Satisfaction Gets $1.3 Million To Crowdsource Your Help Desk

Customers are a hidden source of product specialists that corporations have been slow to tap. They usually become very knowledgeable about products they love and can often solve problems an understaffed support department doesn’t have the resources or will to solve (e.g. how to unlock an iPhone). It’s no wonder crowdsourcing your customers has become a popular and lucrative business - just see our recent coverage of PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice).

satisfactionscreen.gifSatisfaction Unlimited is another one of the companies tapping this knowledge base by helping young companies crowdsource their support amongst their customers. They’re doing it through a network of corporate discussion boards that let customers ask questions, propose ideas, submit problems, or just chat. Satisfaction is currently powering online support for a couple notable properties (Twitter, Pownce, Slideshare) and is now opening up a public beta to even more companies. They’ve also just raised a $1.3 million round from First Round Capital, O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, Jeff Clavier, Adaptive Path, Mike Brown, and Jason Schultz.

Satisfaction’s network consists of AJAXy bulletin boards for over 200 companies. Not all of them are “owned” by the companies they represent, but rather spots for consumers to meet each other and mull over their latest issues. The open beta will let companies come in and claim these boards so they can moderate the forum and connect with their customers.

Having a network of these help boards provides an advantage to setting up your own board since the network comes with an existing user base. Tangler’s forums system also has this advantage.

The boards themselves are very similar to Jive’s entry-level product, their enterprise knowledge base. Users can create profiles and make posts to the board. Corporate mods can surf the board to moderate and answer questions. You can also search for and follow different conversation threads by email and RSS as they unfold. While Jive offers a significant number of extra upgrades to their system, Satisfaction fits the bill for smaller businesses.

Esther Dyson, Guy Kawasaki and Yossi Vardi Join TechCrunch20 Expert Panel

The TechCrunch20 Panel of Experts is now nearly complete. Today we add Esther Dyson, Guy Kawasaki and Yossi Vardi to the impressive list of individuals who will judge the startups launching at the conference and determine who will ultimately win the $50,000 top prize.

The final companies for TechCrunch20 have been selected, and more announcements are coming soon. Register for the event, which is being held in San Francisco on September 17-18, here.

Esther Dyson and her company EDventure specialize in analyzing the impact of emerging technologies and markets on economies and societies. She is the author of Release 2.0, a book which discussed how the Internet has affected our lives. Esther has been a board member or early investor in numerous startups, including Flickr, PowerSet, ZEDO, Medscape, and Medstory. In addition to her active roles in a number of not-for-profit and advisory organizations, Esther enjoys private aviation and commercial space startups and hosts an annual Flight School conference in Aspen.

Guy Kawasaki is CEO of early-stage venture capital firm Garage Technology Ventures and an active blogger. Guy was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, CEO of ACIUS and founder of Fog City Software. Guy has written eight books, including The Art of the Start. He sits on the board of BitPass, FilmLoop and SimplyHired. His most recent venture is launching Truemors, a site dedicated to democraticizing information by encouraging everday people to post news.

Yossi Vardi is one if Israel’s hi-tech veterans, having helped build some 40 hi-tech companies in Internet, software, telecommunications, electro-optics, energy, environment and other areas. Several companies Dr. Vardi co-founded became successful public companies, among them Alon, Advanced Technologies, and Granite Hacarmel. Internet companies backed by Dr. Vardi include Mirabilis Ltd, ICQ (acquired by AOL), Gteko (acquired by Microsoft), Scopus and Answers.com. He is a member of the World Economic Forum, on the board of Amdocs, and the advisory board of 3i. He has served as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program.

Woods survives minor scare to win 13th major title

By SAM WEINMAN TULSA, Okla. - In the final moments of another triumphant week, everything had returned to balance in Tiger Woods' world.
In Tulsa, Tiger Nabs 13th Major New York Sun
Woods's PGA Victory, Like in 1999, May Be Start of Title Binge Bloomberg
The Australian - Long Beach Press-Telegram - Augusta Chronicle (subscription) - FOXSports.com
all 2,917 news articles »


http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn

MediaWhiz Latest Ad Network For Sale?

, a holding company for a number of advertising networks, may be shopping itself to private equity firms. We are hearing that they are looking for $400- $450 million, which is 2.5 - 3 times estimated 2007 revenues.

MediaWhiz owns a number of ad networks, including two that are long time sponsors of this site (Text Link Ads and Auction Ads). Both were recently acquired by MediaWhiz.

I have an email in to the company for comment.

Ad networks are the hot commodity this year, with AOL, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all making big acquisitions. The size of those deals combined is nearly $10 billion.

Sell Your Digital Wares Through Edgeio Paid Content

Classified listing service Edgeio now lets you sell content through your listings. The new type of listing called “Paid content” consists of the same listing Edgeio already hosts, but comes with an embedded digital locker. Through the locker, users can securely sell text, file downloads, and streaming media through a widget hosted by Edgeio.

It seems a good fit for selling podcasts or research reports. Affiliates can also grab the widget code to sell your product on their own sites as well for a revenue share determined by the content owner. Michael Arrington, the editor of this blog, is a founder and investor in the company.

Digital lockers are nothing new. E-Junkie, Payloadz, Tradebit, and Bitpass (shutdown) have done it for a while. However, Edgeio has the added advantage of leveraging the paid listings through their existing listings network and providing a very straightforward product.

It’s pretty simple to get started. You sign up to create a listing like any other through the “Paid Content” link. Next, select your content type, price (currency), affiliate percentage, and coupon code. Finally, Edgeio lets you make a teaser “preview” for the content to give buyers an idea about what they’re purchasing. Once completed, you get some embed code and the listing is placed in Edgeio’s index, linked to the page where the widget is embedded.

An example of one of the widget embeds is included below. The other version of the widget initially shows visitors a teaser, until the content is purchased and unlocked. Use the coupon code “vgforfree” to unlock the content. To purchase the content, you need to sign into your Edgeio account and to pay by credit card or PayPal. The content is then unlocked for your Edgeio account.

Edgeio splits revenue from sales through the widget 80/20 in favor of the content creator. The creator can then split that 80% for sales through affiliates at any percentage they like.

Update (Arrington): This is a company that I co-founded in early 2005 with Keith Teare, months before I started TechCrunch. There is a clear conflict of interest, although I did not write, edit or give input on this post. For a balance of viewpoints, see Techmeme.

TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera makes an interesting observation on the Google News story all over the blogosphere today.

As Variety is reporting, NBC is gearing up to launch it’s first (well, second) “major assault” against YouTube, Didja.com (currently a parked page).

The site will “celebrate advertising as entertainment” and feature “a free online archive of current and classic television commercials, movie trailers and other brand-related content”. The name, Didja, is short for “did you see that”, the apparent reaction they’re hoping to get from viewers. The site will be cross promoted on NBC’s television channel and will eventually on all divisions of NBC Universal. It’s set to launch the beginning of next year, sometime after the still-unnamed joint venture with News Corp., dubbed “Clown Co.” by Google execs.

The site is all about advertising and NBC getting paid for it. NBC hopes advertisers will pay for prominent placement on the site or to create their own branded pages (e.g. an all-McDonald’s channel). The customizable branded pages will allow advertisers to upload commercials to the site, include product offers, store locators, and other tools.

For viewers, the site will feature an extensive social networking component as well as a mash-up tools to remix their own “advertainment”.

This territory has been heavily treaded before. TBS has their own Veryfunnyads website, featuring *gasp* “Very funny advertisements”. Clipland is a smaller site that’s been doing the same thing. Not least of all is YouTube itself, which attracts the lions share of ads and trailers people actually want to watch.

Leveraging Facebook To Compete With eBay Won’t Work

Buy.com made a splash tonight with their announcement of a new Facebook application called Garage Sale.

Facebook users can use the application to sell thing directly to others via their Facebook profile. Buy.com charges a flat 5% commission on completed sales (the seller will also have to pay Paypal or other payment fees. The application says “thanks to Garage Sale, Facebook users don’t have to leave their profile page to advertise and sell personal goods.”

There are other Facebook applications doing nearly the exact same thing. Mosoma, for example, is one that I tested a couple of weeks ago. It also allows users to sell items on their Facebook profile.

There is an argument that a closed network is a better way to sell items because the people who view the listing know you and, presumably, trust you. That gets you over a big hurdle - eBay’s feedback system provides information on the buyer and seller which helps them get comfortable transacting. Without that feedback system to encourage sales, it’s important that something else takes its place. In the case of Garage Sale and Mosoma, user familiarity is the key.

But in practice this doesn’t work so well. Sellers are looking for a big base of buyers to sell into to leverage the network effect. eBay obviously does an excellent job of this. Otherwise there is no reason they would command a long term leadership position with their high fees. Buyers and sellers put up with the fees because it is the place to go to conduct p2p transactions. The network effect perpetuates their success and newcomers have a very difficult time gaining market share.

With Garage Sale and Mosoma, sellers can’t access this large pool of buyers because only their friends will see the listings. And sellers who are looking for a specific item are still likely to hop on over to eBay and do a quick search. They’ll only buy from friends if they serendipitously happen to catch site of an item in a friend’s news feed that they were already looking for.

Microsoft experimented in this area in late 2005/early 2006 with their Live Expo product. Originally Expo was a way to buy and sell items to your MSN IM buddies, or coworkers at a company, which is very similar to the Facebook experiments now being conducted. But over time they seem to have expanded Expo to become a more generic listing service. People want deep listings when they are looking for something.

Closed networks work for some things, but they don’t seem to work for trading physical goods. My bet is that Garage Sale and Mosoma fall short of expectations, and that eBay is looking on with, at best, bemused interest.

Acquisition for Clipmarks

New York based Clipmarks, a del.icio.us-like social bookmarking service, may have been acquired by Forbes. We have no information on the size of the transaction, but my guess is that it was on the very low side.

The service allows users to bookmark all or a portion of a web page and annotate it. It is then shared with the community and popular new bookmarks are “popped” to the top of the site. In some ways it is more competitive with Digg than Del.icio.us since popular stories are linked from the home page. See our post on Digg-like competitors from earlier this year where we talked about Clipmarks and others.

I never took much of a liking to Clipmarks - it wasn’t as interesting as Digg and was lost in the sea of social bookmarking competitors. But I congratulate them on the acquisition and look forward to seeing what Forbes does with it. I wonder if Condé Nast’s acquisition of Reddit last year prompted Forbes to take a look at some of the available competitors out there.