Embed Your Favorite Chunks Of Google With Web Elements

During today’s Google I/O keynote, the company unveiled a new set of widgets collectively called Web Elements that are sure to spread across the web like wildfire. The widgets allow users to quickly integrate some of Google’s most popular products, including Calendar, Search, and Maps, directly into their sites with a minimal amount of effort. Much of the same functionality has previously been available through Google APIs (in fact, some of these widgets were built on them), but most bloggers haven’t known how to use them before now. Google Web Elements makes the process much easier – just copy and paste an embed code, and you’re done.

Perhaps the most interesting widget is the ‘Conversation’ Element, which allows visitors to your site to post comments and videos, similar to the way they could using a FriendFeed embed. Site owners have the option of restricting these conversations to their sites, or to share them as global conversations through Google Friend Connect. You can check out a sample embed below.

Other widgets include ‘Presentations’, which allow you to embed presentations from Google Docs into your site, and ‘Spreadsheets’, which allow you to do the same with Google Docs spreadsheets. This is not going to be welcome news to sites like SlideShare, Scribd, and DocStoc, which let you do this with other documents.

The new Custom Search Element makes adding a Google search to your site very easy – just embed the provided snippet of code into your site, and Google will automatically index it.

The rest of the widgets are fairly self explanatory. Calendar lets you point out some important dates for you and your visitors, maps let you flag a location, and News shows the latest stories from Google News. Google also says that more widgets are on the way.

Google Earth Is Now Open For Businesses

Google Earth has proven to be a powerful and useful tool for combing the Earth.  The virtual-earth application has helped solve a plane crash mystery, was used for a marijuana bust and lets you explore Disneyland Paris. Now, Google Earth is adding something more practical It will let you see businesses and related information on both its desktop and iPhone apps.

By adding a “Businesses” layer to Google Earth, you’ll be able to see businesses by default when you start the application. Google Earth will list businesses like restaurants, bars, banks, gas stations, and grocery stores. As you zoom in further to the map, you’ll see more businesses. When you click on the icons, you’ll get additional information like the address. telephone number, reviews, and hours.

It’s unclear whether Google is using its database of local businesses in Google Maps to power the business listings, but it seems like that’s the case

Google Kicks Off Android Developer Challenge Part Deux

In an effort to continue fostering the Android development community, Google has announced the second round of its Android Developer Challenge – a competition that rewards some of the platform’s best applications with large cash grants.

Google will begin accepting submissions from developers in August. In an interesting twist, Google is going to let anyone with an Android handset participate in the process, allowing them to vote using a special application available on the Android Marketplace. The voting application will randomly download applications from the pool of competitors, and users will be asked to rate them. These votes will determine the top 20 apps in 10 different categories (for a total of 200 apps), which will then move on to the next round. Users will be able to vote in the second round as well, but votes from Google judges will make up 55% of the final score.

So what are the developers competing for? Here’s how Google is breaking down the awards this time around:

Prizes will be distributed as follows; all prizes are in USD:
For each of the 10 categories:
1st prize: $100,000
2nd prize: $50,000
3rd prize: $25,000
Overall (across all categories)
1st prize: $150,000 (meaning the overall winner will receive $250,000)
2nd prize: $50,000 (meaning the 2nd prize winner will receive up to $150,000)
3rd prize: $25,000 (meaning the 3rd prize winner will receive up to $125,000)
In addition, attendees of selected developer events will be provided with devices intended for use in developing submissions for ADC 2.

All together, it sounds like Google is setting aside around $2 million for the winners. For more details, check out the official guidelines here.

Google’s last challenge kicked off in November 2007, with the final winners announced the following August.

Expecting Google Chrome For Mac!

Nearly everyone around the TechCrunch office is a Mac user, and we’ve been waiting rather impatiently for Google to port over its Chrome browser since its debut (for Windows only) last September. Google has been pretty quiet on when a Mac version might come out, and with Google’s I/O event this week we thought that there might be a chance that the search giant would finally release Chrome for Mac during one of its two keynotes.

Today’s keynote was a swing and a miss – we learned about Google’s web elements, new application features using HTML 5, and everyone in the audience got a shiny new GTC phone. But Chrome for Mac was nowhere to be soon. Should we expect more tomorrow?

TechCrunch IT Editor Steve Gillmor caught up with Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and asked when we could expect Google Chrome for the Mac. Brin’s response? “I ask about that every other day.”

Brin says that Chrome for Mac is definitely coming along. The team measures its progress by how long it can get Chrome to run stably on their computers, and they’ve moved from a few minutes at a time up to a number of hours. But it doesn’t sound like it’s close to being finished. Brin could be playing coy, but it sounds like he wants this as badly as the rest of us.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can always try out the in-development (and buggy) versions, though these obviously aren’t ready for public release.

Be sure to watch the rest of the video for more on Google’s experimentation with HTML 5 and YouTube.

Tweetbucks Brings Affiliate Fees To Twitter Users

Talk of how to monetize Twitter, both from its founders perspective and a third-party point of view, is dominating conversation on the web these days. Tweetbucks, a startup founded by entrepreneur Chris Sukornyk, is hoping to make money for users of Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed through leveraging affiliate fees and CPCs from ads.

Here’s how it works. Tweetbucks has a database with thousands of online merchants that offer referral fees (or money you get from merchants when your advertisements of a product result in a purchase ), including Amazon, BestBuy, Barnes & Noble and Shoes.com. All you need to do is find a product on a retail site, enter it on Tweetbuck’s site, and the startup will automatically shorten (via Bit.ly) and convert it to an affiliate enabled link, referencing the site’s data base of online merchants that pay out affiliate fees. You can then add the link to in a Tweet, Facebook status update or FriendFeed message.

Every time people click your link and your recommendation results in a purchase, the online merchant pays a commission to you. For example, referral fees for Amazon’s Associates program hover around 6%, BestBuy pays out 3-4%, and CompUSA pays around 6%. Tweetbucks will take 30% of the money you earn through each referral leaving you with 70%. So if you send out a link via a Tweet to a Kindle being sold on Amazon for $359.00 and someone purchases the Kindle from the link, you will receive $15.12 and Tweetbucks will take $6.46. On the other hand, if your affiliate fee comes from a book on Barnes & Noble (which also pays out 6%) that totals $16.76, you will receive $0.70 cents and Tweetbucks will get $0.30 cents.

Tweetbucks also lets you earn money off of any non-retail site, by allowing you to enable a “custom ad-frame,” on a site you Tweet the link to. Tweetbucks displays an ad at the top of your destination page and you earn a variable rate (CPC) on every click. You can also customize this ad frame to include a hyperlinked logo of your choice. The compensation from this doesn’t seem to have as much potential as the affiliate fees; Sukornyk says returns are around $1 to $2 per thousand clicks.

Tweetbucks give you a complimentary $5 in your account to start with and pays you via PayPal each month. You can also earn a 10% commission on all revenue earned by people you refer to Tweetbucks for 6 months after their approval date. It’s a little shady to be sending out links to friends and followers with out them knowing they you will be making a cut off of their sale. Sukornyk encourages Tweetbucks users to add the hashtag #tweetbucks at the end of any link so that people who click on your link will know whats in it for you.

This has a few similarities to Microsoft’s controversial CashBack program, which gives users monetary incentives to click through and buy products from the ads they’re shown. But Tweetbucks gives users the power to make money from others (and forbids the user to click and buy from the links themselves).

There seems to be the whole double edged sword issue with Tweetbucks. The more affiliate links you send out, the more people will probably purchase from that link and the more money you will make. But the more links you send out, whether it be via Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed, the more you hover on that line of being a pseudo-spammer of links to retail sites. And you could come across as opportunistic if you send out a ton of links that make you money every day, regardless of whether you disclose or not. I guess it was inevitable that services would eventually leverage the power of links with Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook for monetary purposes. For some reason, it just doesn’t sit right with me.

Facebook Actually Worth!

Facebook is worth $10 billion? That may be how the social networking Web site would like the world to interpret its latest capital infusion. But don’t be fooled. While that may represent a target valuation for Facebook, the actual worth, today, of Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room creation may be much lower.

That’s not to completely dismiss the headline figure. Under terms announced Tuesday, the Russian Internet investment group Digital Sky Technologies is plugging $200 million into the company for about a 2 percent stake. By that arithmetic, Facebook would indeed be worth $10 billion.

For a company that, by its own admission, won’t generate positive cash flow until sometime next year, that’s an impressive figure to bandy about. True, Facebook’s last capital-raising 18 months ago, which brought Microsoft and the Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing in as investors, put a $15 billion price tag on the company. But considering the trajectory of financial markets since then, the valuation attached to Digital Sky’s trade actually looks even more robust.

Shares in the technology bellwethers Microsoft and Google have plunged about 45 percent since November 2007. Assume a similar decline in Facebook’s value and, on a market-adjusted basis, Digital Sky is arguably paying at least a 20 percent premium to Microsoft’s entry price, ignoring growth in Facebook’s business in the meantime.

Either way, though, for those trying to value Facebook, there’s a catch in these headline figures. The company didn’t sell just regular stock to Digital Sky or to Microsoft, for that matter. It sold preferred shares. The company won’t talk about the details, but these shares confer rights and privileges not attached to common stock. They are therefore worth more.

So while $10 billion could be a valuation Facebook and Digital Sky Technologies are aiming for, it probably doesn’t reflect the company’s market worth right now. But Digital Sky has also agreed to buy $100 million in shares held by Facebook employees. The price it pays for these shares — and the price at which insiders are willing to part with them, bereft as they are of special privileges — will reveal more about the company’s value today than any press release it might create.

E-commerce!The next wave

How can e-commerce continue to grow? This guest post by Jamie Murray Wells, founder and Executive Chairman of Glasses Direct, looks at the next wave coming round the corner.

Latest figures show UK ecommerce sales continue to buck the financial doom-and-gloom. There was an overall 14% increase in the year to April 2009. E-commerce certainly looks like the Noah’s Ark of retail during the recession: those companies that have a strong online consumer proposition get a ticket to ride out the storm, and those that don’t, may drown.

There is a lot of he growth in the clothing, footwear and accessories category in particular. According to Forrester, in those categories online sales represented 2-4% in 2003, and now represent over 10% and in some cases, over 15% of the total category.

Where the sale of more ‘generic’ products such as books, DVDs and travel can be seen as something of a first wave of ecommerce, understanding how consumers want to buy high-touch, cosmetic products online such as expensive jewellery, fitted garments and for us, eyewear, could represent something of a second wave of e-commerce.

For companies involved in this second wave of ecommerce, it is not as simple as relying on the old cornerstones of price, range, convenience to attract customers. Our peer group face significant consumer purchase barriers to do with try-on, fit, and product education, that one-by-one, need to be identified and addressed, through continued technological innovation and great customer service, in order to pursued customers to make purchase decisions in our favour over the high street.

A number of interesting businesses ride this new wave of e-commerce innovation shotgun with us:

Blue Nile, is an online jeweller that offers a completely new level of service online, changing diamond shoppers’ habits. They offer enormous amounts of information on the diamonds that they sell, specialist experts on-call, and a massive focus on education to teach you about what you should think about when buying a diamond – far more than you could get in a high street store. The technology on their site allows you to see what different carat diamonds would look like on your finger. This matched with the traditional advantages of shopping online – a massive selection, reasonable pricing and convenience, has meant their business has been a runaway success.

Everyone knows ASOS, which has developed some really strong online celebrity and brand engagement. Suggestions for product ranges and tips from other consumers’ purchases, beautifully shot imagery and the ability to zoom in to inspect every detail complete the picture for the ASOS shopper of high-touch products.

At Glasses Direct [interest declared] we help our customers find their ideal glasses with our Virtual Mirror, which allows people to virtually try on glasses while they’re browsing. We want people to use the resulting images to get other people’s opinions on their looks. ‘Do I look good in this’ becomes a question you can ask your community, not just one shopping companion or the store assistant. Retailers like us are looking at ground-breaking ways to visualise products online, especially when the products face higher than average barriers to sale.

And then there’s Zappos, who use customer service to create a ‘personal emotional connection’ with their customers – something that helps it overcome barriers to buying shoes online, drives loyalty and therefore repeat purchase, and helps them sell over a $1b of shoes every year online.

The second wave of ecommerce isn’t about necessarily unique or high technologies, but how we, as retailers of the fitted or fashion product, can fashion practical online solutions to each of our own consumer bases’ needs. I believe that in years to come it is likely that every retailer will be able to offer price, range and convenience like Amazon, and so the real competition will be around the customer experience and the customer service. We’re just ahead of the curve by prioritising these now. This is why, as I said in a blog post after a visit to the company, Zappos, who calls itself ‘a service company that happens to sell shoes’, it will probably in time, replace Amazon as the e-commerce ‘gold standard’.

Now that the first group of second wave companies has proved that the public, investors and the city all buy in to the prospects of companies dealing thin the high-touch, entrepreneurs should be scrutinising the high street for possibilities. Most of the obvious e-commerce first wave opportunities may well have been seized, but there are many second wave opportunities still out there. Look around and anything that says ‘tailor made’ on, is not sacred to the high street anymore.