Surf-Hint news of web 2.0 web site and hint of web site that worth to be visited

Awww…their first outage. It’s more of a right of passage than anything.

Newly launched Hulu is showing a big, fat 404 error on their home page right now. It’s too bad, because I’ve become somewhat hooked on it over the last few days. Despite my constant criticism over the summer, I really like the service they launched.

Hulu videos seem to be streaming just fine at AOL Video.

And since Hulu isn’t available anywhere except the U.S., being down in the middle of the night PST isn’t so bad. Let’s hope this billion dollar company can keep the light on, though, because we’re watching. And waiting.

Update: aaaaand they’re back. Up at 2 am PST, which means confirmed downtime was just one hour.

Rumor has it that Israeli video startup 5Min, which has user-uploaded “how to” videos, has raised another $5 million in cash, from Spark Capital.

We covered the startup recently - think YouTube with special features like slow motion to make the videos more useful. Our original profile is here.

Ouch! How Not To Do An Angel Round

The company previously raised $300,000 in angel funding. For those entrepreneurs who are curious about the economics of angel rounds, the details around 5min are interesting. In their case, it was ugly. An Israeli (print) magazine called Globes recently got their hands on the capitalization table of 5min and published the details. The angels ended up with nearly half the company for that $300k, leaving the three founders (the first three on the list) and all other employees to split the rest.

It’s rare that this kind of information about a company is published publicly, but it shows how angels can squeeze a company if they have the negotiating leverage.

MoFuse, the service for converting your website into a mobile site, is launching its public beta in a couple of days. We first mentioned MoFuse here, when the company launched its private beta. It’s since gained about 1,000 registered users, serving up about 30,000 mobile page views each week.

With MoFuse, there are some additional custom options that most other mobile website converters don’t have, such as a WYSIWYG editor and custom color options. It also acts as a mobile portal and ad network, which you can participate in and earn a 50% split in its rev-share model. A similar service is Mowser.

PayPerPost has changed its name to IZEA, which is an effort to better organize its multiple web properties. Under the IZEA umbrella, there’s also Zookoda, BloggersChoiceAwards, RockStartup, RSSBrief, URLBrief, and BlogInSpace, to name a few.

And that’s not all IZEA has up its sleeves. This name change aligns with the company’s launching of a new service, code named Argus, which will be revealing its alpha version next week at PostieCon, the company’s annual user conference. Not many details have been given about Argus, other than what we picked up on during its logo vote, but it will go along with most of what IZEA is about–marketers and bloggers, enabling them to become one and the same, operating from a single account. There will be reporting tools, open APIs, analytics, social networking features, and other management tools.

I imagine Argus will have something to do with the better organization of IZEA’s several operating websites, with a unified distribution service of some sort, which can be leveraged by both web publishers and advertisers.

Semantic search engine Hakia has just released a new social networking feature, called Meet Others (MO). The basic idea is to "meet others" who asked the same query. This is something I've never seen in a search engine before - and actually I'm not convinced that social networking is a good fit with search. But let's take a look at how this works, using an example provided to us by Hakia:

1. You ask a query and then receive your search results:

2. You will see an icon in the top-right of search results that says "Meet Others who asked the same query". If you click on the button, you enter into a room (if the room exists) of people who have a) asked the same or similar query; and b) decided to post a message to the room.

3. You can either post a message or contact someone who has already posted a message. To post, you only need to authenticate your email address - there is no other personal info or registration required. You can choose the method you'd like to be contacted: via email (which is masked), or IM (Skype of MSN). So if a user has IM contact enabled, you can start chatting with that person with one click.

There is a voting system too, which together with message age determines how long messages stay in the room for.

Conclusion

Hakia MO kind of resembles Yahoo! Answers, in that you are basically asking a question and then getting feedback from other users. However Hakia points out that MO is not a collaborative search result voting system. They are calling MO a "peer-to-peer transactional platform". Rather than Yahoo! Answers, Hakia says that MO most resembles Craigslist - because "users post content and there are no registration requirements."

In evaluating Hakia HO, I'm in two minds about the usefulness of social networking in a search engine. On one hand, it enables you to join groups of like-minded users in a very specific topic. I'm a big Velvet Underground fan for example, so if I search for "velvet underground" then it might be useful and/or enjoyable for me to join a "room" full of VU fans and begin conversations.

On the other hand, social networking is not something I am usually looking for in a search engine. I use search engines to gather information - in and out. Once I get what I came for, I'm outa there. So, will enough users join topic-focused rooms to make Hakia's MO a compelling feature?

I guess we'll find out, but it's an open question worth seeing the results of. Google would probably be very interested to see if they can integrate social networking into their search homepage, given their new OpenSocial APIs. Although, Hakia says they have a patent application on MO - so maybe Google won't be able to do it anyway!

What do you think: do search and social networking go together? Or should they be kept separate?

Disclosure: Hakia is a sponsor of our network blog AltSearchEngines and recently they signed up as a Read/WriteWeb sponsor for November.

Over the past 10 years, Corel, Sun, IBM and others have tried to compete with Microsoft in the office software business, but thus far none of them have been able to take a significant chunk of Microsoft's large market share, which generates revenues exceeding $15 billion each year. These companies have tried everything; including Sun open sourcing their StarOffice suite and releasing it as the free OpenOffice. Yet, even this very compelling move has not been able to make a serious dent in the market.

However, with web 2.0 and the rise of Rich Internet Applications there are renewed hopes for entrepreneurs to be able to compete with Microsoft's Office juggernaut. Now these smaller players can leverage the sharing & collaboration capabilities of the Internet, remove installation & maintenance frictions, and provide globally accessible office software.

Competitive Landscape

By snapping up Virtual Ubiquity, Adobe has become the latest player in the web office market, but Google, Yahoo!, Zoho, and even Microsoft, are all established players in the game as well. Let's take a look at all of the major contenders and their strategies:

Google Apps

Google, whose web office solutions are based on AJAX, probably has the strongest and most clear online office strategy among the big companies. In order to provide offline capabilities (still a must for many, especially outside the USA) Google developed Google Gears, which is a set of browser plugins and Javascript libraries that enable AJAX applications to run offline.

Google built its web office suite via acquisitions. The startups they have acquired are: Gtalkr (instant messaging), Writely (word processing), iRows (spreadsheets), JotSpot (wiki), Tonic Systems (presentations), and Zenter (presentations). By acquiring outside talent in the web office space, Google was able to bring together a team of well focused engineers to execute their Google Apps vision.

All of Google's offerings are freely available thanks to their ad-based business model. For enterprises, Google offers an ad-free subscription based model.

Google is betting on centralized servers and thin clients. That's why they are spending $600 million to build a new data center in North Carolina - the purpose is to provide 100% uptime which is a must for enterprise grade acceptability.

Microsoft Office Live

Microsoft, the old stalwart of the office software space has a dilemma: they need to find some way to simultaneously compete with the free web based offerings from their rivals, while not hurting their existing massive revenue stream from their ubiquitous PC-based office suite. For that reason, Microsoft is not in a great position to make bold moves in the web office market.

Perhaps that's why Microsoft's vision is evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Microsoft doesn't believe in Google's thin client model and it betting that people will continue having strong computers at home and in the office. Microsoft is not trying to centralize software, but instead keep it on the client side. In traditional terms, this means more privacy as well.

That's why, with Office Live, Microsoft is centralizing only the data storage tier. Microsoft's assumption is that every computer will have Microsoft Office installed - that's why they are readying the release of a free, limited and ad-supported version of their Office suite. Further, like Google, Microsoft recently invested $550 million to build a massive data center in San Antonio, with the purpose of providing full availability for its upcoming enterprise grade services.

Making Office free and universally accessible seems like a good idea, but personally, I'm skeptical of the user satisfaction level in a world where all applications are shifting to the web.

Yahoo! / Zimbra

Yahoo! made a late entry to the web office market by acquiring Zimbra for $350 million in mid-September. Zimbra is certainly a great web-based enterprise application provider and will bring a lot to Yahoo!, but Zimbra focuses mainly on groupware features and competes directly with Microsoft Exchange - not Microsoft Office. It is not yet known what Yahoo! will do with Zimbra. They could choose to focus on its office functions (spreadsheets, word processor) and take them out of beta. Or, alternatively, it may use Zimbra to position itself as the leading email communications company, with both hosted, ad-supported (Y! Mail) and ad-free, enterprise (Zimbra) offerings, rather than compete directly in the contentious online office market.

In any case, by following Zimbra's approach, Yahoo! appears to be betting on a decentralized office 2.0 structure. Maybe that's because Yahoo! does not want to invest in beefy server farms like their rivals, which is risky, and possibly is more concerned about privacy than others.

Adobe / Virtual Ubiquity

Yahoo! was not the only major player to enter the web office space in September: Adobe's Virtual Ubiquity acquisition seemed to announce that company's intention to compete for online office market share. Adobe uses its Flash and Flex technologies to power its fledgling office suite. However, there are some obvious concerns here:

• Adobe is inexperienced compared to rivals such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft at offering hosted services
• Enterprise-grade acceptability of Flash technology as an office suite backend is questionable

Alternatively, Adobe may have less ambitious plans and the reason why they snapped up Virtual Ubiquity may be to showcase the possibilities that the Flex platform can bring.

Zoho

Zoho is not as big or as well funded as the aforementioned players, but offers perhaps the most complete office suite on the Internet. Similar to Google, Zoho has a fully centralized approach and its solutions are based on Javascript technologies. Zoho's suite includes a word processor, presentation app, spreadsheets, wiki, CRM, web conferencing, project management, and much more. However, one problem that Zoho faces is that their applications are loosely connected. There is no single sign-on and sharing capabilities are weak or nonexistent between most of its parts. Trust among enterprise users may also be an issue - large corporations may feel more comfortable keeping their data with a public company. These factors put Zoho in a good position for potential acquisition.

Others

Smaller players, such as ThinkFree, suffer from being based on deprecated technologies like Java Applets. There is also gOffice, which seriously lacks usability.

Surprise Player, meebo?

meebo is one of the most successful online instant messaging clients, but with this week's annoncement of a platform there now exists the potential for a lot of development to occur around their user base. By allowing third-parties to tap into meebo's communication platform and users, the company's new development platform could actually be used to create intriguing web office applications. Below is a mockup of what a meebo platform app might look like:

The picture above imagines Google Presentations embedded into meebo.

Conclusion

Finally, we may see new web office attempts from Sun (JavaFX) and Laszlo (OpenLaszlo) - because, like Adobe, they are working hard to prove the readiness of their RIA platforms for the enterprise.

In any case, the future is online and all software makers will need to make their applications available through the web. For me, the big question is whether Google's thin client model will work or not. This model would lead us to live with dumb machines that hook into Google's server farms to do any real computation.

What do you think the future of Rich Internet Applications and specifically the online office will look like? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

This might be a bit hard to grasp if you’re not an online advertising guru, so bear with me. eXelate is a company founded in 2006. which just received $4 million in first-round financing from Carmel Ventures.

That was the easy part. Understanding what they actually do can be tricky, especially if you don’t speak marketingese which is pretty much the only language services like these use in their PR materials. eXelate is setting up eXelate Targeting eXchange, a marketplace that tells you what kind of users are likely to visit what site. So, if you need to deploy a baseball-related ad, they’ll tell you which sites in their network are visited by baseball fans.

Thus, the ads aren’t contextual, like on Google AdSense, but behavioral. The user’s browsing habits and interests determine which ad will be shown, not the content of the site itself. This way - or so they say - ads work better, and ad networks get more money.

Another product that eXelate is launching is called Delayed Ads, which are basically shown to the user later, when they visit a site that’s affiliated with your ad network.

It’s quite an interesting beast, this behavioral ad business, but eXelate has some big obstacles to overcome, the biggest being the fact that big sites like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have enough behavioral data to know stuff about you before you do and can use this data to display ads with extreme precision if they choose to do so. However, companies like Google have been known to buy companies like eXelate, and although billions have already been spent on online advertising by the Big Three, perhaps a new approach can still inject new life into the online ad business.

Also see: The Gphone is coming; how Google could rewrite the rules

We’ve been waiting a long time to hear from Google about its mobile plans and the so-called Gphone or Google-powered phones. According to one report, that wait may be over soon.

The Wall Street Journal today said Google is expected to announce within the next two weeks advanced software and services that would allow handset makers to bring Google-powered phones to market by next summer. Google’s goal is to make applications and services as accessible on cellphones as they are on the Internet.

To compliment the WSJ’s story, Reuters noted that Google is in active talks with Verizon, the No. 2 carrier in the U.S., about putting Google applications on phones it offers.

And in early October, The New York Times posited that the Google phone may not be a phone at all but a mobile operating system.

Obviously speculation abounds, which the tech community thrives on. The WSJ believes that Google-powered phones will wrap together several Google applications like the search engine, Google Maps, YouTube, and Gmail — no surprise there. It makes sense.

The WSJ says the “most radical element” of Google’s plan is its push to make software for the phone(s) open “right down to the operating system” — again, no surprise. It makes sense.

If the Google phones are “open”, independent software developers would gain access to the tools they need to build additional phone features, something that Nokia is already experimenting with. Apple will also be opening up, to some degree at least, early next year.

Of course all of this — and what’s been written the past two months — is speculation. It’s time we hear from Google.

Original concepts: last100 and Lorin Wood.

Also see: The Gphone is coming; how Google could rewrite the rules

Now you have no excuse for missing that Golden State Warriors game. You will be able to watch all games televised by ESPN and TNT this NBA season no matter where you are and what equipment you have on hand.

Thanks to new digital rights, ESPN and TNT will start the NBA season by streaming games live on their broadband outlets — ESPN360 and TNT Overtime (available on TNT.tv and NBA.com). You can watch games on TV, on your phone, or on a computer. (MediaDailyNews.)

“Part of the point is that when we get exclusive games, we can broadcast them anywhere,” John Skipper, the executive vice president for ESPN content, told The York Times.

The digital rights, announced in June, will pay the NBA $7.4 billion through the 2015-2016 season. As part of the deal, ESNP and TNT can deploy their digital rights this season. The first year of the TV portions of the contract does not start until after next season.

For ESPN, it can stream games on the Mobile TV service that is available on Verizon’s MediaFlo, as well as on ESPN360. The rights also allow for live and on-demand streaming of ESPN studio shows and live audio streaming of their radio and TV shows dedicated to the NBA.

TNT, which as the same rights as ESPN, will use its broadband service, TNT Overtime, to stream its games, highlights and other NBA programming. TNT can also stream its games to cellphones, offer NBA podcasts, and expand league content into areas like fantasy games.

The NBA also has granted digital rights to the networks on platforms not yet available.

Wonder how Yao Ming will look on that tiny cellphone display.

“Here at Google, we take our user’s privacy very seriously. In fact, we’re not even allowing ourselves to joke about this topic – yes, it’s that serious. To give you an idea, here is some of the data we don’t pass on to anyone outside our 10,000+ employee company (provided there’s no subpoena making us pass it on, and provided there’s nothing we define as “imminent harm“; and even if we pass something on, we make sure third parties have privacy policies like ours):

• Your registration confirmation containing the information on sites you signed up for, and the password you’ve chosen. It is safe with us in Gmail.
• Your web search history containing your dreams and wishes, and the one time you googled your ex – these are all protected by us.
• The Google Toolbar URL data transmitted to us in case you enabled PageRank checking. We keep this very safe at Google.
• The love messages you sent via Google Talk in June using the off-the-record option. Googlers won’t tell a thing!
• The sites you clicked on in Google results, especially those sites (you know what we mean). Quiet like a fish.
• Your private information which you provided to social network Orkut. It’s completely safe with Google.
• The kind of sites you visit which contain AdSense or (soon) DoubleClick ads. We value your privacy with this data.
• The things you bought using Google Checkout, including that strange DVD from March 14th, 3:30pm. Our employee’s lips are sealed on that one, and your credit card number is safe with Checkout.
• The content of the confidential company memo you saved in Google Docs, the one about the new direction your company wants to take. Trust us, it’s our secret too now.
• The Hotmail email you send to someone who has a Gmail account. We don’t let others read those!
• Your Google Spreadsheet with your income and taxes since 1999. Our employees won’t share with anyone!
• Your Google Presentation containing those hush-hush product releases for next year. No kiss and tell.
• The one time you researched bomb building on Google Groups. We turn a blind eye on that one, perhaps you researched for a friend.
• Your embarrassing party pics of your private Picasa album titled “spring_break”. We understand what it could mean to your future employer, so no word on it from us.
• The content of your Blogspot blog in which you go through great efforts to post anonymously, as the diary-style is quite telling. No sir, no one will find out.
• That email you were typing but then canceled, which we had transmitted to our server thanks to Gmail’s Ajax auto-saving. We know you didn’t want that to share, so we won’t either!
• Every single sentence you translated in the Google Translator. Every single one is safe with us.
• The sites you visited while installing the Google Web Accelerator proxy. We don’t want to share them, really.
• Those random notes you’ve been collecting at our Google Notebook service. Like Fort Knox.
• The one time you searched for “Falun Gong” on Google.cn. Our support person responding to the Chinese government knows that might have just been an accident.
• The restaurant you looked up in Google Maps last night, and the calendar entry you then added, and the subsequent mail you wrote to Susan. Shhh....
• The Google Page Creator draft of your new homepage which you then decided to trash fearing your neighbor would object to your political views. Secret, we promise!

As you can see – and we don’t think we need to offer additional proof for this other than our word, like the time we said we “don’t do evil” and then never did evil – all your data is safe with us and our employees. Again, except for those subpoeanas (and assuming we will not be hacked, and that no service exploits will be found), but to quote from our PDF on the subject of log retention which we linked from our blog ...

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As a matter of policy, we don’t provide specifics on law enforcement requests to Google.>>

... you can see we don’t even share info on what we’re sharing – we’re that privacy aware! In fact, we urge you to increase your trust with us if there’s still a doubt lingering with you. Because, in the words of our chief executive officer Eric Schmidt this year:

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And:

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Please visit our new Google Privacy Channel at YouTube to find out more. We won’t tell anyone which videos you watched. Unless they’re really funny ones. (Kidding!!!)”