The latest from TechCrunch
- You decide: Who Photoshop Hacked Microsoft The Best?
- 25 Years Later, First Registered Domain Name Changes Hands
- iBing? Microsoft Wants You To Build An iPhone App For That
- isocket Raises $2 Million Series A With Some Big Names
- TwitterSense. It's Coming.
| You decide: Who Photoshop Hacked Microsoft The Best? | Top |
| We are overwhelmed with the 168 responses to our “It's A Meme! Get Photoshop Warmed Up And Win A Bing Tshirt” post where we asked you, the readers, to come up with a better photoshop hack job than Microsoft was able to do on their own marketing material. One of the submissions will win a Bing tshirt and sticker. I originally said the winner would be selected by our summer interns, but we want to turn this into a poll. We’ve selected the six we like best, but you can write in your own as well. View all of the submissions here . Thanks everyone. And thanks to Cameron Christoffers , our star intern , for organizing all the photos. Who Wins The Microsoft Photoshop Poland Contest? ( survey ) Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| 25 Years Later, First Registered Domain Name Changes Hands | Top |
| Did you know the first .com domain name that was ever registered was Symbolics.com , on the 15th of March 1985 by the now defunct Massachusetts-based computer manufacturer Symbolics ? While the first that was created in January of that same year was Nordu.net (used to serve as the identifier of the first root server, nic.nordu.net), symbolics.com was the first domain name to actually be registered through the appropriate DNS process a few months later. This was of course long before there was a WWW, but you already had ‘the Internet’. In fact, the first TCP/IP-based wide-area network had already been operational for two years when nordu.net was created, right around the time the United States’ National Science Foundation (NSF) commissioned the construction of the legendary NSFNET, a university 56 kilobit/second network backbone. Only six companies thought it’d be a good idea to reserve the domain name on the root servers in 1985 (the others were bbn.com, think.com, mcc.com, dec.com and northrop.com). But Symbolics was first to make the move. Remarkably, Symbolics.com hasn’t changed ownership once during the nearly 25 years that followed its initial registration. Marking an end to that era, domain name investment company XF.com Investments has just purchased the domain name for an undisclosed sum. Which calls for a bit of history about the original owner: Symbolics, Inc - a spinoff from the MIT AI Lab - was a computer manufacturer headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts and later in Concord, Massachusetts, that designed and manufactured a line of Lisp machines , single-user computers optimized to run the Lisp programming language. The machines became the first commercially available “general-purpose computers” or “workstations” way before those terms were coined. The company also offered one of the premier software development environments of the 1980s and 1990s, now sold commercially as Open Genera for Tru64 UNIX on the HP Alpha. In the late eighties, the company started its slow descent towards bankruptcy and oblivion, neatly chronicled in this blog post by former Symbolics employee Dan Weinreb: The world changed out from under us very quickly. The new "workstation" category of computer appeared: the Suns and Apollos and so on. New technology for implementing Lisp was invented that allowed good Lisp implementations to run on conventional hardware; not quite as good as ours, but good enough for most purposes. So the real value-added of our special Lisp architecture was suddenly diminished. A large body of useful Unix software came to exist and was portable amongst the Unix workstations: no longer did each vendor have to develop a whole software suite. And the workstation vendors got to piggyback on the ever-faster, ever-cheaper CPU's being made by Intel and Motorola and IBM, with whom it was hard for Symbolics to keep up. We at Symbolics were slow to acknowledge this. We believed our own "dogma" even as it became less true. It was embedded in our corporate culture. If you disputed it, your co-workers felt that you "just didn't get it" and weren't a member of the clan, so to speak. This stifled objective analysis. (This is a very easy problem to fall into — don't let it happen to you!) … Meanwhile, back at Symbolics, there were huge internal management conflicts, leading to the resignation of much of top management, who were replaced by the board of directors with new CEO's who did not do a good job, and did not have the vision to see what was happening. Symbolics signed long-term leases on big new offices and a new factory, anticipating growth that did not come, and were unable to sublease the properties due to office-space gluts, which drained a great deal of money. There were rounds of layoffs. More and more of us realized what was going on, and that Symbolics was not reacting. Having created an object-oriented database system for Lisp called Statice, I left in 1988 with several co-workers to form Object Design, Inc., to make an object-oriented database system for the brand-new mainstream object-oriented language, C++. Symbolics still exists as a shell of its former self. But now the very first .com domain name ever registered becomes property of a small domain name investment holding that is so shy about its identity that it doesn’t publish the names of the people involved with the company, let alone a company address, on its website. There’s absolutely no indication of what the future has in store for the historical domain name, apart from the fact XF.com intends to celebrate its 25th birthday next year. To quote Samwise Gamgee in Lord Of The Rings: “I don’t know why, but it makes me sad.” Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| iBing? Microsoft Wants You To Build An iPhone App For That | Top |
| If you’re doing a web search on your iPhone, chances are that you’re using the built-in search bar in the Safari browser. And if you’re using that, chances are that you’re searching with Google, as it’s the pre-installed option. And in fact, if you want to change it in the settings, the only other option is Yahoo Search. If you want to use something like Ask or Bing, you’re going to have to go to those respective web pages (well, at least until Bing starts powering Yahoo Search). But today Microsoft has unveiled a way to get to Bing from within apps on your iPhone, and even your Mac, with a new SDK. The Bing iPhone and Mac SDK is available for anyone to download here , and it’s even open source (under the Microsoft Public License). Here’s what it includes: The ability to easily query Bing from within your Cocoa or Cocoa Touch application. Perform both synchronous and asynchronous queries. Search Bing for Web, Image, Video, News, and Phonebook results. Microsoft also writes that, “ The SDK was designed to remove the headache of manually having to parse XML or JSON in order to communicate with the Bing API. “ Humorously, the domain that houses the SDK begins with “ibing”, undoubtedly a play on Apple’s branding. A lot of companies of course use similar branding for their applications, but Microsoft and Apple are fierce rivals. But it’s great to see Microsoft creating an open source SDK to give developers more options for the iPhone and Mac apps. Bing has been making a lot of smart moves since its launch earlier this year. Now, hopefully Apple doesn’t pull any funny business in the app approval process for apps that use Bing (though I don’t see why they would, plenty of apps use Bing Maps, for example). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| isocket Raises $2 Million Series A With Some Big Names | Top |
| isocket , an open ad platform, is announcing a Series A round of financing led by Tim Draper at Draper Fisher Jurvetson . Also joining the round was David Blumberg of Blumberg Capital , Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, and Dave McClure of Founders Fund Angel . David Hirsch , a former head of Google advertising sales, invested from NYC-based Metamorphic Ventures. Steve Gurasich, the Co-Founder and CEO of Austin based ad agency GSD&M Idea City, invested along with additional Angels. Additional investors include David Cohen of TechStars in Colorado, Quest Venture Partners , Accelerator Ventures , and Plug & Play / Amidzad . isocket is an early stage startup in limited, invitation-only beta testing. It went live in May 2009 via a launch program with TechCrunch. The company has been pretty quiet about product details or plans outside of what's available in their private beta. isocket does not charge a commission on in-network transactions, instead favoring flat monthly fees that are saving publishers an average of thousands of dollars per month over their competitors. John Ramey , Founder and CEO, says they are bringing the "principles of the open web to the historically closed ad market" via their platform and business model. isocket plans on using this funding to expand their team and bring their platform to the public. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| TwitterSense. It's Coming. | Top |
| At this very moment, at this very villa in the Israeli city of Hertzeliya Pituach, the final preparations are being made for what can be best described as ‘TwitterSense’—a way to automatically filter your Twitter stream so that the most relevant Tweets come out on top. The location in question is the home of my6sense , which currently offers a powerful way to filter news feeds. It is applying its filtering technology to Twitter and by the looks of it you’ll soon be able to follow as many Twitter users as you want and still never miss out on the most important tweets. It took insistent prodding on my part to get my6sense to spill some of the beans and give me a sneak peak. The good news is that TwitterSense (my term, not theirs) is real and it works. The bad news is that it’ll take a couple of more months to be deployed. And yes, it could greatly improve the way we consume Twitter streams. The advent of a TwitterSense offering could not be timelier as the onslaught of noise on Twitter has increased dramatically and its manageability has become a real pain point. Even Robert “The Stream Prince” Scoble has had to take dramatic measures , namely, slashing the number of users he follows on Twitter and befriends on Facebook. I, on the other hand, keep the number of people I follow on Twitter in the neighborhood of 150. This number works well for me, but I keep wondering whether I’m missing out on users who could provide insights relevant to my personal and professional interests. That is exactly where TwitterSense would come into play. First, a quick recap on my6sense: The company has been building out what it calls ‘digital intuition,’ a content ranking technology that to date has been applied to RSS feeds to separate the signal from the noise. My6sense's technology translates user actions such as Web navigation within and across various streams of content, and actions taken with various pieces of information in different contexts, into semantically-sensible implicit user feedback. The real beauty is that it requires zero intervention other than using the app itself. Here’s how I described my experience with the alpha release : The "A-ha moment" took a couple of days of interacting with the product, but it came. Suddenly, very relevant info was floated to the top of the main "TOP MESSAGES" pane. By relevant, I mean posts I would absolutely have clicked on through my Reader, but would have had to sift through hundreds of posts before doing so. A couple of weeks ago my6sense announced its new native iPhone app ( iTunes link ), which along with a few new features, presented a major user experience improvement over the original iPhone web app version. So far there is nothing seemingly compelling beyond our previous in-depth look into the company’s technology. But looks can be deceiving. Underneath the surface lies what could transform the way my6sense users consume Twitter. TwitterSense in an extension of my6sense’s ranking technology and in this respect treats a user’s Twitter stream like an ordinary content source, much like an RSS feed. To begin with, my6sense has to differentiate between simple status updates/personal tweets and tweets which link to content. The differentiation is a must because its ranking algorithms require further optimization to be able to correctly float important simple/status tweets. In the short-term they have no plans to solve this particular challenge. Instead, the company is focusing on ranking tweets with links—and we all get quite a few of those. From my6sense’s perspective, your friends provide the first level of filtering. It then provides the second level by taking it upon itself to re-rank these Tweets so a users’ focus is directed to the information that is most important to them. If you tend to click on links from specific friends on Twitter, those will get a boost in the rankings. But my6sense also looks at the underlying pages behind the links and figures out what topics those pages are about using its semantic engine. If those topics match your interests, as determined by your past reading and clicking behavior on the app, then those links rise to the top as well. So the obvious question to ask is, why then if it rests upon my6sense’s existing technology isn’t it deployed already? First, there are challenges in ranking the content behind the link. A typical web page includes not only the post/article itself, but additional data and content as well. my6sense wants to make sure it ranks the intended content and this isn’t always trivial. Second, there are scalability challenges. On average, a Twitter stream encompasses a greater mass of content than an average RSS feed. This means that my6sense has to go out and parse every piece of content behind every link in a user’s steam so it can analyze it based on the user’s ranking model. This requires extra processing power in order to avoid significant delays in ranking. My6sense did close a round of funding recently, but it can’t just throw money at the problem and solve it via brute force (i.e. just buy more machines). I asked Barak Hachamov, the company’s founder and president, whether they’ll be offering TwitterSense integration for Twitter clients. His answer was that they do have such plans but it’s far too early to talk about them now. My6sense plans to make TwitterSense publicly available in a couple of months or so. In the meantime, if you want to experience what it will behave like I suggest downloading my6sense’s native iPhone app to see how it works on RSS feeds. You won’t have to spend very long waiting to see the ranking magic since some backend improvements were made that get users to achieve the ‘A-ha moment’ I mentioned above much quicker, even within one or two brief sessions. There’s also a new digital intuition meter that provides users with feedback regarding the status of their preference model and indicates how strong their digital intuition is at that point in time. We’ll be keeping a close tab on the upcoming release of this so called TwitterSense and reexamine it when it’s made publicly available in a couple of months. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
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