Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has been talking about their web services business unit a lot lately. Moments after he left the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit last week I was able to speak to him about three of their most recent web service offerings: Mechanical Turk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This is a short podcast but you get a glimpse of how important this new business line is to Amazon’s future. The full post is on TechCrunch.
Time: 16:57 Minutes
Size: 7.8 MB
Condé Nast announced the acquisition of Reddit, a social news site, this morning for an undisclosed price. Reddit was founded in 2005 and has just four employees. This is a model company for young entrepreneurs looking to create a new startup with limited resources.
Marshall Kirkpatrick and I interviewed founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian today just hours after the acquisition was announced. While we couldn’t get them to disclose the acquisition price, they did talk about traffic and fundraising - Reddit is currently attracting around 70,000 unique visitors per day and 700,000 page views, and the company has raised just $100,000 in seed funding, all in the summer of 2005.
Time: 24:36 Minutes
Size: 5.63MB
Michael Arrington interviews Jingle Networks CEO George Garrick and investor Josh Kopelman about today’s big financing news as well as the history and future of their free, ad supported 411 service called 1-800-Free-411. Key facts from the discussion: Jingle currently has costs of around $0.25 per call, and revenue of $0.20, although Garrick feels that potential revenue per call will approach $0.50 as the market matures. Garrick and Kopelman also discuss upcoming potential competition from Google and other search players, and how Jingle will compete in that market. The service, which is growing rapidly, now claims 3% of the total U.S. 411 calls, a roughly $8 billion market.
Time: 31:39 Minutes
Size: 7.24 MB
If you are looking for a hosting provider, you need to check out Media Temple’s new Grid Server product that launched this morning. For $20 per month (the same price as most low end shared hosting providers), they are offering a fully scalable hosting product that will grow (or spike) along with your site. See TechCrunch for more details, but there are aspects to this that are superior to shared, virtual dedicated, and even dedicated server hosting.
Michael Arrington spoke with Demian Sellfors (CEO), Chris Leah (Director of Technology), Alex Capehart (Director Marketing) and David Feinberg (Product Manager) for 30 minutes yesterday about the new product. The podcast is enclosed.
Time: 34:48 Minutes
Size: 7.96 MB
Ajax home page Pageflakes, headquartered in Germany, is just settling down after its recently announced venture financing from BenchMark Capital. In the next few days they’ll be launching Pageflakes 2.0, a “significant upgrade to the current offering” CEO and co-founder Christoph Janz tells Michael Arrington. Get the details at TechCrunch, and listen to Michael Arrington’s conversation with Christoph and Pageflakes designer Jeremy Baines here. Topics covered include the state of Pageflakes as well as some hints at the new product.
TechCrunch coverage of Pageflakes is here.
Time: 33 Minutes
Size: 7.5 MB
See TechCrunch for the details on PayPerPost’s announcement of its $3 million Series A round of financing by Inflexion Partners, Villiage Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Michael Arrington and Rob Hof (Silicon Valley Bureau Chief at Business Week) took a few minutes today to talk to Ted Murphy (founder and CEO of PayPerPost) and Josh Stein (a Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson) about the funding and the controversial nature of PayPerPost’s business. It’s a somewhat heated discussion, but we managed to keep things fairly civilized.
See our previous coverage of the company in our post “PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul.” The company facilitates a marketplace where advertisers can pay bloggers to write about the company’s product. Disclosure of payment is optional.
Time: 53 Minutes
Size: 24.2 MB
Episode 12 of TalkCrunch features Robert Scoble at Scobleizer, Om Malik at Gigaom and Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. They speak for just over an hour about their favorite startups and the hot news this week in tech. Topics covered include the state of VOIP, next week’s Yahoo Hack Day and Robert Scoble’s hot new tv show that’s launching Monday, ScobleShow.
Companies mentioned include Digg, Facebook, Myspace, Skype, PicksPal, TechMeme, Jajah, PersonalBee, Scrapblog, Rebtel, Hullo and GrandCentral.
Time: 60 minutes
Size: 27.7 MB
Kiko, one of the first online Ajax calendars, gave up in the face of intense competition just a year after funding (by Ycombinator) and launch. The founders put the site up for sale on ebay…and it sold for $258,100.
The buyer was a twelve year old Toronto-based Internet company called Tucows. Tucows CEO Elliot Noss wrote about why he purchased Kiko on his blog here. Earlier this evening Michael Arrington got Elliot to speak with him about the transaction, which is attached here. Interesting facts: Tucows isn’t interested in the domain name and may sell it later, and the final price jumped over $100,000 in the final two minutes of bidding.
TechCrunch posts on Kiko are here.
Time: 19:35
Size: 4.5 MB
Flock is launching it first public beta this evening (Tuesday, June 13, 2006). See the launch post on TechCrunch, and listen to Michael Arrington interview Flock founders Bart Decrem, Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young, as well as Shasta Ventures investor Jason Pressman, in the attached podcast. The conversation touches on Flock features, the business model and upcoming releases.
Time: 40:06
Size: 18.4 MB
Gil Penchina leaves eBay (see TechCrunch post) to become the first CEO of Bessemer funded Wikia, the new for-profit venture of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch speaks with Gil about his decision to leave, his game plan for Wikia and some of the hot startups he’s recently invested in.
Running Time: 27:40
Size: 12.7 MB
