Flick.IM’s Back With IM As A Platform

The guys who spent a lazy weekend writing a free iPhone IM client that currently has 30,000 users, Flick.IM, are back with a web chat client for AIM, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber. I know, another multi-service chat client - *sigh*. There’s already Meebo, eBuddy, KoolIM, and a host of other services integrating existing chat services. However, Flick.IM has a rather significant twist, they’re acting as a platform for integrating web applications into IM.


FlickIM is letting applications integrate right into chat messages or as widgets along a sidebar. For instance, a Yelp widget will let users search for restaurants and send the reviews to friends through a chat message. Similar to Facebook, users will be able to add and remove the applications and notify their friends about what apps they have installed. Another startup, Imified, integrates web applications into IM, but does this for desktop chat applications through commands to chat bots. Facebook is also a company to watch for this functionality.

For now Flick.IM has launched with a handful applications, but will soon let developers add their own widgets and services to the platform through an API released in the next two to three weeks. All the new applications and information will be available at Flickapps.com. While the depth of the API is still under scrutiny, it may even let developers provide contextually based services by scanning user’s conversations (with permission). For instance, if you’re talking about a movie, a Flick.IM application could automatically provide links and times for that movie.

Their starting applications included six widgets and two integrated services. The integrated services allow you to embed photos and videos right into chat messages. Photos are shared by uploadeding them directly, while videos can pulled from a YouTube video search by typing “/video VIDEONAME”. Non-Flick.IM users will get links to the pictures and videos instead of an embed. Widgets include restaurant search on Yelp, Google Gmail, Last.fm radio, LiveNation, Yoink’d video search, and a beercam for kicks. The Yelp widget has the greatest amount of integration right now. It lets you run a quick restaurant search and send the link to your chat box.

ZiiTrend: The Latest Social Prediction Website

Do you think you know who is going to buy Facebook, or how many copies of Halo 3 will be sold by the end of the year? You can make your make your best guess on ZiiTrend, a social prediction site that launched on Monday. (The answers to those two questions right now are: No one and 6.2 million, respectively).

ZiiTrend comes up with a group prediction based on every player’s vote. Unlike a true prediction market like Trendio, though, where players actually trade virtual stocks around events and predictions are derived from the resulting price, ZiiTrend makes things simpler. You simply make a prediction, and ZiiTrend’s neural-network algorithm blends your answer with everyone else’s to come up with a statistically valid answer that captures the crowd’s intelligence. Rather than revolving around trading, which is hard for many people to grasp, the site’s main appeal is designed to be more around social news exchange. Similar to PlaytheDay, which creates group predictions out of a quiz, ZiiTrend wants to make the whole process accessible to more people.

Members who predict correctly are rewarded with higher status and their votes carry more weight when they make further predictions. The clever bit is a tag-based scoring system that makes the votes of good predictors count more only on questions whose topics match the tags that they’ve proven their expertise on. So if you correctly answer the question, “Who will win the 2008 Oscar award for best actor?”, your personal tag score will go up for any future questions that include the words “Oscar award” or “best actor,” but not for ones about “oil prices.” That’s a steal-able feature for any startups out there trying to build expert databases or knowledge-management systems.

AOL Is Gussying Itself Up for an Advertising IPO

to prepare for a possible IPO, AOL will soon fold in all of the ad sales people who currently sell inventory across AOL.com (the group Mike Kelly oversaw) into Platform A, which is primarily driven by revenues from Advertising.com. In other words, AOL’s money-making focus will shift from selling ads on its own Web properties to selling ads on other Websites. AOL’s total advertising revenues are running at about $2 billion a year($522 million in the June quarter), and should eclipse subscription revenues soon (which were $691 million in the June quarter, and dropping like a rock). Falco’s bet is that those ad networks are the right eggs to offer up to the public markets. But this might end up being another rainbow-chasing move on AOL’s part.
Based on the past year’s deals in the online advertising space (Google/Doubleclick, Yahoo/Right Media, Yahoo/BlueLithium, Microsoft/aQuantive), Time Warner could expect to get a valuation of 18 to 20 times EBITDA for Platform A. I am not going to try to back into an EBITDA number for AOL’s advertising businesses, which it does not disclose. But another way to look at it is that Google agreed to pay 10 times revenues for DoubleClick. You could argue they are overpaying, assuming the deal doesn’t get squashed in Washington, because they are Google. But that would give Platform A alone a top-end valuation of $20 billion, which is what all of AOL was valued at when Google took its 5 percent stake.