Newsvine Relaunch Today: Build Your Own News Site

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Seattle-based news site Newsvine will relaunch this afternoon with significant changes to the user experience. They’re calling the release “Evergreen.”

Among the changes: like Netvibes, Pageflakes and other personalized homepages, users will now be able to move most modules on the Newsvine home page around, or delete them altogether. Users can also add whatever news feeds they want to the home page by adding a RSS feed module.

Until now, web services that allow customization generally put the feature in a standalone area. Yahoo has my.yahoo, for example, but doesn’t allow users to make changes to the main Yahoo home page. Like their often-copied feature of allowing user comments to news items, this may be another way that Newsvine reshapes the online news industry. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the New York Times, USA Today and other sites allow users to create their own version of the newspaper, possibly even allowing outside RSS feeds in, in the next year or so. This builds intense user loyalty and makes it much more likely they’ll spend even more time on the site.

Other features include the addition of local headlines and weather and a slideshow called “News In Pictures” that shows a continuous stream of AP pictures.

Newsvine also just got bigger, stretching from 900 to 1240 pixels. The extra width can be collapsed with a click.

Newsvine has raised just $1.25 million in a single round of financing in July 2005 from Second Avenue Partners. They have six employees. The site currently brings in 600,000 monthly unique visitors generating 3.5 million monthly page views.

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Cameraphones Pass 50% Penetration Mark in USA

M:Metrics says that the number of cameraphone owners has climbed to 106 million in the United States, crossing the 50% threshold. Cameraphones are even more ubiquitous in European markets, led by the United Kingdom where three out of every four mobile subscribers own a camera phone. The measurement firm reports that the proliferation of this technology is driving a decline of one of the first sources of mobile entertainment revenue: the sale of wallpapers and phone graphics, as increasing numbers of people personalize their phone with photos taken on the device.

Cameraphone Penetration and Graphics Purchases: February 2007

Country	Penetration	% Who Purchased Screensaver or Wallpaper	% Who Saved Camera phone Photo as Screensaver / Wallpaper
US	51%	3.3	16.7
UK	75%	2.0	28.3
Germany	70%	2.0	20.4
France	63%	2.1	26.6
Spain	74%	2.6	31.2
Italy	69%	2.9	31.7

"While a cameraphone in the pocket of most mobile phone owners may have picked the proverbial pockets of graphics publishers, the penetration of this technology has a positive impact on operator data revenues overall as consumers increasingly purchase photo messaging bundles," said Mark Donovan, senior vice president and senior analyst, M:Metrics.

Despite a slackening of demand for graphics, Donovan notes that such content is used to good effect by purveyors of off-portal content to entice subscribers to sign up for subscriptions. "Graphics remain a preferred type of content because of the more attractive terms typically associated with licensing of branded graphical content compared with the revenue splits that music labels and publishers expect from ringtones. However, graphics publishers have to work a lot harder and offer compelling, branded content to generate consumer interest."

Photo messaging has consistently been among the most popular mobile applications across geographies that M:Metrics measures, with as many as 31.3 percent of mobile subscribers sending photos or videos to other phones, e-mail addresses or posting to blogs.

Used network services for photos/videos

August 2006			February 2007
Country	Subscribers	Percent	Subscribers	Percent
France	8,796,960	20.5	9,432,842	21.2
Germany	9,238,968	20.5	9,590,281	20.8
Italy	13,156,342	31.3	13,779,059	31.3
Spain	8,671,452	28.4	9,316,644	29.1
UK	13,363,233	30.7	13,187,929	29.6
US	28,218,336	14.5	30,692,545	14.8

"As the technological abilities and habits of mobile users evolve with the capabilities of the devices they own, new mobile content business opportunities are both created and destroyed," observed Donovan. "As we reported, the proliferation of musicphones is also expanding rapidly, so a natural question is how the music industry will respond as these connected creators potentially take a bite out of the ringtone market."

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5min: A collective encyclopedia in form of 5 minute videos

from Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold

(Thanks, Trebor!)

5 mins combines several different smartmobby ideas and technologies in an excellent way: User-generated short videos, collective knowledge creation, peer-to-peer media sharing, open educational content:

5min is a place to find short video solutions for any practical question and a forum for people wanting to share their knowledge.

The vision behind 5min is a very simple one: any solution can be visually explained in no more than 5 minutes. Our aim is to create the first communal Life Videopedia allowing users from all over the globe to contribute their knowledge by sharing visual guides covering arts, business, fashion, sports, health, tech, food, and much more.

5min's basic philosophy is that everybody is an expert in something. The video era gives us the technological opportunity to share our collective knowledge and gather it onto one platform. This is what 5min aims to be – a platform for users, a platform for creators, a platform for talent and anyone that has something to teach.

In order to bring to life our vision of creating a comprehensive Life Videopedia, 5min gives each creator a private promotional Studio – a space to show his/her skills, and share his/her secrets.

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Kyte Launches: More Rich Media Streaming Presence

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Keeping everyone aware of what you are up to every fleeting, uninteresting moment of your life is a hot area for startups right now. Newly launched Kyte seems to fall somewhere between Twitter and Ustream, two services that let users send a constant stream of data about themselves to interested friends (albeit in very different ways).

Kyte is at its core a media player. Users create an account and set up channels. They can then drag photos, video and text into the channels and interact with people viewing the content.

The service is extremely flexible in its approach to getting content into and out of the service. Users can access their account and add content from their (java enabled) mobile phone, the browser or via email. Viewers can interact with content on the Kyte website, their phone and other websites where users embed content via a widget player.

Kyte can be a place users put occasional content, or a live, Usstream-style live stream of their life. The company says “You could even create a “LifeStream”, a minute-by-minute live show that is published in real-time directly to your MySpace page, website, blog, or mobile phone.”

The company has raised a round of financing ($2.25 million, says Om Malik) from Atomico Investments, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Richards and Ron Conway.

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OpenDNS Adds Short-Cut Service

from TechCrunch by John Biggs

DNS is boring, but OpenDNS has added a new Shortcut feature that lets you visit URLs without all that nasty typing. Shortcuts are short, multi-letter abbreviations for your favorite sites. Instead of typing “www.nytimes.com,” you can just type “NYT.” You can also create short-cuts for popular search sites (”g monkeys” to search Google for Monkeys, for example).

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