His newly formed Expa will be akin to startup generators from serial entrepreneurs like Evan Williams’s Obvious and Max Levchin’s HVF, Camp said.

“I’ve been sort of doing this informally but I figured I should formalize it,” said Camp, who recently helped launch BlackJet, an Uber-like company for snagging rides on private jets. “I want to use these observations about everything I’ve learned.”

Camp said he expects to make mobile apps around “media, location, data analytics, smartphones and sensors” and other themes, while admitting that those ideas are indeed vague and trendy.

More specifics will come in a matter of months, when his first app launches, Camp said.

“At Stumble, I tried to be CEO for a long time, but the early product stuff is what I’m really best at,” Camp added. He said he hopes to start these companies and then hand them off to a co-founder, while maintaining the role of executive chairman.

Disqus is already everywhere you’ve been on the Web. It’s the most widely utilized commenting platform on the Internet, spread across two million Web sites both small and large (including, may I add, AllThingsD).

Thing is, Disqus gets little time in the spotlight. It’s the space on the Web page where you respond to content, the little blank box at the bottom of an article where users can weigh in. Disqus may already be ubiquitous, but it’s a secondary thought at best, not a destination.

At least, not yet.

The company recently had a “hack week,” piecing together features that could end up in the final Disqus product. The result: Taking the strengths of Disqus’s existing massive network of active comment discussions across the Web and filtering them, surfacing the most popular material for users to browse.

In essence, Disqus wants to build something greater than the sum of its disparate discussion parts, the “destination” experience that the company is missing.

Think of it as an amalgam of features popular on other social sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon and even Pinterest. In Disqus’ early hacked sketches, CEO Daniel Ha and company built a conceptual main homepage where the most active discussions across the network — or “trending” discussions, in familiar social network parlance — will show up.

There are other early projects focused on local discussions centered around the smartphone user out in the world, as well as a media-centric “color it in” feature that aims to add more life to the usual text-based discussions seen on some commenting platforms.

The thinking behind the experiments makes sense. If the company can create new ways to drum up user engagement through a central portal like a Disqus homepage, that activity can be channeled out to the disparate discussions occurring across the hundreds of thousands of sites Disqus currently lives on. Harness the power of a strong, traffic-feeding homepage and you can deliver millions of page views out to sites across the Web.

In turn, Web publishers will be more apt to implement Disqus on their sites at the possibility of that traffic influx.

That’s similar to the power of a site like Reddit, which can send massive swarms of traffic to third-party sites after a link ends up on Reddit’s powerful front door.

But Reddit wasn’t built in a day. The site has an almost cult-like following of devotees, complete with their own jargon, in-jokes and even a loosely defined code of what should and should not show up on the homepage. Disqus’ aim is to go beyond the cliquishness that seems to define Reddit, appealing to the massive consumer base that logs on to Disqus across any given site on the Web.

In terms of community-building, Disqus has its work cut out for it. You may have noticed on a number of Disqus-based comment sections that many conversations devolve into vitriolic spitting matches, often the lifeblood of Web trolls and anonymous sharpshooters whose only aim is to derail a thread. It ruins any hope of fostering dialogue, which Disqus needs in order to make any notion of being a destination site a success.

These are early days and fledgling ideas, and the company hasn’t ironed out all the kinks quite yet. As of Friday, the company is only previewing a taste of the direction it intends to take.

But I’m told we should see more on this front in the coming months, as the company builds better, more finished versions of the products it wants to introduce. Expect to see new features slowly roll out in the new year, including the company’s experimental “Labs” arm.

If you don’t like Disqus’ new experiments, I’m sure there’s room for discussion — just try not to be a troll about it.

If it sounds like the black-car service Uber for planes, that’s exactly what it is. The company comes from Uber co-founder Garrett Camp, who is leading product development and is the lead investor in a funding round worth single-digit millions.

Along with Camp, Uber investor Shervin Pishevar is in the deal, plus celebrity types like Ashton Kutcher, Roc Nation, Madonna’s manager Guy Oseary and Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment, and 15 more of Camp’s Silicon Valley friends (the list is so long, I’ll put it at the bottom).

BlackJet isn’t the first start-up to try to democratize private air travel — another one currently in the market with venture funding is called Surf Air — and, in fact, the Camp-backed company evolved out of a previous start-up known as Greenjets. It actually still has the same CEO, a longtime aviation guy named Dean Rotchin.

BlackJet wants to appeal to people who are sick of commercial air travel’s delays and hassles, and are willing to pay to escape the security lines and crying babies. The company won’t own its own planes but will help match pilots and passengers, a la Uber.

Promo image from Greenjets, the company that was restructured with Camp’s funding to become BlackJet

The service launches today for reservations for Nov. 15 and after, with flights between New York and Los Angeles and New York and South Florida. It will fly through smaller airports. Bookings are made online — a mobile app is coming.

Camp said in a conversation on Thursday night that San Francisco will likely be the next destination, which makes sense, given that it’s where Uber first launched, and his investors alone could fill up more than a couple private jets.

Users will pay a membership fee of a couple thousand dollars to start, and then $950 for each short flight and $3,500 for each cross-country flight. The service will be invite-only to start.

Until May of this year, Camp was CEO of StumbleUpon, the company he started and sold to eBay and bought back. He started Uber on the side in 2009 but never ran it, handing off those operational duties to co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick.

Camp estimated that in the U.S. there are something like 4,000 business jets seating six to 12 people, and 4,000 commercial planes holding 100 or more — but the private jets are used one-tenth as often, and charge $20,000 to fly coast-to-coast.

But let’s be honest, Mr. Uber Dude. After you “democratized” and “disrupted” black cars to make people feel fancy getting across town, now you’re moving to the even more elite and expensive private jets? I hear you telling me about this “excess capacity” problem, but is this just about a status symbol for your friends?

Garrett Camp

Camp told me he doesn’t look at it that way. “I don’t think of it as luxury at all, I think of it as saving time,” he said. “Yes, it will start at a premium level, like Uber. But we’re spending so much time in transit, and these planes are already flying around empty.”

Here’s the investor list, which Camp said he expects will be even longer before the end of the day, as people return their paperwork: Garrett Camp, First Round Capital, Shervin Pishevar, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, Michael Birch, Naval Ravikant, Rick Marini, Noah Goodhart, Thomas Ryan, Josh Spear, Jay Levy, Peter Pham and Mike Jones from Science-Inc., Dan Rosensweig, Stephen Russell, Tim Ferriss, Matt Mullenweg, Ryan Sarver, Steve Jang, Shakil Khan and David Ulevitch, Precedent Investments, Josh James, Overbrook Entertainment and Roc Nation.

Let me quickly set this story up: In general, there are a few ways to get recommendations on any topic: Ask friends, look to the wisdom of crowds and user reviews, or punch in some past favorites and preferences to build a taste profile.

But perhaps the ultimate way to get recommendations would be to evaluate every single thing a person has ever done, and how much they liked it.

If you’ll accept that premise, now apply it to Web history. Flipora is a new service (actually, a pivot of an older service called Infoaxe) that recommends Web content based on tracking every site a single user visits, how long he or she stays, and whether he or she shares it.

Flipora users install an add-on to their browser — Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer — that tracks their own behavior. The company saves each URL the user visits to the cloud to make a synced and searchable Web history.

The service is private by default; it doesn’t include any sites that are behind a password; and in Firefox, users can specify a blacklist of sites that aren’t sent to the cloud. But you can imagine that this is the kind of thing that people would totally freak out about if someone like Google did it, even though Google already personalizes its search results based on users’ Web histories.

Flipora’s Web history service has actually been available — though it has evolved — for the past four years. Some eight million people have already registered for Infoaxe/Flipora because they like the personal utility. On their behalf, the service indexes 20 million unique Web pages per day.

Now, with the new launch, users can turn on a Flipora sidebar that suggests content they may like, kind of like StumbleUpon. As users click to visit Web pages, the recommendations change. If there’s a particular item that entices them, they can opt to follow broader topics and people. And if they “Like” a certain page, it gets added to their profile, a la Pinterest.

Flipora hits on some buzzword-bingo squares for people who like to theorize about the future of the Internet: Discovery versus search, and interest graph versus social graph.

Actually, Flipora previously launched a real-time search engine based on its users’ Web histories, but the founders told me they ultimately decided they didn’t want to just incrementally improve on Google search. So they turned to the greener fields of discovery.

Flipora is based in Sunnyvale, and raised $3 million in funding from investors including individuals and Labrador Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

While his Web 2.0-era peers sold their companies and founded new ones, Garrett Camp stuck with StumbleUpon for 10 years since creating it as a grad student. That included selling the company to eBay for $75 million, buying it back, and notching 25 million registered users as of last month.

Ten years seems about long enough, Camp said today. “It was my first job and my first love,” he explained.

Camp hasn’t been exclusively focused on StumbleUpon. He co-founded the on-demand ride service Uber and is chairman there as well.

Camp said he’s been thinking about stepping back for years, and more seriously in the past six months. I asked if he wouldn’t have rather quit when Uber was getting started a few years back.

Camp said no. He does have a few new start-up ideas he’s thinking about, but they would be “virtual” products, unlike the real-world challenge of Uber. Camp said Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is better suited to that operational role, where Camp wants to work on products.

StumbleUpon co-founder Geoff Smith is to stay in his position as CTO.

The company is rolling out a newly redesigned Web site that features a new logo, new colors and an integrated “Explore Box,” or search engine, that had previously only been available in beta.

StumbleUpon has also signed up 250 partners for channels on the site, which will act as verticals users can “follow” in order to get the interesting content they want. The partners include such Web sites as Yelp, Gilt Groupe, Vanity Fair and Funny or Die, as well high-profile names like actor Jim Carrey, athletes Mariano Rivera and Paul Pierce, and late-night TV host Chelsea Handler.

While StumbleUpon is getting a face-lift and adding some boldfaced names, it isn’t changing any of its back-end technology: Users will still “stumble” from site to site, which will be served up to them based on StumbleUpon’s algorithm that factors in interests, likes and your friends’ interests.

StumbleUpon founder and CEO Garrett Camp said the redesign was spurred by feedback the company was getting from users in focus groups. Basically, while the users liked the site’s signature stumbling action (which I previously called a procrastinator’s friend and insomniac’s dream), they wanted easier ways to follow their favorite brands and content.

“Some of the words we used when describing StumbleUpon were surprising, adventurous, exciting, and when we put our logo in brand in front of test users, they weren’t saying that,” Camp said. “We wanted to make it that for them, while also simplifying the site.”

StumbleUpon launched in 2001 as a way for people to find interesting content on the Web. In 2007, the company was acquired by eBay for $75 million. Then, in 2009, Camp, his co-founder Geoff Smith and other investors bought the company back and took it private again. The site went through a minor refresh then, but these new updates mark the first major visual changes to StumbleUpon since it was created. The company currently claims 20 million users and more than 1.2 billion stumbles per month.

While recent data showed that StumbleUpon is now the biggest referrer of traffic to other U.S. Web sites — beating out even Facebook for that title — the changes come as giants like Google and Facebook are dominating the Web ad space, with other Web services clawing for more market share, as my colleague Peter Kafka reported earlier. StumbleUpon’s entire revenue model is advertising — around 3 to 5 percent of all stumbles will land on an ad — and the company is uncertain whether these new celeb channels will end up being new ad space.

It’s the Wild Wild Web out there, kids.

What’s a little odd about the situation is that we wrote only two months ago about StumbleUpon’s new VP of engineering hire, which at the time was Balogh (pictured at right).

Balogh, it turns out, never got to StumbleUpon. He did the interview about the new gig with AllThingsD after agreeing to join, but then decided to take another offer to be VP of storage infrastructure products at Google, where he is now. (Balogh declined to comment on the situation.)

Meanwhile, Tulsi will report to StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp, who previously led engineering himself. Tulsi will focus on scaling, advertising and mobile projects.

Tulsi (pictured left) was persuaded to join StumbleUpon after six years at Google spent on products like Google Analytics and YouTube. He said in an interview this week he was particularly interested in working with StumbleUpon’s “strong co-founders,” who sold their company to eBay but then bought it back and continue to be engaged.

Plus, it’s working; StumbleUpon now has 15 million users and gives one billion content recommendations per month. According to StatCounter, StumbleUpon has been referring more traffic to other Web sites than Facebook since mid-June.

And StumbleUpon feels like home, in a way. Tulsi is the 20th former Googler at StumbleUpon, and there are only 80 people at the San Francisco-based company.

Tulsi, by the way, actually did start on Tuesday, so it seems unlikely there will be any funny business this time around.

Balogh said in an interview that his projects will include “a continuing and unrelenting focus on the recommendation technology,” plus improving features that indoctrinate new users and engage returning users, as well as extending StumbleUpon’s development of the open-source Hadoop database HBase.

Balogh had left Yahoo last April, citing “personal priorities” and a specific family situation.

He said that those issues were resolved last summer, and around the beginning of this year he started looking at various technical and operating roles at both larger companies and start-ups.

Balogh will join StumbleUpon June 1, reporting to StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp.

StumbleUpon previously did not have a similar role, with its engineering team reporting to Camp directly. With 70 employees, that was getting understandably unwieldy.

But Balogh said he appreciates that StumbleUpon is small compared to where he came from. “It’s not like Yahoo where there’s a huge chain of platforms,” he said. “It’s a rapid delivery model.”

StumbleUpon has 15 million monthly users and one billion recommendations per month. It recently raised $17 million to support continuing growth after being spun out of eBay in 2009. eBay had bought the company back in 2007 for $75 million in cash.

In some ways, discovery is the opposite of search. About 50 percent of searches on YouTube are “broad,” according to YouTube Director of Product Management Hunter Walk, by which he said he means users are seeking an experience rather than a particular video. So YouTube’s intent with recommendations is less about one right answer and more about a cluster of answers, or eventually, a narrative.

One way to measure the success of recommendations is to ask users to rate them directly, which is a major component of Pandora’s and StumbleUpon’s systems. Pandora, for example, has eight billion thumbs-up and thumbs-down actions in its index. StumbleUpon has an 80 to 85 percent thumbs-up percentage, said StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp. Users look at a page they have stumbled upon for an average of about eight seconds, and a median of 20 seconds, he said.

The social graph is only a small part of good recommendation engines, Conrad, Walk and Camp agreed on a SXSW panel about content discovery. Rather, a recommendation engine is a mix of art and science hinged on refining small changes over time and understanding how users respond to them.

I moderated the panel, so I’m sure I missed writing down all sorts of interesting tidbits, but I wanted to share some of the insights and stories.

In addition to the plaid-shirted trio of Conrad, Walk and Camp–speaking on music, video and Web page recommendations, respectively–we added Google Hotpot product manager Lior Ron to the panel after bumping into him in the hallway. (Hotpot is Google’s newly launched personalized local recommendations site.)

Walk warned to be careful with analytics, saying that positive stats about recommendation performance don’t necessarily correlate with a good user experience. As YouTube has improved its recommendation algorithm, it has negatively impacted the number of video playbacks it gets.

That’s because better recommendations reduce the number of times people start watching and then skip a video, Walk said. Yet the company has almost tripled session length in the last few years as it has reduced these skips, and recommendations have helped improve the overall experience.

One of the most significant improvements YouTube has made to its recommendation technology, Walk said, was in messaging and presentation. When the company started explicitly stating why it was recommending a video–for example, you should watch this Britney Spears clip because you just finished Justin Bieber’s latest post–satisfaction improved.

As Walk explained, “If it was wrong they didn’t blame us; They blamed themselves.”

Ron said there’s plenty of room for companies to play with recommendations, and that he’d welcome more Netflix Prize-like approaches that might introduce significant improvements. “We’re not living in a world with millions of recommendations and we need to turn it down,” he explained.

But often discovery is about that one right thing at the one right time. Conrad said Pandora’s goal for recommendations is to take the smallest possible signal and provide the best possible personalized results. The Internet radio company A/B tests everything it rolls out to thoroughly measure the impact on user experience.

Pandora has experimented with social–for instance implementing Facebook’s instant personalization feature–but it’s just one signal of many. Conrad said the company quickly realized that it shouldn’t have assumed friends had the same taste in music.

(I can vouch for this awkwardness, having loaded up Pandora while logged into Facebook and gotten a recommendation for a curated Celine Dion channel.)

Camp said that for his purposes, the social graph is too much of a closed loop, taking away from the serendipitous recommendations that StumbleUpon works hard to deliver. The company reserves five percent of its stream for entirely new stuff, he said.

StumbleUpon also doesn’t try to hard to figure out what’s on a Web page in its index, because its point of the service is to deliver a variety, rather than a homogenous stream, of content.

YouTube would like to add features that show “what your friends haven’t watched,” said Walk, so users can have the satisfaction of discovering something rather new, rather than the disappointment of learning after sharing a viral video that they’re the last to know about it.

Ron disagreed to some extent, at least for his domain area of restaurants and other local establishments. Knowing where your friends have gone is one of the more important signals, he said, especially knowing where your friends have gone recently.

One more funny anecdote: Pandora users tend to create channels for Christmas music at that time of year. But the company ran into a problem because there was an indie band named “Christmas.” It was worried that users looking for cheery carols would get an unexpected and dissatisfying stream of random indie music.

But before Pandora could introduce a fix, users took care of the problem by thumbing down those selections, effectively filtering out the Pandora spam (accidental or otherwise) of the band named Christmas.

Images grabbed from the panelists’ profiles on their company sites.

The company held a press event at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters to show off the product and other recent launches, which include the professional social stream LinkedIn Signal and the network map visualizer InMaps. Deep Nishar, head of products at Linkedin, said they are part of an overall effort to understand “how does this network bring insights.”

LinkedIn Today is available today online and as a “News” tab update on the company’s iPhone app. It is based in large part on LinkedIn users’ shared links on Twitter, and the product was developed through an extension to the professional networking site’s existing partnership with Twitter.

The service includes 22 industries at launch, including Internet, pharmaceuticals and banking. Users see top recent stories in their network and their industries, as well a smattering of more random content from a partnership with StumbleUpon.

That industry focus makes LinkedIn Today one of the broader social news offerings out there. For instance, LinkedIn product manager Liz Walker said the company has five million members who identify themselves as working in the Internet industry.

The product, she said, combines “three social lenses on the news that we don’t think have ever been brought together in one place”: users’ networks, their industries, and all professionals.

LinkedIn Today was built with technology and employees brought in through the company’s acquisition of mSpoke last summer, Nishar said.

LinkedIn is also syndicating Today’s industry tabs as Twitter feeds. So if you want to keep up with the most-shared stories by people in banking, for instance, you could follow this account.

But the trek won’t be necessary anymore, it seems. Local outlets are reporting that Apple is preparing to open a pop-up shop for the next two weeks at 6th and Congress in downtown Austin. That’s a mere stroll from the SXSW epicenter.

Plans for the store apparently came together in just the last couple days, with an Apple rep scouting the location on Monday and workers sprucing it up and carting in signage on Wednesday. The grand opening is set for Friday.

A swarm of early-adopting iPad 2 buyers is a sure bet; really, the only question is who will be mayor of the pop-up store on Foursquare.

(Here’s Walt Mossberg’s iPad 2 review.)

Meanwhile, AT&T is again boosting Austin coverage for the conference, after failing miserably to withstand the iPhone swarm two years ago and recovering admirably with temporary cell sites in 2010. No word on whether new iPhone and iPad carrier Verizon is doing the same.

As for our plans at AllThingsD, Kara Swisher, Katie Boehret and I will be in Austin this weekend. Kara’s putting Flipboard on the hot seat on Saturday, and I’m doing a panel on personalized recommendations with StumbleUpon, YouTube and Pandora on Sunday.

If y’all happen to take a second to look up from your iPhone apps between checking in, filtering snapshots and mapping parties, perhaps we’ll see you in person.

Streetview capture of the Apple Store pop-up location via Austinist.

The round is from Accel Partners, August Capital, DAG Ventures, First Round Capital and Sherpalo Ventures.

StumbleUpon is on its second run as a start-up. The company raised $1.5 million in angel funding in 2005 and was bought by eBay in 2007 for $75 million in cash. In April 2009 it spun out of eBay with its founders and most of that list of investors providing Series A funding. This new round is being counted as a Series B.

StumbleUpon–which helps users serendipitously find new sites, photos and videos based on recommendations by friends and other users–has become a major traffic provider for blogs. Recent stats put out by the publisher tool provider Lijit had StumbleUpon delivering almost as much traffic as Facebook to sites within its network, and far more than Digg, Twitter and Reddit.

StumbleUpon is now up to 14 million registered users and makes 800 million content recommendations per month.

This one comes from Christopher Mascari, a Gawker Media marketing guy, and it illustrates the blog network’s traffic from social media sites. Less than a year ago, Digg was the single most important social site for Gawker, Gizmodo, Jalopnik et al. Now it has been eclipsed by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and, a little surprisingly, StumbleUpon. And note that Reddit, Condé Nast’s “Digg clone,” is catching up as well:

The other big takeaway from the data is the story that many publishers have been telling in the past year or so: Social traffic is becoming as important, or more so, than search traffic from the likes of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO). Last fall Gawker was getting 10 million visits a month from social sites; now that number is up to 20 million. And Facebook, at 7.7 million visits, now represents more than a third of that number:

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/20090715/happy-chat-paltalk-buys-back-its-shares-from-softbank-at-a-premium/ http://allthingsd.com/20090715/happy-chat-paltalk-buys-back-its-shares-from-softbank-at-a-premium/#comments Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:35:59 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9251 Here’s a funding story you don’t see often, recession or no: A start-up buying back its shares from its venture capitalist, at a premium.

But that’s the transaction video-chat firm Paltalk and Softbank have completed. Paltalk, which sold off 20 percent of its equity to Softbank for $6 million in 2004, has bought the shares back. No one has spelled out a purchase price, but I’m told the deal will be considered a “single” for Softbank–it gets its capital back, plus a return, which in this economy ought to be a home run.

This is different from the “baby buybacks” we’re seeing as the economy sputters, in which founders reclaim all or part of their companies at distressed prices after their investors give up–think eBay (EBAY) and StumbleUpon (and perhaps Skype) or more recently, ManiaTV.

Paltalk can afford to buy its shares back because it’s an Internet video company that actually makes money, which it does via a “freemium” model. Most users can hop on the service for free, but about five percent pay for some extra features, like virtual conference rooms. People familiar with the company tell me it should be on track to throw off $4 million in cash this year from revenue of $20 million. It also has extra cash on hand these days as a result of a settlement it extracted from Microsoft (MSFT) in a patent lawsuit in March.

There are lots of Web companies–let alone Web video or Web chat companies–that would like those financials. But Paltalk is a steady grower, not a rocket ship. And while the company has supposedly gone down the road with potential acquirers in the past, it’s unlikely to get acquired at a huge premium.

So, it makes sense for Softbank to take money off the table; I’m told Paltalk was its last open investment from an Internet fund it raised way back in 1999. Paltalk CEO Jason Katz says he now owns 80 percent of his company.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090715/happy-chat-paltalk-buys-back-its-shares-from-softbank-at-a-premium/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090501/controversial-web-framing-makes-a-comeback/ http://allthingsd.com/20090501/controversial-web-framing-makes-a-comeback/#comments Fri, 01 May 2009 23:04:03 +0000 Marisa Taylor http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=11385 When Digg introduced a new toolbar in early April that added a thin strip – known as a ‘frame’ – to the top of pages submitted to Digg, a publisher outcry forced the social media aggregator to back down. It modified the new DiggBar so that only logged-in users would view submitted stories within a Digg frame and Web address, and also offered them the option to turn off the toolbar altogether.

But despite Digg’s move, the controversial practice of framing seems to be making a comeback on the Web. Danny Sullivan, editor of the Web site Searchengineland.com wrote in an article about Digg’s toolbar changes, that Facebook, Ask.com and StumbleUpon have all begun framing links recently.

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen argues that “frames break the fundamental user model of the web page.” “All of a sudden, you cannot bookmark the current page and return to it (the bookmark points to another version of the frameset), URLs stop working, and printouts become difficult. Even worse, the predictability of user actions goes out the door: who knows what information will appear where when you click on a link?”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090501/controversial-web-framing-makes-a-comeback/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090420/stumbleupons-garrett-camp-speaks-about-being-a-born-again-start-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20090420/stumbleupons-garrett-camp-speaks-about-being-a-born-again-start-up/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:00:47 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=12479

Last week, StumbleUpon announced it was buying itself out of its much-vaunted previous corporate buyout, by being born again as an “investor-baked start-up.”

The Canadian-born social-bookmarking company, which was launched earlier, had come to the Bay area in 2006 and got some fancy angel investors, who ponied up a couple of million dollars. It soon became a traffic-generating hit.

Then, StumbleUpon was bought by eBay (EBAY) two years ago for $75 million in one of Web 2.0′s high points.

End of a fairy tale? Um, nope.

Soon enough, due to both buyers’ and sellers’ remorse, rumors of the San Francisco-based company being sold by its new owners swirled around it, although there was no sale.

Instead, last week, StumbleUpon announced that a roster of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners and August Capital, would return it to its roots.

Its founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith were included, with Camp as CEO.

In a video interview he did with BoomTown, here’s Camp talking all about the latest shift for his start-up, including discussing some more changes on the site, such as an even more personalized Webification of the content discovery service.

Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090420/stumbleupons-garrett-camp-speaks-about-being-a-born-again-start-up/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090415/will-ebay-dump-stubhub-too/ http://allthingsd.com/20090415/will-ebay-dump-stubhub-too/#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:33:46 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6293 Now that eBay has sloughed off StumbleUpon and made plans to dump Skype, theoretically via an IPO, will it drop StubHub, too?

That’s the possibility floated, albeit in an offhand way, via Bernstein Research’s Jeffrey Lindsay in a note published this morning: “We would likely expect further divestments of non-core businesses, possibly including StubHub.”

I understand why the auction site dropped StumbleUpon, a Web 2.0 publishing business with a novel and unproven revenue model. And it makes sense to stop carrying Skype, a telecom business that requires a lot of time, money and maintenance.

But Stubhub, which eBay bought for $307 million a little more than two years ago, seemed like a bona fide fit: The ticket resale business mirrors eBay’s (EBAY) core auction in pretty obvious ways. I’ve asked Lindsay to tease out his thinking for us, and will update if he does.

UPDATE: Here’s Lindsay, via email: “It seems that eBay is going right back to basics, and is dispensing with the ‘we are an auction company’ ethos that got them into so much trouble. We see StubHub as coming out of that era. We think the market in tickets is changing rapidly and there is a chance to sell StubHub at the very top. They might well take it and pursue a much more pure play retail/second hand portfolio and go back to geographic expansion of the marketplaces/PayPal core.”

Meanwhile, if eBay does decide to jettison StubHub, now would be a very interesting time to do so. TicketsNow, its primary competitor, is likely to go on the block in the near future: Parent company Ticketmaster (TKTM), which acquired the business for $265 million a year ago, has said it would dump the business in order to mollify antitrust critics (and Bruce Springsteen fans) who want to stop the company’s proposed merger with Live Nation (LYV).

Anyone want to corner the market on the ticket-scalping industry?

[Image credit: Hyrck]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090415/will-ebay-dump-stubhub-too/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090413/stumbleupon-stumbles-out-of-ebays-arms-to-be-reborn-as-a-start-up/ http://allthingsd.com/20090413/stumbleupon-stumbles-out-of-ebays-arms-to-be-reborn-as-a-start-up/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:20:55 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=12222

The content-discovery service, StumbleUpon, has gotten itself back to start-up status, after being bought by eBay two years ago.

It announced today that it was returning to being an “investor-backed startup” by a roster of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners and August Capital.

Its founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith are also back, with Camp now in place as CEO.

“We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths,” said Camp, stating the very obvious.

That’s quite a boomerang since it was acquired by the auction giant in 2007 for $75 million.

Before that event, which was at the height of the Web 2.0 fervor, the Canadian-born social-bookmarking start-up, which launched several years ago, came to the Bay area in 2006 and got some fancy venture investors (Mitch Kapor, Ron Conway, Shriram and others) who ponied up a couple of million dollars. It soon became a traffic-generating hit.

But rumors of the San Francisco-based company being sold by eBay (EBAY) have swirled around it almost since it was bought, although there was no sale.

The same has been true for eBay’s other purchase, of voice-over-IP service Skype. A recent report in the New York Times said its founders were also considering buying Skype back from eBay.

Under eBay, the site has floundered a little bit, but made some changes, such as unveiling a new Web-centric look and feel and a new partnering program last fall that represented a major shift for the online discovery service.

In that change, users no longer had to register for the service or download its toolbar to “stumble” the Web.

Terms of the deal were not released, but we’re digging! Um, stumbling!

More to come, but here’s the full press release from the company, as well as a video I did at the party StumbleUpon threw after getting acquired by eBay, including an interview with then-thrilled Camp:

StumbleUpon Goes Independent; Backed by Founders and New Investors

April 13, 2009 – StumbleUpon, the best way to discover new content on the Internet, today announced that after nearly 2 years as a subsidiary of eBay Inc., it has returned to the ranks of an investor-backed startup. StumbleUpon is now backed by the original company founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, as well as a number of well-known investors including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners, and August Capital. Camp takes on the role of CEO of StumbleUpon.

“We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths,” said Camp. “This change makes it possible for StumbleUpon to continue to innovate and focus on becoming the Web’s largest recommendation service.”

“StumbleUpon helps users discover the best of the web–it’s a way to find interesting content you wouldn’t think to search for,” said Shriram. “StumbleUpon’s personalized recommendation engine brings serendipity back to websurfing, and lets users sift through socially-endorsed content with a single click.”

StumbleUpon will remain focused on helping people discover interesting content by increasing the accessibility of the StumbleUpon service and the quality of recommendations. In addition, StumbleUpon has plans for several new products and features to be released in the upcoming months.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090413/stumbleupon-stumbles-out-of-ebays-arms-to-be-reborn-as-a-start-up/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090129/bacon-blogrolling/ http://allthingsd.com/20090129/bacon-blogrolling/#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:42:08 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=9166

Who can resist an all-pork post yesterday in the New York Times about a recipe that has taken the Internet by, well, greasy storm?

The piece, by Damon Darlin, chronicles what started out as an Internet marketing scheme for a site called BBQAddicts.com, but that has turned into one of the more popular dishes online of late.

The dish? “Bacon Explosion.”

Writes Darlin: “The instructions for constructing this massive torpedo-shaped amalgamation of two pounds of bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in barbecue sauce first appeared last month on the Web site of a team of Kansas City competition barbecuers. They say a diverse collection of well over 16,000 Web sites have linked to the recipe, celebrating, or sometimes scolding, its excessiveness.”

In true Web 2.0 fashion, Bacon Explosion’s creators used Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us (of course!) and social-networking sites to get the word out.

And the rest, as they say, is pig-story.

[Photos of Bacon Explosion, courtesy of BBQAddicts.com]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090129/bacon-blogrolling/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080930/will-stumbleupons-new-web-look-and-feel-give-it-web-wings/ http://allthingsd.com/20080930/will-stumbleupons-new-web-look-and-feel-give-it-web-wings/#comments Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:01:16 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=4617

While rumors of its impending re-sale have apparently been greatly exaggerated, what’s true about StumbleUpon is that its new Web-centric look and feel and a new partnering program represent a major shift for the online discovery service.

The San Francisco-based company, which was founded in 2001 and sold to eBay last year for $75 million, is announcing tonight that users will no longer have to register or download its toolbar to “stumble” the Web.

Users can now simply start on StumbleUpon’s site, for example, and stumble all over the Web using their Web browser as guide rather than a toolbar.

The move is being made simply because most Internet users are increasingly loath to install Web plug-ins like toolbars, a requirement that naturally has slowed the growth of StumbleUpon’s service over time.

Currently, StumbleUpon has about six million registered users, although only a fraction of those are responsible for the approximately 12 million daily “stumbles,” all using a toolbar.

“We wanted to attract users who do not want to use a toolbar, making it easy so they could use the service right from the get-go,” said Garrett Camp, co-founder of StumbleUpon, in an interview with BoomTown earlier today.

Camp noted that that the toolbar–which has been downloaded between 11 and 12 million times–has seen that growth slow over time. Nonetheless, it is not being eliminated either.

“[Toolbar adoption] was still growing, but not accelerating,” said Camp. “Being able to stumble without one was the biggest feedback we got from users.”

Along with the Web-stumble change, StumbleUpon is also unveiling a redesigned homepage–see an example of it below; click on the image to make it larger–which is an attempt to make it more of a destination.

With the new look, visitors can find content by topic and more related to interests. Other changes include a new look for profile pages, as well as user reviews, rating and comments.

Along with its distribution shift and site renovation, StumbleUpon is unveiling a partner program called StumbleThru that will allow visitors to discover content within those sites without going to StumbleUpon.

Sites–starting with HowStuffWorks.com and the HuffingtonPost.com and followed within weeks by RollingStone.com and National Geographic–will display a StumbleUpon “badge” or custom widget.

It is not unlike similar buttons that now dot Web pages from news discovery services like Digg, which users can click to find related pages.

Essentially, much as Google (GOOG) delivers custom search within Web sites, StumbleUpon is offering custom surfing, giving publishers StumbleUpon technology to allow its users to surface content within their sites that is often deeply buried.

As to the blog reports that eBay (EBAY) had put StumbleUpon up for sale after owning it for a little more than a year, Camp essentially dismissed them, noting that the unit is still operating as an independent subsidiary of the auction giant.

“They have given us a lot of runway,” said Camp.

Here is the new front page of StumbleUpon:

Also, here is a video I did last year at the exceptionally noisy (sorry!) party that StumbleUpon threw after it was sold to eBay a little more than a year ago:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080930/will-stumbleupons-new-web-look-and-feel-give-it-web-wings/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20070629/stumbling-into-the-arms-of-ebay/ http://allthingsd.com/20070629/stumbling-into-the-arms-of-ebay/#comments Fri, 29 Jun 2007 07:05:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070629/stumbling-into-the-arms-of-ebay/ Last night, StumbleUpon–the site that helps you find Web sites based on recommendations from friends and other like-minded people–had a party in downtown San Francisco’s Minna Gallery to celebrate its recent acquisition by auction giant eBay and also just because it is summer.

The Canadian-born social bookmarking start-up, which launched a few years ago, came to the Bay area last year and got some fancy venture investors (Mitch Kapor, Ron Conway, Ram Shriram and others) who ponied up a couple of million dollars.

And, in your typical dot-com Cinderella story, it then proceeded to sell itself to eBay for $75 million recently, after quickly growing its user base to more than two million.

Thus: Party on, Garth!

Here’s a little video I did last night, talking to one of the impossibly young co-founders, Garrett Camp, and also StumbleUpon’s “businessman” (a code word for biz dev), David Lee.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20070629/stumbling-into-the-arms-of-ebay/feed/ 0