The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘tinyurl-or-bit’

You may have noticed over the last few weeks that TechCrunch links on Twitter have had a nifty custom URL, with links looking like tcrn.ch/1A’ instead of more generic codes from TinyURL or Bit.ly. This was due in no small part to the handiwork of our crack team of developers, but it was made possible by a new service launching today called Awe.sm.

There are countless URL shortening services available on the web, and they’re probably only going to become even more popular as Twitter continues to catch on with mainstream audiences. But these services come with downsides, like obscuring where a link is pointing to (which makes them a godsend for spammers). Awe.sm is looking to offer publishers an alternative to these generic services, while also offering a powerful analytics engine that offers much more insight as to how their content gets distributed across the web.

Every time we publish a post on TechCrunch, Awe.sm generates a handful of links specific to the service it originates on. For example, the shortcode link at the bottom of this post is different from the link that we send out on Twitter though the TechCrunch account. Awe.sm then tracks these links, analyzing how they’re spread and storing meta data on each. Even better, the links awe.sm creates are compatible with Google Analytics, so you don’t have to learn how to navigate yet another dashboard.

This means that we can get a feel for how our links are spreading throughout each service, quantifying just how effective each one is and adjusting accordingly. And for some services, including Twitterfeed, AddtoAny, and TweetFace, Awe.sm can work in tandem with the service to gather even more data. Readers benefit too - spammers don’t have access to tcrn.ch, so all URLs pointing to that domain can be considered trustworthy.

Awe.sm is available beginning today for $99/year, which includes 10,000 URL creations per month (more than most people will ever need) and the option to export your data at any time if you want to stop using Awe.sm. The company’s flagship product is this custom URL shortening service, but it is also going to provide publishers with more tools that will help distribute content across a variety of services to maximize their audiences. The service is also slowly opening up an API to developers, who can build their own applications off the platform.

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23andme, a company that helps consumers understand and decipher their genomes, has raised a partial $11 million out of a $24.26 million B round of funding, according to regulatory filings. 23andme, which was co-founded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife, Anne Wojcicki, raised $9 million in Series A funding from Google, Genentech, New Enterprise Associates, and Mohr Davidow Ventures in 2007.

Now PEHub is reporting that Mohr Davidow Ventures divested its stake in 23andme after investing in a direct competitor Navigenics. Losing one of your main investors to a competitor is not a good sign. 23andme maps customers’ DNA and helps them find information about their ancestry and their risks of getting certain diseases (Michael tried it last year). Google ended up taking a $3.9 million stake in 23andMe in May 2007, after Brin had personally loaned the company $2.6 million. The debt was repaid after the Google investment. We’re curious as to how much, if any, of this round’s $11 million is Brin’s or Google’s money.

Also, we’d like to know why Mohr Davidow shifted its funds to a 23andme’s rival. Navigenics’ service is similar to 23andme’s with slight differences. For example, 23andme offers one package, priced at $399, to test your saliva. Navigenics offers two packages of testing priced at at $499 and $2,499, with the higher priced test including genetic counseling and testing for more health conditions. Most recently, California’s Department of Public Health issued cease and desist letters to 23andMe, Navigenics and 11 other genetic testing startups, mandating that the labs demonstrate that they have been certified by both the state and federal government, and, perhaps more importantly, that all genetic tests were ordered by a patient’s doctor, which is required by state law.

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There’s a lot of talk today about how the new big screen Kindle could help save the bleeding newspaper industry. As we laid out last night, that is complete BS. But I think it’s worth revisiting a video we posted a few months back about the topic. It’s from 1981 (incidentally, the year I was born), showing that newspapers seemed to have some idea about what the future of their industry would be.

It’s a common misconception that newspapers are simply late to the Internet game. As this video shows, some of them (including some of the major ones now failing) have been thinking about this stuff for 28 years. That is a long, long time. Towards the end of the video, the local news reporter says, “the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer, but that’s a few years off.” And this was at a time when hilariously, it took 2 hours to receive an entire newspaper over the modems of the day, and it cost $5 an hour to transfer that data — at the time newspapers were $0.20. Despite all of that, the local reporters were smart enough to see that the writing was still on the wall.

The beginning of the video is perhaps the most direct and interesting: “Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to read the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not a far-fetched as it may seem. In fact, both local San Francisco papers are investing a lot of money to try and get a service just like that started.” What happened?

The video ends with the local news reporter saying, “so for the moment, at least, this fellow [a newspaper delivery guy], isn’t worried about being out of job.” That fellow is unfortunately very likely out of a job now.

[thanks Kelly]

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