The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘singlesnet’

People in the online personals industry are buzzing. We’ve heard a rumor that online dating service and IAC property Match.com is acquiring fellow dating site Singlesnet. We’ve reached out to both companies for confirmation. Singleset’s representative wrote back to us to say: “I’m not in a position to discuss or consider this topic at the present time” Match.com has not yet responded.

If true, the acquisition wouldn’t be surprising. Match is in the habit of buying up potential competitors. The dating giant scooped up highly-targeted dating site network People Media last year for a whopping $80 million.

And Singlesnet’s traffic is fairly significant for a dating site that doesn’t have the resources of IAC-backed Match. According to comScore stats for January, Singlesnet saw 3 million unique visitors worldwide, which was half of Match.com’s 6.1 million unique visitors for the same period.

Local search is heating up, especially on advanced mobile phones, where augmented reality apps and immersive photo-realistic apps show great promise. EveryScape, a startup in Waltham Massachusetts which has built out immersive 3D photoscapes for 20 cities, raised a $6 million Series C funding. The investment was led led by SK Telecom Americas, a subsidiary of the Korean telecom giant, which will help EveryScape expand into Asia.

Existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Dace Ventures also participated. EveryScape’s previously raised a $7 million Series B in March, 2008 and a $4.5 million Series A in 2005.

Up until now, EveryScape has been stitching together navigable street photos into 3D environments paired with Google Maps. Of course, Google Maps does much the same thing with its Street View feature. EveryScape, however, can take the viewer inside buildings. Businesses can pay to be listed and called out in the street view mode, and even pay for EveryScape to create those indoor 3D tours.

This sort of experience becomes much more useful on a mobile phone when you are trying to find a business or some other point of interest when you are standing on the street nearby. Still, it’s tough to compete against Street View on Google Maps, not to mention similar efforts on Bing. That is why EveryScape is taking partner-driven strategy,” says CEO jim Schoonmaker. He confirms that EveryScape’s relationship with SK will go beyond the investment, but can’t share any details beyond that. He also says more partnerships are on the way, and claims to have a cost advantage over Google and Microsoft in creating these immersive photo-based virtual environments because as a startup EveryScape has been forced to use off-the-shelf equipment. Signing up more partners will be the key to its survival.

It’s been a long and winding road for Yahoo and Microsoft since Redmond’s first attempt to buy Yahoo for $45 billion two years ago, which ended up in the two companies agreeing to a complicated search deal in July, 2009. Today, the last hurdle to that deal has been removed, with government regulators in both the U.S. (the DOJ) and Europe (the European Commission) approving the deal. Yahoo and Microsoft can finally get on with their lives.

Microsoft will take over Yahoo’s organic and paid search results and blend those resources into Bing. Yahoo will continue to control the front-end UI of search on Yahoo’s sites, and consumers will continue to see and be able to use the Yahoo search engine. The transition of the back-end search algorithms and results may still take until the end of 2010 to complete. Advertisers and Website partners which use Yahoo search may have to wait until after the 2010 holidays to be transitioned to Bing.

Since the deal was announced, Bing has been taking search share away from Yahoo. The question now is whether the combined scale of search across all of Yahoo and Bing can help Microsoft make a dent in Google’s dominance.

Last summer, realtime search engine OneRiot was one of the first engines to debut an API to allow developers to integrated OneRiot’s search results into their applications. Less than a year later, OneRiot is seeing 97 percent of its total searches coming through its API. Today, OneRiot is rolling out a new version of its search API, which includes support for for RiotWise, OneRiot’s ad network, enabling developers to make money off of search results. Additional new features include the ability to deliver vertical and domain-specific search experiences for their users.

OneRiot originally opened its free search API to web developers in June 2009. The startup says the API is now powering hundreds of millions of searches for a growing number of partners. Partners include social messaging apps (e.g. Digsby), browsers (e.g. IE8), mobile apps (e.g. ÜberTwitter), large consumer websites (e.g. Guardian.co.uk) and, other search engines (Yahoo and Microsoft). Currently OneRiot has 105 API partners in total.

The first major part of the new API is the integration of a href=”http://www.crunchbase.com/product/riotwise”>RiotWise. Last year, OneRiot ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. The search engine also launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web.

Now any developer using the OneRiot search API will now also receive RiotWise ads for the realtime web. Developers can choose to display them (and get paid) or not. RiotWise’s ads are comprised of content that similar to within Google, are served up via keywords being searched for. But unlike Google, advertisers aren’t bidding on keywords. Instead, content producers strike a deal with OneRiot to place their content in an emphasized (but clearly labeled) place in their realtime feed within the search engine. OneRiot claims that RiotWise ads have been performing at 3 to 4 times the average industry standard click through rates (CTR) for ads in realtime web apps. Developers who tap into the new API will share revenue with OneRiot but it’s unclear what the rev share will be.

The new API has also been tweaked to allows for specific searches. Developers can enable domain-based search, which allows for realtime search across a specific website or network. For example, the Guardian is the first partner to use this feature of the new API in its “Zeitgeist” tool that features realtime news content from the site.

OpenRiot’s API will include the ability to integrate vertical realtime search so developers can choose to receive realtime results for specific verticals such as news, videos and images. The same filter can be places for searches across niche verticals, including realtime search results for gadgets, politics, and music.

Lastly, OneRiot has rolled out a new “Tweet” format to search results allowing developers to receive search results and ads formatted like a Tweet, with only 140 characters, including a bit.ly shortened URL. This format is ideal for third-party Twitter applications working with limited real estate.

As we’ve written in the past, OneRiot runs the risk of surfacing irrelevant or spammy content with realtime ads. But as a realtime search engine, OneRiot has invested heavily in spam prevention and is constantly sorting through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. Regardless, it seems like a viable monetization tool for developers.

The startup, which just raised $7 million in funding, has been steadily innovating its product and is gathering up partners quickly. The realtime stream ramped up this year with all the big players adding functionality to their search offerings and OneRiot was smart to get in the game early. As we’ve seen with the various partner deals struck with both tech giants and startups, OneRiot’s search results and API are in demand. And the improvement to its API to be able to refine results and possibly make money will only make its offering more appealing in the future.

Managing thousands of applications can be a daunting and complex task for many organizations and small businesses. WizeHive, a group messaging and task management app is launching a new product designed to meet help manage applicants and applications at foundations, grant providers, scholarship funds, admissions directors and contest managers.

WizeHive’s Applicant Manager features preset forms for application submissions and a secure workspace for ranking and reviewing submissions. The application also includes data mining and analysis capabilities as well as an email-messaging tool to quickly update groups of users and schedule interviews.

And WizeHive’s standard features like assigning tasks, storing and editing files round out the manager’s functionality. Applicant Manager is provided as a monthly service starting at $75 per month. We are big fans of WizeHive, and used the Applicant Manager when sorting through and organizing applications from startups for TechCrunch50 in 2009.

WizeHive’s online collaboration tool has received positive reviews thus far thanks to an easy-to-use and collaborative interface. The application combines microblogging features found in Twitter, project management features, and general collaboration and organizational features found in Microsoft SharePoint. Similar to Yammer, WizeHive lets users establish a private and continuous feed of activity.