Rev2.org

UPDATE: First 8 comments get an invite!

Ed. Note: Apologies for the down time! I’ve been immensely busy between travelling, setting up a home office, and working on a startup. Hope things can get back to normal from here.

Mento, founded by Greg Hochmuth, is a new service based out of Germany and that entered private beta very recently. The service is based around the idea of sharing links with the people you care about. It’s not quite Digg, it’s not quite Tumblr, and it’s not quite Mahalo, but a weird mix of all three with a bit of its own.

The service is a easy signup — one of the more intuitive processes I’ve seen recently. At the end of it, Mento gives you a handy “Share with Mento” bookmarklet, which is a main input mechanism into the service. Whenever you’re visiting a link, pressing the bookmarklet reveals a bunch of actions that can be taken with the link. This also defines Mento pretty well in general — you can send the link (supplying a friend’s name/linked with Facebook, an e-mail, or a group/tag), save/bookmark it del.icio.us-style with a description and tags, or add a reply to a recently-bookmarked link on the site in your network.

While the input/sharing mechanism is one main aspect of the service, it’s not the only one. Going to to the site’s homepage, mento.info, reveals the “receiving” end of the spectrum. Among this is your own “Mento Mix” which shows the links shared by your friends and network recently, an “Inbox” which shows the links and replies sent specifically to you, and a way to customize your Mento Mix which is a way to tell Mento the kind of stuff you like to see and don’t like to see.

Additionally, the “Your Links” tab on the top shows your own recently shared links, “Your Network” allows you to manage your contact list and add/invite new friends, and “Channels” lets you join specific groups and categories of like-minded people with similar interests who collect and share links together. This aspect of the site is very much like a YouTube for links where the focus is on aggregation the whole community’s shared items as opposed to the links shared to you by your friends (which is the site’s main purpose).

A really cool thing about the site is being able to link and work with other services. For example, you can connect your Facebook account so that linked shared with Mento are automatically shared with Facebook as well. Additionally, you can export your links to FriendFeed, Twitter, Magnolia, Tumblr, or Del.icio.us all at once, and even use Twitter as a e-mail/bacn replacement to get notified about replies and recommendations.

Aesthetically and simply in the way it works, Mento is a solid product. There has been thought put into its design and interface and the way it looks, feels, and works very much serves to its purpose of building a community around link sharing. Being a heavy Tumblr, Del.cio.us, Twitter and FriendFeed user, I still have to try its integration points, but if it works the way it’s supposed to, I might as well use it as my primary bookmarklet to share something interesting on the web as opposed to twittering, tumbling, and del.icio.us’ing one link three times.

And as the site itself gets built outward and collects more users/my friends, I think I could find a use for it myself in discovering and sharing links. Personally, I think the service is on its way to being a success among other services like Twitter, Del.icio.us, and Tumblr in the area of link sharing if it’s able to somehow gain a good tipping point. But don’t forget, I called it first.

First, it was Dodgeball — the first supposed local social network. That got bought by Google and dumped into the trash can. Then it was Twitter. It’s evolved so much more that “what are you doing?” has lost its value. Recently, Yahoo! launched its own play FireEagle in private beta (we covered it here) which is starting the location-craze again — with plans to have multiple input/output methods looming across the web and devices. But that’s not so much of a location-based social network as it is a “where are you, exactly?” version of Twitter. Here’s one that is — BrightKite.

Currently in a private beta also (first three comments get an invite!), the service is based around locations and what you and other people — your friends, the world, etc. — are doing at what places. After signing up, users can search for their location in the places box and “check in” — similar to Fire Eagle, a Facebook status or a Twitter message. After checking into that place, friends are updated, and you can see who is within your proximity or where your friends are at the moment in the same fashion.

Once the user is checked into a place, there are a number of actions that can be taken. On that place itself, a 140-character Twitter-like note (i.e. we went to Alcatraz today!) or a photo can be posted, and recorded in almost the form of a travel diary — except that it’s ongoing. An additional step that you can take is opt into their mobile service and “placemark” your current place — useful if it’s a specific location. So, for example, where you’re at work, you can check in by texting “@work” to 80289. This gives identity to places and lets you easily let your friends know where you are.

Apart from travellers, whom it’s obviously extremely useful for, I think a huge potential market is urban hipsters. With Twitter being turned into a more of a “broadcasting” mechanism than meeting up and seeing what your real friends are upto, not to mention the vast amount of noise and busyness that fills the streams, BrightKite has the potential to be an invaluable tool.

If there ever would be an eBay 2.0 (or an eBay for the Web 2.0 generation), here it is. Wigix, which stands for “WantItGotItExchange,” is a newly launched service based around the idea of a community-driven marketplace. The site takes the idea of eBay — a community-powered auctions market — a step further, by adding a stock market-esque element of being able to “buy” and “sell” the product at a price determined by the market.

Here’s how it works. Like eBay or any other community shopping market sites, users can buy and sell products. The kicker is: the price, rather than being determined by the seller itself, is determined by a standardized market at Wigix. The service lists market products and has standardized pages for each (saving time and avoiding the seller having to create it for each listing). Then, following the concepts of demand and supply, the price is determined by the number of buyers or the number of sellers a product has. The more the people buy a product, the lower the price gets, and vice-versa.

So in concept, the market decides an equillibrium price for both the buyer and seller, and depending on the particular situation and the price of the product elsewhere, they can decide whether the offer from Wigix is worthy enough. Like most stock markets, the price will more often than not be beneficial to both parties with the equation of time in place (should I sell now or anticipate a higher price and sell later?), which is what makes it work.

The idea, in concept, is needless to say nothing less than brilliant. There’s a value proposition for everybody: sellers don’t have to spend the time and effort creating product listings and deciding prices, and buyers don’t have to look through 10,000 listings and decide which one to bid on and scan through seller ratings. Additionally, the service boasts no listing fees and no fees for items under $25. If you’re looking for an alternative to eBay or Amazon, Wigix is a definite contender.

I have been a skeptic of the mobile platform for quite some time — specifically, mobile advertising and how effective it really is. But recently after watching Robert Scoble’s interview with Omar Hamoui, founder and CEO of AdMob, I’m convinced the platform will be a significant contender of ad dollars and perhaps the most effective/helpful/useful advertising platform in the future. There’s something huge happening here — and I’ve only just caught on to it.

Why Search Advertising Works
First, let’s back up a few steps and see why Google’s bread and butter — contextual search ads — is so effective. In one word, the reason is intent. When people search for something, they are essentially looking for something. More specifically, amidst their quest, they’re granting their search engine to guide them there. Notice that this is much, much different from “Just put Lost back already!” or “Oh, that’s nice. Nike has a new pair of shoes out and it syncs with iPod” or worse still, “Ok, random and annoying Win iPods Instantly site, I just want to Super Wall my friend“.

The intent is most of the times connected to monetary potential, in that the searcher is looking to buy something, or for a service they need, or a guide to something. Connect that with an online shoe store or a digital camera repair service that gives upto a 30% discount — and bingo. You have a clickthrough 5% of the time, you have a purchase 5% of the time, and the advertiser is happy, giving Google another 5 months more access into their knee-deep pockets. And that’s why Sergey Brin can afford to have a marriage in the Bahamas.

Why Mobile Advertising Could Work Better
So, what do you get when you take intent — the core of search advertising
— a step further? Need. And in one word, that is why mobile advertising may prove to be more valuable, effective, useful, and helpful than search advertising.

When I’m visiting San Francisco next time, and I’m in town, hungry for some Pizza, finding a good Pizza place is not going to be my intent, it’s going to be my need. And when I’m doing some hunting on the iPhone and come across an ad that says “Best Pizza in San Francisco — 3 Blocks Away! Click here to pinpoint location,” you can assume a happy $30 customer in the next 15 minutes at that very moment.

Similarly, one of the AdMob ad demos that is shown in the Scoble interview is that of Starbucks on the iPhone (embedded below). Arguably, this is better than my example above. In an ordinary mobile portal page, an ad on the top says “I see Starbucks in your future.” The user clicks the ad, which drops down to a textbox asking for a zipcode. The user enters one (in the future, GPS could very well replace this), and up pops the iPhone Google Maps application showing all Starbucks locations in the entered zip code. BINGO! Advertising, usefulness, and intuitiveness to its best — Starbucks has a new customer.

Conclusion
Certainly I’m no genius, and the possibilities here seem very clear even to me. If not clear, certain. Advertising works best where there is intent, desire, and need — and all three are more than present here. Obviously, not everywhere, and not on every single impression delivered, but watching the Scoble interview where CEO Omar Hamoui sets up a simple ad for a photo sharing website and gets 100 clicks and thousands of impressions within a couple of minutes time, it certainly seems more effective that what we’ve seen on the web.

To sum up, keep your eyes out for players like AdMob and the mobile landscape in general, because the emergence of local, mobile, and advertising is going to bring together a wholly new, different, and effective platform for advertising — and shake up some markets no doubt — to create the most effective advertising platform ever. The question is, when?

The blogosphere’s been abuzz lately about Twitter — everyday, it seems a Twitter disaster makes its way to the blogs of its very users, leaving them with nothing more than a cringe and a hope. Whether it was the weekend downtime where users’ Twitter streams looked more than half empty, or fellow Web 2.0 enthusiast Orli Yakuel’s privacy disaster where her direct messages made their way into the very public Twitter stream, or, most recently, the firing/resignation of Twitter Chief Architect Blaine cook, Twitter has been very much in the public eye.

As I Twittered yesterday (how’s that for irony?): “Does anyone else notice the Facebook hype/meme/craziness is dying? If Twitter can hold itself, it’s TNBT. Problem is, it can’t and hasn’t.” And I beleive that. If MySpace was 2005, YouTube 2006, and Facebook 2007, I have a feeling Twitter has the potential to be the talk of the year for 2008. But the problem is — when you can’t merely stay alive for half the time, there’s very little chance everyone is going to talk about anything other than the fact that you can’t merely stay alive.

As Michael Arrington suggests in his post, it doesn’t matter if Blaine Cook was fired or resigned — what matters is that things can only get better from here. Cook semi-famously gave a talk at the Silicon Valley Ruby conference about scaling Rails and Twitter. In one of the slides (pictured right), he’s quoted as calling the scaling issue “Really Easy” and has a six-step secret sauce as to how to go about doing it, which very obviously hasn’t worked. Infact, I question whether he even went past Step 1 — it seems that lately, it’s been only the users complaining.

That said, there’s still some time left for Twitter. If things are, indeed, only going to get better from at from this point — with their new infrastructure, new hirees (Cook’s replacements — among which — an expert who was involved in scaling Blogger), then Twitter still has a chance to win back the hearts of its cringing users. And I have to say, I’m one of them. It’s clear that its users very much care about the service, and as a result, whenever Twitter has an outage (both literally and figuratively), we go through the same cringing/loving feeling as someone watching their sibling perform badly at stage. It’s not nice, and we want it to get better, but we’re powerless when it comes to it.

Over the weekend, Startup School was held at Stanford University, put together by Paul Graham’s seed-stage venture fund Y Combinator. The event consisted of a number of successful entrepreneurs giving talks and wisdom to an audience of in-progress or future entrepreneurs.

One of the most interesting talks was given by Paul Graham himself, who talked about the act of ‘being good’ and benevolency in startups. In his talk, one of his main examples was a Y Combinator-funded search engine for electronic parts and industrial components called Octopart, which is being chased by industrial component giant Digi-Key for having their prices in their search results. Graham’s point about benevolency and Octopart was that if you try to do something valuable and good to the world and there are people trying to stop it, other people will try to help you. So, having only heard about them in his talk, I figured I’d do my bit.

Founded by a Boulder and two Berkeley graduates who opted to start a startup rather than pursuing their Physics PhD, Octopart is a search engine which targets a simple niche: electronic parts.

If you’ve ever had to look for electronic or industrial components on the Internet using Google, you would know it’s not a pretty experience. Finding the part you’re looking for is one thing, finding information on it is another, and finding a place to buy it is a wholly another. That’s where Octopart come in.

Octopart consists of two parts (if you can excuse the pun ). Firstly, there’s the traditional search engine aspect, where you can type the name of or the type of part directly. The search results you get show all the corresponding parts that match your search and listings on places your can purchase the part, the price by ratio, and availability. Additionally, you can refine by manufacturer or supplier and sort through them by relevance, price, and availability.

Secondly, the homepage lists categories in the format of a hierarchical directory, which you can browse through to find what you’re looking for. From categories that range from ‘Amplifiers & Buffers’ to ‘Memory’ and ‘Microprocessors’, drilling down reveals the number of parts that are in the category, until you end up with the results page for what you’re looking for.

Octopart is no every day man’s game. Being more of a software than hardware fanatic myself (except for when it comes to gadgets), I think I’d find little use for it. However, that’s not to say that its target market is small or any less important. For anyone who works in the electronics industry or tears apart appliances in the weekend, I would imagine it’s an extremely useful, if not essential tool. It’s not going to conquer the world, but I have a feeling it’s going to do well for itself. After all, its founders are, indeed, the next billionaires.

For the last couple of days, I’ve been vigorously trying out a range of productivity tools. Given that I’m going to be at home for the next couple of weeks — I figured it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to get some work done. So when a couple of friends Twittered about RescueTime, I was immediately curious. With buzz words like “web-based time management” lurking their homepage I anticipated another project management web app with the to-do list and time tracker and the usual feature-full things that are supposed to make me more productivity, but it’s something completely different.

Founded by Tony Wright after selling his AJAXy job search engine Jobby to Jobster in May 2006, the project has raised funding from Y Combinator and goes after the idea of “ridiculously easy time management.” We wrote last year about Wakoopa, a service that tracks your software usage a la Last.fm for music, and while similar, RescueTime takes the concept a step further: instead of just telling you, it wants to make your more productive with this data.

The way that the service works is that users sign up, and install the RescueTime tracker utility for their OS (Windows and Mac both supported.) RescueTime then sits silently in your system bar (or taskbar in Windows), watches, and reports back to its servers as you spend countless hours answering e-mail and watching stupid funny videos on YouTube.

Let it do its thing for a day or so, and you get this in your RescueTime dashboard:

Perfect! Now the whole world knows how much time I spend watching useless celebrity gossip channels on Slingplayer.

But of course, the tool doesn’t end there. Once you’ve collected a slew of data, RescueTime lets you tag particular applications and categorize them in this way (i.e. work, personal, media, useless, etc.) And here’s the cool part — you can then use these tags to set up special goals and alerts for yourself when you’re spending more time than you need to on them. For example, I set up a goal stating, “I want to spend less than 3 hours per day on entertainment.” Now I can subscribe to an RSS feed or get RescueTime to SMS my phone everytime I’m over my goal limit.

Undoubtedly, RescueTime is one of the coolest and most intuitive time management utilities I’ve tried out. What makes it so is its core idea of “ridiciously easy” and “no data entry needed.” Additionally, for the first time, computer users can finally measure their real productivity and act on them — as opposed to constantly training their mind to “watch less YouTube videos” or “stay out of Facebook.” For the value it provides, I’d definitely pay for such a tool, too, if that’s the direction they want to take for the future.

Ed. Note: In addition to the regular startup/product reviews, I’ll be covering more news/acquisitions/trends stories for the next couple of weeks. Depending on how that works out, I’ll either stick or go back to writing single-handedly about products and services. If you have an opinion or a suggestion on what you’d like to see, I’d love to hear it.

In a brief blog post, CEO Hugh Crean confirmed today in a brief blog post that FareCast, a travel airfare search/prediction service we covered briefly on Rev2 in 2006, has been acquired by Microsoft. SeattlePI, which broke the rumor last week, later confirmed the price tag to be around $115 million.

Given the partnership with MSN Travel, the acquisition most likely seemed fit for Microsoft to expand their presence in the market. The company has raised around $32 million in funding to date, and SeattlePI reports that multiple offers were most likely considered before a decision to go with Microsoft was made.

CEO Hugh Crean stated in the short blog post, “We’re excited to confirm that Farecast has been acquired by Microsoft! This acquisition creates tremendous opportunities for the Farecast team and our customers.  We look forward to sharing more details in the weeks to come.  On behalf of the Farecast team, thank you.”

The acquisition is undoubtedly a part of Microsoft’s stategy Steve Ballmer unveiled at the last Web 2.0 conference to acquire 20 companies a year. The hefty price tag most likely comes from its investment dollars than real value — while undoubtedly a useful service, you’d have to be a little insane to think the service is around $115 million. In any case, congrats to the folks at FareCast for getting the deal done.

Being one of the first contenders and applicants on the Semantic Web/Web 3.0 bandwagon, one of the hyped products over the year has been Twine. Richard MacManus covered it on ReadWriteWeb back in October last year, and the service recently went into private beta with invites going out to a few bloggers and the press. I had the opportunity to try it out, and I’ll be the second to say it after Marshall Kirkpatrick — it disappoints.

Twine calls itself a social bookmarking, research, and discovery tool — although there are many other obvious applications. The idea behind the service is that users create a ‘Twine’ based on a particular subject/topic/category/hierarchy, and add things such as bookmarks, documents, notes, products, photos, and videos to it using the web interface, e-mail, or the bookmarklet.

The idea is that Twine can semantically sort and discover through this information — uncovering names of people, places, and organizations, and recommending related content to users. In theory, obviously, this is a genius idea — as is the whole Semantic Web. However, the problem is that Twine doesn’t execute as it should, and we’re left with a crippled, half-useful product.

I created an example Twine for use and went throughout the web bookmarking random articles. Coming back to Twine, I noticed a lot of articles I’d bookmarked had been left as they are — relevant content which Twine should essentially recognize wasn’t of any use, and as a result, my experience at Twine was no different than any other social bookmarking tool.

The other problem with Twine is that its user interface is cluttered, confusing, and simply unattractive. If I’m a serious researcher using the tool to gather data, it’s not something I’d want to spend a lot of time in. I came across a number of dead ends and places where the question, “um, now what?” was begged to being asked.

On the other hand, Twine does have a number of features that make it worthwhile. Firstly, I’m a fan of its collaborative features which let you add people to the Twine. If you’re in a team and able to get members used to the system, it can be worthwhile. Another useful feature is the ability to post things to Twine through e-mail (e.g. yourtwine@post.twine.com) — a great alternative if you’re not willing to put up with their clunky UI.

In a few words, Twine is simply del.icio.us with a more complicated UI and offering. It’s a tool that has a lot of promises and in theory, an idea waiting to happen. However, in its current state, it poses a few problems and just isn’t there yet. But seeing they’ve just entered private beta, I’d give them a few months to clear up the air and revisit it — maybe it’s one of those things that gets better over time.

Relaunching a couple of days ago was ReadBurner, acquired last month by Adam Ostrow of Mashable and a few others. ReadBurner combines the idea of community aggregation, as with sites like Digg, with the Attention data from Google Reader — that is, the number of “shares” a story has.

Since Google Reader added social sharing capibilities — the ability to “share” a story to your network and vice versa — not only has usage taken off, but a lot of that usage is being recorded and attention data being built up. ReadBurner turns this data into a useful, meme aggregator-like site where users can check out what’s popular, upcoming, and most recent on Google Reader. Additionally, stories are categorized into Web, Desktop, Mobile, and Apple.

While some may be quick to notice that only a tiny amount amount of people control what’s hot on ReadBurner, they’ve also used this to their advantage and built up value in a Google Reader “share.” For example, users can’t directly vote on the site — the action can only be taken on Google Reader itself — so you can ensure every single share has value and isn’t just a nod-to-the-head as with sites like Digg and Reddit. Also, if anything, this will boost up Google Reader’s activity of shared items — great for the community in general — and given Google’s tedious sign up procedure, keep spammers and spam out of it.

A useful feature in ReadBurner — however simple it is — is the “Google Reader” tab. Clicking on it brings up Google Reader in an iFrame and lets users use the service directly from ReadBurner’s site. This means folks simply have to visit readburner.com instead of reader.google.com, and they’ll get the best of both worlds — a way to read through their RSS feeds, and navigate through the community’s top content.

Until Google comes out with its own ReadBurner-like interface to navigating through its shared items, ReadBurner is safe in the game. The site poses a new alternative to tech news fanatics such as myself who are constantly pouncing between sites like Techmeme, Digg, Reddit, and Hacker News to get our bread and butter.