Yoono, the slick browser plugin that serves as both a social network aggregator and media hub, has announced its impending support for Internet Explorer which will be available on November 7th. In conjunction with the the new version, Yoono is also announcing integration with both imeem and MySpace, as well as a powerful new widget that will help the plugin monetize.

Yoono has existed for a few years, but recently overhauled its browser plug last May. Since we last covered Yoono, it has become a featured Firefox 3 Recommended Download, and has grown to a total install base of around 1.8 million users (though only 500k of those are using the new version).

Beginning today the plugin will begin supporting imeem and MySpace, which join Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and a number of others as supported services. imeem users will be able to play their music from the sidebar as they use other widgets and browse the web. Yoono acknowledges that there are other social aggregators that support more services (and are adding them at a faster pace), but says that it is striving to go through “all the proper channels” for each site to ensure future support and the tightest integration possible. Along with the additional networks the plugin has also seen a nice UI change, remedying my earlier concern that navigating the sidebar was too difficult because it was overly cluttered.

On November 24th the site will launch a Shopping widget, which Yoono says will be a key point in its monetization plans. As users browse the web, the Shopping widget will automatically search for relevant goods for purchase across shopping partners like Amazon, eBay, and iTunes (the site gets paid if users click the link or buy a product). I think that this approach to generating revenue beats putting display ads in the sidebar (as some competitors have tried), but I wonder how often users will voluntarily choose to have the shopping widget maximized as they browse the web - I’d probably minimize the widget and use that sidebar space to see more of my friends list.

Yoono competes with a number of other plugins like Minggl, as well as the Flock web browser.

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Original post by Jason Kincaid

We don’t see it in our Gmail settings (yet), but Webmonkey reports that Gmail Labs has added a very useful opt-in feature for sending text / SMS messages to mobile phones using the built-in Chat functionality.

Turning the option on in your Gmail account settings apparently enables you to send an SMS as soon as you start typing a phone number into Chat’s search box. When you enter new phone numbers, it will save the digits in your contact entries as well. This means that when contacts go offline, the chat window will give you the option to switch to SMS.

Our invitation for a live demo was lost in the mail, but Webmonkey has been given a demonstration of the experimental feature by Gmail product manager Keith Coleman and adds:

The first time you send a text message, it will appear on the person’s phone as coming from a number in the 406 area code. Google has made several thousands of these numbers available for Gmail users, and once a number is associated with your account, all of the text messages you send through Gmail will come from that number.

The 406 number works both ways, so your friend can reply to you via text message. Also, your friend can save that number in their phone as belonging to you, and they can even use it to initiate new chats with you.

We haven’t been able to try this out ourselves yet, but Google does list the text messaging feature on its ‘What’s new in Gmail Labs‘ page (only for US phones, for now).

This is probably one of the first results we’re seeing from Google’s acquisition of GrandCentral (dating back to June 2007 already).

No official word yet on the Gmail blog (the GrandCentral blog has been silent since last April), but we suspect an announcement and general roll-out to follow soon.

(Image credit: monkey_bites)

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Original post by Robin Wauters

Any holiday is an excuse to be a little creative. Today, Halloween, is no exception.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and FriendFeed have special logos (who else?). Microsoft needs a little more inspiration in my opinion:

And Twitter went one step further, allowing users to add special Halloween themed Tweets using special character combinations. Just try >o< or `O` and see what happens.

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Original post by Michael Arrington

I’m not complaining, but some of the ads being paired with some of the content on Brightcove’s Syndication Marketplace may need some rethinking.

This lovely lady is doing a full-nude striptease (we’ve altered the image), along with an Office Depot advertisement promising “Free Delivery.” Which on second thought may be a brilliant idea.

If you’d like to see the evidence for yourself, the not-safe-for-work video is here, or just do a search for “new test” in the marketplace.

And if you’re looking for the closest Office Depot, you can find it here.

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Original post by Michael Arrington

When Facebook raised $240 million from Microsoft in 2007, and another $235 million in debt and equity in 2008, everyone thought they had plenty of cash to get through their big growth phase. With that kind of cash, the company could hire as many people as it needed to and not worry about profitability or going public until at least 2009, as board member Jim Breyer said in 2007.

But a confluence of factors may be conspiring to throw those assumptions out the window and force Facebook back to the capital markets much earlier than they originally planned. We’ve heard from multiple sources that they are testing the capital markets right now, in fact, and may be considering a near term capital raise at terms that could be much more favorable to investors than the previous $15 billion round that Microsoft kicked off in October 2007.

Facebook Is Growing, But So Are Costs

There’s no doubt that Facebook is growing at a breathtaking pace. A year ago, according to Comscore, they had just 74 million unique monthly visitors and 35 billion page views. Today those numbers have grown by 118% and 74%, respectively, to 161 million unique visitors and 61 billion page views per month.

Facebook’s growth, thanks to all these user-created translated versions of the site, has probably exceeded even their own internal projections. And running this engine isn’t cheap.

The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone, say experts we’ve spoken with. Bandwidth is likely another $500,000 or more per month on top of that. The company has earmarked $100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next. And sources say they’ve been buying one NetApp 3070 storage system per week just to keep up with all this user generated content. At up to $2 million each, that adds up quickly - we’ve heard estimates that they may have spent as much as $30 million this year alone with the company. And the icing on the cake - earmark another $15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments.

And don’t forget those human assets. With 750 employees and growing, Facebook is spending at least another $10 million per month on payroll.

It costs a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on at Facebook. But the real problem is keeping up with growth, particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly the opposite of printing money.

So How ‘Bout Those Revenues?

eMarketer estimates $265 million in revenue for Facebook in 2008. That’s great, right? Well, not really. The company is still losing money - lots of it - at current revenues. And it’s not clear that revenue will grow as robustly as costs.

Most of Facebook’s growth is outside of the U.S. A year ago, according to Comscore, Facebook had 31 million U.S. visitors, about 42% of the total. Today, U.S. visitors have grown to just 41 million.

19 million live in Africa and the Middle East. 26 million are in Asia (16 million alone in India). Europe, with 48 million Facebook users, has a larger share than the U.S. Another 16 million are in Latin America.

Just one in four Facebook users come from the U.S. today.

As we wrote last summer, most of these international users can’t be monetized today. And to make things worse, bandwidth costs in those countries is generally much higher than the U.S. So the users cost more, and they don’t bring in any revenue.

That international growth might be ok if U.S. growth remained strong. But the U.S. market just seems to be tapped at this point, and gaining market share from MySpace is a battle. As we wrote in August, at current growth rates it will take Facebook 18 years to overtake MySpace in the U.S.

Uh Oh, The Economy

So costs are skyrocketing, and revenues can’t keep up. Ok, But Facebook still has plenty of money, right?

Wrong.

The economy isn’t looking so hot, and it may get worse. If revenues don’t grow substantially, the company’s runway of cash gets much shorter. 2008 revenues are likely $100 million less than the company anticipated a year ago. If the economic train really derails, Facebook could be in big trouble.

A big chunk, probably a majority, of the roughly $500 million the company has raised is already gone. Even more will be spent next year, particularly if international growth rates remain constant (and there is lots and lots of room to grow internationally). Facebook could be down to just a year’s worth of cash at this point, with no IPO horizon in sight.

And even if they have cash into 2010 (its nearly impossible to figure out exactly how much they’re burning), the economic downturn is likely to be much, much worse than they anticipated. If they don’t grab the money now, it may not be available later on.

Which Explains Why CFO Gideon Yu Is In Dubai

Sources have told us that Facebook CFO Gideon Yu was in Dubai this week, possibly meeting with Dubai International Capital, exploring fundraising options.

U.S. investors, including VCs and hedge funds, aren’t interested or aren’t able to invest at the valuation Facebook expects. That leaves Sovereign Wealth Funds as the only viable funding solution. And the window to get money from them may fast be closing, too.

Which explains why Facebook may be looking for money sooner rather than later. If they don’t raise a big chunk of money now from someone who’ll pay whatever it takes to own a piece of Facebook, there may be a heavily dilutive down-valuation round for Facebook in the next 12-18 months.

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Original post by Michael Arrington

San Francisco based Syncplicity, a startup who entered the crowded market of online storage and file synchronization service providers last April, has raised $2.35 million in Series A funding from True Ventures and other private investors, including technology industry veteran Frank Marshall. The announcement comes almost 10 months after the company raised $250,000 in seed funding from relatives, friends and some angel investors.

Like a plethora of similar services, you can use Syncplicity to store, share, backup and synchronize files from your computer to the cloud. But don’t put it into the same basket with services like Box.net and Dropbox just yet, warns CEO Leonard Chung. He refers to Syncplicity as an ‘online data management’ service provider and stresses that the service is capable of handling ‘active data’, by which he means files that constantly change or are being worked on by multiple people.

While there is some truth to Chung’s statements about being different from other solutions geared primarily towards consumers, I wonder if that is going to prove sufficient to convince businesses to adopt Syncplicity.

What does differentiate Syncplicity is the fact that the company’s open platform integrates well with web applications. The platform enables developers to extend their web applications directly to the desktop, creating seamless interaction between online applications and files stored locally on the desktop. Examples: you can sync your photo library between Facebook and Syncplicity, edit your images with Picnik straight from your file folders, and associate any text document directly with Google Docs, Scribd and Zoho.

For now, Syncplicity’s desktop client only works with Windows XP and Vista, but Chung promises a Mac-compatible version will be released in private beta before the end of this year. Syncplicity will remain in beta for now and offers a free account for anyone signing up, including 2GB of storage space and 2 computers to sync. Also, for every friend you invite you get an extra 100MB in storage in your account up to an additional 3GB.

The company also offers a paid subscription that runs $9.99/month or $99.99 for a year, which includes 40GB space and unlimited computers.

Wuala offers a similar service based on a peer-to-peer file storage and sharing system, and there is also some comparison with Dell’s Remote Access, HP’s Upline, Nomadesk and SugarSync.

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Original post by Robin Wauters

Ok, further proof that it’s looking like 1999 all over again. A huge financial meltdown is just around the corner, and front line venture capitalists are spending money on ecommerce sites. Except this time around it isn’t pet sites. This time, it’s diapers.

Diapers.com, was founded in 2005 by two new dads and has raised two rounds of capital, including a $7 million round led by Bessemer Venture Partners in 2007. The original investor group included Nicholas Negroponte of One Laptop Per Child fame. We’ve got word from a source that the company, based on strong revenue growth, has raised a new and much larger round led by Accel Partners. Yes, the same Accel Partners that invested in Facebook.

Perhaps there’s big money in diapers, but competing with Amazon, BabiesRUs and Drugstore.com, all of which sell diapers, could be a problem in the long run. And the Wall Street Journal noted the site as having the cheapest prices on both Pampers and Seventh Generation brands of diapers, so their margins must be razor thin. But I guess that even if you lose a little on every transaction, you can make it up with volume.

Diapers.com also has the mandatory Green Baby section featuring diapers that are “eco-friendly, natural and organic.” Who knows if they’re better for the environment, but the margins are certainly healthier.

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Original post by Michael Arrington

Deutsche Bank is still out there trying to find a buyer for eBay’s StumbleUpon business, we’ve heard from new sources (we first reported on this on September 18). But there’s one problem: while eBay wants to unload the business, they aren’t willing to sell it for less than $75 million, the price they paid for it in May 2007.

eBay has denied the sale attempt, but there are too many people who’ve seen the deal book and have heard Deutsche Bank’s pitch. The big question is, will it sell?

As we wrote in our last post, StumbleUpon’s traffic has stagnated or declined, depending on which analytics service you look at. StumbleUpon says usage is growing at a fast clip, despite website traffic, because most users never visit the site after downloading the toolbar.

Ok, but StumbleUpon didn’t mind pointing to usage stats in the early days before the sale to eBay. And the stats are likely irrelevant anyway, since StumbleUpon recently deprioritized the toolbar to let users “stumble” to new sites directly from the website. Expect traffic to grow quickly with that change.

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Original post by Michael Arrington

It’s Elevator Pitch Friday, which means another startup has created a video that’s worth showing you. This week’s presentation comes from eRepublik, a Spanish startup that wants to take strategy games and make them more social, more interactive, and therefore, more fun.

eRepublik wants to change the way that strategy games are played by taking out the hours of game play. Anyone who has played Risk or Diplomacy knows how long traditional strategy games can take. eRupublik has built an online virtual geo-political simulator that allows the player to “make history” in its virtual world with as little as fifteen minutes of daily game play. And, it is both free and completely browser based, two things that most strategy games are not.

It plans to make money from by selling the virtual currency used in the game. eRepublik is currently in private beta, and has raised one million dollars.

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Original post by Dan Kimerling

Often, the court that hears your case can determine whether you win or lose. RealNetworks just improved its chances in a lawsuit against Hollywood studios over its recently launched RealDVD software. The software lets you rip DVDs to your computer so you can play movies from your hard drive or turn your PC into a digital media server.

The suit was originally going to be heard in the Central District Court of California (Los Angeles), but the judge there ruled that the case be moved to the Northern District (Silicon Valley). Why? Because RealNetworks beat the studios to the punch by about an hour and 15 minutes in filing essentially the same lawsuit on the morning of September 30 against Viacom and the DVD Copy Control Association in a Northern District Court. (The suit in Los Angeles was filed by Universal City Studios, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Sony Pictures Television, Columbia Pictures Industries, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Disney Enterprises, Walt Disney Pictures and Warner Bros. Entertainment). By filing preemptively, RealNetworks now has a chance of drawing a judge more sympathetic to the arguments of technology lawyers than Hollywood lawyers.

The product itself is not likely to become a blockbuster, but it does address a certain niche. (Read our review). Most people still don’t have enough spare hard drive space to store a complete library of DVDs on their PCs, but they will soon. And it comes complete with its own flavor of DRM. Whatever you think of the product, there is a strong argument to be made that consumers should be able to convert DVDs into digital copies just as they can do the same with CDs of music. That is the issue at stake in this lawsuit.

What’s clear from the ruling, is that RealNetworks knew that a lawsuit was coming from the studios, but decided to launch its product anyway. Excerpt:

RealNetworks originally planned to release RealDVD on September 8, 2008, but delayed the release at Plaintiffs’ request. On September 6, 2008, Plaintiffs and RealNetworks entered into a “standstill agreement” under which all parties agreed to refrain from bringing suit to facilitate settlement discussions. According to Plaintiffs, RealNetworks terminated the standstill agreement on September 22, 2008, which under the terms of the agreement meant the parties could bring suit beginning September 30, 2008. Plaintiffs then asked RealNetworks to delay its release of RealDVD until late October so they could seek injunctive relief, and informed RealNetworks that they intended to file suit in Los Angeles on September 30, 2008. RealNetworks refused to delay the launch.

On September 30, 2008, at 9:05 a.m. in the Northern District of California, RealNetworks
filed a complaint seeking a declaratory judgment against Plaintiffs, DVD CCA, and Viacom, Inc.,
that RealDVD does not violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (”DMCA”) or the CSS License
Agreement. (08-04548, Docket No. 1.) At 10:21 a.m., Plaintiffs filed their Application in the
Central District of California.

The early bird gets the worm.

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Original post by Erick Schonfeld