Houzz has brought home $11.6 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital and other investors, including earlier-stage investors Don Katz, Gary Ginsberg, Oren Zeev and Amos Wilnai. Alfred Lin, a VC at Sequoia and former top executive at Zappos, will join Zeev and others on Houzz’s board of directors.

Co-founder Adi Tatarko said Houzz has increased its traffic tenfold since its last funding round of $2 million in 2010, the site has also introduced e-commerce features to drive purchases of home goods.

Houzz first launched in early 2009, a few years after Tatarko and her husband, Alon Cohen, purchased a home and had a hard time finding the right contractors for home renovations, even with friends’ referrals. (Despite the wealth of options now at their fingertips through their own site, Tatarko says they haven’t yet completed the renovation of their own home.)

Tatarko and Cohen eventually quit their full-time jobs and focused on building up the site to what it is today — a fast-growing (and slightly addictive) home renovation Web site that consumers can browse to create idea books and where designers, contractors and renovation experts can upload their portfolios to in order to attract more clients.

There are now 30,000 professional profiles on the site, Tatarko says, spanning 50 metro areas in the U.S.; Houzz sees more than 50 million page views a month and 2.5 million uniques. Users of the Houzz iPad app, which has been downloaded a million times, browse for one hour on average.

The site also now offers more options for sharing through social media, as well as virtual price tags on certain items — a lamp, for example, or a love seat in a living-room setting — that will direct a user to a place where those items can be purchased.

Houzz is currently free for consumers and professionals using the site; Tatarko says they plan to keep it that way, generating revenue through a direct-advertising model. Houzz, she adds, is on track to become profitable in the next year.

Houzz’s growth comes as the U.S. home remodeling market is seeing signs of recovery. This follows a 12 percent drop in spending between 2007 and 2009, due to the financial crisis, according to a report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Home remodeling fared relatively well compared to new construction in 2009, with remodeling climbing to more than two-thirds of total residential investment; the market for renovations in the U.S. was said to have approached $300 billion in 2010. (The Harvard report does note, though, that all homeowners aren’t kitchen-gutting and paint-slapping-happy: Housing prices are depressed, and a record number of home owners are late on mortgage payments.)

Tatarko says she and Cohen will use the funding to invest in more engineers to continue to build out Houzz.

One of the results of Yahoo’s weak earnings report earlier this week has been the renewal of chatter about possible changes in its leadership and even ownership.

And continued investor discomfort with its troubled stock price–Yahoo shares are down 7.25 percent year over year and an astonishing 49 percent on a five-year basis–and the level of renewed grumbling by major institutional shareholders is causing some key players to go back to their PowerPoints to reevaluate various options.

(By way of contrast, Google is down about 4.5 percent year over year–largely due to last week’s earnings release with higher than expected expenses–but still up more than 20 percent for the five years.)

As many might recall, last year Yahoo was under scrutiny by a number of interested parties–from big media companies to other digital players to private equity firms–considering a number of takeover scenarios.

Most of them were just talk and no action resulted, but that did not mean that interest went away.

The truth is, they are still out there and ruminating–this time with what sources describe as a much more amenable Yahoo board, with several of its key members willing to entertain any legitimate offers or ideas to improve the Silicon Valley search giant’s prospects.

In the last go-round, by contrast, Yahoo’s top execs–including CEO Carol Bartz–denied any interest in the swirl of rumors related to a variety of ideas.

That’s definitely changed–at least at the board level–so here are three very credible scenarios of what could happen:

Peetie, Peetie, Yahoo-Sweetie

Late last year, BoomTown wrote a post about the interest that former News Corp. COO and President Peter Chernin–who now owns his own entertainment production company–had in the situation at Yahoo.

As I wrote in November:

But multiple sources from a variety of sides said that Chernin, a well-liked and deeply experienced media and entertainment exec, has been contacted by a number of private equity firms and other investors about his interest in becoming involved should any of the various and sundry scenarios around the Internet giant pan out.

And Chernin, many sources said, has expressed a definite interest in the situation, perhaps because he was deeply involved in a previous deal when running News Corp.

At the time, it involved combining the media giant’s Myspace social networking site with Yahoo and also Microsoft’s portal MSN and creating a new company, code-named “TrafficCo.”

Indeed, that interest remains for Chernin, who has also been an increasingly active investor, including in the digital sector. He is an angel funder of the hot social media app start-up Flipboard, and also just joined the board of the popular Pandora music service.

The most likely possible scenarios have him joining with deep-pocketed partners, including Providence Equity Partners and, yes, Microsoft, as well as investment banks or advisory firms, such as Morgan Stanley and Code Advisors.

The approach being considered–which would only be done in a friendly way, with the cooperation of Yahoo’s board–would center on making a large enough investment in its shares, allowing the group to take control of the management and the board, putting Chernin in as chairman and maybe CEO (or with a new CEO–see next section).

If Microsoft were involved–and Chernin has strong ties there–such a scenario might include folding all its online properties into Yahoo and renegotiating its rocky search partnership, too.

This is an idea that intrigues a lot of people–including current Yahoo board chairman Roy Bostock, co-founder Jerry Yang and other board members–who have indicated recently to several investors and dealmakers a willingness to listen to credible player such as Chernin.

But, in this scenario, it would be up to Chernin and his partners to make a prosposal, said sources, and he might decide that the complexity of getting the power to make big changes at Yahoo is too big to tackle.

In addition, Chernin remains a successful Hollywood player, with several major television and movie projects in the works, as well as big investment possibilities in Asia.

“Does he want the headache of Yahoo at this point in his career?” asked one person, among many Chernin has talked to recently about becoming involved in the company. “Would you?”

Maybe so, if it would provide a big financial windfall. Many think an exec with a reputation like Chernin’s could easily begin to move Yahoo’s moribund stock upward quickly.

ABC (Anybody But Carol)

Here’s one truth: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz does not get proper credit for a number of moves she has made since coming to the company two years ago, including cleaning up the messy corporate structure, de-complexifying garbled systems, cutting costs and bringing its far-flung operations into line.

Yahoo’s stock is certainly doing better than when she arrived in early January of 2009, when it was in the $12 range compared to its current $16 price point.

But here’s another: That stock price now includes more than $10 in solid assets–cash and Yahoo’s much more valuable stakes in China’s Alibaba Group and Yahoo! Japan–leaving very little true share appreciation.

And here are more truths: Bartz’s inability to get revenues growing, innovations flowing, promising start-ups acquired and–most importantly–to stop the continual exodus of talent out the door of Yahoo has made her tenure shakier than ever.

Add to that making its relationships with Asian partners more tense, almost no traction in key mobile, video and social arenas, a record of loud public declarations that have fallen flat and serious troubles in Yahoo’s search and online partnership with Microsoft–a deal Bartz struck and is charged with managing–recently highlighted in Yahoo’s earnings earlier this week.

As shareholder activist Eric Jackson, who has long agitated for change at Yahoo, wrote this week in a post:

“The truth is that investors are fed up with Bartz. Their enmity towards Bartz is palpable when you talk to them. Bartz talked a big game coming into the job and she hasn’t delivered. It’s that simple.”

Well, not that simple and maybe not fair, but it’s also clear that no one thinks Bartz will be re-upped when her contract is up in 18 months.

Thus, it’s no surprise that ideas of other possible leaders of Yahoo are being contemplated now.

Here’s the short list I have made of my choices: Akamai President and Yahoo board member David Kenny; former Microsoft exec and current Juniper Networks CEO Kevin Johnson; former AOL CEO and current News Corp. digital head Jon Miller; and Nikesh Arora, current Chief Business Officer and sales head at Google.

There are plenty more to pick from, of course, and any could be installed in conjunction with an effort such as Chernin’s.

AOL Under the Hoop

No good Yahoo scenario plotting can be contemplated without including AOL and its flashy CEO Tim Armstrong.

Armstrong has made no secret of wanting to get ahold of Yahoo properties to apply the strategy he has been trying at AOL to get it moving again.

Which is: To become the premiere digital media company.

Which is actually Yahoo’s new motto–although arguably, in word and deed, Armstrong has been much more active in pushing the concept and narrative.

That includes his incessant acquisitions of all kinds of online media properties, including the big fish–the $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post and the coronation of its even-flashier co-founder Arianna Huffington as content chief.

Armstrong has certainly not been averse to the idea of a Yahoo-AOL hookup with him at the top, and has been actively talking to anyone interested in such a deal.

And things could get a lot more interesting if AOL linked with a bigger strategic partner, such as News Corp. or Disney or even Google, Armstrong’s former stomping grounds.

Still, wishing does not make it so, especially with a much smaller and weaker set of assets than Yahoo and a still poor record on goosing its advertising sales.

AOL’s stock is down 30 percent year over year, as investors still worry about Armstrong’s ability to turn the company around, which kind of puts him in the same situation as Bartz.

“AOL is waiting under the hoop for whatever happens, which is a good place to be,” said one person close to the situation. “Why not?”

Why not, indeed–so, let the games begin.

As it gets ramped up for a wider launch, Asana, the high-profile workplace collaboration start-up founded by top former Facebook execs, has hired former SolarWinds product strategy exec Kenny Van Zant in a “COO-type of role.”

Van Zant, who will be Asana’s first business-side hire, has also worked at a variety of tech companies, including Cisco.

Co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein remain at the top of the leadership at the productivity software company, which–perhaps in keeping with its yoga-style name–does not have official titles.

But Van Zant will essentially fulfill the COO role, focusing on bringing Asana to the enterprise market in a socially-fueled, “bottom-up” approach.

“We now have a great product and are ready for our next phase of bringing it to the market,” said Moskovitz, in an interview this afternoon with BoomTown. “While Justin and I continue to work on product and engineering, Kenny will be the driver of that launch.”

Specifically, in a blog post today, Moskovitz wrote:

“Kenny will be leading functions outside of product and engineering, and serve as a key driver for Asana’s marketing and corporate strategy.”

Asana, which is aimed at helping people work on projects together in groups, is now in private beta.

It tackles the often unexciting, but very large and problematic, workplace collaboration and communications software market.

In Sanskrit, “asana” means “sitting down” and refers to strong but relaxed postures in yoga, which presumably means the product will help frustrated workers achieve a digital form of nirvana.

The San Francisco-based start-up, which has raised $9 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, now has 15 employees.

Asana had previously garnered just over $1 million in an angel round, which included a spate of Silicon Valley bigwigs.

Still, it has not, thankfully, received the intense hype of other innovative start-ups from former Facebookers–hello, Quora!

That said, many who are using Asana think it will make a huge splash as it is rolled out and attempts to bring consumer-style tools to the workplace.

There are, of course, a range of companies doing this in different ways–from Jive to Yammer to LinkedIn and to a variety of cloud-based enterprise efforts by Google and Microsoft.

In an interview, Van Zant said the time was ripe for big changes in the way enterprise-aimed products were bought and sold.

“I will be focused on selling our enterprise software product from the bottom up, rather than targeting the CIO,” said Van Zant. “It is clear the world of enterprise is being impacted by consumer behavior.”

While he does not start until Monday, Van Zant speculated that Asana’s free product offering will remain, with a premium version to come.

Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, who made the Asana investment for the firm and is on its board, said the time is right for such businesses aimed at enterprise transformation.

“Kenny wrote the book on this at SolarWinds,” he said. “The consumerization of the enterprise isn’t going to happen–it already has.”

Here is a demo video Asana put out in February of an open house, as well as the blog post from Asana on the Van Zant hire:

Asana Open House from Jerry Phillips on Vimeo.

Justin and I are excited to welcome Kenny Van Zant as the newest member of the Asana team. Kenny will be leading functions outside of product and engineering, and serve as a key driver for Asana’s marketing and corporate strategy.

Until now we’ve focused primarily on developing the Asana product into the best of class solution for task management and project execution. Encouraged by positive feedback from the early adopters in our beta program, we’re now preparing for the company’s next phase–bringing this technology to the rest of the market–and we can’t imagine a better partner than Kenny to drive this strategy and build a strong organization to support it. At SolarWinds, Kenny helped pioneer the bottom-up distribution model for selling software and SaaS into enterprises and small businesses–a sales approach we plan to develop further at Asana. This experience, together with an almost uncanny overlap of values, made it clear that Kenny is the right fit.

While finding Kenny concludes a long search for the right leader of Asana’s business operations, we are continuing to grow the team, looking for passionate designers and engineers to join us in our common purpose: using software to help groups of people work together more effectively.

–Dustin

Kenny Van Zant is a technology entrepreneur with leadership experience in start-ups and public companies. Kenny was most recently the SVP and Chief Product Strategist for SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) from 2006-2010, where he was responsible for products, marketing, and corporate strategy. At SolarWinds, Kenny helped pioneer a disruptive business model for selling software and SaaS into the enterprise and SMB segments from the “bottom-up,” using inside sales, online marketing, free products, and a loyal user community. Based on a unique combination of growth and profitability, SolarWinds enjoyed a successful IPO in May of 2009.

Prior to SolarWinds, Kenny was the EVP of Marketing and GM of the Communications BU for Motive (NASD: MOTV) and the co-founder and COO for BroadJump (acquired by Motive), where he managed the company’s growth from start-up in 1999 to over $60M in revenue and 350 global employees within 3 years.

Kenny has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

It’s happened to everyone–the terrible fallout from eating at that unfamiliar restaurant with the spoons that were a little too greasy, or the chicken that was served a little too rare.

My worst was bad dim sum.

Max Stoller obviously knows the feeling.

So, this computer science junior at New York University has developed donteat.at, a Web service that saves New Yorkers the pain caused by an unclean restaurant, one Foursquare check-in at a time.

To understand how the app works, one needs a little background.

In New York City, the health inspector grades restaurants on a golf-style points scale, where less is better.

More than 28 points will land the restaurant on a flagged list that triggers frequent inspections, or even a shut-down, if the score does not go down.

Stoller’s app, donteat.at, parses the weekly-updated public data set for those flagged establishments and keeps an updated list of violators.

From then on, if a donteat.at user ever checks in via Foursquare to a restaurant that has been flagged, they receive a text message alerting them to that fact.

“In under a minute–I worked very hard on that,” said Stoller.

To activate the service, users visit www.donteat.at, authorize the link with a Foursquare account, then continue to use Foursquare normally.

There is no additional user interface.

“It’s just there.” Stoller said, “Most users just come to the Web site once.”

Stoller’s application of the data and the always watching over you user experience turned a relatively simple data mashup to something more like a public service.

Stoller developed donteat.at for the NYC Big Apps competition, a contest sponsored by the NYC Economic Development Corporation and the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication.

NYC Big Apps challenges developers to build new use cases for New York City’s massive public data mine, which includes almost 400 separate structured data sets, ranging from bike rack locations to the city’s full financial data.

“The idea is just to make all that data more accessible,” Stoller said.

Stoller was looking for something productive to do over his winter break while home in Long Island, and heard about the contest.

“I don’t have any real hobbies other than food, so this is what I went with,” he explained.

In some ways, Stoller has poked a hole in a problem that media organizations and advertisers have been picking at for years now–how to deliver highly relevant information to the right people at the most opportune moment.

The key seems to be tapping into the user, not the data.

Stoller’s application, rather than putting a map mashup of geographically-coded data at the heart of the app, focuses on the user’s activity as the trigger.

People get the data when they need it, because they are asking for it, albeit passively.

Stoller said the next upgrade would include coverage of San Francisco, although he expected implementing a comprehensive data set for the city would be a major barrier.

He also discussed other features that could be added to donteat.at, like texting users when a place they’ve been notified about has made it off of the naughty list.

“The data is there,” he said. “But it’s not always clean, well formatted, or even clear.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110225/early-adopter-think-that-restaurant-looks-shady-donteat-at-lets-you-know-for-sure/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110201/salesforce-buys-manymoon/ http://allthingsd.com/20110201/salesforce-buys-manymoon/#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:44:04 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40098

Salesforce.com has bought Manymoon, the social productivity start-up.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but one source put the sale at between $25 million and $35 million.

Manymoon makes one of the more popular tools on Google’s apps platform.

The San Francisco company, funded with only a small seed funding round by Harrison Metal, offers an online collaboration app that businesses and consumers can use to organize group projects, conversations, tasks or documents that are often done via email or other software.

Manymoon is rather typical of the innovative app makers the search giant has been courting to populate its marketplace.

Salesforce.com has been moving aggressively into social networking in the enterprise arena with its Chatter offering and more.

Earlier today, in fact, it was also part of a $4 million funding of Seesmic, the social dashboard app maker.

Here is the Manymoon blog post–which just went up–on the sale, as well as a video interview BoomTown did with its co-founders Amit Kulkarni and Manav Monga, just as Manymoon joined the Google Apps Marketplace store rollout in March:

Manymoon Acquired by Salesforce.com

February 1, 2011

Today we are excited to announce that Manymoon has been acquired by salesforce.com!

Manymoon has experienced tremendous growth since our launch, with more than 50,000 businesses adopting our social productivity app. We’ve launched on three major web platforms: Google Apps, LinkedIn, and the Google Chrome Web Store. We think we’re on to something special, building an easy-to-use application that integrates with the tools you already use to help you get work done. Over 1,000 new businesses choose Manymoon each week to track any type of work activity with anyone from anywhere.

We’re looking forward to even more growth in 2011, and are thrilled to now be part of salesforce.com, the leader in enterprise cloud computing, to continue to deliver an amazing social productivity application for everyone to use.

What Does This Mean for Manymoon Customers?

We’ll still be the Manymoon that helps you get work done. The Manymoon team will remain intact and will operate as a separate business within salesforce.com so we can continue our focus on building a great social app that makes our customers more productive and successful every day.

The Manymoon you know and love will remain the same:

* Manymoon Standard, our free product, will continue to be available for existing and new customers. In fact, we’ll continue to add features to our free product. And, if you want to upgrade, you are welcome to do that through the Manymoon website whenever you like.

* Existing premium features, subscriptions and price points will remain unchanged.

* Manymoon will continue to work with Google Apps, LinkedIn and the Chrome Web Store. And, we will continue to develop new features to enhance support of these platforms.

*We’ll continue to support our customers in the Manymoon Support Universe.

Salesforce.com and Manymoon Together

Our approach to the market remains unchanged: work with the tools that people already use online (Google Apps, LinkedIn, Chrome), build an app that requires no training or setup, focus on serving the daily productivity needs of professionals and be on the cutting edge of the latest technologies like HTML5. As we’ve grown, we’ve learned that serving customers is more than just building an app with nifty features. It includes providing scalability, security, performance and support–all areas in which salesforce.com has a proven track record.

Like most startups, we admire salesforce.com as the original cloud computing company that made this industry possible. Over the last 12 years salesforce.com has been an evangelist and driver for bringing applications, platforms and collaboration to the cloud. We’re excited to be part of their vision for cloud, social and mobile, utilize their knowledge and experience to build a world-class social productivity app, and move even faster in delivering new capabilities to you!

What’s Next?

We are going to invest more in what you’ve told us you like about Manymoon: Google Apps, LinkedIn and Chrome Web Store support. You can expect to see many of the key social productivity features you’ve requested released in the near future. We’re also going to be working on some exciting, new developments in the coming months…so stay tuned!

Thanks,

The Manymoon Team

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110201/salesforce-buys-manymoon/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101130/richard-bransons-ipad-app-2-99-instructions-included-youll-need-them/ http://allthingsd.com/20101130/richard-bransons-ipad-app-2-99-instructions-included-youll-need-them/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:29:26 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=26446 Richard Branson will hold a press conference in New York this morning to show off “Project,” his new iPad magazine app. But since it’s already live in Apple’s iTunes store, there’s really no need to wait. Pay $3, and you can see for yourself.

Should you? Depends: If you’re into iPad magazine apps, you’ll want to, because it’s a pretty good iPad magazine app, with some interesting deployment of art, video and live Web links. On the other hand, it’s pretty similar to most of the other iPad magazine apps you’ve seen so far.

Except more confusing–the navigation on all of these things changes from app to app, but this one seems even more random. Hence this one-page instruction manual (note to the guy who was confused – yes, this is an actual screenshot):

That said, if you do monkey around with this thing, you’ll find some cool stuff. My favorite so far is an ohmygodlookitathat photo of some nutjob kayaking off a waterfall. This image:

Expands into this image:

And then a link gets you to this astonishing Vimeo clip:

tyler bradt world record–Palouse Fall, Washington State tyler bradt world record–Palouse Fall, Washington State from Vagueo on Vimeo.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101130/richard-bransons-ipad-app-2-99-instructions-included-youll-need-them/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101108/this-day-in-robot-history/ http://allthingsd.com/20101108/this-day-in-robot-history/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:31:38 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32156 When robots finally gain enough communal sentience to establish their own cultural holidays, this date might be one of them. Today is the third anniversary of the open-source Robot Operating System, born out of Stanford’s STAIR project, developed and nurtured by personal-robot maker Willow Garage, and now used in projects around the world. For a quick sampling of the work being done with this platform, here’s a video montage.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101108/this-day-in-robot-history/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101012/announcing-google-windsense/ http://allthingsd.com/20101012/announcing-google-windsense/#comments Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:45:10 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=30961 Google has announced plans to invest in the Atlantic Wind Connection, a project that will connect 6,000 megawatts of offshore wind turbines to the Mid-Atlantic power grid. In the blog post announcing the initiative, Rick Needham, Google’s green-business operations director, described it as a “superhighway for clean energy.” According to the Washington Post, the tech giant is part of a consortium of tech and investment firms involved in the project, the first phase of which is valued at $1.8 billion.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101012/announcing-google-windsense/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100511/party-on-tim-aol-hooks-up-with-chuck-close-for-25th-anniversary/ http://allthingsd.com/20100511/party-on-tim-aol-hooks-up-with-chuck-close-for-25th-anniversary/#comments Tue, 11 May 2010 23:33:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=28344 What in the world is AOL CEO Tim Armstrong up to now?

A “Project on Creativity With American Artist Chuck Close,” according to a party invite for the iconic online service’s 25th anniversary that the company just sent out, which you can see below.

I have calls in to the chiseled-cheekbone exec find out what that means.

But extra points for putting AOL and creativity in the same sentence without even a trace of irony!

Indeed, after getting busy hiring the best management team in online history to run the digital equivalent–compared with Internet giants like Google and even Yahoo (YHOO)–of a lemonade stand, it’s nice to know that Armstrong is still thinking big.

And BoomTown loves a big thinker! In fact, that’s why we’ve invited the former Google (GOOG) advertising exec to the eighth D: All Things Digital conference, taking place in just a few weeks near Los Angeles.

We’ll be inquiring about how AOL (AOL) is doing at 25 years old, how Armstrong’s going to lift it back to innovative relevance and get is ad revenue back, its nascent content effort, how it feels to go from a Goliath to a David, and much more.

Until then, check out Tim’s party (click on it to make it larger):

And here is an interview I did with Armstrong right before AOL spun off as an independent public company last year:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100511/party-on-tim-aol-hooks-up-with-chuck-close-for-25th-anniversary/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100420/icyte-web-pages-for-keeps/ http://allthingsd.com/20100420/icyte-web-pages-for-keeps/#comments Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:20:22 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1185 What do you do if you come across an interesting online article or Web page but don’t have time to read it? You could bookmark it for a visit to the page at another time, or email the URL to yourself in hopes of eventually getting around to reading it. But since the Web is ever changing, a link that works one week might be useless the next.

This week, I tested iCyte (icyte.com), a smarter way of compiling data from the Web. Rather than relying on live URLs, this tool saves a Web page’s content, just as it looked when you first saved it, even if that Web page later shuts down or is no longer retrievable. It also saves any highlighted markings you’ve made on a page. ICyte is a free Web browser add-on that, once downloaded, works with Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Versions for Apple (AAPL) Safari and Google (GOOG) Chrome browsers are planned for May.

There are several existing products that offer to organize digital data in one central place. Among them are Evernote and Springpad, which save a greater variety of content (documents, emails, reminder memos and voicemails as well as some Web-page data) in various places. ICyte focuses specifically on saving Web-page content.

Sharing Research

It encourages people to share Web research with others by inviting them to join a project (iCyte’s term for a collection of Web pages saved on its server), comment on the content and share notes with one another.

For the most part, I liked using iCyte. I created a free account and made several projects filled with “Cytes” (saved Web pages), naming projects according to what they contained, like Tech Stuff and To Read, where I saved a bunch of online articles I wanted to read but didn’t have time to finish. I also used it to create a project with a friend called Silly News, where we shared news articles and Web pages with videos on them in a common space and commented on each other’s pages. People who want to participate in sharing and commenting on iCyte must also create accounts for themselves. ICyte is currently limited to browsers—whether on computers or on smartphones—though the company is considering making an iPhone app.

Once the iCyte add-on is downloaded onto a Windows PC or Mac for use in Internet Explorer or Firefox, two tiny icons that look like an eye and a list appear unobtrusively to the side of the browser’s address bar. When the eye icon is selected, it saves the opened Web page into a new or existing project and lets you add details like notes and word tags.

To save a highlighted section of a page, just highlight it with your cursor before hitting the eye icon, and that text will appear highlighted in the saved Cyte. By selecting the icon that looks like a list, users can open or close a left-side panel displaying a list of all saved Cytes. At the top of this list, and from the iCyte.com home page, a search box lets users comb through all public Cytes or just their own for specific terms.

With a click on the iCyte icon, Web pages—with highlighted text—can be saved as they originally appeared.

Viewing Cytes

Though the ability to highlight and save Cytes only works with the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers, users can log into their iCyte accounts and see their saved or shared content using any browser. I did this using Chrome and Safari browsers on Windows PCs and Macs, and I also accessed my iCyte account on an iPad with its Safari browser.

By default, Cytes are saved as private projects, visible only to their creators. But in one step this privacy setting can be changed so the Cyte is shared publicly for the iCyte community to view and comment on. I browsed several public Cytes and found a few that I chose to save to my own account for reading, like an art history Cyte one user saved from a Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Web page.

Blue Bar Feature

Each Cyte has a blue bar across its top that shows who originally saved it and on what date. The blue bar also tells you whether you’re viewing the page with marked highlight on or off. A button lets you view the page in a live view, which may or may not be the same as what was saved depending if highlights were made, if the page has changed, or if more content has been added to it—like new reader comments on a blog post.

I found it easy to share Cytes with friends using a variety of methods, and a single Cyte can be shared from a private project without allowing someone access to the other Cytes saved in the project. I shared Cytes via Facebook and email, though links to Cytes can be shared in other ways like on Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and MySpace—or by using a shortcut to embed the link on a Web site or blog.

The Highlights

I didn’t use the highlighting feature much, but I could see it being a real boon for people doing research and saving Web pages for specific content. Also, by highlighting text before sharing Cytes with others, users can more specifically point out what they like or find useful in a particular article or Web page.

The version of iCyte that I used is free and a company representative said each user’s profile information is kept private and not shared with third parties. ICyte doesn’t currently include built-in advertisements; instead, the company plans to roll out subscription-based Enterprise and Pro versions. The Enterprise version costs $195 a year and the Pro version is still in the works.

If you use the Web as a research resource or simply like saving articles, videos and other online materials, iCyte could be a great tool for organizing and sharing all of that content.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100420/icyte-web-pages-for-keeps/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100309/manymoon-and-50-others-join-new-google-apps-marketplace-heres-a-video-interview-with-the-founders/ http://allthingsd.com/20100309/manymoon-and-50-others-join-new-google-apps-marketplace-heres-a-video-interview-with-the-founders/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:24:15 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25297

Along with 50 initial partners, Manymoon, the social productivity start-up that makes one of the more popular tools on Google’s apps platform, has joined the Google Apps Marketplace store rollout at the search giant’s Campfire One developer event tonight.

Manymoon’s exec spoke at the event, along with Intuit (INTU), Atlassian and Appirio.

(You can watch the event here.)

The San Francisco company, funded with only a seed funding round by Harrison Metal, offers an online collaboration app that businesses or consumers can use to organize group projects, conversations, tasks and documents that are often done via email or software.

Manymoon is rather typical of the innovative apps makers the search giant has been courting to populate its marketplace.

Before the Google (GOOG) announcement, BoomTown made this video of an interview with co-founders Amit Kulkarni and Manav Monga about the interesting space:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100309/manymoon-and-50-others-join-new-google-apps-marketplace-heres-a-video-interview-with-the-founders/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091202/lets-make-a-deal-groupon-nabs-30-million-in-funding/ http://allthingsd.com/20091202/lets-make-a-deal-groupon-nabs-30-million-in-funding/#comments Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:00:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21221

Groupon, a group-based social e-commerce buying service, has nabbed $30 million in its second round of funding, led by Accel Partners.

The innovative Chicago-based service, which launched only a year ago, had previously received $4.8 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates, as well as $1 million from an angel investor. NEA participated in this round too.

Groupon features a daily deal with a huge discount on a wide range of things–from spas to skydiving–in 26 U.S. cities, including Chicago, Boston, New York and San Francisco, for large groups of potential buyers on the Web, through email or via social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Using social tools, Groupon–which is a mashup terms for “group” and “coupon”–tries to use collective buying power to get low prices and to push customers to local businesses.

If it reaches the number of buyers it needs, which can be in the thousands, Groupon sells coupons to the consumers and collects a hefty fee for the sale from the businesses it sends customers to.

At the cost of discounting and paying off Groupon, small businesses get a crack at a lot of new customers–think of it as social networking lead-generation or, perhaps, the “Social Shopping Network.”

Yesterday’s deal in San Francisco, for example, was a “restorative massage” at Teashi, cut from $100 to $45. It sold out by 10:47 pm with 1,000 buyers.

Groupon is profitable and has about 125 employees.

The start-up plans to use the money it has raised for increased customer acquisition, as well as expansion to more cities and improvement of its technology.

As part of its funding, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Accel’s Kevin Efrusy has joined Groupon’s board of directors.

Groupon grew out of a project of The Point, an online community launched in 2007 for organizing group action.

This kind of thing has been tried before, of course, centering on consumers who group together to get discounts on items by purchasing them in bulk.

In Web 1.0, there were many group-buying sites, most of which failed badly. One of the more high-profile ones–Mercata–got $90 million in funding from investors, including Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures.

Here is the official press release:

Groupon Raises $30 Million Round Led by Accel Partners with NEA
to Support Rapid Growth of Social Commerce

CHICAGO–Groupon, the social commerce service that has saved consumers in cities across America more than $36 million since its launch 12 months ago, has raised a $30 million round of capital led by Accel Partners with participation from Groupon’s initial investor, New Enterprise Associates. The financing will be used to accelerate Groupon’s customer acquisition, expand into new geographies and further develop its technology.

Groupon leverages group buying and social media to provide its millions of customers big discounts on the best local businesses in major cities such as Chicago, Boston, New York City, San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. To date, customers have purchased over 800,000 Groupons on deals ranging from spa treatments and golf outings to fine dining and skydiving.

“We’re proud of the positive impact Groupon is having on consumers and business owners,” said Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason. “Groupon is pioneering a new category, and we believe adding Accel’s experience partnering with digital and social media companies together with NEA’s depth in the area will help us reach our full potential.”

“The social graph is laying the foundation for a new generation of industry-defining Internet companies, and Groupon has effectively invented social commerce,” said Kevin Efrusy, Partner at Accel Partners. “Andrew and the Groupon team are executing with incredible focus at a breakneck pace and are delighting both their merchants and customers.”

About Groupon

Groupon, launched in November 2008 in Chicago, features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, eat, see, and buy in 26 major cities across the United States, including Chicago, Boston, New York City, San Francisco, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. Groupon uses collective buying power to offer unbeatable prices and provide a win-win for businesses and consumers. The social commerce service is a project of The Point (http://www.thepoint.com), an online community launched in 2007 for organizing group action. Groupon plans to be in 30 cities by the end of 2009.

For more information, visit http://www.groupon.com.

To get Groupon’s daily free email for the best in your city, subscribe at http://www.groupon.com.

To learn more on how to become a featured business on Groupon, visit http://www.grouponworks.com.

To see some of Groupon’s top-performing deals, visit http://www.groupon.com/chicago/deals

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091202/lets-make-a-deal-groupon-nabs-30-million-in-funding/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090817/more-local-heat-msnbccom-buys-everyblock/ http://allthingsd.com/20090817/more-local-heat-msnbccom-buys-everyblock/#comments Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:00:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=17636

It looks like the local market is heating up even more, with MSNBC.com announcing the acquisition of Chicago-based EveryBlock.

MSNBC.com–a joint venture of Microsoft (MSFT) and GE (GE) unit NBC Universal–paid several million dollars for the “hyper-local” information site, which is up and running in 15 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Boston, sources said.

In June, Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL paid about $10 million to buy Patch Media.

The New York-based start-up is a platform that does deeply localized coverage of communities on a range of topics, from announcements to news to events to obituaries. It is aimed at competing with local newspapers and other media.

EveryBlock takes a slightly different approach, scouring a mass of publicly available data in a variety of U.S. cities from a variety of public records–such as crime stats, building permits and restaurant inspections–and reassembling them into more comprehensible and geographically relevant news feeds, depending on what a user asks for.

It also pulls up related Flickr photos and information from Web sites like Yelp and Daily Candy and can get very granular, down to keeping track of what is happening on your block or neighborhood.

Maps are also deeply integrated into EveryBlock, as it was on an earlier effort–ChicagoCrime.org–of founder Adrian Holovaty.

The innovative little start-up has a tiny staff of a half-dozen, still calls itself a “project” on its Web site and was started with $1.1 million in grant money won from the Knight News Challenge, an annual contest held by the Knight Foundation.

MSNBC.com is the news channel for Microsoft’s MSN portal, whose execs are very interested in weaving more local results into the site, as well as into the software giant’s new search offering, Bing.

The aim of having EveryBlock data integrated, for example, would be to create a local information dashboard on MSN.

Here’s a screen grab of EveryBlock’s take on my zip code in San Francisco, below (click on the image to make it larger)–and a video interview with Holovaty on YoChicago in early 2008:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090817/more-local-heat-msnbccom-buys-everyblock/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090615/making-documentaries-in-the-digital-age-a-chat-with-autumn-gem-co-producers/ http://allthingsd.com/20090615/making-documentaries-in-the-digital-age-a-chat-with-autumn-gem-co-producers/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:49:14 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=14497

At the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, besides interviewing a lot of tech and media muckety-mucks, the All Things Digital staff and friends also got a terrific screening of a new documentary–“Autumn Gem”–by our Webmaster, Adam Tow, and his wife, Rae Chang.

The pair co-produced the project, which explores the extraordinary life of the Chinese revolutionary heroine and women’s rights activist, Qiu Jin (1875 – 1907).

As Tow and Chang wrote on their Web site for “Autumn Gem”:

“During the reign of the last dynasty in China, Qiu Jin boldly challenged traditional gender roles and demanded equal rights and opportunities for women. At a time when women’s lives were often marked by repressive practices such as footbinding, arranged marriages, and denial of education, she envisioned a future where women would free themselves from the confines of tradition and emerge as strong and active citizens of a new and modern nation.”

Even more interesting is what it is like to get an indie film made and distributed in the digital age, which I talked about with Tow and Chang last week.

Here’s the video with my interview with Tow and Chang (and, below it, a preview of “Autumn Gem”) :

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090615/making-documentaries-in-the-digital-age-a-chat-with-autumn-gem-co-producers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090513/tedtalks-go-global-online-in-40-languages-including-urdu/ http://allthingsd.com/20090513/tedtalks-go-global-online-in-40-languages-including-urdu/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 09:55:14 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=13535

Some of the best delivery of video on the Web right now is via the TED Web site–the Internet part of the well-known conferences where big thinkers express bigger thoughts, mostly focusing on technology, entertainment and design.

The organizers have long put those analog talks, called TEDTalks, online, but are now trying to make them even more accessible globally, starting today.

According to TED Media Executive Producer June Cohen, “every TED talk will have subtitles, an interactive, time-coded transcript, and the capacity to be translated by volunteers worldwide. We’ll launch with 300 translations in 40 languages (including lesser-knowns like Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, etc).”

Yipes! We were planning to translate All Things Digital in Pig Latin–for example: Ittertway isway away ecretsay otplay otay estroyday ethay umanhay aceray iavay Ashtonway Utcherkay–but nixed the effort due to cost.

In all seriousness, this “Open Translation” project by TED is of the kind that has become common across the Web as volunteers help sites go global, an important thing given that too many are still English-only.

Facebook, for example, has used this method to get its sites up quickly internationally.

Thus, a Wade Davis TEDTalk on endangered cultures is now in 22 languages, for example, while Barry Schwartz’s speech on the loss of wisdom is in seven, including Hungarian.

According to Cohen, every talk now has English subtitles, that time-coded transcript, translated headlines, the ability to browse for talks by language and language-specific URLs.

Here is an example of a page (click on it to make it larger):

Here’s the interesting explanation of the project, financially backed by Nokia (NOK), from the TED Web site:

A year in the making, the TED Open Translation Project brings TEDTalks beyond the English-speaking world by offering subtitles, time-coded transcripts and the ability for any talk to be translated by volunteers worldwide. The project launched with 300 translations in 40 languages, and 200 volunteer translators.

Generously supported by a visionary sponsorship from Nokia, the TED Open Translation Project is one of the most comprehensive attempts by a major media platform to subtitle and index online video content. It’s also a groundbreaking effort in the public, professional use of volunteer translation.

Subtitles and transcripts

Every talk on TED.com will now have English subtitles, which can be toggled on or off by the user. The number of additional languages varies from talk to talk, based on the number of volunteers who elected to translate it.

Along with subtitles, every talk on TED.com now features a time-coded, interactive transcript, which allows users to select any phrase and have the video play from that point. The transcripts are fully indexable by search engines, exposing previously inaccessible content within the talks themselves. For example, searching on Google for “green roof” will ultimately help you find the moment in architect William McDonough’s talk when he discusses Ford’s River Rouge plant, and also the moment in Majora Carter’s talk when she speaks of her green roof project in the South Bronx. Transcripts will index in all available languages.

The interplay between the video, subtitles and transcript create what we call a Rosetta Stone effect. You can watch, for example, an English talk, with Korean subtitles and an Urdu transcript. Click on an Urdu phrase in the transcript, and the speaker will say it to you in English, with Korean subtitles running right-to-left below. It’s captivating.

The translations

Rather than simply translate a few talks into a handful of major languages, TED and technology partner, dotSUB developed a set of tools that allow participants around the world to translate their favorite talks into their own language. This approach is scalable, and–importantly–allows speakers of less-dominant languages an equal opportunity to spread ideas within their communities.

To seed the site, a handful of talks were professionally translated into 20 languages. But all translations going forward will be provided by volunteers. At launch, volunteer translators had already contributed more than 200 published translations (with 450 more in development). These volunteers range from well-organized groups working together in their own language, to lone translators working individually and matched by TED with others.

At launch, the Open Translation Project included 300 translations, in 40 languages, including Arabic, Basque, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kirghiz, Korean, Macedonian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese. Our translators hail from cities from Beijing to Buenos Aires; Tehran to Tel Aviv; Espoo, Finland, to Barranquilla, Colombia.

To help ensure quality, we generate an approved, professional English transcript for each talk. (This is the transcript upon which all translations are based.) Once the talk is translated, we then require every translation to be reviewed by a second fluent speaker before publishing it on TED. TED controls the final “publish” button. All translators and reviewers are credited by name for their work. After publication, we provide feedback mechanisms for ongoing discussion or improvement around the translation.

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