Get Ready For Blekko: Public Launch On November 1

Blekko, the shiny new search engine that we first started covering way back in 2008 when they had a hand puppet as their mascot, is preparing to launch. Next Monday, November 1, they’ll turn the lights on and let anyone in.

If you’re really raring to get in at the first possible moment, the site will technically go live at 9 pm California time on Sunday evening.

We’ve been testing it since July, along with 8,000 other people in the private beta (our beta review is here). Unlike the massive failure that was known as Cuil, the Blekko team isn’t out hyping the site as a Google-killer. Rather, Blekko is being positioned as a place for people to create and share their own search engines based on trusted websites, and to get deep insights into SEO via a very transparent ranking system.

Will you like it? During the beta period, the company says, about 11.5% of users stuck around and started using Blekko at least weekly. That’s a very high percentage of repeat usage for a new search engine. The targeted search engine feature is extremely useful, as you’ll see when the site launches. We’ll have a full launch review up on Sunday evening.

The company has raised $20 million from a variety of investors, including Marc Andreessen and Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC.

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Comcast Reports Drop in Cable Subscribers; Blames Economy

In a post this weekend, I wrote about how the cable tv industry was finally stepping towards the cliff. And we’d learn more today when Comcast, the largest U.S. cable operator, reported earnings. Well, the numbers are out, and it’s not a surprise.

275,000 Comcast subscribers cut the cord last quarter. Its subscriber count is down 3.5% from the same quarter last year. To be fair, some of that loss was offset by a gain in 219,000 digital cable subs. Revenue was up as customers bought higher priced bundles of tv, internet and phone service.

During the earnings call, Comcast blamed the drop on the lousy economy. Always a handy excuse. Sure, many people are struggling right now, and it makes sense that the high cost of cable is an expense they can no longer afford. Comcast said, based on exit interviews, only a ‘small number‘ seemed to cut the cord for over-the-air signals, and they are not planning to switch to internet tv alternatives.

Comcast’s exit interviews run counter to other reports. PlayOn, digital media server software that let’s you watch over-the-top video on TV, says 30% of it’s customers have canceled cable after using its box. Perhaps they weren’t Comcast customers? PlayOn estimates its customer base saves $24 million a year in cable fees.

Boxee’s CEO made the point on CNBC yesterday that his box won’t necessarily lead to cord cutting. “Instead, it will usher in a generation of people that never get cable.” He predicts with Boxee, they won’t see the point in cable, just like young people don’t see the point in a landline phone.

The CEO of Verizon, Ivan Seidenberg made the same point last month, saying young people are “not going to pay for something they don’t need to.” He also says “over the top is going to be a pretty big issue for cable.”

Another company to keep an eye on is Clicker. It launched a year ago at TechCrunch50. Clicker bills itself as “the simple way to find, share and watch TV online.” Many viewers agree, based on feedback to my earlier post.

And one more thing. No, not Apple. Actually Yahoo. You don’t hear much about new products at Yahoo. It took the tech community 20 hours to notice Yahoo Mail’s first redesign in five years. But, 600 million user strong Yahoo has a product called Yahoo Connected TV, which gets you access to movies, tv shows, and other web services. It’s already built into TV’s from Samsung, Sony, LG, Vizio, and Toshiba. Crunchgear reviewed it last year.

I haven’t even touched on mobile and DVRs vs Live. Maybe a future post.
But, you can’t tell me cable tv is not an industry being disrupted. Not overnight, but now live on tv.

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It’s A Location Turf War As Google Rolls Out Place Search

Back in April, we noted that Google was about to escalate the so-called “location wars” by reworking and rebranding their Locale Business Center as Google Places. They’ve since done a lot of work on improving the area (despite an on-again/off-again war with Yelp over results) and they’re clearly feeling good about it. How do I know? Because starting today, they’re going to add Place results to Google Search in a major way.

Place Search will now reside on Google.com when you’re doing a search that Google believes is attempting to discover a location. And it will also have a home in the left toolbar (you know, where “Images”, “Videos”, “Shopping”, etc reside) as “Places”, which a user can click on to just get location results.

In their blog post, Google notes:

One of the great things about our approach is that it makes it easier to find a comprehensive view of each place. In our new layout you’ll find many more relevant links on a single results page—often 30 or 40. Instead of doing eight or 10 searches, often you’ll get to the sites you’re looking for with just one search. In our testing Place Search saves people an average of two seconds on searches for local information.

While it’s in the process of rolling out, you can use this link to see what it will look like. As you can see, a search for “Chicago museums” will bring up seven or so museums place pages it believes you may be looking for. If you want more of these place suggestions, you can click on the “more results” link at the bottom of the seven. Or you can click on the Places left sidebar item.

The big question, of course, is what this means for all of Google’s competitors also in the location space? You’ll note that Google rather prominently links to results from sources of place information like Yelp and CitySearch, so some of them could actually benefit from this new style of result. Still, many of them will no longer be the number one result for specific place searches. That could hurt.

That said, this new layout should be much easier for people doing the actual searches to parse and find what they’re looking for.

For their part, Google should make a killing on the sponsored links related to place searches. As you can see below, they’re already populating a ton of these right below the all-important map on the right side. Many place results have sponsored links along the top as well.

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Spotify Looking For A COO, Still Hoping For U.S. Launch This Year

Music streaming service Spotify has retained executive search firm Odgers Berndtson to assist them in finding a chief operating officer as the number two executive after founder Daniel Ek. A number of candidates, particularly in Silicon Valley, have been contacted for the job.

Our first source on this story said that Spotify was actually looking for a new CEO to replace Ek. But Ek says this is inaccurate. “We’re looking for a COO to help run the company,” he said by phone this morning.

I also spoke with Ek about the story I wrote yesterday about acquisition attention from Google and Apple. Ek says Spotify has had absolutely no acquisition discussions with Apple at all, ever. “We don’t want to sell, we are here for the long term,” he said.

On the Google story he was less forthcoming, saying only that the story wasn’t correct in its entirety. “Google is a great partner,” he said.

I also asked Ek, since I had him on the phone, about Spotify’s U.S. launch plans. The company has been talking about a U.S. launch for well over a year, but it hasn’t happened yet. The complications appear to be over their very strong desire to offer a free version of the service here, as they do in Europe. Ek says that discussions with labels are ongoing, and that he still “hopes for a U.S. launch this year.”

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Intel And Another 70 Companies Launch Cloud 2015 Open Data Center Alliance

Today at a press event in San Francisco, Intel and a group of 70 companies announced an alliance to build a system of open standards for cloud computing. Part of the Cloud 2015 initiative, The Open Data Center Alliance makes it easier for customers to deploy cloud computing solutions, as it focuses on interoperability, flexibility and unifying industry standards. The Open Data Center Alliance will represent more than $50 billion in annual IT investment.

Intel, which powers 9 out 10 of the servers for the cloud today, will be a technical advisor and non voting member in the alliance. The companies involved are cross-vertical including Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, BMW and JP Morgan Chase, joining together with Intel towards the ultimate endgoal of simplified virtual computing. While Google, Amazon Yahoo are missing from the list, Intel commented that membership is still open, “There’s a lot of people still in the pipeline. We’re adding people by the minute.”

Grappling with the fact that there will be another one billion people and another 15 billion devices on the Internet in 2015, the Cloud 2015 vision to simplify virtual computing is three pronged: Federated (so clients can better and more securely share data), automated (more efficiency in moving data), and “client-aware” (a cloud API that is device aware, taking into account whether a user is on a phone or a laptop). Intel executives emphasized that communication between the players will be key in achieving the initiative’s goals of decreased IT spending and increased effiency.

“The Open Center Alliance is way to create and unify the voice of cloud consumers and cloud users, using usage models as a way to specify requirements. We’ve never seen this approach before.” said Intel representative Billy Cox.

From the hardware side, Intel also announced an expansion of its Cloud Builders program, which allows companies like Citrix, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp and VMware to provide solutions for many of the issues brought up by the alliance and the usage model roadmap.

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Canada Gets Real About Seed Investing With New $45 Million Fund

If you need more proof that seed investing is taking over the world, just look up north to Canada. Three years ago, a group of angels started Montreal Startup, a $5 million seed fund. This week, they are launching their second, $45 million fund under a new name, Real Ventures. It will invest in startups across Canada from Montreal to Vancouver, but mostly within 250 kilometers of Montreal where most of the partners are based.

The partners include serial entrepreneur Austin Hill, John Stokes, and Jean-Sebastien Cournoyer, Daniel Drouet, Alan MacIntosh, and Mark MacLeod. The fund will invest in web, mobile, software, digital media, social and casual gaming startups.

A $45 million fund is small by venture capital standards, but it is actually quite large for a seed fund. New York City’s Founder Collective, for instance, is a $40 million fund. The more seed capital gets spread across different pockets of entrepreneurship, the more chance there will be for new startup hubs to grow or feed into the bigger hubs in California and, increasingly, New York. You can learn more about Real Ventures and its investing philosophy in this blog post.

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Borders’ Kobo Adds Newspaper, Magazine Subscriptions

Want an alternative to the Amazon Kindle/Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader duopoly? Borders’ Kobo is always a choice, and now there’s word that you can newspapers and magazines on there, “there” being the the Kobo Wireless eReader device as well as the iOS Apps.

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