Fav.or.it, the RSS reader and commenting aggregator in private beta, has launched what it calls a “conversation tracker,” which aggregates all your comments from around the web in one place and allows you to track what conversations you have partaken in, whatever the platform.

As found Nic Halstead says on his blog:

Decentralization has meant many services now let you follow a whole range of feed content and often times comment on it. The problem? That conversation is wrapped around that particular service and not around the original content.

Fav.or.it is tapping into some powerful ideas floating around right now. ReadWriteWeb reckons the conversation has left the blogosphere and leading entrepreneurs like Loic Le Meur want the conversations back on his blog, which he owns, not DIgg/Twitter/ etc. FriendFeed is trying to do this, but it’s basically just another platform owned by someone else, not your blog.

Conversation Tracker will show what posts you have commented upon before and now have replies that you may want to respond to. To date, fav.or.it is still the only service out there that sends comments back to the source of the original content. Here’s a video:

fav.or.it Conversation Tracker from Nick Halstead on Vimeo.

The fav.or.it API is still continuing to be developed, allowing access to a fav.or.it’s core framework of sending comments to blogs. Conversation tracking wil be included in this second phase.

The API means you’d be able to integrate all comments into your own blog – that’s a powerful lure and not something any other service can match right now, assuming all goes well for its public launch.

RecommendBox, a new site where friends can share recommendations, launches today. The site allows friends to make recommendations and request recommendations in categories like books, movies, places, clothing, music, restaurants and services.

Now, before you say ‘haven’t we seen that somewhere before?’, here’s their pitch:

Their idea is that while there are a lot of recommendation sites out there, what people actually recommend to their private social network is different to what they would just review on a public site.

They say recommendations and reviews are different – when you write a review you give your view on something. When you make a recommendation you are suggesting to someone that they will like something.

I have to say, the difference between the two maybe end up being completely semantic. But that’s their idea anyway.

Perhaps what’s more key about the service is that all recommendations and recommendation requests are private, so therefore encouraging a little more honesty and frankness out of people I guess.

RecommendBox has integrated with the Amazon and Google Local APIs – so it will suggest products and search queries for your recommendations. Future plans for the service include the creation of a collaborative filtering engine, a la Amazon and any number of other sites.

RecommendBox is a bootstrapped UK startup co-founded by Robert Loch, who has been running a networking event in London for a while called Internet People. There’s many a London-based startup that has attended one of his dinners or central London parties. He was also co-founder of Soflow Inc which last year morphed into Wis.dm. The other co-founder is Scott Rutherford, previous head of the development at Cominded (which launched Yabb recently) and was CEO and co-founder of Axomic.

ikordo, a UK web application for arranging meetings between busy professionals, is to cease trading (i.e. Falco*), along with parent company Volutio.

The information I have is that despite much interest from potential investors – one of which I understand to be Eden Ventures – Volutio was unable to secure a further round of investment.

Prior to ikordo’s launch last year Volutio did some research and found that 25% of executives spend up to three hours doing the mechanics of organizing a meeting with people outside of their organisation; a further 6% spend a whole day doing so. So that’s a space for a startup to address, right?

However, my sources tell me that the firm found out what probably a lot of people could have told them – although lots of people have difficulty arranging meetings, especially between three or more people, most web apps tend to be beaten by people just picking up the phone. Getting adoption for a new service outside the enterprise is probably pretty damn hard.

As someone who was recently on the end of an ikordo invite, I have to say the interface to it was pretty damn confusing and it seemed to take days to organise a simple lunch. Or perhaps it was just me?

CEO James Cook is now looking for new opportunities, but with two years experience building a startup under his belt I daresay he’ll be snapped up.

Update: I forgot that there is a free web app for arranging meetings called doodle. It’s quite good.

* If you don’t understand “Falco” look here (btw, where is Dave Green when you need him?).

It seems to be a day for shutting down. ScribbleSheet, a citizen journalism portal which only launched in September last year, is no more. It turns out there are a lot of other places on the Internet where people could write about politics, technology, business and culture.

The London-based self-funded startup from co-founders John Ndege (22, formerly with Accenture), and Brian Oula (22, former IT consultant, was a brave, but I’m afraid naive, attempt to reproduce the success of OhMyNews or Newsvine. As I wrote on their launch “I fear they will get nowhere near those sites”. Ndege told me then that Scribblesheet would be a better alternative than all the “dead blogs” people create and then let die. He appears to have been quite prescient. [Update: He blogs about the experience here].

If we had a deadpool on TechCrunch UK I’d put this ScribbleSheet there. Definitely not mothballed…

I also have to say (sorry guys!) that ScribbleSheet felt like one of the frothy companies that appeared last year where just about anyone was trying to launch a social media site. I would not take it as indicative of a ‘slump’ in the UK startup space by any stretch. However, it’s clear the bar is getting higher to winning investment, especially for first-time entrepreneurs.

UK startup i-Together last night said it was closing its Facebook application BlogFriends, an RSS feed sharing app which had attracted upwards of 27,000 users and was growing. i-Together failed to attract a second-round of seed funding for the project which was designed to give greater exposure to non-A-List, “long-tail’ bloggers – funding which was required to improve the offering. However, they seemed to struggle to wrap a definable business model around the idea, notionally advertising-based, and fell short of the 100,000 users they’d aimed for.

In a statement iTogether said:

“Blog Friends is actually an unusually complex and resource-intensive application to maintain and grow. It also is pretty original in the way it combines your extended, fuzzy social network and your interests as filters for your blog recommendation River. Because Blog Friends was so original and quite ambitious, we had no way of projecting accurately just how many users we could welcome before our solution began to creak.”

A “sister” service to Blog Friends, Buzzspotr, which creates a “buzz” around locations like cafes, and hooks into Twitter’s API, has also not attracted backing, although it has yet to leave closed alpha stage, and has received an enthusiastic welcome form UK geek observers.

The team that built both projects – Luke Razzell, Benjie Gillam and Jof Arnold – plan now to re-focus on consultancy work at Brainbakery and Weaverluke, a move which will effectively mothball the company they created, i-Together. They hope to launch Buzzspotr to the public at some point in the future.

My analysis is this: Blogfriends was a nice idea, and had it reached 100,000 users could well have been a Facebook application with a future, perhaps inserting keyword advertising into blog feeds inside Facebook. But the project did not gain traction amongst Facebook’s rather non-blogger crowd, and felt for a long time like a ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘must have’ application. People who read blog RSS feeds tend to use full-blown RSS readers, and there are very few examples of attempts to ‘mainstream’ RSS which have worked outside well-funded giants like Google.

Buzzspotr (reviewed here), however, has a lot more potential and it’s a great shame that the simple lack of a small amount of funding has halted its development for now. The team that built both these projects is widely known in London as being amongst the best in their field – and the Buzzpotr idea of creating a social network around real-world location is essentially sound, and has lots of possibilities, not least hyper-targeted advertising at a local level. Afterall, Plazes – which requires you to download a full application to your laptop so that it can tell your friends where you are, raised €2.7m last year from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. The last I heard, Buzzspotr now allowed Twitterers to talk to each-other in cafes across the US. Plus, it is platform independent of Twitter and could potentially hook into a number of messaging apps. Angel or seed-fund specialists reading this would do well to get in touch with the team and see if it cannot be revived in some way.

I hear UK startup Webjam is bringing in some deals. Yamaha music group is using the web community platform to spearhead grassroot music eduation. And the UK Conservative Party think tank CPS is using it to launch an e-democraty initiative. (Oh, and and UK university student newspaper Sanctuary is using it). I also gather they are getting an increasing amount of traffic from the US. The recent change in direction for Webjam seems to be working.

Last.fm has apointed F. Scott Woods senior vice president and managing director for Germany. He joins Last.fm from Google where he served as Head of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development, Northern & Central Europe, will oversee the expansion of the Last.fm presence in Germany, the country with the second largest Last.fm userbase after the US. (Not surprising as Last.fm started first in the UK and Germany). Woods will help set up a permanent Last.fm office in Hamburg.

The CBS-owned London-based social music platform, recently partnered with Europe’s biggest-selling daily newspaper Bild to power its radio service on the paper’s website.

• Last night at the PaidContent UK mixer in London (pictured) co-founder Martin Stiksel said on stage that Last.fm plans to start ‘scrobbling’ TV. It’s already working on scrobbling music videos and will do something with those as a bridge to TV, he said. The site’s scrobble software already indexes music files on users’ hard drives to improve recommendations and can do the same for streaming audio, even competitor Pandora.

It was a fairly open secret that this was in the game plan for Last.fm, but for Stiksel to say this on stage and indicate they were getting closer to a TV strategy is significant.

XING, the German-born social network for professionals which has spread across Europe and Asia and now competes with Silicon Valley’s LinkedIn, has released its annual report and the numbers look pretty good. It’s met its annual guidance for 2007 with revenues of €19.61 million ( about $30.98 million) and the member base increased by over 3 million members (through acquisitions and organically) reaching nearly 5 million. By contrast LinkedIn has a million members in the UK and another four million across Europe. It claims to have the highest growth in paying members in social networking. It has also established new revenue streams in eCommerce and advertising.

In its first full financial year, XING achieved revenues of €19.61 million and an operating EBITDA of €6.89 million. This corresponds to an EBITDA margin of approximately 35.2 percent. Earnings per share for FY 2007 amounted to €1.10. In other words it nearly doubled revenue for the year and achieved an EBITDA margin of 30-35 percent.

Over the last year it has acquired the Spanish platforms eConozco and Neurona, bringing its member base to approximately 4.83 million. At the end of the financial year, XING had approximately 362,000 paying members, up from 221,000 paying members at the end of 2006. A few weeks ago, XING says it hit 400,000 paying members.

The “eCommerce” it introduced in October 2007 contributed approximately €0.40 million in revenue, mainly from job listings posted on the platform. Advertising started around the same time and resulted in revenue of €0.75 million

I really wonder what the exit strategy is with XING, but Given that LinkedIn is probably going to want to scale even more across Europe and Asia, XING seems like it’s well on the road to becoming an acquisition merger target. In 2006 XING IPO’d raising €35.7M.

The TheNextWeb conference happens in Amsterdam next week, and they’ve announced the startups that will be pitching in the startup competition (below). Some 22 companies get to pitch and the last 2 will be chosen by the crowd. A few other notables are turning up including TechCrunch’s Eric Schonfeld, Kevin Rose of Diggnation (which will be recorded at the event) Robert Scoble, Nova Spivack (Twine), Chris Saad (DataPortability.org) and Scott Rafer (Mashery, MyBlogLog, Lookery) (He also works with Ireland’s PollDaddy. I am also going.

The startups:

• andUnite: Based in Germany, this connects users who do similar searches on search engines. The idea is to allow people to meet who have the same or similar interest because of the search terms they use. (Hmnnn…. Not sure it works as an idea but I’ll judge at the pitch).

• Backbase: Backbase’s main product line is its Enterprise Ajax framework for building Ajax applications. Apparently they’ve sold 3 million copies in 80+ countries.

• Bemba: This Dutch startup has a browser button plugin allowing you to share any content with your network on Hyves, Twitter or Bemba’s own network.

• Beezbox: The Paris startup enables companies to ‘engage with their communities’ on social networks. Looking at the site it’s not really clear what they actually do.

• ConfNetwork: This is a tool to facilitate networking at conferences – it’s in closed beta and will launch at the conference.

• CoComment: A well-known Swiss startup that aggregates comments on blogs. Plenty of competitors in this space already but lots to play for.

• eBuddy: Based in Amsterdam, this is a browser based chat and messaging service for MSN, AOL etc on the web or mobile. The recently raised €6.5M funding. Competes with Meebo.

• Empressr: This Ajax/Flash based web presentation company out of New York which launched in 2006 so not really a startup any more.

• Fav.or.it: Mainstream RSS aggregator and commenting platform. Very interesting company which I’ve written about several times in the past.

• Fleck: Based in Amsterdam, Fleck is designed to make the browser social with collaborative annotation of Web pages. Launched in 2006 but still privately backed.

• Goojet: is designed for low to high-spec handsets and enables you to customise your phone by organizing your “mobile space” with picture galleries, notes, message board, voting, RSS feeds, status messages and weather forecasts. They presented at Lew Web 3. They have raised a €2.3m seed-round.

• Hoera: under construction still. Hurry up guys…

• Introniche: Enables cross-promotions between niche sites. Sounds like a Web ring – but that’s unkind I’m sure.

• Lookery: This is an ad network for Facebook and social networks. They raised $900K seed round. The company has gone from less than 200 million impressions in January to 640 million impressions in February, and has hit the one billion impression mark. Not bad.

• Netlog: The Belgium-based MySpace/Facebook socnet site is across Europe with a 30 million strong user base. Has big backers.

• Radionomy: This French and Belgian startup is aiming at online radio, allowing anyone to set one up. Currently in French and English. Appears to be in beta.

• Symbaloo: A new take on the personal home page with the weirdest interface you’ve ever seen.

• Twingly: Twingly is a ping service and blog search engine that connects traditional media to the blogosphere.

• uberVU: This Romanian startup wants you to manage all your conversations in one place. Er…. ambitious to say the least.

• Wakoopa: Similar to what Last.fm does for music, this startup looks at all your desktop apps and suggests new ones to you.

• Wauw.fm: Wauw is a downloadable app that lets you access all your pics, movies, and music on your PC from your mobile.

• Webnode: This is a website builder and manager. Hard to see the innovation here.

• ZiLok : Winner of the public award at Plugg, this company pitches itself as an eBay for renting stuff.

It’s highly significant that The Guardian newspaper has just made a major hire direct out of Yahoo! in the US to begin building some kind of development platform.

Matt McAlister, currently the director of Yahoo’s developer network in San Francisco, is to become head of the Guardian’s development network from the end of April. He’ll be reporting in to Mike Bracken, recently appointed to the new post of technology director for development at Guardian News & Media (GNM).

McAlister was an early proponent of RSS and social media, joining Yahoo in August 2005, and even joined the Hack Day London event last year. Previously he was with online media title InfoWorld and was the first employee at former dotcom magazine The Industry Standard in 1997. I should also disclose that he is a former colleague at The Industry Standard Europe, which we launched in London back in 2000.

Bracken says we should now “think about the Guardian as a platform, and not just a publisher.” This is a major signal that the media group will now be looking to work with developers and tech startups.

He added:

“We want to allow people to connect, and will provide data that people they can reuse and be creative with a vehicle that will help engage smaller agencies and development teams in other companies to create applications.”

McAlister has added on his own blog that there are “plans to open up data and services for developers.”
It’s going to be extremely interesting to see what they come up with.

The Red Herring has released it list of top 100 Tech startups in Europe and they include a number of UK firms. Among the list (and I may have missed some) is blinkBox, Bragster, Miomi, mydeco, Mydeo, Refresh Mobile, Rummble, Silobreaker, SportsDo, StrategyEye, T5M, Taptu, Webjam, Wonga, Zebtab, Zemanta, DisplayLink, Trampoline Systems and Zygo Communications. The 2008 companies will present at the Red Herring 100 Europe event in Malta in a couple of weeks (a darn expensive place to get to and stay BTW) after pitching to an audience of entrepreneurs, financiers and corporate strategists.

Here’s the list in full:

24access Solutions BV
7signal
Adhoco
Adjustables
Air Semiconductor
Aito Technologies
Akamedia
alaTest.com
Albumprinter
Alenty
amiando AG
ammado
Appear Networks Systems AB
April System Design
Aptilo Networks AB
aquaMobile S.L.
Aria Networks
Asetek A/S
AutoQuake
AwayPhone
Axes Systems
Biosciences
Biosciences
blinkBox Entertainment
BLOGMUSIK
Bloxx
BLUE LION mobile Gmbh
Bragster.com
Brainloop AG
BuyVIP S.L.
Caleido
cellity AG
ClickTale Ltd.
ClubCooee
coComment
Codima Technologies
Collanos Software
communipedia
Conduit
Confidex Ltd
CoreBridge Ltd
Dapper
Design of Systems on Silicon
Dezide
DisplayLink
DIVOLUTION
Doodle
Dreampark
Edetiendas
Engago Technologies
Epsilon Telecommunications
Exabre Ltd.
eXo Platform
Experteer
EXPWAY
Extricom Ltd
eZ Systems
Fizzback
Floobs
Foamix
FriCSo
G.ho.st
Gameforge
Geewa
GFI Software
Gigle Semiconductor
Global DataCenter Management
Goojet
Greetz – Venspro
H-care
Holistis
hybris
IDIT I.D.I Technologies
Imagiin.com
iMedix Inc.
Independent IP BV
InforSense
inLive Interactive
iO Global
IQwind Ltd
Jagex Ltd
Kameleon
Kimia
King.com
kooaba
Language Direct
Lemonquest
LiberoVision
mediaclipping
mediapeers
MindMeister
Miniweb Interactive
Miomi
mixxt
mmCHANNEL
MoBank
Mobilegov
Mobiletech AS
MobiLuck
Mobiya
MoMac B.V.
Momail
Museeka
Muxlim Inc.
mydeco
Mydeo Limited
Naviexpert
NAVX
nCore Ltd
Netineo
NetPressDigital
Netviewer AG
Newstin
Next Generation Security Software
Noovo
Novaled
nugg.ad
O3Spaces
Ocio Media Interactiva
Openet
OpenTrust
Ormigo Gmbh
Packet Vision
Panaya Inc.
Panoramio.com
Piexon AG
Portal United
PROMIS Group
Properazzi
Pudding Media
Purple Labs
Qiro Gmbh
Q-layer
QOSMOS
Real Time Content
Recogmission LLC.
RedMere Technology Ltd
Refresh Mobile
ReVolt Technology
Rummble Ltd
SAFE ID Solutions
Sclipo
SECU4
SecurActive
Sensimed AG
sevenload Gmbh
Severa Oy
ShipServ
Shopall
SIDSA
Silobreaker Ltd
smaboo
Solaiemes
sonic emotion
Speakanet
SportBuzz
SportsDo
Spotzer Media Group
SSP Technology
Starfruit
Starhome
Sterna Technologies Ltd
Storytel
StrategyEye
Streamezzo
Symfact
T5M
Tablefinder AB
Tailgate Technologies Ltd
Taptu
Telepo
Telerik Corp.
TerraNet
TestFreaks
The GenSight Group
Tideway Systems
Tobii
Trampoline Systems
trivago
Trovit
TVtrip
UBIqube
Ultimate/Ralf Manstein
Valimo Wireless
VANAD Group
Vatera.hu Kft.
Visumotion
Webjam
Weblin (Zweitgeist)
Whatamap.com Ltd
WHISHER
Widisys
WIRELESS MUNDI
Wixi
Wonga
WorkLight
Xcerion AB
Zebtab
Zemanta
Zoomio
Zoomorama
Zygo Communications

Launching in Alpha today is Zemanta, the London-based startup which has developed a facility for WordPress blogs to suggest contextually relevant links, pictures, related content and tags using an internally developed semantic analysis engine. Eventually they will also integrate tabs for third parties who provide vertical-specific suggestions (tech or SEO, for instance). The upshot? Start writing a blog post and Zemanta looks at it and then starts to add the most likely links to the text, which you can then edit (something a lot of bloggers would kill for no doubt). I wrote more about it here.

You can now download a demo which works with Firefox and TypePad, WordPress and Blogger. It’s in alpha material, so don’t expect it to be full-formed.

The Zemanta team emerged out of Slovenia and took part in Seedcamp (a London-based Y-combinator-style incubator) last year and was one of those selected as winners. They recently announced a $1.5M seed round, led by Eden Ventures with additional investment from Saul and Robin Klein through The Accelerator Group. The co-founders are Andraž Tori and Boštjan Špetič, both hyperactive, smart young guys who I met at Seedcamp last year. They have since brought in an experienced CEO in the shape of Aleš Špetič, a former O’Reilly author and CEO of an IT integrator in Slovenia. As it happens, the Zemanta story is quite typical of the European startup scene right now – very “London meets New Europe”.

Zemanta WordPress Plugin Teaser from zemanta on Vimeo.

I don’t know about you but if I ever watch TV I really just can’t sit there without having a laptop open. It would just be so boring otherwise. I love reading plots for films on Wikipedia instead of having to sit through the whole thing. Yes, I’m odd like that.

So I am not surprised that the image of passive TV viewer is fading fast, with much of the population going online while watching TV, according to research by AIM-listed video search engine Blinkx. Harris Interactive fielded the online survey on behalf of blinkx among a nationwide cross-sections of over 2,000 adults in Great Britain.

The research showed that nearly 70 percent of online British adults who watch television go online while doing so, with 21 percent of 16-24 year olds always using the Internet while watching TV. And more adults who surf the web for content related to what they’re watching on TV are at the same time searching for products which appeared in the show (30 percent) than for the products which were advertised between the shows (27 percent).

And guess what. People are watching film, TV shows and sporting events online, with 19 percent of all online adults typically watching such content online. Who knew.

News (27 percent) and comedy (22 percent) lead the way for the types of video and television content being watched online

We are also multitasking to the max. Nearly 70 percent of online British adults who watch TV go online when watching television at some point, with 21 percent of 16-24 year olds always going online while watching TV.

Assuming you can get over China’s appalling treatment of democracy protesters in Tibet, you’re about to get the chance to win two tickets to the Olympics in Beijing this year just by adding a Facebook application. Yay.

The Samsung Virtual Torch Relay app allows users to pass their own torch to other users, hence creating their own little bit of Olympic history. Samsung are one of three sponsors of the Olympic Torch Relay, and is understood to be the only one using social media to promote itself. Once you sign up you can pass the torch on to your contacts, see your own Olympic torch fly around the world and win points in the competition for the tickets. You can also check up on who’s torch is leading among your friends in the Leaderboard.

The real-world Olympic Torch Relay begins on 25th March 2008, and finishes on 4th August 2008. It consists of International legs and legs in China, with a total of 21,780 Torchbearers. I think Facebook can beat that. Since Facebook wasn’t even around the the last Olympics, it’s going to be an interesting ride.

I hear the app was done by London-based Techlightenment, the same guys who did the Bob Dylan FB app.

Oh, and I called my torch “Tibet”. Pass that around.

A few weeks ago I said the recent drop in UK traffic to Facebook was not significant as it had happened over the Christmas break. According to 95% of the British media this view was wrong and the fall heralded the end of the social networking roller-coaster as we know it.

Today Hitwise reports that Facebook’s market share of UK Internet visits last week (w/e 22 March 2008) was equal to its previous record high of 2.16% during the Christmas week (w/e 29 December 2007).

I hate to say I told you so…

Nice to see the Financial Times catching up on a story I first broke in January and confirmed in February, namely that private equity house 3i is abandoning early-stage investing in start-up companies.

It’s a hard fall. In early 2000 it managed 750 technology investments valued at £2.4bn ($4.8bn) – half its portfolio – and was seeking to compete with the top venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. By September 2007, its VC assets had fallen to £734m, less than a tenth of its total portfolio.

I hope this is not some kind of attempt at a press relations strategy to presage a pull-out from its few remaining portfolio startups, like Taptu.

N.B. Kudos to The Guardian for recognising the scoop.

The London Technology Fund is running a competition for tech startups. Prizes include a share of up to £1m in investment funding and over £100,000 worth of training and advice. The deadline for submission of entries is 30th June 2008. Winners will be announced at a ceremony to be held on 29th October 2008. The London Technology Fund is funded by the London Development Agency and the European Regional Development Fund and managed by Company Guides Venture Partners.

I’ll look into this more to see if it’s worthwhile, but in the meantime check it out for yourself…

IBM is to establish what appears to be Europe’s first Cloud Computing Centre at the IBM Innovation Campus at Mulhuddart, West Dublin. Some 21 people will work in the Centre which will serve as a European hub to provide research and services to a number of satellite facilities to be built in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Not long after London-based advertising software startup OpenAds spent some of its $20.5 million in VC funding on changing its name for the for the sixth time, its confusing the hell out of its customers. Again.

This week well meaning company blogger/marketer Scott Switzer posted about OpenX’s priorities in 2008. These include stability, simplicity, integration and efficiency.

Hold on a sec, did he just say stability? Yep.

“Our current version of OpenX, v2.4, is the first stable release since the release of phpAdsNew in 2002. Almost everything (except the interface!) has changed. We need to work on making the core OpenX server as stable as ever. We currently have about 120 outstanding bugs, and more unverified bugs from the forums that we are making a top priority to get resolved. (UPDATE: v2.4 has around 25 outstanding bugs, and the remainder are bugs for v2.5 beta)”

Now, full points to a company for blogging its priorities openly, but the point about bugs has started a comment war on the company’s blog.

As one commenter notes:

“Thanks for being honest in the post, but 120 bugs is a lot for saying that 2.4 is stable. That scares me away from wanting to use it and switch to Google’s Ad Manager. You made great points against Ad Manager and I really, really want to use you all but if OpenX is not stable it is hard to switch. =( “

However many bugs OpenX has got, maybe it would be a cool idea to iron out the bugs first, then start posting about priorities.

OpenX has around $20.5 million in funding from Accel Partners, Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

I really like the guys from Intruders TV. They are, to some extent, Europe’s answer to (first) PodTech and latterly FastCompany TV. I really hope they are successful because creating original video interviews is not for the faint-hearted.

For those of you who don’t know them, Intruders.tv is a global network of video blogs covering the web 2.0 and technology ecosystem. What they tend to do is go around the major conferences and events around the world, interviewing entrepreneurs and investors. So far they have a team in Canada, France, United Kingdom, Ireland and Italy and appear to have plans for Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, USA, Germany, and Spain.

They are privately backed and their teams seem to be at every major event I go to.

But, here’s the “but”.

Right now they tend to post their videos quite late after they are recorded (sorry guys, but I just have to point this out) and until recently their iTunes subscribe button didn’t work (today it seems to work, thankfully). I don’t know why the videos go up so late when they are essentially grabbed interviews with people at events, but there you go. It’s probably something to do with the bizarre world of video editing. Or something.

A case in point is the filmed keynote by Reid Hoffman, Chairman and President, Products, LinkedIn, recorded at the Essential MediaTech conference in London on… November 20th, 2007. Watch it, it’s a great speech where he essentially says “scale first, monetise later”. [I tried embedding it below but it didn't work].

As for the business model… Well, PodTech hasn’t done too well and they had hype-meister Robert Scoble. So I fear for Intruders unless they can hit some kind of new model to fund all these useful interviews they produce. If enthusiasm were money they’d be rolling in it.

UPDATE: As per a comment below, I hadn’t realised until now that the CEO of Intruders is French video blogger Thierry Bézier who last year closed his personal site and redirected it to Intruders.

Below is a short interview with Bézier last year (in French):