eBay Just Reports Great Q; May Be Acquiring Stumbleupon

from alarm:clock by BT

TechCrunch and Gigaom are speculating that eBay is on the verge of acquiring tool bar company Stumbleupon for $40-50M. As it happens, eBay just reported a great quarter and Meg Whitman will be on CNBC and other channels where we might hear here discuss Stumbleupon if indeed that goes down.

StumbleUpon is a simple bar that suggests sites based on your surfing habits and how they compare to other StumbleUpon users. If indeed eBay bought Stumbleupon the reason would most likely be access to a rapidly growing user base. Users could Stumbleupon products for sale on eBay. Already the company embeds sponsor sites in some of its search results. With Stumbleupon's user base doubling large numbers so frequently $40M could become a cheap customer acquisition spend. We would also expect eBay to marry Stumbleupon with Skype.

Calgary-born, SF-based StumbleUpon had raised $2M in angel funding from Google board member Ram Shriram, and angels Ariel Poler, Mitch Kapor and Ron Conway.

eBay seems to have a spring back in its step. Today, its first-quarter profit surged 52%, helped by higher average selling price of goods sold and more growth at Paypal. Skype saw revenue more than double to $79M.

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Which Color Do You Prefer?

Just for fun... made by Create Your Own WIRED Cover Tool

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Nifty and dangerous: FlickrCash

from StockPhotoTalk | Special Interest Blog by Andy Goetze

One of the tools for Flickr I noticed recently but then lacked the time to dig deeper into is FlickrCash, finally online since March 03 this year. Here´s a quick roundup.

As FlickrCash´s founder Augustine Fou puts it, using Flickr´s API "FlickrCash turns Flickr into the world´s largest stock image marketplace by helping image buyers more efficiently find images and image owners to sell them, by accepting payments for them and archiving licenses for public inspection".

To get the basic idea, you can view here for example the impressive Sunset Lightbox of FlickrCash´s developer Jesse Skinner, or watch the FlickrCash demo.

read more at StockPhotoTalk http://www.stockphototalk.com/phototalk/2007/04/flickrcash.html

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smashed through 200,000 on Alexa, 1,000 registered users

http://flickrcash.com/?k=flowers+purple

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Coghead Announces 17,000 Developers Building Applications Visually

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Silicon Valley based Coghead is making a bit of a splash today at the Web 2.0 Expo. They’re officially launching, although it’s largely ceremonial: they’ve been open to the public since October 2006. I wrote in detail about Coghead last year. The company competes in the “online access” space (a reference to Microsoft Access). We’ve written about Coghead competitors in the past, including Dabble DB, Zoho Creator and WyaWorks. The primary use of these products is to create business applications that deal with everything from task tracking through to purchase orders. What is special about CogHead is that users building applications with the product require less technical skills because the process is (mostly) all drag-and-drop and visual. CogHead is unique because of just how easy it is to create forms, views and apps - the design view allows users to create fields by dragging and dropping them onto a form. The user can lay the fields out and place them on the page, making the application they build more user friendly and easier on the eyes. Building the logic behind the forms is also a graphical process, the user takes objects and actions and drags them into a flow chart that is similar to a data-flow or logic diagram. There are a number of starter applications to help users get comfortable with the platform. Coghead is also announcing today that 17,000 developers are now working on the platform. The company has raised $11.2 million in two rounds of venture capital from American Capital Strategies Ltd., SAP Ventures and El Dorado Ventures. They have 21 employees in their Silicon Valley headquarters and another 15 in China.

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