Webware

Correction: This story originally misstated the status of PersonalRIA. PersonalRIA is still alive, but in hibernation mode until the market recovers.

Last year, 124 products were unveiled during the TechCrunch50 and DemoFall conferences. A week later, we went through and sorted out which ones you could actually use. As anticipated, most were closed off from public use. Was this a surprise? No, but it showed which companies were ready for business versus those that had a snazzy PowerPoint presentation.

It's been a little more than seven months since then, and I've gone through the list a second time to see what's changed. So what has? The number of products and services that are open for use has increased from 71 to 94. And impressively, only one of the companies that launched out of the 124 total are no longer in existence.

Here are a couple of charts that help put a face on the numbers, including the ones from our first go-around:

Note: We considered sites that were listed as having "private" or "invite only" betas as closed. This is because there is no guarantee that you could get immediate access once you signed up to use them. For physical products, like the Fitbit or software, we counted whether or not you could purchase or download them. We've also given both charts an equal number of products in the X axis to show scale.

To put things in perspective, a week after TechCrunch50 concluded, 42 percent of the products were open, with the remaining 58 percent still in private beta, in production, or attempting to get funding. Demo fared slightly better, with 67 percent of the launched products open, with the remaining 33 percent behind closed doors. You can see the makeup of this in the chart above.

One thing to note with these numbers is that the Demo conference had a slightly higher number of launching services at 72, compared with TechCrunch's 52, however the apples to apples comparison degrades when you begin to break down Web- and software-based services verses physical product launches--something we should have noted the last time around. TechCrunch50 only had one real hardware launch with the Fitbit, a Wi-Fi and Web-enabled pedometer and sleep tracker, while the rest were all software or Webware. Demo on the other hand, had 7 products that were hardware-based, including UbiSafe, a GPS beacon you could use to track people or objects, and ioDrive, which is a NAND flash-based storage solution for servers.

The casualty

Baseball season is finally here, so it's time we take a look at some of the best baseball resources across the Web. Whether it's fantasy sports, news, or statistics, you'll find all the best right here.

Fantasy baseball

BenchCoach: After you sign up for BenchCoach, it imports your fantasy baseball team and analyzes your roster. Once complete, it offers advice on how to improve the team. It even projects your success.

CBS Sports: CBS Sports' free Fantasy Baseball league provides real-time scoring and live chat. Its player news and stats features help you pick the right players for your team. It's highly-recommended if you want a full-featured, yet intuitive fantasy baseball league. Disclosure: CBS Sports and CNET are both owned by parent company CBS.

DraftHelp: DraftHelp gives you team depth charts to help you pick the right players in your fantasy draft. But its most useful feature is its "projected stats" tool, which tells you how well a player should perform for the year.

ESPN Fantasy Baseball: ESPN Fantasy Baseball Leagues are free. Users can create a public or private league. The tool's player news and stats come straight from ESPN.com. But beware: ESPN charges a fee for access to its in-depth news articles.

Fantasy Baseball Champ lets you know who to pick.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)

FantasyBaseballChamp: FantasyBaseballChamp provides users with real-time player rankings. Those rankings are based on how they're performing so far this year and how they should perform going forward. The site also has advice columns offering tips on who to add to your fantasy team. That said, don't consider it an ideal resource. It's a backup.

MLB.com: Major League Baseball's free fantasy baseball service is one of the simplest in this roundup. It boasts team management, stat tracking, and a league message board so team owners can communicate. That's about it.

ProFantasyBaseball: ProFantasyBaseball helps you pick the right players for your fantasy baseball team. Its "sleepers" section gives you information on players who might be off your radar but worth adding to your team. All the information is free.

RotoAuthority: RotoAuthority tells you who the top players are this year, based on current and projected performance. The site's blog is updated daily, providing guidance on who you should add to or drop from your team.

TG Fantasy Baseball: TG Fantasy Baseball offers basic player reports and depth charts. The site's Dollar Values tool tells you how many players at each position you should have on your roster. Its Projections tool gives you information on how well your players should perform during the season.

Yahoo Sports: Yahoo's fantasy baseball leagues are free, player information is always up-to-date, and the service's stat tracking is outstanding. But if you want a draft kit or scouting reports, you'll need to pay $9.99 and $14.99, respectively. Even though you'll have to pay for that information, Yahoo's fantasy baseball league is great. It's worth trying out.

Baseball season is almost under way. So it's time we all get online and start forming our fantasy leagues. Perennial favorite sites from ESPN, Yahoo, and MLB.com will probably top the list for most people when they decide which service to use, but more goes into fantasy baseball than simply signing up for leagues. What about stats? Did you forget about the news? Did you happen to remember scouting tools?

Hear are the rest of the sites you need.

Step 1: Form the league

There are a number of fine league-building services out there, but if you want to have the best experience, stick to these selected few:

CBS Sports Not only is CBS Sports' Fantasy Baseball league free, it provides real-time scoring, live chat so you can talk with buddies during the game, and adequate player news and stats to help you make more informed decisions. I've used it a few times over the past five years and find it to be easy to use and high-powered for a private or public league. Disclosure: CBS Sports and CNET are owned by the same parent company: CBS.

ESPN Fantasy Baseball provides an easy-to-use interface.

(Credit: Don Reisinger/CNET)

ESPN Fantasy Baseball I've also used ESPN's fantasy sports services for years, and I've been impressed with how much they offer. Leagues are free, player news and stats come straight from ESPN, one of the best sources for sports news, and managing your team couldn't be easier. But ESPN's penchant for charging for extra scouting help and more in-depth player information is annoying.

MLB.com If you want the most basic offering for your fantasy baseball league, you'll probably want to use Major League Baseball's service. It's free and makes it easy to set up a league. But I'm generally unimpressed with its stat tracking, and managing a team isn't nearly as easy as it is in competing services. It's a well-known fantasy site, but it's not the best.

Yahoo Sports Yahoo was one of the first companies to start fantasy leagues. More than a decade later, it's still providing an outstanding experience. All the leagues are free, player information is always up-to-date and reliable, and the service's stat tracking is second to none. Yahoo does charge some hefty fees for access to a draft kit ($9.99) and a scouting report ($14.99), but it's still a great service.

It's a fun time for sports fans. There's the Super Bowl extravaganza on Sunday, and a few days after that, Major League Baseball's spring training starts up. March Madness is right around the corner and in a couple of months, all our favorite sporting pastimes will be in full swing.

Because of that, I've found four relatively unknown sports statistics sites that will provide you with all the sports research you need to make more informed decisions in your fantasy baseball league or make you look smarter with your friends.

Sports Data Hub isn't just a statistical hub for those who want information about a football player's performance over the past year; it provides users with an incredibly useful stack of information that narrows basic statistics down to its most detailed level.

Do you want to know how Peyton Manning (quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts) has performed in outdoor stadiums on Sunday afternoons during the month of November for the past four years? Sports Data Hub will provide that information.

That said, the site isn't just a directory of stats. Sports Data Hub also lets users share insight with others through the site's blog and forums.

The only problem with Sports Data Hub is that it currently only offers statistics for the NFL, and it has not indicated whether or not stats for other sports organizations will be coming soon. But since it's free with registration, it's definitely worth using if you want to find out which players will give you the best shot of winning each week in your fantasy football league.

SportsGenie, much like Sports Data Hub, tries its best to provide users with the opportunity to make more informed decisions in their fantasy leagues. But unlike its competitors, SportsGenie employs calculations using formulas and algorithms to make predictions on a player's future performance.

Once you sign up for SportsGenie, you're allowed to run scenarios on player performance and team variables to determine if you should start a player or bench him for someone else.

SportsGenie is updated daily with player statistics to help you make the most informed decision. In fact, the company claims that it currently has a database of more than 750,000 games that it uses as a frame of reference.

Unfortunately, SportsGenie isn't free. Upon registration, you only have access to one prediction. Subsequent to that, the company charges $20 per week for its service.

Sports Reference provides the most comprehensive statistical data I've ever seen. Ranging from baseball to football to hockey, the site caters to just about every sports fan and allows you to find information about any team, person, or coach for free.

To give you an idea of the scope of information Sports Reference currently provides, you need not look further than its Baseball page. The company's baseball statistics date back to 1871 for major league players, teams, and leagues. Minor league stats are available for 1992 to the present and minor league box scores are available back to 1952.

But Sports Reference doesn't just cater to baseball fans. The company's football page features every statistic and game result ever recorded in the NFL, including Pro Bowl selections and draft picks. Its Olympics page contains data for "every year, every athlete, every sport, every country, and every event." It's filled with more than 150,000 pages of statistics.

Sports Reference is easily one of the best places to perform exhaustive research on sports figures. It's huge, it's useful, and it's free. It's a winner.

Although it originally started as a college basketball site where users could find any statistic they wanted on hoops players, StatSheet has quickly grown into a hub for those who are looking for statistics on the NBA, NFL, and even high school basketball.

But the main issue facing StatSheet is that much of its data is still incomplete. If you're looking for college basketball statistics, StatSheet is an ideal destination. But so far, its NFL statistics leave much to be desired. In fact, its NFL page is populated mostly by 2008 data and little else.

Regardless, StatSheet provides exhaustive data on the world of basketball. Whether you're looking for scores, player statistics, or coach information, the site has it all. It even boasts a chart builder so you can compare multiple data points, and gives users the option of embedding the site's widget, which contains statistical information, into their own sites.

StatSheet still has some growing to do and right now, it's not ideal for those who want information outside of basketball. But if you're looking for basketball information, StatSheet is a great source. And it's free, so that makes it worth trying.

Can't get enough of sports? Good! Coming Thursday and Friday, we're going to take a look at how to stay updated on the Super Bowl without actually watching it--and we'll find other related online activities aside from the big game.

• Click here for more Super Bowl stories.

If you're too impatient to wait for Google to release its own iPhone app or Safari-optimized version of Google Analytics you might want to check out myAnalytics. This $1.99 iPhone application (app store link) lets you see a general overview of how your sites are doing, and stores the data locally on your device so you can access it when you're away from a data connection. Considering Google's most recent release of Analytics requires Adobe Flash, this is the easiest way to get it short of getting your hands on a real computer.

While convenient, it is worth noting that myAnalytics can get bogged down if you intend on using it for more than eight different sites. Also, the current version only shows you basic numbers and a small chart, unlike Google Analytics, which lets you dig deeper into each component of your site. Version 1.1, which is coming soon, will let you view each individual stat on its own graph, which is a good start.

Related: Sergej Müller's mobile Safari-friendly version of Google Analytics (Note: this only lets you see page views and visitor counts.)

If you're trying to access Google Analytics on the go you can avoid looking at the Flash cube of fail, and instead see some simple, and colorful graphs and charts with myAnalytics.

(Credit: iphone-analytics.de)

I'll admit it--one of my favorite sites years ago was Hot or Not.

Not because it combined the best facets of MySpace and StumbleUpon before either site existed, but because it was devilishly fun to put your own picture up there and get a general consensus of how other people thought you looked on a purely superficial level. Admittedly, there are serious flaws in such a system. Your picture could be not your own--and the camera can easily play tricks. What made the whole thing so damn fascinating were the stats. You got to see how you stacked up on a numerical scale, which at the time was revolutionary.

Following in Hot or Not's steps is FaceStat--a perversion of this idea, letting others rate you in a dozen categories, and best of all, making all the results public for everyone to see.

Some of the categories are downright sophomoric, like "does this person look intoxicated" or guessing their wealth and political party. These stats splash out across people's photos with little animations and can be browsed one at a time to see the specific percentages of how people ranked your shots.

One big difference from services like Hot or Not is that FaceStat uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk to do the processing power, harnessing the power of the masses to do the legwork. Because of this, users are limited to just one upload a day, but will get results back in just a few hours. In our test we got our picture back in just 10 minutes.

To upload your own, just go here. You can add a shot from your hard drive, or Facebook. I have to give the site bonus points for not only letting you peruse your latest shots, but your entire folder of previous Facebook profile shots, which should make finding that shot of you that doesn't look anything like you far easier.

Let other people figure out your life story from a single snap shot using FaceStat, a Web 2.0 version of Hot or Not.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

This morning, it seems like everyone on my Twitter contacts list is talking about TweetClouds. It's an application that uses the microblogging service's API to create a "cloud" of the most frequently used words used in a given Twitter member's feed of "tweets."

It only works with Twitter accounts that are publicly accessible--some members keep their updates friends-only--and it takes a while for the app to munch through all the "tweets" and form a cloud. And like many small Twitter applications that get unexpected viral buzz, the server sometimes crashes. But when it's working, the end result can be kind of cool.

My TweetCloud.

(Credit: TweetClouds.com)

Judging by my Tweet Cloud, it looks like I most frequently Twitter about hopping around the grid of Manhattan. My most-Twittered word is "going," followed by words like "getting," "home," "time," and um, "party." After that, it looks like I Twitter about my job: words like "office," "work," "writing," "coffee," and "facebook" (the company I spend the most time writing about) are on there, too, as is "boston," a city I like to make fun of a lot.

Also in the cloud are some of my favorite things, like "running," "reading," and "pizza," and a display of my propensity for words like "dude," "awesome," "omg," and "pumped."

Another new application of note is TweetStats, a more quantitative Twitter application that crunches numbers on how often you Twitter, to whom you send the most "reply" tweets, and when you're Twittering the most (3 a.m. anyone?). CenterNetworks' Allen Stern suggests it as a way to spy on other Twitter users. He's probably got the right idea there.

Now if there were a way to mash up TweetClouds and TweetStats, well, that would be creepy.

One of my favorite things to get in my e-mail each week is the data report from News Corp-owned Photobucket. Think of it like the Google Zeitgeist, but for people's searches on the popular photo hosting site. While the report doesn't offer up every statistic, the creators pick a few interesting or pertinent things that make good reading. This week's tidbit? Politics.

The Democratic and the Republican presidential nominees (Edwards now obviously excluded from that list) are represented with several thousand search hits each. So what do the numbers show?

Democrats:
1. Hillary Clinton (25,400)
2. Barack Obama (24,736)
3. John Edwards (1,829)

Republicans:
1. Ron Paul (10,589)
2. Mike Huckabee (2,064)
3. John McCain (1,986)
4. Mitt Romney (1,785)

Clearly the Dems like to search. Despite getting more love from the media, Huckabee, McCain, and Romney combined don't come close in searches to Ron Paul. Take that for what it's worth. However, it could mean that people are trying to figure out what the guy looks like.

I would like to see other popular social sites release weekly or even daily stats. The very nature of site stats are similar to Digg, Delicious, and others, in providing entertainment and a window into the habits of other users.

The rest of the report is posted after the break.

... Read more

Earlier today Google unveiled some new and upcoming features being added to their Analytics service at the eMetrics Summit in Washington, D.C. Site owners will soon be getting a way to see what their users are searching for within the site, potentially making it easier for them to reorganize, or prioritize the what's on the page. Users will also have their choice of several third-party search tools that work with the new search analytics, along with Google Custom Search, Google Mini, and Google's enterprise search appliance.

The service is also rolling out a new "Events Tracking" section for keeping tabs on all sorts of user interaction including widgets, embedded movies, and outbound links--the links that take visitors off your site. The latter of which has been available for some time from services like CrazyEgg and MyBlogLog ClickTagging, but a welcome addition nonetheless. The other cool thing is that the new JavaScript code will update automatically with any additional features Google decides to add later on down the line.

Users of Urchin, the analytics platform Google purchased two years ago, will also be getting access to a new limited beta of the software. The service isn't aimed at consumers but lets businesses access metrics and analytics internally on their own servers using the same colorful interface.