uLinkx video search catches up; adds new features

By Vivek | May 31st, 2007 at 05:49 am ET         

Video Search Engine uLinkx, which aggregates videos from Youtube, Google videos, MySpace, Metacafe, Reuters and likes to make you content discovery easier, has been growing rapidly in the past few months and is now claiming to be clocking 2.5M pageviews/month. Not a big number as compared to the biggies in the space, yet the consistent upward curve at Alexa et al looks promising. This number would definitely get a boost when uLinkx launches it’s API sometime soon, enabling reuse of the aggregator data.

While API still has time to come out, uLinkx released a bunch of new features today including a customizable All In One Video page feature provides access to popular videos from many video sharing web sites, like Youtube, Google videos, MySpace, Metacafe, Reuters, Yahoo, Revver, Grouper, iFilm,Dailymotion and many more sites on a single page. So if you are a video junkie and want to avoid going to 10 different sites for the popular refresh, uLinkx would be a good place to be. Other features include users being able select popular videos based on timeline ( Today, Week,Month and All Time ), search based on date besides relevance, family filter, and user being able to import their YouTube videos. Lot of catching up stuff out there, but still good to have those features.

While the UI and features are great, a big change I would like to see at uLinkx would be in the search mechanism where it starts looking beyond the video metadata to power it’s search results. Right now uLinkx looks mainly at title, descriptions and tags for videos, but the ability of being able to analyze video and audio streams is already upon us. It’s better to work in that direction now before that space also gets crowded.

Links:
uLinkx

Attributor tastes first blood; Signs-up AssociatedPress

By Vivek | May 31st, 2007 at 12:17 am ET         

Attributor, the Redwood City, CA based startup that has been building a web-wide content monitoring and analysis service, today announced that it has signed up Associated Press as the first customer. AP will be using Attributor technology to fingerprint content and to identify and document its display wherever it appears across the Internet.

To start with, Attributor platform will continuously monitor billions of pages on the Internet and perform comparison analysis against AP content to provide a customized view of content usage, including a context sensitive understanding of compliance with applicable licensing and legal requirements. The arrangement will initially cover AP text, which represents one of the largest daily sources of original content in the world. AP content in other media formats will also be tested with Attributor’s comparison technology. Attributor will also interface the service with all the organizations that exchange or distribute editorial content or information through AP. Potentially more business models might emerge between Attributor and AP around development and distribution of editorial, licensing and advertising applications based on the Attributor platform and AP’s content distribution systems.

I had written about Attributor couple of times before and had expressed my concern around the number of big partnerships the startup would be left to make in the wake of serious competition from Audible Magic. Anyway, here they are with one of the biggest partnerships that either of the 2 startups could have made.

Late last year, Attributor had raised $10 million in Series B round from Sigma Partners, Selby Venture Partners, Draper Richards, First Round Capital and Amicus Capital.

Links:
Attributor

Appirio widgets live at AppExchange

By Vivek | May 30th, 2007 at 10:36 pm ET         

Appirio, the San Francisco, CA based startup that offers services and support to Salesforce customers, has finally gone live with it’s iGoogle based widgets at Salesforce AppExchange. I had written about the private beta launch of these widgets couple of weeks back. 

Yesterday I had a quick chat with Narinder Singh from Appirio about the future direction the startup plans to take in terms of the product.  Their plan is to continue offering the basic widgets for free, and probably start charging a small fee for additional features. Still, no current plans to charge the end users. Future enhancement coming to the widgets in the next 1-3 weeks include addition of gadget manager that a company account admin would be able to install into Salesforce to control the fields that can show up in the widgets. So, instead of showing the default set of information, companies would be able to customize and deliver the right information. Again these controls will not be available the user level, and would result in company account wide changes. However, as Appirio already offers 4  widgets delivering data from entirely 4 datasources inside Salesforce, this would not be an issue with most of the small-mid sized customers.

As for those people expecting similar widgets from Appirio for Netsuite, SugarCRM and likes, the startup is purely focusing on Salesforce.

Links:
Appirio widgets at AppExchange
Appirio

Buxfer analyzes expenses to suggest Deals

By Vivek | May 30th, 2007 at 09:57 pm ET         

I had not realized the amazing finance app coming up at Buxfer until I talked with the team today. The startup launched by 3 PhD students from CMU, Amit Manjhi, Ashwin Bharambe and Shashank Pandit, in September of last year has covered quite a bit of ground in the short time span. The startup is focusing on the younger demographic with it’s web-based financial application that let’s them track their expenses and help them stay in the budget. Buxfer is currently tracking over 130,000 transactions worth more than $25 million dollars. Without spending any money on advertising, the startup has got attention from angel investors including YCombinator, Eric Cooper, and Georges Harik.

Recently Buxfer quietly launched amazing set of features out of which few have not been offered by any startup till date. The most significant of them is Deal recommendations. Buxfer platform now goes beyond just tracking money to actually helping users save money. Based on how users spend money, Buxfer recommends deals which can help them save on future purchases. I think a platform enhancement like this is easier said than done ’cause Buxfer is crawling the web for deal information and then ranking those deals based on their relevance to user transactions and popularity among other Buxfer users. Most of the apps out there just to one of the 2 things - deal tracking or finance tracker. Delivering a combination is a nice move from Buxfer.

uGenie is the only other startup in recent history that has a serious enough plan around coupons.

Coming back to Buxfer, the finance app now also offers a pretty comprehensive way to categorize user transactions. Transactions can be either automatically classified into meaningful categories by Buxfer. If that doesn’t work out that well, users can over-ride the automatic categorization by manually labeling their transactions with a particular tag. If there are going to be multiple transactions from the merchant/type, users can automate this manual process of tagging by using ‘automatic tags’. An automatic tag simply specifies a selection criteria for transactions, and specifies which tags to apply for transactions matching the selection criteria. Buxfer has also introduced a new feature - Budgets - wherein users can set limits on certain kinds of expenses, and Buxfer will help them stay within those limits. I think this would operate more on month-month basis.

New features aside, one of the best features i liked at Buxfer - new transactions can be posted to an account via SMS. Did i tell you that Buxfer is using Buxfer to track and manage the company expenses? If you haven’t used Buxfer till date, I think it is worth a look.

Links:
Buxfer 

First ticket to San Dimas Project up on eBay! Current bid: US $154.85 ^

By Vivek | May 30th, 2007 at 10:54 am ET         

San Dimas Project team at eBay is out there with some viral tricks to promote their new product. Targeting the “Alpha-Geek” crowd, they have put the first San Dimas invitation up on eBay as a charity auction. It is meant to be for the person who really wants to be in there first. Personally, I would have loved to be in there, but the bid price is going up fast - currently at $154.85 - with 5 days 2 hours to go. I think I will skip  

Good part of the auction is that 100% of the auction proceeds, including eBay’s fees, will be donated to the Cavy Care Guinea Pig rescue in Aurora, Colorado.

As for those who are wondering what exactly is San Dimas Project - it is a new eBay desktop application under works that will run on top of Adobe Apollo. The product will offer buying features, including search, browse, watch list, and bidding/buy it now and also desktop-specific features including alerts and browsing history.

History:
After Firefox, eBay onto Apollo

Links:
San Dimas Project