Edgeio, a company I co-founded in 2005, had a final board meeting this evening and made the decision to shut down operations of the company. We are putting it into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Edgieo first launched in February 2006 after a beta period. The company raised a small angel round of financing, then in October 2006 closed a $5 million Series A from Intel Capital and Transcosmos.

The company burned through that money according to plan, meaning they ran out this month. The product roadmap was fulfilled, meaning development lags didn’t hurt the company. But the revenues didn’t come in and user/partner milestones weren’t met. And that meant no one else was going to put more money into the company.

For the last few months CEO Keith Teare has been working on a number of plans to keep the company going, but none of them panned out. So tonight the board decided, appropriately, to shut the company down. This will be orderly – employees will be let go but will be fully paid. In this job climate, all of them will hopefully find work very quickly.

I’m obviously sad about this since I was one of the founders, although my involvement for the last two years has been as a board member only. But this is the way the startup world works. You win some, but you lose most. Edgeio wasn’t meant to be a success. And now Keith and the rest of the team can start the fight over again, and hopefully next time they’ll come out winners.

On a side note, our job site, which is run by Edgeio, will be transitioning over in the next day or two.

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There’s been no shortage of stories lately alleging that Wikipedia moderators have fascist tendencies, but a new case goes one step further. A German politician has filed charges against Wikipedia alleging that the worlds most famous UGC site promotes Nazism.

Katina Schubert, a deputy leader of the Left Party (Die Linke) told reporters that she had filed the charge on the grounds that Wikipedia’s German site contained too much Nazi symbolism with a particular fetish towards the Hitler Youth movement.

Schubert told Reuters (via SMH) that “The extent and frequency of the symbols on it goes beyond what is needed for documentation and political education…This isn’t about restricting freedom of opinion, it’s about examining what the limits are.”

Schubert went on to claim that there may be a Nazi plot afoot on Wikipedia itself: “There are signs neo-Nazis are trying to take advantage of such structures, and this needs to be stopped.”

Wikipedia Germany denied the allegations, saying that the imagery used was used for educational purposes. Use of Nazi symbols except for educational purposes is illegal in Germany.

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SmugMug has released a set of new features that further cements itself as a first-rate photo sharing website.

The first of these constitutes just a user interface upgrade, but a very attractive one at that. SmugMug realizes that users often change the size of their browser windows – and switch between devices with differently sized screens – so it has implemented dynamic resizing of photos, a feature it’s calling “SmugMungous”.

Change the size of your browser window and the photo that you are viewing will automatically get bigger or smaller while preserving its quality and resolution. The rest of the page’s interface will accommodate the new size as well, with thumbnails appearing or disappearing dynamically to fill the additional or remaining space. SmugMug’s not only about photos, though; videos hosted by the service will now also resize automatically in response to changes in the browser’s win­dow size.

There are a few other new features related to video in particular. High definition video encoded in H.264 and with a maximum size of 1280×720 can now be uploaded to and played through SmugMug using Quicktime (and, soon, Flash). When you upload high resolution video, it will automatically be encoded in a variety of sizes (”Web”, “iPod/DVD”, and “HiDef”) so you can play it back in a variety of settings.

Video collections that you share publicly can now be exported to iTunes as podcasts so that family members and friends can watch up-to-date videos on their computers and play them on their Apple handhelds. And finally, SmugMug’s iPhone interface now supports video so you can browse and play videos through Quicktime on your phone.

SmugMug, a family-run business that will celebrate its fifth year anniversary this Friday, says it has over 450,000 paying customers and makes over $10M in revenue per year. There are no free accounts on SmugMug; users must pay a minimum of $40 per year, but they have access to unlimited storage and bandwidth. The company has yet to take any outside money, and seeing how well things are going, probably won’t.

Update: We’ve embedded Robert Scoble’s video coverage of SmugMug and this announcement below. Footage of the actual release doesn’t start until around the 12-minute mark.

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<![CDATA[ After writing yesterday's post about politics on Wikipedia, I came across a copy of the actual email Durova sent purporting to demonstrate that the Wikipedia user she subsequently banned was a „troublemaker.“ What it boils down to is that the user in question was too good at contributing to Wikipedia, and so must not really have been a new user when she signed up in July. Basically, Durova thinks that she's made a suspiciously large number of helpful edits, including familiarity with relatively obscure Wikipedia features, and so she must be an experienced user creating a „sock puppet“ to help unspecified co-conspirators gain control of the site. Now, it's pretty clearly paranoid to think this proves there's some kind of conspiracy going on; there are any number of reasons an experienced Wikipedian might want to start a new account, and as long as the new account isn't being used as a „sock puppet“—and Durova offered no evidence that it was—it's not really a problem.

But at the very least, Durova is right about one thing: the way you gain power and influence within the Wikipedia community is by making thousands upon thousands of helpful edits to Wikipedia articles. To the extent that there are competing factions battling for control of the site, they conduct their battle by competing to make the best contributions to the site, thereby earning the respect of other Wikipedians and enabling them to win election to leadership positions like the site's Arbitration Committee. If you peruse the comments people make when they're voting, you'll see that a lot of people vote against individuals because they haven't been on the site long enough or haven't made enough contributions. What this means is that it doesn't matter very much how paranoid, vain, or power-hungry the senior leadership of Wikipedia is, or that there might be factions plotting to seize control of the site away from the current leadership. In fact, it might actually be good for the rest of us if that's true, because it will spur each faction to re-double their efforts to do more editing in the hopes of earning the support of rank-and-file editors.

There's an obvious parallel to real-world human societies here. People often criticize capitalism for promoting greed, but that's not quite right. Greed has always existed in human societies. In pre-capitalist societies, the way greedy and ambitious people got ahead was largely by conquering new countries, enslaving their inhabitants, assassinating political rivals, lobbying the government for monopolies, and engaging in other wasteful and destructive activities. The rise of capitalism didn't abolish greed and ambition, but it harnessed it for the public good. Now, if you want to become rich and powerful, one of the best ways to do it is by creating a company that produces goods and services consumers want. (You can also still get ahead by lobbying the government for special privileges, so the system's not perfect) The better you are at serving your customers' needs, the richer you get. In a competitive market, it doesn't really matter if our elite businessmen are nice people, the system is set up so that they're driven by their own self-interest to do things that benefit their customers. By the same token, it doesn't matter if, as critics claim, Wikipedia is run by a paranoid cabal; the system is organized so that they have to continue contributing positively to the site in order to maintain their positions of authority.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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The strange days of post-thanksgiving excess and crushed consumers are over. Of course, that means that the pre-holiday rush has begun, and CG’s holiday recommendations are coming fast and furious. But there’s been some controversy: old man Dvorak trashed the OLPC, our own Peter Ha alleged that the PS3 “stinks,” , and also that Leopard should die, causing an influx of fanboys to leave their folky brand of wisdom in the comments, and Mr. Biggs stirred up the PR kids when he suggested a little truth on their part. On the tech side, some small towns in the UK are demanding to be removed from GPS maps, and we found that the Pleo robo-saurus is actually pretty fun, not to mention cheaper than an Aibo. If you’re looking for gadgets, keep an eye out for the 32GB Creative Zen  — it’s cheap, spacious, and pretty good-looking too. In phones there was an outpouring of information from Blackberry users here, so if you have or want tips, drop by. Doug also found this cool Linux phone for under three bills. Keep an eye out for more CG recommendations if you’re trying to think of gifts for your geek.

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Stealth startup Hyphen-8 has been beta testing their new mobile social network called Lime Juice in San Francisco since October.

Using your phone to create or enhance real world interactions is a killer application, but no one has cracked the nut yet. The reason is that the network is useless until it achieves a critical mass of users who are online and using the application via their mobile phone. If no one else is online, there’s little point in you being online, either. And presence detection is another (technical) problem. Even if people have joined the network, how do you know when they are near you?

But once it does happen, look out. You could be in a bar and see who’s single, who thinks you’re cute, who wants to talk to you, etc. (if they choose to share that information). Forget meeting via an online dating site and then organizing an awkward in person meeting that usually falls flat. Instead, you can do the online an real world thing simultaneously.

We’ve kept an eye on the new startups launching in this space. Check out Mig33, ZYB, Mocospace, Aka-Aki, Nokia Sensor, Dodgeball, Mobiluck, MeetMoi and Imity, just to get warmed up. But none of them yet have critical mass (Mig33, however, is turning into a very large cheap VOIP provider on the side).

LimeJuice now joins the group with a unique product. Users can actually join on the fly, via SMS. And the company is sponsoring party after party at bars and clubs in San Francisco to get users to try out the product with lots of others at the same time. The test results are encouraging – people are using it. A lot.

How It Works

The goal is to allow people in a bar or other social gathering to learn a little about the people around them, and flirt via the mobile network as a way to break the ice. The details are what makes LimeJuice interesting. It’s dead simple to join and use.

First, users can register for the service via SMS. That means if just one person in a bar is a member or even knows about the service, they can tell others and quickly get a core group to join. When you create an account, you tell it something distinctive about yourself (tall blonde, red dress!) so that people searching will be able to quickly know who you are. When you go to another event later on, you simple update the description for the evening).

Second, all of the key interaction (for now) happens via SMS. So every phone is ready to go. No need to download a java app or even go to a web page. Just send a text message to the service along with the identifier of the person you want to talk to (which you can get via search), and the message is sent to them.

Third, even though people are using the service to send text messages back and forth, phone numbers are not exchanged. LimeJuice sits in the middle, and you can block someone easily.

Beta Events

LimeJuice has seen a good level of participation at the handful of events they’ve sponsored. An average of 40–50 people participate per event. They spend about 1.5 hours each using the service over the course of the evening and average ten text messages sent per person (some people send as many as 180 text messages). At one event, over 2,500 messages were sent to the service from participants.

For now the company will continue to sponsor events in San Francisco, hopefully building up a core user base that will begin to spread out and get others to join. If/when they get a lot of people in San Francisco to use the service, they’ll then expand to other cities.

The company, founded by Tobin Van Pelt and John Garrett, is based in San Francisco and has four employees. They’ve self funded to date with $100,000 and are currently pitching for a Series A round of funding.

₀_1197066022“,„hyp­hen8“); 

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“A professional community of top global brands dedicated to promoting best practices in corporate blogging” have formed The Blog Council, a “forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs.”

Initial members include AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo.

The crux of the idea is that big businesses can get together and talk blogging, from the challenges corporate blogging presents from a governance perspective, through to management and policy development .

The reaction to the formation of the Blog Council has been mixed; some such as Lionel Menchaca, Digital Media Manager at Dell and Rick Calvert at BlogWorldExpo think its a great idea, where as others including Dave Taylor thinking its a poor idea, with Taylor writing

My translation: “we’re all clueless, but don’t want anyone to realize just how unplugged our organizations have become from the world of “marketing 2.0″, so we created a club so our ignorance can be shielded from public eyes.”

I’m not so sure. My natural reaction against the Council is based on its name; “The Blog Council” sounds like it owns blogging or has some sort of superior position over the medium, where as it is nothing of the sort. Something such as the Corporate Blogging Association or similar would have suited the purpose far more better than what they’ve picked. In terms of big companies getting together under a formal structure to discuss blogging they’re entitled to do so but you’d have to ask why? Are they, as Dave Taylor suggests, soo clueless that they need to set up a separate body to understand new media marketing?

The Blog Council’s website is here; ultimately you can be the judge.

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<![CDATA[ Back in 2003, Disney's brilliant idea to „compete“ with TiVo and Netflix was to start MovieBeam. Just the fact that Disney felt it needed to compete with TiVo and Netflix shows you how backwards the thinking was at the point. Moviebeam was a terrible idea from the start. People were expected to buy (yet another) expensive set top box from Disney, which would basically be a very limited DVR. The hard drive would come packed with about 100 movies, and each week some would disappear and others would magically „beam“ into the box. Despite the fact that you already had to pay for the box, you still had to pay each time you wanted to watch a movie – and, you were only given a 24-hour time period in which to watch that movie. Two years into the program (with only a few small test markets) Disney shut down the program. At the time, we figured it was gone for good, but somehow, some VCs and Cisco were convinced to pony up $50 million to bring this idea back to life as a spinoff from Disney. Yet, when the offering was relaunched (with a few small improvements) people still didn't care. Earlier this year, the company was basically sold off for next to nothing, and now the company has announced that it's shutting down operations next week. Who knows, though, maybe it'll rise from the dead again, so that it can fail a few more times.

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While Facebook’s Beacon program has been drawing the ire of many people because of the privacy issues surrounding it, advertisers might be equally concerned about whether Beacon is inflating Facebook’s overall visitor and traffic numbers. Yesterday, Compete reported that Facebook’s unique visitors went up 20 percent in the month of November, after a controversial dip in September and practically zero growth in October. Could the increase have had anything to do with the launch of Beacon in early November?

In a word, yes. Every time someone visits a Facebook Beacon partner (there were 40 of them at the time of the announcement) and performs a pre-defined action like writing a review or rating a hotel, a little Beacon toast pops up alerting you that your action is being sent to Facebook. That pop-up is actually coming from Facebook, and in some cases may be counted as a Facebook page even though the person seeing it does not normally click through to Facebook. It is triggered by a tag on the partner’s page known as an iFrame, which then tells your browser to load a page from Facebook within the site you happen to be visiting. This occurs even when a non-Facebook member visits that page and performs the same action. In that case, it creates a ghost iFrame, though, because the viewer does not see anything. But data is still sent to Facebook.

I called up Jay Meattle at Compete, who wrote the post, and he confirmed that of the 29.2 million unique visitors Compete counted for Facebook in November, those could also include visitors to Facebook iFrame “pages,” which are really nothing more than a pop-up on a partner site. So, for instance, if you write a review on Yelp, a Beacon partner, a JavaScript is executed for all users writing a review (http://www.fa­cebook.com/…e­acon.js.php) and an iFrame is launched (http://www.fa­cebook.com/…h_i­frame.php). That review on Yelp can now count as a unique visitor on Facebook.

So how many Beacon iFrames “visits” did Compete mix up in its numbers? Meattle says that 2.3 million people triggered a Beacon iFrame in November. But he wasn’t able to tell me what the overlap is because a portion of those 2.3 million people could have already been counted as Facebook visitors when they visited Facebook previously, and thus would not be counted again. The Beacon pop-up would be treated in that case like any other Facebook page. (That is, after the first one, it would count towards page views, but not towards unique visitors). But remember, these iFrames are triggered by non-Facebook members as well who never go to Facebook proper. That would explain why Facebook had such a huge jump in visitors in November. If all 2.3 million of those iFrame visitors were counted improperly as part of Facebook’s total, that would account for nearly half of the 4.9 million jump in unique visitors measured by Compete.

Another strange thing about the Compete numbers is that they show unique visitors going up by 20 percent but page views only going up 2.58 percent. That could be due to lots of things, like Facebook users doing more stuff with apps on a single page, clicking off to Websites controlled by application providers, or Facebook just becoming more efficient in not making you click around as much to do the same things. But I wonder if that is partly Beacon-related as well.

Will wel see the same inflation in comScore’s November numbers when they come out next week, or in other measuring services such as Quantcast, HitWise, or Alexa. The folks at comScore assure me that they filter out any traffic or pages not requested by users such as pop-ups, so it might not be an issue for them. I don’t know how the other measuring services treat iFrames. But in an age when Websites are interchanging so much data and so many actual applications, where one begins and the other one ends is becoming blurred. Do page views even matter anymore? Do uniques? Maybe it is time for some new metrics.

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So I thought it was interesting and humorous when we discovered that Facebook, which will more than double the number of employees to 700 next year, was grabbing Google employees at an alarming rate – at least ten high profile hires so far, and 2–4 more each month.

But what isn’t so funny is that they are poaching from other startups and companies much closer to my heart. Namely, us. Today I found out that they’ve hired our product manager for Crunchbase, Ben Meyer. Ben was one of our star interns over the summer, and we kept him on in a full time role when the internship ended. We don’t have many people here at TechCrunch, and everyone is key. Losing Ben is very, very hard.

But apparently the gravitational pull of Facebook and their stock options was enough to lure him away from TechCrunch. Congratulations to Ben, who will be missed but will do well in his new job (and, I hope, give us internal access to Facebook’s admin system ).

But I am not happy at all with Facebook about this. Stay the hell away from our employees, Facebook, and fill your employment quotas elsewhere. Anyone else, and I declare war.

On a completely unrelated note, if anyone has a lead on a highly negative Facebook story, send it our way. Unfounded rumors and pure speculation are encouraged. Jerks. (Update: this is exactly the kind of stuff I’m looking for)

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