Startup Meme

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WSJ is reporting on tip from an insider that eBay is in advanced talks to acquire StumbleUpon. According to WSJ:

The potential price for a deal is in the range of $75 million, these people say. One of the people said that no final agreement has been reached and the talks could fall apart.

We wrote about eBay potentially buying StumbleUpon in mid April. Google took the opportunity to launch its Recommendation service on the same day, perhaps a sign that it lost the bidding battle.

Back in April the price tag for StumbleUpon was rumored to be around $40-$45 million, which has now gone up to $75 million according to WSJ. StumbleUpon has 2.1 million registered users, up from 1.7 million in December 2006. 4+ million sites are “stumbled” daily. ComScore is reporting 6 million page views in March, doubling from the previous month. Unique visitors continue to rise sharply: 900,000 in March, 3x rise over last year.

StumbleUpon has raised $1.5 million in funding to-date from First Round Capital and other angel investors. Our previous coverage of StumbleUpon is here.

VentureBeat has a really interesting scoop. Ticketmaster the owner of social event planning site Evite has threatened to sue rival Socializr alleging that Socializr has ripped off some of their invitation templates and are using them on their site. Evite cited three templates “Holiday,” the “Hawaii Luau” and “Winter Celebration” to be infringing its copyright. Socializr took immediate action and removed Holiday and Hawaii Luau from their template section but have continued to host Winter Celebration. Check out the two templates for yourself.

I think that the reason Socializr has not removed Winter Celebration is because they have really not ripped this one, and Evite listed it in the rip off list for the sake of pumping it up a bit.

This is not so unusual, Viacom did something similar when they slapped Youtube with a massive DMCA take down notice, including some movies in the copyright infringement list that were fair use. EFF took immediate notice of this and counter sued Viacom for acting against fair use. The battle eventually ended in Viacom accepting its mistake and vowing to protect fair use.

Ticketmaster has also recently sued StubHub for scalping tickets, so I guess they are on a suing spree. Also see over review of Socializr which we did when they launched.

Check out the letter from Evite’s lawyers embedded below.

Kyte.tv, a new service that launched today, allows users to create their own channel to broadcast across the net. Sharing your activities with others is becoming a hot playground for startups these days. Twitter arguably was the first to ignite this craze by allowing users to share their activities with others via sms (micro-blogging). Then came Atten.tv, a service that allows you to record your click stream and upload it to their servers where viewers could opt in to view it and see what you are doing on your PC. Kyte.tv, the latest entrant in this space, brings even more interactivity by allowing users to share all forms of media from photos-to videos with people around the world.

The primary differentiator between Kyte and other services in the space is its multimedia capabilities. Kyte allows users to display photos, videos, music and polls in your shows. Everyone can create a channel and start broadcasting his personal life right away. Channel owners can also enable live chat, and all the previous shows of your channel are displayed in a horizontal menu bar below the screen. There are several permissions and privacy options for each channel to choose from, allowing you to display your content to the general public or just to your friends. Channels could also be embedded anywhere on the web.

The content added to the channel will be broadcast to everyone in real time. A red blinking dot will appear on the top left of the tv screen to indicate that the content is being streamed in real time. Kyte also shows you who else is posting your content on their site, and has trackbacks to inform you about the people viewing your channel. Content publishers can also co-brand their channels to show their logos, customize background image, and even display text description of their choice. Content can be posted-to and received -from the channels via any java enabled mobile phone.

The service is basically a media player, built on Adobe’s Flex 2 platform, where as the entire backend is written in Java, allowing the service to be almost real-time. For watching Kyte.tv you might need to upgrade to the latest version of Flash.

Kyte.tv is backed by a solid team of investors including Draper Richards, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (Hotmail and Skype investors), Niklas Zennstrom(Kazaa, Skype and Joost founder), and Ron Conway(angel investor in Google). Decentral, the company behind the service has raised $2.25 million to try and make some splash in this space.

The service is yet another push towards truly user generated content, yet another nail in the coffin of old media publishing methods and yet another marketing gold mine to be explored.

MyQuire is a social network for productivity, that allows users to manage tasks, scheduling, projects and photos. Users can also make friends and associates, and join networks.

Every user on MyQuire has a personal homepage, that is divided into sections including photos, tasks, projects, friends and there is a “Wall” as well where you could post random tidbits and ideas that come to your mind. MyQuire also provides each user with an inbox to send and receive messages from other users.

There is also a projects area, where users can create projects and assign members to them. To add a member to a project, simply drag the person from your friends list, and drop him on the project board. Each project is logged in the “My Hard Drive” section of the website, where you can manage the project folders via a WYSIWYG editor.

MyQuire also provides a calendar to add tasks to by day and time. The calendar could be synchronized with other popular calendar offerings including, Microsoft Outlook, iCal, and Mozilla Sunbird.

MyQuire has several communities for universities like Yale, Harvard etc, that students from these universities could join to manage team projects and tasks. However there is one aspect that I did not like, MyQuire is not free. Although there is a free basic account as well, but it is good for nothing, and allows users to manage just a single project. The premium account costs $5.99 per month and allows upto 20 projects, another unnecessary restriction that I would like to be removed.

AOL founder Steve Case has officially launched the health care portal RevolutionHealth this Thursday, in a bid to challenge the market leader WebMD for a piece of the multibillion dollar pharmaceutical ad market.

Revolution Health is different from health search engines like Healthline and Medstory in a way that it does not make users search for health related issues but rather enable them to ask about such issues on the community portal-its actually a health related social network.

The free site includes information on health issues, conditions and diseases, and also has a personal page builder using which all users could create their profiles, link to other users and set personal health care goals. Users can also create pages to outline the risks of suffering from particular diseases and their remedies and can rate doctors, hospitals or health care services and check symptoms for potential causes. Revolution Health also has a place for users to keep their medical records and maintain an ongoing relationship with their doctors, as well as widgets to track their health even from personal blogs.

The site has created a lot of tools to help people become healthier, such as the Lose one pound tool that shows how long an activity should be done in order to lose a pound of flesh, or the Cigarette cost tool that shows you how much money you will be saving if you quit smoking.

The page building features in Revolution Health are a result of their acquisition of CarePages, a service that allowed users to create personal and private web pages to share with family friends and doctors and monitor each others health. Revolution Health’s care pages are seen as a key differentiator between the site and its competitors like WebMD and Yahoo Health. Another important difference is the lack of ads, mainly from pharmaceutical companies, although Revolution Health do plan to incorporate ads into the site eventually. They will also be selling memberships and earn revenue through their store as well as through affiliate programs by providing Insurance company information on the site.

Health care advertisement is a huge market, with top 13 pharmaceutical companies spending nearly $14 billion in marketing and prescription and over-the-counter medicines in 2005, according to TNS Media Intelligence and Advertising Age. Although currently less that 5% of these marketing dollars are spent online, the figure is likely to soar as more robust health care sites with authoritative content come online.

WebMD posted revenues of around $254 million in 2006, up 50% from the previous year. WebMD has capitalized on its early mover advantage to offer private health care portals to corporations, which account for nearly 21% of its net revenues. Competitors like Revolution Health will definitely find it hard to get into the private portal space effectively, however the market over all is big enough for a few players to prosper.

StumbleUpon has launched a new feature called StumbleThru, that lets you stumble through your favorite sites. So if you are a Flickr freak, you could now use StumbleUpon to stumble flickr photos, give recommendations on the photos and with time the system will start serving you with hyper relevant content. The sites supported by this feature include-Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, Youtube, Google’s Blogger, Wordpress.com, TheOnion.com, pbs.com, physorg.com, cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, .gov websites, .edu websites.

The initial set of sites for which the feature has been enabled must be the favorite destinations among StumbleUpon users, however their is a lot of useful, interesting and exciting content scattered around the web that is yet to be stumbled. What I would like to have is a way for my visitors to stumble through posts on Startup Meme. The ratings of the users from my blog could then be fed into StumbleUpon’s recommendation engine and could be used to determine which posts are really good, and could be served to general StumbleUpon audience who has the relevant preferences. This will in no time provide StumbleUpon with immense and valuable data about the great content scattered across the web, hidden even from the spying eyes of some of the best Search Engines.

StumbleUpon has recently been at the center of attention. They just went through a web2.0 makeover, than came the news of eBay acquiring StumleUpon for around $45-$75 million, which was spoiled by Google’s launch of Google Recommendations, a similar service, on the same day.

I have also embedded the Youtube video below, that I stumbled through. Watch it and tell me, if you find it interesting.