The United States Senate overwhelmingly supported a tax on Internet sales today, voting 69-27 in favor of the Marketplace Fairness Act. The outcome was expected after a similar non-biding show of approval passed the Senate with roughly the same number of votes, despite extraordinary opposition from eBay and other major Internet organizations.

As we’ve written about before, supporters argue that tax-free Internet retailers have an unfair advantage over their physical counterparts and it robs states of billions in revenue. Opponents counter that the current bill would create an unwieldy tax code labyrinth, which would be forced on startups and Internet retailers before software technology could manage the new tax.

The bill now heads to the House of Representatives for possible revision. TechCrunch’s sources on Capitol Hill say that broad support in the Senate makes it difficult for House members to oppose the legislation, but it may be modified to increase the threshold for businesses who have to collect online taxes, from $1M in revenue to $10M

This is one of those laws that affects almost everyone directly. I’m kinda surprised there’s not more of an uproar.

Update 2: House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte just released a statement (The Internet Sales Tax bill most likely will go through the Judiciary Subcommittee, so his views are very influential):

“I do not believe the Marketplace Fairness Act is sufficiently simplified yet. While it attempts to make tax collection simpler, it still has a long way to go. There is still not uniformity on definitions and tax rates, so businesses would still be forced to wade through potentially hundreds of tax rates and a host of different tax codes and definitions. … I am open to considering legislation concerning this topic but these issues, along with others, would certainly have to be addressed. The Committee will also look at alternatives that could enable states to collect sales tax revenues without opening the door to aggressive state action against out-of-state companies.”

Update: the vote 70-24 reported earlier was for a managers amendment. I’ve updated the article for the final vote on the actual bill.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter is great if you’re famous. But Jawbone’s founding CEO Alexander Asseily thinks everyone deserves a powerful voice online, so today he’s launching State, a structured opinion-sharing network where people don’t need to follow you see your posts. You can get an early State invite now and start contributing to an opinion graph where what matters is what you believe, not who follows you.

An Equal Opportunity Opinion Graph

Let’s be honest. Twitter seemed like it would host a global conversation, but it’s evolved into a one-to-many broadcast network. In fact, Twitter’s about page touts “You don’t have to tweet to get value from Twitter.” Or, let experts, artists, comedians, and celebrities tweet, you just sit back and take it. And in practice, you don’t have much of a choice. Unless you have some special way to gain followers, your audience will remain some subset of your friends on Twitter. Barring the rare tweet that goes viral in a big way, the average user’s voice doesn’t travel very far.

That doesn’t mean Twitter doesn’t have it’s place. As a journalist it’s a vital tool, but there’s a need for a more egalitarian way to share publicly. That’s what State could be. The service launched today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY conference, and you can see State’s loud and proud launch video here.

State co-founder Alexander Asseily explains to me, “The Internet would be better if it was organized around what people think instead of who they are, or where they shop, or what they browse. All the intelligence that’s gathered online today is gathered by following people. It’s not very empowering to people, and it’s not a precise way of getting insights about what people think.” Luckily, Alexander and his brother Mark, who was formerly head of product at VOIP startup Rebtel and is now State’s CEO, have $14 million in seed funding to reorganize the web.

Structure Plus Speed

Organization is actually one of State’s key differentiators. Rather than start with an open text field, when you “State” an opinion, you use type-ahead boxes to pick a topic or paste in a link and choose several words that describe it. For example you could pick the portable stereo Big Jambox and call it “Amazing” and “Loud”, Bitcoin and describe it as “fad” or “misunderstood”, actor Christian Bale as “talented” or “deteriorating”, or TechCrunch’s article “Google Now Launches On iOS” and call it “overdue” or “inferior”.

This typeahead system makes it extremely quick to share an opinion. Alexander tells me “The objective is to make it accessible in practice to everyone ,which means making it so easy that you can use it for both serious and frivolous opinions.” If you want to leave more complex thoughts, you can always tack on a longer text description.

Instead of these posts going just to your followers, State surfaces them to anyone interested in the topic you’re talking about. The homepage shows popular topics and sentiments you can respond to. State also focuses on showing them to people the minute you publish, so there’s a feeling of real-time feedback and community. That’s why State’s structured data is so important. It creates a precise, interconnected graph of thoughts, while other social networks are more scattershot. There’s still some interface quirks that could cause confusion, and you can’t delete posts just yet, but the publishing system is strong for version 1.

State also shows you what the world thinks about a certain topic with a slick word-cloud visualization, as well as where you stand compared to everyone else. Structure begets aggregation, which reveals insights.

And beyond what you do on State, Alexander wants its data to be valuable elsewhere. Along with its bookmarklet for importing and posting about websites, State wants to eventually serve as a replacement or supplement to blog comments. It could replace swarms of trolls drowning out sane ideas with a structured view of what people thought about the article’s content. This could also draw more traffic to publishers because it exposes their articles to the State network alongside opinions.

Finally, Alexander hopes to release a State API that gives open access to its structured data. For example a politics site could employ State data to show off a synopsis of perceptions of different politicians or legislation. Alexander says “we could potentially monetize that somehow.” API apps and publisher integrations could also solve State with its biggest problem.

Revealing We To We

Proving its unique value and gaining traction will be the real challenge for State. If you asked most people where they share their opinions, they’d tell you Twitter or Facebook. It’s no easy task explaining why structured data and nerdy aggregations are reasons to add another web service to their lives. But State hopes to wake the world up to what they’re missing. If it succeeds, there’s a second-order benefit for us all. Alexander concludes, “The ultimate goal is much self-awareness in society — products that are built with the opinions of the market in mind, or political and cultural decisions made in the same way.”

Visit State to get an early invite, and watch my interview with Alexander Asseily about how State answers what broken with Twitter

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For cynics who say that Silicon Valley has become too mired in photo-sharing apps and addictive games, take a 15-minute drive to South San Francisco.

In a non-descript lab is a company that may be paving the way for the Valley’s next wave of disruptive startups, which marry software with data from the human genome.

Counsyl is doing genetic tests that look for more than 400 mutations and at least 100 genetic disorders for parents who are planning children. At $599 total, or $99 with insurance, their tests cost a fraction of standard ones, which often only look for a single condition like cystic fibrosis, and run anywhere from $100 to $500. A full panel of tests for Ashkenazi Jews, a minority famously at risk for various genetic conditions, can run about $4,000 to $5,000 from companies like Quest Diagnostics.

Founded six years ago, Counsyl has grown to handle carrier screening for 2.5 percent of all births in the U.S.

To ramp up, Counsyl has quietly taken in roughly $65 million in funding from firms like Founders Fund, Felicis Ventures, India’s Manipal Group, Google’s senior vice president of corporate development David Drummond, WTI, Rosemont Seneca, and Google research scientist Jeff Dean.

“We want to make the genome practically useful,” said CEO Ramji Srinivasan. “People don’t necessarily care about genomics. At some point, the novelty of this data will wear off. The diagnostic utility has to be extremely obvious: can it change someone’s behavior? Can it make them make a different decision?”

The company is coming of age at a time when the costs of full-genome sequencing are falling faster than even Moore’s Law would have predicted. Full genome sequencing — not the kind of testing where you’re handling only select snippets of DNA — runs at around $8,000 now, down from $100 million in 2001. Capitalizing on this, Counsyl has products for both snippet tests and a more comprehensive test that is about $999 for 10,000 genetic mutations.

It’s helped women like Jen Baumgartel, a nurse in a Nashville, Tennessee in vitro fertilization clinic, choose IVF over conceiving naturally. Through a Counsyl test, she found out both her and her husband were carriers for Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, which put their potential children at risk of heart problems, developmental delays and cleft palate.

They had a one-in-four chance of passing the condition on, and both Baumgartel and her husband carried the genes for the severest form of the disease.

“I was hoping I would get an easy pregnancy,” Baumgartel said. “You never really think about how to avoid passing something onto your child, but suddenly we had this really harsh reality that this is what we would have to do.”

They ended up spending around $12,000 on in-vitro fertilization and now have a healthy nine-month-old baby girl named Kinley Jo (pictured at the top).

Costs Falling Faster Than Moore’s Law

Unlike the consumer software world where costs of starting a company have fallen precipitously over the last five to ten years, bioinformatics may only be at the beginning of seeing a similar drop.

“The Counsyl team are brilliant technologists,” said David Lee of SV Angel, who is investing in the company and has deep interest in health informatics as a cancer survivor. “They understood the trend of biology and software converging earlier and deeper than anyone we had met.”

While other founders tapped into the big social networking and mobile app trends of the last five years, Srinivasan instead went for higher-hanging fruit.

Before the market peaked in 2007, he was working on equity research for Morgan Stanley alongside famed analyst and now Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker. Like many entrepreneurs who come to the Valley from the banking and consulting worlds, he was looking for tangible work with more meaning. From across the country, he saw how old classmates from Stanford were building companies.

“These guys were changing the world and I was moving around pieces of paper,” he said. “My brother told me that the genome was the next Internet. I decided to leave my earthly belongings and go live on a futon.”

Srinivasan’s brother Balaji, who is one of the company’s other co-founders, is press shy and declined to comment for this article. When Counsyl was founded, he had just finished a Ph.D. at Stanford in electrical engineering and was teaching and doing research around computational biology. The pair had never worked on a company together before.

“My brother told me that the genome was the next Internet. I decided to leave my earthly belongings and go live on a futon.”

Srinivasan said the way founders approach problems in the Valley is almost like an inverted Maslow’s pyramid. Products that are about self-expression like social networking apps get the most attention from young founders, while businesses that are about more basic needs like health or financial security are under-addressed. Founders get intimidated by the regulatory risks and by the deep subject matter knowledge that you might need to attack the health, financial or legal industries.

“Bright people in Silicon Valley aren’t necessary focusing on health because the speed of iteration seems slower,” he said.

Yet Counsyl has managed to deal with the steeper capital costs of doing biotech startup and captured a meaningful share of the carrier screening market. While they don’t say the number of tests they do per month, they do admit that they’re handling 2.5 percent of all births in the U.S. The CDC reports 4 million U.S. births per year, so one could infer that they’re doing at least 100,000 tests annually.

The tests themselves are easy to administer. Couples get the testing kits from their doctors, send in either a blood or saliva sample, mail it to Counsyl’s lab and then get results back in two or three weeks. Results come in a couple color-coded pages that show a couple’s numerical risks for having children with any of more than 100 recessive genetic diseases.

Improving Each Step of the Testing Process

Counsyl’s price advantages over competitors are not really about any single transformative change to genetic testing. It’s more about correcting inefficiencies at every step of the way.

“He’s like the Jeff Bezos of bioninformatics,” said Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, who said the firm put its largest single check ever into the company last year. “He’s good at wringing inefficiencies out, which is very much like the Amazon model.”

Counsyl built image processing software that cut down on common testing errors by a thousand-fold.

They creating billing infrastructure when it was too complicated to deal with the 700 insurers that pay for Counsyl tests.

They created an iPad app for doctors so it would be easier to order tests and fit Counsyl in with their daily workflow.

They refashioned a robot arm that’s normally used to spray paint Toyota Prius cars to handle trays of samples without requiring human intervention.

They created their own wetware and had to re-engineer some chemicals from scratch when they realized they couldn’t rely on third-party labs to handle their samples properly.

“If you hold the vial at the wrong angle, it will melt the reagent,” Srinivasan said. “We got to this moment where we realized we had to do it ourselves. We attempted for years not to build a lab, but once we decided to do it, it took a few months.”

They found a space, started ripping out its carpets. Srinivasan bought a Home Depot book on plumbing. It was costly and tedious, but it yielded unexpected benefits.

“It turned out to be the best thing for us,” Srinivasan said. “Now we control the full stack just like Steve Jobs tried to do with Apple. He said the ideal computer starts out at the beach with the sand and ends with a running machine that you can touch. If we never had to re-engineer everything, we would have never been able to do what we’re able to do.”

Once they went forward with the lab and could see a path toward scaling easily, others investors stepped in. Founders Fund, which has backed companies like Tesla, SpaceX and Facebook, came in during 2011.

They are “a classic Founders Fund company,” said partner Brian Singerman. “Pragmatic, but a bit crazy — good crazy — at the same time. The team is top tier and out of the box in both science and business execution.”

Now that the hardware and wetware sides of the business are more manageable, Counsyl can focus on its true opportunity: interpretation and curation of genomic data.

“The interpretation is the expensive part of the problem,” Srinavasan said. “It looks like a software problem, talks like a software problem and acts like a software problem.”

As the wealth of data grows, Counsyl is building a scalable and repeatable system for intrepreting DNA readings. If one were to take all of the published research papers associated with all of the mutations that Counsyl tests for, it would take five work years to read them all.

So Counsyl is creating rule sets for how to understand what different mutations mean. Deletions or insertions into a person’s DNA can be quite serious, but there are also minor mutations that might not affect amino acids produced from the DNA.

Already, Counsyl is processing a half-a-terabyte of data per day. If the company did full genome sequencing for all the customers they currently handle, they would be doing 5 terabytes per day. (For a somewhat random apple-and-oranges comparison, Facebook said last fall it was handling 500 terabytes per day for its billion users. Basically, even just a few thousand genome sequencing tests can produce a lot of data.)

Why Carrier Screening

On the consumer-facing side of the business, Counsyl’s near-term progress will be about expanding deeply into the carrier screening market. Eventually, they want to build a mainstream brand with lots of applications.

“Philosophically, we want to build a consumer brand. We want people to associate us with understanding the genome the way people think about Kleenex with tissues,” Srinivasan said.

From that point of view, carrier screening is an ideal starting point. Parents are strongly motivated to do their best for their future children. Not only that, timing really matters for pregnancies and childbearing. If customers end up having a good experience with Counsyl products early on, they’ll develop a trust or affinity for the brand, which will help later down the line with future services.

This is unlike other genetic testing services, which focus on predicting diseases a person can contract in old age. The issue with that market is that people have a tendency to push off or procrastinate on testing for potential bad news.

“The conversation with the doctor needs to be very targeted and focused. There can’t really be a question of — are you testing me? Are you testing my prospective kids?” Srinivasan said. “We don’t want to muddy the message from the doctor. The interaction has to be simple and we want the test to be squarely about prospective children.”

The other issue with testing for conditions in old age is that there is an inverse relationship between how predictable and how actionable these diseases are. With the most predictable genetic conditions, there might not be much that a person can do to change their fate. But conditions that are more behaviorally or lifestyle-influenced like heart disease are not all that accurately forecast by genetic tests.

Counsyl also tries to be conscientious about the murky ethical issues that sometimes arise with genetic testing. There are some fascinating questions here for prospective parents. For example, would a couple make a different reproductive decision if they found out that they were carriers for a lifelong condition like cystic fibrosis versus a BRCA mutation that could lead to breast cancer in mid-life?

“We’re big believers in reproductive autonomy,” Srinivasan said. “We didn’t invent the idea of carrier screening. We’re just making it cheaper to find this information out. It goes back to the question: is it better to know or withhold information?”

Genomics at Web Scale – Counsyl Tech Talk from Counsyl on Vimeo.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is a guest post by Mario Zelaya, Managing Director at Majestic Media, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer & digital marketing agency, specializing in custom apps and promotions for web and mobile.

Facebook has been vigilant in its effort to improve adverting options on the Facebook Platform. They’ve been very smart and creative about the options now available to marketers. Sadly, few marketers know or see the full power of the features available to them.

Our duty as a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer is to share our knowledge and expertise, namely about one of the most underestimated and powerful marketing tools available on the Facebook Platform: Partner Categories.

Partner Categories builds on top of Custom Audiences, launched back in the fall of 2012. The new product allows advertisers to target their ads to 500 unique segments, provided by Datalogix, Acxiom and Epsilon. Each segment is based on actions these users have taken or are likely to take.

For those who don’t know the back story: Facebook accomplishes this through a partnership that allowed them to match online data with offline actions taken at physical store locations. Partner Categories then collects user data from activity across the web and makes it available to advertisers on Facebook. Advertisers are now able to utilize this information, including user’s location, online purchases, and browsing histories, to better target their advertising.

A few of the new segments that were created as a result of this partnership include, “Children’s Food & Product Buyers” and those “In the Market for a Crossover Vehicle.” Each category provides the advertiser with a brief description of the subset as a whole, including how many individuals are in that group and where the data was collected. While it doesn’t reveal specific information about each user, it still provides marketers with the ability to target that audience group, allowing advertisers to serve up ads that are more relevant, creating ROI for the advertiser and a better experience for the user.

With Partner Categories, advertisers can select a category of users and further segment a specific subset of that group. For example, if advertisers decide to target their ads towards “cereal buyers,” they can dive deeper into that segment to select “Children’s Cereal Buyers,” “Fiber Cereal Buyers,” or a number of other groups. They can also layer on demographic, location or interest-based targeting.

One of the best examples for the use of Partner Categories is by car dealerships. Car dealerships can target their Facebook ads toward those who live nearby and are in the market for either a “Crossover Vehicle,” “Full-Size Sedan” or “Entry/Economy/ Compact.”

What’s important here is not only the use cases, but also the fact that this is something that’s available to the open public through the Facebook Power Editor. This means that you don’t have to work with a large budget, utilize a company like ours, or use a third-party ads platform to manage your ad spend. It’s a feature that’s openly available to all marketers.

Our hope is that this article has helped you see and understand the power and features available to you on the Facebook Platform, and more importantly, that it helps you achieve a better ROI for your ad spend.

Mario Zelaya is the founder and managing director of Majestic Media, Canada’s first Facebook Marketing & Technology agency. His extensive experience on the Facebook Platform includes building out social strategy, campaign ideation, app architecture, and social design for brand clients such Volkswagen, Kia, General Motors, Mazda, Gatorade, Hot Wheels, Infiniti, Nissan, Visa and many others. Majestic Media has executed over 200 large-scale campaigns and works with big brands and agencies in helping them to get results and ROI through campaigns that are social by design. Follow Majestic Media and Mario on Twitter @majesticmedia @zelaya.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Brightnest’s co-founder Justin Anthony describes his startup as “a digital dashboard for your home.” And after using the service that past few weeks, I understand that analogy. Brightnest brings not only home maintenance, but home ownership, into the Internet age.

Brightnest launched in early 2012. The company has since raised just over $1 million in funding led by TechStars’ David Cohen. 500 Startups, OCA Ventures, Quotidian Ventures and a handful of angels also participated. A graduate of 500 Startups, the company’s genesis came after the two co-founders were driving around and released that a car has an information display that can tell the owner all sorts of things. But a house doesn’t.

Now 18 months and one slight pivot later, Brightnest is, as Justin told me, serving its users with a very relevant, personalized experience through an engaging and smart signup process.

It takes about a minute to sign up for Brightnest through the website or app. After connecting with Facebook or using a traditional signup form, the system learns about the user’s home. Where does the user live? What sort of household chores/activities are they interested in? Does the user have pets? Kids? Lastly, the system asks simple questions about the house involving the exterior construction, HVAC system, and inquires about extras like if there is a pool or garage.

This is where the startup thrives. Not only is the signup process quick, but it’s smart, allowing Brightnest to tailor the experience differently for each user.

I live in Michigan. It’s cold in the Winter and humid in the summer. Brightnest wisely created a system that allows my content and home maintenance items to fit my situation — mostly.

As I told Justin during our chat, I’m an avid home improvement nut. Minutes before I started writing this article, I was setting bricks in mortar for our new front steps (because I learned the hard way that I should use an angle grinder to remove loose bricks rather than trying to smash them out with a sledgehammer ’cause that just makes a bigger mess and makes the wife really mad). Brightnest isn’t completely for someone like myself. It’s for the person that’s looking for guidance as much as motivation.

Think Pinterest meets a handy dad. Brightnest displays household projects — chores, maintenance items, and crafty projects — in a grid layout. Each project is clearly labeled with how long it takes to complete and the supplies needed. All the content is created in-house, thus allowing the team to test and verify everything before passing it along to their users.

Items on my landing page includes “Clean your toilet (15 min.)”, Save money in the bedroom (30 min.)”, “Make a DIY animal coat rack (60 min.)” and “Inspect your air ducts (30 min)”. The idea is to present a low friction way to improve a house. The site has successfully created a way to make me want to inspect my air ducts. Essentially, if I know it will only take 30 minutes to inspect my air ducts, then that’s something I’m likely to at least attempt.

Moreover, owning a house comes with a lot of regular maintenance. Brightnest has its users covered there too. This is where I’ve started using the service.

Some tasks, for instance fertilizing your yard or testing smoke detectors, should be done several times a year on a regular basis. Just click the schedule button and up pops a menu that lets the user select a future date. Notifications can be emailed to the user and are also available through the iOS app. You know, just in case you want your email to nag you about chores, too.

Brightnest has seemed to create a helpful mix of tools and content. It might not have the depth of Pinterest or, likewise, Bob Villa, but the service has found a fantastic medium. As long as the site can continue to provide its users with fresh content and home improvement tips, Brightnest’s future is, well, bright.

Look for Brightnest’s Android and iPad app in the coming months.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

E-commerce giant Amazon looks like it is gearing up for the latest chapter in its international expansion: an operation in Russia. According to this article in Forbes (in Russian) the company has opened its first office in the country, headed by Arkady Vitrouk. Vitrouk is the former general director of ABC-Atticus, a publishing group owned by media barron Alexander Mamut.

Forbes cites unnamed sources but notes that the appointment, and the office opening, have not been confirmed by Amazon itself. However, Vitrouk’s LinkedIn profile does confirm his as director of Kindle Content for Amazon in Russia.

It looks like right now Amazon is hiring for at least three other positions for Russia specifically for its Kindle business and the sourcing of local content: a senior product manager for Kindle content pricing, and a principal for content acquisition for Kindle Russia, and another content acquisition manager.

A visit to amazon.ru currently redirect’s to the company’s main page for Europe, with links to other countries’ local sites, including the UK, France, Spain, German and Italy. We have contacted Amazon and Vitrouk himself for more detail and will update this story as we learn more.

The news comes in the same week that Amazon announced that it would take its Appstore business international — extending it to nearly 200 countries, another sign of how the company is gearing up for more scale.

Russia is currently Europe’s largest internet market, according to a recent study from comScore, with an online audience of 61.3 million users.

That, combined with Russia’s rapidly rising middle class, has led to a boom in e-commerce. Morgan Stanley believes the Russian e-commerce market will be worth $36 billion by 2015, up from $12 billion in 2012.

Russia has been a noticeable hole in Amazon’s footprint, but that has spelled opportunity for local players, too.

Ozon — commonly called the “Amazon of Russia” — has raised $121 million in funding and has been building up a very Amazon-like business. That includes an extensive logistics network to deliver a soup-to-nuts range of goods. As we’ve pointed out before this is especially important in a country like Russia, which didn’t have an excellent pre-existing delivery infrastructure. That, and the lack of credit card penetration, has meant that companies like Ozon and fashion/home goods site KupiVIP (itself flush with $120 million of funding) have built out fleets of their own delivery trucks, with drivers who take cash on delivery for goods (KupiVIP, focusing on clothes, will even wait until the recipient tries something on, so that it can also get returned on the spot).

Like Amazon, Ozon has also been eyeing up a move into cloud services. Unlike Amazon, Ozon’s strategy has yet to include any products or services like Amazon’s Kindle operation.

This is where Amazon could come in. In another BRIC market, Brazil, Amazon has been building out a business based on its non-physical goods — Kindle books and Kindle devices.

This could be one route to how Amazon decides to tackle Russia, at least in part. In that sense, it’s interesting that the Forbes report specifically names as the head of Amazon in Russia someone whose immediate experience lies precisely in publishing, rather than e-commerce or retail, and that he’s already heading up business for the company there in that vein.

P.S. I write “at least in part,” because it turns out that it’s also hiring for other Russia-related expansion plans as well. Online fashion e-commerce site Shopbop, owned by Amazon, is seeking a marketing manager for a new rollout it is planning in Russia. Amazon has also been headhunting in Moscow for software engineers — although these would be for relocation to Seattle.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is testing a new link format with larger photos and no headline or summary. Another test looks the same as other link posts, but includes a small icon in the bottom right corner to indicate which site the link is to.

With the first test, an image takes up the full width of News Feed, appearing as large as photo posts but being clickable to a third-party website. Previously, if a person or page wanted to share a full-size image along with a link, they had to make a photo post and put the link in the caption. When users click a photo, it opens the image in lightbox view. Users have to click the link separately. With the test as seen below, users can click the large image and be taken to the site. However, the headline and summary for the article or webpage are not visible.

In another test, Facebook has begun showing domain-specific icons along with links that are shared in the new desktop News Feed. The icons, which appear in the bottom right corner of a post, help make links more noticeable in the feed.

Facebook has made a number of improvements to link posts recently. First, increasing the size of the thumbnail image from 90×90 pixels to 154×154 pixels. Then, with the redesigned News Feed, making link titles and body copy larger and putting them in a serif font to stand out from the rest of the site. Now, a 25

A new startup called Repost aims to make it easy for online publishers to distribute their articles via embedding — the same way I can share a video from YouTube or a document from Scribd directly in a blog post.

Right now, if I saw an article that I thought TechCrunch readers would find valuable — such as this blog post from Repost founder and CEO John Pettitt — I could share a link on Facebook or Twitter. But what if I wanted to share it on TechCrunch itself?

After all, while TechCrunch does plenty of original reporting, we also build on stories that broke elsewhere, and we point readers to announcements that companies have made on their own blogs. In those cases, I could include a link, but according to Repost, there’s only a 2 percent chance on average that readers will actually click. Pettit elaborates:

Yes, there are lots of sharing services. But here’s the thing, they don’t actually share the content. They share links to content. VERY different.

If you want to take an article from one site and publish it on another, you have to find a person, get permission, and then manually copy it. Assuming you don’t break all the formatting in the process, you’re still not in good shape because you still have to worry about search engines seeing it as duplicate content.

With Repost, I can just copy-and-paste an embed code into my post, and then you get the full article, with all the formatting and images preserved. You can see an example at the end of this post. (Update: Apparently there are still some issues with how Repost integrates with TechCrunch’s specific WordPress installation, so what you’re seeing is actually a stripped-down version of the embed.)

That means the original publisher gets their content presented with clear attribution and their own advertising. It also integrates with existing analytics systems, comScore counts the embed views as part of the publisher’s traffic, and since the article is rendered in an iFrame, it doesn’t look like duplicate content to a search engine.

The new publisher, meanwhile, gets to present the full, most up-to-date version of the article to their readers. Since the author is basically saying, “Please share this article!” it should help avoid a lot of the tedious arguments about whether one publication is “aggregating” another site’s content.

In outlining his solution to the content distribution challenge, Pettitt drew parallels with the video world. He said that initially, if you had told the video industry that you wanted to add a button to their content making it easy to embed those videos anywhere, “They would have told you you were crazy.” Yet those buttons are “ubiquitous” today, because video publishers realize the value of broad distribution, and they can monetize that distribution by including their own ads in the embedded videos.

Repost says it already enables embedding for 3 million articles from more than 4,000 publishers, including Fox Sports, PandoDaily, NewsRight, and Tom’s Hardware. On average, Reposted articles see a 5.7 percent clickthrough to the original publisher, and they make readers read three times farther down on the page.

Pettitt estimated that around 75 percent of those publishers aren’t just using Repost as a way to share their content, but also to find outside content worth posting on their own sites. Future plans include adding e-commerce features, such as automatic insertion of affiliate links.

The Repost model could even work for paywalled sites, Pettitt added — in fact, the company is working on a partnership with one such site right now. Publishers could enable Repost sharing for their free content, or sharing of a snippet of their paywalled content.

“Fundamentally, the best ad for your content is your content,” he said.

Pettitt isn’t the only one who thinks this could have a big effect on web publishing. Jeff Jarvis, a well-known media pundit and associate professor at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism/Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, recently joined Repost’s board of advisors.

“Repost should end the wars over aggregation and copyright,” Jarvis said in the press release announcing the company’s launch. “The Repost technology changes the fundamental architecture of content distribution on the net, and reinvents and reverses the idea of content syndication.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter is nearing an agreement with Viacom to host TV clips and sell advertising on the site, reports Bloomberg. It is also reportedly discussing a content partnership with Comcast’s NBCUniversal, and one or more of the deals could be reached by mid-May.

According to sources cited in the article, the partnerships would let Twitter stream videos on its site and split the resulting ad revenue with the networks. Twitter already has agreements in place with ESPN, Weather Channel LLC, and Turner Broadcasting System.

If the partnerships come to fruition, it would be the latest step in Twitter’s moves to branch out from being a microblogging platform to a multi-faceted media platform in a bid to increase user engagement and reap more advertising revenue. Engaging with television networks is a logical step for the company: a third of active Twitter users tweeted last June about something they saw on television, up from 26 percent last year, according to a Nielsen report (Twitter has also partnered with Nielsen to measure how much of chatter on the site is prompted by television programs).

Other recent moves by Twitter to build tools allowing users to share content within the platform instead of relying on third-party providers include the launch of its music app last week after it acquired music discovery service startup We Are Hunted, and the introduction of Vine.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s a gold rush going on these days, or a Bitcoin rush, at least. Driven by the recent swings in the value of a Bitcoin, more and more people are learning about and becoming interested in the currency. While they could just buy Bitcoins at the current market rate, others are looking to try their luck at mining Bitcoins. And like prospectors who traveled west during the Gold Rush of the 19th century, many Bitcoin miners will find that they spend more on chasing the Bitcoin dream than they’ll ever hope to win back.

As explained here, Bitcoins are “mined” by unlocking blocks of data that “produce a particular pattern when the Bitcoin ‘hash’ algorithm is applied to the data.” It seems simple enough, but the cost of Bitcoin mining is greater than one might expect. The more Bitcoins are mined, the more difficult it becomes to find the next block. Unless the miner is using the latest specially-designed mining rigs, the computers used often sport high-end graphics cards (since the GPUs are more efficient than CPUs for mining application). And running those computers requires a lot of power.

Blockchain.info, which tracks Bitcoin-related data, estimates that miners are using 1,005.59 megawatt hours of electrical consumption each day in their pursuit of new blocks of Bitcoins. That ends up costing about $150,000 in power costs each day to mine the currency. [Hat tip to Bloomberg for reporting on the data.]

That may sound like a lot, but miners on average are making money. According to Blockchain, miners are generating $470,000 in Bitcoin-related revenue per day. In fact, due to the recent interest in the virtual currency and its popularity, operating margins for Bitcoin miners are close to record highs.

While it might be easy to look at those numbers and think it’s NBD to just like, extract value out of thin air, Bitcoin mining isn’t as lucrative as it seems. Regular users hoping to use their regular computers to mine shouldn’t expect to just start making money by setting aside a few compute cycles to dig up Bitcoins. That’s generally reserved for special mining computers that do nothing BUT mine for Bitcoins using custom encryption processors.

As Biggs points out in his article, “While you could simply set a machine aside and have it run the algorithms endlessly, the energy cost and equipment deprecation will eventually cost more than the actual Bitcoins are worth.” That’s been confirmed by my colleague Matt Burns, who wrote in our internal message board that “after mining for a few days, the energy required to run my computer at full tilt was far greater than the Bitcoins I mined.”

Even if you do choose to pool your resources to mine, it’s a fairly complicated process, even for tech-savvy users. Check out the aforementioned article by Biggs for how he connected his home PCs into a Bitcoin-mining pool.

The alternative is to just buy specialty hardware designed to do nothing but mine for Bitcoins. Like any other investment, the return isn’t assured, and likely will be based on how Bitcoin market takes shape as time goes on. But right now, as with most gold rushes throughout history, it’s those who are supplying the miners that are finding the real riches.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch