There’s a trend emerging on the Internet, and it isn’t pretty. Well, it is pretty, but it’s bad news for those of us with absolutely nothing to add to the conversation. Those of us without a sense of style.

I’m the kind of guy who thinks the protagonist in The Devil Wears Prada looked better before she started dressing in the latest styles and became popular with her coworkers. But apparently there are a lot of people who disagree with me. And based on the popularity of sites like PopSugar and Glam, this trend is making its way to the Internet big time.

Three new companies are testing out a new kind of social network - centered around (mostly) women’s fashion. In particular, the fashion of the users themselves is the primary content of these networks. All of these sites encourage members to take photos of themselves in new outfits and post them on the site. Social networks spring up around and between members, who comment on each other’s outfits, add people as friends, etc.

The oldest startup in this space is Los Angeles-based StyleDiary, which launched in May 2005. CEO Patricia Handschiegel started the company with her co-founder William Kapke after being in the fashion industry for years. StyleDiary has lots of passionate users, and Handshiegel tells me they are rolling out new social networking features in the near future. The only problem with the site is the poor quality of the photographs - users tend to take the photos themselves, with a mirror, often using a camera phone in poor lighting. The results are often less than great. The company says they are working on ways to auto-enhance photographs to increase quality.

ShareYourLook is a more recent entrant. They’ve copied most of the interesting features of StyleDiary and have added more “web 2.0″ features like photo ratings and bios. The result is a more user friendly site, although the image quality issue plagues them as well.

The final site, yet to launch, Shoutfit. This is a Y Combinator company that we first mentioned in November along with a few other’s in the Y Combinator family. There isn’t much information out yet on Shoutfit, but from what we hear it will be similar to StyleDiary and ShareYourLook.

Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

New startup LicketyShip, the Kozmo-like ecommerce service that delivers goods within a couple of hours of ordering, is counting on this holiday season to make a name for itself. The company, which we first noticed back in January, launched in September, but they’ve recently gotten a lot of mainstream press attention and are offering $9.99 delivery up through Christmas Eve. So while the big ecommerce sites can no longer get stuff to you by the big day, Lickety Ship is still running strong. The company is only shipping same day in the Bay Area currently.

They are almost certainly taking a hit on the $9.99 deliver charge - LicketyShip outsources delivery to local couriers with extra capacity to make deliveries, which is costly. While the holiday season is a good time to pick up extra customers for ecommerce companies, Lickety Ship may be sending the wrong signal with the greatly reduced delivery charges.

Kozmo, which offered free deliveries within an hour, flamed out spectacularly in 2001 after burning through $280 million in capital. Real-time deliveries are expensive, and just because there’s lots of demand to have stuff delivered in a couple of hours doesn’t mean there’s a good business model there. LicketyShip needs to prove that people will pay $20 or more (their break even cost) to have something delivered in a couple of hours. The company says that 30% of Amazon orders are for overnight delivery, where the cost of shipment often exceeds the cost of the item itself. If that’s accurate, then there may be a bright future for the company. But Lickety Ship needs to focus their marketing attention on that segment of the market, not last minute Christmas shoppers.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Brobeck, Pleger & Harrison LLP was a well known law firm in silicon valley during the first Internet boom. They had thousands of startup and public company clients and handled all aspects of their legal needs. Their client list included Cisco. None of that mattered in the end though - the law firm dissolved in 2003 due to financial mismanagement after the downturn.

But now the nightmare could be beginning for Brobeck’s former clients. In a bizarre story, the bankruptcy court handling the Brobeck case, citing the historical value of the records, has given permission to turn over all confidential client documents to the Library of Congress and put on display in a new public archive. The project even has its own website and will have advertisements published in the Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The court is sending out notices to former clients, asking them to Opt-In or Out of the process (copy of notice is here). If the client is unreachable, the documents will be included in the new archive. Documents relating to clients who do not opt in will be available in a closed archived only, and the public will have only limited access (see more here).

This is one off the stupidest things I’ve seen in a while. First of all, these documents remain the property of the clients, not the law firm or anyone else. Those rights are being completely ignored by the court. Many of these documents will also contain extremely confidential information of third parties that were not clients to Brobeck and will therefore not be getting notice.

If you were the subject of a personal dispute with a startup represented by Brobeck, you may want to hire an attorney now to protect your rights. Documents relating to employment relationships are supposed to be purged, but given the huge volume of material that has to be sorted through, it is very likely that things will slip through. And I guarantee that journalists will be waiting eagerly to dig through these documents as soon as they possibly can.

There are many sites that sell customized casino chips (just do a search), but we haven’t found any that have an online design tool to allow you to create the chip itself. TheChipLab has take the extra step and has created a very nice Flash tool for designing your own casino-grade chip. The creation tool is very flexible and layer based. It’s not as powerful as new online image editor Fauxto, which is also Flash based, but it does the job.

So my question is, why don’t CafePress and Zazzle implement Flash tools to help people create customized products as well? Zazzle’s Ajax tool is pretty nice and allows some basic resizing and movement of images, plus the addition of text. Imagecafe is stuck in the nineties - their product creation tool has next to no flexibility at all. Neither are anywhere near offering what TheChipLab does.

Adobe has created awesome tools that tiny ecommerce companies like TheChipLab can use to provide a cool service to customers. It’s time for the VPs of Product at CafePress and Zazzle to wake up and reinvent their products, too. Adobe has done all of the heavy lifting, all they have to do is implement it.

AllPeers, a Firefox P2P file sharing plugin, had incredible hype when it launched in August (the rumors had been around for nearly a year at that point). People were calling it the “killer app” for Firefox, and the company is backed by early investors in Skype, Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures. And since AllPeers is a Firefox extension, it works across all platforms.

But some of the hype was lost as AllPeers found itself among a flock of competitors - we compared four of them here. We named it the best, but noted that all parties to the transfer had to have AllPeers installed, something some of the others didn’t require.

Today they released a new version of AllPeers. There are a number of minor tweaks, including the way they handle file organization. But the exciting update is that they added a pop up chat feature. This would be extremely popular as a stand alone plugin, and adding it to AllPeers is a no brainer. You can now chat with friends as you send files, or just chat with friends without sending files.

I’m still disappointed that AllPeers and Flock haven’t gotten around to porting this to the Flock browser yet. Flock needs a P2P file sharing feature, and AllPeers is all ready to go.

More details about the release on the AllPeers blog, and check out the video below.

Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

We see a lot of landing pages for startups not yet ready to launch, but today I saw what may be the worst one yet. The loud sound effects that start without warning combined with the yellow background alarmed me and sent my blood pressure up. Then I see that the company describes itself using 20 or so tags (see image below), but nothing else to put these in context. Descriptive words include “photos, friends, favorites, writing, notes, music, business, gifting, blog, video, to do, news, rate, bulletin board, calendar, art, movies, and video.” Oh, and “money”

This means everything and nothing, of course. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen bad landing pages before. But they are usually bad in a “the engineers slapped this up in 5 minutes so that we could have a place for people to give us their email address” kind of way. I actually kind of like it when startups cut corners on design early on because they have no money are are focused on the back end. But ipicit’s landing page is bad in another kind of way - it looks like it involved designers. And quite probably consultants. I bet they spent a lot of time picking out those tags.

A final note - the site also has a little spam tool where you can enter in the emails of your friends and they’ll be notified when ipicit launches. It’s not a good idea to begin your relationship with a potential user via an unsolicited email message.

Now it turns out I’m not completely in the dark on what ipicit will be, because the person who tipped me off on them says they are “planning to take MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube users with their all in one interface.” So it sounds like a new social network. Knowing that, the tags make more sense. Why not just add a sentence saying something along those lines? It’s not like your competition (MySpace, YouTube and FaceBook) are going to be paying much attention, and people will have a better idea of what they are signing up for.

Of course I’m intruiged, as always. I’m a sucker for any landing page, even a terrible one. It’s launching on January 1, so we’ll know soon enough what all these tags are supposed to mean.
Update: Someone in the comments pointed out that Zombo is pretty bad, too. I agree, although I would like to hope that it isn’t actually a landing page for a new service? Let me know about any other atrocities that we’ve missed.

Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Wengo, a subsidiary of 9 Telecom, France’s second largest telecom, has a well designed chat widget for bloggers. It’s called Wengo Visio and is like MeeboMe but with video chat. Visio runs in Flash through a bit of embedded JavaScript and CSS, with SIP as the communications protocol. Check here for some bloggers that have it implemented.

When you have your widget installed, you can make yourself available to chat by logging in through an admin menu. While online, readers can solicit you for chatting by typing a little message in text box that shows up on the owners side. The owner can then initiate the chat if they choose. Chatting is currently one-to-one via mic and optional web cam, which makes it less overwhelming than the flood of texting that can happen with MeeboMe. Although, the group video chat of PalTalk and ability for readers to listen in could make for an ad hoc “Gillmor Gang” style meeting of the minds right on your blog.

But Wengo Visio isn’t intended to be a standalone program, rather it is an effort to expose Wengo’s other products, Wengo Talents community and Wego Phone to a wider audience. Wengo Phone is their own chat client that lets you text chat, call other VOIM users, call landlines, call cell phones, set up audio conferences, and make video calls. It also runs on Win, Mac, and Linux, with Google Talk, Yahoo, ICQ, and GAIM compatability. Similar to Skype-out, they only charge for calls to landlines and cell phones, but have a free trial with € 0.50 of credits until January 4th. So far, over 72 million minutes have been shared over Wengo.

Stepping back a step further, both Wengo Visio and Wengo Phone are part of their long term plan of building a pay-per-call expert network, Wengo, where people can sell their time on the phone via PayPal or credit card. This may sound a lot like Ether, sans the 1-800 number, and it is very similar. Wengo, however, has opted to build their offering around their own Wengo community site, where users have categorized themselves, received ratings, and posted profiles. Ether has opted for a different strategy by relying on users to promote services on their own.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Don’t be mistaken. GreenLancer, while seemingly just another consulting firm, is a technology company utilizing the cloud for ambitious engineering projects. Instead of hiring a technology firm to plan, say a solar power array, GreenLancer collects all the pertinent data and farms out the work to contractors through its propitiatory and standardized platform. GreenLancer, a Detroit-based startup, currently focuses on designing solar energy products, but is looking to quickly expand into more alternative energy markets. And with the additional $275k it just raised from four Michigan funds, GreenLancer is quickly headed towards that goal. The startup got off the ground with $160k in seed funding from the owners of Mersino, a Michigan-based construction company. This latest funding comes from investors throughout Michigan: Bizdom (Detroit), Start Garden (Grand Rapids), Blue Water Angels (Midland) and Northern Michigan Angels (Traverse City). “GreenLancer has created a hybrid business model that leverages technology with the flexibility of the human touch,” said Rick DeVos, Founder and CEO of Start Garden, one of GreenLancer’s newest investors. “Their assembly line approach has proven that they can provide professional engineering support that is far more cost effective than their brick-and-mortar competitors. This is exactly what the renewable energy industry needs to reduce the soft cost associated with developing clean energy projects.” This round of funding helped the company hire five full time staffers including the two web developers and a database engineer. With these new hires, GreenLancer is looking to build an API to increase its efficiency. In the coming months the company hopes to expand into other green markets including hydro-power, geothermal, solid outside fuel cells, and energy efficiency. “We’re not experts in the fields. We’re experts on the platform” co-founder CEO Michael Sharber told me. GreenLancer is seemingly off to a good start. Founded in late 2011, the company is already showing revenues from projects spanning 32 state and six countries. It’s even more impressive considering the jobs were acquired just from the co-founders personal contacts. GreenLancer plans on opening its platform to general use in early April.

When TechCrunch attended the San Francisco premiere of Game of Thrones Season 3, we didn’t just ask the cast members about their smartphones. I also had a few minutes to talk to HBO CEO Richard Plepler, when I asked him about the show’s status as the most-pirated program of 2012. “Well, look, it’s the good news and the bad news, right?” Plepler said. “The good news is that a lot of people want to see it. Over 12.5 million people are watching it legally. And most of that pirating is occurring overseas. We’re going to do what we can to bring that down, and we’re going to do what we can, obviously, to bring that down in the United States as well.” When I asked Plepler about HBO’s next steps from a tech and distribution perspective, he said that the model is giving customers “a whole lot of programming across a lot of different genres” that they can watch on any screen they want: “As long as we give that for a fair price, we like our model very much.” Following up, I asked Plepler to predict where what HBO’s distribution will look like in five or ten years, and he replied: The most important thing for us is creating content that is addictive. … And if we continue to create great content, then the means of distribution, while very important — people are going to find it. So what we want to do with HBO Go is give people as much optionality as we possibly can. … Where do I think we’ll be in five years? I think there may be even more optionality, but with our partners. With our partners in the cable business, satellite business, and the telco business. Maybe even a broadband-only HBO delivery system. Who knows? We’ll see where that goes down the road. That’s very far from a commitment to broadband-only HBO, but it isn’t an outright rejection of the idea either. Apparently Plepler made similar comments to Reuters, prompting AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka to remind readers why it isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.