eMediaOne

Even Circuit City’s CEO admitted that liquidation was a very real possibility if a sale of the company didn’t occur by January 16th, and needless to say, time’s up. According to a breaking report from the AP, the once colossal electronics retailer will indeed be forced to liquidate, which should bring happy times for bargain hunters and sad times for employees. Now that details are starting to flow in, we’re told that it will liquidate 567 of its US stores after failing to secure a buyer or refinancing deal. For those who care, Great American Group LLC, Hudson Capital Partners LLC, SB Capital Group LLC and Tiger Capital Group LLC have been chosen as liquidators.

[Thanks, Doug]

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Circuit City fails to be wanted, will now be liquidated originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Our biggest gripe with the Peek email-only handheld has always been the incredibly annoying $19.95 per month data plan. If you jump in today, however, you can forget all about those recurring charges. It seems the suits at Peek have finally stumbled upon what could actually be a viable business model for this unique handset, as they’re offering the unit up for $299.95 with data included for the life of the device. Unfortunately, the deal is a one-day only affair, but truthfully, we fully expect this option to become the norm in the not-too-distant future.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Peek for Life: $299.95 one-day sale means no monthly fees originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Skout, a location-based social network similar to the likes of Loopt and BrightKite, has decided to take a new approach to mobile-based networking. In conjunction with the upcoming release of its first iPhone application, the site has decided to abandon its role as a standard social network, and is instead reinventing itself as one of the iPhone’s first location-based dating services.

CEO Christian Wiklund says that location-based functionality is increasingly becoming a commodity, and that networks are going to have to do something to differentiate themselves. While some of the larger networks do offer some features that involve flirting and meeting new people, Wiklund says that because these are only secondary features people will probably use them less.

The iPhone app is planned for release next week (you can see a preview of it below), and doesn’t seem to be too different from the apps we’ve seen from Loopt and BrightKite – it seems that the biggest difference will lie in the intent of its users.

To coincide with the new iPhone application, Skout will also be revamping its homepage to reflect its new goals. Fortunately Wiklund says that 83% of Skout’s 20,000 active users were using the network for dating and flirting already, so the switch shouldn’t be too jarring. The company has also brought on a set of new advisers to help guide its new position as a dating site, including match.com founder Gary Kremen.

I think that’s there’s a definite market for dating apps on the iPhone and other smart phones, but I question if there is demand for yet another dating network – many people already belong to established sites like Match.com and eHarmony, and won’t be eager to deal with yet another one. But if Skout can form partnerships with some of these established sites, offering either white-labeled application or importing their accounts into Skout, then it could do very well for itself (the site has already been in talks with some, but won’t say who).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Ustream is anticipating Apple’s approval of the first non-jailbroken iPhone application that will let users record and broadcast live video from the device. Last month MobileCrunch obtained a picture of the application running on a test phone. Yesterday, co-founder John Ham demo’d the product for me here at TechCrunch – see the video below.

The application lets users broadcast live video from the phone, as well as read and participate in user comments.

Competitor Qik has had a similar application running on hacked phones since August 2008 (also here). Flixwagon has a similar application for jailbroken iPhones. But no one has gotten one through Apple’s approval process.

Here’s the video:

Note that this is a different application than we wrote about yesterday. Yesterday’s application allows people to watch Ustream videos on their iPhone (which is also really cool). This app lets people broadcast live video from their iPhone to the Internet.

The application is currently pending approval from Apple, and Ustream isn’t saying much about when that might be. But stay tuned, hopefully this is coming very soon.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

This week’s Elevator Pitch comes from Sqworl. I picked it because it looks like it was filmed in this guy’s college dorm room, yet he manages to get across what his site does succinctly: condense a collection of URLs into one URL. Points off, however, for not mentioning the business model (advertising, obviously).

Sqworl lets you put together a collection of links and share those with one Sqworl link. You can also take notes below each Website thumbnail, which could come in handy when you are researching a purchase and want to keep all of your links in one place (see screenshot below), or simply want to share a collection with others. (Like the one I made of awesome tech blogs). The actual process of adding links is a bit clunky. You have to cut and paste each URL into the site. A browser add-on that lets you bookmark pages as you browse would be better.

But I like the idea of collapsing an entire group of links into a single URL.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

After November’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, blame was flying thick and fast and some of it landed on Google Maps. That was embarrassing, but now the understandably jumpy residents are worrying about a new threat: open Wi-Fi networks.

When it was revealed that terrorists had hacked a tourist’s computer in order to send an email shortly before the attacks, cybersecurity became a pressing issue. Mumbai police are now cruising around the metropolis looking for unsecured routers and poorly protected connections. The behavior is commonly called wardriving, and usually the idea isn’t to secure the points, but to build a database of them.

Social network aggregator Power.com was off to a hot start when it launched in late November. The service, which lets users access and share content among several social networking sites at once, raised $5 million in venture financing from Silicon Valley-based Draper Fisher Jurvetson and attracted a whopping 5 million users during its private beta period. Things were looking good.

Then Facebook sued them for inappropriately storing user credetials and scraping data from the Facebook site.

That lawsuit has since been resolved, although Power had to make significant changes to its service. Now, MySpace says they’ve blocked Power.com from accessing user accounts for similar reasons.

Power.com chooses not to use MySpace’s OAuth authentication mechanism, instead directly storing user credentials on its servers. That’s a big security issue, MySpace told me earlier today, and negotiations with Power.com to change its authentication process haven’t been resolved to MySpace’s satisfaction. That leaves them no choice, they say, but to block Power.com to protect users.

Frankly, MySpace is 100% right. Unlike Facebook, they’re not being unreasonable about sharing user data. But the authentication issue is very serious, and Power.com needs to make changes.

MySpace is also concerned with the abundant use of their logo and name on the Power.com site, which could give users a false sense of security when entering their credentials. MySpace is mentioned multiple times on the Power.com sign-in page.

MySpace’s statement is below:

MySpace has been in talks with Brazilian Website Power.com to express our objections with how the company has been collecting user data from the global MySpace community and to persuade Power.com to implement MySpace’s secure log-in authentication process.

From the home page of their site, Power.com is soliciting MySpace users for their private credentials including username and password in order to gain access to MySpace profiles and is using the MySpace trademark in doing so. Power.com’s actions violate our Terms of Service and their methodology to collect this information implies an affiliation with MySpace that confuses our community and gives our users a false sense of security that MySpace has endorsed the practices of Power.com. In fact no official partnership or other affiliation between the two companies exists. While we are in conversations with Power.com, their failure to implement MySpace’s secure log-in authentication process in accordance with our Terms of Service presents us with a unique set of security challenges. Per our stringent safety policies created to protect sensitive user information, effective immediately, MySpace will no longer allow Power.com to gain access to user accounts.

It’s imperative that MySpace is able to effectively manage site security. The tactics being used by Power.com are compromising our ability to keep user data safe, private, and within our users’ control. Our goal is to help create a more social Web but key functionalities such as a simplified and secure log-in authentication process must be protected and maintained. As of today, Power.com is refusing to implement a simple technology provided by MySpace that would secure this process for our global users. We are confident that we’ll come to a resolution with Power.com quickly.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

I don’t make any advertising or revenue decisions around here, that’s left to our CEO Heather Harde. But I’m nervous about our ad partner Federated Media, which supplies about a third of our total revenue. They’re going through layoffs (I read this on their blog), and payments from them have dipped substantially in recent months (which isn’t a surprise given market conditions).

We’ve stuck with Federated Media through the years, despite our love/hate relationship with them.

But as advertising dollars become harder to come by, staying with Federated becomes more costly. The biggest issue is that as a market leader among tech blogs, we end up subsidizing others. An example – an advertiser comes to us with, say, a $100,000 spend. They are referred through to Federated, who if they make the sale gets a 40% cut. That cut is fine. But what Federated then does is spread that $100k around to many different blogs. In the end we may only see a small fraction of it spent on TechCrunch. This works in our favor as well when leads come in from other blogs. But given how much higher profile we are than many of the other blogs in the Federated network, a disproportionate share of leads comes in through us.

In effect, we’re subsidizing our competition. As ad dollars become more scarce, the effect of that subsidy is more pronounced.

These and other reasons led Digg, GigaOm and others to leave the Federated Media network. Are we next? That’s Heather’s call. But we’ll be sure to let Federated Media know what we’re thinking via a blog post, the same way they delivered their news today.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Want to set up your own blogging network on the fly and automatically share the ad revenue among the contributors? That’s the premise behind Fair Blogs, a new service from Fair Software. The idea is simple: you organize a blogging network or a virtual company through Fair Software, where each contributor enters their own Google AdSense ID and Fair Software then rotates ads from each members’ account accordng to their ownership share of the blog or blog network.

Fair Software CEO Alain Raynaud explains:

If you have a blog with Google AdSense making some money, you can open a project on FairSoftware and hire people. Let’s say you hire one contributor and give him 30% of the project shares.

On your blog, you replace the Google AdSense javascript by a script we provide. Then, every time someone visits your blog, we serve an ad from one of the members of the project, following the share ownership. So in my example, 30% of the time the ad will belong to the new hire. Then Google just pays each person directly.

This is the same model Fair Software has for software projects (minus the Google AdSense part). It launched at TechCrunch 50 with a way to create virtual shares for companies building software, but the model can be applied to other businesses as well. Fair Software offers a quick and dirty way to pull together teams and allocate a portion of revenues based on each person’s contribution.

Fair Blog is a good idea, but limited in its capabilities. At the very least, I’d want to be able to tie the revenue split from AdSense to each blogger’s performance as measured by Google Analytics. So that the percentage each person gets could be based on pageviews and automatically adjust every payout period.

The other thing Fair Blogs needs is to incorporate more ad networks. AdSense is usually the bottom of the barrel in terms of how much it contributes versus other types of blog ad inventory. But it does have the advantage that everybody uses it. Raynaud plans on adding Amazon affiliate accounts next, and then will move on from there.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Cloud storage and file synchronization is becoming increasingly important as users access the Internet and their data via a plethora of devices – desktop computers with large hard drives, laptops with smaller drives, and netbooks and mobile devices with relatively small internal storage. There are a lot of online storage/syncing startups and products out there to choose from, ranging from Microsoft Foldershare, dropbox and Sharpcast to pure online storage services like Wuala, box.net and drop.io.

Newcomer Zumodrive, from Y Combinator startup Zecter, enters this space with an interesting twist. Like other syncing services, Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But instead of syncing those files with all of your other devices, Zumodrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.

That’s not such a big deal when in comes to PC-to-PC syncing where hard drive storage isn’t an issue. But I have far more music files than will fit on even my laptop. Zumodrive lets me access them (even via iTunes) in a way that makes them appear local. And when it comes to netbooks and mobile devices with very limited hard drive space, Zumodrive is a Godsend. It just appears to make your hard drive limitless in size.

One other thing Zumodrive does that’s smart is it actually syncs files you use a lot across all your devices. That way you’ll have access to those important files when you’re offline. You can right click on any file to make it local on that machine. The service also makes guesses as to other files that should be synced locally.

The product is launching into private beta today. If you’d like to try it out, we have 1,000 invitations, just use the invite code ireadtc or click here.

And that’s not all. Zumodrive will soon have an iPhone application to allow users to access files from that device. If you are interested in testing out an early private version of the iPhone app, you can sign up here once you have registered for Zumodrive.

The Zecter guys previously launch a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. Work on the product is on hold for now as the founders focus on Zumodrive, but they say they may develop it further in the future.

Zecter has raised a total of about $1 million and is based in San Mateo, California.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors