Contact Information

Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Company Ltd, 10/F, Fiyta Bldg, Gaoxinnanyi Ave, S District of Hi-tech Park
Shenzhen, Guangdong 518057
CHINA

It is a public service broadcaster, established by a Royal Charter and funded by the licence fee that is paid by UK households.

The BBC uses the income from the licence fee to provide services including 8 national TV channels plus regional programming, 10 national radio stations, 40 local radio stations and an extensive website.

Contact Information

British Broadcasting Corporation
Research & Development, Kingswood Warren
Tadworth, Surrey KT20 6NP
United Kingdom

The site was initially launched as an invitation-only service, although at one stage, accounts were also available to users of the Flock web browser. However, accounts can now be registered by anyone, and there are over 10.6 million individual blogs with the service as of April 2010.

Other Information

• Type of site : Blog hosting
• Registration : Optional
• Owner  : Automattic
• Created by  : Automattic

Established in 2003, Taobao is China’s largest Internet retail platform , taking up about three-fourths of the market share, according to domestic research firm iResearch. Platforms within Taobao also include Alibaba (www.alibaba.com), an online advertising exchange and affiliate network for hundreds of thousands of publishers in China, and Koubei.com (www.koubei.com), China’s leading classified listing website.

Other Information

• Developers : Tencent Holdings Limited
• Stable release : QQ2009 Simplified Chinese SP6 (Windows) 2009-12-08, QQ2009 Traditional Chinese SP1 (Windows) 2009-10-20 / 2009-04-16 (Windows)
• Preview release : QQ2009 International Beta2 （Windows）2009-12-03, QQ for Mac 1.0 Beta1（Mac）2009-01-09, QQ for Linux 1.0 Beta1（Linux）2009-01-04
• Operating system : Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iPhone/iPad
• Available in : Chinese, English
• Type : Instant Messaging

Other Information

• Type : Corporate
• Founded : Mountain View, CA, United States
• Headquarters : Mountain View, CA, United States
• Area served : Worldwide
• Industry : Online Advertising
• Products : In-text advertising

Chitika offers search-targeted advertising solutions. The ad units can be used on websites alongside with Google AdSense or as an AdSense alternative.

Other Information

• Type : Private
• Industry : Internet advertising
• Founded : Shrewsbury, Massachusetts (May, 2003)
• Headquarters : Westborough, Massachusetts, USA
• Key people :
  • Venkat Kolluri, Co-Founder, CEO
  • Alden DoRosario, Co-Founder, CTO
• Products : Chitika Premium

Cozi was co-founded by Robbie Cape and Jan Miksovsky after the two of them left Microsoft. Most of the company’s employees worked previously at Amazon.com, Expedia, or Microsoft. The company’s first product was called Cozi Central and released on September 25, 2006, and includes a family calendar, shopping lists, family messaging, and a photo collage screensaver. Cozi was relaunched as a web-oriented company on June 3, 2008.

Corporate Culture

Cozi uses Tupperware-style events called Mom’s parties to conduct market research.

The company is unusual among technology start-ups in that it employs a roughly equal balance of men and women.

From Cozi Website

Cozi is a free web service that helps families manage crazy schedules, track shopping and to do lists, organize household chores, stay in communication and share memories—all in one place.

People have accused us of being fanatically family focused, and you know what? They’re right. From our very beginning in 2005, we’ve been all about families. When we started Cozi, we were just a small group of Microsoft, Expedia, and Amazon veterans—all with kids of our own—looking for a way to balance our busy schedules and create more harmony at home. So we pooled our collective knowledge and experience to create something special. Something that would make it easy and fun for families to juggle everything they have to do. Not just our families, but families everywhere.

We know every family is different, but we all have one thing in common: we’re crazy-busy. Cozi is designed to make it easier to manage everything we have to do. Cozi tracks appointments and activities, simplifies shopping lists and chores, and makes it easy for everyone to communicate with each other. Even when schedules change, Cozi is there making sure all the moving pieces fit together at the end of the day.

Other Information

• Founded March 2005
• Headquarters : 506 2nd Ave, Suite 710, Seattle, WA, 98104, USA
• Key People : Robbie Cape – CEO & Co-Founder, Jan Miksovsky – Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder
• Official Website :

The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices in Tel Aviv and New York. Metacafe is privately held and its investors include Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.

Metacafe is similar to other video viewing websites such as YouTube or Dailymotion, but with several differences. Core differentiators include duplication elimination, a different type of Adult content filtering, a community member reviewer panel, VideoRank, and Producer Rewards. Its VideoRank system gauges viewer reactions to videos in order to feature those that prove most popular to its viewers. Additionally, Metacafe pays video creators for original work that has exceeded a certain threshold of both total views and VideoRank score through its Producer Rewards Program.
The site features short-form videos in a variety of categories, including Animation, Comedy, Entertainment, How To, News and Events, People and Stories, Sports, Video Games and others. Original content is uploaded to the site by independent video creators, small to mid-sized production groups, and major media companies.

From the Website

Metacafe is one of the world’s largest video sites, attracting more than 40 million unique viewers each month (comScore Media Metrix). We specialize in short-form original content – from new, emerging talents and established Hollywood heavyweights alike. We’re committed to delivering an exceptional entertainment experience, and we do so by engaging and empowering our audience every step of the way.

Since 2003 Metacafe has been one of the top independent online video sites, and we’re a leader in the evolution of digital entertainment. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices in Tel Aviv and New York. Metacafe is privately held and investors include Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.

How is Metacafe different?

Metacafe is not a video sharing and hosting site that allows any and every video to be posted. Instead, Metacafe is a video entertainment site that focuses on:

1. Short-form – Metacafe specializes in short-form original video – content that is made for the interactive Internet medium. We don’t have full-length television episodes or movies chopped into pieces. The average video on our site is just over 90 seconds long. People come to Metacafe looking for an entertainment break in their day – and we deliver.
2. Entertainment – We’re all about entertaining a large audience by featuring only those videos that amaze, inspire and make viewers laugh. This means you won’t find hard news stories, personal videos or webcam chatter on Metacafe.
3. Audience-driven – The Metacafe experience is determined entirely by our community. Videos are user-generated, user-selected, user-reviewed and user-rewarded. At Metacafe, we put the audience in the driver’s seat, empowering viewers in a much more meaningful way than other video sites.
   • Community Auditions – A community review panel of more than 80,000 volunteers takes a first look at each of the thousands of videos submitted to the site every day.
   • Community Rankings – Our VideoRank™ system identifies and exposes the most popular videos by automatically gauging every interaction each viewer has with a video.
   • Community Rewards – Our Producer Rewards™ program pays video creators for their best original work, as determined by the viewers.

What does this all add up to? A better entertainment experience. We consistently hear from our viewers that it’s easier to find videos they like on our site as compared to others – and that keeps them coming back for more.

Other Information

• Type : Private
• Founded : July 2002
• Headquarters : Palo Alto, CA, United States
• Key people : Erick Hachenburg, CEO, Eyal Hertzog, Founder and CCO
  Eran Pilovski, CFO Jack Rotherham, SVP of Strategic Sales and
• Partnerships :  David Rice, VP of Product, Yaron Finkel, VP of R&D, Scott Bushman, VP of Business Development
• Industry : Online video entertainment
• Slogan : Video Entertainment, Powered by You
• Registration : Optional (required to upload, comment on, rate, and review videos)
• Available in : English, Spanish

Mahalo’s directory employs human editors to review websites and write search engine results pages that include text listings, as well as other media, such as photos and video. Each Mahalo search results page includes links to the top seven sites, as well as other categorized information, and additional web pages from Google. The company also pays freelancers to create pages for piecework compensation in the Mahalo Greenhouse – the pages are approved by a full time staff member prior to appearing in the main index.

Mahalo’s approach is similar to that employed by Ask.com in 1998. At that time, both Ask.com and Google were up-and-coming search engines. Ultimately, Google prevailed because Ask had trouble scaling up its human edited directory, while Google’s search results were generated by software

Mahalo has started with the top 4,000 search terms in popular categories like travel, entertainment, cars, food, health care and sports and is adding about 500 more terms per week with a goal of covering the top 10,000 by the end of 2007. This goal has been exceeded when, in December 2007, Mahalo announced that its index has reached 25,000 pages, a year earlier than it was expected.

Mahalo also offers “how to” guides offering instructions on popular topics in an editorial fashion. Mahalo will deliver results for less popular searches from Google.

Search results quality

Mahalo’s goal is to improve search results by eliminating search spam from low-quality websites, such as those that have excessive advertising, distribute malware, or engage in phishing scams. Webmasters have a vested interest to see their sites listed. Calacanis has said that algorithmic search engines, like Google and Yahoo, suffer from manipulation by search engine optimization practitioners. Mahalo’s reliance on human editors is intended to avoid this problem, producing search results that are more relevant to the user.

Mahalo Daily Video Show

Veronica Belmont was hired by Mahalo.com to produce a daily video show for the site. Her first video was an interview with Leeroy Jenkins. Belmont left Mahalo Daily to co-host the Revision3 series Tekzilla. After a month-long search, Belmont’s replacement was announced on June 5, 2008. Former cable sports show host Leah D’Emilio won Mahalo Vlog Idol and now co-hosts the show with Mahalo.com employee Lon Harris. The show format remains predominately the same as when hosted by Belmont – shows around five minutes long, intended to be both entertaining and generally educational. Shows regularly feature interviews, particularly of people in the local area, and “in 60 seconds” clips of major events (Apple Keynotes, US Presidential debates, and so forth) regularly feature. Harris and D’Emilo have introduced two new features to the show lineup – a “This week on YouTube” show each Friday, covering (in a disparaging fashion) viral videos on Youtube for that current week, and a “Mahalo Mondays” Q&A show each Monday.

Mahalo Answers

On December 15, 2008, Mahalo launched a new service called Mahalo Answers. The service is similar to Yahoo! Answers in that it allows users to pose questions regarding a wide variety of subjects, and those questions will be answered by other users. A key difference between the two services is that Mahalo Answers allows questioners to give a monetary reward (called a “tip” on the site) to the user who provides the most helpful response.  Tips are paid using “Mahalo dollars,” which are bought using PayPal, and, once earned, can then either be used to tip other users or be cashed in at a 75% exchange rate.

Critics

Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com said, “Just like a lot of people who watch movies think they can be scriptwriters, there are a lot of people who use search engines who think they can build a search engine.” Lanzone cited the fact that about 60% of search inquiries to Ask are unique as just one of the challenges of running a search engine. Google claims that 20% to 25% of its search inquiries have never been used before.

At the SMX Conference in June 2007, Google software engineer Matt Cutts explained that while he supports different approaches to search, like Mahalo, it is untrue that humans have nothing to do with Google’s search results. As examples of human involvement he cited Google’s use of hyperlink analysis, toolbar voting, and user reporting of spam. Cutts suggested that Google would evolve to take advantage of social media.

Ownership and funding

Lead investors in Mahalo.com include Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz, an early investor in both Google and Yahoo; Elon Musk, founder of PayPal; and News Corporation. Other disclosed investors include Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and AOL chairman Ted Leonsis Jason Calacanis has said that he has enough funding to run Mahalo for four or five years without making a profit. Mahalo eventually hopes to make a profit by selling ads next to search results.

Traffic and growth

Mahalo has experienced moderate growth since it was launched in May 2007. Mahalo.com traffic has increased from roughly ten thousand visitors a month in July 2007, to two million visitors a month in January 2008.  In the three month period leading up to the date of February 23 2008, the number of global internet users who visited Mahalo.com rose by fifty percent, and the site is currently ranked by Alexa in the top 3000 most visited websites. On October 22, 2008, Calacanis announced that he was laying off 10 percent of Mahalo’s employees due to the economic downturn. Conflicting reports suggest that the percentage of employees let go was much higher, with reports stating that it was a third of staff.

Other Information

• Genre  Search Engine
• Founded  2007
• Founder  Jason Calacanis
• Headquarters  Santa Monica, California, USA
• Key people  Jason Calacanis, Founding CEO. Elliot C.R. Cook: COO, Mark Jeffrey: CTO
• Revenue  Unknown, Startup May 2007
• Employees  20
• Slogan  “We’re here to help.”
• Type of site  Web directory
• Advertising  Google AdSense
• Available in  English
• Launched  May 30, 2007

Links

• Website  Mahalo.com