Second Rotation, the company behind gadget ‘reCommerce’ site Gazelle, has closed a million Series B funding round led by RockPort Capital Partners, with existing investors Venrock Associates, Austin Ligon, and Henry Vogel also participating.

Gazelle’s service, which launched in July, allows users to receive cash for their used gadgets without having to deal with online marketplaces like eBay or Craigslist. After entering some basic information about a product (including model number, condition, and accessories) Gazelle will make an instant cash offer. If the user accepts, Gazelle will pay any shipping charges and pays out the cash amount within a few days of receiving the gadget, assuming the product’s condition corresponds with what the user described. Users generally receive less money than they would through eBay, but Gazelle is usually more convenient.

The site will also help recycle any items it can’t resell, which makes it more eco-friendly than most other online marketplaces. And it’s a quick way to get some cash – the relatively small effort involved will appeal to users looking to clear out the random gadgetry filling their desks without having to deal with eBay’s auction process.

Another similar competitor in this space is Venjuvo. Ztail has also experimented with this, but it isn’t the site’s primary focus.

Update:This post originally noted that Gazelle wasn’t much more ‘green’ than garage sales, eBay, or pawn shops. However, the site will help users recycle goods that can’t be resold, so the ‘green’ label is warranted.

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MyBefia is a great little site to compare Apple iPhone applications based on their rankings in the App Store. Add up to three applications (the only annoying thing is you have to look up its iTunes Store URL) and see how rank has changed over time. It also shows estimated market share, review rankings over time and popularity. The widgets are embeddable via Gigya.

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We all know how tagging makes the Web a richer place (by tapping into people’s desire to categorize things and share those categories, ad-hoc though they may be, with the everyone else). Tagging brings a bottoms-up order to the Web by making information more searchable and thus easier to find. Now it is time to start tagging the world. The real world.

In fact, millions of people are already doing so every time they upload a geo-coded photo to Flickr, add a review to Yelp, Tweet about a specific place, or use any of the dozens of geo-aware social apps springing up all over the place. They are not just tagging the world with keywords, they are commenting on it and annotating it in tiny little bursts. To get a sense of what some of this activity looks like, check out Twittervision or Flickrvision, which show Tweets and Flickr photos, respectively, on a map as they are posted to the Web.

Services such as Plazes (now owned by Nokia), Brightkite, and Nokia’s new Friend View app all combine social communications and location information, making them visible on a map.

Most mobile social networks, on GPS phones at least, put geo-labels on everything you do. FriendFeed just recently started adding Google maps for any messages that contain location information, and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle makes it easy for other services to add their own geo-location layer.

Geo-coded communications are becoming more and more common, and this is just the start. I like to complain about the increased noise level that lifestreaming services are bringing into our lives. While that continues to be a growing problem on an individual basis for people who want to tune in and use these services (”You’re at the bus stop? Great. Keep those Tweets coming.”), on an aggregate level all the seemingly useless drivel has the potential to become useful meta-data.

And this is not limited to GPS-enabled services. You can tag Tweets, for instance, with hashmark codes that act as tags for places and things (”#bus-stop”, “#centralpark”). All of these messages get dumped into databases on the Web, which are then searchable. And that is where things get interesting. Chris Brogan explains in a post titled “Secrets of the Annotated World”:

Services like Twitter and FriendFeed and Flickr and Facebook and LinkedIn and more are hosting conversations around you that might be of value to you. . . . If you’re not using services like Yelp and BrightKite, (and you could name several others), you’re missing some of the glyphs and warnings we’re leaving on the landscape to tell you about the way things are versus the way things are marketed. You’re missing chance encounters. You’re missing stray opportunities.

Again, you don’t have to get involved. It’s just that we are, and we’re passing many more notes than you can imagine.

I am glad there are people out there like Chris who are obsessive about geo-coding everything they do. They are like the early taggers, the two percent or so of people on Flickr, Delicious, and other services who did all the heavy lifting of organizing and categorizing all the data that was dumped into them. The more that data can be sliced and diced, the more useful it becomes. And location data is particularly valuable because it relates to places, people, and events in the real world.

Every geo-coded Tweet, Flickr photo, or restaurant review is adding a tag or comment to the world that is then searchable by others. It is what will make visions like Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera a reality. It is why Fotonauts, an upcoming photo app that launched at TC50, makes it easy to geo-tag every photo in an album via Google Maps or Wikipedia. Everything in the world will be tagged. But it is such a huge task that the only way to do it is if we all pitch in. (Or at least if Chris and his friends pitch in—the rest of us can freeload).

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Most venture capitalists will tell you that a good idea isn’t worth much – the value is in execution, which is very hard. But that doesn’t stop people from coming forward to take credit when someone hits a home run. We saw it with Google and countless others. Someone gets rich, and someone else says they stole the idea.

This time it’s YouTube. Herbert Elwood Gilliland III emails us to say that YouTube’s name and idea were his, and that he told Chad Hurley about it years ago. After a different conversation he says he had with Sergey Brin in 2007, more of his ideas appeared in YouTube:

I’m writing you because I am looking for some media outlet to cover my situation. I invented the YouTube brand and worked at a company where I was developing a similar product in 1998. I inverted several key elements of the product “Synthetic Interview” to create YouTube, and shared this idea with my friends. I also tried to create a company called YouTube several times between 1998-2004, when in November, I talked to Chad Hurley on the phone when he was still working at PayPal. I explained the idea behind YouTube, the brand name, and challenged him to start the company since he had close ties to Peter Theil, a well known billionaire venture capitalist. I asked for 1% of the proceeds of the sale of the company in exchange for this great idea. Years later, I am still trying to get Chad to recognize me with fiscal compensation and/or credit for creating the brand, basic concepts (video uploading, video commenting, agnostic video format, layout of the main video screen, awards and top listings “most watched”, star ratings, viewers, DMCA automation, video and audio fingerprinting).

After a phone call with Sergey Brin in August of 2007, several other of my ideas became a part of YouTube (thumbs-up and thumbs-down, video annotation). Since they seem to depend so much on my ideas to make their billions, why can’t then see the benefit in enabling me to start my own firm? Why do these “altruistic” billionaires not see the benefit in sharing some of their wealth?

–
H. E. Gilliland III

“Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.”
— Plato

I haven’t emailed YouTube founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim to get their side of the story, but I’m guessing they aren’t going to credit Gilliland with as much as a comment on this, let alone sending him a check.

Gilliland has says his specialties are “Security, networking, interface, process consulting, medical devices (and requirements), graphic design, advertising, web design, product development” on his LinkedIn profile. More information about him is available on his web site.

Back in 2002 he was looking for funding for a life perpetuating device – “Please help me save this information by designing and marketing brain perpetuation devices for post-mordem cultivation of valuable neurologically stored information.”

What does he want exactly? million dollars. To become a doctor.

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And now they want more.

They’ve got a new user-translation tool to make their site available to non-English speakers, modeled on the the Facebook approach. The first I heard of it was a couple of days ago when the founder emailed us about it.

But instead of just letting us know about the feature, he unleashed a barrage of criticism about our Facebook-love (Facebook would disagree), accused us of bias and says we’ll forever lose his respect if we don’t write about them:

Clicky analytics (getclicky.com) released a crowd sourced translation framework back in April, and we have just now made available the results. Our service is now available in 12 languages, all contributed and voted on by hundreds of our users.

http://getclicky.com/blog/144/clicky-is-now-available-in-12-languages

I know you’re thinking, that’s great, now why the hell do I care? I’ll tell you why. Earlier this year, Facebook released a similar system, and you thought it was SO AMAZING that you had to write FOUR stories on the topic:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/21/facebook-taps-users-to-create-translated-versions-of-site/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/07/facebook-turns-1500-users-into-spanish-translation-slaves/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/02/facebook-now-in-german-thanks-to-2000-generous-users/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/31/facebook-gets-aggressive-on-translations-adding-22-more-languages/

Many people think you write way too much about Facebook (myself included), and/or that you have a major bias towards them. Well I want you to prove us all wrong. Prove that you wrote about this feature on Facebook four seperate times, not because it’s Facebook and you love them, but because it is in fact a really cool feature that would be amazing for any site to implement.

Prove that you write about stories not because it’s a company you love, but because the company is doing something cool, even if it’s not the first of its kind (by the way, interesting factoid, Clicky is 100% programmed by ONE person (that’d be me), I wrote this entire framework myself. How many programmers does Facebook have? Probably a couple of hundred?)

Prove your integrity by writing us up for the same amazing feature, or you will simply prove that you do in fact have a major Facebook bias, and you will have forever lost my respect. I’m being completely serious.

Sean

Ok Sean. I have no idea why you didn’t just email us about the feature minus the insults. I won’t mention the fact that this me-too feature isn’t nearly as interesting as you think it is. Or that Facebook’s initial launch of the translation tool propelled them way past MySpace to 160 million monthly unique visitors around the world (which is why we continue to mention it). Or that polite emails tend to lead towards better results than this. No, insulting us was definitely the right approach. Here’s your post.

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Some interesting things were said, including remarks by Bronfman that Warner will only sign new artists if they agree to give the label a cut of all possible revenue streams. But the biggest story about the talk, by far, was this: MySpace may be creating a music device.

At least that’s what dozens of blogs and mainstream news outlets reporte. A sample:

• Reuters: Is MySpace dreaming of a music device?
• Reuters: MySpace could develop digital music player (Reuters liked the story so much they wrote two articles)
• The Telegraph: MySpace rival to iPod is ‘possible’, says chief executive
• About.com: MySpace MP3 Player in the Works? (”It is reportedly a distinct possibility for the future”)
• Business Journal: Report: MySpace hints at iPod competitor

The source for the stories: DeWolfe, when asked “Do you think, or as you plot…the future of MySpace…do you think there is a place where MySpace might create a device?” said only “Uh, it’s possible, right now we’re just focusing on the service itself.”

The video is below, and DeWolfe’s tone and body language suggest he was simply being polite. I contacted MySpace, wondering if big press was tipped off to read more into the statement than appears reasonable. They declined to comment.

Judge for yourself. In my opinion, there’s nothing there.

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Update: looks like alarm:clock jumped the shark on this one. coComment CEO Matt Colebourne got back to our e-mail and says rumors about an acquisition are false, and that there will be an announcement about a partnership or some other kind of collaboration between the two startups soon. JS-Kit’s Chris Saad (who is also co-founder of DataPortability and Media 2.0 Workgroup) checked in as well to say there will be an announcement soon, yet declines to share details.

Update 2 with details of the announcement made:

Henceforth, coComment will automatically track comments from all sites enabled with JS-Kit Commenting, on a fully opt-in/out basis, so brand owners can easily follow consumer opinions on more than 600,000 sites. coComment will now offer JS-Kit commenting (and Rating, Reviews and Polls) to sites. coComment and JS-Kit confirmed that all existing users of coComment’s Site Comments engine will continue to be fully supported and will not be inconvenienced.

JS-Kit raised a total of .8 million in two rounds, the Series B for .6 million dating back less than a month. coComment was backed by even more venture capital: it had raised a total of .6 million from Swisscom and the Japanese Netage Capital Partners. This leads us to believe coComment simply ran out of money and chose to merge with a company offering a similar service rather than dying. Alarm:clock adds that coComment’s US employees (their headquarters are in Switzerland) are being offered jobs at JS-Kit or unceremonously fired.

coComment is a service that essentially lets people keep track of all their separate comments and discussions across the web, notifying users of newly posted comments while displaying any comments and conversations that a user may be tracking on sites such as blogs, news, photo sharing, and social bookmarking sites.

JS-Kit’s widget library already includes a commenting system, as well as ratings, polls and reviews, all of which can be embedded on a web page with a short snippet of code. Over the summer, JS-Kit acquired HaloScan, another commenting system, to improve its global profiles and better integrate with blog platforms.

Hence the title of consolidation in the online conversation world. You may remember SezWho acquired a contextual analysis startup called Tejit last May, and Automattic (the company behind WordPress) also made two acquisitions in this space after last summer: Intense Debate and Polldaddy.

Other players include Disqus and Tangler.

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A year ago they were still seen as controversial and experimental. Labels defended them as justification for investing in an artist in a time of decreasing CD sales.

Today, though, those deals are becoming mandatory. Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman told the Web 2.0 Summit audience that his label now requires all new artists to sign 360 Deals, and that about a third of their signed artists are under those contracts.

Bronfman argued to a hostile crowd that it doesn’t make sense for labels to pour money into artist development when CD sales, their primary source of revenue, continue to decline (although he did say that digital sales now make up 20% of their revenue). Without other ways to make money from an artist, he said, they wouldn’t continue to promote artists.

Bronfman also said that 360 deals give labels the ability to give away music for promotional purposes to spur event and merchandise sales.

And that, for me, is the key. Bronfman, an outsider to the music world until recently, sees the writing on the wall – music downloads will eventually be free, and will serve as little more than marketing collateral to other revenue streams.

360 deals give labels a place in the new music economy, and there’s nothing wrong with their attempt to keep their businesses alive over the long run. Artists can choose to go with them or not, depending on their own opinion of the benefits. If labels really can bring enough marketing and promotional benefits to the table, artists will take those deals. They may be slaves to the labels, but they have a chance (albeit a very small one) of becoming rich slaves, at least.

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