Category Archives: Internet

BillMeLater – $1 Billion in funding so far

By putting different pieces together we have just realized that all the funding for the so called credit card alternative BillMeLater totals $1 Billion. Pretty impressive at first sight but on second reading we guess it is in norms for a financial company with such ambitious goals and operations.

BillMeLater is a young seven-year-old company that is taking on the major competitors, including MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, which made its name as an online payment provider. BillMeLater has landed as merchants some of the most popular on-line retailers like www.Overstock.com, www.Walmart.com, www.usairways.com, www.officemax.com, www.brookstone.com, www.continental.com, www.etoys.com, www.hotels.com, www.1800flowers.com among others. Amazon will be offering the payment option as well.

The company incorporated initially as I4 Commerce and has changed its name to Bill Me Later, Inc. in 2007.

Bill Me Later, Inc. has developed and operates the PayCapture® technology platform and its suite of credit tools including its flagship Bill Me Later®–the first new payment method since credit cards to be broadly available within the United States.

Managed by a team of industry leaders, the Bill Me Later® Payment Suite allows merchants to leverage payments as a strategic tool to enhance customer loyalty, drive higher sales and expand profit margins.

Bill Me Later, Bill Me Later Business, the Preferred Account Program, and Promotional Financing tools are the first in a series of solutions designed to help merchants meet the demands of an increasingly competitive marketplace.  Leveraging existing infrastructures, most merchants can fully deploy these next-generation credit tools in a matter of weeks as opposed to the months it can take to set up other payment methods or private label accounts.

Millions of consumers rely on the safety and convenience of Bill Me Later, Inc.’s payment solutions when shopping online, via catalog and in-store to help save both time and money. 

On the consumer part it is:

Bill Me Later is the new way to pay that’s simple, fast and secure. 

Easy and Convenient
Bill Me Later is a convenient and secure new payment method designed for purchasing on the web or over the phone. As a credit account, Bill Me Later provides you with the flexibility to purchase without using your credit card. To request a Bill Me Later account, you do not have to complete a lengthy application prior to making a purchase. Simply select Bill Me Later at checkout to complete your request.

Security You Can Count On
With no card number for making purchases and no physical card, Bill Me Later gives you an extra level of security. Plus, Bill Me Later offers “zero fraud liability” protection, which means you are not responsible for unauthorized charges.

It operates much like a credit card company largely because its founder and chief executive Gary Marino has a long credit card pedigree, having served as chief credit officer for both First USA/Bank One and Citigroup. He started Bill Me Later after an investor suggested that online billing options be as simple as the “bill me later” tear-out form that comes inside magazines.

Revenues

It is the sixth-fastest-growing company in the country by revenue – on track to bring in more than $100 million this year – according to Inc. magazine’s September issue. No information publicly available whether the company is profitable.

The People

Gary Marino is the company’s chief executive officer and founder.  Gary has over 20 years of experience in the credit card industry with expertise in credit management, marketing, Internet strategy development, and general management.
Prior to joining Bill Me Later, Inc., Gary was Executive Vice President, Chief Credit Officer, and Chief Marketing Officer of the consumer lending division at First USA/Bank One. Gary also held numerous executive positions in his 13 year career with Citibank’s European and North American Card Division. These include Chief Credit Officer and member of the Bankcards Executive Planning council.

Other executive include

  • Steve Burleson – Chief Financial Officer
  • Craig Eckstrom – VP Sales and Account Management
  • Carolyn Groobey – Head of Consumer Strategy
  • Adam Joffe – Chief Information Officer
  • Tom Keithley – VP Credit and Integration
  • Mark Lavelle – VP Corporate Development & Strategic Planning
  • Bill Seligman – VP Credit Operations
  • Bill Shupert – VP Human Resources
  • Vince Talbert – VP Marketing
  • Marita Ventura – Chief Technology Officer
  • Chris Williams – VP Consumer Marketing

Investors & Tranches

The company, which is about 7 years old, has received $200 million in venture capital funding from investors such as Chase Paymentech and Azure Capital Partners, as well as a $640M credit line from Citigroup. The past month BillMeLater raised a whopping amount of $72 Million as well. The past week Amazon.com has just put yet another amount into the company as terms of the deal were not disclosed. Earlier last year the company secured $27.4 Million in Venture Funding.

Some of the investors as included below with short bios and company information.

ChasePaymentech is the payment solutions company of choice for online and offline transaction processing. A leader in the industry for more than sixteen years, ChasePaymentech processes one out of every two U.S. Internet transactions. ChasePaymentech is also a strategic investor in Bill Me Later, Inc.

Azure Capital Partners was founded in April 2000 with a focus on infrastructure technologies. Their philosophy of investing is to support and accelerate companies throughout their lifecycle of growth, ranging from early seed stage through maturity in the public markets.

GRP Partners is a global venture capital firm focused on retailing, retail technology and financial services technology. With $650 million under management, GRP finances early-stage and late-stage companies that develop solutions meeting pressing customer needs.

First Data Corporation processes payments for 312 million accounts around the world. As the leader in payment services, First Data serves approximately 3 million merchant locations and 1,400 financial institutions. First Data also provides consumer account processing services for Bill Me Later® and is a strategic investor in Bill Me Later, Inc.

Crosspoint Venture Partners invests in virtual service providers and broadband infrastructure. With over $1 billion under management, Crosspoint was recently named the #1 venture capitalist based on three – year returns.

CIT Group Inc. (NYSE: CIT), a leading commercial and consumer finance company, provides clients with financing and leasing products and advisory services. CIT, a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 Index, holds leading positions in cash flow lending, vendor financing, factoring, equipment and transportation financing, Small Business Administration loans, and asset-based lending. With its global headquarters in New York City, CIT has approximately 7,500 employees in locations throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific.

Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking is the most complete financial partner to corporations, financial institutions, institutional investors and governments in the world. As a global leader in banking, capital markets, and transaction services, with a presence in many countries dating back more than 100 years, Citigroup Corporate and Investment Banking enables clients to achieve their strategic financial objectives by providing them with cutting-edge ideas, best-in-class products and solutions, and unparalleled access to capital and liquidity.

Citigroup (NYSE: C), the leading global financial services company has some 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 100 countries, providing consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, and wealth management. Major brand names under Citigroup’s trademark red umbrella include Citibank, CitiFinancial, Primerica, Smith Barney and Banamex.

Equifax is today’s number one provider of real-time consumer information with the world’s largest repository of consumer credit information.

T. Rowe Price: Founded in 1937, Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price is a global investment management organization that provides a broad array of mutual funds, subadvisory services, and separate account management for individual and institutional investors, retirement plans, and financial intermediaries. The organization also offers a variety of sophisticated investment planning and guidance tools. T. Rowe Price’s disciplined, risk-aware investment approach focuses on diversification, style consistency, and fundamental research.

Legg Mason, Inc.: Legg Mason, Inc. is a global asset management firm, with over $1 trillion in assets under management as of September 30, 2007. The Company provides active asset management in many major investment centers throughout the world. Legg Mason is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland and its common stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (symbol: LM).

Via

[ http://www.bill-me-later.com/wss/help/aboutus.do ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/11/amazon-invests-in-bill-me-later/ ]
[ http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/071211/20071211005292.html?.v=1 ]
[ http://www.corporate.billmelater.com/billmelater/Content.do?pageID=15 ]
[ http://corporate.billmelater.com/ ]
[ http://www.bill-me-later.com/wss/index.do ]
[ http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-bz.billmelater04dec04,0,4892376.story?page=1&coll=bal-technology-headlines ]
[ http://www.fool.com/personal-finance/credit/2007/11/26/profit-from-holiday-credit.aspx ]
[ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/27/AR2007112702246.html ]
[ http://corporate.billmelater.com/billmelater/FilesInline.do?file=Citi Financing (2).pdf ]
[ http://corporate.billmelater.com/billmelater/FilesInline.do?file=funding03_28_06.pdf ]
[ http://corporate.billmelater.com/billmelater/FilesInline.do?file=Bill Me Later Inc. Announcement.pdf ]

Hakia takes on major search engines backed up by a small army of international investors

In our planned series of publications about the Semantic Web and its Apps today Hakia is our 3rd featured company.

Hakia.com, just like Freebase and Powerset is also heavily relying on Semantic technologies to produce and deliver hopefully better and meaningful results to its users.

Hakia is building the Web’s new “meaning-based” (semantic) search engine with the sole purpose of improving search relevancy and interactivity, pushing the current boundaries of Web search. The benefits to the end user are search efficiency, richness of information, and time savings. The basic promise is to bring search results by meaning match – similar to the human brain’s cognitive skills – rather than by the mere occurrence (or popularity) of search terms. Hakia’s new technology is a radical departure from the conventional indexing approach, because indexing has severe limitations to handle full-scale semantic search.

Hakia’s capabilities will appeal to all Web searchers – especially those engaged in research on knowledge intensive subjects, such as medicine, law, finance, science, and literature. The mission of hakia is the commitment to search for better search.

Here are the technological differences of hakia in comparison to conventional search engines.

QDEX Infrastructure

  • hakia’s designers broke from decades-old indexing method and built a more advanced system called QDEX (stands for Query Detection and Extraction) to enable semantic analysis of Web pages, and “meaning-based” search. 
  • QDEX analyzes each Web page much more intensely, dissecting it to its knowledge bits, then storing them as gateways to all possible queries one can ask.
  • The information density in the QDEX system is significantly higher than that of a typical index table, which is a basic requirement for undertaking full semantic analysis.
  • The QDEX data resides on a distributed network of fast servers using a mosaic-like data storage structure.
  • QDEX has superior scalability properties because data segments are independent of each other.

SemanticRank Algorithm

  • SemanticRank algorithm of hakia is comprised of innovative solutions from the disciplines of Ontological Semantics, Fuzzy Logic, Computational Linguistics, and Mathematics. 
  • Designed for the expressed purpose of higher relevancy.
  • Sets the stage for search based on meaning of content rather than the mere presence or popularity of keywords.
  • Deploys a layer of on-the-fly analysis with superb scalability properties.
  • Takes into account the credibility of sources among equally meaningful results.
  • Evolves its capacity of understanding text from BETA operation onward.

In our tests we’ve asked Hakia three English-language based questions:

Why did the stock market crash? [ http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=why+did+the+stock+market+crash%3F ]
Where do I get good bagels in Brooklyn? [ http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=where+can+i+find+good+bagels+in+brooklyn ]
Who invented the Internet? [ http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=who+invented+the+internet ]

It basically returned intelligent results for all. For example, Hakia understood that, when we asked “why,” I would be interested in results with the words “reason for”–and produced some relevant ones. 

Hakia  is one of the few promising Alternative Search Engines as being closely watched by Charles Knight at his blog AltSearchEngines.com, with a focus on natural language processing methods to try and deliver ‘meaningful’ search results. Hakia attempts to analyze the concept of a search query, in particular by doing sentence analysis. Most other major search engines, including Google, analyze keywords. The company believes that the future of search engines will go beyond keyword analysis – search engines will talk back to you and in effect become your search assistant. One point worth noting here is that, currently, Hakia still has some human post-editing going on – so it isn’t 100% computer powered at this point and is close to human-powered search engine or combination of the two.

They hope to provide better search results with complex queries than Google currently offers, but they have a long way to catch up, considering Google’s vast lead in the search market, sophisticated technology, and rich coffers. Hakia’s semantic search technology aims to understand the meaning of search queries to improve the relevancy of the search results.

Instead of relying on indexing the web or on the popularity of particular web pages, as many search engines do, hakia tries to match the meaning of the search terms to mimic the cognitive processes of the human brain.

“We’re mainly focusing on the relevancy problem in the whole search experience,” said Dr. Berkan in an interview Friday. “You enter a question and get better relevancy and better results.”

Dr. Berkan contends that search engines that use indexing and popularity algorithms are not as reliable with combinations of four or more words since there are not enough statistics available on which to base the most relevant results.

“What we are doing is an ultimate approach, doing meaning-based searches so we understand the query and the text, and make an association between them by semantic analysis,” he said.

Analyzing whole sentences instead of keywords would indefinitely increase the cost to the company to index and process the world’s information. The case is pretty much the same with Powerset where they are also doing deep contextual analysis on every sentence on every web page and is publicly known fact they have higher cost for indexing and analyzing than Google. Taking into consideration that Google is having more than 450,000 servers in several major data centers and hakia’s indexing and storage costs might be even higher the approach they are taking might cost their investors a fortune to keep the company alive.

It would be interesting enough to find out if hakia is also building their architecture upon the Hbase/Hadoop environment just like Powerset does. 

In the context of indexing and storing the world’s information it worth mentioning that there is yet another start-up search engine called Cuill that’s claiming to have invented a technology for cheaper and faster indexation than Google’s. Cuill claims that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods.

Speaking also for semantic textual analysis and presentation of meaningful results NosyJoe.com is a great example of both, yet it seems it is not going to index and store the world’s information and then apply the contextual analysis to, but rather than is focusing on what is quality and important for the people participating in their social search engine. 

A few months ago Hakia launched a new social feature called “Meet Others” It will give you the option, from a search results page, to jump to a page on the service where everyone who searches for the topic can communicate.

For some idealized types of searching, it could be great. For example, suppose you were searching for information on a medical condition. Meet Others could connect you with other people looking for info about the condition, making an ad-hoc support group. On the Meet Others page, you’re able to add comments, or connect directly with the people on the page via anonymous e-mail or by Skype or instant messaging.

On the other hand implementing social recommendations and relying on social elements like Hakia’s Meet the Others feature one needs to have huge traffic to turn that interesting social feature into an effective information discovery tool. For example Google with its more than 500 million unique searchers per month can easily beat such social attempts undergone by the smaller players if they only decide to employ, in one way or another, their users to find, determine the relevancy, share and recommend results others also search for. Such attempts by Google are already in place as one can read over here: Is Google trying to become a social search engine.

Reach

According to Quantcast, Hakia is basically not so popular site and is reaching less than 150,000 unique visitors per month. Compete is reporting much better numbers – slightly below 1 million uniques per month. Considering the fact the search engine is still in its beta stage these numbers are more than great. Analyzing further the traffic curve on both measuring sites above it appears that the traffic hakia gets is sort of campaign based, in other words generated due to advertising, promotion or PR activity and is not permanent organic traffic due to heavy usage of the site.

The People

Founded in 2004, hakia is a privately held company with headquarters in downtown Manhattan. hakia operates globally with teams in the United States, Turkey, England, Germany, and Poland.

The Founder of hakia is Dr. Berkan who is a nuclear scientist with a specialization in artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. He is the author of several articles in this area, including the book Fuzzy Systems Design Principles published by IEEE in 1997. Before launching hakia, Dr. Berkan worked for the U.S. Government for a decade with emphasis on information handling, criticality safety and safeguards. He holds a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tennessee, and B.S. in Physics from Hacettepe University, Turkey. He has been developing the company’s semantic search technology with help from Professor Victor Raskin of PurdueUniversity, who specializes in computational linguistics and ontological semantics, and is the company’s chief scientific advisor.

Dr. Berkan resisted VC firms because he worried they would demand too much control and push development too fast to get the technology to the product phase so they could earn back their investment.

When he met Dr. Raskin, he discovered they had similar ideas about search and semantic analysis, and by 2004 they had laid out their plans.

They currently have 20 programmers working on building the system in New York, and another 20 to 30 contractors working remotely from different locations around the world, including Turkey, Armenia, Russia, Germany, and Poland.
The programmers are developing the search engine so it can better handle complex queries and maybe surpass some of its larger competitors.

Management

  • Dr. Riza C. Berkan, Chief Executive Officer
  • Melek Pulatkonak, Chief Operating Officer
  • Tim McGuinness, Vice President, Search
  • Stacy Schinder, Director of Business Intelligence
  • Dr. Christian F. Hempelmann, Chief Scientific Officer
  • John Grzymala, Chief Financial Officer

Board of Directors

  • Dr. Pentti Kouri, Chairman
  •  Dr. Riza C. Berkan, CEO
  • John Grzymala
  • Anuj Mathur, Alexandra Global Fund
  • Bill Bradley, former U.S. Senator
  • Murat Vargi, KVK
  • Ryszard Krauze, Prokom Investments

Advisory Board

  • Prof. Victor Raskin (Purdue University)
  • Prof. Yorick Wilks, (Sheffield University, UK)
  • Mark Hughes

Investors

Hakia is known to have raised $11 million in its first round of funding from a panoply of investors scattered across the globe who were attracted by the company’s semantic search technology.

The New York-based company said it decided to snub the usual players in the venture capital community lining Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road and opted for its international connections instead, including financial firms, angel investors, and a telecommunications company.

Poland

Among them were Poland’s Prokom Investments, an investment group active in the oil, real estate, IT, financial, and biotech sectors.

Turkey

Another investor, Turkey’s KVK, distributes mobile telecom services and products in Turkey. Also from Turkey, angel investor Murat Vargi pitched in some funding. He is one of the founding shareholders in Turkcell, a mobile operator and the only Turkish company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Malaysia

In Malaysia, hakia secured funding from angel investor Lu Pat Ng, who represented his family, which has substantial investments in companies worldwide.
From Finland, hakia turned to Dr. Pentti Kouri, an economist and VC who was a member of the Nokia board in the 1980s. He has taught at Stanford, Yale, New York University, and HelsinkiUniversity, and worked as an economist at the International Monetary Fund. He is currently based in New York.

United States

In the United States, hakia received funding from Alexandra Investment Management, an investment advisory firm that manages a global hedge fund. Also from the U.S., former Senator and New York Knicks basketball player Bill Bradley has joined the company’s board, along with Dr. Kouri, Mr. Vargi, Anuj Mathur of Alexandra Investment Management, and hakia CEO Riza Berkan.

Hakia was on of the first alternative search engine to make the home page of web 2.0 Innovations in the past year… http://web2innovations.com/hakia.com.php

Hakia.com is the 3rd Semantic App being featured by Web2Innovations in its series of planned publications [  ] where we will try to discover, highlight and feature the next generation of web-based semantic applications, engines, platforms, mash-ups, machines, products, services, mixtures, parsers, and approaches and far beyond.

The purpose of these publications is to discover and showcase today’s Semantic Web Apps and projects. We’re not going to rank them, because there is no way to rank these apps at this time – many are still in alpha and private beta.

Via

[ http://www.hakia.com/ ]
[ http://blog.hakia.com/ ]
[ http://www.hakia.com/about.html ]
[ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hakia_takes_on_google_semantic_search.php ]
[ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hakia_meaning-based_search.php ]
[ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/hakia.com/?metric=uv ]
[ http://www.internetoutsider.com/2007/07/the-big-problem.html ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/search/hakia.com ]
[ http://www.redherring.com/Home/19789 ]
[ http://web2innovations.com/hakia.com.php ]
[ http://www.pandia.com/sew/507-hakia.html ]
[ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/hakias-semantic-search-the-answer-to-poor-keyword-based-relevancy/5246/ ]
[ http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/hakia-semantic-search-set-to-music.ars ]
[ http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9800141-7.html ]
[ http://searchforbettersearch.com/ ]
[ https://web2innovations.com/money/2007/12/01/is-google-trying-to-become-a-social-search-engine/ ]
[ http://www.web2summit.com/cs/web2006/view/e_spkr/3008 ]
 

Exclusive: Imeem inks a deal with the world’s largest record company

In what is believed to be a big leap for the relatively small social networking site called Imeem they announced today a licensing agreement allowing its users to listen free to the music of Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group.

Universal Music, the world’s largest record company, has opened a new chapter in the industry’s experiment with advertising-supported music by backing Imeem. Imeem now boasts deals with all four major record companies, including Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Group, all of which have already inked deals with the social network.

It’s a sharp turnaround from earlier this year, when none of the majors were willing to sign on to imeem’s new ad-supported interactive service. In fact, Warner sued Imeem, arguing that by allowing its members to upload and share MP3s of Warner music, it was infringing on its copyrights.

After months of negotiations, the companies have concluded a deal in which Imeem will have full access to Universal’s catalogue, making it the first social networking site to reach licensing agreements with each of the four big record labels.

Imeem has received attention from music executives because it has quickly built an audience of 19 million monthly visitors, up from the 16 million they reported in May 2007.

Despite these claims and the deal itself, Imeem’s traffic seems to have fallen off since earlier this year, from a peak of 5 million visitors in April to 2.37 million in November according to Compete.com. Quantcast is showing even worse numbers – only 2.4 Million American visitors. The traffic curve there is permanently falling down over the past 6 months.

Imeem is an online community where artists, fans & friends can promote their content, share their tastes, and discover new blogs, photos, music and video. Here are some of the things you can do on imeem:

Discover
-Enjoy the latest videos, music, photos, or blogs posted on imeem.
-Stay up-to-date with your personal network of fans and friends with “What’s New” notifications.
-Get in-depth stats for all your content and track their popularity.

Interact
-Tag, comment, rate, and share any of your friends’ cool (or embarrassing) content.
-Create or join groups for your favorite band, event, topic, and more!
-Start discussions with other imeem users and make new friends.
 
Share
-Embed your media on other pages (such as your blog, Bebo, etc.).
-Recommend stuff to your friends or add it to your “Favorites” list.
-Easily add media to your Del.icio.us, WordPress, Blogger, or Typepad.

Imeem is hoping to make money from advertisers, a portion of which will be shared with its music partners. It has signed up Puma, Nike and Microsoft among others, though it does not disclose revenues.

As part of the deal, Universal is said to have received an upfront payment worth more than $20 million, as well as an equity stake in Imeem. Universal will also receive a small payment each time one of its songs is streamed on the site of Imeem. A person familiar with the discussions said that the pay out Universal is about to receive is an equivalent to a fraction of a cent in addition to receiving a share of advertising revenue associated with a given song, that is, ads running near where a song is accessed. Most licensing deals with services that combine free music with advertising tend to offer labels only a share of revenue.

Imeem isn’t the first ad-supported music service to gain the support of all four major labels. Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI have also been making their music available to ad-supported music downloading service Ruckus. Ruckus had an early advantage over other services in securing the majors’ cooperation because it targeted colleges and universities, where illegal music downloading is a particularly serious problem and is basically not possible.

In a statement, Universal Chairman Doug Morris called Imeem “innovative,” and praised Imeem for “ensuring that our artists are fairly compensated for the use of their works.”

According to eMarketer, spending on advertising on social networks will rise from $900 million this year to more than $2.5 billion in 2011.

Imeem is based in San Francisco and takes its name from “meme” – a term coined to describe the ideas that communities, adopt, and express. Dalton Caldwell is the CEO of the company and the co-founded together with Jan Jannink. The company used to be in Palo Alto and is known to have launched in 2004. Known investors in the company are Morgenthaler (Series A founding) and Sequoia Capital, the venture capital fund that supported Google and YouTube.

Via

[ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ff0a7e34-a6c3-11dc-b1f5-0000779fd2ac.html ]
[ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119725218005518932.html?mod=googlenews_wsj ]
[ http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204800459 ]
[ http://www.forbes.com/business/2007/12/10/imeem-universal-music-biz-media-cx_lh_1210bizimeem.html ]
[ http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9831163-36.html ]
[ http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1004896 ]
[ http://mashable.com/2007/12/10/imeem-universal/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/09/imeem-pens-a-deal-with-universal-music-now-has-all-the-majors/ ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/imeem.com ]
[ http://www.crunchbase.com/company/imeem ]
[ http://imeemblog.imeem.com/ ]
[ http://lifehacker.com/software/social-networking/not-just-another-social+networking-site-208719.php ]
[ http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2005/54152.php ]
[ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/imeem-pioneers-free-music-with-ads/ ]
[ http://www.morgenthaler.com/content/Ventures/Articles/Articles%20documents/imeem%20in%20venturewire.pdf ]
 

Rackspace jumps on the web acquisitions bandwagon – snatches Webmail.us

During the past 2 years the Web’s M&A market is very intensive. In what is known to be the RackSpace’s first web acquisition the company has acquired Webmail.us, a business web email service provider for an undisclosed sum.

At the time of the deal Webmail.us provided email hosting services to more than 80,000 small to medium size businesses totaling 600,000 users. Also recently Webmail.us made the Inc 500 list as the #217 fastest growing private company in America. Webmail.us already had a successful partnership with Rackspace – their entire email hosting infrastructure is hosted by Rackspace and Rackspace is their largest reseller. Webmail.us’s CEO Pat Matthews makes a note that “the market is really going to open up, leaders are going to emerge, and followers are going to fall behind.” He said that Webmail.us decided to sell to “make sure we’re positioned to be the leader in our space”.

Webmail.us is known to be using the Amazon S3, The Simple Queue Service and the Elastic Compute cloud to run its operations.

In the Webmail.us’s blog we read about the reason why they did this.

Why are we doing this?

We are committed to building the world’s most trusted provider of business email hosting. Rackspace very much believes in our mission and wants to help us make it a reality. They have done a phenomenal job of building one of the world’s greatest service companies and their experience and expertise will be invaluable as we grow our business.

We are natural business partners. In fact, we’ve been partners for more than three years. Rackspace already hosts our entire email hosting infrastructure and has become the largest reseller of our email hosting services.

Both companies see the world in the same way. Unlike other companies that sell technology-based solutions to businesses, we both believe that great service is what really matters. Since our inception, we’ve been committed to delivering great service to our customers and Rackspace only raises the bar. Experiencing Fanatical Support first-hand has proven to us that Rackspace is a different kind of company—one that is truly dedicated to its customers. We are eager to raise the bar as we bring Fanatical Support to our customers.

Our cultures are very similar, which has made integration easy—and exciting! Both companies are filled with amazing, passionate people that love what they do. And you can’t deliver great service unless you have great people that love what they do!
We believe in Rackspace. We share their vision for what email and IT hosting will look like in the future. We believe in their leadership team and their ability to execute. We love their people. We believe in Fanatical Support. And most importantly, we believe in our ability to achieve greatness—TOGETHER!

Nonetheless Webmail.us is a great example of a small company in the Web 2.0 age that is relying subscription based business model rather than on advertising even though having less user base when compared to the gigantic free email providers like Hotmail, Yahoo! Email and Gmail. That raises the interesting question what would it be if Google or Microsoft, for example, decide to jump on the same business model and turn just 1% of their free email users into recurring paying customers by adding and offering them some featured extras above the free accounts.

After the deal the company is going to stay in Blacksburg, Virginia. However, they  will now be able to leverage several locations for hiring — including Blacksburg, San Antonio, and the United Kingdom. The company was first incorporated in 1999, then raised about $140,000 in seed capital over the next three years, mostly from friends and family. But once it proved itself, it was time to look for more funds to expand the business. Alec Siegel, director of operations for MBA Management Group in Blacksburg, was one of the first angel investors. He invested $20,000 of his own money after meeting Matthews and the Webmail team. (MBA provides some staffing for Matthews’ company.)  David Sabotta, vice president of federal market development for G3 Systems in Blacksburg, also put up $20,000 of his own money. He discovered Webmail after reading Matthews’ blog, which includes Matthews’ commentary on the company and his vision for it. Then Sabotta got to meet the company. Webmail.us has then raised more than $400,000 in what represents its first round of financing – all from private investors.

Webmail.us used to be Excedent Technologies before they have changed the name in 2005.

Today Webmail.us stands at:

  • 100% focused on business email services
  • Headquartered in Blacksburg, VA
  • Employs over 60 employees
  • Hosts email for over 80,000 companies
  • Manages over 600,000 email accounts
  • Partners with a network of 325 resellers
  • On target to generate over $6M in sales in 2007
  • Over 100% year-over-year revenue growth, four years running
  • Voted best technology company to work in Southwest Virginia for the past two years
  • Voted #217 on the 2007 Inc. 500 list of fastest growing private companies in America

Based on everything we see above it appears that Webmail.us is not the usual Web 2.0 company, if at all.

About Rackspace

Rackspace Managed Hosting is a recognized leader in the global managed hosting market. They deliver enterprise-level managed services to businesses around the world. Serving more than 15,000 customers in eight data centers worldwide, Rackspace integrates the industry’s best technologies for each customer’s specific need and delivers it as a service via the company’s award-winning Fanatical Supportâ„¢.

They serve as an extension of their customers’ IT departments, enabling them to focus on their core business. They got started in 1998 and since then Rackspace has grown more than 50 percent a year. There are currently 1,800 Rackers around the world serving customers.

Via

[ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/webmailus_acquired_by_rackspace.php ]
[ http://www.webmail.us/blog/a/2007/10/we_are_merging_with_rackspace ]
[ http://www.webmail.us/about-us ]
[ http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2005/feb/1119735.htm ]
[ http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/index.jsp?epi_menuItemID…&newsId=20071127005923&newsLang=en ]
[ http://www.roanoke.com/business/wb/xp-21688 ]

Edgeio closes doors after burning $5M in one year

In a final board meeting last evening Edgeio’s board members have decided to shut down operations of the company.

This failure is sort of symbolic for the Web 2.0 sector. Why? What Edgeio is interesting with? First off it has been co-founded by Michael Arrington from Techcrunch, an influential, probably the most, blog that is symbolic itself for the web 2.0 age and Arrington himself is the editor there and one of the most influential people on Web today, according many sources, including but not limited to Wired and Forbes. He is also mentoring, advising, consulting and probably brokeraging companies across the Silicon Valley and is generally well known technology evangelist. He expanded his Crunch Network with Crunchboard, Crunchgear and Mobilecrunch and is rapidly becoming the most influential journalist in the tech scene nowadays.

Aside Edgeio Michael Arrington is also having active participations in the following companies.

  • He is an investor in a stealth company called Daylife, based in New York.
  • He became an investor in Dogster on September 14, 2006
  • He is also an investor in Omnidrive since December 2006.
  • He is also an investor in Dancejam since the spring of 2007 and
  • An investor in Seesmic from November 2007, a video upstart launched by a French entrepreneur.

Aside Michael Arrington the company was also co-launched by Keith Teare and is said to be a great tool for bloggers and buyers alike. Using content from RSS-enabled sources, Edgeio is able to take millions of listings and categorize them in a central location. Early employees of Edgeio also include Vidar Hokstadt, Matt Kaufman and Fred Oliveira. Michael Arrington was not an executive but instead he served the company as a board of directors’ member.

Edgeio is all about edge publishing. It is Edgeio’s belief that services that try to restrict how users create and consume information cannot ultimately be successful. Users own their data, and services exist not to silo that data, but rather to add value to it. That is what Edgeio is setting out to do. Good mission. Simply put Edgeio will be focusing on classified listings of any type to start.

Blogs and other websites syndicating their content through RSS are an ideal place to post classified listings. Not only is the publisher in complete control of the content (what to include, when to change or update it, when to delete it and how to syndicate it for other services), but the website itself gives valuable context to readers of the listing. Unlike anonymous listing services, listings on blogs controlled by the publisher give readers an idea of who they are dealing with. That additional information is an important factor for readers in deciding if and how to interact with the publisher.

Very few blogs publish classified listings today. Most blogs have a relatively small group of readers, including friends and family, and are not able to effectively reach the larger audience needed to effectively market their listings.

That’s where Edgeio comes in. They promised to find edge published listings if they include the category or tag “listing” within the post or content. The listings will be indexed through the blog’s RSS feed and aggregated with other “listings from the edge”. Users of the Edgeio service will be able to search through listings and communicate directly with the publisher. Edgeio will also make aggregated listings available though a web service to other Internet sites and services that would like to include edge listings.

Edgeio promised to never attempt to silo or control publisher data, or restrict the ways that listings can be used by others.

The company has also launched a Chinese language version of its web site named mulu100.com (which in Chinese means catalog of catalogs). The Chinese service has initially formed a partnership with edeng.cn, a China based listings site, similar in many ways to craigslist.com.

Edgeio recieved $1.5 million in angel funds from the likes of Louis Monier, Frank Caufield, the RSS Investors Fund, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, Michael Tanne, Auren Hoffman, Sam Perry and Bill McCabe.

In October 2006 Edgeio Closed $5 Million Series A Funding led by Intel Capital and also included an investment from Transcosmos & Business Development Inc, a Japanese public company with a Silicon Valley investment arm focused on Internet-based U.S. technology companies expanding into the Japanese marketplace.

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. No revenues came in and the user/partner milestones weren’t met and no one else was going to put more money into the company.

Employees will be let go but will be fully paid according Michael Arrington.

When being asked from a commenter on his blog what the company spent the money for Michael Arrington jokingly replied “parties, scotch, hookers, blow. You know the usual.”

The company seems to have failed even though Edgeio got a serious amount of coverage and in-context mentions on Techcrunch over the past years. All entries can be found over here: http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/edgeio

De-facto it also affects another initiative of Techcrunch the Crunchboard.com, which will also undergo restructuring in the next days as they say. 

Michael Arrington also has said ”it is unwise for a company to spend a lot of money building out infrastructure before a product proves itself as well as they always had problems with the PayPal API, which is a total piece of crap”

Here are some more interesting thoughts for food.

Advertising on TechCrunch is not cheap – $10,000 per month and Edgeio is known to have been an advertiser at TC for quite long period of time. The site was also used in TC’s job site www.crunchboard.com, which in our understanding did also cost money for the Edgeio. Having an influential company the rank of TechCrunch adopt and use your company’s services or products in our view is more expensive than having a banner rotating on the TC’s blog network.

The company was recently caught (September 2007) to be spamming Bloggers, which was even criticized by Arrington himself calling it ”Bad Idea”.

It is really interesting to see how things in SV tend to work. You have an idea, find an angel or two, prepare for the series A funding, raise the money, give it a try, if it work things out fine, if not then also fine, you close shop, go home, take some rest and try again later with another start up.

Indeed the company looks very good and healthy to us. Well done technology, good idea/concept, good numbers, was well funded, high-profile people involved and engaged and beyond. Quantcast reports for over 150,000 unique visitors from US alone while Compete is showing very healthy number of visitors – 348,797. Edgeio has access to over 100 million listings in 1,484,953 cities and 166 countries, 9,190,705 listings from 1,405 edge-direct feeds and 2,736 listings from 134 Classified Boards.

So what went wrong?

Why the company did not take a series B round of funding or tried to sell itself before crashing down? The business plan to start generating revenues was too pushful and unrealistic, in less than one year after funding? The company seems to have been given with less than a year to break-even? By contrast I remember another company that got coverage on Techcrunch Mahalo, started out by Jason Calacanis and was said that the company is having enough money to survive for at least 5 years without making any money at all. The company could have even been sold or profitably liquidated in one way or another and not simply closed.

So is there anything behind the scene that the public is not aware of?

Well, the very simple conclusion we can draw here is that a company success is not always guaranteed solely by who the investors or founders are… The DNA of the success with a company probably lies somewhere else and is a complex of factors, interests and events. 

Via

[ http://www.edgeio.com ]
[ http://wiki.edgeio.com/display/ExternalWiki/Home ]
[ http://blog.edgeio.com/2006/10/23/series-a-financing-china-web-site-and-patent-filing/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/06/edgeio-to-shut-down-in-the-deadpool/ ]
[ http://www.crunchbase.com/company/edgeio ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/30/edgeio-spams-bloggers-bad-idea/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/edgeio ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/24/edgeio-closes-5-million-series-a-financing/ ]
[ http://venturebeat.com/2006/10/23/edgeio-gets-5-million-to-expand-web-20-classifieds-site/ ]
[ http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/10/edgeio_has_been.html?campaign_id=rss_blog_blogspotting ]
[ http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2006/10/24/edgio-gets-5-million-in-vc-money/ ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/edgeio.com ]
[ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/edgeio.com/?metric=uv ]
[ http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/CompanyDetail.aspx?CompanyID=49351685&cs=QGC8QwFIE&pc=compete ]
[ http://rexdixon.wordpress.com/2006/10/24/edgeio-secures-5-million ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/about-techcrunch/ ]
[ http://www.crunchboard.com/ ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Arrington ]
[ http://www.teare.com/category/keith-teare/edgeio ]

Dmoz.org – a falling star

While researching over the popular business directories business.com and allbusiness.com, both recently acquired, I came across some very interesting details about Dmoz.org – the famous Open Directory Project (ODP).

Once mythical site millions of web sites were desperately relying on for Web authority, today Dmoz.org is declining in every aspect you can imagine of – from traffic, site usage, indexation level, PageRank(tm) to overall authority, trustworthiness and beyond. All traffic measurement companies are revealing similar and very unpleasant trend for the old web directory. Quantcast is reporting for slightly above 1.7 Million visitors per month. The situation at Compete is even worse – 1.5 Million where huge 33% decline is seen from the previous year on month-to-month comparison basis. Even the not-so-accurate Alexa is showing significant decline in the Dmoz.org’s popularity – once used to be close to Alexa 100, as far as I remember, today’s Alexa rank is in the 680 range. Just like to outline the negative trend the site’s yesterday rank (Dec 05, 2007) was 1143. If you take a look at the traffic’s graph from Alexa (shown below) for Dmoz.org you will see there is a constant decline in popularity over the past 6 months, at least. Just like this is not enough, even Google’s indexation level has dropped to only 211,000 pages, out of millions before, as we last checked it out. The Google PR has also dropped down from 9 to 8.

In matter of honesty we do believe the real traffic is bigger than what is shown on the sites above yet it appears the traffic today is times less than what Dmoz.org used to have in the past.

While the site is still claiming to have 4,830,584 sites, 75,151 editors and over 590,000 categories we are sort of agreeing only on the part of the number of sites and the categories. The active human editors in our belief are way below the number shown on the web site. For example, there were 7407 active editors during August 2006 (Open Directory Forum – General – Analyzing editor numbers – page 1, 13 August 2006).

I cannot help but ask why? What’s happening with Dmoz.org anyway? While there are potentially many reasons for the current situation behind Dmoz.org and we claim no accuracy here at all, I will try to summarize some of the issues below:

  1. The Open Directory Project’s main strengths, today, seem to be turning into its main shortcoming and its greatest weakness. Dmoz.org has always been run by volunteer human editors ensuring that listings remain high quality. However, this fact is fast becoming Dmoz.org‘s downfall most notably in the last 6 months.
  2. There have long been allegations that volunteer ODP editors give favorable treatment to their own websites while concomitantly thwarting the good faith efforts of their competition. Such allegations are fielded by ODP’s staff and meta editors, who have the authority to take disciplinary action against volunteer editors who are suspected of engaging in abusive editing practices.
  3. Dmoz.org.org has been accused a number of times by tens of thousands of small web sites and individuals in elitarism and corruption in how they were listing and delisting the web sites in the directory. 
  4. According to the masses pointing fingers at the ODP, some editors’ heads have become too big for their body. These rumors are also backed up from some Dmoz.org editors themselves. Allegedly, some editors have become too lazy to do their jobs properly. More serious allegations joined the fray. It became clear that editors have become petty and have started declining the applications for Dmoz.org listing for no valid reason. Other claims of corruption in the ranks of the listings became widespread. This began another round of rumors that said editors have turned dictatorial in their approval to protect their own interests; that is, if an editor perceives a site to be his competition, that web site isn’t going to get approved at all, and there’ll be no explanations given for the rejection.
  5. Other alleged abuses have occurred at the executive level, with company management leveraging the link value from ODP to accelerate new privately funded projects. Although site policies suggest that an individual site should be submitted to only one category, as of October 2007, Topix.com, a news aggregation site operated by ODP founder Rich Skrenta, has more than 10,000 listings*.
  6.  Early in the history of the ODP, its staff gave representatives of selected websites, such as Rolling Stone magazine, editing access at ODP in order to list many individual pages from those websites.
  7. ODP’s paid staff has imposed controversial policies from time to time, and volunteer editors who dissent in ways staff considers uncivil may find their editing privileges removed. One alleged example of this was chronicled at the XODP Yahoo! eGroup in May of 2000. The earliest known exposé was Life After the Open Directory Project, later appearing as a June 1, 2000, guest column written for Traffick.com, by David F. Prenatt, Jr. (former ODP editor “netesq”) after losing his ODP editing privileges. Another example was the volunteer editor known by the alias The Cunctator, who was banned from the ODP soon after submitting an article to Slashdot on October 24, 2000, which criticized changes in ODP’s copyright policies.
  8. We have been witnessing many corporate, brand and social battles and wars on Dmoz.org over the past years, similarly to what is today happening with Wikipedia.
  9. As we said above the number of active editors is getting lesser and lesser over the years while the backlog of web sites in the queue waiting to get listed is increasing. There were websites that had to wait years before they got listed. When Dmoz.org was first established listing could take a matter of a few weeks. Over time as Dmoz.org popularity grew so did listing times.
  10. It became known that some categories inside Dmoz.org did not even have any editors. In other categories editors became inactive and the backlog of submissions just continued to mount up.
  11. Many Dmoz.org editors are believed to have moved to Wikipedia through out the past 2 years.
  12. Dmoz.org began taking more flak when people started saying that the reason Dmoz.org is so lacking in editors – which leads to some categories not having editors at all for a great length of time – is the fact that the powers at Dmoz.org are reluctant to admit new editors to their ranks.
  13. Uninhibited discussion of ODP’s purported shortcomings has become more common on mainstream Webmaster discussion forums.
  14. On October 20, 2006, the ODP’s main server suffered a catastrophic system failure that prevented editors from working on the directory until December 18, 2006. During that period, an older structure of the directory was visible to the public.
  15. Many site submissions were found to be in conflicts with the financial interests of the category editors.
  16. Underlying some controversy surrounding ODP is its ownership and management. Many of the original GnuHoo volunteers felt that they had been deceived into joining a commercial enterprise. As ODP’s content became widely used by most major search engines and web directories, the issue of ODP’s ownership, management and governance became of greater importance to the public interests.
  17. Dmoz.org listings are also a powerful force in the world of expired domain traffic. Due to the popularity of the Open Directory and its resulting impact on search engine rankings, domains with lapsed registration that are listed on ODP have attracted domain hijacking, an issue that has been addressed (at least tried) by regularly removing expired domains from the directory.
  18. Competition. Dmoz.org clearly has missed the web 2.0 evolution and was left behind by better organized (semantic approach), bigger in size and more effective (contextual links) modern directories, an example of which is LinkedWords with its more than 38 Million English categories, sub-categories, phrases and words to get listed with. Basically LinkedWords is large-scale contextual platform which has similarity with Dmoz.org in its huge ontology directory structure but is entirely built up upon the spirit of web 2.0 with greater flexibility (adding pages, categories, sub-categories in real time), functionality (automated creation of contextual listings, yet there is zero spam) and technology (maximizes contextual linking among web sites, not just lists them). Having the web sites listed on its platform contributing, on daily basis, to the popularity of LW with in-text contextual links spreading around the Web is yet another advantage. This way sites like LinkedWords are not only helping more the web sites involved by connecting them together on a contextual basis but they are also helping the algorithmic robots find, classify and organize the information in context (following the in-context linked words) and not last the common users are also given with a chance to find the information in-context and on demand while reading around the web by clicking on the same in-text linked words.
  19. Google has begun to disassociate itself from the Open Directory Project. Nothing can be more symbolic than Google’s relegation of the directory from a prominent position in Google’s site to a position reserved for ordinary ‘worth checking but not really that important’ type of site, regardless of the high page ranks of most of the categories at Dmoz.org.
  20. Since the clamor of discontent has reached such a high degree and Dmoz.org’s staunchest ally – Google, has begun to keep its distance, Dmoz.org is like a decaying dinosaur that other animals are steering clear of it to avoid the vultures that are expected to feast on the beast when it dies. The death toll has been sounded for Dmoz.org.

While many of the points listed above may be arguable in one way or another – depending on points of view and interests – since they are gathered from the public Web during our research, they reveal the true picture behind Dmoz.org and it is easily to understand why the decline is so huge in the Dmoz.org’s village.

All of the above raises the reasonable question, how can Dmoz.org remain useful when people no longer trust its human editors?

Money makes the world go round they say. In 2007 it is also true that money makes the World Wide Web go round. In a world where online businesses can easily sell for a billion dollars the original lure of Dmoz.org for both webmasters and editors is waning. Today, Dmoz.org is still being used when web masters want their web sites listed. However, people no longer attribute much importance to it.

That pretty much sums up ours and a million other people’s sentiments about the current status and usefulness of this Open Directory Project. Sweeping changes and general reform, from political to technological, are required for the ODP to change from a Web 1.0 decaying dinosaur into a modern and effective directory with web 2.0 functionality.

For the people who do not know what Dmoz.org is, below we will include some basic information and historic facts about the ODP project. No, not everybody knows about Dmoz.org. In our basic estimate there are probably more than 400 million online users today that have no idea what the ODP project is.

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as Dmoz.org (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.

ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

ODP was founded as Gnuhoo by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel in 1998. At the time, Skrenta and Truel were working as engineers for Sun Microsystems. Chris Tolles, who worked at Sun Microsystems as the head of marketing for network security products, also signed on in 1998 as a co-founder of Gnuhoo along with co-founders Bryn Dole and Jeremy Wenokur. Skrenta was already well known for his role in developing TASS, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems. Coincidentally, the original category structure of the Gnuhoo directory was based loosely on the structure of Usenet newsgroups then in existence.

The Gnuhoo directory went live on June 5, 1998. After a Slashdot article suggested that Gnuhoo had nothing in common with the spirit of free software, for which the GNU project was known, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation objected to the usage of Gnu. So Gnuhoo was changed to NewHoo. Yahoo then objected to the usage of “Hoo” in the name, prompting them to switch the name again. ZURL was the likely choice. However, before the switch to ZURL, NewHoo was acquired by Netscape Communications Corporation in October of 1998 and became the Open Directory Project. Netscape released the ODP data under the Open Directory License. Netscape was acquired by AOL shortly thereafter, and ODP was one of the assets included in the acquisition. AOL later merged with Time-Warner.

By the time Netscape assumed stewardship, the Open Directory Project had about 100,000 URLs indexed with contributions from about 4500 editors. On October 5, 1999, the number of URLs indexed by ODP reached one million. According to an unofficial estimate, the number of URLs in the Open Directory surpassed the number of URLs in the Yahoo! Directory in April 2000 with about 1.6 million URLs. ODP achieved the milestones of indexing two million URLs on August 14, 2000, three million listings on November 18, 2001 and four million on December 3, 2003.

I find similarities between Dmoz.org and Wikipedia.org. So, is it possible the same to happen with Wikipedia at future?

Via

[ http://www.Dmoz.org ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Directory_Project ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/Dmoz.org ]
[ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/Dmoz.org/?metric=uv ]
[ http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/Dmoz.org ]
[ http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/Dmoz.org_had_9_lives_used_up_yet.html ]
[ http://www.newswriter.us/ShowAdminArticle-17.htm ]
* [ http://search.Dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=topix (accessed on 18th October 2007)]
[ http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/xodp/messages/1 (XODP Yahoo! Group Message Archive)]
[ http://www.traffick.com/story/06-2000-xodp.asp (David F. Prenatt, Jr., Life After the Open Directory Project, Traffick.com (June 1, 2000))]
[ http://slashdot.org/articles/00/10/24/1252232.shtml (CmdrTaco, Dmoz.org (aka AOL) Changing Guidelines In Sketchy Way, Slashdot (October 24, 2000)]