Below are four of the newest startups according to Killer Startups for the period ending May 16, 2008. Check out previous Killer Startups posts.

Myartplot - Global Arts and Crafts Community

The idea behind Myartplot (MAP) is that artists, artisans and crafters have suffered since the beginning of time from a lack of cohesion due to a deficiency in technology. MAP hopes to change that by providing a community portal where artists from around the world can exchange ideas and knowledge and publish and sell their works directly to the consumer. The site is divided into two user groups: Participants aka artists, and Shoppers.

SubHub - Design and Launch Websites

SubHub is an internationally-operating, web-based firm that designs, constructs, and launches websites for their customers. Customers come to SubHub to create their website. From there, those customers have a platform for which they may generate income by charging for subscriptions or memberships, as well ads for advertisements, and eCommerce ventures. Customers may choose from four different service packages, all with varying degrees of features and associated respective prices.

XtremeNow - Extreme Sports Video Portal

XtremeNow is a video site where anyone can watch streaming videos of extreme athletes doing what they do best. Either enter a search term into the search bar or narrow down your search by selecting one of: Motox, Skysurfing, Rollerblade, Barefoot Ski, BMX, Wakeboard, Snowboard or Skateboard. There are currently over 1,000 videos to choose from and they are generally of high quality and accompanied by an appropriate soundtrack.

FuelFrog - Helping You Save Money

With fuel prices soaring and predictions of $200 a barrel, the world is feeling the squeeze. Everything from food prices to airline luggage fees are going up. One way to be smart about your fuel costs is to use FuelFrog. FuelFrog tracks how much fuel you expend. It takes the information you input—how much gas you used, how much money you spent, etc—and compiles trend information about your fuel habits.

Partner Links
– Web Jobs
– NY Tech Directory
– CenterNetworks LinkedIn Business Group
– CenterNetworks Facebook Fan Page
– Purchase an Apple iPhone

Source:CenterNetworks

Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington is reporting that technology site Ars Technica has been acquired by Wired. Arrington notes that his sources suggest the price is around $25 million. SAI also has received confirmation on the sale.

Ars will become a sub-brand under the Wired Digital brand and CondéNet will take over ad sales. Ars Technica has a very strong and loyal userbase - this is evident by their continual Digg frontpage status.

This type of acquisition makes sense from the purchaser perspective. Ars isn’t run by one voice that "powers" the brand - rather Ars has multiple writers that contribute to the overall site. When I think of most of the major blogs, there is one (sometimes two) names that are behind the blog. This is why we haven’t seen many acquisitions of these single-force blogs - potential suitors wonder if the blog can exist without the name behind it. We will certainly see some tech blogs acquired this year, there is money around and some of the blogs have large brand recognition.

Here’s Compete’s U.S. Ars Technica unique visitor count:

In its February issue, Wired promises “The Untold Story” of the iPhone. But as typical for the magazine, they instead deliver a rehash of things you mostly already know, spread over 3,336 lavish words. Here, instead, are 378 words, in bullet points, containing the truly juicy tidbits Wired writer Fred Vogelstein was able to turn up. My favorite? That when Steve Jobs gets really mad, he doesn’t scream. He stares.

• In the fall of 2006, in Apple’s boardroom, the prototype flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly. Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.” The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums.

• For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.
• Just weeks before Macworld, Jobs had a prototype to show wireless boss Stan Sigman. Sigman, uncharacteristically effusive, called the iPhone “the best device I have ever seen.”
• About 40 percent of iPhone buyers are new to AT&T’s rolls, and the iPhone has tripled the carrier’s volume of data traffic in cities like New York and San Francisco.
• In February 2005, in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Jobs laid out his plans before a handful of Cingular senior execs, including Sigman. Apple was prepared to consider an exclusive arrangement to get that deal done. But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself.
• At one point, Jobs met with some executives from Verizon, who promptly turned him down.
• Around Thanksgiving of 2005, eight months before a final agreement was signed, he instructed his engineers to work full-speed on the project. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.
• Internally, the project was known as P2, short for Purple 2.
• Whenever Apple executives traveled to Cingular, they registered as employees of Infineon, the company Apple was using to make the phone’s transmitter.
• Even the iPhone’s hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes.
• By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it.

Drew Schutte, the longtime publisher of Conde Nast’s Wired, will now run the sales side of The New Yorker and its website. David Carey, publisher of Portfolio, is adding Wired to his responsibilities. [BusinessWeek]

Chris Anderson’s BookTour is one of those why-didn’t-I-think-of-that sites. It scratches a specific itch to bring together touring book authors and the people who go to see them. Bespectacled novelist groupies are spared from the non-bookish mob at Upcoming — and vice versa. A billion-dollar idea? Of course not. But a required, um, bookmark among the New York literati by March? Yeah, I’ll bet a buck on that. A side note from BookTour’s About page: San Franciscans spend more per capita than residents of any other American city on books and wine.

Why all the lists heading into 2008? Well, laziness. That, and the urge to reflect on the year gone by. No, mostly laziness. And in that spirit, we present you Valleywag’s top 10 list of top 10 lists. Oh yeah — our lazy, it’s meta.

The Web’s top 10 top 10 lists
• 10. Wired’s “The 10 Best Gadget Ads of 2007” makes our list because it points out why everyone wants an iPhone. Apple’s genius ads.
• 9.The New York Times’ “Buzzwords 2007” can has number 9.
  
  
• 8. eMarketer’s Predictions for 2008 makes our list because we’re so handy with their charts.
  
  
• 7. Tumblr founder David Karp’s 2008 Tech Predictions.
  

  Google will launch the Web Service competitors GStorage, GCompute, and GAmazonFlexiblePaymentService.

• 6.Your Best Shot 2007 Samplr, collected by Flickr, features the most interestingness of any list in our top ten.
  
  
• 5.Silicon Alley VC blogger Fred Wilson sure can pick ‘em. No, not startups. Rock bands. Like the ones in his Top Ten Records 2007.
  function streampadPop(l,n){window.open(”http://flash.streampad.com/playerL.swf?autostart=yes&list=”+l+”&songNumber=”+n, “Streampad”,”toolbar=no,width=200,height=300,resizable=yes”);}
  
• 4.The second Wired entry — out of nearly a dozen folks, so there’s real competition here! — to make our list has to be The Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 because it reviews how we did playing God last year.
  

  Cancer-fighting Clostridium bacteria
  Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment mean that a cancer diagnosis is no longer always a death sentence. But certain oxygen-starved parts of tumors are still difficult to reach with the old methods. Enter the Clostridium family of bacteria. Injected into the body, they grow and multiply only in the oxygen-poor parts of cancer tumors. In September, scientists in the Netherlands showed they could arm Clostridium bacteria with therapeutic protein genes, essentially creating search-and-destroy tumor missiles.

• 3.We’re not going to pretend we understand the Large Hadron Collider, which comes online in 2008, according to Ars Technica’spredictions for 2008. “The Higgs boson, supersymmetric particles, and dark matter candidates all beckon,” Chris Lee writes. We’ll just show you this neat video.
  newVideoPlayer(”Ars_LHC.flv”, 475, 376);
  

• 2.Tech CEOs say the darndest things, don’t they? Like remember when Zuck said media changes every 100 years? Wired’s editors do, and they bring it all back in their 2007 Foot-in-Mouth Awards.
  

  There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get. — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the iPhone, which is outselling all Windows Mobile phones combined.

• 1. How’s this for meta? We’re going to declare Valleywag’s own “The Web’s top 10 top 10 lists” the winner. Meta FTW!

(Photo by andrer69)

The libertarians are coming! But don’t let a Republican explain it to you. Instead, crazy fun local lefties the San Francisco Bay Guardian report on the Ron Paul phenomenon. I’ve culled some easily-absorbed bullet points from the lengthy article.

• It’s rare to see GOP campaign signs in Mission District windows and beat-up old cars, or crowds of enthusiastic supporters flooding the city’s streets.

• Paul’s frank assessment of the United States as an overreaching empire [remember, this is the Bay Guardian] got his campaign rolling.
• Paul’s libertarian platform is attracting support from lifelong members of the National Rifle Association to medical marijuana activists to disenchanted college students.
• One unifying theme among all Paul supporters is their absolute belief in their candidate’s integrity. “My gut tells me Ron Paul is different.” “Ron Paul’s not trying to sell you on himself; he’s just selling you the message of freedom.” “He is the only Republican nominee who would not steal the election.”
• Paul’s Dec. 16 fundraising push raised more than $6 million in a 24-hour period, breaking the record for funds raised in one day held by the John Kerry 2004 campaign.
• Most of the donations to the Paul campaign are small contributions from committed individuals. The average size of each donation is around $100.
• There is no political mystery to Paul; he has been articulating the same message — one of limited constitutional government, low taxes (if any), and free markets — since he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1976 from his home state of Texas.
• Paul is a self-proclaimed noninterventionist and has opposed the war in Iraq from the start. He is by no means liberal or progressive; he’s more a classic conservative who opposes government regulation.
• He sees the USA Patriot Act as a breech of civil liberties; wants to stop US involvement in the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and other free trade agreements; and supports bringing American troops home from Iraq posthaste.
• He is also staunchly antichoice, introduced legislation in 2004 to repeal bans on assault weapons, and wants to beef up the US’s borders.
• There are more than 80,000 Ron Paul online meet-up members around the country — 452 in the San Francisco group as of the writing of this article — and most of them find themselves in complete agreement with Paul’s perspectives. “We’re right where Kerry was in 2004 going into the primaries, when Dean had already been crowned winner by the media,”

(Photo by Anarchyware)

Source:Valleywag

“I just threw away 5 months of Wired, unread. There may be some newly-minted jargon for that, but I have no way of knowing.” - Adam Lisagor

In a shareholders’ conference call yesterday, Pay By Touch CFO Robert Sigler told investors the company plans to raise $150 million in 2008. This after Pay By Touch management has already burned through over $300 million since its founding and cost some 250 jobs just this fall. Tell you what, I hope Sigler and returning COO Eula Adams find their investors. Beause whoever they are, maybe I can find something to sell them, too. (Photo of the Brooklyn Bridge by absolutwade)

Source:Valleywag

AOL CEO Randy Falco is a lot like Santa Claus, really. Why, he’s downright jolly when laying people off, and he has an uncanny ability to fly whenever and whereever he wants. So who better to pen a year-end missive to rally the elves? Here’s that letter, conveniently downsized to just 100 words.

It’s over a year since I came to AOL. When I arrived it needed work. More than I expected. Pageviews were in decline. Products were behind and underinvested. Advertising needed investment. I needed to rebuild AOL. Let me highlight progress. We upgraded products. We’ve refreshed programming. Everything was trending downward on AOL Search; changes have turned these trends around. Internationally, there’s upside for AOL. Our ad network reaches 9 in 10 Web users in the U.S. We invested $800 million on advertising. Cutting costs and laying off people is about resource allocation and being smart. I feel really good. I’m making progress. Happy holiday.

Source:Valleywag

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson left his iPhone on during a recent trip to China. Because the device automatically checks for new email every 10 minutes, Anderson rang up more than $2,000 in data charges. AT&T eventually contacted Anderson in China to warn him about his bill. They offered to switch him to a $300-a-month plan. Anderson told MSNBC.com he agreed to the switch, but hasn’t heard back from AT&T since. They way we see it, his only remaining option is to pull a Kevin Rose.