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Our weekend social experiment: Upload a picture, win a TechCrunch Tshirt. You may have noticed our post on Picwing earlier today. While we’re waiting 6-8 weeks for the damn picture frame to arrive, I’ve decided to create a new album that allows anyone to upload photos. Email an image to TCR@picwing.com and it will appear in the widget below. See the whole album here.

Whoever submits the best picture, defined solely by me or more likely one of our interns that I assign this to, will win a TechCrunch tshirt in the size of their choice (we have all womens and mens sizes except, alas, men’s medium). Go for interesting or funny, that’s the best way to win. The first picture in the album is our very own Dan Kimerling holding up a tshirt that with a little effort could soon be in your hands. We’ll notify the winner by emailing whatever email you use to submit the picture.

Anything disgusting or not safe for work will be removed immediately and you will be banned from TechCrunch for life.

Have fun! The winner will be chosen on Sunday. I’ll be shutting down submissions overnight as I sleep, then back on in the morning - no moderation mode.

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Source: Michael Arrington

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London based Songkick, a Y Combinator startup that launched in October 2007, aims to help music artists pack fans into concerts. They’ve been developing a number of new products that are slated for launch soon. But one that they quietly launched last week without much fanfare is something they refer to simply as “Battle of the Bands.”

It’s a sort of Alexa or Compete comparison engine, but instead of comparing websites it compares bands and artists. They track any band that has 50 or more followers on MySpace - about 1 million bands currently. They then scour the Amazon sales rank for their music, mentions in 1,500 popular music blogs, total MySpace friends and plays, and other stats to determine the overall excitement for a band at any given time.

Type in one or more bands and see how they compare over time.

Who’s the hottest band right now, according to Songkick? Vampire Weekend, who are currently on tour and had 30 blog mentions this week. Hear their music here. Soon, Hogarth says, they’ll add permanent links for battles and give users the ability to embed graphs into websites.

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Source: Michael Arrington

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The fledgling startups listed below will present their ideas and initial products to investors at this spring’s Y Combinator Demo Day on March 18. Of the 19 companies in this batch, 10 have already launched and only one remains in stealth mode. Most of them have been in development for only three months.

Chatterous

Chatterous connects various forms of communication so that people can message each other regardless of the form they use most. Currently the service ties SMS, email, IM, and web together so that messages sent using one technology will be received by others using any of the other technologies. This works by setting up a group on Chatterous’s website and putting down all the ways your friends can be contacted. You can then start sending messages to them immediately, meaning that they don’t even have to change their own behavior all that much. Chatterous launched in public beta last week.

Addmired

Addmired provides the AddHer and AddHim social network widgets, both of which display two user profile pictures at a time and ask users to answer certain questions about them, such as “Who’s more popular?” The founders argue that their widgets are more appealing to social network owners than other widgets, because they help drive traffic within the social networks, not siphon traffic out of them. They look to establish service level agreements with some of the smaller social networks. We covered the service in February here.

Snaptalent

Snaptalent is an advertising network for job listings that uses IP detection to determine whether website viewers work or study at particular companies or institutions. It then displays listings from employers who want to attract workers from organizations known for their talent, such as Facebook or Harvard. See our review of the service from this week here.

RescueTime

RescueTime helps individuals and businesses track how they spend their time at the computer, and consequently, find ways to become more productive. The web-based dashboard charts application and website usage over long periods of time and shows you whether you’ve been reaching your goals. So far, 278 businesses have signed up for RescueTime for a total of 26,132 seats. See our review from last May here.

MightyQuiz

MightyQuiz is a user generated quiz destination and widget provider that we covered recently. Users are encouraged to answer trivia questions from a wide range of categories. They can also submit their own questions and embed them on their sites. The site is very sticky: the average session lasts 8 minutes (or 19 questions). As a comparison, the founders claim that Slate has an average session length of 4:22 and Wired has 3:34.

Tipjoy

Tipjoy is an easy micropayment system for the web. It has been designed to cut out the steps necessary for website visitors to leave small amounts of money for content publishers, such as bloggers. The Tipjoy button placed on a website asks for only an email address and by default registers a donation of 10 cents. The service is nearing 70,000 impressions per day and the founders are exploring different models for micropayments, such as employing them to finance high definition video on the web. We wrote about Tipjoy here.

8aWeek

8aweek promises to save you hours of time wasted each week on time-drain websites like Facebook and Drudge Report. The 8aweek browser toolbar will track your website usage, remind you of how much permitted time you have left on each restricted site, and even block you from particular sites once you’ve spent too much time on them. See our review from February here.

WebMynd

WebMynd provides a visual interface for reviewing your browsing history. The founders draw comparisons to Gmail - just as Gmail obviated the need to sort messages into folders by providing effective search and tagging, WebMynd renders it unnecessary to manually bookmark sites and organized them into folders because it’s easy to search and visually flip through the pages you’ve visited. WebMynd operates as a Firefox toolbar and has already indexed 8M page impressions. We wrote about them in January.

BaseShield

BaseShield will protect Windows PCs from malicious viruses and attacks by leveraging virtualization software. Its methods improve on existing anti-virus solutions by preventing all types of attacks, not just the recognized and documented ones. The service has yet to launch.

Insoshi

Insoshi is an upcoming white label social networking platform. It will differentiate itself from many of the other social networking platforms by taking a completely open source approach (think: WordPress of social networks). The software has yet to be released.

Mixwit

Mixwit describes itself as a combination of Slide and iTunes. While it has more ambitious long-term plans, it currently provides an easy way to make sharable mix tapes with songs found through the MP3 search engine Seeqpod.

Omnisio

Omnisio will help you annotate and share videos from any website. It will also add structure to the existing video content on the web. The service has yet to launch.

Deluux

Deluux aims to become a distributed Facebook, or an inverted Ning, by relocating the center of people’s online identities to their websites, which exist outside of any one social network. The service will facilitate the distribution of personalized content around the web and help drive traffic to these personal websites. It has yet to launch.

Wundrbar

Wundrbar wants to improve upon the search bar experience by providing users with powerful inline commands. The idea is reminiscent of YubNub but Wundrbar strives to appeal to a larger audience and to incorporate functionality that helps people manage their personal online accounts in addition to searching the web.

YumDots

YumDots wants to be the go-to mobile application for finding places to eat when out on the town. Its emphasis on using interactive maps to display information about local restaurants makes it more efficient than other mobile review services like Yelp’s. The service has yet to launch.

280 North

280 North will debut with a web-based PowerPoint clone called “280 Slides” that strives to mimic the desktop experience and features the ability to export presentations to PowerPoint format. The founders’ longer term goals consist of providing a JavaScript-based development framework for building desktop-like applications for the web. None of these services, however, have been launched yet.

Kirkland North
Kirkland North wants to take an infectious campus-wide game popular at Yale and Harvard last year and spread it to other campuses around the country. The Risk-like game pits sections of campuses against each other in a virtual battle for university-wide domination. While the founders have plans to roll out an integrated solution that can serve many institutions at once, they are currently rolling out individual versions of their online service, such as one for Stanford that launched only two weeks ago and already involves 20% of the campus.

Joberator
Joberator will help employers find developer talent by encouraging computer science students to refer their developer friends, of whom they have more intimate knowledge than any professional recruiter. Incentives for personal referrals are created by employers who list the bonuses they will pay to pay those who recommend candidates eventually hired. The service has yet to launch.

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Source: Mark Hendrickson

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Having a page put up about you in Wikipedia is difficult, mostly because of the Notability requirement for inclusion - and you aren’t “notable” unless you’ve received significant media coverage elsewhere. Other services have filled in the gap for the billion or so people online who can’t get onto Wikipedia - sites like LinkedIn, Wink and Spock (as well as most social networks, for the less professional profiles).

New Y Combinator startup Biographicon, founded by CEO Ethan Herdrick and CTO Daniel Terhorst, aims to fit itself somewhere in between Wikipedia and LinkedIn. Anyone can be included. And anyone can edit any page, like on Wikipedia. For now, that’s it. The founders say they’ll add more structure over time, and give dedicated places to add bio information (schools, work, etc). Here’s my page.

Biographicon will have a significant hurdle to overcome - until it gets traction people won’t for the most part bother entering in their information. But like all Y Combinator startups it’s used just a tiny amount of capital to get to launch. We’ll check back in in a couple of months and see how they’re doing.

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Source: Michael Arrington

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New Y Combinator startup 8aweek aims to help you stop wasting all that time on random Internet sites. They offer a Firefox plugin that monitors the web sites you visit and how long you spend on each site. If you are on a user-defined “restricted site,” the plugin will tell you when you’ve spent too much time there. Or alternatively, it will block sites if you tell it to be a little more aggressive about time management.

Some users may not be all that Interested in having the plugin try to change their surfing habits. But the service also provides an interesting chart showing all the sites you visited the previous 24 hours and how much total time was spent there. Some users may be surprised to see, for example, just how much of their life is spent on Facebook. The product includes a privacy option that allows users to turn off monitoring, or have the data stored only on their PC, not the Internet.

The company is offering the plugin for free; they want to make money by selling the service to businesses who want to limit the amount of time their employees waste on the Internet. Today businesses can buy a web filter to block access to known time wasting sites. But filters don’t catch everything, and some companies may want to take a softer stance by simply monitoring time on these sites rather than blocking them outright.

8aweek is very similar to RescueTime, another Y Combinator startup that launched last November. RescueTime montiors usage of both websites as well as desktop applications, so the products are not identical. But the products seem too close for comfort - I’m surprised Y Combinator is backing both of them.

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Source: Michael Arrington

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The idea of a “tip jar” on blogs and other content sites to help bring in a few extra dollars has been around for years. Donations and payouts are generally made through PayPal, and there are a number of plugins for various blogging platforms to make the process easier.

New Y Combinator startup TipJoy is designed to make it even easier to get people to click that tip button. Readers are not required to create an account or have a PayPal account to leave a tip, so there is little friction to them getting started. If they want to leave a tip they just click the button and type in their email address. I’ve added a tip button below to show how it works - any money we receive we’ll be distributing back to other bloggers who add the button, and/or donating to charity.

If you leave a tip as a new user, you start to build up an account debit. You can eventually pay that off via PayPal (TipJoy keeps 2%), although no one comes after you if you choose to skip out on the bill. You can also start to ask for tips on your own site, and anything people leave for you offsets what you’ve given to others.

The TipJoy site shows popular sites that have received a lot of tips, and you can also send any URL or email a tip directly as well. As a tipper, you can choose the amount you’d like to tip by default (starting at ten cents). Then, every time you click the tip button on a participating site, that amount is added to your bill.

If you want to cash out of your tips you can choose to either receive an Amazon gift card or donate the amount to charity. For now, you can’t receive cash since the company wants to avoid becoming a regulated money transfer service. In the FAQs they suggest they’ll be adding this functionality eventually.

I like the service because it creates a network around the idea of tipping for content. Users are both tippers and tippees, keeping a balance that they pay off eventually. I also like the fact that people don’t have to pay off that bill. It creates an interesting psychology where people find it very, very easy to leave the tip, and then may feel guilted into paying off the bill. At the very least, TipJoy is an interesting human psychology experiment.

The service has a number of options for integrating buttons and graphics on to the site. I imagine they’ll be adding plug-ins and other tools as well over time.

TipJoy was founded by Abigail Kirigin and Ivan Kirigin. The company blog is here.

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Source: Michael Arrington

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Y Combinator wasn’t the only incubator to demo their most recent startups today. Colorado-based TechStars also brought their startups on stage - ten of them - to give the audience a first look at what they’ve been up to all summer. Each startup gave 5% of their equity in exchange for $15,000, operational support, office space and mentoring.

Most of these companies are unlaunched and seeking additional angel funding (exceptions are noted). Here are our notes on each - and see Don Dodge for his take:

EventVue builds social networks around conferences (see confabb, an existing competitor). The idea is to let people connect before, during and after conferences in an online space, to add to the physical interaction at the conference itself. The company plans on generating revenue by charging an affiliate fee for each new registration. They are currently looking for $150k in funding.

Intense Debate - see our previous coverage. Intense Debate is a souped-up blog commenting widget that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Currently installed on 30 blogs. Installing the plug-in on your blog (WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad) adds threading, comment analytics, bulk comment moderation across all your blogs, user reputation, and comment aggregation. They are looking for $500k in funding.

SocialThing is an ambitious project that simplifies the management of digital content (blogs, photos, music, friends, social networks and links). Users can also synchronize information from and to various social networks from their profile page. Strong viral component. Revenue from advertising. Raising $500k.

J-Squared Media has launched their “Sticky Notes” Facebook application. It has 1.7 million users after six weeks, who have sent over 4 million sticky notes. They are working on several other related Facebook applications and are cash flow positive with $30,000/month in revenue from cost per action advertising. Not seeking funding. More here.

Search-To-Phone is a mobile search service via voice. Call and leave a voicemail asking about a product or service. The request is then routed to the appropriate business to call you back with information and/or a special offer. Built on TellMe and Gold Systems technologies for voice recognition. They’ve signed a business development deal with Excell Services to provess 10 million calls. They are looking for a small capital investment and more partners before launching.

Villij is a recommendation engine that analyzes your online life (social networks, blogs, bookmarks, etc.) to find people who may have similar interests as you. Raising $500k.

MadKast has the honor of being the first TechStars startup to launch. Our previous coverage is here. They’ve made a dead simple way to increase distribution for your blog with one line of javascript or one click for Blogger and TypePad. Once the widget is installed, readers can send a blog post via email, mobile MMS, or social bookmarking networks to friends. They are raising $300k in capital.

FiltrBox is a content monitoring and filtering service for blogs, news sites and other websites. Content is filtered by topics, keywords and context and then delivered to the user via RSS, email and/or text messaes. Filters can be adjusted via sliders and will learn what you like over time. Raising $500k in capital.

KBLabs is developing Facebook applications and widgets. Wah! Cool was their first application, which launched four weeks ago. It now has 100k subscribers and is generating 1.5 million page views per week. Other applications include Post Secrets, Motivate Me and Track Bot. The founders are going back to college this Fall but will continue to consult and build Facebook applications. They are not looking for funding.

BrightKite serves location based notifications (”place streaming”) over email, instant messaging of text messages. The idea is to stream content about a place, from a place. Friends are alerted when you are nearby. You receive offers from local busineses. Etc. Targeted towards conferences, bars, parties and public places. It is also a platform for third party applications. Raising $500k in capital.

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Tags: startups,, mobile

Source: Michael Arrington

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Y Combinator is held their fall bi-annual Demo Day today at their Mountain View office. The fall demo day featured a whopping 19 companies giving lightning fast 7 minute elevator pitches to a room of press and potential angel investors. The companies were earlier selected during their Summer application drive.

Paul Graham started of the event briskly after an initial mixer, encouraging investors to close deals fast on the 11 week old companies.

Here’s a look at the presenters (note, some of the 19 companies declined mention in this roundup):

Anywhere.FM

We announced Anywhere.FM’s launch earlier last week. They compete in the online music locker space. However, I find a lot of these sites are more a niche segment of the storage market than a full application.

Anywhere.fm is a more consumer friendly music storage solution and has set dead aim at being an online version of iTunes. Anywhere.FM’s site lets you upload your music collection onto their site, create playlists, and play them back anywhere from the web. You can even listen to your friend’s music on a “Buddy radio station”. You can easily start your library with an iTunes uploader.

Over the past two weeks, they have received over 125,000 visits and had over a million songs uploaded to the site.

Today they expanded on their monetization plans, which include advertising, affiliate sales, and premium accounts. They plan on inserting audio adds into your music stream and are in talks with TargetSpot to supply local audio ads. The player’s Buddy radio feature will serve as a discovery engine, which they can sell music through and generate affiliate fees. Finally, a paid premium account will provide higher quality bit rates and other TBA features.

ClickPass

ClickPass making OpenID one-click consumer friendly. They declined to state greater details for now.

DropBox

DropBox is another entrant into the online storage market. They are creating a transparent file management system (Mac/Win) that aims to:sync your desktop files on the web, back up files, provide access anywhere, and make files easy to share.

Although they are still in private beta, they showed an example of their product for the Mac. For the demo they showed how files stored in their desktop Dropbox folder were accessible and synced online. You Dropbox files are backed up online, with a version history to provide easy rollback, and recovery in case you delete them from your desktop system. The files can also be shared via a permalink.

The demo looked slick although they were not able to disclose any details about the scalability of their backend in the short 7 minute presentation. See our previous coverage of the Y Combinator is holding their fall bi-annual Demo Day today at their Mountain View office. This demo day will feature a whopping 19 companies giving lightning fast 7 minute elevator pitches to a room of press and potential angel investors. The companies were earlier selected during their Summer application drive.”>online storage gang.

Versionate

Versionate is taking on Microsoft Sharepoint, online offices, and the wiki market with their new collaborative document editing application. We covered their launch earlier.

Once you upload your documents to Versionate, you can search your content, control access rights, and edit them in the browser. Currently only Word documents are editable online. Every version of your changes is saved in wiki style. They support viewing for Word, Excel, PDF, OpenOffice, Powerpoint.

Versionate will also be offering a self-hosted version for customers concerned about data security and are pursuing desktop/web integration.

Adpinion

Adpinion is looking to fix banner advertising. To do this, they are helping ad networks target advertising by allowing visitors vote on the advertising preferences. Through the voting, Adpinion can determine what groups of ads go with what groups of users and sites. Since launch, they have been approached by over 180 businesses considering integrating Adpinion into their networks, including CBS.

Rebel Music Sharing

File sharing is very popular (13 million users connected to eDonkey at any time). However, it’s also very illegal. Rebel music is looking to make file sharing legal by avoiding a lot of the legal issues that got a lot of other startups sued into oblivion (unless you’re in Russia). To ensure this, they’ve been talking with the music industry from the very beginning.

The biggest legal complication Rebel will avoid on their P2P network is downloading. Instead, users will use their desktop application to stream music to their computers from their friends. Streaming from friends computers also avoids the internet radio limitations imposed on other legal streaming solutions. Yet it still leaves recording artists open to piracy because stream capturing software is available for people who know what they’re doing.

Their end goal is to use the service as a music discovery engine and drive affiliate sales.

Disqus

One of the most championed features of blogs is the conversation. However, commenting systems on a lot of blogs are still somewhat lacking. Disqus is another startup looking to fix this by enhancing the comments. Disqus supports full moderation, spam and troll filtering, voting, threading, and more importantly a forum. For each post made on your blog, Disqus will generate a forum on their server, where users can continue the conversation in depth. They plan on monetizing through a business class version of the product.

As more blogs add the feature, Disqus will also be able to connect the conversation across blogs. Their plugin is currently live on Fred Wilson’s blog. We expect to see more when they officially launch.

Fauxto

Fauxto is an online version of Photoshop made in flash. The functionality is pretty amazing and includes layering, all sorts of tools, and effects. For the demo they live edited a photo of Steve Ballmer from the web by adding a Google logo to his forehead and changing his eyes to a nice baby blue. You can save the edited photos to your desktop or the web.

Over the past three months they’ve been live the site has grown to 56,000 registered users without any promotion. Their initial plans for monetization include licensing their technology.

Fuzzwich

Fuzzwich is one of my latest internet addictions. It’s a a dead simple way creating and publishing animated shorts out of a pre-generated cast of characters and backgrounds. They add more and more each day. Since launch users have created over 50,000 animations and added a new cast of animated characters.

Today they’ve previewed a new advertising engine through customizing their characters through branded goods. For instance, you can dress your character up in Gap, or pimp your ride with the latest web bling. Because they control all the content that goes into the videos, it seems like a more effective way of incorporating advertising into user generated content than with social video. New creatives can easily be added and hyperlinked to connect to purchase points. Lately indie music labels have contacted also them about possible music promotions.

Cloudant

The Slapvid guys have changed their startup and come back as a hardware startup, Cloudant. Their router promises to take full advantage of your bandwidth by simultaneously downloading multiple parts of a file. They say this is possible for a large number of the files you download online because of the range request abilities built into the HTTP spec. This means that your router can open multiple connections to a site and download multiple chunks of a file in parallel.

The router will also have other advanced features, such as network security out of the box, creating a peer to peer content distribution network amongst the routers, and embedded applications pre-installed on the box. For the demo, they showed their router download a large high-quality image file in about 16 minutes, compared to the Y Combinators old router taking an hour.

They plan on releasing a beta in May of 08 and are seeking a 500K investment to get the production going.

Mark Hendrickson took some photos of the event with the help of Babak Nivi’s (Venture Hacks) iPhone. Click the image below for more.

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Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, startups, demo, day

Source: Nick Gonzalez

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