Whenever cable companies feel threatened, they form a joint venture. The latest is called Project Canoe, an effort by all six major cable companies in the U.S. to deliver targeted TV ads to viewers through their set-top boxes. The NYT reports:

Collectively, the cable companies will initially put about $150 million behind the effort in order to build a national service that can sell targeted advertising across all six cable systems.

The cable companies may control the set-top boxes, but they only collectively control about $5 billion of the $70 billion spent each year on TV ads. Most of those are local spots. With better ad targeting through Project Canoe the cable companies hope to triple their take to $15 billion. But that may be wishful thinking.

Of course, all of this is a reaction to Google, which already is testing its own TV ads on EchoStar’s Dish Network (no satellite companies are part of Project Canoe). Just last week, some Google TV Ad beta testers were able to start buying TV ads through AdWords as part of their regular advertising campaigns. In other words, they can buy search ads on Google, contextual online ads across the Web, and TV ads on Dish all through the same Google interface.

Through its partnership with EchoStar, Google’s software is on millions of set-top boxes, anonymously monitoring everything viewers do while watching TV. Advertisers in the beta can bid on ad slots by geography, demographics, day, time, and network. Google gives them data on how many people saw their TV commercials, how long they watched the ads, and at what point they lost most of their viewers. These are similar to the same sort of detailed reports advertisers can get on the Web. As I suggested last November:

Any new video ad unit that starts to gain traction on the Web could be ported over to regular TVs—clickable overlays, contextual video ads, unobtrusive sponsorship icons. Why not even let viewers program their own ads with a laundry list of categories and companies to choose from? They might actually watch them.

When it comes to advertising, Google is not shy about stating its ambitions. “We are confident we are going to revive the television advertising industry,” says [Google TV’s Vincent] Dureau, “by bringing new advertising to it.” Already, Google is trying to make TV ads more relevant, easier to target, and cheaper to deploy. As a result, Google thinks it can attract more ad dollars from smaller businesses that may not have been advertising on TV before.

The fact that the cable companies are creating their own advertising tracking software does not bode well for Google’s TV ad project ever making it beyond satellite-TV networks. Why should they hand over to Google a cut of their ad revenues? But giving Google the high hat will just make it more likely that Google will go ahead with its own secret set-top box project. An Android-like open-source set-top box could end up being a lot more disruptive to the cable companies’ business than simply letting Google in the front door.

AdWords already has a strong presence among the very same small- and medium-sized businesses the cable companies are going after. The big opportunity here is bringing more local ads to TV because one of the most effective ways to target TV ads is (still) by geography. Just ask Spot Runner, which already lets small, local businesses buy TV ads over the Web and is planning on combining that with online ad buys as well.

The cable companies have an advantage in that they own the set-top boxes required to make ad targeting work on TVs. They are now paddling fast to catch up. But there are also some mighty currents working against them. This is not just about putting software on set-top boxes, it is about creating the right software that can make TV ads more relevant. Who is more likely to do that: Google or a multi-headed joint venture? Then the cable companies will have to create their own ad network as well, which will compete with the TV networks their business relies on. They’d better put that canoe in the water and start paddling fast.

(Photo via Jeff Kubina).

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

If you’ve heard of Zoho, you probably think of Zoho Office, its suite of Web-based productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation). But Zoho Office is primarily as a marketing exercise. Zoho’s real business is in offering a series of Web-based enterprise apps that it started introducing last September—CRM, Project Management, Web conferencing, an online database. And today it is adding Zoho People in beta.

Zoho People is a Web-based enterprise app for managing human resources—recruiting, org charts, HR forms, an employee self-service portal. Here are some screenshots and an online demo.

Zoho People is targeted at small businesses with 50 or more employees—companies that cannot afford PeopleSoft, but cannot manage their business on Excel spreadsheets anymore. More directly, Zoho is going after WorkDay (started by PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield), Salesforce.com, and smaller online HR apps such as Vemo’s. To get businesses to try it, the software will be free for the beta period. The pricing is yet to be determined, but will probably be in the range of $50/month for HR administrators and $4/month for other employees. It will also be available as part of Zoho’s suite of enterprise apps under blended pricing. Maybe Salesforce should just buy Zoho. Oh yeah, it already tried that.

Zoho People from Raju Vegesna on Vimeo.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Y Combinator startup MightyQuiz just launched with the intent of bringing user generated content to quizzes.

The concept is straightforward: users can write their own quiz questions on any topic (e.g. “Aside from English, what is the second official language in New Zealand?” Answer: “Maori”). These are then categorized, answered, rated, and commented on by other users, who can pass time by going through them one after another.

The creators have implemented all of the social features we’ve come to expect from Web 2.0: user profiles, top contributor lists, most popular quiz questions, and widgets. We’re told that one potential monetization strategy will come from white labeling the service for use on traditional media sites that need ways to engage users. For example, Rolling Stone could encourage their online readers to contribute questions about the history of music.

While the service is mainly for entertainment in its current form, it could also be tailored for educational purposes. The topics of history and science are two natural fits for a tool like this. As apparently is Seinfeld (see pic).

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

There are a bazillion social network aggregators out there (Mike attempted to round up some of the most notable ones here). FriendFeed is the most visible of them all for two main reasons: it was founded a group of ex-Googlers and, as a consequence, benefits from a clean and easy-to-use design.

But FriendFeed’s going to have some serious competition from a TechStars startup called Socialthing!, which makes it even easier to get an overview of what your friends are doing on the web.

Socialthing! officially goes into private beta today and will let in the first 1,000 TechCrunch readers who use the invitation code “TechCrunch” to sign up (you’ll have to wait a few days to get your account, however). The service primarily differs from FriendFeed in the way it determines which of your friends to track. While FriendFeed actually requires users to create their own list of friends on FriendFeed, Socialthing! realizes you probably don’t want to create yet another list of your friends. So instead of asking you to do more work, it automatically detects who your friends are on the social services to which you belong.

The distinction may sound inconsequential but Socialthing!’s method actually makes things a lot easier, both for initial set up and for longer term maintenance. When you sign up for Socialthing!, you only have to provide it with your credentials to sites like Facebook and Pownce. And as time goes by, you don’t have to worry about setting up new friends on the service because it will automatically know that you’ve become friends with people elsewhere. In contrast, FriendFeed requires you to both explicitly designate friends during the initial configuration (either one-by-one or through Facebook/Gmail importing) and manually add new friends over time.

Another benefit Socialthing! has over FriendFeed is its focus on allowing users to send data back to social services (if you want to respond to someone’s tweet, for example, you can do so directly from Socialthing!). On the other hand, FriendFeed is all about reading data from services but not about writing it back.

While FriendFeed generally takes more effort, its approach does have unique advantages. You can follow friends of friends on FriendFeed and see updates from services that you don’t personally use, all because FriendFeed users have more independently-defined presences. FriendFeed also supports a wider range of services than Socialthing! (28 vs. 11, although Facebook updates are noticeably lacking from FriendFeed). Time, however, should narrow the gap.

In the end, whether FriendFeed succeeds more than Socialthing! will depend on whether people are looking for another community or just a way to easily track their existing ones. I suspect the latter will be the case.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

This weekend news came that a Gmail archive service called G-Archiver, which backs up all of your Gmail emails to your hard drive, was actually the front for a scam - hard coded into the application was a “feature” that sent every user’s email address and password to the creator’s own email account, giving him access to all of their Gmail messages.

These users should have known better than to type their email credentials into a third party service, so sympathy levels are at a minimum. But there is a much bigger problem to consider. Gmail is the entry point into a vast array of Google office services - including Google Docs and Google Apps. Those services allow users to share documents with others. If one user’s email credential become compromised, all of those sensitive documents become available to the bad guys, too. So if a single user’s credentials become known, the business they work for is at risk.

That has led a number of experts to conclude that Google Apps can never be a real threat to Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint. All of the sensitive business information of a company, if stored on Google’s servers, is just a password guess, or in this case what is effectively a phishing scam, away.

I’ve spoken with Google employees about this issue in the past, and they point out that Google Apps allows authentication mechanisms that require more than just a password. In the Google Apps Security Policy, they state: “Google Apps integrates with standard web SSO systems using the SAML 2.0 standard. This allows integration with custom sign-on and/or advanced authentication (SecureID). Solutions can be custom made or Google Partner supplied.”

Of course many companies won’t use SecureID for authentication, and they’ll still be at risk. Over time, hopefully, even smaller companies will require it.

In the meantime, something else about Google’s security policy caught my eye. They’ll turn over data to third parties when required to by law (including search warrants, court orders, or subpoenas.) Google says they will “attempt to notify users before turning over their data whenever possible and legally permissible.” That may not be good enough for many companies, who would choose to fight an information transfer in court before they turn it over. If it was on their own servers they would be able to do that. But Google, certainly, won’t be going to court to fight on your behalf. Users should consider themselves luck just to be notified that the information was released. Caveat Emptor.

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

The best things in life are free
But you can keep them for the birds and bees
Now give me money
That’s what I want
That’s what I want, yeah
That’s what I want…

Paul McCartney has signed a $400 million deal with Apple for the distribution of the entire Beatles’ back catalog on iTunes. Under the deal, the money will be distributed to Ringo Starr, the families of George Harrison and John Lennon, Michael Jackson, EMI and Sony, along with McCartney getting his share as well.

The deal finally finishes Steve Job’s quest for the Holy Grail of music downloads.

(via CrunchGear)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

About 43,000 pints of blood are donated each day by Canadians and Americans, which help the 4.5 million patients who need that blood transfusions every year. Total donations aren’t adequate to satisfy demand, though, and shortages occur regularly.

When a patient is in need of blood that isn’t available, it becomes a life and death situation. Historically the Red Cross will make efforts to alert the public during a shortage. But there may be a better way - leverage the social networks to get the word out. If shortages of a certain type of blood occur in a certain zip code, having a database of willing donors in that zip code to contact may be the most efficient way to solve the problem quickly.

That’s where Takes All Types (TAT), a non-profit organization, comes in. Users install their just-released Facebook application, tell it their location and blood type, and say how often they are willing to be contacted to donate blood (maximum is every 57 days). If a shortage occurs, they’ll contact you via the methods that you authorize (Facebook, email, text message, etc.)

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Last Thursday, March 6, multiple sources say, the CNET board of directors and CEO Neil Ashe met with representative from the Jana Partners investor consortium that has amassed a 21% ownership stake in the troubled company. The goal of the meeting was to negotiate a settlement that would avoid a proxy fight and a potential hostile takeover attempt.

Jana Partners’ founder Barry Rosenstein was the lead representative from the consortium’s side, which also includes investments from Sandell Asset Management, Spark Capital, and entrepreneur Paul Gardi.

From what we hear the meeting didn’t go so well. “It was tense and uncomfortable,” said one source. The CNET board “is in a state of denial” about the seriousness of the situation, said another. The consortium wants the company to focus on technology, including an overhaul of the dated CNET content management system and ad serving platform. The CNET board instead wants to “aggressively expand” their business internationally and focus less on infrastructure improvements.

For now the two groups are mostly talking about high level company strategy. But at some point the consortium, which is the largest CNET stockholder, will want a significant board presence. That might mean as many as 3-4 board seats out of the 8 that exist now.

CNET stock continues to slump - it’s worth about half as much as it was two years ago. The company has recently made a few high profile management changes (all for the better, in my opinion) and has sold off assets. But deeper changes are clearly needed.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Digg users tend to get pissed off about a lot of things. Any story about Microsoft, for example. Or anything that criticizes Apple. Usually, the ability to bury stories about non-mob-approved topics, combined with the comment area under headlines, is enough of a release valve to settle things down.

But not always - and Digg has a track record of surrendering to the mob when things get really bad.

Based on some of the comments to this story about Digg’s officially-not-happening (but happening nonetheless) acquisition, Digg users are getting all riled up for another fight. Particularly if the buyer ends up being Microsoft.

A sample of the 544 comments left on that story:

• Don’t sell Digg Kevin! Digg this story he needs to know how we feel!
• Why not sell digg when you don’t care about the community. Sell it and we will be happy.
• Somehow i think if Microsoft manages to buy digg a larger revolt than 09 F9 11… will happen, at least i know what i will do
• I would have to see how things went afterward. If Google tried to shoehorn their “style” in to Digg’s interfaces (see: Jotspot), or if Microsoft tried to turn it in to a Windows program, I would switch to Reddit. I like Digg more, but either of those scenarios would kill Digg for me.
  If MS is in, I’m out.
• OK guys, Kevin doesn’t give half a shit about you. He cares about what all americans care about: $500,000,000 in his pocket. Good old capitalism, eh?
  Goodbye Digg… Its been good knowing you… too bad you were gobbled up by corporate america. I remember back in the day when you were a bastion of free speech and unfettered entertainment, but no longer. I guess I will have to revert back to the “best of” section of Craigslist. Don’t sell your soul.
• As long as they lets us delete our accounts
• I am new to digg.com and I really like it. If Microsoft were to buy it that would be it for me. I will remove it from my favorites and never come back.
• Dude. If Microsoft gets its fucking hands on this site then you will definitely have one less viewer. Those fuckers taint everything they touch.
• Is this for real come on Kevin don’t give up to digg to these huge companies. What makes digg so special and fun is that it’s independent this is not a good idea.
• If Microsoft purchases this site, go ahead and make your last act to institute a ‘delete your account’ function.
• This is terrible news. Lets see if we can have yet another viable outlet bought up by huge conglomerates which try to feed us what we are allowed to think and censor our beliefs. I tell you what. If digg is sold, I’m not coming here anymore! Kevin please don’t let this happen. Tell us this is about more than money.

So far, the feedback is mostly pleading, not angry (see this blog post). But as things progress, this could turn nasty, and fast. Mixx, Reddit and other competitors, I’m sure, are looking forward to that happening, and will be more than happy to pick up any stray Digg users who abandon the much-loved/much-hated Digg.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Zivity is an adult content social network and user generated content site (they call it “Promoting Beauty 2.0″). It has the distinction of being one of the first adult content startups to be backed by venture capital via a $1 million seed round in 2007, and it caused quite a stir at its official launch at TechCrunch40. As we mentioned last month, mainstream press is starting to pay serious attention to them.

The company will announce a new $7 million round of financing in a deal led by both BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund. The company has now raised a total of $8 million. The social networking experience that these VCs add is substantial. Founders Fund is an early Facebook investor. Both are investors in Slide.

John Malloy of BlueRun Ventures and Luke Nosek of Founders Fund join Zivity co-founders Scott Banister, Cyan Banister (who also models for the site) and Jeffrey Wescott on the company’s board of directors.

The site allows both amateur and professional models and photographers to show their stuff. Users vote on those that they like, which channel real dollars to the talent. The more votes, the more money. The basic site is free, but users must pay to vote. About 40% of gross revenue is given directly to the talent. With a recent redesign, the site is focused much more on social networking - users and talent have profile pages and can add each other as friends. They’ve even added a news feed feature that shows who is adding who as friends, and which models users have voted for.

Zivity remains in private beta (and will likely stay there until early 2009), although current users are given invitations to give to their friends. That means that most people joining the site today already know someone who’s using it, and can add them as a friend. In my “testing” of the site I noticed that the current users seem active in voting and friending. My guess is that building the community slowly but focusing on active users is a good way to go. And besides, anyone that really wants in can get an invitation on InviteShare.

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