Webware

Despite a bleak economic outlook, 2009 saw the release of some incredible new Web services. But every year--recession or no recession--there are always a few sites that close their doors.

We've highlighted 15 sites that ceased operations over the course of the year. A number of them came from big companies like Google and Yahoo--the latter of which did some major restructuring in 2008 that left it with new leadership and a leaner, meaner mentality towards cutting things that just weren't working. Others were simply ideas that needed a little more time and money, but couldn't get it in time.

Click on the slideshow link below to get started.

15 sites that went kaput in 2009 (images)

Article updated Tuesday, December 22 at 7:30 am PT with corrected pricing information.

Tax time. We're dreading it as much as you are, but the fact remains that soon after we ring in 2010, we'll be paying for 2009.

In anticipation of the 2009 tax season, we've gathered some preliminary information about tax prep software for the DIY tax-doers among you. There are noteworthy changes to H&R Block's and Intuit's software, the two developers that take up the lion's share of the tax software market and the two we therefore focus on in our coverage. The prices of some applications in the two product families have crept up $10 but others remain steady compared with last year.

If choosing among multiple products weren't confusing enough, you also get to determine if online or desktop apps are the way to go. To that end, we've rounded up pros and cons for these two tax prep approaches.

Taxes are complicated, and the software offerings are no different. We tried to keep information simple and organized in a chart below, but with extra charges for state returns and extra e-file submissions, it's easy to get lost. Keep in mind that this is a preview, not an exhaustive comparison, and that we'll return in early 2010--after we get our own forms in the mail--with in-depth reviews on some of the software products mentioned here.

What frequent drivers need is a way to search for information while cruising without taking your eyes off the road. That's what Robert Acker, president and CEO of Aha Mobile, thought when creating his yet-to-be-released application for iPhone and Android.

Before they put foot to pedal, drivers will set up a dashboard of buttons, each representing an audio channel for everything from the traffic report for the road you're on, to a search for nearby bathrooms and cafes, music channel, and your Facebook news feed. As we saw in Acker's demo at the Under The Radar start-up event in Mountain View, CA, pressing a button triggers a robotic voice that reads out the information you've selected.

The demo wasn't long enough to gauge the app's efficacy, but it's clear that application-makers like Aha Mobile are looking for ways to bring search capabilities found in a navigator to those without.

Aha Mobile will partner with providers like Yelp to match its content to your location. Expect to see an iPhone app in the next month or two, followed by one for Android. Aha Mobile is also working with carmakers to explore a radio implementation or other in-dash solution.

Split screen is Bolt's take on zooming.

(Credit: Bitstream)

We were impressed with the Opera Mini 5 beta browser, which came out in mid-September. At CTIA Wireless 2009, a smaller player, Bolt Browser, leaves its beta behind to chase after Opera's dominance as an alternative browser for Java phones.

We liked what we saw the first time we tested out Bolt as a beta (video review) on a Samsung Propel. Bolt's rendering felt truer than Opera Mini 4.2 on many sites, but it didn't seem faster. Now that Bolt has shucked off its beta, we find performance essentially unchanged.

True, Bolt has undergone some cosmetic alterations, such as a Google search box that's separate from the URL bar, and a welcome download manager that lets you download files as well as upload. It also caches pages now, so you can jump back to the previous page without reloading it. Bolt 1.5's new video manager selects the best of three delivery mechanisms for streaming video on your device, including triggering your media player if the phone isn't well equipped for playback.

But what of those speed claims? Bolt, a proxy browser built on Webkit, now claims that it's about 15 percent faster than before and compresses data at a 23:1 ratio. In other words, 2.3MB from the Web shrinks down to 100KB. That may be, but we pulled up our online stopwatch to run our own surf tests.

Without ever budging from our roost, we tested navigation three times on each of three sites, keeping the routine the same for Bolt 1.5 and Opera Mini 4.2. We would have thrown Opera Mini 5 beta into the mix, but it didn't seem compatible yet with our testing phone, a Samsung Propel on AT&T's 3G network. We're telling you this because we know what a difference carrier, data strength, and handset type makes in each user's result. Were you to run the same test, you might get slightly different numbers.

Bolt took 12-14 seconds to load and navigate on Nordstrom.com versus Opera Mini's 9-13 seconds. It took 26 seconds to load The New York Times site and two other stories on Bolt. On Opera, the same stories loaded in 19, 11, and 10 seconds. Yelp was about the same for Bolt 1.5 and Opera Mini 4.2, about 14 seconds, but one Bolt page ran 2 seconds slower. Our tests clearly favor Opera Mini for speed, but there are one or two other caveats and clarifications to consider before declaring an all-around winner.

First, Bolt renders pages more faithfully than Opera Mini, with sharper text and photos, and with all the photos intact. Opera Mini 4.2 tended to overly compress some, but it bought it speed. On some sites, Opera Mini stripped an image or two out, or the photo footprints drastically condensed. Bolt also has an interesting feature that Opera doesn't--the capability to split the screen. This is essentially Bolt's zoom feature. As you pass the cursor over the zoomed-out section up top, the same area is zoomed in below. The 5 key toggles split-screen view on and off.

So which Java browser prevails overall? It's a tough call: Bolt renders graphics more clearly, but Opera was speedier. We'll see if these numbers continue to stand up when Opera Mini 5 comes out of beta. In the meantime, try them both out and chime in with your own views. You may find that a few seconds are worth it to you to use Bolt's interface. Maybe speed is all that matters and you'll stick with Opera Mini for now. You tell us.

Bolt browser 1.5 is free to download. BlackBerry owners should download the optimized version for BlackBerry phones, which integrates RIM's typical operating system shortcuts.

The Accuterra topo map will get a slide-out control panel in version 3.1.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

As a wannabe weekend warrior, I'm happy to see topographical maps for mobile phones gaining ground on decidedly consumer devices. Interactive trail maps like Accuterra for iPhone make a lot of sense, especially with cellular reception and baked-in GPS chips strong enough in so many local hills and national parks that you can actively record your steps, share photos, and track your stats.

At CTIA Fall 2009 (see all stories), we got a sneak peek at the next version of Accuterra that will hit the iPhone app store. Version 3.1, which is expected in a few weeks, doesn't layer on a ton of features, but there is a new slide-out panel we like that makes the controls much more accessible. With a well-aimed swipe and a tap, you'll be able to toggle between the Accuterra topo maps and Google's maps. The app will also contain a simpler library organized around a search bar up top and traditional iPhone tab menu buttons below.

By the end of the year, you should be able to purchase extra content within the app, such as a video of your location or a historical Civil War walking tour. Accuterra costs 99 cents in the App Store; with local maps selling for about $3 each.

Start configuring Twitter from Slacker.com.

(Credit: Slacker)

At the CTIA Wireless conference (see all stories) this afternoon, Slacker Radio showed off its new applications for Android, BlackBerry, and Windows phones. Unfortunately, Slacker isn't sharing a time line for those release dates. That's not to say we'll walk away empty-handed. On Wednesday, Slacker will turn on Twitter integration, so registered members can tweet songs they're listening to in real time.

Know up front that this is a limited service that Slacker will flesh out later with those updated smartphone apps they teased us with. Think of the Twitter feature as a working preview.

Using a new feature, tweet your tunes from Slacker Radio.

(Credit: Slacker )

Starting tonight at 9:00 p.m. PT, a Twitter box will appear on the Community tab of Slacker.com. (If it doesn't, wait a few minutes and try again.) After signing into Twitter, you'll be able to configure Slacker to auto-tweet any combination of the following: whenever you change or play a station, a favorite song, a banned song, or a banned artist. According to Slacker, when the Twitter integration appears on those future Slacker Radio apps, you'll be able to manually tweet any of the above from the mobile interface so you won't bludgeon your buds with your musical taste, no matter how impeccable it is. Until then, it's automatic tweeting or nothing for you.

After integrating Twitter, Slacker will look to other social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace.

While Slacker's new Twitter integration gives cell phone rockers and crooners the chance to share streaming ditties within the Slacker Radio experience, it's not the only service to tangle with Twitter. Here are six more ways to tweet your musical faves.

Article updated at 2:50 pm PT with more details.

Yahoo's mobile home page gets pagination to show off multiple headlines without refreshing as often.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Last spring's CTIA Wireless conference saw Yahoo majorly refresh its m.yahoo.com home page for mobile visitors. At Wednesday's keynote talk, David Ko, Yahoo's senior vice president of Mobile, unveiled a refresh of that redo.

Most significantly, Yahoo includes pagination on the landing page, which imparts access to Yahoo's top story headlines and movie posters without having to reload the page. As on the iPhone, dots at the bottom of the news or RSS module indicate how many more "pages" await. You'll still need to reload pages to read the full text stories.

Yahoo has also fleshed out its RSS reader to display photos with their captions, and includes the capability to scroll through your favorites feed without having to stop to refresh the page.

Video is a hot topic in mobile, and Yahoo wisely promotes its own shows on the mobile page, in addition to a video playlist that makes use of thumbnail images instead of just text, as in the previous version. Also in the entertainment vein, Yahoo's enhanced mobile site displays movie play times near you. As with previous versions, movie trailers and Yahoo and Rotten Tomatoes reviews are viewable, and you can also buy tickets through a partnership wit MovieTickets.com.

The initial home page overhaul last April must be working. Yahoo reports "a fivefold increase" from this April redo. Yahoo further reports that the use of its mobile site has more than tripled from August 2007 to August 2009.

Yahoo's refreshed mobile home page is available now in 32 markets.

During his keynote, Yahoo's Ko also touched upon Yahoo's mobile strategy, which has become more focused on partnerships. In other words, gathering together a suite of Yahoo and non-Yahoo suites and services for visitors to Yahoo's site. This seems to return Yahoo to its original role as an Internet portal.

Ko also discussed the app store success of three focused, cross-platform mobile applications for Blackberry and iPhone: the Fantasy football, Flickr, and finance apps launched last month.

In the last three years, September has become a busy time for Web start-ups and other new companies looking to make their mark. Warring start-up conferences TechCrunch50 and DemoFall take place within mere days of one another, leaving a wake of more than 100 companies that are launched within just a week's time, all vying for media and consumer attention.

Last year it was even worse, as both conferences happened at the exact same time.

This scramble to get things ready often leaves companies not ready for the users they hope will flock to use their product. So, as a service to you, we've gone through and sorted out which of the products you can use right now. These are sites with open registration, and no special beta or invite requirements.

We've also sorted out which ones are aimed at business users versus consumer use. All of this information can be found in a spreadsheet embedded at the end of this post. But before we get there, let's take a look at the makeup of launches that were open versus closed:

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, we counted whether or not you could purchase or download them. All data was gathered Thursday.

This year, there were slightly less products launching at Demo, although that's not including the 14 "alpha pitch" companies, which are neither part of the main program, or by definition supposed to be live at the time of presenting. That said, there was a higher percentage of companies that were live and ready to go in the days following the show than the year prior, which came in at 75 percent compared with last year's 67 percent.

TechCrunch50, on the other hand, stayed around the same as the year before. Last year's show had just 42 percent of the 52 launching companies open for public use, compared with this year's 48 percent.

Worth noting is that there are a few sites that are on the verge of being open but that were not ready to go in time of this article going live:

• HealthyWage, a company that launched at TechCrunch50 will be opening up to beta users on Monday.
• Spawn Labs, the video game place-shifting service that demoed at TechCrunch50 will be available in November. We played with a demo unit at the show and everything worked great. The company is just working on production ramp-up to get it ready for the holiday season.
• Twirl TV, a DemoFall launch is currently open, but will close after the first 10,000 users sign-up. We marked it in this list as open, since we were able to register.
• Weels' site said it would launch on Thursday, however it was having problems with Amazon's EC2 service, and was expected to launch later in the evening.

Consumer vs. Business

Also of interest, and something we didn't do when comparing open and closed companies for last year's shows, is the make-up of products that launched at the show. Were they for consumers or businesses?

Not surprisingly, TechCrunch50 had a better showing of consumer-oriented products and services. That's to be expected though. The show is pitched at this audience and as a place for companies to pitch new software and services. Very little hardware is chosen to present--and what is has historically been for consumers. Demo on the other hand had more than a third of the companies aiming their products at businesses, or business users.

How important is being open?

Tech trade shows are never likely to have a 100 percent live at launch factor, nor should they. Many of the companies that made their debut at these shows are coming out of stealth mode and have worked very carefully to keep information about their service secret, both for a competitive advantage and to iron out last-minute kinks. Others have services that just plain aren't ready for big audiences and need a small and eager test group to help see if their creation scales.

What's often more impressive is how quickly some of these companies that aren't live, go on to sort things out and open up. Although last year that wasn't necessarily the case. Just seven months after the conferences many of the companies that were not yet live or open were still shut (including a few that shut themselves down). Will it be the same with this year's crop? Check back here in six months.

Previously:
Post-launch frenzy: What can you actually use? (from 2008's show)
TC50/Demo revisited: What's alive, what's dead? (seven months later)

Outside the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco earlier this week.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn / CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--At some point during it became evident that the Web 2.0 floodgates are no longer open.

Maybe it was when conference co-organizer Jason Calacanis asked one of the panels of judges what they'd thought of a round of pitches from just-launched social-networking start-ups like inbox aggregator Threadsy and photo-sharing iPhone app Clixtr. Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and former Facebook exec who will be portrayed as a "Silicon Valley bad boy" in the film adaptation of ," leaned his elbows on the onstage table, slouched, and declared, "I'm a little bit bored with social media."

Maybe it was when the TechCrunch50 conference winners were finally announced and the grand prize went not to a slick and shiny app filled with Ajax interfaces and social-media mashups, but to RedBeacon, a mundane-looking local services start-up that aims to offer an alternative to Craigslist and the Yellow Pages if you're looking for somebody to paint your house or cater a party.

Or maybe it was when several Facebook execs took the stage to announce, among other things, that the social network--the subject of perpetual hand-wringing over how it would possibly make money--achieved a cash-flow positive status for the first time in the second quarter of this year, earlier than its 2010 goal.

Web 2.0 has grown up, after three years of investment, start-ups, and media hype, and it couldn't have been more evident at TechCrunch50, a two-day parade of start-up launches that sometimes feels less like a conference and more like a fraternity reunion. By this point just about everybody knows just about everybody else; the launch demos were just as likely to come from established industry players as from hopeful young newcomers.

Not so long ago, the Web start-up landscape was dotted with dozens of small companies with a legitimate shot at getting huge. As recently as last year, it wouldn't have been entirely ludicrous for an ambitious entrepreneur to take the stage at TechCrunch50 and announce that he or she was hoping to build a new start-up into the next Facebook. But the big guys have gotten bigger, and everything in comparison appears to be niche, peripheral tools.

Innovation on the Web these days comes in the form of fine-tuned features and tweaks, not big and lofty new schemes. TechCrunch50's lineup showed that while there are very promising ideas out there, the new stuff is about improving existing concepts, not creating something off-the-wall new. ToyBots, a new Web-connected toy company, takes the kiddie Webkinz craze from a few years ago and infuses it with the thinking behind "hackable" household gadget Chumby. Winner RedBeacon, as well as used-car marketplace Mota and job-hunt site LocalBacon, all pitched themselves as better options than traversing the Craigslist jungle. iMo and Spawn Player are both add-ons for gamers, the former an iPhone controller app and the latter a Slingbox-like place-shifter.

And when something popped up at TechCrunch50 that was pretty darn original, it was met with some restraint. There was plenty of excitement over AnyClip, a new database site that indexes and deep-tags short clips from movies, but the judges rightfully expressed concerns over the difficulty of wrangling with copyrights and content owners.

It's a far cry from the days when, even in the post-Napster era, into music- and video-sharing start-ups that weren't prepared to deal with the intricacies of big media. And likewise, VC dollars were once flooding into start-ups that hoped to be the biggest social network in the world. The economy put a damper on this, for sure, but so did the increasing dominance of the likes of Google, Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter and Digg. The big news in venture capital on the Web these days is Twitter's alleged billion-dollar valuation and , not in a huge rush of investors heading for the next big thing on the Web--which is exciting nonetheless, because it wasn't all that long ago that these companies were just as small as those presenting onstage at TechCrunch50.

For now, if we want genuine, holy-crap excitement in the tech industry, perhaps we should be looking at hardware, green tech, edgy mobile innovations like augmented reality, or perhaps even enterprise technology. TechCrunch50 seemed to have the right idea by --but the judges, whose backgrounds were in Web and software investments, admitted that this wasn't their area of expertise.

There were blunt words for some of the companies at TechCrunch50, especially community-based sites that require a critical mass of users to stay afloat; judges seemed skeptical that the social-media fever of the past few years can still pack enough of a punch. "Why would I leave Twitter for this?" asked Robert Scoble of one start-up--the same Robert Scoble who, in fact, , which had impressive technology but little mainstream appeal .

The next big game-changer in social media might be out there already, and we haven't even seen it coming yet. But watching more than four dozen start-up pitches in a row made it pretty clear that most of the biggest splashes of Web 2.0 have come and gone: we simply don't need another news aggregator, another discovery engine, another question-and-answer service, another blogging platform, or heaven forbid, another social network. This is good. It's a sign of industry maturation.

And it's certainly not a bad thing that Silicon Valley's elite finally seem to be catching on to that.