Congratulations To the Crunchies Winners; We’ll ‘Facebook’ Takes “Top Prize” For Second Year.

Congratulations To the Crunchies Winners; We’ll ‘Facebook’ Takes “Top Prize” For Second Year.

TryMyFashion: Because ‘Fashionistas’ & “tejas” Need To Micro-blog, Too

TryMyFashion: Because Fashionistas Need To Micro-blog, Too

eSnips: A Story of Hearthache (For Its Founders, Investors & Employees)

Three years ago when Web 2.0 began proliferating, Israeli startups used eSnips as the poster child for their case that a successful social network could be founded in Israel. Based on the criteria in those days, eSnips was in fact delivering: It was able to convince top tier VCs to buy into an advertising-based business model, it leveraged user-generated content (the main activity is sharing personal media), used free storage as a hook, traffic was rising steadily, and it became a press darling domestically and internationally. As we say in Israel, “It was all honey”.

Now fast forward to Q4 2008. A shell of its previous self, eSnips is now a startup train wreck: Founders divorced and dismissed, threatened litigation courtesy of a record label and, with no possibility for further funding, the company was unloaded for approximately $750,000 to the Logia Group.

In the past three months I have spoken to a number of sources close to the company and have managed to reconstruct the circumstances that brought the company from its zenith, to its nadir.

test my app with this 2+4 & check result

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Dead Simple Posterous Gets A Round Of Funding And Launches Group Blogs

Posterous, which launched in June, is one of those sites that I tested and it stuck – I continue to post pictures to it regularly.

What I like about it – you don’t have to create an account to use it. Just start emailing text and files (images, video, whatever) to post@posterous.com and you’ve got a site where it all goes. And they’ve steadily added features. You can, for example, repost all the stuff you email in to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr or wherever.

Today the company is announcing a new product, group blogs. You can add your friends or family’s email addresses to any Posterous site you control, and they can then email stuff in too. It’s useful for families, sports teams, etc. to share photos and video. Once you’ve added those emails, all they have to do to post is send whatever they want to publish to post@sitename.posterous.com. No registration required. An example is here.

Posterous is a Y Combinator startup. They also just raised a second angel round of financing – $725,000 from XG Ventures and a whole bevy of high profile individuals.

AlertThingy Gets An Upgrade, Kills FriendFeed Support (But Not Really)

We’ve covered AIR application AlertThingy quite a bit in the past, being one of the most elegant tools available to keep on top of all your social networking accounts from your desktop. Most recently, we announced AlertThingy v2 was going to add support for Digg, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce and Tumblr besides Twitter, Flickr and lifestreaming service FriendFeed. The release was delayed a bit, and things turned out to be a bit differently than advertised.

Support for Pownce is now no longer necessary, of course, but all the other announced integrations have been included for this upgrade, with the addition of the TinyURL service. But surprisingly enough, the makers of AlertThingy (design & development house Howard / Baines) have decided to no longer support FriendFeed in this edition, which is a peculiar move to make as AlertThingy actually launched as a FriendFeed desktop application to begin with

JS-Kit Introduces Picture Comments, Embraces OpenID 2.0

Cross-platform feedback widgets maker JS-Kit just added a feature that enables users to enhance comments with pictures, on any of the 600,000+ websites using its custom commenting system. I’ve always been curious to know why major blogging platforms don’t simply add such a functionality to their commenting systems, while there are already companies like Seesmic, Viddler and Blipback focussing on taking a step further by adding video commenting features to websites.

There are custom picture commenting plugins for WordPress and Movable Type available, but we should note JS-Kit is not only meant for blogs, as it can be installed on any Javascript-enabled website. According to the blog post announcing the new features, JS-Kit users can now attach multiple images to each of their comments on sites running its commenting systems. Images will be auto-thumbnailed and can be clicked on for full-size viewing.

What Are Marketing Departments Cutting Due To Recession In The Economy

Marketing departments at all B2B companies are our customers. We love them all and strive hard everyday to come up with solutions to make them happy. As I have been speaking with a number of our prospects and customers over the last few weeks, I have seen a clear slowing down of their momentum in planning the “next” campaign. This MarketingSherpa study is really useful to understand how marketing departments are thinking in this economy and how you can help them do more with less. We are big believers in the philosphy of LESS – less makes you do things right and what comes out of less is usually higher quality stuff. Everyone will be forced to do more with less in marketing departments all over and its time to get creative and truly innovative.

Pew Survey Confirms What We All Know: Net Beats Newspapers As A Source For News

News Flash: More people get their news from the Web than from newspapers. While this hardly counts as news to most of our readers, the Pew Research Center is surprised by the shift. In a survey of 1,489 adults in the U.S. conducted in early December, 40 percent said they get most of their national and international news from the Internet, compared to 35 percent from newspapers. The percentage of newspaper readers has been pretty steady since 2005. What’s changed is the number of people admitting they get their news from the Internet as well, up from 24 percent the last time the Pew Center asked this question in September, 2007. (TV still beats both as a news source, with 70 percent, but give it a couple more years and the Internet should overtake that as well).

How They Make Toys At Google

You know those engineer elves at Google like to do things their own way. That build-it-better ethic also applies to Christmas toys. If you click on the Christmas Doodle on Google’s main search page, you will see the five images below, which shows what I can only assume is one of Google’s older engineers in his workshop with his son. He is putting together a contraption with wooden gears and tubes that create toys (and explosions too!). Those must be Internet tubes.