GigaOM launches…A TV Station

Interesting new site launch over at GigaOM’s popular video news blog, NewTeeVee - NewTeeVee station. The site contains videos from various video sites like YouTube, Blip, etc. that have been selected by editor Liz Shannon Miller, who was previously at Variety and the Daily Reel.

NTV Station is leveraging some of the tools created for Ostatic, another site recently launched by GigaOM - including an overview and editor and user reviews and ratings. They are also maintaining a database of shows, cast, crew and other information.

Overview video by Miller is below. It looks like NTV Station isn’t going niche, instead trying to focus on popular videos and up and coming stuff. It’s going to be hard to compete with Digg video when it comes to finding really interesting stuff, in my opinion. But hey, all this content is created by others, which makes it a lot easier to maintain the site.

Some additional features, from Om Malik’s post:

* Features editorial reviews of online videos written by a team lead by Liz Shannon Miller, who comes to us from Variety and the Daily Reel.
* Has over 100 NTV shows & videos as part of the launch effort alone.
* Sports a database of cast, crew and other details to map out the expanding web video universe.
* Invites readers to become part of the editorial process by adding their own reviews, comments and ratings.
* Boasts eight channels of the most memorable comedy, commercials, drama, music, news & talk, personalities, reality and zeitgeist picks.
* Showcases what’s hot at that moment, right on the front page.
* Can be subscribed to via the Station RSS feed or be bundled with NewTeeVee Feed.

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Google And Salesforce Cooking Up Something New Together

Google and Salesforce can’t seem to get enough of each other: over a series of announcements the companies have aligned their product strategies more and more closely over time. Now the companies are planning something new together, to be announced by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Google VP Engineering Vic Gundotra at Salesforce’s upcoming Tour de Force developer event on June 23 in Santa Clara.

A year ago Salesforce integrated adwords tracking into their platform. Then two months ago we heard rumors that the companies were planning on deeper product integration - it turned out to be the complete integration of Google Apps (Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and Gtalk) and Salesforce’s online enterprise apps.

With the most recent announcement Google in effect became Salesforce’s productivity suite. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentation can be created from within Salesforce’s CRM application. GTalk works as the de facto instant messenger within Salesforce. With one click, sales people who use Gmail can send any email correspondence with potential or existing customers to Salesforce, where it becomes recorded as part of the sales cycle. Sales events and marketing campaigns can be overlayed onto a Google Calendar, as well as colleague’s schedules for figuring out convenient meeting times.

So what will the two companies announce later this month? Gundotra, who keynoted the recent Google I/O conference, is responsible for developer evangelism and open source programs at Google. That includes things like Android, Gears and Open Social. Connecting the dots isn’t too hard.

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OurPlanet Has A World-Class Ego

OurPlanet, a new travel site that describes itself as “trip advisor, but so much better!!!”, is launching a promotional travel tour that promises a few lucky travelers the trip of a lifetime.

The site is looking for “30 lucky people that get to travel the world for one year” to rate products and services in the travel industry. Sounds great, right?

Maybe not. There’s no salary, and the site doesn’t pay for food, accommodations, or outside activities. OurPlanet says that most of these things should be covered by sponsors looking to get exposure on the site, “Because the Our Planet platform is so much better than anything that currently exists on the market.” Of course, the site won’t actually launch for 3-6 months, which makes such bold statements a little hard to judge.

OurPlanet will pay for all flights for their “Nomads”, so at least you won’t have to worry about airfare while you travel the globe. Just remember to bring some cash for those basic necessities like food and shelter. You know, in case this TripAdvisor-killer doesn’t quite pan out.

Global Nomads from ourplanet on Vimeo.

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Want to Try Out Apple’s MobileMe? Check Out SproutCore

MobileMe won’t be available until July, but you can at least get a feel for some of the service’s features by heading over to SproutCore and trying out their photo app. SproutCore is an open source JavaScript framework that Apple used to build some portions of MobileMe, so it isn’t surprising that the photo app bears a strong resemblance to the demo shown at today’s WWDC conference.

At first glance the SproutCore photo demo looks like an online clone of iPhoto, which isn’t a bad thing. You can use the maginifcation slider to resize images in real time, and library photos can be sorted into folders. You can also create “subscriptions” (RSS feeds) to other users’ photo albums. Mac users will feel right at home.

SproutCore was created by the developers of Sproutit, an online mail help desk. Apple has actually been using SproutCore technology for some time - the .Mac galleries they introduced in 2007 were also based on the platform.

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Wednesday: TechCrunch / CrunchGear Berlin Meetup

250 people. 27 sponsoring startups. Countless others coming as guests. There’s just one word for the TechCrunch / CrunchGear Meetup in Berlin this Wednesday, June 11: Awesome. Organised with the excellent assistance of our local partner twidox, the event has been made possible by our generous sponsors, listed after the jump.

Imedo.de has kindly offered to throw the networking event at their offices but the meetup, ( announced back in May), is now, alas, completely full. So if you haven’t got a ticket now I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until we do another Berlin meetup, which may well be before the end of the year, judging by the enormously enthusiastic reaction to this one.

To keep up with the event live, there’ll be a ‘live community’ on http://blog.twidox.com via Six Groups. If you upload your pictures and/ or videos to Sevenload or Flickr, please tag them with “tcberlin” and use the hashtag “#tcb” when twittering. To join the live stream and for your tweets to also show up, please go to blog.twidox.com and register for the community. When registering, state your twitter account and then your tweets will appear in the live stream.

We hope everyone has a great night. Peter Ha from CrunchGear and I ( Mike Butcher) look forward to meeting all the startups and we’ll be doing some live coverage of our own.

Check out more detail on our sponsors after the jump.

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Microsoft Exits Classified Listings Business

Microsoft Live Expo, their experiment with classified listings that launched in early 2006, will be shut down on July 31, says a notice posted on the site. New listings have already been suspended.

This comes as Craigslist solidifies its position as the top free listings service. Other services like Kijiji (owned by eBay) and Oodle (which recently partnered with Walmart) continue to grow. Recently Kijiji has made waves about their impressive growth rate. And other classified listing startups continue to get funded.

There’s just no room for Microsoft in the classified listings space, it seems. It joins the deadpool.

A screen shot of what it looked like in the good days is below.

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Here Come The New iPhone Apps

As Apple gears up for the launch of its 3G iPhone, outside developers and startups are finally going to get to sell or give away their own applications that run natively on the phone (as opposed to being optimized for the Safari browser, as are most legal, third-party apps today). These apps, which are built on the iPhone SDK announced last March, will be distributed through the upcoming iPhone App Store (which apparently won’t launch for a few weeks). These apps will have some limitations (you can only run one app at a time and VOIP services only work via WiFi, for instance), but they will also bring a lot of innovation to the iPhone.

We’ve been tracking some of these announcements as companies prepare to unveil their new iPhone apps. They are listed below. There is a good chance more will be announced on stage during Steve Jobs’ keynote today. We will update as we learn more. Please let us know which ones we missed in comments.

Zenbe Lists:Webmail service Zenbe (reviewed here) is testing the iPhone development environment with a to-do list application that can be used to keep track of your chores and collaborate with friends and coworkers. Create task lists, check off items, and sync them with your contacts. Lists can be sent to your friends via email and accessed through the browser when sitting at a desktop computer. The Lists application won’t be integrated with Zenbe’s main email app, at least to start.

Super Monkey Ball: It took Sega two weeks to create a version of its popular video game for the iPhone. It will cost $9.99 at the iPhone App Store. Players use the built-in accelerometer to move the character.

The Associated Press: New app will retrieve local news based on your location. Also links every iPhone with the app to the AP so citizen journalists can send in photos taken on their iPhones of breaking events, as well as text commentary.

Six Apart (TypePad): Blogging from you iPhone? An iPhone announcement from Six Apart is expected today. More details as we get them. Update: Six Apart’s iPhone app lets you blog from your iPhone and add photos taken with the phone’s camera. It makes it easy to create micro-blog posts around a photo by adding a title, category and text. This app will be free for Typepad users. See how Six Apart CEO Chris Alden tried valiantly not to answer Mike’s questions on video when he was cornered right before the Apple keynote:

Pangea Software (Enigmo and Croman Rally): Two games for the iPhone that will cost $9.99 each. Enigmo is a touch-based puzzle game where you move drops of water around with your finger. Croman Rally is a race game with Flinstone-style cars that players control with the iPhone’s accelerometer.

Cow Music: Built by a single developer, Mark terry, in his time, the app is called Band. It lets you play virtual instruments on the iphone and create music. Instruments include piano, drums, guitars. You play the instruments by banging (lightly) on the iPhone.

MLB.com’s At Bat: Shows stats and video highlights of baseball games.

Modality: An anatomy app for medical students. The app is filled with anatomy drawings and images linked to Google and Wikipedia for more detailed information.

MIMvista: Another tool for doctors to view CT scans and PET scans on their iPhones.

Digital Legends Entertainment: Another game that took two days to port to the iPhone. Will be available in September.

SlingPlayer Mobile: You will soon be able to watch TV on your iPhone. Just like a Slingbox that let’s you access your TV from anywhere around the world, Sling Media is creating a version of its SlingPlayer Mobile app for the iPhone. That means theoretically you could watch all the channels you have at home on your iPhone, as long as the Internet connection is strong enough to stream the video.

Loopt: The social mobile network is expected to announce an iPhone version of its app. Loopt shows you where your friends are based on GPS and other location-tracking technologies. Loopt is already available on many Sprint and Verizon phones. With the iPhone, it will add AT&T to its roster.

Phanfare: Take pictures on your iPhone, add captions, and share them as slideshows on the Web. Phanfare is launching its iPhone version today.

Whrrl: Another mobile social network geared at sharing opinions and reviews of local establishments with your friends. The company behind Whrrl, Pelago, was is part of Kleiner Perkins’ iFund. (Read our review here).

Citysense: Nightlife tracker. Let’s you see the city’s hot spots by showing heat maps of where people are via their cell phones and other signal-emitting mobile devices. Only available in San Francisco for now. A demo app for Sense Networks.

iCall: VOIP on your iPhone. We covered it here.

Glide 3.0: It’s your desktop on your iPhone.

eBay: We’re not sure what eBay has up its sleeve either, but Mike caught up with an eBay executive at the Moscone center who sounded like had something to hide:

Update: Turns out eBay developed an auctions app for the iPhone. From Mike’s liveblog notes: “They’re showing home screen with search, avatar and a number of navigation items.”

Kooaba: Point your iPhone camera at a movie poster and get movie details and show times Cool visual-recognition app

:

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CrunchGear Interviews Glenn Lurie, President of National Distribution for AT&T

Check out Matt Hickey’s interview with Glenn Lurie, President of National Distribution for AT&T at CrunchGear. Here’s a snippet.

Steve and his friends had a great presentation where we saw new apps for a bevy of developers, most of them pretty good looking.

But the star of the show was the new iPhone 3G, a slimmer, faster version of the handset we all know an love. I talked to Glenn Lurie from AT&T Mobility earlier to clear up a few lingering questions. Sadly, most of what he told me were qualified “no comments”, but we were able to glean a couple nifty tidbits about AT&T’s involvement with the new phone.

Many were wondering if the lower price would mean a subsidy from AT&T. The new contract prices seem to indicate that it does, though Lurie couldn’t go on the record about that. One fear some had was that Apple would have to pull the phone from the Apple store, selling exclusively through AT&T retail outlets. This won’t be the case. The iPhone 3G will continue to be sold through AT&T and Apple both, good news for many.

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$199 iPhone? Sure, with a 2-year contract

For the sake of time, I’ll just paste the release. Pricing for the iPhone 3G is based on a 2-year contract. Woohoo. Unlimited data plans for iPhone 3G customers will be $30/month while business users will have to pony up $45/month. Also, revenue sharing has ceased going forward between Apple and AT&T.

Update: Scoot on over to CrunchGear for all the updates and answers to your questions.

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The 3G(PS) iPhone Arrives (See The Video From the Stevenote)

Apple announced its new 3G iPhone today. It is much thinner, much faster, and much cheaper than its predecessor. Starting at $199(with a two-year contract), you get an 8 gigabyte device with GPS that works on AT&T’s high-speed 3G network (as opposed to the slower EDGE network all previous iPhones are bound to). A 16 gigabyte version will go for $299. Considering that the current 8 GB iPhones cost $399, that is quite a steal. The battery is supposed to support 300 hours of standby time, 5 to 6 hours of Web browsing, 7 hours of video, and 24 hours of audio. But talk time is cut in half from 10 hours to 5 hours, when using the 3G network. The launch date is July 11.

Jobs claims that the 3G network approaches the speed of WiFi. What is really going to be a game-changer, though, is the higher speed in combination with the GPS chip, which will open up a whole slew of location-aware apps (some of which we’ve already seen). That and all the new iPhone apps that will be built for it by outside developers.

Apple has already sold 6 million iPhones, notes Steve Jobs. This price drop and the new features should put Apple over the 10-million mark without a problem. Here’s a video of Steve Jobs going over all the features from the keynote (taken, appropriately enough, on a cell phone):

And here’s one of the new ad for the 3G phone:

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Apple Relaunches .Mac as MobileMe: Sync Everything

As was widely speculated before Steve Jobs’ keynote address today, Apple is relaunching its .Mac service as MobileMe. The service syncs emails, photos, contacts, calendars, and other information between your iPhone and different computers. It works not only on Macs, but also on Windows. It will cost $99 a year, with 20 Gigabytes of online storage. The service, which will replace .Mac, will be available in early July.

Apple calls it “Exchange for the rest of us.” Interesting positioning. Usually Apple does not aspire to be like Microsoft. Video is above.

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The Games Begin: Live Coverage Of Apple WWDC Event In San Francisco

Update: See Our In Depth Coverage As Well:

- CrunchGear Interviews Glenn Lurie, President of National Distrubition for AT&T

- Here Come The New iPhone Apps

- The 3G(PS) iPhone Arrives (See The Video From the Stevenote)

- Apple Relaunches .Mac as MobileMe: Sync Everything

It’s now around 8 am PDT. We’re (Mike and Mark) arriving at Moscone West a couple of hours before the 10 am Steve Jobs Keynote with Matt Hickey from CrunchGear. For the next couple of hours we’ll be live blogging the bedlam around the registration table, taking photos, and interviewing any expert we can find on what they think will be announced.

Then, at 10 AM, all bets are off. We rush into the auditorium, elbow and threaten our way to the best seats we can find, and start creating all kinds of rich media for your enjoyment. I’ll be live blogging the event here, as will Matt Hickey. Mark Hendrickson is manning his shiny new camera with enough optical zoom to tell you the thread count on Steve’s sweater - expect those photos to be posted regularly throughout the session.

The layout will be a bit of a mess, but we’ve got an army of interns back at the office who’ll keep things as orderly as possible and will clean things up after the event is over. Then the real fun begins - we all get to opine and speculate on what we’ve just seen.

For a little background see our coverage of the iPhone SDK event.

The Big Event:

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Location-Tracking Startup Sense Networks Emerges from Stealth To Answer the Question: Where Is Everybody?

What if you could look at your cell phone and see a heat map of where everybody in the city was at that very moment? The more people at any given location, the redder it would appear on the map. That’s what Citysense does. It is a mobile application that is supposed to help you figure out where the hottest clubs and night spots are so you can go there (or avoid them, depending on your preference).

It senses where the most popular places are based on the location information emitted by everyone’s cell phones, shows the places with the most activity, and then links into Yelp or Google to help you find out what is at that location. Over time, it learns about where you like to go (fancy restaurants or punk rock clubs) and shows you other people like you, and where they are—right now. And it does all of this anonymously. (You can’t see your where your actual friends are). Citysense only works in San Francisco right now. It is available as a mobile download for the Blackberry and soon for the iPhone as well.

The application is essentially a demonstration for a startup called Sense Networks that is emerging from stealth mode today. Citysense is built on top of the company’s main technology platform, Macrosense. The company ingests billions of data points about people’s location from cell phones, GPS devices, WiFi, and even taxis. The company also collects geo-location data from everyone who downloads Citysense, or any future app (although, the company considers the data to be yours, and you can delete it from the database at any time).

Using machine-learning algorithms, it then indexes all of this location data and ranks places in the real world much like a search engine ranks Websites. But instead of looking at Web links, it looks at how much data (i.e., people) are moving between locations. The company makes money by selling this data in the aggregate to professional investors and financial institutions, who are keen to find out things like where people are shopping.

Sense Networks was founded by MIT computer scientist Alex Pentland and Columbia computer scientist Tony Jebara back in May, 2003. But it remained pretty much a research project until the company was incorporated in 2006. In April, 2008 it raised an A round from hedge funds (including Passport Capital, Drobny Global Asset Management and the Challenge Funds) and angel investors. The amount was not disclosed, but VentureWire reports that it was $3 million.

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Slide Got Theirs, Now RockYou Gets Some Too

Back in January Slide pulled off a whopper of a financing for an effectively pre-revenue startup: $50 million, valuing the company at a cool half billion dollars. Not bad.

No one was surprised to hear that arch-rival RockYou would soon close a big round of their own. And we have not been dissapointed. Today RockYou is announcing a $35 million Series C round, led by DCM. Previous investors include Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, and First Round Capital—none of which are mentioned as participating in the current round. The company had raised just $16.5 million over two previous rounds, bringing their total to $51.5 million.

RockYou is the second-most popular creator of applications on Facebook (after Slide), and says that its widgets are seen by 87.5 million people a month across the Web (compared to Slide’s 63.7 million). The company also offers OpenSocial applications that have been installed 10 million times. RockYou sells social-networking ads against the audience for its widgets. At 2.7 billion pageviews a month, that’s a lot of advertising inventory.

Now it just has to figure out how to get more people to click on them.

The stress between these two similar startups to compete is brutal. Sarah Lacy explained in her book how when either company would release a new feature or application, the other would race to duplicate it within hours:

This has all been building to a nasty war between Slide and RockYou, with each maintaining it is larger, each ripping off the other’s products. Having an enemy has helped focus Slide, and for now, it beats RockYou on every count.

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Exclusive Access to Viewzi, The Ridiculously Flexible Visual Search

One of the problems with visual search sites is that most of them are only suited for a few specific kinds of queries. Try searching for a song on SearchMe, and you’re more likely to get a Wikipedia page than an MP3. Viewzi, a startup out of Texas, is looking to offer a more adaptive visual search that can radically change in both appearance and function depending on the search term. To check out the site, click here (for now this is the only way into the site, you’re free to adjust the search term and view mode once you’re in).

Viewzi draws its flexibility from its “views”, each of which is essentially a customized search aggregator. After entering a search term, Viewzi tries to figure out what you’re looking for, and presents the results in an appropriate view. At launch there are 16 views that include the “3D Photo Cloud”, “Album View”, and the curious “Weather View”. Each view draws results from different sources, ranging from Amazon to Weather.com.

Enter a search for “More Than A Feeling”, and you get the MP3 Search View, which lists links to the song, each of which can be previewed using an embedded Flash player. Try a search for “iPhone”, and you’ll get the Gadget View, which presents a mashup of iPhone queries on Amazon, Digg, Flickr, and Wikipedia. You’re also free to manually pick which view you’d like to use, though results can be less relevant.

For the time being, users will only be allowed to use views that have been created by the site’s developers. However, the site plans to roll out an API in the near future which will allow users to create their own views, and eventually hopes to make a WYSIWYG “View Maker” that will allow anyone to create their own views.

In practice Viewzi did a pretty good job at determining which View corresponded to a search term, though it wasn’t perfect. My biggest problem with the site at this point is that some of the views are pure eyecandy, offering little in the way of useful information. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing - I enjoy eyecandy just as much as the next guy. But it feels like a few of the views are sacrificing function for good looks (Gadget View, for example, is almost useless).

Viewzi competes with a number of other visual search engines, including SearchMe. Their custom aggregated search is similar to Rollyo.

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BlogTalkRadio Gives Listeners A Voice With “Ask The Host”

BlogTalkRadio, the site that allows online broadcasters to generate shows using phone calls, has introduced a new feature they call “Ask the host”. The feature allows fans listening to live shows to interact with the show’s host in real-time using VoIP and their computer’s microphone.

After finding a participating live show on BlogTalkRadio’s servers, listeners can “dial-in” with an embedded Flash widget. While the feature may not sound particularly exciting at first (radio shows have let callers participate for ages), BlogTalkRadio says that it will open the door to international participation. In the past, users needed to call a New York phone number, which could lead to costly phone calls for anyone located outside the United States. Done right, this could lead to some very compelling discussion - imagine a talk show on international politics with input from around the world.

BlogTalkRadio tries to make online broadcasting as simple as setting up a conference phone call. Since it launched in 2006, the site has added a number of notable members to its service, including The Petagon and Sun Microsystems (which run branded private ‘Stations’ on the site). Another player in this space is TalkShoe.

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Delicious 2.0: We’ve Been Waiting 9 Months

It’s been over nine months since Yahoo first gave us a glimpse of Delicious 2.0 - a complete code rewrite from the now aging platform that was acquired by Yahoo in December 2005.

Yahoo never said when they’d be ready to launch the new Delicious (it’s available at preview.delicious.com but beta invitations are locked down). In January there was a hint on the Delicious blog that the new version was coming soon: “We know we haven’t updated the blog in a looong time but the team has been heads down working on the next version of Delicious. We’ll have an update to share with you guys next week.” But no update came, and since then, not a peep from Yahoo.

It’s now been nine months. We’ve heard from Yahoo insiders that founder Joshua Schachter is now working on another project, and now that his stock has fully vested it isn’t even certain he’ll stay with the company. Meanwhile, scaling issues have confounded the Delicious team and they continue to rework the architecture.

In April venture capitalist/blogger Fred Wilson noted that the user numbers for Delicious were dropping. Schachter told us that the Comscore numbers did not reflect their business, saying they continue to “grow normally.” He also pointed out that a large number of people use the service via Firefox and other browser plugins, and that the service shut off search indexing, hurting unique traffic numbers.

Delicious is still my social bookmarking service of choice, but Delicious 2.0 is a serious black eye for Yahoo and the Delicious team. It’s time for them to update us on when we can expect a general release of the next version.

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TechCruncher Nik Cubrilovic Gives Seesmic A Little Advice

Nik Cubrilovic gives Seesmic a little user interface advice in this interactive video hosted at…Seesmic. Very funny if you use both Seesmic and Twitter. The other 95% of you should just move on the the next post.

Disclosure: I’m a Seesmic investor. And I still think this is funny (Nik seems to imply that Seesmic is a waste of time).

Leave your best video comment below and tell Nik why he’s wrong. or right. or not funny. etc. Best one gets a TechCrunch Tshirt. Bonus points are awarded if you are already wearing a TechCrunch Tshirt in the video.

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Use Twiddict For Those Inevitable Twitter Downtimes

Good ideas are flying in for dealing with a Twitter that has been put on life support to try to keep a pulse going through the Apple WWDC keynote event later this morning. Watch the news on the Summize Apple search page, and if the service goes down, hop on over to Twiddict, which will post your messages to Twitter right away if the service is live, or will queue them up and hold them until the service is back online.

TwitterMail provides a similar feature via email, so choose your poison. But the good news is, you don’t have to stop Twittering just because Twitter’s stopped letting you.

A warning on both services - you have to enter your Twitter credentials to make it work. Don’t come complaining back to me if something ridiculously awful happens to you afterwards.

Read more at TechCrunch UK.

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TravelMuse May Be The Undecided Traveler’s Dream Come True

You’ve got a week in vacation time that’s about to expire, an economic stimulus check that’s burning a hole in your pocket, and a passport that hasn’t been opened since the Clinton administration. So, where to?

TravelMuse (formerly known as TripOvation) just launched in public beta, and is looking to help. The site asks users a series of simple questions and, using their input, tells them where they should consider traveling. The site rounds out its suggestions with weekly editorial content from 50 freelance writers, all of which TravelMuse says is objective and fact reviewed.

The suggestion process is simple: enter your city of origin, the amount of money you can spend per traveler, how far you’re willing to travel, and which of the available activities you’re interested in. Activities listed on the site run the gamut from Whale Watching to Hot Air Ballooning, though travelers with more obscure interests are going to be left in the dust. The site takes the entered information and spits out up to eight matches, ranked by their compatibility.

TravelMuse then generates a number of pre-configured travel packages that fit into your price range, and users can read up on local POI’s with the site’s comprehensive database. The site also facilitates group travel by allow friends to share suggested trips with each other.

One of the nice things about TravelMuse is that it relies on information that has been manually entered by experts, not some complex Google algorithm. Of course, this could pose a problem in the future: if the site ever adds a new activity, somebody will have to go back through every city to see if it offers it.

At this point TravelMuse seems like a good place to start when you’re beginning to plan a trip, but it probably isn’t the best place to actually book it. Users looking to get the best deal will probably want to turn to more comprehensive hotel and flight searches like Kayak. But as a hybrid travel magazine/suggestion site, TravelMuse may well find a place in the crowded travel space.

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Twitter Partners With Summize to Cover Apple News

For those of you who just can’t wait to hear the latest Apple news this morning as it breaks (our live on the scene coverage begins at 8 am PST): Twitter is partnering with Summize to show all twitters that contain the words “wwdc,” “apple,” “iphone” or “steve jobs.”

Twitter is promoting this heavily on every Twitter page with “Apple fan? Our pals at Summize are tracking the WWDC.” I didn’t notice it myself (I use Twhirl and rarely visit the Twitter site), but others have.

It’s no surprise that Twitter is pushing this - they are actively trying to find ways to reduce the database load on their frail infrastructure during the event, and pushing users to a third party service will help. If Twitter goes down, though, there’s nothing Summize will be able to do to help.

Watch the news here.

I’ll say one thing for Twitter, They have community dedicated to keeing the service alive. Pushing page views and the constant refreshes to a third party is real service. Golf clap for Summize.

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Firefox Add-on To Save You From MySpace

AmIOnMySpace is a new Firefox plugin that we found via digg tonight that does one thing - if you “accidentally” navigate to MySpace it stops you, and brings you to a previous website you’ve visited. Useful? Not so much. Funny? Yes.

Download it here.

Add me as a friend on MySpace here.

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Healthline Launches Semantic Health Ad Network

Believing that health sites need their own ad network, Healthline is bringing its semantic search technology to advertising. The health search engine is launching the Health Media Network, an ad network that will place contextual ads on health Websites. It is like an AdSense for health sites.

But instead of relying simply on matching keywords on the page where the ad is being served, Healthline says it can serve ads that match the health concepts on the page. So an article that mentions the medical term “costochondritis” (an inflammation of the rib) might serve up an ad for ibuprofen (the most common treatment).

Healthline has created a taxonomy of 200,000 related health terms and concepts for its search engine, and is using the same underlying technology for it new ad network. It will be powering contextual health ads on its own search engine as well as partner sites such as United Health’s upcoming MyOptumHealth; AARP, Health.com, HealthPricer, JustAnswer, and USNews.com. All told these sites reach 10 million people a month, says the company.

Healthline itself has shown more zig-zag performance, most recently attracting 3.4 million visitors to its site worldwide in April, according to comScore. That was down from 5 million the month before.

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

Twitter Tempts Fate

Twitter tempts fate in a big way: tomorrow will be a day that they do not get kicked in the face over yet another outage, they say in a blog post.

They outline two lines of defense in preparation for a big wave of Twitter usage around the Steve Jobs/Apple WWDC Keynote:

1. “We’ve moved much of the load off our database by utilizing more memcache, employing more read-slave servers, and by fixing some bugs for improved efficiency” (until now they had just three database servers, possibly shown in the image above ) and

2. “In the event that our estimates and preparations fail…We have isolated and created on/off switches for many Twitter features.”

Experts I’ve spoken with say these are reasonable precautions to take, although they question why more slave servers weren’t set up in the past (”it takes ten minutes,” said one anonymous source). But as a Twitter user, I’m glad to see they’re preparing for the surge.

But this blog post is a possible mistake - if Twitter does go down people will know that the team is unable to keep control even when they promise things will go right. I would have kept quiet on the changes and then wrote a postmortem if everything was smooth sailing.

The smartest thing Twitter could have done would be to hire former Chief Architect Blaine Cook back as a consultant to keep an eye on things for the day (he seems to be the only person that can keep his crazy architecture actually live). But from what we’ve heard that hasn’t happened.

The main thing Twitter has to be careful of is going down. Once that happens it will take them hours to get the service live again, and the keynote will then be over. If they can keep load down to a point where nothing fails, they may win the day. Expect silence on our end if they do, and a merciless blog post if they fail.

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

Apple WWDC 2008 Keynote Live-Blogging Tomorrow

Matt, Michael, and Mark (the M-Team) will be reporting live from WWDC tomorrow at 10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern. We will be posting on CrunchGear. You can talk about the event with us at CrunchChat. It it all goes pear-shapes we’ll revert to a static HTML page in place of the dynamic page for the duration of the event. TC will have a copy of the coverage as well.

If you will be away from your computer during this time, we will use Pingie to to send SMS messages regarding ONLY THE PRODUCT LAUNCHES. You can sign up here. Regular SMS charges may apply, but you will not pay Pingle or CrunchGear for this service.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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