Friday, March 19, 2010

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Check-In Fatigue. Or, Why I'm Rooting For An All-Out Location War. Top
I didn’t have the same problems at SXSW this year that some people did. Was it too crowded at some events? Sure. But there were plenty of alternative things to do. Did some of the keynotes bomb ? Yes. But there were plenty of other things to listen to. Did AT&T fail? No. Actually, they did an awesome job keeping the network up. Instead, I had a problem of a different kind: check-in fatigue. Seeing as location was this year’s Twitter at SXSW , and seeing as I write a lot about location, I wanted to try to use as many of the services as I could during the actual conference. I drastically underestimated how much work that would actually be. At first, I was using all of the services I had on my phone to check-in when I arrived at a place in Austin. This included: Foursquare , Gowalla , Loopt , Whrrl , Brightkite , Burbn , MyTown ,  CauseWorld ,  Hot Potato , Plancast , and (at certain places) Foodspotting . Even with great AT&T service, this would take a solid 10 minutes or more to check-in to all of them. And it took even longer when I’d have to pause to explain to my friends what the hell I was doing on my phone all that time. This was at every venue we stopped at. The situation simply wasn’t tenable. By the second day, I had cut the services I would check-in to in half. It still wasn’t close to being something I would consider doing on a regular basis. By the end of my time in Austin, I was down to using only two services — yes, the two in the midst of the “war” — Foursquare and Gowalla. Pretty much everyone I knew in Austin were also using both Foursquare and Gowalla to send out all their check-ins. And all seemed to agree: it was still too tedious to use even just two services to do the same thing. In the end, there should be only one. And so it should be no surprise that a few companies are already working on a solution for this problem. One is by the creators of Brightkite, who managed to obtain the killer check.in domain name. The team showed me a preview of the app at a party one night, and I immediately knew it was exactly what I needed (see a preview of it here). But there’s a problem with this solution too. Currently, Gowalla’s API is read-only, which means you actually can’t use another app to check-in to the service. I spoke with CEO Josh Williams a bit about this just prior to SXSW, and he noted that the main thinking behind this is to maintain the user experience Gowalla is looking for (a very Apple-like argument). But, he did say that eventually he thinks they will open up a two-way API — maybe once they have time to create some best practices documentation, he noted. Another problem is that currently each of these check-in services has their own places database. That means that a place on Foursquare may be slightly different than a place on Gowalla, even though they’re technically the same place. Worse, there are plenty of duplicates for some venues since people are allowed to create their own. Check.in works around this place problem by doing a look-up on each service and letting you pick the correct check-in spot. But it’s a bit slow, and still seems rather tedious. A better solution would be for the various services to adopt a standard for places. The Activity Streams group is working on such a concept. Yahoo may also be able to implement such a system on top of its WOEID system . Of course, any service that adopts such a standard would be risking at least part of their business since these place databases are one of the keys to each service. Meanwhile, Facebook is thinking about aggregating data from both Foursquare and Gowalla for its own upcoming location implementation. Might that be the one location stop to rule them all (of course, the writing back to Gowalla would still likely be an issue)? Not if Twitter has anything to say about it . I love that all these startups are emerging around location right now (at least a dozen more have emailed me just since I’ve been back from SXSW). But I’m starting to worry that this is going to turn into a repeat of the social wars, where we all have 15 different profiles we constantly have to update across a range of networks. During our Realtime Crunchup last year, I brought up this issue during our panel on location . All the players on stage (including Twitter, Foursquare, Hot Potato, Google Latitude, GeoAPI, and SimpleGeo) seemed to want to say that they could all get along and play nicely together for the betterment of location as a whole. I didn’t buy it then, and I’m definitely not buying it now. From a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense for these guys to all play nicely with one another and make it so you don’t have to use their services. The need to take steps to ensure that you will use their service , and will do so instead of a rival service. That’s the way it works, and that’s the way it has always worked. And that’s why it’s a war. Right now, it’s just the early stages where all sides are arming themselves. Soon, they’ll try to kill one another. And that may not be such a bad thing. [photo: flickr/ intagiblearts ] CrunchBase Information Foursquare Gowalla Facebook Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase
 
The Man Corporations Love and Xenophobes Hate Top
During my recent trip to India, I flew down to Bangalore for one reason: To meet N.R. Narayana Murthy. Murthy is the co-founder, executive chairman and former CEO for 21 years of Infosys, the first Indian company to go public on Nasdaq and effectively the company that began the $30 billion Indian IT outsourcing market. Murthy's idea was so successful that it quickly became controversial—not only within the United States where some Americans feel Indians are "stealing jobs," but also in India where many are concerned about a tech economy that doesn't make anything. I wanted to meet with Murthy, because in many ways he’s the best person to address what Indians at home and abroad are facing and where Indian entrepreneurship goes from here. Here are a few highlights from our meeting: His Day Job . Murthy thought he was stepping down from Infosys back in 2002, but he couldn't fully let go. As such, he still works pretty much full time for the company, traveling to meet with customers and running a lot of the company's mentoring and training programs. The more surprising aspect of his job: He personally signs off on the architecture of every building on each one of Infosys' campuses that employ some 17,000 people around the world. The one we were sitting in was spread of eight acres and had some remarkable buildings, including one that looked like the Luxor casino in Las Vegas. I asked why this was a top priority—after all, many Valley campuses are plush but from an architecture standpoint look about the same. He said when GE and other American multinationals were starting to come into his business everyone thought Infosys would lose the local talent war. So Murthy studied why people want to work at a particular place. One of the results was the comfort and design of the facilities. That was in 1994 when Infosys was designing the very building we were sitting in as we had this conversation. "I've been in charge of every building since– all over the world," he says. Hurting or Helping Local Entrepreneurship? Given exactly how plush Murthy and his colleagues have worked to make Infosys, has he indirectly hurt Bangalore's entrepreneurship scene by making the risk of leaving so daunting? He smiled when I asked this and said, "We may have unwittingly. But I do feel like the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and kicking in Bangalore." Further, I asked about Bangalore's Zippo-flipping, free-spending generation of young techies who've graduated to a huge wave of multinational jobs that pay them far more than their parents ever made, in many cases more than the rest of their families combined. Murthy didn't deny that that instant-gratification, “gimmie” contingent was strong in the city he helped build, economically speaking. But he blames the Internet and the mass-cross-pollination of Western pop culture, not the bigger paycheck from companies like his. "We are moving towards a uniform, global culture with an intense competitive spirit and an intense desire for instant gratification," he says. "But I have a firm belief that each generation is better than the previous one. The Indian entrepreneurs today are more daring than we were." (This from a man who became a capitalist after after hitchhiking across communist Eastern Europe and getting thrown in jail for chatting up someone's girlfriend on a train. "More daring" is a tall order, young Indian techies.) Is India's Tech Community Too Addicted to Services? Clearly, services has been a great business for Infosys and the hundreds of dollar-millionaires and even more rupee-millionaires that the company's generous stock program has created. But a lot of Indian CEOs and investors complain that in most cases services-based tech businesses are a great way to get revenues quick, but not a way to build a huge, high-growth business. There's a big question of whether India's tech sector has a worrying lack of product-building know-how. Murthy says it's a progression. "India missed the industrial revolution, but Indians had intelligence," he says. "We had to make do with pen and paper. We were always forced to look at the abstract. What is happening in India today is the creation of jobs. Let's create jobs as long as they are legal and ethical, it doesn't matter, as long as we make money. The time will come for creating products. I wouldn't lose sleep over this. If we create enough jobs we'll raise the confidence of the youngsters and they'll create products." India's Infrastructure. Here's something it's hard for even Murthy to be upbeat about: India's shoddy physical infrastructure. Murthy has traveled the world and it's frustrating that so much money has poured into the country he loves, and yet, the infrastructure is still so shockingly bad. There is progress—Infosys for instance has benefited from a new overpass that cuts down on the drive to the campus by more than thirty minutes. ( See! ) But it's not moving nearly fast enough, he says. "I don't know if we will reach the level of the United States or China," he adds. Murthy gave a more nuanced explanation than the usual "it's corruption" answer you get in India. He explained that 65% of India's population lives in rural areas and 35% live in cities. And there's such polarity between the quality of life that politicians have to appear to be doing more for the villages than the cities if they want to get re-elected. That leaves prosperous economic cities blighted by poor sewage systems, pollution spewing generators and beggars weaving through traffic tapping on car windows. "Different emerging nations take different paths," he says. "In China, they chose to emphasize giving people economic freedom first and political freedom second. In India we chose the opposite path." Hurting or Helping US-based Indians? All you have to do is read the comments on one of Vivek Wadhwa's posts to see the ugly, anti-immigrant, anti-Indian fervor that's been whipped up in America, post-recession. A lot of it has to do with outsourcing. I asked Murthy if he felt his company and industry's huge success has indirectly made life harder for Indian-Americans. He turned the blame on xenophobes like Lou Dobbs and grandstanding politicians who use the wedge issue to get viewers and votes. But it's an issue he has to address a lot. He answers it by saying every morning he gets up and gets a Pepsi out of his GE Fridge and drives his American car to work where he sits down at his Dell computer. India used to have companies that made soft drinks, refrigerators, cars and computers. But the American ones were better. Allowing them in hurt Indian workers in the short term, but provided a far better quality of life for a much bigger swath of Indians long term. He argues outsourcing has done the same thing for US companies. Greater efficiencies and cost-savings enables these companies to stay competitive and there's no reason they can't—in theory—plow those savings into better local jobs or job training. This argument isn't going to pacify hate-mongers, because nothing will. Murthy knows that too and while he regrets it, he seems to accept it as reality. Advice for Entrepreneurs. Murthy has started a $170 million venture fund, so although he spends most of his time still at Infosys, he clearly cares about encouraging the next generation of entrepreneurs. He had two big pieces of advice for them. One, be able to articulate what you do in one sentence. If you can't, you don't have a good idea. And two, make sure the market is ready. Businesses are killed, not congratulated, for being ahead of their time.
 
Opera, Safari Beat Chrome On Google's Own JavaScript Conformance Test Top
Back in June, Google launched Sputnik , a suite of tools that runs over 5,000 tests to check a web browser’s JavaScript conformance. Last week, they made the tool a lot easier for anyone to use, with a version that works in the web browser. The results are interesting. Notably, both the Opera and Safari web browsers beat Google’s own Chrome browser in the test. As you can see in the picture above, Opera is the clear leader, with only 78 failures (the closer to the center, the less errors). Safari came in second with 159 errors, with Chrome in third with 218 errors. Firefox is close behind with 259 errors, while Internet Explorer is the outlier with 463 errors. These tests were run on Windows machines, with the latest released version of each browser. Using the web tool on my Mac, though, shows similar results (at least for Opera, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox — there is no IE for Mac anymore). While much of the focus on JavaScript is about speed (that’s what the SunSpider test measures, for example), Sputnik is interesting because it focuses on conformity, making it more like the Acid3 test, which tests web standards compliance. Chrome, Safari, and Opera have all passed Acid3, with Firefox getting very close (94/100 for Firefox 3.6). IE, meanwhile, again lags behind with just 20/100 for IE8. And even the new IE9 preview only scores 55/100. Speaking of IE9, I tried to run the Sputnik tool in the preview build of the new browser on Windows 7. Unfortunately, it completely shut down several times after getting up to about 50 failures after only a few hundred of the 5,000+ tests — not a good sign. But again, it’s just a very early preview release of the browser, and early SunSpider results for the browser have been good. CrunchBase Information Opera Safari Google Chrome Firefox Windows Internet Explorer Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Review: Aperture 3 Top
If you’re a photographer and use a Mac, chances are you’re using Lightroom or Aperture. Probably Lightroom, since Aperture is less popular among pros — and the latest version seems to be an acknowledgment of that. The features added in version 3 are clearly intended to draw casual shooters using iPhoto to the paid image editing honey pot. Since so many of these amazing new features are direct side-loads from iPhoto, it smooths the process and makes the program as a whole more approachable, though whether existing Aperture users will find them helpful is questionable. Brushes, on the other hand, are a welcome addition to any photographer’s toolset, and depending on how dedicated you are, may be worth the price of admission. Continue reading…
 
Crocodoc Sets Its Sights On Adobe Acrobat With New Update Top
Last month we wrote about Crocodoc , a new Y Combinator-funded company that makes it very easy to upload a text document or PowerPoint deck and mark it up online to share with your colleagues. Unfortunately, it was also pretty bare boned — you couldn’t even save your edited document to your hard drive. Today, that’s changing: Crocodoc has rolled out some key new features (including the ability to save) that make the service significantly more flexible, and also pits it more directly against Adobe’s Acrobat Pro. Aside from the ability to save to PDF, the new version includes a freehand pen tool, a tool to convert any website to PDF (which you can then add notes to), and a new API. In a few days, the company will be releasing its application on Google’s recently-launched App Marketplace . The service will also be rolling out a Flash-based embeddable document viewer (similar to what you’ll find on DocStoc and Scribd) that lets you both view and mark up embedded documents. CEO Ryan Damico says that these features make Crocodoc more competitive with Adobe’s $400 Acrobat Pro software because the free Acrobat Reader most people have doesn’t allow them to mark up and save their documents (personally, I’ve been avoiding any software with the word ‘Acrobat’ in its title for years). Damico does acknowledge that there are still plenty of premium features that Crocodoc doesn’t have that Adobe’s paid software does, but says that this basic editing/saving functionality is what most people are after, anyway. Damico says that in the long term, Crocodoc is hoping to “do to Acrobat what Gmail did to Outlook” by taking a widely used desktop application and bringing it online. CrunchBase Information Crocodoc Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Google Hands Out Its First 1337 Cash Prize For A Chrome Bug Top
Back in January, Google announced that it would follow Mozilla’s lead and start offering cash bounties for bugs found in the code of Chromium (the open-source browser behind Chrome), or Chrome by the community. Google both matches Mozilla’s $500 and ups the bounty all the way up to $1,337 (yes, 1337 ) for “particularly severe or particularly clever” bugs. This week, they rewarded the first of those. As noted on the Chrome Release blog, Google made four cash payments on Wednesday. There were two $500 prizes (both for memory errors), one $1,000 prize (for a cross-orgin bypass), and the first-ever $1,337 prize. The lucky receipient of that was a man named Sergey Glazunov, who located a bug that Google is calling, “ High Integer overflows in WebKit JavaScript objects .” This crowd-sourced bug hunting seems like a great idea, especially for a browser moving through development as quickly as Chrome. Chrome has only existed for a year and a half and already they’re testing version 5.0. Stable builds of both the Mac and Linux version of the browser are likely to launch at some point over the next few months. CrunchBase Information Google Chrome Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Green E-Biller Transactis Raises $2.5 Million Top
Banks, cable companies, and utilities all want to get rid of their paper bills and get customers on their electronic billing systems. Just as there were back-office billing providers for the paper era, there are now back-office electronic billers. A company in Charlotte, North Carolina called Transactis is one of them, and it just raised a $2.5 million round led by New York City-based Metamorphic Ventures . CEO Joe Proto and other existing shareholders also participated in the round. The round is an extension of a $3 million series C the company raised last year, and brings the total capital raised to $10.5 million . Transactis works primarily with banks and payment processors to take over the whole e-billing process for them, from presenting the bills via email to collecting the cash. More and more consumers are opting to go paperless (it’s the green thing to do), and companies save on the paper, printing, and postage costs. Email billing is a growth business, and Transactis is carving out a nice little niche for itself. CrunchBase Information Transactis Metamorphic Ventures Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Location Isn't A War Between Two Sides, It's A Gold Rush For Everyone Top
Editor’s note : This post was written by Joe Stump , the co-founder of SimpleGeo , a geolocation infrastructure company. While much of the focus in location these days is on the front-end side of things, SimpleGeo focuses on the backend, allowing startups to very easily get started with geolocation. There’s been a lot of coverage lately about the location “ war ” between Gowalla and Foursquare. Nobody is arguing that Gowalla and Foursquare aren’t, on some levels, competing, but I do think a lot of people are missing the big picture here. Which is the impending location gold rush . My cofounder, Matt Galligan , and I firmly believe that location is in a similar position as social was in 2001 or so. By that I mean that, at the time, social was very nascent, but exciting as it gave us a whole new view of the data we consume every day. Over the course of almost 10 years we’ve seen social get baked into everything from photo sharing to financial tools. I think that location, similarly, gives us an interesting new view of our data. This momentum has been slowly gaining steam since, essentially, the iPhone was released. We, the developers and general nerd populous, finally had an open platform that had location (in the form of latitude and longitude of our users) baked into it. The first wave of location services made location the core feature. Much like social, this isn’t sustainable long-term. You can’t be “Some Company plus location” and expect to sustain users. Especially after Some Company enables location themselves. Which bring us to the second wave of location, which I think was started by our friends at Foursquare. They were, in my opinion, the first product to gain traction by moving past simple location and building an experience on top of it. It’s as if co-founders  Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai said, “Okay, we have location, but that’s boring. Let’s make a game out of going out with our friends!” In other words, they worked under the assumption of having location and built a compelling experience from there. I think people who are building location-based applications need to keep two things in mind: 1. If there’s any war brewing, it’s over presence. That is the very basic question of where you and your friends are and who may know those details. Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, et al, if they wish to own presence, will be duking it out with Twitter and Facebook. For anyone who’s not already in this game it’s going to be very hard to break into it at this point. 2. You need to move past the mindset that location is the feature. Build products under the assumption that you have a user’s location and that you can use the social plumbing we’ve been building for the last nine years. What kind of interesting experiences can you build on top of the potent mixture of friends, location, and the real world? So who’s going to win? More than just one company. The users are going to get more interesting and compelling experiences, some familiar names will revolutionize their products with location, and some kid in a garage we haven’t heard of is about to make us all look like fools. I can’t wait. [photo: flickr/ bogenfreund ] CrunchBase Information Foursquare Gowalla SimpleGeo Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Apple Starts Accepting iPad Applications; Launch Apps Must Be Submitted By March 27 Top
There are only two weeks left until the iPad’s April 3 launch date, and Apple has just started reaching out to developers to say that they’re accepting applications that were developed specifically for the device. We’ve included the Email below. The key takeaway: If you’re looking to have your app available at launch, you need to submit it by March 27, at which point Apple’s team will let you know if your application is ready for the grand opening. The first few weeks after the iPad is released will be a huge gold rush opportunity, as users look to try out the device’s large screen for the first time. In short, if you can make it to one of the App Store’s ‘top apps’ lists, you’ll likely do very well for yourself. The only problem is that the vast majority of developers have never had access to an actual iPad — they’re all working off of emulators, save for a handful of extremely lucky developers who literally have their iPads chained to a desk. Developers can tweak their applications all they want on their computer monitors, but until they’ve actually gotten to try it out for themselves, they’ll have a hard time figuring out if their apps feel right. I expect most developers will scramble to submit what they have by March 27, and that we’ll then see numerous updates immediately afterward as developers tweak button placement and other interface elements. Some developers may choose to simply wait until they have a device in their hands so that they can try out their apps before submitting, but the App Store’s discoverability issues make this a risky move (of course, given the hundreds or thousands of applications that will launch alongside the iPad, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get noticed on launch day, either). Keep in mind that users will also be able to use scaled-up versions of iPhone applications on their iPads. Given the choice, though, there’s little doubt they’ll choose a native iPad app over an iPhone app every time. CrunchBase Information App Store Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Yahoo Chief Technologist Sam Pullara Leaves To Become An EIR At Benchmark Top
One of Yahoo’s key chief technologists, Sam Pullara , is leaving the company to become an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital. Pullara was the technologist who headed up the development of the the Yahoo! Open Application Platform , the Yahoo! Query Language and Yahoo! Pipes . His departure follows that of veteran Yahoo senior executive Ash Patel earlier this week . Back in 2008, Yahoo was making a big push to open itself up to developers , and Pullara was one of the champions of that strategy. He was also Yahoo’s representative on the OpenSocial Foundation, which sought to create a counterweight to Facebook. Pullara has been an EIR before. In 2004, he held that position at Accel Partners and created a startup called Gauntlet Systems, which he sold to Borland in 2006. At Benchmark, he will be looking for new startup opportunities. He will also be working again with Benchmark partner Peter Fenton, who was at Accel when Pullara was there. Pullara’s last day at Yahoo will be on April 1. Yahoo has no plans to hire a replacement. Today, another Benchmark EIR , former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, was named CEO of Eucalyptus Systems . CrunchBase Information Sam Pullara Yahoo! Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Bootstrapped Social Network For Families Genoom Hits 1 Million Users Top
Who says you can’t attract a substantial number of users on a shoestring budget? Spain-based social networking platform provider Genoom , which lets family members communicate amongst each other on private online community sites, is about to sign up its millionth user. This isn’t exactly a huge milestone, but I think it is noteworthy since the startup is operating on a mere $80,000 in seed funding , which it raised from Midatel roughly 3 years ago. Genoom was launched in July 2007 and will cross the 1 million registered users mark by this weekend. According to company spokesperson Bob Samii , the site is now available in 17 languages and counts more than over 10 million profiles from families all over the world. On the Genoom website, users can add family trees, personal information, photos, videos, and related documents about ancestors and living relatives alike, limiting access to uploaded information through invitations and custom group privacy settings. This makes the service effectively a marriage between genealogy and social networking. Genoom offers a handy Facebook application , allowing users to access their family tree and communicate with family, all while logged into their Facebook account. CrunchBase Information Genoom Information provided by CrunchBase
 
WorkSnug Augmented Reality iPhone App Hits SF And NYC For Mobile CoWorkers Top
WorkSnug , an augmented reality iPhone app that is setting out to connect "mobile workers" (that's everybody now, right?) to the nearest places to work in major cities, is now live in New York and San Francisco. This follows launches in London and Barcelona. To kick-start a process to reach scale they've used volunteers and app users to visit and review hundreds of workspaces where the coffee is good and the screaming kids are less prevelant - rating WiFi, noise levels, power provision, "community feel", with the idea that we all hang out in a mobile kind of way these days. They have an Augmented Reality iphone app [ iTunes Store link ] which pulls in data from the site.
 
Apple iPad? The Germans Have Other Ideas Top
While every man and his dog is waiting for their preordered iPad to arrive, some Germans went their own way and yesterday presented a Slate that appears to have, well, better features. The Neofonie WePad has similar form and function as the wet dreams of our Crunchgear editors, but facts are that the German Android device has a bigger multitouch screen and a faster CPU than the iPad . Also it runs Flash, has USB ports, an inbuilt card reader and expandable memory. Additionally it allows complete multitasking and has a webcam. Beat that baby.
 
OneRiot Rolls Out Realtime Ad Unit That Refreshes To Match Trending Topics Top
Last year, OneRiot ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. The search engine also launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, that has since been integrated into the search engine’s API. Today, the realtime search startup is improving upon its advertising product by offering Trending Ad unit that automatically updates in realtime corresponding to the the most popular trending topics at the time. The ability to update in realtime allows OneRiot to show advertiser content that is relevant to trending topics as they emerge on networks like Twitter, Facebook and the web. The ads are available via standard-size IAB Ad Units and is enabled by OneRiot's realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm. And previously, OneRiot's "Trending Ads" were available only via OneRiot's API. This meant that developers had to integrate the raw feed into their applications, and create their own UI. The new ad unit allows any website currently monetizing with standard static ad units to display RiotWise Trending Ads. In order to implement he new ad unit, publishers need to integrate Trending Ad Units in the same way they would call standard ad units. The ads will then link to realtime and relevant content from OneRiot's network of media partners. One Riot claims that the realtime relevance of the ads leads to click through rates at four times the average rates. Currently OneRiot's trending ads have been used on Twitter apps (ÜberTwitter) and desktop clients ( Digsby ). OneRiot shares revenue with the application developer. As we’ve written in the past, OneRiot runs the risk of surfacing irrelevant or spammy content with realtime ads, especially is the ads are refreshing constantly to match trending topics. But as a realtime search engine, OneRiot has invested heavily in spam prevention and is constantly sorting through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn't. Regardless, it seems like a viable monetization tool for developers. The startup, which just raised $7 million in funding, has been steadily innovating its product and is gathering up partners quickly. The realtime stream ramped up this year with all the big players adding functionality to their search offerings and OneRiot was smart to get in the game early.
 
Google's Need For Speed Is About Making You Search More Top
Google’s obsession with speed is well-documented. One of the primary design principles behind its search engine is to return results as fast as possible and strip away anything extra. But its need for speed goes well beyond search. All of Google’s apps are optimized for speed (well, except Gmail lately, but they promise to fix that ). The Chrome browser is extremely fast , and the upcoming Chrome OS is also expected to make Web browsing and other computing tasks zippier. It almost doesn’t matter if Google’s Chrome browser and OS gain significant market share or not, as long as they push other browsers and operating systems to keep up in the speed race. Google’s need for speed boils down to one very simple thing: money. It realized long ago that every millisecond improvement in pageload times on its search engine resulted in more searches, and thus more search ads served and clicked on. The opposite is also true. Google once did a study showing that delays of 100 to 400 millisecond in showing search results translated into up to 0.6 percent searches. Multiply that across the billions of searches done on Google and it starts to add up to real money, perhaps tens of millions of dollars per quarter. Google can keep trying to make search faster because that is under its control. But what about the rest of the Web? The faster pages load, the more Web pages people will visit overall (this is why broadband adoption is the single biggest driver of Internet traffic and e-commerce). And it stands to reason that the more Web pages you visit, the more searches you will perform in any given day. Because searches are driven by the other things you do on the Web. You go look for information, surf around, and then go back to search when you want to find something new (at least Google hopes you do). By helping to speed up the Web, Google can speed up that information loop so that instead of waiting for Web pages to load you can get what you need and start another search instead. No wonder Google tries to do everything it can to make the Web faster. For instance, it is supporting emerging standards such as HTML5 and SPDY , and sharing its best practices and speed-monitoring tools with developers. It is also baking the PuSH protocol into Google Reader and other apps . In doing so, Google is helping to deliver news feeds faster (PuSH, aka Pubsubhubbub, was created by two Google engineers, of course, and released as an open-source project). The list goes on and on. It is all about trying to get people to achieve a “flow state” where they are just clicking from one link to the next and it all happens instantaneously. In order for humans not to notice electronic delays, new information needs to appear in a matter of milliseconds. Get the whole Web humming like that and we may never leave our monitors. Photo credit: Flickr/ Ana Patricia Almelda CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Skype Legend Morten Lund Will Rock GeeknRolla, April 20, London Top
We've just confirmed that Morten Lund, possibly the quintessential European tech entrepreneur/investor - will be keynoting at this year's GeeknRolla in London on April 20. An entrepreneur from Copenhagen, Denmark, Lund is a talismanic figure on the European scene. While many tech players in Europe are accused of being too timid, this is a guy who - like many Silicon Valley players - bets a lot of chips at once. Indeed, his story reads like a roller-coaster ride in European entrepreneurship. Wikipedia describes Lund as a startup 'ideologist' and 'visionary' who has founded or co-invested in more than 40 high-tech start ups in the last decade, most famously Skype. In May 2008 he exited Danish social networking and mobile backup site ZYB to operator Vodafone Europe for around $49m.
 
New Media Infrastructure Company Ankeena Networks Raises $16 Million (Updated) Top
Ankeena Networks , a Santa Clara, CA-based provider of new media infrastructure solutions, has raised approximately $16 million in new VC funding, according to a regulatory filing (via peHUB ). Update: small oversight from the good people at peHUB – which we didn’t catch either – but this isn’t actually a new round but an amendment filing: The company had reported back in 2008 that it had secured $8.5 million of a $9.4 million Series A round, and this new filing is actually an amendment. The company later announced a $6.5m extension in the summer of 2009, although did not submit an SEC filing. The new report says that the securities were first sold in 2008, and we should have caught it. Our error was due to the fact that the filing was not labeled as an amendment (that's just an explanation for our original post, not an excuse). The company’s total funding stands at roughly $16 million . Apologies for any confusion. No word about who backed the company with this third round of financing , but Ankeena Networks was listed by one of its main business partners , Juniper Networks as one of their investments when they announced their $50 million fund recently, so that’s one name at least. Ankeena has also secured funding from VC firms Clearstone Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures. Ankeena Networks' flagship product is a content delivery platform dubbed Media Flow Director , which enables mobile operators and other service providers to take advantage of rising consumer demand for mobile content and other rich media content across mobile devices, PCs and televisions. MFD aims to ensure users receive a smooth viewing experience without buffering or stuttering despite of varying network conditions, regardless of the viewing device, over mobile as well as wire-line broadband networks. Ankeena does this by dynamically detecting the available bandwidth and varying the delivery bit-rate. Ankeena Networks was born under another name, Nokeena , back in 2008. The company was co-founded by CEO Rajan Raghavan , chief strategy and technology officer Prabakar Sundarrajan, chief strategy and technology officer, VP of Engineering Kumar Narayanan and Jaspal Kohli, chief architect, along with Deepak Srinivasan, VP of Business Development. Collectively, this team brings leadership expertise from companies like Akamai/Speedera, Cisco, Citrix/NetScaler, Exodus Communications, HP, IBM, InSilicon/Virtual Chips, Intel, Level 3 Communications, Mirapoint and Yahoo. One to watch closely. CrunchBase Information Ankeena Networks Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Interview: Microsoft's Scott Guthrie on Silverlight and Windows Phone Top
This year's MIX 2010 was led by Scott Guthrie, who has emerged from Microsoft's rank and file to own just about everything developer-related. Where last year's MIX and PDC conferences were spearheaded by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, Guthrie's keynote appearances focused on the progress Silverlight has made in driving the company's 3 Screens and the Cloud approach to the disruptions going on in mobile, television, and the Web OS desktop. I spoke with Scott after his opening day keynote in Las Vegas:
 
SeeWhy Aims To Optimize Website Conversions Through Email, Social Media Top
Andover, MA-based website conversion company SeeWhy today launched Conversion Manager , an automated web analytics service that allows publishers and e-commerce companies to optimize website conversion rates through real-time ‘remarketing’ campaigns. The company claims that their solution can recover up to 50 percent of website abandoners (i.e. people who start but never complete a sign-up or payment process) by triggering automated campaigns using email and social media. The company fences with study results that highlight the importance of real-time follow up with website abandoners, citing research from MIT that says 90 percent of e-commerce leads go cold within the first hour. SeeWhy CEO Scott G. Silk compares such leads with fine wine, stating that unlike the latter e-commerce leads don’t get better with age. Cute. SeeWhy’s new product builds upon the functionalities of its predecessor, Abandonment Tracker Pro, which we wrote about earlier. With added support for Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, Conversion Manager is able to track individual visitors' behavior on e-commerce and other websites and trigger automated, real-time messages to shopping cart, online form, and other abandoners by email and social media the moment abandoners leave the site. Conversion Manager is available now at an annual fee of $15,000. SeeWhy has so far raised $6.5 million in venture capital: $4.5 million in May 2009 and another $2 million from the same investors in December 2009. SeeWhy’s CrunchBase profile doesn’t list any competitors and a Web search doesn’t immediately turn up potential rivals – if you know alternative services feel free to share their names in comments. CrunchBase Information SeeWhy Information provided by CrunchBase
 
CloudCrowd Takes On CrowdFlower To Outsource Labor To The Cloud Top
TechCrunch50 startup CrowdFlower has been attracting a lot of attention, even raising $5 million in funding recently. CrowdFlower is a labor as a service startup that helps businesses outsource mundane or repetitive tasks to the cloud. Now the startup has attracted a competitor, recently launched CloudCrowd , which also promises increase efficiency and lower costs to companies by breaking large projects into smaller tasks, and distributing them to its virtual workforce. Once a client assigns a task to CloudCrowd, the company will distribute tasks its work force of more than 100,000 workers. With each task completed, a worker earn a credibility rating that determines the types of tasks they are offered. Workers who don’t have a rating yet are assigned basic tasks until they develop a reputation. Workers are able to see how much each separate task pays, and earnings are distributed through PayPal. Tasks range from content moderation, internet research, audio and video transcription to data entry. Since the company’s launch a few months ago, CloudCrowd has completed over 500,000 tasks for a variety of clients, including USC and RentCycle. As I wrote above CloudCrowd will face competition from CrowdFlower, but it seems that the model is attracting the attention of businesses to perform mundane tasks, so there should be room fr several players in the space. CrunchBase Information CloudCrowd Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Looks Like 123people Has Been Acquired By France's Yellow Pages Top
According to investir.fi and various other sources , the world's leading people search engine 123people , which strives from Austria, has been acquired by the leading french yellow pages company PagesJaunes . The company was incubated by i5invest and received VC money from Austrian Gamma Capital Partners . Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
 
DIY Social Network Platform GROU.PS Now Syncs With Yahoo Groups Top
GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on moderated online collaboration has unveiled a synchronization tool that allows the group administrators on Yahoo Groups to sync with GROU.PS. So Yahoo Groups admins can incorporate functionality such as, location-based services and chat, into their platforms from GROU.PS. The new tool doesn’t require the Yahoo Group owners to shut down their existing group. They can still continue using their email list. Instead, a GROU.PS group surrounds their old Yahoo Group list and will add additional functionality such as collaboration, deep customization tools and integration with Facebook. GROU.PS will essentially create a whole new social network tailored particularly to that specific list, and augments its functionality with typical social networking features that can be found on any GROU.PS group. And GROU.PS has amped up its offering for publishers by launching Elastic Modules, which gives publishers the ability to change the way the data is displayed to their visitors. To date, the highest reach of look and feel customization was at the template level; the publisher could only change the skin of their site. Now publishers can actually modify the backend of the social network they’ve created. The startup’s networks are attractive to users because it lets you run all of your group's collaboration tools from one GROU.PS domain using a single login. The system supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups – each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc). The startup, which has over 40,000 networks on its platform and 2.5 million users , also added ActivityRank Pipelines, a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network measure and rank members' content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to members based on these rankings. And the social network is launching a subscription model that will allow moderators to charge subscription fees to members (GROU.PS gets a 50% cut on any fees charges). GROU.PS raised $1 million in funding, bringing the startup’s total funding up to over $2 million. But while the social network is growing, it is still faces major competition form the leader in the space, Ning, which hit 37 million users with 1.6 million social networks in November. CrunchBase Information GROU.PS Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Siri Hires Mobile Expert Gummi Hafsteinsson Away From Google Top
We haven’t heard all that much from Siri , the venture-backed startup that is working on virtual assistant applications for smartphones. Still well below most people’s radar, the company raised $24 million in venture capital and recently released its first app for the iPhone after nearly a year of development . But that doesn’t mean the startup has a lack of ambition: they’ve just hired Gummi Hafsteinsson , who has led several of Google’s most successful mobile product initiatives as Senior Product Manager for the past 5 years, as their new VP of Product. Hafsteinsson originally joined Google’s mobile group in July 2005 and first managed the Google Maps for Mobile product. More recently, he led development of Google's voice-powered search app for all the major mobile platforms – iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Symbian. He reported directly to Vic Gundotra , Google’s VP of Engineering. Prior to joining Google, Gummi founded and ran a company called Dimon Software that produced mobile enterprise connectivity software designed to enable enterprises to access corporate IT systems from any mobile device. His experience in developing scalable applications for multiple platforms tells us Siri is working on making its virtual personal assistant product cross-platform. Its proposition was compelling enough to bring home the award for most innovative Web service at the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, by the way. In other news, Siri is now available for iPod touch devices, integrated Twitter into the service last week and is closing in on a quarter million early users. (Photo by Peter DaSilva for the New York Times ) CrunchBase Information Siri Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Those Facebook QR Codes Are Part Of Their Location Plans Top
A few days ago, we noted that Facebook was testing putting links to QR codes on their main profile pages. Now we know why. Apparently, Facebook is doing some testing ahead of their location feature roll-out, which will use these codes. A source with knowledge of Facebook’s plans tells us that the QR codes will be used with an upcoming version of Facebook’s mobile app. More specifically, businesses could potentially print out a QR code and put it on a wall or a counter in their venue to allow users to scan it to check-in at that store, we’re told. Facebook is expected to unveil its location plans at its f8 conference in late April. For those unfamiliar, a QR code (short for “quick response”) is a sort of barcode that stores information which can be captured and interpreted by a mobile device by way of the camera on the device. Google , Microsoft , and others have been experimenting with their usage recently, and now Facebook is hopping on board. But Facebook’s idea is particularly interesting because it’s based around the hot check-in space right now. While services such as Foursquare and Gowalla are quickly gaining popularity, both still have under 1 million users, while Facebook has over 400 million users. Recently, the social network has been testing out pulling in data from both of those networks , rather than trying to build its own location network from scratch. That said, with a feature like this, it appears that you could use Facebook to check-in, then perhaps send it back out to someplace like Foursquare. The problem with Gowalla is that their API is currently read-only, so checking-in would have to be done through their own app, and not Facbeook. While the QR code links spotted the other day didn’t work yet, it was clear that one would link to the actual profile page, while the other would link to a particular status update. It seems that Page owners will get the option to view them soon as well. Facebook’s location plans continue to unfold. CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Google May Slay Your First Born Child, According To This Video Top
Look, I’m all for privacy, liberty, rights, etc. But this video (embedded below) is pretty ridiculous. Listening to this, you’d think Google was born of a desire to trick everyone on the planet. Does Google make almost all of its money off of ad revenues? Yes. But does that mean they’re out to screw you by any means necessary? No. The video even delves into Google Buzz and its privacy debacle . But it implies that the issue stems from Google’s desire to control you. Really, it’s just that Google can’t seem to comprehend social, and was rushed into rolling out Buzz, and handled it very poorly. The bottom line is that if you really think Google is out to get you, you shouldn’t be using it — at all. In fact, they have a new analytics opt-out feature that is probably right up your alley. But you also probably shouldn’t be using the Internet at all, because all of these companies are doing basically the same thing to varying degrees. Maybe Google wants to murder you, but I don’t know, I’d bet that they’re not going to. CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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