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I bumped into Artiklz at the Blog08 conference in Amsterdam last month, and got a rundown of what the LA-based startup was working on while the service was still in alpha mode. Today, Artiklz is releasing its finetuned and upgraded application in private beta with a slew of new features.

We have 500 invites for TechCrunch readers; all you need to do is sign up here and tell them we sent you.

Artiklz aggregates comments around content from a variety of services (including Digg, Reddit, Yahoo! Buzz, FriendFeed, Mixx, Delicious, Diigo etc.). In addition, they offer plug-ins to track conversations on major blogging services like Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, and self-hosted WordPress blogs and centralize what’s being said and referenced regarding your own content as well as discussions about it across the web.

Artiklz enables you to get notifications by e-mail, SMS, IM or a web interface, whenever a new comment is made about your post on any given service, which is a great way to track conversations across the social web without the need to actively monitor different services. You can also add a badge to your blog that gives your readers the option to be notified when you post a new article, or when somebody leaves a comment on a given post, and you can even track a specific individual’s comments. The startup has added a Firefox toolbar and bookmarklet today that should make it easier and faster to track conversations even without being a registered user (demo video) and has also released an improved web interface.

There are many startups in the comment tracking space (e.g. coComment, SezWho and Disqus) but Artiklz in my opinion doesn’t compete with them but rather with aggregation services like uberVu (see recent review) and search engines like Backtype.

Testing the application reminded me of this blog post published earlier this year by Loïc Le Meur about the ‘(de)centralization of me’. If he stills feels the same way about the fragmentation of his social map, he might want to give Artiklz a try.

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

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

So how does that compare to Digg?

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

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

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

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

Source: Robin Wauters

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

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

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

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

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

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Source: Jason Kincaid

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Microsoft has released the latest set of data for its controversial Live Search Cashback program, which offers users monetary incentives to click through and buy goods from the ads they’re shown. The results? Things seem to be looking good from a ROI perspective, as users are responding to the ads more than they typically do on other search engines (though this isn’t very surprising, as they are being offered money). More significant is the fact that Microsoft’s share of ad dollars has risen significantly, especially in proportion to its relatively weak market share (which has largely languished, despite the new program).

Microsoft is reporting that according to Comscore, Live Search referred 12% of all commercial transactions across the web - a number that is much smaller than Google’s referral share, but one that is also significantly larger than Live Search’s market share, which hovered around 9% during the same period. This makes the Live Search user base very appealing to advertisers, as it shows that they’re more likely to purchase goods than their Google counterparts.

Since May, Live Search has seen strong advertiser response - the company reports a 30% growth in Cashback offers made to customers, with 20 of the web’s 50 top online retailers in the U.S. are now on board. To help bolster its offerings, Microsoft has partnered with e-commerce shopping carts Miva Merchant, Early Impact Inc. (ProductCart) and 3DCart, which help small and mid-sized retailers run online stores. These smaller companies will now be able to promote their goods through the cashback program.

Microsoft also reports an average 4.5 million unique users of CashBack - a significant base but only a drop in the bucket compared to the gains needed to catch up with Google. After an initial bump in search market share the engine’s traffic quickly declined back to its former value. Clearly CashBack isn’t the answer to all of Microsoft’s search engine woes - even if its ads are seeing encouraging returns, Microsoft still has to pay out a significant chunk of the proceeds to users participating in the program. But it’s a good differentiator, and at this point innovation is probably the only thing that can take a sizeable bite out of Google’s market share.

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Source: Jason Kincaid

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Now that the election is over there is going to be no shortage of punditry looking to pinpoint exactly what moments in the last 18 months contributed to Barack Obama’s victory over John McCain. No one is better equipped for this analysis than Auditude, the video fingerprinting company that was recently employed to power part of MySpace’s video platform.
Using a database chronicling millions of hours of video content, Auditude can identify the original source of video clips scattered across the web, even if they’re only a few seconds long. And with that, the company can figure out which speeches, gaffes, and ads actually mattered to The People.

For its initial analysis of the election, Auditude has mapped out the popularity of each moment in this year’s three presidential debates. Crawling across sites like YouTube, Veoh, MySpace, and Yahoo, the site isolated several thousand videos depicting portions of each debate, and then laid them out in a timeline to determine which moments were the most viewed.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of popular clips involved McCain gaffes and moments when Obama said something that was especially poignant. This bias can be attributed to Obama’s much stronger web presence, and a generally liberal bias on sites like Digg where videos tend to go ‘viral’ and garner millions of hits. That said, there’s still plenty of useful data to be found (for example, note that the infamous “that one” statement only had around half as many hits as McCain’s “Zero?” reaction in the third debate).

Below are charts for each debate, along with links to the highlighted clips:

Clips:
Eisenhower ‘Goof’
You Were Wrong

Clips:
That One

Clips:
Zero?

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We are pleased to announce that we will hold a TechCrunch party that will close LeWeb conference next month in Paris. LeWeb is probably one of the most important web event in the industry and certainly the most important in Europe with more than 1500 participants coming from all over the world. TechCrunch has a been a media partner for a couple of years but this year we will do a little more and we’ll hold a special event december 10th at night.

We are expecting about 600 to 1000 participants (yes, even after 2 days of conference and a Myspace party..) and the party will be open to partcipants and non participants of the conference (all details will be announced soon). Music, open bar, quality mingling in an international crowd will be the agenda.

The party was announced a few days ago on Twitter and TechCrunch France and we have already 2 key partners for the event: SFR development and HotelaParis.com.

We have a few more sponsorship opportunities. If you are interested contact us at dan [at] techcrunch.com

Still need a ticket to LeWeb? TechCrunch readers get a 20% discount.

See you in Paris!
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Source: Ouriel Ohayon

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WorldFriends, a social network with a focus on connecting internationally-minded people, was established as early as 2003 but has flown under the radar of the American blogosphere since then. The Tokyo- and Shanghai-based site, which now has nearly 2 million users from all over the world, did a soft (re)launch last week, mainly enhancing a number of networking features.

WorldFriends is walking a fine line between being a platform for dating, language exchange and making international friends. At first sight, WorldFriends actually looks much like a heavily internationalized version of your average dating site. The profile page, for example, features a member slide show (showing only female users if that is what you said you are interested in when signing up), a “New photos”-container (again girls only) and an “Your Ideal Match”-list.

But WorldFriends CEO Dominic Penaloza says the focus lies on cross-cultural networking, finding international penpals, getting travel tips and learning foreign languages (yeah, right). The site, which is available in English, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, boasts over 110,000 language teachers among its registered members. About 65% of total message traffic between members is cross-border.

Perhaps WorldFriends’ most interesting aspect is the business model, which isn’t solely based upon selling advertising space. The site charges users via three different kinds of upgrades that essentially enables members to interact with each other in various modes. For example, users have to pay $24.95 per month to be able to initiate contact (emails, instant messages, voice chat or video chat) to all members (initiating contact with friends and friends of friends is free of charge). It costs $244.95 a year to be able to initiate contact with all members and enable all members to initiate contact with you free of charge. By way of comparison, business network LinkedIn charges $199.95 a year for its so-called Business and $500 for its Business Plus premium accounts. Premium members of Germany’s business platform Xing have to pay about $90 annually.

Penaloza says about 4% of WorldFriends members are paying for services, which certainly helped the site to reach profitability 3 years after launch. Currently the company is particularly active in Japan, where 33% of paid members are from. Penaloza says his price system is fair, particularly considering the $25 to $80 people in this country have to pay for a 60-minute English lesson.

Consequently WorldFriends runs an office in Tokyo, which in July, almost unnoticed by Asian media, managed to close a significant partnership deal: Yahoo Japan agreed to become the first partner worldwide to adopt the new WorldFriends API (the site already has secured partnerships with over 200 websites, mostly through white label partnerships). Registered users of Nippon’s biggest web company can log into WorldFriends via their Yahoo Japan IDs and subscribe by using the Yahoo Japan Wallet payment service.

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Zazzle, the site that lets you custom-design and sell everything from T-shirts and hoodies to sneakers and skateboards, has launched a new feature that may well put it leagues ahead of its competitors: embroidery. And while the prospect of having an embroidered shirt may not sound appealing at first (I’ve always associated embroidery with tacky nametags emblazoned on polo shirts), Zazzle’s new feature is very impressive and will likely draw a large number of new customers.

In the past, most custom shirt designs from Zazzle and its competitors have used flat prints that are essentially glued on top of the fabric (these are higher quality than the iron-on products you’ll find in stores, but look similar). These look fine enough on T-shirts, but tend to look much cheaper (and tackier, depending on the item of clothing) than designs that are actually sewn into the fabric, and don’t hold up as well to multiple washings. Now, Zazzle’s new embroidery option is giving users the chance to have their designs sewn into their clothes, resulting in items that are much better looking and durable.

The process for producing an embroidered item is a bit more involved than for a standard Zazzle order. After selecting a suitable (non-copyrighted) logo or design, users upload their image to Zazzle and choose how large they’d like it to appear on their pieces of clothing. Zazzle then has to “digitize” this image - converting it into a format that is compatible with their automated sewing machines. To do this Zazzle uses a computerized system that does around 50-70% of the work, and then passes the files on to a large team of human workers who manually ensure that every design accurately reflects the image that was uploaded. Prices to have an image digitized vary depending on the number of stitches required (average prices seem to be around $10-$20), and the process takes 24-48 hours. But you only need to do this once for each image - once you’ve got your digitized file, you can apply the same stitching to any item of clothing on Zazzle without having to go through the process again.

The digitization process is simple for the user (you just upload the image), but Zazzle’s Bobby and Jeff Beaver say that the technology behind it is very complex - a team of Zazzle engineers has been working on it for over two years (surprisingly enough, this custom clothing company has a heavy focus on technology, with around 30-40 engineers). The difficulty associated with the embroidery technology ensures that it will be hard to replicate by competitors, and the team has also protected its IP where appropriate. Each image has to be converted to an instruction set of stitches, maintaining the complexity of the original design while still restricting the final output to fall within the physical limitations of the sewing machines.

To ensure that the customer will be satisfied with the final product, Zazzle has built what amounts to a sewing machine emulator - you can watch a clip of how the stitching will be done in the machine, and see exactly what the final product will look like down to each individual thread. These movies are a great safeguard for customer satisfaction, but they’re also really cool - I never thought I’d find myself watching a sewing video for fun (you can see a sample movie above).

As with other Zazzle items, users will be able to sell their creations on the Zazzle marketplace. The Beavers say that besides their mainstream customers, this option will give professional embroiderers a place to showcase their wares, explaining that they haven’t really had a place to do so online.

Zazzle’s embroidery option is likely to be a big seller, especially as the holiday season approaches - a custom embroidered jacket or shirt makes for a great gift. The new technology also helps separate Zazzle from competitors like CafePress (which only does pseudo-embroidery using sew-on patches).

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Source: Jason Kincaid

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