Piracy up, global warming down

 

 

 

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Family Networking site Kindo receives funding

 

 

Kindo has announced seed funding from a group of investors that includes Saul and Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group, former Last.fm chairman and Ricardo founder Stefan Glanzer, and several founding engineers of Skype, who went on to build the venture capital firm ASI. The amount of financing has not been disclosed.

The basic framework of Kindo is very simple. It’s a website that allows you to build a family tree - and network with and learn about the personal Web you create. Consider it one part Facebook or LinkedIn and a small bit Ancestry.com.

The way in which you establish your family tree on Kindo is quite straightforward. First, you create an account. Since minimal information is required, this takes only a short moment. You are then transferred to a visual graph, where you input similarly general data for the individuals who created you. Any siblings can be designated your closest links as well.

There’s really no telling whether Kindo will prove successful. While it’s a decent concept on paper - in that it is strictly a family-only construct - the volume of networking tools both basic and complex launched in weeks, months and years past is altogether too much to handle for many Web users.

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Yahoo Live launches and then crashes

 

 

Yahoo, apparently unfazed by the acquisition chat, turns out what is the first answer from the multi-billion dollar tech players to the UStream-style embedded video world. A quiet launch of Yahoo! Live took place this evening, and was described on their developer network blog as “an experiment in personal live video broadcasting.”

The streaming system appeared to work reasonably for broadcasting, up until the point they apparently ran out of bandwidth.

After playing with the system for a bit, the features seem a bit fuller than most of the other systems out there. There is an interactivity to the system greater than Operater11, in terms of video streams available from the audience. The design is as slick as Justin.TV. The chat system and video windows are as portable as with UStream.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t presently seem to have a mechanism in place for recording streamed sessions. It doesn’t have any of the live compositing features of Mogulus, and it doesn’t seem capable of handling more than a few hundred concurrent connections, as about 45 minutes from launch, frequent downtimes and service interruptions started.

All in all, it is a unique offering. It will provide, undoubtedly, a certain level of competition to the established players.

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Facebook uses 1,500 users to create Spanish Facebook

 

 

Not long ago Facebook took an innovative approach to translating its site into various languages - get the users to do all the work.

Users can ask to translate bits of the site, which are then voted on by other users until a good localized version is created. Users have been hard at work translating Facebook into German, Spanish and French.

Facebook says that the Spanish site was completed in less than four weeks and is based on the work of nearly 1,500 Spanish-speaking Facebook users. Facebook has 2.8 million active users in Latin America and Spain.

Today Facebook opened up the Spanish version of the site. If you visit Facebook from a Spanish-prevalent country starting next week, the default language will be auto set to Spanish. Users can also change the default language to Spanish in their account settings.

Facebook takes a very different approach to localized sites than rival MySpace, which is opening up offices all over the world to serve those markets.

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Dizzyworld takes $1 Million Series A

 

 

Virtual world for kids 8-12 Dizzywood has taken $1 million Series A in a round led by Shelby Bonnie with Charles River Ventures and other individual investors also participating.

Tiburon, CA based Dizzywood aims to “inspire young people to use their imagination and have fun, while learning real-life values and skills.” Their online virtual world/ gaming platform offers creative, story-driven play with “challenging activities” that teach children to cooperate with others and develop cognitive skills.

The company has a decent pedigree among its founders. Scott Arpajian is a former SVP of CNET Download.com and Sean Kelly co-founded Wallop. Third co-founder Ken Marden is a game designer and a published children’s book author.

The company plans to use the capital to further develop and expand content and services. Dizzywood launched in November 2007.

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Can Revver stay out of the deadpool?

 

 

CNET is reporting that video sharing site Revver is trying to sell itself for $300-500k, a measly price given its total funding of $12.7M.

The company apparently has fallen on hard times, with over half of its staff leaving in the last 18 months and having accrued a debt of $1M. So far the company has had no luck finding a buyer even at such a low offering price. Both LiveUniverse, a “network of entertainment Web sites”, and Microsoft’s Soapbox (i.e. MSN Video) have considered buying Revver but neither has bitten.

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Ebay to disable sellers from leaving negative comments

 

 

The BBC reports that the Ebay will soon disable sellers from leaving negative comments about buyers. For those of you who haven’t used eBay in a while, you’ll recall feedback is eBay’s reputation system that allows buyers and sellers to leave ratings and comments about each other in an effort to weed out the bad apples.

The move stems from what eBay describes as retaliation that occurs when a buyer leaves a negative comment on a seller’s feedback profile. eBay says that some buyers have grown so concerned about negative retaliatory feedback that they’ve stopped posting negative feedback about sellers. Sellers are of course not happy about this, arguing that this move will leave them with little recourse when a buyer ends up not paying for an item. For its part, an eBay spokesperson tells the BBC, “If a buyer doesn’t pay, the seller can easily contact eBay, we will review any complaint and maybe remove the buyer.”

eBay’s auction business has fallen flat over the past couple years, with the number of listings growing only 4 percent in the company’s most recent quarter. eBay has already announced plans to slash fees for sellers in an effort to get more people auctioning off their stuff. Is making the feedback system one-way another way to juice up listings? Perhaps. eBay’s community has always been one of the strongest parts of the site, and if flaming between buyers and sellers has truly become a significant problem, it has likely turned off some people from the site.

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