The latest from TechCrunch
- DEMO: Vitamin D Brings Smart Searching To Security Footage
- Twitter Needs An App Store, Oneforty Provides One
- This Microsoft Windows 7 Launch Video Is, If Possible, Worse Than That Musical One
- As Google Looks To Get On The Acquisition Track Again, Here's A Map Of Where It's Been
- Basic Flaw Reveals Source Code to 3,300 Popular Websites
- Cloudera And Facebook Shed More Light On Hadoop Integration
- Mallory From Family Ties Could Be A Harbinger Of What's To Come With Twitter Retweets
- SGN Snags Former EA And LucasArts Exec To Join Gaming Company
- You Collaborate On Web Docs. Now Collaborate On Web Designs With Notable.
| DEMO: Vitamin D Brings Smart Searching To Security Footage | Top |
| There’s no doubt that searching video footage can be an incredibly tedious and time consuming task — unless someone else has manually tagged a video with keywords, there’s a good chance you’ll have to wade through minutes (or hours) of footage to find what you’re looking for. In the last few years we’ve started to see the emergence of some new technologies to address this issue, like Digital Smiths , but most of them are focused indexing premium content. Vitamin D is a new startup making its debut today at DEMO Fall that’s looking to bring content identification to user generated videos. Vitamin D’s first product allows users to search through surveillance camera videos without having to watch though hours of footage where nothing is happening. But this isn’t just based on motion detection — you can fine tune your searches using a visual interface for building a custom ruleset. Say, for example, I wanted to monitor a specific door in a room for any humans that had walked through it. Using Vitamin D, you can drag and drop to highlight a certain doorframe and then ask the software to immediately identify any matches it has in its archive. Using this technology you could condense many hours of footage into only a few seconds, which you can browse through a in playlist-like format. The company says it will have a public beta available this fall. Vitamin D also looks to apply its technology beyond its security application, though it sounds like further products are a ways off. Also see HighlightCam , which can automatically condense lengthy video clips to their most important moments. The startup was a part of Summer 2009’s Y Combinator class (you can find our full post on HighlightCam here ). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Twitter Needs An App Store, Oneforty Provides One | Top |
| With the explosion of Twitter mobile apps, web-based clients, and desktop applications, it was only a matter of time before someone launched an actual Twitter-focused app store. Oneforty has built a marketplace to for basically all things Twitter, helping developers get their creations found and letting users access a centralized place to find and buy Twitter-based technologies. We have 100 invites to try out the site (OneForty is in private beta); just click here and use the code: TC140. The site lists 1,332 free and paid applications and services built on Twitter’s API, where people can search for, rate and buy Twitter services. The site also features lists of the most popular apps on the marketplace, ad lists the “best” app for nine types of Twitter services, such as apps for business, url shortners, image sharing, news, and travel. The site also hopes to be somewhat of a social network, with users having the ability to create profiles of their favorite Twitter apps and services. You sign into oneforty with your Twitter account, which lets you interact with the site with your Twitter handle. Each listing for an app or service has a detailed description of its features and and includes screenshots, and categories that the app fits into (i.e. business or mobile). You can click the “I use this” to add the app to your profile and you will be listed on the app’s page as a user. The listing also identifies the developer who created the app, features press mentions of the site or app or site and pulls in a stream of Tweets that mentions the app or site. And you can “share” a particular app via Twitter. Oneforty’s revenue model is fairly basic. If you want to download Tweetie’s iPhone app, oneforty provides an link directly to Apple’s App Store, allowing oneforty to collect an affiliate fee. Of course for the free downloads and sites, such as TwitPic or TweetDeck, oneforty will just direct you to their sites, where you can download or access the application. oneforty is also going to list Twitter-related books and merchandise, with affiliate links to Amazon.co. An interesting bit of trivia—the site’s founder, Laura Filton, wrote the “Twitter for Dummies” book and taught a “”Twitter for Business” class at Harvard Business School. Oneforty was incubated at TechStars and is advised by Guy Kawasaki. Twitter currently lists applications and also has a wiki-based directory of Twitter-related sites and apps, but it’s layout isn’t easy to navigate. Twitdom also has an application database which includes reviews and ratings but doesn’t seem to have the user interface and marketplace feel of oneforty. Finton tells me that soon oneforty will become a full fledged e-commerce platform, where developers can sell their apps on the site itself. I think its fairly easy to use and am a fan of its sharing features. If oneforty can pick up a dedicated base of users, it has a chance at becoming the defacto Twitter app store. The site is in private beta at the moment, but we have Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| This Microsoft Windows 7 Launch Video Is, If Possible, Worse Than That Musical One | Top |
| Either Microsoft's sense of humor has gotten almost British in its sophistication and dryness, or this is the worst promotional video I've ever seen in my life. Yes, worse than their Songsmith video. I'm beginning to think Microsoft's marketing department really is a thousand monkeys with a thousand high definition cameras. Or are we being punk'd? TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| As Google Looks To Get On The Acquisition Track Again, Here's A Map Of Where It's Been | Top |
| For most of this year, Google has been holding back on its M&A activity. But its recent acquisitions of On2 Technologies in August and reCAPTCHA a week ago signal that Google is regaining its appetite for acquisitions. CEO Eric Schmidt told Reuters today that he wants to buy at least one small startup a month primarily because it is a great way to hire the best talent. So what type of startups is Google likely to buy? One way to figure that out is to look at what kinds of startups its bought in the past. The Google acquisition and investment map below was created by the folks at MeetTheBoss (they’ve made similar visualizations for Amazon and eBay ). There are a few deals missing like last week’s reCaptcha acquisition (see CrunchBase for a more complete list), but the subway-map visualization above gives the broad outlines of Google’s acquisition path. The longest lines with the most stops (each stop represents a deal) are technology (dark violet) and web services (green). Startups which fall somewhere on those two lines seem to have a stronger chance of getting picked up by Google, at least historically. Other shorter, but overlapping lines, include advertising (pink), search (salmon), mapping (violet), social (red), video (dark red). Which lines does Google need to extend? (Click on the map below to enlarge). Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Basic Flaw Reveals Source Code to 3,300 Popular Websites | Top |
| A Russian security group has posted a detailed blog post ( translation here ) about how they managed to extract the source code to over 3,300 websites. The group found that some of the largest and best known domains on the web, such as apache.org and php.net , amongst others, are vulnerable to an elementary information leak that exposes the structure and source of website files. A web surfer is able to extract this information by requesting the hidden metadata directories that popular version control tool Subversion creates. The actual ‘exploit’ itself has been well known for a long time. It is the fault of the server administrator or developer, rather than the fault of a particular application, since the working metadata directories in Subversion are only required for working copies of code. What is surprising is just how prevalent the problem is – and who it affects. Finding version control metadata directories is as simple as looking for ‘.svn’ or ‘.cvs’ folders within web paths, for example: http://www.test.com/.svn/ . The metadata directories are used for development purposes to keep track of development changes to a set of source code before it is committed back to a central repository (and vice-versa). When code is rolled to a live server from a repository, it is supposed to be done as an export rather than as a local working copy, and hence this problem. Most web servers are configured by default to disallow access to directories that begin with a period (the traditional prefix for a hidden file or folder in UNIX) – which makes this problem more embarrassing for the affected sites as not only have they mismanaged their version control, but have somehow managed to disable the standard safeguard in webservers meant to prevent hidden files and folders from being returned to users. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Cloudera And Facebook Shed More Light On Hadoop Integration | Top |
| For a startup that was founded less than a year ago, Cloudera has seen some pretty amazing growth. Backed by an impressive list of investors and advisors and run by a team of experienced technology veterans, Cloudera commercially distributes and services Hadoop. It’s similar in theory to Red Hat’s distribution of Linux. Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google's published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides services around the technology. Via Cloudera, Hadoop is currently used by most of the giants in the space including, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, AOL, Baidu and more. To date, Cloudera has raised $11 million in funding from Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. Cloudera is organizing and hosting a conference, Hadoop World: NYC, in a few weeks to support the growing Apache Hadoop community. Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon Web Services and IBM will all be making presentations about how they use the technology to support large volumes of data. Facebook is one of the more interesting use cases of Hadoop use, says Cloudera co-founder Christophe Bisciglia. Facebook software engineer Ashish Thusoo said that prior to Hadoop, the social network uses conventional RDBMS based data warehousing technologies and switched to the open-source Hadoop because of its scalability, cost and flexibility. Facebook implements both Hadoop and Hive, which is a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop that provides tools to enable easy data summarization, adhoc querying and analysis of large datasets stored in Hadoop files. For example, the software makes it easy to create business data reports with data, aggregation and analysis that is used to drive Facebook products, model generation and optimization problems for ads. Cloudera is offering an exclusive discount code to the Hadoop event in New York City, with will knock off 25 percent of the list price of $399 per ticket. It’s valid through 9/29. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Mallory From Family Ties Could Be A Harbinger Of What's To Come With Twitter Retweets | Top |
| So Justine Bateman, you know, Mallory Keaton from Family Ties , completely lost her cool this morning with a bunch of people on Twitter. She kept noticing people she doesn’t follow showing up in her tweet stream and proceeded to publicly call them all “shitheads.” Of course, what she doesn’t realize is that this really is a feature and not a bug. And it could spell some trouble for Twitter if they don’t handle it properly. The issue is that Twitter apparently enabled Bateman’s account with the new retweet functionality. Obviously, she wasn’t made aware of it, and doesn’t seem to know what the feature actually is. Clearly, she doesn’t frequent TechCrunch or a number of other tech blogs who have been covering this upcoming change extensively, because if she did, she would know that with the new retweet changes , users will now see the original tweets that are being retweeted in their stream, rather than a person they follow retweeting it. This means that people who you don’t actually follow could show up in your stream, which is exactly what happened to Bateman. Here’s what she wrote to Thing Labs (makers of Brizzly ) founder Jason Shellen : Mr. Shellen, I don’t know what kind of deal you cut with TwitterBerry or how much it cost you, but suddenly you’re on my Twitter feed and I NEVER OPTEN TO FOLLOW YOU nor do I wan to. I’m set to flame this incident all over the Internet. I suggest for the sake of your reputation on-line, YOU GET YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT TOGETHER, and stop attempting to shove your posts into other people’s feeds. Sincerely, Justine Bateman There have been plenty of other examples of her threatening other Twitter users who showed up in her feed too. Including blogger John Gruber and Twitter engineer Ryan King . Setting aside the fact that it’s mildly hilarious that Bateman thinks that somehow users are to blame for this, and that she thinks her lame Internet threats will put an end to all of this, there is actually a potential issue here for Twitter. When the new retweet functionality goes live, which should happen relatively soon, Twitter needs to make it very clear to all users that the change is happening, and what exactly it means. Otherwise, we could very well see a backlash similar to Bateman’s only on a massive scale. As we’ve seen when Facebook rolls out changes to its site, users generally don’t like change, even if it’s for the better. The backlash that occurred immediately after Facebook rolled out their News Feed a few years ago is a perfect example of this. As is the backlash FriendFeed initially saw when it rolled out its real-time continuous updating system earlier this year. Both of those changes were for the better, and users eventually realized that, but initially they thought the company was ruining their experience. I think Twitter’s new retweet functionality is in the same boat. It seems like it will ultimately be a positive change for the service, but plenty of users are sure to hate it at first. There’s not much Twitter can do about that other than explain what is happening very clearly and to say something along the lines of “try it out, give it a chance.” But if they drop the ball on the transition, potentially millions of users who have no idea about the change are going to wake up and think their Twitter accounts have been compromised by tweets of people they don’t follow. If those users are thinking clearly (which Bateman clearly wasn’t), they’ll likely questions whether Twitter has sold them out and violated their privacy (which, of course, won’t be true, but that’s how it should look to those users not in the know). Or they’ll see it as another Twitter failure. So in some ways, Twitter is lucky that Bateman seems to be a hotheaded user who doesn’t mind attacking people publicly on the Internet. She has given them a potential taste of what is to come. Twitter should look at her reaction and come up with a plan for how they’re going to explain this upcoming change to other confused users. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| SGN Snags Former EA And LucasArts Exec To Join Gaming Company | Top |
| Social Gaming Network (SGN), the startup that creates popular games for iPhones and social platforms like Facebook, has been seeing significant growth, with SGN’s games now on one out of every three iPhone and iPod Touch devices. To compliment this growth, SGN is adding several seasoned gaming execs to its employee roster. SGN, which is led by CEO and founder Shervin Pishevar, has named gaming industry veteran Randy Breen as the company’s new COO, whee he will be managing game production, business development and finance. Formerly, Breen was Executive Producer and Creative Director at Electronic Arts, Vice President Of Product Development at Lucas Arts Entertainment, and Chief Product Officer at Emotiv Systems Eric Huynh will become SGN’s new chief technology officer. Huynh was previously a founder and CTO of gaming company Ubisoft, founder and CTO of mobile gaming company Gameloft, and was an exec at Vivendi Games. SGN’s chief creative officer, Eric Lindstrom also joins the company from Vivendi Games. Randy Angle, an experienced gaming developer, is joining SGN as director of game design where he will spearhead the development and engineering for SGN's games. Margaret Foley-Mauvais will be serving as art director for SGN and Dan Brazelton has joined company as executive producer. Girls In Tech founder Adriana Gascoigne will join SGN as director of global communications after serving as director of marketing for social network hi5 and VP of digital marketing at Ogilvy, a worldwide creative agency. SGN also recently made waves last week at TechCrunch50 with the launch of its spinoff ToyBots, which revealed its "Kindle of toys" or an "iPhone inside of a toy" technology. The technology, which has massive potential, will be licensed to toy manufacturers that will make those toys Internet connected and controllable. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| You Collaborate On Web Docs. Now Collaborate On Web Designs With Notable. | Top |
| When companies have employees based in different locations, collaboration can often be difficult. At TechCrunch, we use Yammer to communicate. But what if you want a team to collaborate and provide feedback on the development of content and features on websites and web platforms? That’s where Notable comes in. Notable, which is a product of design agency ZURB, lets you quickly and easily give feedback on design, content, and code on any page of a website or application without leaving your browser. Notable is essentially a page capture utility with an annotation feature that lets you highlight copy, design elements and even code that needs to be tweaked. To get started, you either install the Notable Firefox plugin, or download the Notable iPhone application from the App Store [ iTunes link ]. From there, you capture the design via a Firefox tool button, upload a JPG image or design mock-up from your desktop, or type in a URL. You can invite people into your “workspace” where they can leave comments in dialog boxes that can be dragged around the page and provide feedback on the design and code. Notable is giving away a free iPod Touch to anyone who has the most views on a public post through September 30. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
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