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After negotiating over the past few weeks with Microsoft and signing a letter of intent to be acquired, e-mail startup Xobni has walked from the deal, according to a source close to the negotiations. The deal would have been a natural for Microsoft, which was offering to buy the two-year old startup for somewhere in the $20-million range. (The company has raised less than $5 million so far in venture capital from Khosla Ventures, Atomico, First Round Capital, Ron Conway, and Y Combinator).

But the deeper that Xobni got into the discussions, the less comfortable it felt about its eventual fate inside the Microsoft machine. The fear was that Xobni would end up nothing more than a feature of Outlook. Microsoft wanted the entire team to move up to Redmond, and was vague in its answers about what it had planned for that team, or the product. In the end, the body language just wasn’t there.

Xobni offers a plug-in for Outlook that makes it smarter and easier to use by giving you handy stats in a sidebar and showing you how your contacts are connected to each other. But the company has greater aspirations than to become a feature of Outlook, as its internal integration with Yahoo Mail suggests. The service is still in private beta, and is approaching 50,000 registered users.

Was Xobni crazy to walk away, or did it make the right move in the long run?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Okay, so we've been playing with the Psystar Open Computer for a few hours now, and we've formed some early impressions and put together a short video of it in action. We haven't really tried to stress the system yet, but based on our other experiences with OSx86 machines, we're expecting things to generally go smoothly. That said, there are some definite rough patches and issues, all mostly having to do with the fact that OS X isn't really built for this hardware. Here's what we know so far:

Continue reading Psystar Open Computer notes, benchmarks and video

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The old "accepted wisdom" was that folks in Europe communicated via SMS text messaging, while folks in the US were mainly doing internet-based instant messaging. There were a variety of reasons for why things developed this way, but it was a generally accurate statement for a while. However, even early on, some of us began wondering what would happen as the two worlds started to merge. That is, as mobile phones became more powerful and acted more like handheld computers, wouldn't users start to realize that instant messaging would save them a lot of money in terms of data costs. Especially with advanced phones like the iPhone, it seemed inevitable that "expensive" SMS would start to run into trouble. And, in fact, that appears to be happening. A new study in the UK (where SMS text messaging is huge) has shown that, as people start using instant messaging applications, their use of SMS text messaging drops significantly. The one exception, by the way, is with older users, who are comfortable enough with SMS and don't seem as interested in using IM on their phones. Either way, this has to be a concern for mobile operators who have a tendency to assume that high-priced services will always remain high-priced and in high demand.

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What it does

Although government action like the creation of the Do-Not-Call List has helped to stem unsolicited telemarketing calls, the problem is far from solved. CallerComplaints.com is a site established to help consumers fight telemarketers, who can range from an annoyance to borderline harassment. Federal agencies where you can make complaints do exist, but Caller Complaints says their site will be a more effective way to take action. Anyone can sign on and search for the phone number of a telemarketing call they received. If the number is already in the database, they can add their complaint to the list, or start a new entry if the number hasn’t been registered yet. There is a CAPTCHA system in place to screen users. There is also a section on the site for ‘spoofed numbers’ - those telemarketers who trick Caller ID devices into displaying an incorrect phone number. All data collected by CallerComplaints.com is available to the public, and the data could be used in the future to file class-action complaints with the government.

In their own words

"We're Building The Leading Telemarketer Database. By combining the data from users all over the world, CallerComplaints.com provides unique information about a phone number not available anywhere else. This data can be used to file joint-action complaints with government agencies, allow other users to learn more about a phone number, or any of a dozen other uses."

Why it might be a killer

Unsolicited telemarketing calls are an annoyance that almost everyone deals with, so lots of people will probably appreciate having a website on which to vent, document their complaint, and hopefully discourage future telemarketing calls.

Some questions

If filing a complaint with a government agency or registering on the Do-Not-Call List isn’t a very effective way to combat telemarketers, how will making your complaint on a non-government website really make a difference? Can this site do anything to discourage those telemarketers who circumvent Caller ID’s with an “unknown number” message?

Updates


 » original news

Strands has been around for a couple of years now, and has made quite a name for itself in th realm of social media recommendations. Often considered a competitor to sites like Last.fm, Strands built a brand around providing a service that spanned the web and mobile devices for introducing you to new music, and more recently videos, by way of search and discovery, among other things.

So with a vast amount of funding reaching $55 million, what’s this company doing acquiring Expensr, a money-management tool?

As with many other online money management services emerging in this day and age, Expensr already had a social component to it. Acquired for an undisclosed amount, expensr’s inclusion into the Strands family will help the recommendation service branch out into new directions. To kick things off, Strands is launching moneyStrands (currently in private beta), which directly applies social recommendations to personal finance.

It seems a bit odd at first, but there are already services out there, like Redux, Facebook Beacon and others that have already begun to take such measures into consideration, to varying degrees. If media recommendations, among other types of user and consumption behavior, can be applied to search and discovery, then it can be applied elsewhere–like towards personal finance.

In an anonymous manner, you can share your financial activity in order to compare yourself to others, and learn from the aggregated data that moneyStrands is keeping tabs on. It’s quite similar to some of the social stock-picking sites we’ve seen, as well as other socially adept personal finance management tools, like Geezeo. And it wouldn’t be a Strands product if it didn’t have an optimized mobile offering as well.

With strategic investment from the global financial institution BBVA late last year, the current moneyStrands features have apparently been in the works for some time. As a result of Strands tis with BBVA, Strands will also be ensuring industry best practices. So how do you feel about being able to compare your personal preferences across media as well as spending habits under one virtual roof–Big Brother or a better road to Beacon? To what other areas of our lives will personalized recommendations be applied?

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Yahoo Personal Finance Launches, Shrug
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Geezeo Adds Motley Fool & More to Personal Finance Tools
Quicken to Soon Launch Web-Based Personal Finance Tool
MatchMine Fully Launches Cool Media Recommendations at DEMO
RecommendationBox Should Take My Advice: Open Up!

Microsoft is leaking that they are willing to increase their Yahoo bid to as much as $33 per share, up from the original $31/share offer. That original offer, which included payment in Microsoft stock, has fallen in value to just $29.12/share.

This is a surprise since Microsoft has previously stated they wouldn’t increase their bid. Analysts largely expected them to either walk from the deal or go hostile.

$33 may not be enough to get Yahoo to move the knife away from their nose, however. The WSJ says they want $35 - $37.

The people say that it’s unclear what final approach Microsoft will take, but that discussions between the two companies have been stymied by a stark divide on price. Microsoft has said privately in recent days that it’s willing to offer as much as $32 or $33 a share, well above the $29.12-a-share value of its original cash-and-stock offer as of Tuesday’s market close, these people say. But major Yahoo shareholders have signaled they want in the range of $35 to $37 a share, with Yahoo’s management and board similarly shooting for an offer in the upper $30s, they add.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made big promises of mysterious, highly-interactive new methods of monetizing YouTube in a CNBC interview today. "We believe the best products are coming out this year," he said. "And they're new products. They're not announced. They're not just putting in-line ads in the things that people are trying."

As all established media (not just newspapers) face a growing challenge from the internet, with its on-demand, highly personalized and infinitely interactive social connections - can TV, and TV on the internet, learn keep up with the times? YouTube had better come up with something very, very good. Cultural momentum is leaning away from passive consumption of moving pictures.

YouTube is A Lot Like TV

The vast, vast majority of YouTube users are passive viewers of video content uploaded by someone else. It's far easier to view video than to make it, making video is hard. The biggest hits on YouTube aren't user uploaded videos, either - they are professionally produced music videos.

The site has been maddeningly hard for Google to monetize, too. Other sites that are more interactive, take Facebook or Digg for example, face monetization challenges because their users don't come to those sites to view ads passively. Passive media and advertising does not have a bright future, and many people in those industries who are watching the direction the internet is going know it.

That's why Google is going to have to come up with something really good to make the kind of money from YouTube that they want to.

The Cultural Context

In his excellent talk at the Web 2.0 Conference last week (embedded below), consultant and NYU prof. Clay Shirky called television a "cognitive heat sink" that absorbed a huge amount of human thought over the last 50 years while humanity learned to see media's shrinking of the world as an asset instead of just a shock to the system.

Here's the video, below which you'll find a few of the many great nuggets from Shirky's 15 minute talk. Shirky focuses on Wikipedia, but World of Warcraft, blogging and other social media experiences may be even better examples of what's likely to absorb more of this surplus energy. As a work of art, Wikipedia is a good reference point though.

Now, while you're watching that video - open up RWW in another tab and leave some really smart comments! It will be interactive then, and the increased pageviews will help us figure out how to monetize video! Ha, kidding. Here's some highlights:

• Wikipedia currently represents about 100 million hours of human thought.
• Television is watched for 200 billion hours, in US alone, every year.
• That's the equivalent of 2000 Wikipedias each year, spent watching TV.
• People in the US spend 100 million hours each weekend watching TV commercials. So an entire Wikipedia could be replicated in a weekend if we did that during the commercials - except our brains wouldn't be in the best position to do so.
• If 1% less TV was watched in the US, 10,000 Wikipedias could be created each year.

Shirky says that old media has assumed people just want to consume but that the internet is showing that people want to consume, produce and share. If just a tiny fraction of that consumption continues to shift towards production and sharing - there's going to be some serious cultural and economic disruption going on.

That's why YouTube has to come up with something fundamentally more engaging than banner ads run next to music videos.

Thanks to Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny for posting the Shirky video on his excellent blog. Zawodny writes that he never watches TV and I can happily report that I've only had a TV in my home for 1 of the last 13 years as well.