Saturday, March 20, 2010

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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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