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It’s not easy to launch a successful WebEx competitor. Most businesses have long since established their “system” for dealing with web meetings, using old standbys like WebEx or GoToMeeting. And those businesses that are willing to venture into the unknown have had plenty of cheaper alternatives to choose from, like DimDim , for quite a while. But that isn’t keeping CallWave from launching one of its own, dubbed Fuze Meeting . And while it’s not going to be an easy space to compete in, Fuze Meeting doesn’t disappoint. As far as startups go, the history of the company is pretty unique. CallWave was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. After reaching a peak soon thereafter of over $15 per share, the stock dropped steadily, dipping as low as 50 cents early this year. Deciding to cut its losses, the company delisted itself from NASDAQ on Monday after buying back shares from public shareholders at a 44% premium over the current market value and paying out a total of $10 million. CMO Patrick Moran says that the company did this on its own accord, and that its hand wasn’t pushed by any banks or VCs. CallWave will soon change its name to Fuze Box to reflect its new position as a startup. While all of this has been going on, CallWave has been building the “fuze platform” that powers Fuze Meeting, which it’s pitting as a sleeker, lighter, and cheaper alternative to services like WebEx. Last fall, the company decided to show off an early version of the product to some press, perhaps prematurely (it was labeled as “incomplete” by CNET). Finally in May, a full eight months after making its public debut, Fuze Meeting finally became commercially available. And only now that the company’s financial wranglings are complete is it ready to really announce it to the public. I played around with the complete version yesterday, and for the most part I was impressed. The application is slick and intuitive, and unlike some other screen sharing apps, Fuze Meeting requires no plugins — it should work on just about any browser, and also offers support for both the iPhone and BlackBerry. Screen sharing supports high resolution video sharing, allowing presenters to jump to any point in the video as each participant’s screen is updated in real time. Presenters can also annotate video frames, which will likely appeal to marketing organizations. While the service is currently working on acquiring free users, it is going to operate under a subscription model of $29 a month, or 12 cents per minute for users who would prefer to pay as they go. This is substantially cheaper than WebEx, but other less well known alternatives sport similar price points, so cost won’t be the only thing Fuze can rely on to differentiate itself. If you’d like to see a video of the service in action, check out the clip below. Warning: it features Moran’s kids, and may be too cute to handle. Fuze Meeting from Patrick Moran on Vimeo . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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The beta testing stage can be the cornerstone to the successful development of a new site. And many startups have to conduct and implement beta testing of sites, surveys and analytics internally, which can be an daunting task when you are launching a site. Prefinery lets startups outsource the whole beta invite process, from start to finish. Prefinery is offering 100 TechCrunch readers with beta invites to test the site. You can sign up here. Use the invitation code “TECHCRUNCH” when signing up for the service. Prefinery’s ambition is to create a valuable first experience for beta testers and to help startups in collecting and organizing information that will result in a better product. Prefinery will do anything and everything when it comes to the beta testing process. The service will create a splash page for your product, generate an HTML sign-up form with fields and survey questions, create an automatic welcome e-mail/message, take signups into a queue, approve users, and trigger invite e-mail. The service will also generate invite codes and assign quantities.

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Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web. The settlement has drawn its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. But Google keeps on plugging away, making its book search better and better. For instance, Google Books recently launched a plethora of new and innovative features to make the product easier for consumers to use, such as embeddable previews and better in-book search. Today, it added one more useful feature relating to search: a visual cue on the right margin showing the pages throughout a book where a search term appears. When you search within a book, a page appears in a window, with a scrollbar on the right. Little rectangles will appear in the margin beside the scrollbar to show you where your results are located. When your mouse hovers over one of the rectangles indicating where a search term can be found in the book, you’ll get a preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to that respective page by clicking on the rectangle. With the previous search function, it wasn’t as easy to find the exact location of the results in a book. With this simple tweak, Google has improved the visual display of search functions, helping users navigate results in a more organized and efficient way. The DOJ will probably hold that against it. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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When I first signed up for GrandCentral a few years ago, I lived in a different city. As such, I had a different area code. And that was fine until I moved and Google, which bought GrandCentral in 2007 and subsequently put it on lockdown, prohibited me from changing it. I didn’t think much of it until my GrandCentral account magically transformed into a Google Voice account a few months ago, taking a good service and making it excellent . Unfortunately, I was still stuck with my old number. But now, there’s an option to change it. The “Change your number” functionality, as spotted today by Boy Genius Report , is great news for users like me. Unfortunately, it will cost you to change it. There’s a one-time $10 fee, which in my mind is well worth it. Best of all, Google Voice will activate your new number right away and still keep your old one active and forwarding to the new one for three months. What’s also nice is that in picking your new number, you can search by area code and by a word that you want your number to contain. So for example if I search for area code 408 and the word “tuna,” I can get a 408 number that ends in 8862 (”T-U-N-A” on a keypad). Here are the details: There is a $10 one-time fee to change your Google Voice number. Here is how it works: Pick a new number in the area codes we have. Pay $10 with Google Checkout, using your credit card. Your new number becomes active right away. Calls to your old number will keep coming to your Google Voice account for three months, so you have time to tell everyone about your new number. We’re still waiting on number portability (the ability to use your existing numbers as Google Voice numbers), but this is a nice start. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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The new MySpace exec team has promised changes (”we have…laid the groundwork for an exciting new chapter of innovation for MySpace”). And they’re delivering. A couple of hours ago they changed the MySpace logo. No longer does it say “MySpace.com - A Place For Friends.” Now it simply says MySpace. The old logo is below. We’ve confirmed that the change just occurred this evening, although MySpace PR is as usual not responding. They refuse to confirm that the logo is new, or say why they changed it. But it sure is absurd to have a conversation that goes something like “So it looks like you’ve changed your logo this evening? No Comment. Uh huh. Ok, so any official reason why you changed it? No comment.” Trade secrets, I guess. And heck, I’m just happy someone still works there to pick up the phone. MySpace is also on the warpath to get more users. At login they now strongly suggest you log into your email and invite friends (hopefully they’ll avoid turning this too spammy ). And they’ve also added a “people you may know widget” that shows friends of friends. We’re also hearing that MySpace will be removing some of the ugliest ad units that adorn the site today. Whether that’s an effort to clean up the user interface or simply a sign of slowing ad sales, we’ll probably never know. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Twitter has long had an official Facebook application that allows users to update their Facebook status with tweets. It’s quite useful for those of us who don’t want to have to spend all day updating multiple services with the same messages. The app has over 250,000 monthly active users. But if you’re not already one of them, I have bad news: You’re not allowed to use it. For the past several days, anyone who has tried to install the app has been greeted with the following message: Error while loading page from session test There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of session test are trying to iron out. We appreciate your patience as we try to fix these issues. Your problem has been logged - if it persists, please come back in a few days. Thanks! A few days? Try a week now. And it seems that despite the issue being “logged” neither side seems to care much about fixing it. And what the hell is “session test”? Well, it turns out Session Test is actually another Facebook application created by someone called “Bob McTest” — a Facebook profile with two friends and a crazy picture (below right). Session Test has 45,373 monthly active users and 182 fans, despite awful reviews (because as far as I know, all it does is block this Twitter app). Humorously, when you try to install Session Test, you get the same Session Test error message. At first, I assumed this was some kind of test application Facebook created to log errors, but it says clearly on the page, “This application was not developed by Facebook.” So why is a second app popping up when you try to install the Twitter app? It may be some kind of exploit. When we contacted Facebook about it, they said they would look into it. On the Sessions Test page you’ll find some rather humorous reviews and discussions from users who are pissed off about not being able to install the Twitter app. The Reviews area for example features messages like, “Steady errors for weeks now… Way to go… update: another week, still nothing….” and “errors!!!!!!!!!! f@ck!!!!” But you won’t find any kind of response from either side there. And the Discussions area is even better. One thread called “I hate you” features a bunch of annoyed would-be Twitter/Facebook users. Another thread called “TWITTER” features more of the same. Finally, someone made a thread just to point out other apps created to workaround the problem, but really, it’s pretty ridiculous that neither side has even responded to any of this. One user links to a Get Satisfaction thread also talking about the issue. But again, no response from anyone on either side. I know Facebook and Twitter may not be on the best terms right now following Twitter’s rejection of Facebook’s offer to buy the startup late last year. And the subsequent moves Facebook has taken to become more Twitter-like . But it’s the users of both services who are getting angry here. After I reached out to both sides about the issue, both said they would look into it. Facebook doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem on their end as VP of Communication and Public Policy Elliot Schrage told us, “this is a question more appropriately posed to Twitter — they built the app!” But it seems pretty clear that one app is exploiting another one, which would seem to be at least partially Facebook’s problem. Meanwhile, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone tells us that he’s looking into it. It seems hard to believe that neither side would even be aware of the issue, but then again, given that the two seem to be competing more and more, an app that allows you to use one of the services rather than the other is probably not at the top of the priority list for either side. And the app still works for the users who had it installed before this issue arose. But if you try to change your username or password, you will get the error message as well. CrunchBase Information Twitter Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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The wave of investments in “realtime” is continuing with today’s announcement from Cognitive Match that it has raised Series A investment from Dawn Capital. Terms were undisclosed but it’s understood the figure was in the £1m+ ballpark, in tranches. The UK company applies artificial intelligence, learning mathematics, psychology and semantic technologies to match content to individuals in, you guessed it, realtime. This content can be product, offers, editorial or advertising of course, making it a very interesting prospect for an outfit like Twitter.

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We were just forwarded an e-mail conversation between a Twitter API team member and a third-party developer because the latter was using a UI for its web-based service that was admittedly very similar to Twitter’s web application. The startup of course has the right to protect its assets and do its utmost to avoid confusion with users who might think they’re using a Twitter product rather than that of a developer making use of its API. But something else caught our attention in the thread: Hi, Twitter, Inc is uncomfortable with the use of the word Tweet (our trademark) and the similarity in your UI and our own. How can we go about having you change your UI to better differentiate your offering from our own? Thanks, First of all, I had no idea that the word ‘tweet’ was trademarked by Twitter, and after browsing its Terms of Service and API documentation I couldn’t find any reference on their website about this either. ( update: a commenter links to the US trademark application , which was filed April 16, 2009 and another one claims a trademark application has been filed in Europe in June as well) Second, I’m assuming that the note about the company being ‘uncomfortable’ with the use of the term was in reference to the combination of that with the closely resembling UI of the web application. If I’m wrong and this signals that Twitter wants to move forward with actively barring third-party apps from using the word ‘tweet’ in their names in the same way that it refrains them from using the word ‘twitter’, than this could have consequences for a plethora of developers. Should TweetDeck, TweetMeme, Tweetie, BackTweets, Tweetboard etc. start worrying? We’ve asked Twitter management for clarification. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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With a webcam built into or sold together with nearly every computer that goes over the counter nowadays you’d expect direct video-based communication to have massively taken off by now, but the reality is that it’s far from being as ubiquitous as some proclaimed it would become in the past. But maybe it’s just that there’s isn’t always that good a reason to video chat with your friends and family when you can just as easily use voice call or text chat to communicate with them directly. After all, once you’re connected you can just as easily get your message across without actually seeing someone. But Israel-based 6rounds thinks that there is a demand for a video platform that offers additional layers of fun, social interaction and utility on top of the basics of video conversations, and they’ve raised the necessary funds to bring the idea to market. CEO Dany Fishel and COO Ilan Leibovich tell me that they view 6rounds essentially as a live meeting point that comes with real-time video chat but also a set of additional features that should enhance the “sharing experience”. Sharing can mean anything from co-browsing YouTube to playing games, adding funny effects to a live video conference, interacting on Facebook together with your contacts or even shopping for things online together with your friends or family members. You really need to try it to experience how much fun that can be, and for that reason we’ve arranged invitation codes for 500 TechCrunch readers . Simply head over to this webpage and enter code “6techcrunch”. If you’re too late, check out these screenshots and a short demo video below to get an idea of what 6rounds is all about. 6rounds is not just a mere destination site, and wants to enable users to interact socially in real-time regardless of what their favorite social network is. The platform comes with an open API and can easily be integrated into third-party websites or services – starting with a Facebook or MySpace app, continuing with a plugin for WordPress or an embeddable widget in users personal pages, and ending with various extensions to IM, ICQ, Skype and Firefox. It also does a fine job at tapping into your social networking accounts to build a profile for yourself that indicates your interests, hobbies, music and movie taste etc. When you’re in a video chat you can click a button and a question will be proposed based on the profile of the person on the other end. This could be useful as an ice-breaker when you’re having a conversation with someone you don’t know very well yet. Sounds all fine and dandy, but how will they make money? The founders explained to me that they see four different revenue streams for 6rounds: 1) users could purchase virtual and real gifts (think ringtones, MP3s, etc.) and send them to other users during the video experience. 2) users could personalize their video experience by purchasing customized skins and choosing different applications for private arenas (unique games, targeted extensions and special activities). 3) affiliate fees from e-commerce majors: from music, movies, TV shows and books through the personal profile slideshows to a dedicated co-shopping experience in a variety of online retailer stores. 6rounds aims to earn revenue shares from these transactions and allow other developers to tap into this stream by means of the open API. 4) advertising, licensing and product placement: the company at a later stage intends to offer advertisers licensed versions of 6rounds as well the ability to insert video advertising units within the layers (think sponsored gifts, targeted activities, and promoted themes). The company just closed a seed investment of $1 million , led by Rhodium Investment Group and followed by private angel investors from the Israeli Startup Factory group, who previously invested $350K (November 2008). The founders had initially founded the startup with the help of family and friends on some $150K back in February 2008. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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If you’re like me, you always try to avoid storing or backing up files, even those that are important to you. It’s too boring, time-consuming and cumbersome to remember doing it regularly. This is where a new service called quanp (short for “quantum paper” and pronounced “kwan-puh”), launched today in beta, comes in. Developed by Japanese technology giant Ricoh , quanp wants to become your online center for collecting and organizing all of your personal “digital life memories”. Dropbox and many other services basically do the same, but the idea behind quanp is to turn storing and sharing pictures, music, videos, PDFs etc. online into a more enjoyable experience by making it more “visual”. The service is currently free and as Ricoh says, mainly aimed at US residents for the time being ( in Japan , quanp is available in free and paid versions since March). The US version is being managed by a Ricoh office based out of Cupertino in California. The structure of the quanp site is a tad confusing, but you basically get a suite of three tools : quanp.on (a Windows-only online storage client) quanp.net (a browser version) quanp drop (a desktop widget) Here is a quick rundown: quanp.on I had to unearth my Windows machine for quanp.on , but once installed ( system requirements ), the software works as promised. It lets you drag and drop, tag and date files you can then navigate through a pretty “3D” interface (Ricoh calls this 3D visual browsing). Files can also be easily shared with other quanp users over the web. quanp.net Definitely not as sexy as quanp.on or the widget, this browser version (for Mac and Windows users) doesn’t offer anything similar services have been offering for years. quanp drop “quanp drop” is an animated, customizable widget that sits on your Mac or Windows desktop ( system requirements ) and allows you to share files by dragging and dropping them into it as if you’re adding files to a folder. You need to register in order to then manage and share these files. quanp drop also requires Adobe AIR to function. Ricoh says these beta versions of their tools are mainly aimed at geeks and heavy web users whose opinions the company wants to use as a basis for further improvements. So give one of the tools a shot (personally I recommend the widget and the client version), follow them on Twitter , and post your feedback in the forum (or write an email ). The following video provides more background on the service. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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