The elections were good to the HuffingtonPost, the political uber-blog. It’s audience in the U.S. rose fivefold in the last year to 5 million monthly uniques in October, according to comScore (see chart below). In what may turn out to be perfect market timing, the Times UK is reporting that the company is close to raising $15 million. In the past, it has raised a total of $12 million from investors including Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Bob Pittman, and Ken Lerer.

As with all political sites, it is likely that the HuffPo’s traffic will dip now that the election fever is over. The question for investors, though, is whether its current levels represent a peak or, whether it can take advantage of its new-found audience to establish a solid, new traffic floor from which to keep growing. If you look at the HuffPo’s chart from Google Trends (above), it looks like traffic is at the very least plateauing so far in November, as you would expect.

Where does it go from here?

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If you were intrigued by BitGravity’s Multiview product that allows viewers to choose from six different camera angles as they watch an event, check out episode 177 of Diggnation today at 3 pm PST.

The regular “director’s cut” will be shown at at Diggnation.com. The customized version will be available here on the Revision3 website.

We’ve got a few screenshots of today’s show (actually, we’ve seen the show, but we can’t post it here, you’ll have to watch at 3 PM).

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When most private companies reach 500 shareholders, they trigger an SEC rule which effectively treats them like a public company and requires them to some of the same reporting requirements. Google ran into this issue just before it went public. Now Facebook is quickly reaching that same threshold as it continues to hire and allows employees to sell shares to outside investors.

But in a letter dated October 13, 2008 (embedded below), Facebook’s lawyers argue that rule should not apply to Facebook because most of the shareholders are employees. The SEC granted the exemption.

So Facebook can keep issuing both restricted stock and options to new employees without fear of triggering the (costly) reporting requirements. As long as most of those shares stay inside Facebook, the company should be all right. But if enough employees take advantage of its program allowing them to sell shares to outsiders, and the number of outside investors grows beyond a handful or a few dozen, the SEC might want to revisit this decision.

Facebook Letter to SEC - Get more Legal Forms

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Yahoo has been rumored to be selling Paris-based comparative shopping site Kelkoo for some time now, and it appears that they have found a buyer. Yahoo acquired Kelkoo in 2004 for €475 million.

The company has been sold to a UK-based private equity firm called Jamplant Ltd (update: here is a profile of the fund) for something less than €100 million, according to sources with knowledge of the deal.

Ex-Kelkoo CEO Pierre Chappaz announced the news on his blog (in french), and a copy of the internal email announcing the acquisition is below.

The company has lost much of its momentum since the Yahoo acquisition in the face of significant competition.

The email is below.

Hello Everyone,

It has been since summer since I gave you update email. I have waited because there are so many things nearing launch that I thought it best to wait till they had happened to give the update. Firstly, I would like to end the speculation from the last few months about the future of Kelkoo. Both Toby and I have announced that we were exploring strategic options for the business. One of the options that Laila and I were exploring, in fact pushing for, was to find it a new home for Kelkoo. I am pleased to announce, today, that we have done just that!

The new owners of Kelkoo are a UK based private equity company called Jamplant Ltd funded by several angel investors, and in their own words: “Jamplant Limited is very excited about the price comparison space, and being able to help Kelkoo continue its rapid growth. Philip Smyth, Chairman of Jamplant, believes that with our backing, Kelkoo should be able to accelerate its growth much faster as a standalone company . We are looking forward to working with the highly experienced and established management team at Kelkoo” Laila and I are also very excited about this new phase in the history of Kelkoo, accelerating the growth strategies we have put in place over the last year, and exploring new opportunities for all of us.

So, what does it mean to our daily lives as Kelkoo employees? We will carry on with the great work already in process. This is due to the fact that many people have been working hard behind the scenes to ensure a very smooth transition out of Yahoo! Today at 3pm GMT (4pm CET), we will schedule a video all hands for Kelkoo staff. Please ask any questions that are on your minds to Sasha ( —— ) before the meeting, we will do our best to answer during the broadcast.

I also want to update you on the things we are delivering on our top 3 priorities. Out of the new organization of Kelkoo last October, the Country Managers and the Exec Team have spent time thinking about and stretching our expectations of Kelkoo. That resulted in the following mission statement (slightly altered with the help of our new marketing director, Bernard):

Ø Kelkoo will be integral to the online retail experience by completely satisfying the needs of our users, helping them to find and discover what and where to buy. In doing this, we will ultimately deliver more buyers to retailers than any other site.

To achieve this, we have all been pushing on delivering on the following priorities:

* Fix the Search
o (Convergence) which has seen the launch of Search 5 in France and Netherlands and is currently showing nearly - - - % uplift on revenue per visit
o (Comprehensiveness) we have finalized the agreement with - - -, are working with them to
* Give more noticeable value to users thru creating Kelkoo Club
o - - - launched in all countries in July
o - - - launched in some countries in September
o Cash-Back launched in beta in the UK yesterday, and will launch in FR next week
* Build the Brand
o We have kicked off our own version of project Goldmine , to study and understand our customers and their needs. We have appointed three agencies to help us with the project, which should complete by the end of February. An exciting part of this project will be to interview some employees on “what is Kelkoo”, and feed that back to the business priorities we will establish over the next 6 months.

So you can see, that we are delivering more and faster than ever in our history. Laila and I are proud of the work that has been done so far, and believe that the future of Kelkoo is really bright.

In closing, I feel that it is important to thank Yahoo! for all the investment and work that has gone into Kelkoo and our employees over the past 4 years. To list all of the people we will miss would take an age, but in particular, I would like to thank Toby and Jonathan Wolf for making the new chapter possible.

Regards,
Glen & Laila

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Some apps wander around the wilderness for a while until they can find the perfect home. For Evernote, that home is the iPhone. The note-taking, picture-capturing, voice-recording, handwriting-recognizing universal memory service has been under development for years and launched last February in private beta on the PC. But it wasn’t until May 29 that it debuted on the iTunes store as an iPhone app. That’s when it started to take off.

Now Evernote has 512,000 registered users, who have created 13.8 million notes. In addition to the iPhone app, Evernote offers its service thorugh a PC client, a Mac client, a Website, and other mobile devices. The iPhone app is the most popular, being used 57% of the time. It is followed by the Web (51%), the PC client (32%), the Mac (28%), and other mobile clients bring up the rear (8%). These numbers add up to more than 100 because nearly half of all users access the service via more than one app.

The PC and Mac clients are the most fully-featured, yet it is the iPhone app that gave Evernote its critical mass. Perhaps that’s because the iPhone app lets you take pictures using the camera, append a note and save it to your Evernote page, where it is archived and searchable. It is more difficult to capture memories with a laptop.

Here is Evernote’s Elevator Pitch:

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Color me impressed with this one: Prague-based 360 Cities, a network of ‘Virtual Reality’ photographers promoting high-resolution spherical imagery, has integrated its portfolio of stunning 360° panorama shots into the Featured Preview Layer for Google Earth.

A collection of the panoramas just became visible automatically to every user of the free 3D earth visualization software, and the rest of the 360cities database, which is nearly 10,000 spherical images strong, has been added to the Gallery in Google Earth as well. Some of these are breathtakingly beautiful: check out this shot of the Berlin holocaust memorial, or the inside of this Iranian mosque, or this market place in Gambia, or the Cuban corner bar I embedded below.

I love seeing people outside of Google doing their best to enhance the Google Earth experience, although it must be said that the company is doing its part too. Recently, they made it possible to visit Ancient Rome in 3D.

Note: this only works with the latest version of Google Earth (4.2), which features the new PhotoOverlay format. You can download the KMZ file here.

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I took some shots of 2.2 in action. The walking directions would have been great for the past two weeks - I've had so much trouble using car-based GPS in walking/biking cities. Streetview is also great for cities like New York but it's very limited right now - there was no information for Paris, for example. The podcast download is also really nice to have. An impressively end-user-oriented update by Apple this time around.

We’ve received two reports tonight of users having their email notification settings on Facebook deleted. They were notified at login that there was a problem, and told to head over to the Notifications page to reset them.

At least one user is angry about it. The other (Simon from Ozmota), who sent the screenshot above, was more contemplative. He suggests someone simply forgot to back up a table before implementing an enhancement. I checked my account, and it’s fine.

Whatever happened, it’s a small embarrassment. The kind you see with young startups all the time. And Facebook, despite its massive growth, is still a young startup.

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Bucket tests and experimental products are one thing. But to mess with the real Google search is serious stuff. Why did they do it?

Google’s overall search share has grown substantially this year (and all other years since it went live). Their share of search advertising dollars is likely even higher.

The changes Google made to search today certainly make it more interactive and social. I can now write comments on search results, and read comments from everyone about TechCrunch (or anything else - see the awesomely useful TechCrunch comments in the image below, along with my votes on each) and vote them up or down. I can move search results around on the page - up, down, or off the page entirely. I can also add other URLs into search results.

In fact. Google paid Wikia Search the highest compliment possible today. They copied most of their features.

So, why did they do it?

In their blog post, Google says they’ve created a way to customize search results, and share (via the comments). They say they are striving to improve the search experience, and giving people tools to make search even more useful to them in their daily lives.

But Google search wasn’t broken. It’s one of the few things on the Internet that isn’t. I love it, as does 62% of everyone on the Internet. This new stuff is a mess of arrows and troll comments and stuff moving around the page. That doesn’t make my search experience more useful. It makes it move to another search engine.

My guess is they’ve made the changes to see what kind of data they get, and how it can be used to make their overall search results better. So when Google says “The changes you make only affect your own searches,” I think they’re only being half-truthful. All this data, in aggregate, will certainly be used to improve Google search results in general.

The worst part of the new stuff is you can’t turn it off. Once you click “Yes, continue” you’re in. And as far as I can tell, you can’t get back to the good old Google that worked just fine.

Google, I’m begging. Please pull a Lively and get rid of this thing fast.

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Further proving that security through (very, very light) obscurity isn’t a good means of keeping things secret, a new beta version of Yahoo’s Mobile Front Page (generally known as just m.yahoo.com) has been found hiding just one character away from the beta announced to the public back in January.

Where as the public beta can be found at beta.m.yahoo.com, our tipster dug up the new version by instead navigating to beta2.m.yahoo.com. Unfortunately, it seems we weren’t supposed to see this just yet; within a half-hour of us reaching out to Yahoo! for comment, the page had become password protected - but not before we snagged a couple screenshots.

The screenshots you’ll see below are what you’d see on an iPhone - on most other handsets, the new beta will look more like the current standard mobile front page: white backgrounds, light image use, etc. The visual changes of the iPhone version from the first beta to beta 2 are somewhat minimal - at least, they’re much less extreme than the jump made between the current m.yahoo.com and the first beta. They’ve decreased the gloss on the gradients, but have rounded out the corners. They’ve also added in a spot for advertisements above the fold, which I don’t remember being there before.

More notable than visual tweaks, however, is the addition of Yahoo’s oneConnect and onePlace. oneConnect brings in the notifications and updates from your e-mail accounts (Gmail, Windows Live, Yahoo) and social networks (Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, Twitter, Dopplr, and a bunch of others), and allows you to update your status at all appropriate sites in one quick swoop. onePlace is a similar all-in-one concept but for general information, squeezing together news, weather, stocks, bookmarks, RSS feeds, and more.

Both oneConnect and onePlace were announced as downloadable applications in the first quarter of 2008, though it seems that an iPhone version of oneConnect is the only thing to have made it out thus far. This is the first time we’ve seen a browser based version of either.

Oh - and if you’re curious as to what Yahoo had to say on the matter after they locked it up tight: they’re “constantly working on innovations” but they have “nothing to announce anytime soon.”

(I’ve removed a bunch of the status updates from image 2 to keep it from making this page absurdly long. Click the image for the fullsize version.)

[Thanks Matt!]

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When we announced the 7 finalists of the Amazon Web Services Startup Challenge two weeks ago, we dubbed Yieldex an “online ad optimization engine for Web publishers”. It’s time to take a closer look at what that means, because the company has just been awarded the top prize in the contest, bringing home $50,000 in cash, $50,000 in services credits plus an investment offer from Amazon.com.

Yieldex, not to be confused with similar service YieldBuild, has a solution for managing ad inventory, enabling Web publishers to allocate advertising campaigns more efficiently by forecasting overlapping inventory and predicting how ads are going to deliver. All in all, it seems like a nice solution to hmm … yield more revenue out of premium ad inventory, but I’m left wondering if ensuring optimal ad campaigns isn’t something that’s baked into most ad serving solutions already, or at least should be? I mean, it’s one of the core reasons for using an ad serving system in the first place, right?

Amazon.com annually rewards the most innovative US startup built on its cloud-computing infrastructure, and they get hundreds of applications every year, so there must be something about Yieldex that made them the winner.

So, congratulations to Yieldex and its founders, which consists of industry veterans from Matchlogic and NetGravity (check out CEO Tom Shields’ blog post on winning the award). The prize comes in addition to a previous, undisclosed seed funding round from Sequel Venture Partners, First Round Capital and Woodside Fund.

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Orb, a $9.99 iPhone application that should be familiar to home networking buffs, is available now and will stream music from your home computer, photos, and live television from a TV tuner card - all over the Internet. It can even stream input from a webcam to your phone.

Even before "The Wizard" enchanted and inspired the gaming generation, gamers have sought that final prize: making a living playing video games. Unfortunately, dreams of professional-gamerism have been shown to be as elusive as dreams of being a professional gambler. Luckily, startup BringIt is attempting to make both those dreams a little more attainable. BringIt made the connection between the huge online gambling market and the exploding online gaming community, and has created a site where gamers can challenge one another with cash on the barrelhead.

The calendar now reads November 21st and, just as expected, iPhone firmware 2.2 has been released to the masses. Seeing as a pretty good number of developers have had their hands on test versions of 2.2 for sometime now, and as NDAs generally turn to pudding after a few hundred people are in on the secret, we've had a pretty good idea of what this release would bring to the table for a while. For the sake of those who may have missed a day or two, though, we'll recap: Safari's address bar/search has been tweaked a bit, apps now request a rating upon deletion, over-the-air podcast downloads (which, oddly, works over 3G, though podcasts downloaded over radio can't be over a certain size, determined by the carrier), various video and audio quality tweaks, and assorted bug fixes throughout. Oh, and Google Maps has been upgraded to include Street View and directions for public transit and walking - if you have an iPhone rather than an iPod Touch, that is.

A new site called TweetStalk is in private beta. It allows you to “follow” Twitter users without them knowing you are doing it (Twitter tells you when someone new has subscribed to your data). It’s all through a Firefox Add-On and appears to modify the Twitter page itself via Greasemonkey or otherwise. You are then able to follow the person without them knowing, and the service provides a RSS feed as well.

This isn’t as bad as it sounds. Twitter pages are public by default so all the content is there for everyone to see anyway. Twitter should probably just implement a private follow feature of some sort to allow this anyway. But until they do, you’ve got TweetStalk.

Update: Nashville, TN based Sitening checked in to say they’re the ones behind the service. Find out more about them on Crunchbase.

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Social news community Mixx is seeing healthy growth ever since they left stealth mode. They got a nice traffic spike last May after CNN integrated ‘Mixx it’ buttons in their articles, roughly doubling their number of unique monthly visitors to nearly 1 million, and it appears their new community building features aren’t hurting them either.

A screenshot from their Google Analytics account shows that the Digg-competitor is gaining traction, receiving over 5.8 million unique visitors last month. Compete (as usual) estimates lower numbers but shows a similar growth pattern, as does Google Trends. Quantcast seems to affirm the number of reported visitors as well.

So how does that compare to Digg?

While we don’t have any insight on their internal stats, we do know Comscore, Compete, Quantcast and Google Trends all show that Digg yields much more traffic than Mixx, even if growth appears to be stagnating while Mixx’s is soaring.

Mixx is also very eager to show that their user base is more diverse than Digg’s audience, citing a Hitwise report that suggests its users tend to be more female (49% vs. 33%), older (36% in the 18-24 age group vs. 45%) and wealthier (e.g. 19% makes more than $150k per year vs. 4%) than Digg users. But comScore’s U.S. demographics of both sites tells a different story. According to comScore, females make up 47% of the Mixx audience vs. 46.4% for Digg. So about the same. But when it comes to 18-24-year-olds comScore thinks Mixx skews younger, with 17% vs. only 14% for Digg. And for households earning more than $100,000, Digg wins there as well with 30% vs. 27% for Mixx.

So whose numbers are you going to believe? It’s important to note that the Hitwise report was based on a 4-week study, which is in my opinion far from enough data to jump to any conclusions about the difference in user demographics. When you take the comScore data into account, the demographic differences seem pretty minor. Certainly they are not big enough to make any solid statements about Mixx being more mainstream than Digg.

Still a nice traffic growth pattern for a website that’s only been live for about a year and raised only $3.5 million in funding so far (Digg, for reference, has raised $40 million to date). Below are some comScore charts for the U.S.

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A couple of weeks ago I headed over to Belgium as part of my ongoing TechCrunch Euro Tour, to get a taste of the local web/mobile entrepreneur community (BTW, come to the London and Helsinki events soon). I hooked-up with another TechCrunch writer, Robin Wauters, and organiser of the Plugg conference, who had kindly arranged a TechCrunch Belgium meetup in Gent. Gent is quickly becoming one of the main places to startup in that country, as it’s a short drive from Brussels (which has the main airport and the excellent Eurostar), but Gent is cheaper, somewhat prettier and is a big university city with lots more potential talent to draw from. The startups each pitched their wares and here’s what I found. [Apologies for the delay in posting this, I've been visiting tech companies in China, of which, more later]. Thanks to Bart Claeys for the photos, below.

Adhese Control
Adhese has come up with a way of tracking the rich media ad campaigns increasingly littering the Web. It can tell you where your Flash creative is appearing and what people are doing with it, even if it goes through a network like Doubleclick. It will report impressions and clicks and interations like numbers of mouse rollovers etc. Interestingly, it will also track Flex / Air apps. You just add a small line of code to the banner or app. The cost is impression based. [Crunchbase]

Attentio
In May this year Attentio, which develops technology in the social media analytics (sentiment, topics, & brand profiles), won €1.5Million in backing. Their showcase blog trend search Trendpedia.com is very interesting - here’s TechCrunch’s trend graph. Their Attentio Brand Dashboard (SaaS) is sold through advertising and PR agencies which use it for issue detection, influencer identification, marketing ROI and basically to understand their word of mouth brand. Their main differentiation is being able to do this across European languages and sources. The average selling price is Euro 15-25,000 per year. They have deals now with the likes of Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson and Lexus. It’s an interesting market - similar trend tracker Umbria was acquired and TNS bought Cymfony. According to Gartner the “Social media analysis” industry will be worth $3bn by 2013. But of course, at the end of the day this is still anapp that has to be sold by humans, rather than scale virally across the web. [Crunchbase]

Casius.com
Casius is a service aimed at home owners who want to find trusted tradesmen, but they’ve been a long time coming. They raised EUR4m in 2000-2004 but burnt the lot, did an MBO in 2005 and since then are generating EUR6m per year in revenue from their service in Belgium. Tradespeople pay to go on the service and are matched to customers, not unline the UK-based MyBuilder.com. I rather wonder why it’s taken them so long to really get going and question the strategy of “getting big in Belgium first,” but the model seems predicated on local salesforces selling the service into the trade. That doesn’t scale too fast. And I hate their .com home page. Village People anyone? [Crunchbase]

CityLive
CityLive want to launch an MVNO in Belgium called GloweMe which is basically Blyk but with mobile web adverts instead of SMS. Blyk, if you recall, offers a very cheap mobile service aimed at the youth market in return for their opting into targeting advertising offers and campaigns. Citylive think it can pull off a virtually free MVNO by allowing users to market the service to their friends in exhange for credit. Think Multi-Level-Marketing but in mobile. It must be said that ideas for MVNOs are not normally pitched at events like this, but I guess you’ve got to start somewhere. Odd place to start though. CEO Frank Bekkers “is an expert in MLM”. Ah…. [CrunchBase]

Contact Office
Self funded and profitable since 2003 they are a SAAS service for 450k users. It offers a full-blown suite of products like shared calendaring, contacts, shared bookmark, IMAP client, pretty much you name it. It has a sophisticated Ajax front end, drag and drop, Java backed end and was developed for modular integrations. You can manage your data (emails, contacts, meetings, documents, tasks) in this “virtual office” from anywhere. When I asked what the exit was for this business, the answer was “a trade sale”. Ultimately this is basically the opposite of Web 2.0 - lots of apps wrapped up instead of best of breed allowed to flourish as independent apps. But they clearly have a business with customers and revenues, so you can’t knock that.[Crunchbase]

IntroNiche
Their pitch: The Credit Crunch means you need to do great marketing. You need to attract customers and retain them. But it seems one company’s giveaway is another company’s gift. So this is a “B2B Craigslist for offers”. One business has a giveaway that is another business’s potential offer to get new business. So businesses trade these items. It sounds like it could work. Maybe. Just as well they are staying in consulting, while waiting for some kind of critical mass to develop.[Crunchbase]

Mollom
Mollom is a web site and protection moderation service which comprises some of the people who came up with the Drupal content management system, which is impressive. Right now they are concentrating on developing Spam filtering systems for companies, and they have already signed up a number of large players like MTV. It’s a hosted service with an open API. They don’t believe spam classification is binary ( in the same way Akismet does). Although they use Captcha’s only 4%of visitors have to fill out a captacha. So far they have blocked 30m spams on 3,000 sites. There is also a further model here which is bubbling up the best content - because if you can find the worst (spam) you might be able to find the best. It’s a Freemium model and they are self-funded. I think this has long legs. [Crunchbase]

iStockCV
Coming from the premise that most jobs sites suck and don’t appeal to the new online generation, IStockCV will publish your CV in many languages and allow you to upload a video CV as well. It’s a social network for CVs aimed at new generation used to doing things like a Seesmic video. They have also Integrated Tokbox so they can do live meetings. Promising. [Crunchbase]

MyOwnDB
They bill this as “Microsoft Access on the Web” or the missing Microsoft / Google app for databases. Still in demo mode, MyOwnDB is an open source database application you can download and run on your own server or have your data stored on one of their servers. Competitors would include Dabble, CouchDB or EditGrid, but the difference is that it’s open source and you can use it right now. They says CouchDB is too technical for the average user. And MySQL is a great database, but if you want to share data you still have to develop a product doing that. They are aiming at the installed base of Microsoft Access business users. The two guys behind it founded UploadforMe.com. [Crunchbase]

Happenr
With the quintessential Web 2.0 “r” in their domain, these guys are attempting to build the “largest database of events going on in Europe”. Their point is simple: Eventbrite have ticketing but no content. Eventful has content but not ticketing. Happenr combines both and is focused on European events. It will therefore compete with Amiando in Europe. An iPhone app is on the way and they have seeded the engine with lots of events organisers. It ended up getting some traction on TechCrunch. But clearly work is needed on the database if this is to be truly Pan-European. A search for events in Birmingham, considered to be the UK’s second city after London, turned up results listed as being in Edinburgh and some that didn’t mention Birmingham at all. However, I can see a need for an engine like this - especially one that can track the myriad number tech events across Europe. (Disclosure: One of our writers, Robin Wauters, is an investor and acting as head of marketing in his limited spare time). [Crunchbase].

Radionomy
Radionomy allows users to set up an online radio station. It features pre-programmed music shows, libraries, the ability to upload your own music library (apparently they will be paying licenses for all this music, even the stuff users upload). Aiming for 200,000 stations and EUR63m in revenues - quite a tall order as right now they have about 1,000 stations and are aiming for 4,000 by the end of this year. This sounds like an attempt to create reach across a long tail of user generated radio stations and monetise accordingly. Radionomy shares revenues with their DJs based on audience. It sells 4 mins of advertising per hour compared to 18mins for commercial raido. They wan to create the Long Tail of radio. They have about a million euros in funding. However they have “20,000 on the waiting list” which rather puzzled me. If this is Web 2.0, why should there be a “waiting list” at all? [Crunchbase].

Tagger.fm
“Tag your favorite music by sending us an sms while you’re listening to the radio, at a concert or wherever you may be. By collecting these songs they become instantly available to share with you’re friends, and also give you the opportunity to purchase or to see upcoming concerts.” On first inspection this appears to be a clone of Shazam, but this is more like a service aimed at event organisers and radio stations so they can monetize live events, improve reach and ticket sales and get feedback. Sounds like a good business, but may not scale that fast in its present incarnation. [Crunchbase]

Tikitag
Profiled on GigaOm earlier this year, this Alcatel-Lucent internal startup is an RFID tag reading system designed to plug into the growing movement of the “internet of things”. This makes sense - we interact with 3-4,000 objects a day. With around $10 million in corporate funding, tikitag is a set of RFID- and Near Field Communication-enabled tags and a standards-based reader which uses both the ID of the tag and the location of the tag reader. Anyone can use it and they are selling the $50 hardware starter kit on Amazon in the US. It will be 24 euros in Europe. A tag could activate an iTunes song or a poster - you name it. There have been other proprietary attempts like this but a standards-based approach may win out. With the world seeded with Titkitag’s, Alcatel-Lucent will sell subscriptions for business users to link their applications with consumers, thus helping their own equipment business. This is also a “Long tail loyatiy systems for tiny companies”. All they need now is for consumer to “get it”… [Crunchbase]

Tunz
The Tunz boss decided not to show up for the pitch, but at least his employee did his best. This is a mobile wallet/payment system. You can pay anyone with a mobile phone number and receive payments via SMS. Think paypal for mobile. Started in Jan 2007, Tunz will also integratae loyalty points, has viral distribtuion, and the clients money is always redeemable through bank wire. Use your iPhone Safari navigator to visit https://m.tunz.com/ to access a version of Tunz.com optimized for your iPhone to access your account history, manage your alias, and recharge your wallet using your credit card. They only operate in Belgum but in January next year they want to expand. So far they have 3,500 users using it at places like the Carrefour supermarkets.[CrunchBase]

Yuntaa
They bill themselves as “more than just online file backup”. You can also synchornise with your PC, share files or edit and save your documents. So far they have 40,000 users with little marketing and just won a Series A funding round. The focus is security and piracy as against other file storage networks. It’s based on Sun and Oracle platfroms and also offers a business version for small busineses. Their argument against Silicon Valley startup Dropbox is that with Yuntaa you can do that and other things.[Crunchbase]

Lastly, I also bumped into these guys, who didn’t pitch, but looked interesting:

KnowledgePlaza
This is a Web-based secure knowledge sharing platform with some social tools. You can share and manage bookmarks, documents and files, e-mails, contacts, microblogging. Apparently not so much like Huddle or Basecamp (project management) as “knowledge sharing”. Competitors might be Connect Beam, which is social bookmarking in the enterprise. Started in January they have a team of 15 and are backed by EUR500,000. At the moment they have 1,000 users with one big client and can’t say who it is, although there seemed to be hints that it was a global consulting firm. My stumbling block with KnowledgePlaza is that they have to sell the service into clients, which would slow adoption. But each to their own.[Crunchbase]

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When I think of Blackberry users, I think of accountants, lawyers and anyone else who wears a tie and carries a briefcase. You know, really boring people. MySpace users, sorta the opposite.

But there must be some significant overlap, because 400,000 people downloaded the MySpace Blackberry application in the last week, says MySpace - it was launched on November 12.

Both RIM and MySpace say this is a record - no other application has been downloaded so quickly onto Blackberry devices, and MySpace has never had an application on any platform be downloaded as often.

MySpace also says that 15 million messages have been sent and received via the mobile app, and users have updated their mood and status more than 2 million times.

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YieldBuild, an ad optimization platform that helps users manage multiple ad networks and position advertisements on their webpages, has launched its self-service program to the public. When we last covered the company, YieldBuild was still in private beta and only sites with more than 500,000 monthly visitors were eligible to participate. Now, web publishers of any size are welcome to join, and the installation process has been streamlined to require only a few snippets of JavaScript.

YieldBuild helps publishers maximize their ad revenues in a number of ways. To begin, the publisher ties their accounts from Google AdSense and similar services to their YieldBuild account. Next, they designate a number of hotspots on their page where ads can appear, but don’t necessarily have to (for example, I could tag five possible ad spots on a page and let YieldBuild figure out the ideal configuration). YieldBuild will automatically display different configurations to different visitors until it figures out where each ad should be placed for optimal results. The service also takes into account ad appearance, adjusting font size and color as needed. In the past the system would take around 100,000 visitors until it had ‘learned’ the ideal settings, but the new algorithm needs only a fraction of that traffic.

YieldBuild has also recently introduced support for CPM ad networks, and allows users to not only perfect the placement of their ads, but also which ad networks should be used at a given time to maximize revenues. Other players in this space include Pubmatic and Rubicon Project which also offer management for multiple ad networks, but focus less on the actual placement and formatting of the ads.

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