMind, Swoogle, TaWithYou and Weatherbug.

3scale’s systems themselves are powered by Amazon’s EC2, S3 and Cloud Computing services. Signing up is free of charge and there is no usage fee outside of transaction commissions.

The startup was one of the DemoPit companies that demonstrated at TechCrunch50. The company will also be showing off its wares at the upcoming Le Web conference in Paris, where it was selected as one of the presenting startups.

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Here’s one thing that people all over the world will continue to need even in the worst of recessions: food. And while there are many places you can go to if you want to discover great recipes for home cooking, Cookstr is launching a website later tonight at a press event in New York City that takes a different route than all the cluttered and user-generated content sites out there: it’s all about the top chefs and cookbook authors, baby.

Cookstr has managed to sign up over 200 star chefs, cookbook authors and publishers who contribute to a database of high-quality recipes for a wide variety of dishes, with more being added every day (both chefs and recipes). The contributor list is impressive, to say the least, including people like Mark Bittman, Jamie Oliver, Mario Batali, Nigella Lawson, Daniel Boulud, Jacques Pepin, Julia Child, Alice Waters … the list just goes on and on.

The site, which has just been opened up a couple of minutes ago, features a nice interface and a powerful engine for searching recipes and information about the chefs, with menus and ‘tips & techniques’ coming soon. There are a lot of ways to search for great recipes: by main ingredients, cuisine, occasion, method, etc., and once you start looking there’s an intuitive filter in the left sidebar that helps you narrow down your search to find the right recipe.

(CenterNetworks recorded a demo by CEO Will Schwalbe recently at a NY Tech Meetup you might want to check out)

Other than that, the site is intentionally clean; there’s currently only a print button for recipes and a way for people to send recipes to friends by e-mail. Soon you will be able to create your own MyCookstr, where you’ll be able to save recipes, notes, and shopping lists. More community features are also on the works.

Business model, you asked? Cookstr plans to integrate advertising in the beginning of 2009, and as a recent NY Times article on the startup points out, they’ll also be collecting affiliate revenue when books are sold on e-commerce sites via their website.

Cookstr is completely bootstrapped by its founder and CEO Will Schwalbe, who stepped down as editor in chief of Hyperion Books in January 2008, and was co-developed by New York incubator Tipping Point Partners. The company is actively looking for funding to take the web service to a new level, which I’m pretty sure they’ll find based on what they’ve already accomplished on a shoestring budget.

That said, Cookstr is up against some stiff competition from well-known recipe databases that are less high-end but offer an adequate solution for many home cookers, such as FoodNetwork (owned by Scribbs), AllRecipes (owned by Reader’s Digest), Yahoo Recipes, Epicurious (owned by Conde Nast), Delish.com (owned by Hearst Communications), and so on. It’s not that there’s not an audience: comScore reported earlier that food sites attracted 45.6 million unique visitors in September, more than double the rate of total Internet growth in the United States.

Cookstr is also looking to expand the service internationally.

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Why do certain videos on YouTube become mass phenomena while the vast majority of videos just get a handful of views, if any?

Riley Crane, an American post doctoral fellow currently researching at the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at ETH university in Zurich/Switzerland, says he has the answer: According to him, the success of online videos can be explained with physics.

Crane claims every time a YouTube video turns into a hit, the development takes the form of an “attention spiral”, a geometric pattern that partly follows physical laws. He discovered that a decrease of popularity with certain videos, for example, can be explained through methods usually utilized in modeling the aftershocks of earthquakes. He believes social systems on the web follow the rules of physics and can therefore be analyzed mathematically.

The popularity of YouTube videos can be characterized through curves visualizing increases and decreases in the number of viewers and the amount of attention they pay to each video. For example, the following graph shows two different attention spirals (top left: level of search activity following the Tsunami that hit part of Asia in December 2004; top right: the volume of search queries for Harry Potter between April and October 2007, bottom left:views of Harry Potter videos on YouTube; bottom right: views of tsunami videos on Youtube):

After researching the usage of about 5 million YouTube videos over 8 months, Crane found out that only 10 percent are viewed more than 100 times a day. According to Crane, the popularity of these videos can be measured through distinguishing whether a burst of activity was observed after a large-scale “exogenous” (external) shock or whether it’s the result of a number of smaller “endogeneous” (internal) factors that had a cumulative effect. Also, it seems to be important to take into account the extent to which web users can influence others to take action (what he calls “critical” vs. “subcritical,” where the latter term means exerting influence is impossible).

Crane categorizes especially popular videos into three different classes:

• “junk” (exogenous subcritical type, videos that quickly pick up and lose viewers / see the green diagram at the bottom left in the picture below)
• “viral” (endogenous critical type, videos spreading through the site through word of mouth / see the red diagram at the top right in the picture below)
• “quality” (exogenous critical type, videos that attract attention quickly and only slowly lose their appeal over time because of their high quality / see the blue diagram at the bottom right in the picture below)

Junk videos are characterized by a significant peak that contains the vast majority of views and fail to spread through the site. In contrast to quality videos, viral videos show precursory growth before peaking out and decaying slowly (see the Harry Potter example above, diagram A): It takes time for the endogenous phenomenon to build up and spread within the network. Quality videos, however, reach the peak much faster as a reaction to an external “shock” but also decay slowly (see the Tsunami video example above, diagram B).

Crane claims that viral and quality videos show very characteristic patterns over a specific period of time, supposedly making it possible (through the analysis of tendencies) to predict if a video has the potential to become a super hit.

The final goal is the development of an encompassing and science-based online trend monitoring system. The university newsletter writes (German only) Amazon is currently in negotiations with Crane to integrate his model into its site, hoping to predict the potential of newly listed products at an early stage.

The critical factor here (and one of the long-term objectives) is to correctly determine the tipping point, the point in time at which the viral effect kicks in and sales or (in the case of YouTube) views of videos take off. Details of the Crane model (presented with fellow researcher Didier Sornette) can be found in the October issue of PNAS magazine (available online here).

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It seemed almost like the Good Old Days when everyone waited on Microsoft to show their cards before doing anything. While Adobe took over Moscone West in San Francisco for its MAX developer conference, Microsoft launched its Microsoft Online Services operation at the St. Regis 3 blocks away before an audience of press, analysts, bloggers, and most importantly, business partners. As one Adobe high up said, "Microsoft is focused on the enterprise."

Remember Metacafe? That’s right, the video entertainment site which got overshadowed by YouTube’s phenomenal rise? Well, it’s now making a huge gamble on a new product direction and doing so with zero guarantees. The gamble is WikiCafe, a collaborative editing approach for video metadata. To appreciate how important WikiCafe is to Metacafe just take a look at the company’s official R&D resource usage: 60% WikiCafe, 30% revenue generating opportunities, 10% everything else. That says it all.

I spent a few hours with Eyal Hertzog, the company’s co-founder and Chief Creative Officer who walked me through the company’s new product vision and the rationale for its big bet on the wiki approach to organizing videos. Hertzog was frustrated that users (he being among them) couldn’t just locate “THE” result when searching for a video. His definition of “THE” being a single video result that encompasses all the relevant (and preferably accurate) info, along with multiple language versions, captioning, and so on. The current reality, of course, is that when we perform a search for a video we get back multiple results—sometimes even in the hundreds—from multiple sources, in various languages, with different view counts, fake versions . . .. You all know the drill.

Hertzog explains:

“We actually believe that quality metadata is as important – if not more important – than the videos themselves. We’re focused on delivering a great entertainment experience through short-form video, which means we have to make it easy for people to find and discover great videos every time they come to Metacafe. The only way to do that is to have accurate and complete information about what the videos on our site are about. And we believe the only way to get that information is to enlist our community’s help. WikiCafe is absolutely essential to our strategy going forward, and we believe it gives us an unprecedented competitive advantage over other sites.”

Put simply, WikiCafe is everything you’ve come to learn to love about Wikipedia but attuned to video. It is a collaborative video metadata editing tool built on top of WikiMedia, the Wiki platform originally written for Wikipedia. Its purpose is to foster collaboration and aggregation of standardized, categorized knowledge on a single “document”—in this case a video.

The collaborative taxonomy used by WikiCafe is created and maintained by the community, so just like Wikipedia, it has the potential to become more comprehensive and accurate over time. Of course another major benefit is that the community polices the edits the data so the amount of false-positives and spammy results could dramatically decrease—not all at once, but Rome too wasn’t built in a single day.

The backbone of the system is an advanced tagging system that supports:

• Redirects: Tags such as ‘PS3′, ‘PSIII’, ‘PlayStationIII’ are all redirected to ‘PlayStation 3′.
• Disambiguation: ‘Apple’ as a tag would offer as options ‘Apple (Computers)’, ‘Apple (Record Label)’, ‘Apple’ (Fruit).
• Tag Hierarchies: The tag ‘iPhone’ is a child to ‘Apple Computers’ and ‘Smartphones’. ‘Apple Computers’ is a child to ‘Technology’ and ‘Smartphones’ is a child to ‘Cellular Phones’ which is a child to ‘Phones’ which is a child to “Communication Devices”.
• Tag Translations: Videos that are tagged with one language tag are automatically ‘tagged’ in all the other languages as well, thereby providing language-transparent search. This means that users using non-Germanic languages such as Hebrew or Japanese for example would be able to search for say ‘Britney Spears’ in their native character-set and get results as if they used English.

Editable metadata information includes Title, Description, Rating Properties (sexy, violence), Language, Country of Relevance, and more. There are also metadata templates such as “Music Info” that includes Album, Artist, Genre, and Label. There are also flags such as “Suspected Duplicate” and “Misleading Thumbnail”.

While Hertzog gave me a walk through we edited this video’s tags from ‘TechBrunch’ to ‘TechCrunch, and added ‘Michael Arrington’ to the already existing tags ‘Michael’ and ‘Arringon’. You can see the revision history here.

So far WikiCafe is exceeding the company’s expectations. The system is currently logging 14,000 user Edit Actions per day, up from 4000 in September. In my book Metacafe deserves kudos in this respect as well because forming a collaborative community is in many respects far more difficult than delivering the collaborative technology.

ComScore’s September numbers position Metacafe as the web’s largest independent video site with 38M unique users worldwide, led only by YouTube and MSN (it passed DailyMotion and AOL Video in the summer). Time will tell whether Metacafe’s gamble on WikiCafe will pay off, but you have to admire the company’s vision and courage. Instead of sitting still it’s pushing the envelope in delivering its audience the most accurate video results. Speaking for myself, I’ve begun developing a habit of searching Metacafe before trying my luck on YouTube.

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The web is filled with countless editorial and user reviews on nearly every consumer product you can find in retail stores. But sifting through this wealth of information is a chore, and it’s never clear which reviewers actually know what they’re talking about. Bestcovery, a new startup launching today, is looking to eliminate these hassles by offering an at-a-glance guide to finding the best item in many popular consumer product categories. The site was founded by Kamran Pourzanjani, co-founder and former CEO of PriceGrabber.com, which was sold to Experian for $500 million.

Bestcovery currently offers brief product reviews on categories including home appliances, health and beauty, and consumer electronics like televisions and video games. But unlike most review sites, which assign vague Pros and Cons and leave the consumer to make the final decision, Bestcovery labels one product as “the best”. The top product in each category is chosen by a Bestcovery ‘expert’, and is prominently featured on the page alongside a brief description. Towards the bottom of the page, a handful of runners-up are listed. Each product description also includes links to online stores that carry the item, but Bestcovery doesn’t sell anything itself.

All Bestcovery reviews and analysis is performed by a team of in-house editors as well as external ‘experts’, who lend their information to the site for free. The site hopes to cut back on possible bias by allowing users to submit suggestions if they feel the wrong product has been chosen as “the best”, but editors have ultimate control over who gets the top billing.

For major purchases like computers or TV sets, I would be hesitant to use Bestcovery as my only source of information - there is simply too much room for bias, and personal taste plays a big role in these purchases. But for smaller items that I know nothing about, like electric razors, I would readily turn to Bestcovery to make a choice for me. That said, the site is going to have a long road ahead. There are countless well established review sites, and while other sites may not always label a product as “the best”, they generally have a list of the most popular or top rated items, which can be similarly interpreted.

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Jerry Yang just put up a blog post on his reasons for stepping down as CEO of Yahoo.

In it, he highlights the successes of the past 18 months. Yahoo is now “rewired,” the new ad platform has been launched “that we think will transform how ads are bought and sold online,” and Yahoo remains “first or second in more than 20 product categories.” And he ends with the promise “that I will always bleed purple.” No matter what his critics might say.

The post is reproduced below in its entirety:

As you’ve no doubt already read, I’ve decided that I will step down from my role as Chief Executive Officer after my successor has been selected.

Ever since founding Yahoo! with David Filo 13 years ago, I’ve been passionate about this company, its brand, its employees, and the millions of people around the world who consider it their online home. That’s why I accepted the Board’s request to become CEO in June 2007, taking on the challenge of transforming Yahoo! at a time when the industry was evolving quickly and we needed to rethink and restructure our business.

And despite the tough external environment that we face, I truly believe we’ve made tangible progress in bringing our strategic vision to life. Most significantly, we’ve rewired our entire network to create a Yahoo! that has opened its doors to outside publishers and developers. We’ve launched an advertising platform that we think will transform how ads are bought and sold online. And we’ve continued to grow our audience –- standing first or second in more than 20 product categories and demonstrating that Yahoo! is the place users turn for major events like the Olympics and the Elections.

And now I believe the time is right for us to bring in a new leader –- someone who will build on the important pillars we’ve put in place and who will take the reins on the critical decisions our company faces. As for me, I’ll be returning to my role as Chief Yahoo and board member once my successor is named. I’ll go back to focusing on our global strategy, product excellence, technology innovation, and working with the Board and our executive team to help Yahoo! realize its full potential.

It’s been an extraordinary year here at Yahoo! –- for all of us. I’m really proud of the determination and resilience of Yahoos around the world who are so committed to giving you the best Internet experience possible. It is for them, and for you, that I will always bleed purple.

Jerry Yang
Chief Yahoo! and CEO

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