go to our new Timeline or share your top tech on Facebook

There aren’t too many techie happenings that are greeted with grumpy ire as when Facebook makes an interface change.

So when the social networking site rolled out Timeline to brand pages a few weeks back, we just decided to embrace it and have some fun.

To do so, we’re celebrating a decade of the AllThingsD conference, given it is our 10th anniversary this year.

We’ve selected about 50 of the biggest moments from the past decade in tech and placed them in our new Facebook Timeline , culled from a decade’s worth of significant people and stand-out gadgets collected by our ace editorial team.

The Timeline features commentary, links to articles from way back when and original, unpublished images from deep in the AllThingsD archives.

And when we didn’t have the right images, we just mashed some up, as you’ll see.

Looking for never-before-published images of a bearded Steve Jobs of Apple onstage at the very first D conference?

They’re in there (May 2003).

Or Kara Swisher’s very first snarktacular post on AllThingsD.com Yup, that too (April 2007).

Walt Mossberg’s thoughts about the very first version of Mozilla Firefox?

Certainly (November 2004).

Bonus points to you if you can find our special photoshop of Léo Apotheker “passing the Hewlett-Packard baton” to Meg Whitman (hint, look in September, 2011).

I’m pretty proud of that one.

But the Timeline of Tech is only half of what we’re launching on Facebook this week.

Our audience at the conferences and here at AllThingsD.com is full of well-informed tech insiders, so we also want everyone to hear your picks for the top moments in tech, as well.

To facilitate that, we’ve added a few questions for you to answer in a special Facebook tab called “Top Tech, which we’ll leave open for the next week or so.

Do you think that the interactivity of the Flip video camera changed the game? Would we all be talking via telegraph, if not for the release for the Microsoft Kin? And where would QR-code technology be without the CueCat?

Your top tech answers might just make it onto our permanent list.

After we take in all your submissions and talk them over, we’ll then pick the best to be permanently added to our Timeline of Tech.

We’ll even make sure that the ones we choose get the special AllThingsD Photoshop treatment.

Thanks in advance for your help — now go browse our picks and give us your suggestions for the most influential gadgets and biggest tech moments since 2003.

Go To our New Timeline or Share Your Top Tech on Facebook

Coliloquy, a start-up demoing at D: Dive into Media, is running with that idea, in the hopes of creating a new kind of fiction-reading experience, built on the Amazon Kindle developer platform.

Books released using Coliloquy are written by authors but are released as “active applications,” rather than as e-books with a fixed set of pages.

For the reader, that means the books can be changed and updated over time, just like apps.

Serialized stories, like those that used to appear regularly in magazines, are just the beginning.

In some stories, readers have the option of selecting desired traits in the characters, which are then automatically woven into their version of the story.

In other words, your Fabio can be a brunet.

Romantic fiction aside, Coliloquy’s platform offer authors the ability to adjust stories based on feedback from readers — something previously sequestered in the nerdiest of fan-fiction forums.

Coliloquy stories are already available, but the demo at D: Dive Into Media showcased early-user data and the company’s first contemporary novel, as well as a new, personalized Erotica series.

We can’t wait to see what they’ve added to the conference swag bags.

But there is hope, even for the hopelessly tone-deaf, in Songify Live, a new app that lets even the most egregious musical offender crank out a catchy tune — in tune.

Songify Live, which is being demoed at the D: Dive Into Media conference, is the newest release from the partnership between app makers Khush and viral music video sensations the Gregory Brothers, who are famous for turning remixed video clips of news programs into “Auto-Tune the News.”

Songify Live lets users speak into their iPhone, and its Auto-Tune-inspired software engine turns their regular speech into a Gregory Brothers-style pop song, complete with complex beats and tricky arpeggios.

Users just push the button, start talking, and a song instantly appears.

The app may not provide the instant feedback of a karaoke audience but, then again, neither will users find themselves being chased down the street by a bottle-wielding crowd after an unfortunate rendition of “Piano Man.”

Have a look at Khush founders Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia using the service to create their own promo video:

But there is hope for future generations who want to see what people of 2012 were posting on the Internet: Scribr, a brand-new company based in Santa Clara, Calif., is building a service to help users’ social Web content survive, long after even mighty Facebook’s servers have stopped spinning.

Scribr provides a way of collecting all the stuff a user has shared via the social Web, so that a few years or decades from now all those tweets, check-ins and Facebook photos will still be around for perusal.

Like any other API-driven Web service, users start by logging in to Scribr, connecting their various social accounts, and waiting for the service to ingest all the data they’ve ever posted to Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo’s Flickr, Tumblr and Foursquare.

Once finished, Scribr lets users order a physical book of their collected postings, printed on demand by Lulu, one of the Web’s larger on-demand printing concerns.

Though a chronological book of online life may seem like a pretty simple thing to collect, Scribr co-founder Adam Henson explained that getting a book with that many tiny parts to make sense takes a fair amount of secret-coding sauce.

Henson used the example of users posting a picture to several services with a single click as the sort of obstacle Scribr had to overcome before its first book rolled off the press.

“We don’t just de-duplicate [similar posts across several services],” Henson said. “We roll those up into a single, more rich piece of content.”

Scribr boasts another brilliantly obvious feature to get users adding content to their books: Auto-journaling via email.

Users can sign up to receive daily emails, which arrive with a subject line like, “How was your Thursday?”

After a user replies to that email, Scribr adds that content to all the other posts and photos it has accumulated for publishing.

Henson said Scribr’s next move is to clean up the code base and add a few more social services to the list, all ahead of opening to a larger beta community by the end of January.

The project, which has been bootstrapped by the three co-founders for the last year, has roots in the “quantified self” movement, whose practitioners gather and retain all kinds of data about their lives — from steps taken to text messages sent, and just about everything in between.

But Henson’s aspirations for Scribr are much more about bringing the benefit of gathering life’s data to the millions of people who aren’t into life-logging.

Henson explained:

“We want it to be as easy as possible for the masses to do this, because most people just aren’t good at taking the time to write a journal.”

Like many of the very new businesses written about on AllThingsD, Scribr has all kinds of obstacles to overcome before it is ready for mainstream use. The Web site and printed book still have a beta level of polish, and the market for these books, from which Scribr plans to make its money, is still unproven.

Right now, users pick the date range, and their printed book is essentially a chronology of their social Web lives during that period. But Henson said Scribr is already getting requests for printed products that its system is capable of making but that its founders never conceived of.

“We’ve already had one request from a group of Civil War reenactors who want to make a sort of yearbook from several of their members’ Facebook accounts, and another from a guy who wants to make a book out of his recently deceased father’s Facebook account,” Henson said.

These possibilities are only a few of the things that come to mind for a service that can bring together all kinds of posts and personal media and drop them into an organized and more indelible format.

There is something admittedly reassuring about a tangible product.

“At the end of the day, I’m really glad I have that book on my shelf,” Henson said.

Scribr is betting that someday, when Twitter or — gasp — Facebook go the way of Yahoo’s now-defunct GeoCities, other users will be glad to have that book, too.

Henson chatted with me about the future of Scribr, and in this video he shows off the beta version of a Scribr book. Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120106/start-up-scribr-wants-to-help-your-twitter-feed-survive-the-coming-web-pocalypse/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20111217/obaz-wants-to-rebuild-the-online-deal-site-with-help-from-groupons-founders/ http://allthingsd.com/20111217/obaz-wants-to-rebuild-the-online-deal-site-with-help-from-groupons-founders/#comments Sat, 17 Dec 2011 18:48:09 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=154445 It used to be that online shopping was a refuge from the holiday scrum at the mall. Pajama-clad shoppers could curl up with some hot cider and casually tick off all the gifts on their list. Those were the days.

Today, if you are trying to find the coolest gift from the hottest gift Web site, the experience can be, well, I’ll let iOS developer Ben Jackson, describe it:

Jesus. @Fab is like a river teeming with starving, design-savvy piranhas. It’s like playing Counter Strike to get anything in limited stock.

— Ben Jackson (@benjaminjackson) December 14, 2011

 

Enter oBaz, which is either just another online curated boutique, or the next stepping stone on the path to wherever online shopping is headed.

What separates oBaz, which stands for “online bazaar,” from competitors like Fab.com is a major attempt at personalization.

Where Fab offers the same aesthete-targeted deals to every visitor, oBaz attempts to offer visitors a mix of products catered to their tastes. In a sense, shoppers don’t look for a store they like, the store fits around whoever “walks in.”

Or, at least, that’s the idea.

“We’ve organized the deals into ‘aisles’ that users can choose to become part of,” said co-founder Brian Ficho. “Once you choose a few aisles, we can start to target deals to you specifically.”

Personalized recommendations in online shopping certainly aren’t new — Amazon has been offering them for years.

But the online retail giant and others are still fundamentally search-and-destroy-style shopping experiences, targeted at shoppers in search of a particular item.

Eight-week-young oBaz is the brainchild of Ficho and Greg Caplan. The company took seed-stage investment from the founders’ former employer, Lightbank, which invested before this recent pivot.

Lightbank is the Chicago-based venture firm founded by Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, the well-known pair who also co-founded Groupon.

Like most very early-stage companies, oBaz still has lots to shake out before it could hit its stride.

The oBaz team, which now numbers six, is experimenting with different ways to build up a “product interest graph,” which will power its product recommendation engine — much like Facebook and LinkedIn are built on graphs of associations between people.

Its current beta product entices users to help build up their graph by playing a “hot or not” game.

In the game, the site shows a picture of a product to which the user can assign a thumbs up or thumbs down. Those preferences are then used to curate the products offered.

But both co-founders acknowledged their current “game” plan is an incomplete solution to the graph-building problem.

Clever customization aside, oBaz will be faced with the same costs of scaling that weigh on Groupon and every other daily deals site that depend on an ever-increasing flow of offers.

But oBaz’s unique model does give them an advantage. Deal sites like Groupon must constantly seek out new companies to source deals from, because many companies can only afford to use Groupon sparingly.

“At oBaz, we aren’t offering that kind of deal. We can maintain a constant relationship with a merchant, who is really using us to sell extra stock of some item,” said Ficho. “We can see how fast a certain deal takes off, then dial it back so that we only sell as many of something as the merchant has in stock — which means we can sell from that merchant all the time.”

If the future of e-commerce is personalization, then oBaz might be among the first to take a very important step for the retail space: Moving past recommendations in a expansive store and instead rebuilding the store for each customer, while filling it with merchandise that really exists.

Caplan and Ficho stopped by the AllThingsD office for a video interview about the infant company:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111217/obaz-wants-to-rebuild-the-online-deal-site-with-help-from-groupons-founders/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111209/jetpac-transports-friends-photos-to-the-ipad-for-a-truly-personal-travel-magazine-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20111209/jetpac-transports-friends-photos-to-the-ipad-for-a-truly-personal-travel-magazine-video/#comments Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:09:19 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=152249 Facebook is full of clever little apps that deliver interesting but useless stats and graphs to the user.

After getting authorization, an app spins its wheels, hoovering up all the data it can and finally spitting out some pretty graph, friend-web, or stat sheet about which “Harry Potter” character a user is most like.

Not that I’d know anything about that.

But a new cadre of applications is rising above this fray and attempting to deliver a deeper set of services based on the data users so willingly fork over.

Jetpac, a new Web app from co-founders Pete Warden, Derek Dukes and Julian Green, is one such service.

What began life as a simple Facebook-connected Web application is quickly growing out of its Web-browser box and into something novel.

Jetpac’s initial user experience is simple: Connect a Facebook account and Jetpac will return a personalized visualization of where a user has traveled, where all of their friends have been and how much of the world they’ve collectively covered — all tidily bundled up in a vintage-travel-inspired Jetpac.com profile page.

To get the data, Jetpac crawls the captions of every image ever shared across a user’s entire Facebook friend group.

Warden said that translates to an average of 200,000 photos accessible to each Facebook profile, with slightly more than a quarter of those being geolocatable based on a word search of the captions.

“We realized that people do the work of telling us what photos are important and travel-oriented by choosing to take the time to name them,” Warden said.

“People don’t caption pictures from the local bar with the location, because their friends would know. They put the location in the caption when location is an important part of what they are sharing.”

But it’s a fine line between helpful serendipity and photo-stalking.

Warden knows better than most about the dangers of over-creepy geolocation. Back in April, he and a colleague uncovered the iPhone’s location-tracking “bug,” which made national tech news. Their discovery caused Apple, Warden’s former employer, to update its software and eliminate the location-storage issue.

But photo crawling is just the means to an end for Jetpac, which is aiming to launch its iPad app in late January.

The app, which is still in active development, is part photo viewer, part friend-powered travel magazine and part vacation-destination browser.

The app organizes all of the user’s friends’ photos into location-based albums, which can be searched and browsed based on various criteria.

The version I saw was unfinished, but the mixture of photos, friends and places that the app presented felt like a new kind of media experience — one where my friends were part of the story of a place. I was able to see who had only uploaded the requisite tourist shots, and who had spent more time in a given place.

As with many clever ideas, much stands in the way of a successful Jetpac takeoff.

Facebook users are accustomed to a certain kind of relationship with Facebook apps, and the thought of making one connection to the Jetpac Web service, then instantly getting a customized experience on the iPad, may be too foreign for some.

Cutting-edge media problems aside, the tech behind the app isn’t flawless, either. Identifying places by their name can be tricky.

Warden said: “We couldn’t figure out why we were seeing lots of pickup trucks in albums, and then we realized it was called the Chevy Tahoe.”

Apparently, Jetpac can have similar problems differentiating between people who’ve been to Chad and people who know a guy by that name.

Word-nerd jokes notwithstanding, the service’s eventual monetization strategy is also unclear — though it’s not hard to imagine how compelling a product like this could be for the travel industry.

But many start-ups in Silicon Valley don’t focus on making money from the earliest stages, and while Jetpac will eventually have to cross that bridge, the whole construct of a personalized media experience, based solely on the free content pulled from a user’s Facebook account, is a compelling idea — one that will likely be remixed and reissued by others before it finds the right niche.

I talked with Warden and Dukes in their San Francisco office, where they shared some of the big thoughts behind their fledgling app. Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111209/jetpac-transports-friends-photos-to-the-ipad-for-a-truly-personal-travel-magazine-video/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20111204/start-up-slader-looks-to-solve-the-math-homework-problem/ http://allthingsd.com/20111204/start-up-slader-looks-to-solve-the-math-homework-problem/#comments Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:36:25 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=149560

Slader, a quiet New York-based start-up, is picking away at what the school-attending quarter of this country’s population would probably list as the biggest pain point in their young lives.

Homework.

Of course, textbook publishers, test-prep services and an army of private tutors have been making a fortune from it for decades.

But co-founders Scott Kolb and Kyle Gerrity are building a service to take homework help, or at least math homework help, in a new direction.

For those readers who haven’t been assigned math homework in a while, let me set the stage.

A high school pre-calculus teacher, using one of five or so major math textbooks on the subject, assigns homework — let’s say Chapter 1, Section 1, problems 1-30. Remember to show your work.

Most of these text books have solution sets in the back, usually only for every other problem.

Are you having terrible high school flashbacks yet?

The answers in the back are almost always just that, numerical answers, and offer no help to someone who hasn’t any idea how they might arrive at that answer on their own.

Solutions is where Slader steps in.

Slader spent all last summer with a bunch of math nerds, developing step-by-step solutions to most of the math problems in most of the high school math books used in this country — at last count, that’s about a million solutions in 275 textbooks.

Slader users, who are a mix of math students and the parents tasked with homework help, log in to the Web-based service and spend “points” to see the fully-formed solutions, and, hopefully, to learn something as well.

Users pay for blocks of points, or subscribe for an allotment of points every day, or they buy “gold,” which is transferable to other Slader users and can be converted to points.

While this might sound overly complicated, the reason for the monetary obfuscation has to do with the convoluted economics of high school finances.

Co-founder Kolb explained:

“Our customers are sometimes parents who have credit cards, but we are also seeing demand from students, many of whom do conduct transactions online even if they don’t have a card to do it with. Kids buy pre-paid debit cards with cash, pay friends with credit or debit cards to buy things online, or use PayPal.”

Economics aside, the Slader team does have some serious issues ahead if they intend to scale beyond the current beta product.

According to Gerrity, every three years or so textbook publishers issue new editions of their math books that are then adopted at different rates across the country.

It’s that variation that turned the roughly 100 distinct math texts Slader covers into 275 versions, and in most cases, “Problem 47 would become problem 48 in the next edition,” Gerrity said. “We have the data, but every time [textbook publishers] release a new edition, we have to go through the whole thing with a giant Excel spreadsheet, even though it’s 99 percent the same.”

That means staffing is a huge part of scaling, and for a small start-up, that means a need for outside money, which it has done without thus far, aside from a small angel investment.

And growth won’t simply come from adding more textbook solutions, either.

Gerrity said that Slader’s current growth is driven by word of mouth within high school friend groups.

“We’ll see a sign-up from some school we’ve never seen before, and pretty soon there will be 12 more,” Gerrity said. “A little Facebook digging will reveal that all 12 are on the track team together or something.”

Kolb said he hoped to better monitor, track and understand that kind of viral growth, but that problem is certainly complicated enough to be the value proposition of a whole separate company.

Barriers aside, the 2010 U.S. census puts Slader’s potential market size at near 20 million high school-aged people, not to mention the parents and teachers whose job it is to help with all that math homework.

Even regional market domination could mean big business for the start-up, but Slader hasn’t arrived at that solution just yet.

I met up with Kolb and Gerrity during a recent fundraising trip to the West Coast, and shot a little video interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111204/start-up-slader-looks-to-solve-the-math-homework-problem/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20111120/captainu-builds-the-mint-com-for-student-athletes/ http://allthingsd.com/20111120/captainu-builds-the-mint-com-for-student-athletes/#comments Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:15:37 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=145900

One sure path to making money on the Internet is to find a business that people can get emotional about — that is, enough to type in their credit card number.

CaptainU, a start-up that serves the families of young athletes, may have found the most emotional business of all.

The San Francisco-based company has positioned itself between student athletes and the college teams that might recruit them, in much the same way that financial Web app Mint.com placed itself in between people building their financial goals and the banks and credit card companies seeking new clients.

But don’t call CaptainU a recruiting service — that might run it afoul of the NCAA.

CaptainU users sign up and then build a profile that includes the student athlete’s statistics, team affiliations, training camp attendances and GPA.

The site also provides templates for tracking statistics, displaying highlight videos and all the other ephemera college coaches might look for when recruiting.

But, according to co-founder Mike Farb, CaptainU’s real service — like Mint’s — is about helping users make decisions with more information.

Once they decide they want to play at the college level, “students really need a road map for what they should to do, to develop athletically and academically,” Farb said. “Today, most families just rely on high school coaches and other parents.”

What CaptainU provides, after analyzing all the data added to a profile, is a realistic set of goals and prescriptions for achievement.

Want to play lacrosse at Duke? CaptainU can tell you what GPA you should shoot for, whether or not you are on the right traveling lacrosse team, and which coach you should get in touch with.

Farb, like other founders wary of nailing down claims of early traction, wouldn’t share user numbers in detail. But he acknowledged that CaptainU currently had “hundreds of thousands of users.”

Users can sign up for a free “rookie” profile, or trade up for an expanded services profile, which runs between $20 and $40 per mont — pricey, but not when compared to something like a bag full of top-tier hockey equipment.

Farb said that he didn’t think the financial future for his bootstrapped company, which is looking to raise an A round of funding, was in paid user accounts.

“We can now connect families with videographers in every state, so that they can get highlight footage taken,” he said. “We want to provide the same connections for private coaches, camps, and anyone else who provides services for athletes families.”

The plan for CaptainU is to become a platform for all of these partners to connect and transact business with the start-up’s growing user base. CaptainU takes a small cut of each deal, and charges admission for trainers, camps and other service providers to be listed on the site.

This “platform play” isn’t new, but Farb said that growing the sales and marketing staff, which CaptainU organizes by sport, is the next step.

“After all, how many former college athletes do you know that end up in sales?,” he asked and then answered. “All of them.”

Here is the video of an interview I did with Farb:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111120/captainu-builds-the-mint-com-for-student-athletes/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20111118/openmargin-hopes-to-be-more-than-social-e-reading/ http://allthingsd.com/20111118/openmargin-hopes-to-be-more-than-social-e-reading/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:30:15 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=143066

Back in college, there was this trick to buying used books for class: If you were smart, you’d flip through and look in the margins to see how good the notes were.

The idea was, why not get good help, even if it’s anonymous? (Even Harry Potter did it.)

Openmargin, a start-up based in the Netherlands, is employing the old used-textbook trick to bring a similar experience to just about any e-book around.

The company of three co-founders has built an iPad app, also called Openmargin, which allows users to create marginalia in their e-books, by indexing notes they take and comments they share to a highlighted area.

Anyone else using the Openmargin app to read the same e-book will see the highlights and be able to drill down into the comments.

“We started the company with the goal of helping users interact with people of similar interests,” co-founder Marc Köhlbrugge said. “And we chose the margins of a book as the place where people can connect.”

At scale, that could mean downloading an e-book, opening it inside the Openmargin app, and discovering all kinds of shared thoughts, debates and conversations that had been “hidden” in the e-book you’d had all along.

But scale is a long way off.

What Openmargin is reaching for is what social networking types call the “interest graph,” which is a buzzwordy way of saying stuff people like enough to talk about.”

Openmargin’s bet is that books are a natural fit for this emerging generation of topic-based, ad hoc social interactions, because books are full of ideas that can be discussed.

“I really don’t want to bring up the comparison to Color,” Köhlbrugge said, referencing the failed social image-sharing app, “but part of what they were trying to do was link people who don’t know each other around an experience. For us, that’s the book.”

But Openmargin, like many companies attempting to create in copyright-heavy industries, faces a hard reality — there are big rights-holders who want big profits, and it’s a long road to partnership.

Today, Openmargin is avoiding the issue by only offering its services around e-texts that don’t have any rights management restrictions — known as DRM-free. That means it will work for any texts in the public domain, and most books published under the various Creative Commons licenses.

That’s still a very small subset of books — especially on big e-book sites such as Amazon and Apple — which makes it a very large problem for Openmargin moving forward.

Köhlbrugge and crew are all based in Amsterdam, where the three-year road to start-up life has looked a little different than it might had they lived in Silicon Valley.

The company was initially funded not by angel investors, but by a national government grant for companies making innovations that were “culturally relevant,” Köhlbrugge said.

The company still hasn’t taken any private investment, but is now seeking another grant to make its first full-time engineering hires.

As it grows, Köhlbrugge’s hope is that Openmargin can avoid being “just another service that plugs into Facebook and shows you those friends.”

“The real hope is to show you not just opinions of people you know and agree with,” he said, “but to connect you with people who care about the same things, even if they don’t share your views.”

Here is a video interview I did with Openmargin’s co-founder, Marc Köhlbrugge:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111118/openmargin-hopes-to-be-more-than-social-e-reading/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111113/viral-video-interview-with-isaac-asimov-on-education/ http://allthingsd.com/20111113/viral-video-interview-with-isaac-asimov-on-education/#comments Sun, 13 Nov 2011 23:48:19 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=143520

When you look at all the prophecies about the future that have come true in the span of just 20 years — and now at the growing cadre of online education start-ups that have cropped up — it’s time to check in with the legend behind it all: The late, great science-fiction author Isaac Asimov.

As you will see from the video below (from an interview with Bill Moyers), what Asimov said, way back when, is finally coming true.

Of course.

It’s a bit long, but well worth your time:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111113/viral-video-interview-with-isaac-asimov-on-education/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20111113/21-year-old-founder-of-open-social-network-diaspora-has-died/ http://allthingsd.com/20111113/21-year-old-founder-of-open-social-network-diaspora-has-died/#comments Sun, 13 Nov 2011 20:34:34 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=143503 Social network co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy has died. Zhitomirskiy, along with Maxwell Salzberg, Daniel Grippi, and Raphael Sofaer were preparing to launch Diaspora, a social networking site designed to be open and decentralized. He was 22.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111113/21-year-old-founder-of-open-social-network-diaspora-has-died/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20111112/us-court-orders-twitter-account-opened-in-wikileaks-investigation/ http://allthingsd.com/20111112/us-court-orders-twitter-account-opened-in-wikileaks-investigation/#comments Sat, 12 Nov 2011 16:14:54 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=143472 A U.S. district court decided Thursday to grant the Justice Department access to the Twitter account of Birgitta Jonsdottir, Icelandic Minister of Parliament and WikiLeaks volunteer. Federal Judge Liam O’Grady ruled that Twitter users gave up privacy rights, including those to IP address information, when signing up for accounts on the popular microblogging service.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111112/us-court-orders-twitter-account-opened-in-wikileaks-investigation/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20111111/another-flies-the-coop-media-guy-robin-sloan-leaving-twitter/ http://allthingsd.com/20111111/another-flies-the-coop-media-guy-robin-sloan-leaving-twitter/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 21:58:28 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=143341 Robin Sloan, who worked on Twitter’s media partnership team, is exiting the microblogging platform. Sloan says he’s leaving to become a “full-time fiction writer and media inventor.” He’s one of several high-profile Twitter employees who have left in recent weeks.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111111/another-flies-the-coop-media-guy-robin-sloan-leaving-twitter/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111110/another-googley-acquihire-apture-to-join-the-chrome-team/ http://allthingsd.com/20111110/another-googley-acquihire-apture-to-join-the-chrome-team/#comments Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:57:07 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=142861

Google has bought Apture, the start-up that makes a browser plug-in that adds additional contextual information to Web pages for the Internet’s most prominent publishers.

The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

A Google spokesperson said the search giant was interested not only in Apture’s product, but the team and the partnerships it had built.

Apture CEO Tristan Harris has spent some of the last four years wearing out the carpets in the offices of major online publishers.

In an interview today, Harris said that the Apture staffers will join the Chrome team at Google.

“We started the company to help people have more frictionless access to information,” he said. “And those features will take on new forms in the Chrome browser.”

Apture has raised $4.1 million in venture funding so far, including a $3.5 million round from Clearstone Ventures.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111110/another-googley-acquihire-apture-to-join-the-chrome-team/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111105/fetchnotes-wants-to-get-your-to-do-list-out-of-your-head-to-where-it-will-be-safer/ http://allthingsd.com/20111105/fetchnotes-wants-to-get-your-to-do-list-out-of-your-head-to-where-it-will-be-safer/#comments Sat, 05 Nov 2011 17:00:30 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=140453

You’re walking around out in the world and an idea strikes you. How do you best trap that random neuron and save it for later?

Fetchnotes, a small start-up out of Ann Arbor, Mich., is hoping to be your answer to those pesky, brain-leaking notes. 

The service, still in closed beta, is pretty simple thus far. Basically, users register for an account and then are allowed to text a note to a special phone number. 

The notes are saved on the Fetchnotes Web app, where they can be “auto-organized at the point of capture,” said Fetchnotes co-founder Alex Schiff.

The notes are arranged based on hashtags inserted in the notes themselves, and will eventually be automatically available for sharing using Twitterlike @ symbols. 

But, according to Schiff, tomorrow’s Fetchnotes will look a lot different than today’s.

“We’ve only built in about 10 percent of the functionality we want,” he said. “The goal is to be able to get notes into Fetchnotes any way you want.”

Next, he said, the start-up will add the ability to call in notes, instant-message them via tools such as Google Chat, and link notes with dates in them right into Google Calendar. 

It’s a pretty ambitious road map for a bootstrapped start-up outside Silicon Valley — although less so, when you consider that all of the things Fetchnotes hopes to loop together are really just hooks into everyone else’s APIs.

When I asked about competitors in the space — and there are a lot — Schiff was quick to address the elephant in the room: Evernote, which currently dominates the mobile memory space. 

Schiff said that while Evernote wants to be your digital memory, Fetchnotes wants to be how you commit things to memory.

“In Evernote, it takes 12 steps to add a note with a tag on their mobile apps,” said Schiff. “That’s too much for short things.”

Fetchnotes came out of a collaboration between Schiff and Chase Lee — both juniors at the University of Michigan’s start-up incubator, called TechArb. 

The team is now nearly 10, and Schiff said the company isn’t yet interested in taking money, although it has been approached. 

The big question about these sorts of memory-helpers has to do with the battle between native tools and the cross-platformers. 

Apple recently added the Reminders app, with its iOS 5 release, to the creatively-named Notes app that has shipped with every iPhone since the start. 

Clearly, there is some mindshare they are after — enough to warrant the famously target-specific Apple building another OEM app. 

The other side of this niche market includes services like Evernote, which try to be as cross-platform as possible, and collect everything into the cloud, where, theoretically, it will be safe. 

Schiff’s company comes down in the Evernote camp, but he said he sees his real competition as “native apps like Notes, and more ‘lifehack’ stuff, like emailing yourself.” 

I will add that the API-powered note-taking idea isn’t a new one. In fact, it’s nearly a demo product for what is possible with Internet telephony-based APIs. In fact, Fetchnotes is currently powered by an Internet telephony-via-API service.

Schiff and Fetchnotes may not be the only way forward, but light, fast, feature-oriented companies like his make a compelling argument for competing with the big boys by adding even more ease of use.

Here is a video I did with the Fetchnotes team: 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111105/fetchnotes-wants-to-get-your-to-do-list-out-of-your-head-to-where-it-will-be-safer/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20111020/image2play-connects-images-to-the-videos-they-came-from-demo-at-asiad/ http://allthingsd.com/20111020/image2play-connects-images-to-the-videos-they-came-from-demo-at-asiad/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2011 03:36:33 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=133867 Humans do such an incredible job of recalling things, we don’t often realize what a difficult problem it is for, say, a computer.

A few bars of music can bring back an entire song, a smell can trigger memories of an event, and a single freeze-frame image can bring back an entire film.

It’s that last human talent that Image2Play, a technology from Korean smart-search firm Enswers, tries to port over to the world of computing.

Image2Play, which demoed its beta technology today at AsiaD, analyzes images and instantly matches them up with their corresponding video … assuming the image did, in fact, come from a video.

In essence, Image2Play does for video snapshots on the Web what music recognition app Shazam does for music in the real world.

The technology, currently deployed as a javascript plugin for Web sites and a browser plugin for users, overlays a “play” button on any image taken from a video, on a given Web page.

The user can then click play, and the corresponding video begins in a pop-up player, right on the site where the analyzed image was displayed.

The whole thing, in this iteration at least, is paid for by a pre-roll ad in the player that pops up over the analyzed image.

Additionally, the Image2Play team said they are working with video provider partners to offer the connected videos for sale, also from inside the popped-up player.

Image2Play claims that there are over 8.5 billion page views of “entertainment content” consumed in the U.S. each month, and while it’s unclear what fraction of those pages contains images grabbed from movies, it could amount to a significant ad network and revenues.

Below, video and images from the demo.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111020/image2play-connects-images-to-the-videos-they-came-from-demo-at-asiad/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111019/lytro-comes-into-focus-asiad-demo/ http://allthingsd.com/20111019/lytro-comes-into-focus-asiad-demo/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:54:31 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=133112 For a generation now, camera development has been measured in megapixels, but Lytro, which demoed today at AsiaD, is hoping its new camera will constitute the biggest leap in imaging since we swapped film for digital.

The company, founded by Ren Ng in 2006, has built a whole new kind of camera capable of performing a number of tricks that standard digital cameras just can’t do. The technology works by capturing a whole scene and digitally recording all the light available, instead of bringing a specific element into focus.

Lytro calls the resulting images “living pictures,” because each one contains more data than the single visible frame can display. After taking the picture, users of the camera can choose what they want in focus, and even switch between 2D and a subtle 3D image.

“We’re capturing this multi-dimensional set of data and… we can create some really really different and amazing pictures,” Lytro Chairman Charles Chi said, while demonstrating the camera on stage at AsiaD.

In addition to its bag of tricks, Lytro is touting the speed of the camera. Because the camera doesn’t need to focus, the image capture is nearly instantaneous. The light field technology also improves picture-taking in dark places without a flash.

The technology is an outgrowth of Ng’s doctoral work at Stanford in what is called “light field” imaging.

Ng hopes Lytro can upset a digital camera industry that has been dominated by the Japanese giants of imaging, Canon and Nikon, for generations. Its first cameras will ship early next year, with models starting at $399.

As for the camera itself, it boasts an f/2 aperture even when using its 8x zoom. It only has two buttons, with a touch surface used for the zooming. The back of the camera is a small multitouch screen that can be used to compose and view pictures.

The technology behind Lytro is compelling enough to have attracted $50 million in venture investment to date, including sizable chunks from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, K9, and NEA.

All are hoping Lytro can take a serious chunk out of the traditional digital camera industry, which the company claimed was worth nearly $40 billion in 2010.

AllThingsD‘s Ina Fried contributed from Hong Kong.

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