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
Digg 3.0 is set to launch on Monday, June 26, 2006. Screen shots and a feature overview are available on TechCrunch and Read/Write Web. Here on TalkCrunch, Richard MacManus and Michael Arrington interview Digg founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson on a wide range of topics, including the history of Digg, features included in Digg 3.0, and their thoughts on the new Digg-clone that AOL launched at netscape.com. We also review current Digg stats (now bigger than the New York Times) and growth rates (site traffic is doubling every two months). This is a long podcast, but worth it.
Time: 55:20
Size: 25.3 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
Tom Fudge, host of the KPBS San Diego show “These Days“, had CNET Editor-at-large Brian Cooley and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on his live show on Monday, May 8, 2006. The topic? Web 2.0 and what it means to the average Internet user. With KPBS’ permission we are adding a recording of the show here at TalkCrunch.
Running Time: 19:07
Size: 13.1 MB
The long-awaited blog search engine Sphere launches at 10 PM tonight. In this episode of Talkcrunch we speak with Tony Conrad and Toni Schneider about the Sphere story.
Tony Conrad is the CEO and co-founder of Sphere. Toni Schneider, formerly the CEO of Oddpost, is currently the CEO of Automattic (wordpress.com, wordpress.org, etc.) and an advisor to Sphere. In the podcast we talk about the motivation to starting Sphere, what problems it solves and how it competes along with some of the challenges and technical problems involved in developing a blog search engine. There are some very interesting insights here from two guys who have been involved in working with blogs and new web technologies for a long time.
The TechCrunch post on the launch of Sphere is here.
Running Time: 58:05
Size: 51.3 MB
According to Riya there are 300 billion digital photographs stored in various places today, and they want to help us organise them. Riya is a photo sharing and search site that will tag and index your photos automatically using intelligent recognition. Riya took the web by storm when it launched it’s beta last year and amongst the hype, rumors of an acquisition, and $15M Series B round of funding has managed to build a great service. Riya released their public beta 2 weeks ago and since has seen great uptake of the service – living up to many expectations.
In the fifth episode of Talkcrunch we are joined by founder and CEO of Riya, Munjal Shah, and Riya’s online marketing and blogging head Tara Hunt. We talk about the launch, how Riya was developed, the challenges they faced in developing the application and other topics.
During the podcast we learn that Riya is more than just web-based photo sharing in many ways, it makes it easier to find images and to access the metadata associated with your photos. Munjal and Tara take us through some of the plans that they have for the future of Riya now that they are a public service.
TechCrunch posts on Riya are here.
Download size: 18.2MB
Duration: 39:20
Update: There was a small problem with the original file which has been updated now. Apologies.
The fourth episode of TalkCrunch is a discussion with executives of four of my favorite online feed readers: NewsGator, Attensa, Rojo and Feedlounge.
I brought on Frank Gruber as a co-host, who wrote a comparison post of nine online readers last week on TechCrunch. The conversation focuses on feature comparisions, issues around slowdown as all of these companies are seeing massive growth, and upcoming products in the pipeline.
I did my best to create controversy, even calling “bullshit” on a statement by Chris Alden that the online guys aren’t trying to beat eachother up, but rather grow the RSS market together. We also discussed Feedlounge’s prospects as the only non-free online feed reader on the market.
Guests:
Greg Reinacker, Founder and CTO, NewsGator
Eric Hayes, Founder and VP, Attensa
Chris Alden, Founder and CEO, Rojo
Alex King, Founder, Feedlounge
Running time: 57.00m
Download Size: 26.1MB
The third episode of TalkCrunch is all about Amazon’s game changing new S3 Grid Storage web service that I wrote about on TechCrunch last week when it launched. Co hosted with Keith Teare and Nik Cubrilovic, we bring on two guests from the Amazon Web Services group: Adam Selipsky (VP of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services) and Dave Barth (Product Manager for S3).
In the first segment Adam gives us a high level view of all of Amazon’s web services. In the second segment, David gets into detail on the new grid storage service itself, including an in depth review of features.
Keith and I also try, without success, to talk Nik into building his new online storage company Omnidrive on top of S3. It’s a lively conversation, to say the least.
Other companies mentioned include PayPal, Jigsaw, Plaxo, Yahoo, Google and Riya.
Running time: 51:25m
Download Size: 23.5MB
In our second episode of TalkCrunch we talk to LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman and August Capital VC David Hornik about social networks on the web. We also talk a bit about the main news from the past week, and other topics such as web video and podcasting. Podcast hosted by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington and Nik Cubrilovic
Notes:
Runtime 43:40m, Download 10.2MB
