Last night at an event in NYC dubbed “Videocracy,” YouTube gave marketers a sneak peak at some upcoming initiatives. Silicon Alley Insider’s Michael Learmonth tried to get in, but was thrown out. Luckily, Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer took notes. Here is what he learned:

—YouTube is excited about its active sharing feature that lets YouTube watchers signal to other viewers when they are watching a particular video (if you turn the setting on, anyone watching the video at the same time as you will see your username on the right side of the screen).

—Better video-editing tools are on the way. (What took you so long?).

—Video recommendations will soon be launched based on what you have already watched (similar to Amazon’s collaborative filtering, people who liked this book also liked that one).

—YouTube wants to be everywhere. It will continue to distribute its videos beyond the Web browser to mobile devices and large, flat-screen TVs in the living room.

—For marketers, the “real news was YouTube’s announcement of an impending launch of advanced analytics tools. You’ll be able to see where video views are coming from (geographically and site-wise), as well as many other data points. This will be a huge help to advertisers trying to extract more success metrics and data from their YouTube efforts.”

YouTube is also planning some more “Tentpole Content Initiatives” to draw a mass audience, much like its presidential debate partnership with CNN. These will include:

—The YouTube Games. A takeoff on the Olympics featuring homemade videos of the “wacky wide world of weird sports.”
—Living Legends. Videos of living legends like the Rolling Stones.
—The YouTube Global Gathering. A worldwide event that will be broadcast from multiple locations on YouTube.

Thanks for sharing, Ian!

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Topper search offers a search service which….um…machine learning….um something…..results.

Here’s the pitch anyway.

Here is a quick description of how to use it. Enter a search query. Topper Search will go out and get the top 100 results and display the top 10. Select at lease one ‘+’ and one ‘-’ result. Topper will use machine learning to build a model and classify all 100 results. Use the buttons in the top bar to redorder these results to your taste . Topper will then display the a different top 10 based on your model.

It is great for building ad hoc models for a single search. Try it for disambiguating a query. The stock example I use is ‘lions’ (for the football team or the animal). It can also be used for multiple searches and has a simple persistence mechanism for later use. For example once you have a model built for ‘lions’ try a search for ‘bears’ or ‘eagles’.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. We are building out tools for blogs and news etc using similar machine learning tools.

There’s a PDF on Topper here for those interested.

It sounds cool, but I’m not a coder and this sounds rather complicated. Using it is worse again, after the slow delivery of search results you’re asked to + or - results in an attempt to create better search results (sort of a poor mans Reddit, but more complicated and without the kooks.) Developers and coders may find this interesting so ultimately those of you reading this who are that way inclined can take a look. For the vast majority of the rest of the planet, it comes in on the usability scale at between ZOMG and FAIL. Still, it might take off, maybe the world is looking for a complicated version of Google

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TV listings site Couchville has joined the deadpool.

The service, provided by PVR software maker Snapstream, offered US TV listings via zip code and cable or satellite provider. According to Michael’s March 2007 review:

… and it shows you a simple, easy to navigate TV guide. A vertical red line shows you what’s currently on, and via an Ajax interface you can grab and drag the listings vertically (for channel) or horizontally (for time) to see more (this works much like the Google Maps interface)….It’s very simple and it’s very useful.

Michael said Couchville did one thing right, just a shame that one thing wasn’t sustainability.

(thanks to 1to10 Reviews for the tip)

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I haven’t seen this much public drama between founders and their investors since the FilmLoop forced merger in early 2007. Earlier today I wrote that Israeli startup KnockaTV was heading to the DeadPool. Employees, who are apparently going unpaid, are pushing the company into liquidation to try to get at least some of what is owed to them.

We dug a little more into the story, because it just didn’t make sense: the startup was well funded with $3.5 million in capital from mid 2007 and the founders, who were among the creators of ICQ, had a $407 million payday in 1998. That doesn’t guarantee the startup would be successful, but it suggests that employees wouldn’t have to worry about their paychecks this early on.

Based on rumors going around Tel Aviv, there was some sort of major fallout between Evergreen Venture Partners (the venture firm behind the financing) and company founders, particularly Sefi Visiger. Product development may have been seriously delayed. Burn rate was so high that an additional funding round was needed, and Evergreen may have demanded the founding team put up more cash instead. Tempers flared, the founders elected to shut the company down, and are reportedly supporting the employees in their efforts to liquidate it. According to one source, the liquidation will ensure that employees are paid before other creditors become too numerous.

A liquidation would knock out existing stockholders, leaving the company assets to be sold off. Quite possibly they would then be acquired by the original founding team, leaving Evergreen without any stock, or their original investment.

How much of this is true? Sefi and Evergreen won’t comment directly to us. But there is little our contacts in Israel want to discuss today other than KnockaTV and what they heard happened. Companies that closed substantial funding just a couple of months prior don’t generally fall apart immediately before launch. Evergreen’s reputation in Israel is considered excellent, whereas some members of the KnockaTV founding team are said to be major league partyers first and serious business people second. More will likely be said on this story, from both sides, before it is finally put to bed.

The sad part of all this (other than employees going unpaid) is that the product actually held promise. Our early reviews were generally positive.

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CNN launched iReport.com yesterday, a “citizen journalism” site dedicated to user news submissions.

Andy Warhol said in 1968 that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” and iReport.com is offering users at least part of their 15 minutes as submissions may be used on CNN itself. But unfortunately that’s where it ends, because there is no payment for submissions. CNN claims this is a site is “where the community — not CNN — became the most trusted name in news,” but trust doesn’t equal money at a time where more and more sites and startups explore ways of compensating users for their time and effort.

There is some good content on the site, and CNN has selected star reporters in a social networking style popularity contest that encourages decent content, that and users can vote on stories as well. The weakness in the idea is that submissions are not pre-vetted or pre-read (or seemingly post-read), and you get stories like this one that is currently sitting as the fourth most viewed story on the site. I’m sure the weather in New York might be disgusting, but does a story that consists of one line and a picture of snow really make for great reporting? Then there’s stories like this one; Testing testing…… I can see people having proper fun with this in the coming days, until CNN ultimately decides that not moderating the site is a dumb idea.

Bored TechCrunch readers should feel free to add their own stories to CNN iReport and post the links. There’s no prize for the best one, other than your 0.25 seconds of Warhol fame in the TechCrunch comment thread

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Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur wrote a long blog post about his $6 million Series A round of funding today (I am an investor in this company). Most of the round was taken by Atomico (founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis), and rounded out with a long list of angel investors. Much of this was reported late last year.

This is Loic’s fourth or fifth startup, but his first in the U.S. (he’s French). Seesmic, a video-focused startup that is very twitter-like in its ability to facilitate random discussions, is doing well in its closed beta period. We aren’t covering it much given the conflict of interest, but this is a company I expect great things from, which is why I invested. See Dave Winer, VentureBeat, Mark Evans, Ryan Stewart, TheNextWeb and others for their thoughts.

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Anyone who’s ever visited HotOrNot and clicked on pictures for hours will be a perfect user for AddHer. Users (women only at this point, look for AddHim soon, I presume) upload a photo of themselves and create a widget that can be embedded on MySpace or another website. The widget shows the user plus another randomly selected woman and asks readers to select who they like better based on a variety of questions. If this doesn’t make sense, just see the embedded widget above and keep clicking on my face (the founders decided to allow me to join even though I’m not a woman).

Readers can visit the MySpace page of the person they clicked on, and users who’ve created a widget can see their ratings and the total number of times people have seen their image. See their tour and the AddHer blog for for more details.

More on the AddHer CrunchBase page. AddHer is a Y Combinator startup.

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MySpace is now providing an easier way for publishers to help users spread their content virally.

They’ve set up a “Post to MySpace” button that essentially just runs a snippet of JavaScript that sends some content to a user’s MySpace profile page. The snippet takes four parameters: a title, some content, a URL, and the location in the user’s profile page to post the content (in their “about me” section or on their bulletin board, for example).

We’ve set up a button below with which you can send a TechCrunch link to your MySpace profile page. If you’re interested in adding it to your site, you can go here for more information (Note: at time of writing, this link was broken).

This button is similar to the Flux fshare button that we previously wrote about.

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Plaxo finally got bought, say valley whispers, and blog after blog have speculated incorrectly about who the buyer might be (first Facebook, then Google). Finally, someone may have gotten it right - Valleywag is saying that Comcast is the buyer, for $175m. That makes sense based on what we heard earlier today, too: that one of the cable players bought them, for something just under the $200 million previously rumored. Comcast is the most active buyer in the bunch. In fact, they’re getting a bit of a reputation as the guys who’ll look at any deal, and don’t quibble much on price. If no one else will take you, there’s always Comcast.

To be fair, some of my disdain for Comcast exists solely because they supply my cable and Internet at home, and really really suck at it. I believe I’ve spoken to every customer service rep they employ.

Plaxo did around $5 million in 2006 revenue, doubling that to $10-$12 million in 2007. 2008 projections are $20-$25 million. The company has 1.8 million worldwide visitors per month (Comscore).

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Yahoo has just released the following letter to shareholders outlining its reasoning for rejecting Microsoft’s offer to buy the company:

Dear Stockholders,

On February 1, 2008, Microsoft made an unsolicited proposal to acquire your company. As much has been reported in the press recently, I wanted to reach out to you personally to let you know why your Board of Directors, after a careful review by Yahoo!’s management along with our financial and legal advisors, believes that Microsoft’s proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo! and is not in the best interests of our stockholders.

Most importantly, I want you to know that your Board is continuously evaluating all of Yahoo!’s strategic options in the context of the rapidly evolving industry environment, and we remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all our stockholders.

We have a unique combination of strengths

– Yahoo! is one of the most recognizable and admired brands in the world. We have over 500 million users (nearly 1 out of every 2 internet users worldwide). In the U.S., we are # 1 in many of the most used online services including personalized home pages, mail, news, music, shopping and travel. Because we have leadership positions in so many indispensable online services, users spend more time on Yahoo! sites than anywhere else online.

– Yahoo! is an attractive partner for marketers. Yahoo! is #1 in online display advertising, which represents 90% of the advertising inventory on the web, and we are also a leader in search marketing and a pioneer in the growing fields of mobile advertising and online video advertising. Through Yahoo!, advertisers can now connect with consumers on our owned sites as well as those of our growing network of partners including eBay, Comcast, AT&T, a consortium of over 600 newspapers, Forbes.com, Cars.com, WebMD and more.

– Yahoo! has the financial flexibility to execute our plans, thanks to our healthy cash balance, which exceeded $2 billion as of December 31, 2007, and our substantial operating cash flow, which we expect to grow double digits in 2009.

– Yahoo! has made important investments in our core computing infrastructure enabling us to dramatically increase the speed of our search engine updates even while handling vast and growing quantities of data.

– In addition, we have the added value of our substantial, unconsolidated investments in Japan and China. We have substantial positions in Yahoo! Japan, the leader in its market, and Alibaba, which is strongly positioned in China, a market with enormous growth potential.

These assets–our brand and its audience, our relationships with marketers, our financial strength, our technology, and our strategic investments–are the core of our value and our leadership position in the industry.

We have a huge market opportunity - and are uniquely positioned to capitalize on it

The global online advertising market is projected to grow from $45 billion in 2007 to $75 billion in 2010. And we are moving quickly to take advantage of what we see as a unique window of time in the growth - and evolution - of this market to build market share and to create value for stockholders.

We are executing our strategy - and making headway

We have taken significant but disciplined steps to refocus our business on our objectives to become the starting point for the most consumers and the must buy for the most advertisers and enhance Yahoo!’s long-term performance.

Starting Point Objective: Our goal is to grow visits to key Yahoo! starting points and properties, where users enter the Internet, by 15% per year over the next several years. We are the most visited site in the U.S., and we continue to grow - we experienced double-digit growth in U.S. users in 2007 on our Yahoo.com home page.

In addition to traditional starting points on the PC - including our home pages, mail, My Yahoo! and search, we are particularly excited about our growth prospects in mobile, the biggest emerging starting point in the world. Globally, there are twice as many users of mobile devices as users of personal computers, and mobile advertising is projected to grow substantially in the coming years. We have an important competitive edge as the number one mobile destination in the U.S., and we are building a superior mobile experience for Yahoo! users globally so we can further capitalize on this opportunity.

Must Buy Objective: We are working to make online advertising easier and more effective for marketers, opening up new ways for them to connect with consumers. We’ve successfully completed the global roll-out of our search marketing system, Panama, which improved the search experience for our users, boosted returns for our advertisers, and increased revenue for Yahoo!. Last year, we bought Right Media, an exchange that enables buyers and sellers of online advertising to come together. Another 2007 acquisition, Blue Lithium, brings us best-in-class performance marketing capabilities, complementing Yahoo!’s existing offerings for advertisers. We also integrated our search advertising and display advertising sales forces, creating a one-stop shop for all of advertisers’ online marketing needs. All of these - Panama, Right Media, Blue Lithium, and our combined sales efforts - complement and enhance Yahoo!’s existing capabilities and will make it easier for advertisers and online publishers to buy and sell advertising online.

We are also creating a unique and valuable network of premium websites to serve our advertisers. We are making it easier for our advertisers to provide interesting and relevant offers to our users by combining advertising space on Yahoo!’s owned sites with that from a growing group of premium partners including eBay, Comcast, AT&T, a consortium of over 600 newspapers and many others.

As we reach more users both on our own websites and on the sites of our premium partners, and better monetize the ad space on Yahoo!’s owned and operated sites, we are striving to increase the percentage of total online advertising demand we touch from an estimated 15% in 2007 to 20% over the next several years.

These key strategies will be enhanced by our adoption of new, more open technology platforms that will encourage the development of new applications and the involvement of third-party developers - and help enrich the user experience.

We have accomplished a great deal in a very short time - and we are focused on building this momentum

Today, Yahoo! is a faster-moving, better-organized, more nimble company than it was just a few months ago. We have redeployed our resources to drive Yahoo!’s key strategic priorities - taking important steps to streamline our organization and close down or scale back businesses that don’t support these critical growth initiatives. The fact is that we are well on our way to transforming the experiences of Yahoo!’s users, advertisers, publishers and developers - an important shift that is at the heart of our plan to create stockholder value.

I want you to know that the Yahoo! Board of Directors and management team remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all our Yahoo! stockholders. This is a great company and we are moving quickly to make it even better.

Jerry Yang

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