The latest from TechCrunch
- EtherPad Launches A Virtual Document Time Machine
- About a Quarter Of Facebook Users Connect Via Mobile Phones
- NetBase Thinks You Can Get Rid Of Jews With Alcohol And Salt
- Producteev Now Lets You Crowdsource Your Tasks On Twitter
- Dimdim Launches Webinar Service, Teams Up With Eventbrite
| EtherPad Launches A Virtual Document Time Machine | Top |
| AppJet's EtherPad, the real-time Google Docs-like wiki tool that was recently upgraded to become more collaborative, has launched an uber-cool tool that definitely worth a look. Called the “Time-Slider,” the feature lets you see the complete history of a document’s evolution. Here’s how it works. EtherPad keeps track of all your typing in realtime. At any time during the course of typing a document on EtherPad, you can click on the “Time-Slider” button that will play an animation of your document to see how it evolved over time. The tool also features a timeline where you can click into any stage of the document and see the evolution from that point. You can also create “bookmark” in the document’s timeline to mark certain points during the evolution of document that you’d like to go back to. Time-slider is a really interesting tool, if only for the nifty screencast of your document’s evolution. But seriously, when it comes to collaboration between several people, the time-slider could be useful to see how a particular document took form. You can also test out EtherPad’s new tool here, when the startup captured Paul Graham writing an essay on startups. EtherPad was the brainchild of former Googlers (who founded online programming tool and Y Combinator funded AppJet) who wanted a real-time, yet group oriented way to collaborate on notes and documents. Thus, EtherPad was born. EtherPad continues to upgrade its product with compelling features and innovations. The startup recently partnered with video-chat startup TokBox to offer document collaboration. And earlier this summer, EtherPad got a user interface makeover and added the ability to import and export Word, PDF, Plain Text and HTML documents. Appjet made writing a document in EtherPad more like writing out notes in Word or Google Docs, adding rich text formatting, including bold, underline, italics and strikethrough commands to the wiki. And organization of notes within a document became a little better with the ability to add bullet points. EtherPad’s tools and functionality could just give Google Docs a run for its money. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| About a Quarter Of Facebook Users Connect Via Mobile Phones | Top |
| Facebook’s quest to become the social operating system of the Web is driven by how many how many other Websites and apps tap into the social network through Facebook Connect. The mobile Web is a big target for Facebook. Back in March, it made Facebook Connect available to iPhone apps , since those are the most fully featured and popular. Today, it took another step in expanding the reach of Facebook Connect to any mobile phone with a Web browser. Called Facebook Connect For Mobile Web , it will let any mobile site accept Facebook IDs for sign-on, grab social data from Facebook with permission from the user, publish items into their Facebook stream, and more. (Developers can get more details here ). The mobile Web is already a big deal for Facebook. Across all of its mobile apps (iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, etc), its mobile Website, and SMS, a full 65 million members reach Facebook via mobile devices every month. That comes to 26 percent of the 250 million total active members that Facebook puts out as its official number, or 18 percent of the 370 million monthly worldwide uniques that comScore measures. Either way it is a significant and fast growing chunk of overall Facebook usage—between a fifth and a quarter. Back in December, only 20 million people were getting to Facebook via mobile devices. http://developers.facebook.com/connect_iphone.php Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| NetBase Thinks You Can Get Rid Of Jews With Alcohol And Salt | Top |
| This morning I wrote about NetBase Solutions’ healthBase, a semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of authoritative health sites including WebMD, Wikipedia, and PubMed. But is it a semantic engine or an anti-semitic search engine? Several of our readers tested out the site and found that healthBase’s semantic search engine has some major glitches (see the comments). One of the most unfortunate examples is when you type in a search for “AIDS,” one of the listed causes of the disease is “Jew.” Really. The ridiculousness continues. When you click on Jew, you can see proper “Treatments” for Jews, “Drugs And Medications” for Jews and “Complications” for Jews. Apparently, “alcohol” and “coarse salt” are treatments to get rid of Jews, as is Dr. Pepper! Who knew? I’ve included the screenshots of the results below if you don’t believe me. Now, I don’t think that healthBase is being intentionally anti-semitic, but for a technology which is supposed to understand the nuances of human language, this is about a big a fail as you can get. It is plainly obvious that its technology needs to be fixed before it is parsed out to other companies and media corporations. I emailed NetBase to figure out exactly how this could appear and this is the response I received: This is an unfortunate example of homonymy, i.e. words that have different meanings. The showcase was not configured to distinguish between the disease "AIDS" and the verb "aids" (as in aiding someone). If you click on the result "Jew" you see a sentence from a Wikipedia page about 7th Century history: "Hispano-Visigothic king Egica accuses the Jews of aiding the Muslims, and sentences all Jews to slavery. " Although Wikipedia contains a lot of great health information it also contains non-health related information (like this one) that is hard to filter out. Personally, I think such basic distinctions should have been ironed out before launching the site. This is just the most flagrant example of site giving non-health answers to health-related questions. If you look at the pros of AIDS (yes, it thinks here are pros to having AIDS), it comically lists the “Spanish Civil War.” One of the causes of hemorrhoids is “Bronco” (I don’t even want to know). HealthBase is touted to be a showcase for NetBase’s semantic technology, which can supposedly understand language. Clearly, it doesn’t understand language well enough. And if the technology is going to be peddled to other companies to be used to power additional search engines, it needs to be improved immediately. UPDATE: Here’s a more detailed response from NetBase: Yesterday, we launched a microsite - healthbase.netbase.com - intended to publicly demonstrate a new kind of semantic search technology that actually reads web content and delivers more relevant answers to health-related queries. HealthBase is built on our Content Intelligence Platform that has been deployed successfully in different domains by Fortune 1000 companies, global publishers, and the federal government over the last few years for a variety of strategic applications. A ready-for-primetime consumer search engine it is not. It is a powerful and automated technology, that when applied to something as messy as the Web, will produce some amazing results, but also some strange, funny and irrelevant ones. Our first release of healthBase yesterday surfaced a few embarrassing and offensive bugs. These were far in the minority of results but enough to keep us up late improving the site. We sincerely regret and apologize in particular for any offense caused. We’ve learned a lot in the last 24 hours and are fully committed to do better in providing an effective and accurate demonstration of our technology. This morning, we are a little tired and humbled, but even more determined than ever to showcase the power of this new technology. You will see improvements in the next hours days, and weeks, including the addition of user feedback mechanisms. We appreciate the feedback and please keep telling us what you think. Thanks, Jens Tellefsen, VP of marketing and product strategy & The Netbase Team Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Producteev Now Lets You Crowdsource Your Tasks On Twitter | Top |
| There are plenty of Web-based task management tools that let you track the progress of your work projects and collaborate with co-workers. Producteev founder Ilan Abehassera wants to go one better and help you “complete your task” by making it easy to ask your contacts and followers on Twitter for assistance. Producteev shows you a dashboard of different tasks you’ve set up, each in its own widget box which you can drag around and rearrange. For its commercial launch today, Producteev is introducing some new features. One is the ability to syndicate any task to Twitter or Facebook. So if you need a Web designer or sales person for a project, for example, you can create a task on Producteev and share that not only with your co-workers, but also publish it on Twitter. A link brings your Twitter followers back to a public page on Producteev for that specific task/message, where they can reply. All outside replies are brought into the Producteev activity stream for everyone in your work group to see. This is good, but it doesn’t go far enough, as you can’t reply via Producteev and have that reply appear on Twitter. Another new feature makes Producteev like a Friendfeed of productivity apps. It lets you bring in other streams of data from outside Producteev, including Slideshare, Scribd, Zoho, Twitter, and soon Google Docs, Google Reader, and Yammer (yes, it competes with Yammer on the communication stream, but Producteev is more about task management). So you can automatically see when someone on your team adds a new presentation to Slideshare, edits a doc, or shares an article. There is also now a timeline/calendar view, which comes in handy since every task can be assigned a due date. (The other views are a dashboard grid that is similar to Netvibes or iGoogle, and a straight, chronological activity stream). Workers can now generate reports based on their tasks in progress and completed, which they can show to employers to prove they’ve been working ( oDesk anyone? ). Soon Producteev will add graphs as well for productivity tracking at a glance. Other upcoming features on the product roadmap include integration with Meebo Community IM for chat functionality, the ability to export deadlines and reminders to iCal, Google Calendar, and Outllook, an OpenSocial application on Xing, and a JoliCloud app. Producteev is gradually becoming a fully-featured online productivity and collaboration tool. I would compare it to WizeHive , another great online task management tool with a slightly different set of features. Producteev is seed funded, and recently raised $180,000 in angel money from a group including Fotolia president Oleg Tscheltzoff. The service is free for up to 3 users, and then starts at $19/ month up to 10 users. The top Gold membership is $99/month for 100 users. Different pricing applies to university students, another target market. We’re giving away 10 Gold subscriptions for one year to whoever adds the best comments below about their greatest productivity challenge or suggestions for new features. Abehassera will pick the best 10 and respond in comments. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Dimdim Launches Webinar Service, Teams Up With Eventbrite | Top |
| Dimdim , the open source web conferencing software company backed by $8.4 million in venture capital, today launched Dimdim Webinar, which allows SMBs and individuals to host an unlimited amount of completely web-based webinars with up to 1,000 people using nothing but a web browser. Dimdim has arranged to provide free Dimdim Webinar accounts to up to 300 TechCrunch readers by signing up right here . The winners will be notified by e-mail. In addition to its new product, the startup announced a partnership with Eventbrite , a provider of online event management and ticketing services, to enable webinars organizers to make money with web-based meeting and events. Dimdim Webinar builds on the Dimdim 5.1 platform, which is said to be used by more than three million people and businesses today, and doesn’t require users to install any software whether they want to watch or participate in webinars, presentations, etc. The company is also debuting a customizable widget today that allows for webinar organizers to easier distribute one-click registration forms and links to detailed information web pages. Dimdim Webinar is accompanied by a couple of helpful resources that guide organizers through the necessary steps to monetize and analyze the performance of their webinars, including an affiliate program that pays up to $150 for each webinar signup, help videos and guides and this dedicated microsite , a free eBook and the ability to schedule and provide tickets to webinars for free or for a fee through its exclusive partnership with Eventbrite. Pricing for Dimdim Webinar starts at $75 per month, but there’s a free 30-day trial available and if the number of attendees you want to accommodate doesn’t exceed 20 than you can use the limited, free version. Or you could go back to the top of this post and see if you can get that free premium account. Similar offerings include GoToMeeting and WebEx , which both offer more features at higher prices. 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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