JanRain, creator of some of the most popular OpenID software libraries and a forum-like communications tool called Pibb, has released a new SaaS offering for websites that want to become relying parties for OpenID.

We’re told that the service, simply called RPX, makes it possible to start accepting users with OpenID accounts within one day. This is actually the second SaaS solution provided by JanRain, the first being the similarly named OPX, which lets websites do the opposite: provide OpenID accounts to users, who can then sign into any other websites that accept them. JanRain also provides OpenID accounts to users directly through its myOpenID service.

Helping websites become relying partners is more important (at least at this point in the game) than helping them become providing partners. That’s because few popular sites accept OpenID and, consequently, consumers see little reason to set up OpenID accounts for themselves. This is an even bigger problem than the user experience issues that have plagued the movement over the last few years.

RPX is being marketed toward medium sites that want to increase their registration conversation rates, import user information from elsewhere, and build out connections to other social services via oAuth. It’s not meant as much for big internet sites like Blogger, Plaxo and AOL, who have become relying parties using their in-house technical resources.

The question stands as to whether OpenID will gain momentum through the long tail or adoption by a critical mass of the big players. It will probably take a few very popular services, such as MySpace and Facebook (through their respective Data Availability and Connect services), to popularize the protocol. But once they do, services like RPX should help the long tail take advantage of it.

RPX comes in two flavors: “plus” for smaller sites and “pro” for bigger ones. Pricing starts at a flat fee and then increases based on how many people sign into your site using OpenID during the span of one year.

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LiveWorld is a publicly traded company that’s been around since 1996 and is best known for its white labeled social networks. These are online communities that LiveWorld helps clients build up around their existing brands, and they often take a good deal more time and effort to set up than communities created on top of self-service platforms like Ning or KickApps.

However, LiveWorld is making a significant foray into “out-of-the-box” communities with the release of LiveBar, a widget-like site addition that brings community features to any website using only one line of JavaScript.

The LiveBar consists of a thin strip that sticks to the bottom of the browser window and displays social content related to the page. It’s reminiscent of Facebook Chat or the upcoming community instant messaging offering from Meebo. But instead of facilitating instant messages, the LiveBar shows three types of user contributions: Conversations, Soapboxes, and Shouts.

Conversations are essentially lightweight forum threads where users can post messages and solicit responses. Soapboxes are akin to blog posts and Shouts are like tweets in that they’re restricted to 140 characters. In the LiveBar’s simplest implementation, these pieces of UGC are associated with individual URLs, so when you move from one page to the next, you see different content.

However, they can also be tied together into so-called bundles so that discussions form across pages that relate to each other. The LiveBar can also be rolled out across multiple sites on different domains, with bundles providing social glue around pages and sites that were formerly fragmented.

The biggest downside to the LiveBar (which could also be seen as its greatest virtue) is its discreetness. Visitors are prone to overlook it entirely because it sits so low and short on the page. To combat this tendency, LiveWorld has developed a suite of widgets that hook the LiveBar into the actual page layout. The widgets can be used, for example, to print the most recent conversations or solicit new ones. I expect that most publishers will deploy these extra widgets to get the most bang for their buck. After all, the LiveBar isn’t free; like other LiveWorld services, it’ll cost you thousands of dollars just to get it up and running.

LiveWorld plans to add more flexibility and functionality to the LiveBar over time, with chat in particular on the way. This will put LiveWorld in direct competition with Meebo, although Meebo’s specialty in online instant messaging should make for a superior product.

Both Tulane University and A&E Biography already plan to use LiveBar on their respective sites.

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It’s well known that entrepreneurs are risk takers, but the continued activity of EB Exchange Funds (EB) – which allows startup founders to hedge their bets by pooling their shares together – goes to show that everyone has a conservative side.

The idea behind an EB Exchange Fund is simple: large shareholders from a diversified set of mid to late-stage companies each put 5-10% of their shares into a pot. They can then claim minority ownership of the entire fund in exchange for their contributions. And if several of the participating companies go belly-up, at least their founders can share in the success of those companies which exited successfully.

EB has been arranging these funds since before the first dot-com bust. EBX1 (each fund gets its own number) was established in 1999 for 11 early stage businesses. The first fund could have been a winner had not Zaffire, a hot optical networking company at the time, turned down a $6B acquisition offer and pushed for $8B from its prospective buyer (and this with only a $100M valuation when coming into the fund). But the bubble burst soon after and none of the EBX1 funds had extraordinary exits, so EB went on to form another fund in 2002. OpenTable, whose founders participated in EBX1, does however continue to do well and will probably IPO, making the fund worthwhile in the end.

EBX2 involved 26 later-stage companies that went on to have 15 exits and 6 liquidity events. One of those could have been Google. But EB founder Larry Albukerk didn’t agree with Sergey Brin that his company should be valued at $2B in 2002. It is hard to blame him; most everyone undervalued Google those days.

Five years passed before the third, and most recent, fund was established on the eve of 2007. EBX3 involves 30 even later-stage companies, two of which can be considered Web 2.0 plays. The names of the companies involved in an EB fund are rarely disclosed publicly, but we are told that 14% of EBX3’s companies provide online consumer services, 10% provide software as a service, and 27% produce other types of software. Other types of participating companies include medical device producers, financial services, media, and more.

EB Exchange Funds charges management fees in similar ways to more traditional venture funds. Its funds are designed to reward companies that succeed by not charging them the percentage fees that are imposed on companies without exits. While the system is a bit complex, EB basically makes a 85-15 VC-style split on liquidated shares.

The organization also picks suitable companies for its funds by piggybacking off investors and their due diligence. And it has safeguards in place so that if a company goes under or raises a down round within a year of joining, its founders are shown the door.

The idea of an exchange fund for entrepreneurs doesn’t come without concerns. Albukerk admits that venture capitalists are not always the most enthusiastic about having their startup founders effectively divest themselves of stakes in their companies. Because participation in an EB fund often requires the approval of one’s investors, the organization often must work with founders to allay the concerns of their investors.

The exchange funds are also not without competition, and from none other than the VCs themselves. With the surplus of money floating around private equity circles these days, VCs often offer to put money in the pockets of entrepreneurs for a chance to invest in their companies. Sometimes just as much money will go toward cash bonuses as goes toward companies themselves, all in an attempt to lure the best companies away from competing firms. This is a trend that Erick wrote about after interviewing the founder of TheFunded (coincidentally, EB Exchange Funds has also partnered with TheFunded).

EB Exchange Funds is looking to close its fourth fund with 30 companies by this coming June.

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Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch. There are also rumors that press is being pre-briefed on the product, although we haven’t been contacted by Google.

BigTable is a highly scalable database system used internally by Google to support over 60 of its products and projects. A source says Google has plans to announce next week that it will make BigTable available to outside developers as a service. Amazon provides a similar service through SimpleDB, a cloud database solution announced in December.

Google started development on BigTable in early 2004 and began using it actively in February 2005. The non-relational, proprietary system was designed internally to fulfill Google’s peculiar need for access to massive amounts of data at very high speeds (millions of read/writes per second). BigTable is based on the Google File System (GFS) and designed for distribution across thousands of commodity servers that collectively store petabytes of data. Services that rely on it include Google Search, Google Earth and Maps, Google Finance, Google Print, Orkut, YouTube, and Blogger.

The decision to open up BigTable would seem to mark Google’s challenge to Amazon Web Services (AWS) suite, which also includes the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for cloud processing power and Simple Storage Service (S3) for cloud storage. The Amazon triumvirate of SimpleDB, S3, and EC2 is meant solve the scalability needs of web developers with a utility-like model. Customers pay for just the storage, computations, and bandwidth they need, and none they don’t. While Google has yet to announce the pricing for BigTable, we presume it will share the same model as AWS.

If Google does indeed announce public access to BigTable next week, expect the company to follow up with cloud storage and processing solutions as well, since there are substantial synergies between the three.

For more information about BigTable, see a paper (PDF) that was written about it in 2006. You can also watch a talk about it given at the University of Washington in October 2005.

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A new desktop application called Songbeat has been released that allows you to search the web for MP3s using Seeqpod technology, stream those MP3s, and even download them.

Seeqpod, which we covered alongside Skreemr and Songza, is a search engine for MP3s that are hosted across on the internet. Whereas with Skreemr, you can actually click on a link to download a track, SeeqPod only displays a non-clickable URL to the file so it’s not easy to download several songs. Therefore, Songbeat makes it easier than SeeqPod to proactively collect copies of MP3s from across the web.

The client is currently only available for Windows, although a Mac version is purportedly coming soon. Two versions of the Windows client are available: a free, ad-supported version and a “pro” version for 10€ per year that gets rid of ads and allows unlimited downloads.

Songbeat says explicitly on its website that it “assumes no responsibility for any copyright infringements or legal issues” and insists that you “make sure that you have the right to download the music you have chosen.” Yea, that’s going to happen.

Also check out Freemusiczilla, which makes it possible to download tracks from any streaming site, including SeeqPod.

Seeqpod

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Skreemr

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songza

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LongJump, an SaaS offering that enables ordinary people to build and customize database-centric applications (for sales, marketing, IT, HR, finance, etc.), has launched a new offering dubbed “Database-as-a-Service (DaaS)” that allows the more technically literate to build applications with databases in the “cloud” (i.e. stored on LongJump’s servers).

The company is comparing its new offering to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service, because both remove the burden of having to maintain servers locally. In LongJump’s own words, DaaS shines by “cutting the costs and easing the hassles for entrepreneurs and developers who would otherwise have to purchase a database server, provision it, address data access and availability issues, manage backup and replication issues, and tackle security and data protection.”

Most of LongJump’s value has hitherto been relevant for the type of people who don’t have the expertise or initiative necessary to develop applications the old fashion way (i.e. actual programming), so it’s interesting to see the company introduce a service intended for precisely the opposite sort of person. The DaaS service can be used either to design applications that use the same data accessed by LongJump applications themselves, or it can be used apart from such applications to deploy wholly disconnected projects.

LongJump, with access to its REST-based API included, costs $24.95 per user per month, or $19.95 per user per month with a 12-month commitment. Competitor SalesForce has a similar type of API but one which is SOAP-based. LongJump’s offering differs from Amazon’s newly released SimpleDB service by functioning as a MySQL-based relational database service, whereas SimpleDB possesses its own architecture. For more information on LongJump’s API, check out the company’s API guide.

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HaloScan, a company that provides easily deployable commenting systems for over 489,300 sites, has partnered with JavaScript module provider JS-Kit to provide its user base with “one-click” deployment of JS-Kit’s ratings widget.

HaloScan users can now go into their regular commenting system control panel and check a box to show JS-Kit’s ratings widget alongside their comments. JS-Kit provides a number of widgets including its own commenting system, reviewed quite awhile ago, that will complement, not replace, the system offered by HaloScan.

While the ratings widget now comes as an optional feature alongside HaloScan comments, it does not have anything to do with the rating of user comments (as is the case with several commenting systems like SezWho). Rather, users are supposed to click on JS-Kit’s 5-star ratings badge to rate the content of the page, which probably displays a news article given the typical HaloScan-enabled site (DailyNews of Los Angeles and The Olympian are a couple of the bigger ones).

JS-Kit CEO Khris Loux is emboldened by this partnership because he believes that scale and prevalence are very important for startups that provide extra functionality for existing websites. He also expects a shakeout in 2008 among such service providers as those that fail to gain traction die off. We’ll just have to see how much room the market has for multiple providers of commenting, rating, review, and polling widgets (I imagine quite a lot). But if he is right, this could very well prove to be an important first distribution deal for his company to make.

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Yossi Vardi, founding investor of ICQ’s Mirabilis, has put an undisclosed amount of money into Tel Aviv startup AllofMe.

The company is developing a product, currently in private beta, with which you can lay out your digital assets (emails, photos, videos, documents, etc.) along a digital timeline. While few details about AllofMe have been revealed, it appears as though you will be able to include media files from online services such as Flickr and YouTube.

Founder Addy Feuerstein has described AllofMe in the following way:

“The idea is that if I or someone else has a picture that includes my son, alone or with friends, I or anyone else will be able to tag the people in the picture and transform these digital assets into part of my sons. When he grows up and takes control over his own timeline, he will have a timeline of tagged material from his childhood…We will also transform the timeline created by each person into a video movie, through a widget on an internet site [and] enable comparison of your timeline with that of your acquaintances, or chronological data files. For instance, you will be able to compare your own timeline with historical events of Time, and see where you were when some important world event occurred.”

via Haaretz. Thanks Orli.

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Last night we outlined the details emerging about Google’s social networking initiative, OpenSocial. Below are some screenshots of OpenSocial in action that we didn’t have time to include in that post.

Most of these shots show the integration of iLike and Flixster applications with social networks on Ning. A few show the integration of applications with orkut and hi5. We’ve also included an overview document below.

Update: See Marc Andreessen’s screencast here.

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Another product that aims to simplify your digital lifestyle is launching today. Give Fuser access to your email and social networking accounts, and the website will organize all of the messages from those accounts in one place so you don’t have to bounce back and forth between multiple interfaces to handle them.

Fuser is still in beta and I ran into a few glitches while testing the site, but it certainly has promise. You can pull in accounts from any IMAP or POP email service and the social networks MySpace and Facebook. Once you have loaded your accounts, messages from all of them appear in one collective inbox. It’s impressive to see posts to my Facebook wall displayed like email messages next to my actual email messages.

Not only can you view messages from all of your accounts together, you can also reply to them as with a normal webmail client. If you want to reply to a Facebook wall post, you can hit reply and either leave a note on your friend’s wall or send them a Facebook message. It’s quite surprising how much of Facebook’s functionality Fuser has been able to extract out of that social network’s website.

Beyond organizing all of your messages in one place, Fuser plays around with the social network data to add a little functionality. You can view a “leaderboard” of your social network friends to see who communicates with you most frequently. Friends are ranked according to how many times they have sent you messages or posted on your wall, and you can view rankings according to certain time periods. Nothing terribly revolutionary, but their attempts demonstrate how it is still possible to mash up Facebook data from outside of the developer platform.

Fuser is free and supported by discreet AdSense advertisements. Check out Orgoo for another message aggregation service. Orgoo, which presented at TechCrunch40 last week, differs from Fuser by integrating instant messages, video conferences, and SMS messages instead of data from social networking accounts.

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