Internet and Networking

Remember that time when a marketing agency’s labs unit cooked up an application that allowed you to print your tweets in a custom notebook (aka, Tweetnotebook)?

Ok, fair chance you don’t – I sure do because I have one of those lying around here somewhere.

Anyway, it was only a matter of time before they did the same for Facebook – and lo and behold, here’s My Famebook.

Concept is the same as Tweetnotebook: you can create and order a unique notebook, featuring an item from your Facebook feed at the bottom of every page, via the website in just a few minutes. You can make a ‘book of you’ or select the wittiest Facebook status messages from your friends.

Once personalized with a custom lay-out, message selection and cover design, you can preview your Famebook and choose to order the 320-page paperback version for €14 ($19) or go for a 200-page hardcover edition at €18 ($25) – shipping costs not included. You know, if you really always wanted to have your Facebook stream printed on dead trees.

Just a thought: who actually owns status messages posted on Facebook, and is it cool for My Famebook to just print them out? Not that we want to be party poopers, but there must be some copyright issues here, right?

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OMGTwitterisdownagain. Or extremely flaky, at least. This time, the problems seem to occur only when trying to access the Twitter website, as the API seems to be fully functional and thus not causing any trouble for third-party clients.

Search also seems to work fine, as you can tell from all the people tweeting that Twitter is down for them – go figure.

We’ll keep it short and sweet: use a third-party client for your tweeting needs or find something else to do (like blog about the fact that Twitterisdownagain).

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Last Thursday saw the third edition of Plugg, a conference I started in my home country Belgium back in 2008 that essentially aims to launch and inspire European tech entrepreneurs and advance the startup ecosystem in these parts. The event is closely tied to TechCrunch, with myself as lead organizer and TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher running things on stage. We invited a host of speakers from all corners of Europe to deliver inspiring keynotes about a wide range of topics, and as every year had 20 (well actually, 19) startups vying for the top prize in an exhilarating pitching competition. All these startups were carefully selected and are some of Europe's most promising early-stage ventures, so I invite you to take a look at the full list of finalists in our previous post. In the end, Estonia's Fits.me won the main award of the show, with RazWar snatching the audience choice prize and Distimo and Inbox2 as runners-up. If you didn't attend the event but are interested in finding out what went on on stage, we've got you covered: the whole thing was captured on video and in pictures, and we also embedded a handy Nomadesk widget on the Plugg website where you can access a virtual folder carrying all the presentations. Here's a selection of videos I think will interest TechCrunch readers most (but please check out all of them):

Last time I was in India I wrote about the amazing business model innovation that had allowed telecom operators to make money on a paltry $6 a month per average user. That compares to a desired average monthly payment of $50 or more in the U.S.

The results have been phenomenal—550 million people in India have phones, and it has transformed the poorer service economy by giving them an affordable way to be reached and arrange jobs. Just last month, nearly 20 million new mobile accounts were opened. That’s more than double the people than have high speed Internet in the entire country. Even in slums where people live on less than $2 a day, everyone has a phone. If “Slumdog Millionaire” was more accurate, Jamal wouldn’t have had to go on TV to find Latika. He could have just called her, or worst case, called a few friends until he found her number.

It’s unequivocally India’s most successful infrastructure achievement —despite some mounting concerns about the effects of all those towers dotting nearly any urban rooftop that can hold one. And a host of exciting applications are being built on top of this invisible thread that connects a disparate country with a vast terrain and even bigger gulfs in language, literacy, income, religion, language and living standards

But amazingly, when Rajiv Mehrotra (pictured below) looked at the existing telecom penetration in India, he saw failure. What about the people who can’t afford $6 a month or live too far to get service? Don’t they deserve to be connected as well? The result was VNL, a company that’s already gotten a good deal of press and acclaim for its dead-cheap, low-maintenance, Ikea-like easy-to-assemble, solar-powered base stations that extend existing mobile footprints into rural villages for a fraction of the price, allowing the remotest, poorest villages to have mobile phones in every household at drop-dead low prices. “We are the bottom of the bottom,” boasts Mehrotra, practically daring competitors to try to play his low-cost, super-durability game.

The World Economic Forum named it one of 26 Technology Pioneers, and just last month VNL won the Mobile World Congress’s Green Mobile Award. Time called it a “Tech Pioneer that Will Change your Life” and Fast Company named it one of the world’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in the world.

I met with Mehrotra at the company’s headquarters in Gurgoan during my November trip to India. This time I wanted to see its technology live in villages and hear first hand what the impact had been. I traveled to a village that had now had phones for about seven months to see how the technology had changed their lives. Of the 500 families spread across this area, almost all of them had a phone—and most for the first time.

The majority of the people I spoke with said the first calls they made were to family members, and that the biggest impact was the ability to stay in touch with family, to know when there was an emergency and be able to respond quickly.

But there have been business effects too. One man (pictured here) has a business operating several trucks traveling between this village and Delhi and before he’d have to ride on a bike between back-and-forth to coordinate them. Now he can sit at home and just call the drivers. He installed one of VNL’s small base stations on his roof, and he said it had increased his standing among his peers—he is frequently the one called on to settle disputes. And now they can just call him. Similarly wives will call husbands out in the fields when its time to come in and eat, rather than trudging out to get them, allowing them to focus on kids and the housework.

Another woman (pictured below) I spoke with was a widow with six kids and 21 grandchildren. (So many, she actually had to ask someone else how many she had.) As grandkids clambered in and out of her lap, she explained that she gets pension checks from the government, but the delivery used to be spotty. Before her phone she had no recourse but to travel to Delhi to inquire about it. Not exactly something she relishes, having lived her whole life in this village and only been to the big city twice. Now she can call the office and gives them an earful. Not surprisingly, the checks have started to come more regularly.

Another man (pictured to the right) told me he felt more connected to the rest of India as a result of having a phone. This village is surrounded by mountains, and he said that he felt “imprisoned” and cut off, despite being just a few hours drive from Delhi. Now he has a renewed interest in politics and what’s happening in other villages and the country at large. This man had only had his phone for six months, but he expected it would change his life in ways he couldn’t articulate or imagine. “Since the day I got this, my life has already changed,” he said through an interpreter.

Indeed, Mehrotra says it’s already having a ripple effect on the politics of Rajisthan—the state between Pakistan and India where VNL did its first installations. Politicians come through and make promises and villagers demand their cell phone numbers and call to check up on whether those promises are kept. “They have to be accountable,” Mehrotra says. “They can’t wriggle out.”

These phones are not just a nice-to-have, they’ve quickly become a must have for these villages, deeply tied to the way they make money, participate in their government and retain closely important family relationships. And these ripple effects are only now beginning. Think of what the impact will be when there are better programs for marketing crops, saving money and even learning and game playing rolled out on these very basic phones. Life will always be different in a village or a city, but India can at least gain some basic common denominators between the two.

Mehrotra is a big believer in the Ghandian mantra: Change the villages and you change India. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has already built businesses rolling out satellite TV and landlines to rural areas, but he thinks this company will have a bigger impact than anything else he’s done and is the one with the real potential to go global. It bears noting that he’s invested all of his own money in the project—and it’s taken far more than he expected.

This is not a cheap venture—Mehrotra has invested more than $100 million in the last five years and is still investing more. But I’m not sure it could be built any other way. I don’t think there’s the venture capital appetite or risk profile in India to fund something like this and most of the mobile equipment companies Mehrotra talked to back when he started thinking about this insisted it couldn’t be done. Once he built it he’d take equipment and operator executives out to see it and they still couldn’t believe it. They were making calls to test the quality from different areas of the village trying to find pockets without a signal. “They were climbing on the antenna and shaking it like monkeys trying to break it and they couldn’t,” Mehrotra says.

From a business point of view, the operators love VNL because it cheaply expands their existing footprint. The equipment operators aren’t so sure. In theory, VNL isn’t competing with them because they’re not going into the cities. Now that VNL has proved this model works, could a larger established vendor steal the market? The best chance of that would likely come from a Chinese powerhouse like Huawei. That said, any vendor that builds such a low cost solution that’s too good will risk eroding his higher priced systems designed for urban areas. “They’ll say ‘Give it to me in the city too.’ ” Mehrotra says.

All these awards aside, this is the year for VNL to prove it’s really a viable business. And Mehrotra says there are some surprises in store. In terms of market, VNL is already rolling the technology out in other countries and in terms of product they’re not done with just simple mobile access. The countries are likely in Africa and perhaps Latin America, and my guess is the new functionality will entail turning on some kind of Internet access through the existing base stations. Expect much more on this newly minted international do-gooding darling in 2010.

While a lot of the smaller startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting much of the buzz at SXSW, Twitter isn’t sitting idly on the location sidelines. Sure, they launched location integration on their site a few days ago, but they’ve also apparently set up a sub-site totally around location for SXSW. But here’s the weird thing: It’s only for stalking their employees.

As co-founder Evan Williams tweeted out earlier, sxsw.twitter.com shows you a Google map of Austin, Texas (where SXSW is held) with tiny Twitter logos overlaid on it, showing Twitter employees at the conference tweeting.

The site, which is clearly tailored for mobile usage (it looks great on the iPhone, for example), has two areas: “Twitter People” and “To Meet.” The Twitter People area is the one that shows the map and the tweets overlaid on it. The To Meet area is interesting because it asks, “Which of these sound like awesome things to work on?” and gives you a few different options to click on.

For example, if you click on, “Making fast and sexy applications” it takes you to a list of various Twitter employees at SXSW that you should meet. If you click on “Partnering with Twitter,” you get a different list. Clearly, Twitter is using this site for both new employee recruitment, platform expansion, and partnership opportunities.

Twitter, while now fairly commonplace in the mainstream (especially the media), first rose to fame among early tech adopters during SXSW three years ago.

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Today at SXSWi, keynote speaker Danah Boyd took the stage to talk about privacy and publicity, and how they intertwine online. Boyd is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and has studied this space extensively for years. It was a compelling talk that challenged the notion that personal information is on a binary spectrum of public or private. To help underscore her points, she recalled and discussed a number of major privacy blunders from Facebook and Google. You can find my notes from the presentation below.

Boyd says that privacy is not dead, but that a big part of our notion of privacy relates to maintaining control over our content, and that when we don’t have control, we feel that our privacy has been violated. This has happened a few times recently.

How The Buzz Launch Failed

As a first example Boyd brought up Google Buzz. She says that nothing with the launch was technologically wrong — you could opt out of Buzz, elect to hide your friend list, and so on. But the service resulted in a PR disaster because Google made non-technical mistakes, doing things that didn’t meet user expectations:

• Google integrated a public facing system in one of the most private systems you can imagine. Lots of people thought Google was exposing their email to the world.
• Google assumed people would opt out if users didn’t want to participate. “I can’t help but notice that more technology companies think it’s ok to expose people tremendously and then back pedal when people flip out”, she says.
• You want to help users understand the proposition. You need to ease them in, invite them to contribute their content.

Boyd says that years ago, researchers noticed people in a chat room would often ask “A/S/L” (age, sex, location). So some services, looking to streamlines things a bit, started building user profiles that had this information. What they failed to understand is that this “A/S/L” was a sort of chatroom icebreaker. Users lost that, and putting that information in a profile — even if they would have shared it to answer that chat message — could creep them out.

With Buzz, Google found the social equivalent to the famous “uncanny valley” (where things seem almost natural, but aren’t quite close enough, so they’re creepy). They collapsed articulated networks (email) and assumed it was a personal network.

Boyd then transitioned to talk a bit about the fuzzy lines between what is public and private. She says that just because people put material in public places doesn’t mean it was meant to be aggregated. And just because something is publically accessible doesn’t mean people want it to be publicized.

The Facebook Privacy Fail
Boyd’s second case study was Facebook’s privacy changes in December, when Facebook changed ‘everyone’ to the default. We’ve written extensively on this fiasco, which may take years to really reveal the extent of the damage it has done.

• Facebook said 35% of users had read the new privacy documentation and changed something in the privacy settings. Facebook thinks this is a good thing, but it means 65% of population made their content public. Boyd has asked non-techie users to tell her what they thought their settings were. She has yet to find a single person whose actual privacy settings matched what they thought they were.
• Boyd recounted a story of a young woman who had moved far away from an abusive father. The young woman talked with her mother (who had moved with her) about possibly joining Facebook. They sat down to make the content as private as possible, which worked well. But in December, the young woman clicked through Facebook’s privacy dialog (as most people did) and had no idea her content was public. She only found out when someone who should not have seen the content told her.

Boyd then discussed how different groups of people think about privacy. She says that teenagers are much more conscious about what they have to gain by being in public, whereas adults are more concerned about what they have to lose.

As an example, Boyd talked about a teenage girl who often put risqué, sometimes illegal content online. When Boyd asked why she’d want to do something, the girl replied, “I want to get a modeling contract just like Tila Tequilla”. Her calculation wasn’t about what she could potentially lose, but rather what she stood to gain.

Boyd says that most techies think about Personally Identifiable Information, but that the vast majority of people are thinking about personally embarrassing information. People often share private information with their friends in part because it allows them to bond, it makes them somewhat vulnerable and establishes trust. But when it’s through technology (e.g. Facebook’s public by default setting) it’s a huge technology fail.

Boyd also called out the presence of racism in social media. On the night of the BET awards last year, all of the trending topics were dominated by terms relating to the event and the black community. In response, some Twitter users made very racist comments — clearly even these open communication platforms are still prone to hate.

To conclude the talk, Boyd pointed out some of the challenges we will continue to face with regard to privacy online. She asks whether or not teachers can be expected to maintain a professional, pristine presence online — something that is very difficult to do while leading a normal life.

Ultimately, she says, “neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both.” We’ve been looking at privacy and publicity as a black-or-white attribute for content, when really it’s defined by context and the implications of what we’ve chosen to share.

Pixelpipe, the service that lets you syndicate text, audio, video and image files to 120 different social networks, blogs and sites, is adding geolocation functionality to its site with a Foursquare integration. The true virtue of Pixelpipe’s service is the fact that it lets you publish all types of files to various social networks and sites from a centralized place. And the startup offers its service on mobile devices, including a nifty Android app, as well.

Using Foursquare’s API, Pixelpipe now allows you to add check-in to a location with a link to media captured at the venue, which is hosted on your Pixelpipe Page. And you can check-in to a location with media (text, photo, video, audio or a file) with Pixelpipe’s Android app. Pixelpipe will present a list of venues to a user. The number after the venue represents the number of recent check-insFor example, if you are at SXSW, you can record an audio clip or video and post the media long with your check-in to the Austin Convention Center. The link will lead vistors back to your Pixelpipe landing page.

Sort of like a Ping.fm for media, Pixelpipe automatically distributes any new audio files, images, or videos to your profiles on social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. You can choose to group these services by tags, so you can be more selective about where you’d like to to post the content. Pixelpipe’s CEO Brett Butterfield tells me that Brightkite and possible Gowalla integration will be rolled out in the future.

As the geolocation wars heat up, it seems like web applications and mobile apps, both new and old, are getting into the location game. Hot Potato, SimpleGeo and new startups StickyBits and Social Great have hooked up their applications with Foursquare. And Foursquare competitor Gowalla upped the ante with a new release.

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There’s been a lot of hoopla over the past couple of years about Twitter’s so-called “firehose.” Essentially, it’s an open stream of all their data that is provided to developers to use for third-party apps. Foursquare has a firehose of its own, but access to it has been on lock down. Today, for SXSW, Foursquare opened up its firehose a bit more.

Social Great, a service which tracks trending places in cities back on location data, has just gotten access to this firehose of data. This allows them to show in realtime the trending places throughout Austin, Texas, where SXSW is taking place. The service also pulls in data from Gowalla, Brightkite, and GraffitiGeo (Loopt).

As Polaris Ventures EIR Jon Steinberg notes (who helped build Social Great), “the numbers look crazy.” What he means is the check-in data at SXSW. Judging from what I’m seeing on the ground here in Austin, that may be an understatement. Venues routinely have dozens if not hundreds of other Foursquare users at them when they’re trending.

SimpleGeo, one company that has had early access to Foursquare’s firehose, built Vicarious.ly to visualize real-time check-ins around Austin. That data looks fairly insane as well. Most of the check-ins appear to be coming from Foursquare (which saw over 300,000 check-ins on Thursday alone) and Gowalla, but co-founder Joe Stump notes that the battle is too close to call still.

One other note: all these check-ins are made possible by the fact that AT&T’s network has been up and working the whole time. It’s been impressive. Crisis averted, so far.

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A couple weeks ago, we noted the city of Topeka, Kansas’ humorous attempt to get Google’s attention: by rebranding their city “Google, Kansas.” Why would they do such a thing? Because they want in on Google’s fiber action — the search giant’s proposed plan to sell 1 gigabit-per-second broadband to consumers. Now Baltimore, Maryland is getting in on the fun as well.

The city has appointed a “Google Czar” — yes, that’s the actual title — to lobby the company to put Baltimore on the list of cities in the initial trial. Tom Loveland, CEO of a local tech company, Mind Over Machines, has been appointed by Baltimore’s mayor to take this exalted, but volunteer position.

The Baltimore movement has also launched a website, BmoreFiber, which states in huge, bold letters, “Ask Google to Invest Billions in Baltimore’s Future.“

These attempts by cities to catch Google’s attention, while humorous, show a massive desire for better broadband in this country. It’s kind of sad that it takes an outsider, Google, to spur faster broadband development. Meanwhile, companies that offer broadband as a core business, like Comcast, drag their feet with service that is an order of magnitude slower at huge prices.

What happens when you pair seven visual artists with seven engineers and technologists? The New Museum in New York City is about to find out. An upcoming exhibit called Seven On Seven will put together artists and programmers for one day and tell them to come up with something together. It could be an application, a work of art, a full-blown product, or anything they want. Some of the participating technologists include Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg, former Facebook data dude Jeff Hammerbacher, and Tumblr founder David Karp.

Here are all seven pairings:
Artist / Technologist
Cao Fei / Jeff Hammerbacher
Evan Roth / Joshua Schachter
Aaron Koblin / Matt Mullenweg
Monica Narula / Andrew Kortina
Ryan Trecartin / Hilary Mason
Tauba Auerbach / Ayah Bdeir
Marc Andre Robinson / David Karp

Schachter, for instance, is being paired with artist Evan Roth, who has created open-source software to analyze graffiti tags and has even created a Graffiti Markup Language (GML). Schachter, of course, pioneered the use of data free-form tags to categorize Delicious bookmarks years ago. Mulennweg is being paired with Aaron Koblin a digital artist who creates art based on the input of thousands of individuals. He is also the artist who created Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video using no cameras (embedded below)

The seven pairs of collaborators will present their final project at the New Museum on April 17. We have 50 discount codes good for $100 off the $350 ticket price (just enter the code “techcrunch” here).

The idea to pair programmers with artists came from betaworks CEO John Borthwick, who is also a board member of Rhizome, the New Museum affiliate which is put the program together.

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We’re big fans of Animoto, a website that lets you easily create photo and video slideshows matched to music. The site is constantly innovating its nifty product, most recently adding an iPhone app and the ability to incorporate video. For those not familiar with Animoto, the startup basically allows you to take your images, video and your music and mash them together to create cool videos. What makes the videos cool is the company’s technology that renders the pictures so they’re in-step with the music you’ve chosen, adding nice transition effects. This morning, Animoto is opening up its API, allowing partners to now incorporate Animoto’s compelling technologies into independent sites

The first API that being rolled out for the Animoto Partner Platform is Animoto Quickstart.  The API essentially allows any website to tap into Animoto’s video creation flow.  The aim is to make Animoto one click away from any website that has photos, videos or music.  Quickstart allows websites to connect their own content, including photos, video clips and music to Animoto as the first step in creating an Animoto video. So partners can integrate Animoto’s video slideshow creation tool into their sites. And the startup promises that Quickstart takes only hours to a partner to set up on a site.

For example, SmugMug, a photo sharing site that caters to professional photographers, uses Quickstart so users can ‘pass’ their photo albums into Animoto’s video creation flow. So the user now has the option of making a slideshow from their hosted photos and simply needs to pick a song to complete their Animoto video. Once a user clicks to make the slideshow, he or she will be taken to Animoto’s site, where their video and photos will automatically be placed into Animoto’s site.

Another use case is a promotion Animoto is launching with iconic musician John Bon Jovi where fans of Bon Jovi can go to Bonjovi’s site to create an Animoto music video with Bon Jovi’s latest single and footage from his music video.  Pepsi also used the Quickstart API to help users create video slideshows in a contest involving its ShareTheJoy campaign.

With the launch of this API at SXSW, Animoto is partnering with music publication SPIN magazine to allow fans to promote their favorite South by Southwest bands for a chance to win prizes.
From now until March 31, 2010, fans can create and submit Animoto videos featuring songs from top South by Southwest bands for a chance to win $1000 and a spot on Spin.com, and other prizes.
 
Currently Animoto has 1.4 million users and makes money off of its paid subscriptions. On its site its free to create 30 second videos, but you need to pay $3 per video to make an lengthier slideshow. The site sells a year long subscription to users for $30. A large part of Animoto’s subscription business is composed of professional videographers and photographers who pay $250 per year to create their own branded videos that they can download, and burn to a CD (and the slideshow doesn’t bear the “Animoto” logo). Animoto’s CEO Brad Jefferson tells me that 10 percent of users, so 140,000 people, are have paid for at least one product on the site.The company is already cash-flow positive, which isn’t bad for a startup that’s less than three years old.

In terms of monetizing the API, Animoto isn’t charging any of its partners. In fact, it’s actually paying its partners in terms of affiliate fees. So if any partners lead new users to the site who end up buying a subscription, Animoto will give the partner a 40 percent cut of the first year’s consumer subscription fee or $50 of the first years pro subscription fee.

The Quickstart API seems to be the first of a few sets of APIs that will extend Animoto’s technology onto the other sites. It’s a smart move. While many photo sharing sites have the ability to make slideshows, the technology is not nearly as fun and easy to use as Animoto’s. And Animoto is undoubtedly a compelling tool for an brand marketer to use for a campaign. Frankly, the possibilities are endless because Animoto is such an easy tool to use.

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The problem with all of these people who are walking out the door at MySpace isn’t so much the number of them, because MySpace is trying to replace them by hiring more people. It’s the fact that the best people are leaving, and taking a lot of the knowledge base with them.

Three star senior employees left to go to cross-town startup Gravity, we reported earlier this week. And tonight we’ve heard that Jeff Webber, the engineering director that oversees the email, instant messaging and other “communications” platforms for MySpace, resigned earlier this week as well to join a startup. He’s been at MySpace for nearly three years and was one of the star engineers and leaders, says one source.

Other recent departures – VP and General Manager of Mobile John Faith, SVP User Experience Katie Geminder and most of her team. And of course CEO Owen Van Natta. And lots more as well, only a few of which we’ve reported.

The company has no direction, says everyone we talk to at MySpace except the top execs, and internal politics are the only thing that seem to matter. Ambitious new projects like Remaking MySpace have been thrown away just because the wrong exec supported it. Anyone who actually wants to build products has left or is looking for a new job, say many, many sources.

If you’re a MySpace employee and feel differently, please contact us anonymously. Because right now all we see is a ton of fluff and absurdity coming from the top, and massive morale problems at the middle management ranks.

The title of this post is actually a recent quote from a (now former) MySpace employee, and it seems to be accurate. They say a company has to hit rock bottom before it can even think about rebuilding into something new. If that’s the case, the time to start rebuilding is, apparently, right about now. But in our opinion MySpace has no chance at all until it is free of the News Corp. death grip.

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How many e-book readers do you think are out there right now for you to choose from? If you did a little digging, I bet you’d find 50 or so. Maybe 10 really worth checking out. But right now is a bit of a weird period in e-reader history. The Kindle cemented e-readers in the consumer headspace, catapulting them from weirdo alternative technology to mainstream gadget. That’s what the iPad threatens to do with tablets — we’ll see about that. But the Kindle and the iPad are two important data points in the current e-reader wars; the question, upon the answer of which depends the success of many a device, is whether “bonus” features like second screens and weird form factors in e-readers will be enough to differentiate them from the high-profile devices pressing them on both flanks?

See, the vast majority of e-readers were designed as a response to the Kindle, not to tablet computers, which may or may not obsolete e-readers altogether. It’s a bad situation: the whole time you’re improving your competitor’s product, someone else is skipping your entire device class on the grounds that it will be made ridiculous by their awesome gadget. Some of the special features developed to combat the Kindle will stay, and some won’t live to see their own first birthday.

Continue reading…

Ever wanted to tell the world how much you love BMW, Coca-Cola, and any of the other biggest brand names on Earth? Here’s your chance: MyBrandz is a new community site that looks to let people talk about their favorite brands with other users, allowing them to share their favorite products, photos, and more. You may remember MyBrandz as the company that convinced a guy to tattoo the YouTube logo to his arm a few months back.

My initial reaction to the site was that it was a bit bizarre — is there really an audience of people who want to talk about how much they love these multibillion dollar corporations (many of which couldn’t give a hoot about their customers)? And then I remembered the throngs of die-hard Apple fans that police internet forums, and the Ferrari store in downtown San Francisco that sells $200+ leather jackets emblazoned with the classic logo. Yeah, there’s definitely an audience for this.

Once you’ve browsed to the fan page of the company you like, you can share notes, photos, video, and links with like-minded fans. To help boost engagement, the site is currently running a promotion that invites users to ‘own their brand’ — the top user for a given brand site will win a free stock certificate. The site is happy to point out that “a Google share is worth more than $600 and an Apple share over $200″, but doesn’t go out of its way to say that the top user on Playboy’s fan page can expect a windfall of $3.58.

The site has some nice touches, like a scrolling wall of logos to help you quickly build out a roster of your favorite brands, and a graph that plots the ranking of brands based on their market value and popularity. But, as with most social sites, it’s going to face a chicken-and-egg problem. And many of these brands have already spawned their own communities and forums — it’s going to be hard to get those to migrate to MyBrandz.

Brand fans may also want to check out Logorama, the brand-studded animated short that just won an Oscar.

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Mobile social networks have tremendous potential to flourish in developing countries where mobile phone usage trumps internet connectivity. SMS based social networks like SMSGupshup have gained considerable traction in Asia because of this. For example, in India, there is currently a 10 to 1 mobile-to-PC ratio. Mig33, a mobile social network that involves VoIP calls, instant messaging, e-mail, text messaging, and picture sharing, has accumulated 35 million registered users of its service and is growing fast in South Asian markets such as Indonesia and India. Assuming 3 to 10 percent are active on a monthly basis, that would be 1 million to 3.5 million active users.

Mig33’s users are now sending over 1 million virtual gifts a month, and posting approximately 100 million messages a day on its network, or 1,000 messages every second. Twitter, in comparison, just passed 50 million a day. Mig33 is eying the virtual gift economy as a revenue maker because of the model’s success for China’s similar application, Tencent QQ. According to Mig33, the Chinese mobile social application has nearly 8% of its over 500 million users in China paying about $2 per month in virtual gifts and goods. Mig33 is hoping to emulate that model in markets like Indonesia, India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Bosnia.

Mig33 is available worldwide and optimized for more than 2,000 different mobile devices. The startup has steadily added to its app by integrating social games, user-owned groups, virtual gifting and, most recently, avatars. Avatars are actually a source of revenue for mig33, by charging users to customize and enhance their avatars. Mig33 is looking to expand the virtual economy. In fact, the startup says that its revenue stream has grown to over $1 per user per month in countries such as Indonesia and India.

Founded in 2005, mig33 is backed by Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and DCM and has raised a total of $23.5 million.

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Sometimes it is obvious where the world is headed, but some people and industries become frozen in place and time. They are like the duckbilled dinosaurs happily munching on the still-abundant plants around them when the meteor strikes instead of the small furry mammals underfoot who take cover every day by natural habit. In the print newspaper industry, it’s the same story. Everyone wants to wall off the Web and keep grazing on declining ad revenues.

A week ago, I wrote a post based on a conversation I had with Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen in which he made the case that print media companies would be better off shutting down their print operations now (“Burn the boats”) and move forward unencumbered into the digital age, no matter how painful that may be. That suggestion hit a deep nerve, and continues to do so.

Just yesterday, Allan Mutter, who writes the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, took exception to Andreessen’s advice. By his estimate, in 2009:

Print-driven newspaper revenues still are running at better than $30 billion a year. It doesn’t take a certifiable Silicon Valley genius to see that no business can walk away from some 90% of its revenue base without imploding.

Mutter’s indignation is typical of the response to the article, even among enlightened newsosaurs. But that is exactly what Andreessen is saying. As I noted in my original post, he is quite aware that “at risk is 80% of revenues and headcount” (or 90%, if you take Mutter’s numbers).

Yes, the Internet media business is much less lucrative than the print side, and may never replace it in terms of the revenues it generates. But Andreessen’s point is that the meteor is on its way and the sooner that media companies start looking for cover, the more likely they are to survive.

He is not trying to be an alarmist. He’s just a realist. In the technology industry, similar disruptions happen all the time. The companies that survive are the ones that adapt and jump onto the next wave of technology before the one they are on finishes cresting. So the real question is one of timing. How long will it take that $30 billion print business to go to $20 billion, $10 billion, or zero? No doubt, it will take years, probably decades. But how long do print media companies wait before they leave their old business behind?

The people who read print newspapers and magazines are getting older and older, while advertisers always chase the young and impressionable. That audience is already on the Web. And they are no longer satisfied with getting all of their news from one or two trusted sources. They get their news from all over the place: newspaper sites, TV news sites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook. More and more, the news is coming to them through their friends and the various streams they consume. The old days of cross-subsidizing political news with ads from the Travel and Auto sections are over.

The longer media companies wait, the bigger disadvantage they will have when they cross over to the other side and find a whole new host of competitors who never had any print legacy businesses to protect. Those competitors right now are blogs and online news hubs who are still furry little rodents in the underbrush, but who won’t stay little forever. The sooner print media companies cross over, the sooner they can be on pure offense. Their online strategies and business models won’t be crippled by any allegiance, or need to protect, to the old print business. If they wait until their online revenues become 25 or 50 percent before they fully commit, it will be too late.

But that is probably what will happen. Media companies are still surrounded by $30 billion worth of leaves that look mighty good.

Photo of duckbilled dinosaur fossil by Ed Schipul .

Brightkite is tricky. Tricky and smart.

While larger than most of their location-based rivals with over 2 million users, they know that in the past year they’ve lost some momentum to the newer check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla. So they’re trying to do something unique to swing momentum back in their favor.

Today, at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Brightkite is unveiling its new Group Text service. It’s both a feature on the website and a standalone application in the App Store (it should be available shortly). With it, Brightkite is latching onto one of the most popular and fast growing categories in mobile applications: group texting. Unlike regular text messaging, this type of app allows you to message many people all at once (and go back and forth). And better, in a world where cell providers are still managing to rip-off users with their text message bundles or $0.15 rate per-text, group texting is absolutely free.

Services such as textPlus have already made the functionality very popular on the iPhone, and now Brightkite hopes that will translate into converting different types of users over to its core location-based service. The reason is that built-in to the Brightkite Group Text app is the core Brightkite functionality itself. While it’s a bit buried to the left hand side of the menu, you can both check-in at venues, and get check-in updates from other users in the app.

It’s a smart play. As other location services such as MyTown have proven, there’s a market to get users outside of the traditional early-adopter crowd into location by doing something novel (in their case, a straight-up Monopoly-type game). Group texting users seem to be rabid about the software, so why not give them a little location-based bonus to play around with if they desire?

At the same time, this app provides a nice compliment to the Brightkite service itself. With it, users get another social outlet to communicate with, sending messages or pictures, and having them threaded both in the app and online. And yes, it still works with traditional SMS messaging, as Brightkite was lucky enough to be granted a texting shortcode (41414) and it can work with these threaded conversations. For example:

By adding three digits to the end of the code, each person can now have 100 simultaneous threaded text conversations running on their phone.
41414-001 = conversation 1
41414-002 = conversation 2

And thanks to the SMS support, you can contact anyone in your address book, not just those using the app.

The service is now live on Brightkite’s site, and look for it later today in the App Store.

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Last night, we wrote about a CauseWorld teaming up with TechCrunch to provide double karma points during the SXSW festival starting today in Austin, Texas. These points, obtained through checking-in at various locations, can be used to donate to charities through big brands that support the app. It’s a great feature, and we hope you’ll use it in Austin. What we didn’t talk too much about is the app itself that enables it, CauseWorld, which just released a new version of its iPhone app in the App Store.

We first covered the app back in December, but now it has been significantly upgraded. One of the core ideas behind the app has always been the intersection of the mobile and physical world (something I’ve thought a lot about as well). A new feature bridges the gap a bit more as you can now scan barcodes on individual items with your iPhone to earn extra karma points. Proctor & Gamble are the ones sponsoring these points on different products they make. It’s a good idea, because even if you choose not to buy the item, it forces you to pick it up and look at it a bit.

This feature points to the bigger idea that CauseWorld parent Shopkick is thinking about when it is ready to launch its flagship product (CauseWorld was born as just a trial site of an idea, but quickly ballooned into an app with over 300,000 downloads). It’s the idea that the cellphone is the only interactive tool you carry in a non interactive setting at all times. So why not use it to make the physical retail space more interactive, Shopkick CEO Cyriac Roeding reasons.

Another huge addition to the CauseWorld app is a social layer. Previously, the app was all about what you did. But now you can hook it up to Facebook (which will earn you bonus karma points) and share the progress and donations you’re making with your friends. On top of this there are new features such as gifting which will help the app virally spread through social networks.

This social layer also allows for a leaderboard to be created showing which of your friend have donated the most karma points. Sometimes social pressure is the best way to get people motivated.

Again, CauseWorld stems from trying out an idea to see what would work with the larger Shopkick plan when that eventually launches. But the response to it has shown Roeding enough that he believes ”the next big thing after the check-in is the check-out.” Given the big brands they’re signing up to support CauseWorld, he just might be right.

You can find the new CauseWorld 1.5 in the App Store here. It’s a free download.

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We’ve written about FunMobility’s nifty picture messaging app for the iPhone and Android, called FunMail, that allows users to blasts their text into the application, which then breaks down whatever the user typed for context and places fun graphics with your original text. Now, FunMobility has caught the Twitter bug and is launching FunTweet, a web service which turns any Twitter stream into visual messages that are related to the text.

Similar to FunMail, FunTweet will turn text in Tweets into a matching image. On FunTweet’s site, you sign in with your Twitter credentials and the service will draw your Tweets from your Twitter homepage feed and display each tweet as a FunMail image on FunTweet. Users can also enter a @UserName, a HashTag or a Subject as well to the images. If you like the image FunTweet picked, you can publish the Tweet to your Twitter account. If you don’t like the image, click “Try Again” and you can choose from other images. For example, if you tweet about writing a story or reading a book, then FunTweet will come up with images that match “story” – a book, a magazine, a typewriter, or a pen.

FunMobility is hoping FunTweet can be a display tool for parties, conferences and other gatherings where live stream messages may be projected. I find myself wishing I could include my own pictures into my FunTweets so I’m hoping the site will soon include that functionality.

FunMail for the iPhone has gained a bit of traction in a short amount of time with 100,000 downloads since its launch in November. So FunTweet could gain a loyal following a fun tool to spice up Tweets. TwitSig and SayTweet also allow you to make images from Tweets.

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This is the lede, verbatim, from a story that appeared in The Hill yesterday: "The Internet allowed extremists to contact, recruit, train and equip the suspect responsible for the attempted Flight 253 bombing on Christmas Day 'within weeks,' a top Pentagon official told lawmakers Wednesday." What's the implication, that because someone used the Internet to plan something, something bad, we should get rid of it? Fine by me, believe me.