SOMEWHAT FRANK

GenieTown Service Marketplace Launches

Looking for a little help on your next home project? If you live in the San Francisco area you might be in luck as GenieTown, a Palo Alto-based startup founded by a group of Stanford entrepreneurs, officially opened to the world today. GenieTown offers a platform for anyone looking for local services to either browse through a broad range of specific service providers or post a job request and invite qualified responses. GenieTown creates an eBay-like marketplace for services.

eBay Seller Boycott Could Give Startups A Shot

A movement that started as a thread in the eBay forums has turned into an all out eBay Seller Boycott from February 18 - 25. The sellers on eBay have united and are staging to lash out against eBay for recent seller fee raises and feedback changes. A similar eBay boycott was successful for sellers in 2005 so it appears they are looking for a repeat success. They have even created a YouTube video for the eBay boycott.

I am not a big eBay buyer or seller but I think this little boycott could give other startups in the space an opportunity. If you are looking to sell handmade goods you might give Esty a try. If you are looking to just get rid of something in your local area you could leverage craigslist or Kijiji. There are lots of other options as well, so if you have a startup that is an alternative to eBay share it with SOMEWHAT FRANK by dropping a comment with the information.

Help Finding A Nintendo Wii

Are you looking for a Nintendo Wii? I know some of my friends are. One of my friends is even thinking about getting in line at 5 o'clock in the morning at the Nintendo retail store in New York to try and snag one. The store only allows you to buy one Wii at a time if you are one of the lucky souls that gets one at all. However, there may be a few other options on the Web that might be less time consuming and physically challenging to get your hands on a  Nintendo Wii.

Shoeboxed Organizes Your Shopping History

After two of the biggest shopping days of the year Black Friday and Cyber-Monday respectively I figured it was probably important to make sure you save your receipts. You may throw them in your wallet, purse or in a shoebox under your bed somewhere. With Shoeboxed you can save all your receipts in one place online. Shoeboxed aims to make it easy to keep track of your own personal shopping history by offering an online repository with sprinkles of social candy to make sharing it easy to share some of your personal shopping history.

Ztail Simplifying Selling Stuff Online

Have you ever looked around your place and noticed you tend to save things, lots of things, that you no longer need, want or care about? If so, you might want to sell something on Ztail, an eBay compatible Alpha application. Through a partnership with Compete.com, Ztail surveyed 2,500 registered eBay users about what stopped them from selling online. Eighty-five percent (or 2125 people surveyed) said online selling was too hard and time consuming.

Ztail is focused on simplifying selling by searching product and transaction data for millions of items and automating the listing process, creating the basis for the simple, intuitive and effective Click Once, Sell Everywhere model. Ztail aimed to bypass a complicated and lengthy process, and simplified it into three easy steps:

Find your product, Publish your listing, Share your listing.

Once the listing is created, Ztail plugs the user into his or her own social media and instantly distributes the listing to selected friends via blogs, email and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Finally, Ztail offers tools to help users track and adjust activity in their personal MyZtail pages. 

Bill Hudak and Dave Keefer founded Ztail in 2006, with a combined 20 years in online experience at companies like Google, Netscape, ePinions and Shopping.com. Bill and Dave have watched online commerce develop from its infancy and created Ztail to make selling online quick and easy for everyone.

I set up an account, followed the directions and personalized my ad within a few minutes on eBay, edgeio, Google Base, oodle and vast. GigaOm offers additional perspective on Ztail as well.

StumbleUpon & Hitwise Acquired, Netvibes Universe Launches, Web 2.0 Expo Wrap-up, AOL India & Education 2.0

Photo of the Week: I snapped this photo of the West Wing while celebrating Earth Day 2007 on the White House grounds.

eBay Acquires StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay for between $40 to $75 million but it seems Google Google tried to rain on their parade with a toolbar update.

Hitwise Acquired by Experian for $240 Million
All of those great charts that Hitwise so freely provide us, have paid off big time for the web intelligence company. Information services provider Experian has announced their cash purchase of Hitwise for $240 million.

Netvibes Launches Universe: Customized Public Pages
Netvibes launched Universe, allowing users to create highly customized versions of Netvibes and publish them for public access. Netvibes has created 100 or so branded versions for the launch - users will be able to create these soon. Netvibes hosted a huge launch party this past Monday in San Francisco.

What Every Video Aggregator Site Needs
Here are a few things that every Video Aggregator website needs in order to stay afloat in this ever-crowding market.

AOL Launching Next Week In India
AOL President and COO Ron Grant is going to be in India next week for the launch of AOL’s India portal.

Google Feed API
Google Reader finally has its first official API. Any developer in the world can request the entire history of a web feed from Google's geo-distributed server cloud in a normalized response for inclusion in their websites or products.

Web 2.0 Expo: All Things Widgets
The Web 2.0 Expo included two sessions on widgets. Also, offline web apps could be the next big thing after seeing an Apollo demo, by Kevin Lynch of Adobe.

Web 2.0 takes On Colleges And Universities: Education 2.0
In the shift from an intellectual economy of push, to one of pull, the evolving participatory media are making their impact felt . It is no longer enough to pump out information like gasoline and expect authentic learning to take place - the new generation.

With Skype 3.0: No More Free Calling :(

Apparently there is no such thing as a free lunch as Skype, the Internet calling service owned by eBay, which has offered unlimited calls to landline and mobile phones within the United States and Canada since last Spring. Skype is planning on charging an annual $30 fee for those same calls starting January 1, 2007 according to a recent NYTimes report. The report went on to say:

"The new annual fee for unlimited calling, while still nominal compared with other Internet calling plans, is part of a broader strategy by eBay to expand Skype’s product offerings and revenue."

I do not know how much $30 a year will affect people's decision to continue to use Skype since Skype is still going to be very inexpensive to the user. Personally, I probably will continue to use the Skype service or just limit myself to Skype to Skype calls. In a highly competitive web 2.0 world this could open the door for other services to take on Skype's current "free" calling model to differentiate itself from Skype when they do switch to a paid model. Interestingly, AOL offers a similar VOIP service to Skype called AIM Phoneline and also charges a fee for unlimited calling just like Skype's plans. It will be amusing to see if new services spring up with the free calling model. 

CrunchCast is Back with Kiko Discussion

TalkCrunch the podcast which is part of the Mike "Captain Crunch" Arrington powered CrunchNetwork, is back!!! TalkCrunch has released a new podcast in which host Mike Arrington interviews Elliot Noss. They discuss Tucows and ths purchase of the Ajax calendar of Kiko via eBay. Yes they bought Kiko on eBay for just under $260K!

The twenty minute podcast interview is worth a listen. All I can say is thank god TalkCrunch is doing podcasts again - its been too long!