AllThingsD » real-time

The Big Picture of Facebook f8: Prepare for the Oversharing Explosion

Liz Gannes — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 07:08:45 +0000

Facebook, as expected, will launch a set of tools and partnerships today that is aimed at socializing users’ activities all over the Web.

What does this all mean? Lots and lots more sharing, and probably a good amount of oversharing, that’s what.

It’s infinitely easier to consume something than to make an active decision to share it with other people. Facebook’s new real-time “ticker” stream of everything users read, watch and listen to (and also tag, friend and like) could turn every act of online consumption into something that’s now shared with friends.

Now Facebook users won’t necessarily have to endorse or recommend something by liking it, or exert themselves to come up with a witty comment. They can just keep reading, watching and listening as they always have.

Or they can head over to Facebook, see what their friends are doing at that moment, and join right in.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been positing since at least 2008 that every year Internet users share twice as much information as the year before.

He’s about to give this so-called “Zuckerberg’s Law” a big push.

It’s not hard to imagine Facebook sharing more than doubling after the f8 launches. Millions of tiny little actions are going to move from implicit to explicit. You can start to see why Facebook enabled its “ticker” news feed earlier this week (that’s the dizzying real-time stream that many users have been complaining about). There’s going to be a ton of information flying by.

Of course, many people no longer trust Facebook and its endless revisions and privacy incursions. It seems inevitable that people will feel exposed and exploited when everything they read, watch or listen to is shared.

So we’ll all be watching to see how Facebook and its partners control the privacy settings on this one. At the very least, there needs to be a very prominent and easy-to-use incognito mode.

But at the same time, what Facebook is doing isn’t new — it’s just turbocharging passive sharing with its social network. For instance, Last.fm, which “scrobbles” and shares users’ music listening item by item, was founded in 2002.

Later, in 2009, the Huffington Post built one of the most involved Facebook Connect implementations to date, in which participating users share every single article they read on the news site through Facebook. This functionality is basically what Facebook is going to be enabling and pushing to a mass of content sites now.

(In fact, Facebook had already built a version of this real-time automated sharing tool for “canvas” apps that run within Facebook, having launched a “games ticker” in August.)

Another thing to look for Thursday is how Facebook handles the contextualization of this flooding stream, since Web users consume mountains of content these days. Every once in a while I look at my own browser history and I’m shocked at how many pages I visited in the span of a few minutes.

According to sources, Facebook has built some interesting new interfaces around chronological views, consumption histories and item grouping.

We’ll make sure to look for that, and we’ll also be listening for whether Facebook addresses how advertisers and sponsored stories fit into the ticker.

On that note, team AllThingsD will be at f8 Thursday (tune in at 10 am PT here and/or to the Facebook live video stream) and will provide coverage and analysis throughout the day to overshare our content, too.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

A Social Update From AllThingsD's Social Media Editor

Drake Martinet — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:00:52 +0000

A few months back, after our staff more than doubled in size, AllThingsD launched our redesigned Web site. Today, we’re taking another step forward by launching an updated social media strategy.

You can explore the new features we’ve added by clicking the button below:

See the new features

But, before you go, I’d like to call out a few specifics that we’re particularly excited about.

The core of our expanded social media presence is the 15 new topic and category-based Twitter accounts. These new accounts — specifically about Apple, venture capital, personnel changes or mobile, to name a few — allow readers to more closely follow topics and companies they care most about.

We’ve chosen to keep the main @AllThingsD account live and real-time, meaning it will still deliver all of our stories within seconds of publishing.

But readers aren’t always awake when the news they care about breaks, so the new topic- and category-specific accounts are optimized through our partnership with SocialFlow, a real-time service for social media delivery.

SocialFlow listens for when the followers of a Twitter account are active, and chooses to tweet the posts that are best. Some articles may be held back for a short time, especially those published in off-hours, although we’ve chosen settings that will keep anything from getting stale and also maximize the relevance of our tweets.

The system is designed so that readers following our main @AllThingsD account can also follow others without being overburdened by additional tweets.

Following multiple accounts just means you’re more likely to see news that is important to you.

Aside from Twitter, which we know to be popular with our readers, we have also expanded our use of Facebook.

At the main AllThingsD page, we curate and offer commentary on some of our more topical and consumer-focused stories. Clicking “Like” on any of our pages will put our updates into your news feed along with your other friends.

Finally, I’m inviting you to interact with me on the various social streams. While tweeting at me via my personal Twitter account will get my attention most quickly, I’m also available to you via Google+, Facebook and also by sending an email.

Most of all, I encourage you to click the button below. It will take you to our new subscribe page, where you can follow any of the new accounts and customize how you get your news from AllThingsD.

Again, here’s the button to get you started:

See the new features

And So the AsiaD Speakers Begin: Google, Alibaba, Twitter, Asus, Nvidia and More to Come!

Kara Swisher — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 19:31:40 +0000

No rest for the weary D conference producers!

Which would be Walt Mossberg and me, since we are now hard at work — after a very successful ninth D: All Things Digital — on our newest event: AsiaD.

An international confab — this one will be held October 19 to 21 in Hong Kong — is a big deal for us and we’re making sure it is up to snuff for our audience there.

That begins with the speakers, which we will start announcing now and continue to as we add them onto the roster. As we have said before, we’re going for a lineup of both Asian and U.S. speakers, as well as demos from the region, with a focus on the critical emerging market.

That’s why with smartphones in ascendance globally, having Andy Rubin, who runs Google’s Android efforts, is a no-brainer. The longtime mobile exec is at the top of an aggressive push by the Silicon Valley Internet giant to dominate the important sector across the world.

Speaking of domination, we are asking Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma onstage to talk more about his efforts to make the company a powerhouse in China and elsewhere. His recent bare-knuckled fight with Yahoo over Alipay, as he has built a wide-ranging Internet giant, should make for an interesting interview.

Expect a deep dive into what makes the future Web work with Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey, who is someone breaking new ground as he tears down old digital paradigms. With Twitter, Dorsey redefined the real-time world and how the virtual one communicates; with Square, he is upending the payments arena, even as others try to upend him.

Nvidia is not only a pioneer of graphics chips, but now its processors are widely used in the latest mobile devices. That’s why its founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has a lot to say about the future of the fastest-growing sector of computing, from smartphones to tablets and whatever’s next.

And Asus Chairman Jonney Shih has presided over the Taiwanese tech giant since the early 1990s. Most recently, the company pioneered the netbook market and is now plunging deeply into the tablet business, making Shih perfect to discuss these key issues in Asia and around the world.

As usual with D, there will be more big names to come — and you can find out more here.

Exclusive: Wal-Mart Paid $300 Million-Plus for Kosmix

Kara Swisher — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 00:46:25 +0000

According to sources close to the situation, Wal-Mart Stores paid just over $300 million in cash for Kosmix.

The six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company–which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic–has raised $55 million from a large group of Silicon Valley venture firms.

The acquisition by the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant was announced earlier today.

Wal-Mart did not disclose terms of the deal, which is focused on building out its social and mobile e-commerce offerings.

The price for Kosmix is a pricey one to do so, but traditional retailers need to jump into the digital market now dominated by app-happy, smartphone-wielding customers.

Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs, the company said.

Kosmix was founded by the team that sold pioneering e-commerce company Junglee to Amazon in 1998.

After that, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman raised $55 million in funding from Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, and angel investors Jon Miller and Ed Zander.

As eMoney’s Tricia Duryee wrote earlier today:

The company may be best known for powering TweetBeat, which it defines as a real-time social media filter for live events. It also operates Kosmix.com, where people go to discover social content by topic, and it operates RightHealth, which it claims to be one of the top three health and medical information sites by reach.

One interesting aspect of the deal: Accel’s senior partner Jim Breyer–who was not the principal VC in the Kosmix investment–is on the board of Wal-Mart. Presumably, he recused himself from the decision.

Exclusive: Flipboard Confirms $50 Million Funding at $200 Million Valuation

Kara Swisher — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:23:12 +0000

Late last month, BoomTown posted about a huge venture funding effort by the high-profile and even more highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, Flipboard.

Today, its co-founder and CEO Mike McCue confirmed the $50 million round at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, in a wide-ranging interview at the start-up’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” he said. “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

The bulk of the new second round of funding–Flipboard had previously raised $10.5 million–came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

Insight’s Jerry Murdock said in an interview that he was excited about the idea of “social endorsement” that Flipboard was pioneering.

“We back great entrepreneurs and Flipboard is that and also in an obviously unique position to solve a problem of media consumption in the digital age,” he said. “The sky is the limit. Or more precisely it is the best environment to consume curated real-time content for Twitter and Facebook, because of the user experience and social endorsement integration with the content.”

Insight is also an investor in Twitter.

Also stepping up in the new Flipboard round is Comcast’s venture arm, as well as previous investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Twitter co-founder and product guru Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

“From a Comcast perspective, we’re intrigued with Mike and what he’s doing with content aggregation,” said Amy Banse, Comcast Interactive Capital’s new head. “We think we can learn from him and he from us.”

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

The elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In its current offering, there are pull-quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on a social networking or microblogging site.

McCue said the new giant pile of cash will be used to increase its 32-person staff to about 50, international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development on more platforms.

The next in the arena will be the iPhone version of Flipboard, said McCue, followed by one for the Google Android mobile operating system eventually.

Left unsaid, of course, was the need for funding to fight the likelihood of increased competition in the hot space for delivering both professional and social content to consumers on a wide range of devices.

Rivals are varied, such as Silicon Valley’s most adorable news reader start-up Pulse and also Zite, a news reader which was recently sued for copyright infringement by a group of major publishers.

There are bigger potential players, such as Google, which is trying to find various ways to move into the social space.

In fact, said several sources, Google and others have made acquisition approaches to Flipboard, which has instead opted for raising more funding and staying independent for now.

McCue declined to talk about that, but did note that he is not surprised by publisher interest, especially of the worried and wary kind, in the arena.

“Anyone not respectful of others’ content is going to get in that kind of trouble,” he said, noting Flipboard has struck deals with 17 big publishers so far, including this morning’s announcement about a partnership with Oprah Winfrey’s and Discovery’s OWN cable network. “There is not one half to this equation.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

McCue said advertising will be the key to Flipboard’s business plan in the future, although it’s not clear if the company will ever sell advertising itself.

Rather, it will partner with publishers seeking better distribution in the explosive tablet and smartphone market, where Flipboard has been gaining traction quickly.

But until that is sorted out, there is now $50 million more in the Flipboard kitty to figure it all out.

“With this funding, we can grow at the right pace and have a lot of flexibility to get the product right,” said McCue. “And, that’s the most important thing.”

When Media Giants Attack! Cease-and-Desist Letter to News Reader Zite Claims All Kinds of Copyright Damage

Kara Swisher — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 22:24:14 +0000

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment he posted below, Davar also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine-learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $4 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

Zite’s technology originated at research at the University of British Columbia several years ago.

In an interview with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes a few weeks ago, Davar seemed sanguine about publishers.

Wrote Gannes:

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

Short-sighted maybe, but legally lethal definitely, as you can see by this cease-and-desist letter, as well as a video from Zite on how its app works:

Letter to Zite _03 30 11_ –

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

(Full disclosure: New Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

Groupon's Andrew Mason Talks About…No, Not Exec Shakeup, But Groupon Now

Kara Swisher — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:04:19 +0000

Yesterday, BoomTown had a cheap Chinese lunch and a chit-chat with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason in Silicon Valley–but not about what most people want to talk to him about.

That would be the departure of the Chicago-based social buying site’s President and COO Rob Solomon and who is on the very short list of candidates the hot start-up will replace him with.

Oh, I tried to get him to ‘fess up about all that, but Mason would not bite, except on his Kung Pao Chicken.

Instead, all he wanted to talk about and show off is Groupon’s latest real-time deal innovation, which it is calling Groupon Now–and which Mason has been touting a lot of late.

“It’s deals in a time window linked to a location,” said Mason. “Until now, no one has had the assets to fix a merchant problem that was viciously subject to a chicken-and-egg situation.”

By that metaphor, Mason means real-time deals by location, rather than via emails, doled out and paid for immediately, taking advantage of perishable retail inventory.

And, of course, using the burgeoning smartphone phenom via an app with only two buttons:

“I’m Hungry” and “I’m Bored.”

Which pretty much covers most of humanity’s main complaints.

The company is rolling Groupon Now out to thousands of merchants in early April, first in Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

“Even the most popular restaurants and businesses are never completely full,” said Mason. “Groupon Now can help them even out the flow of customers.”

It’s this push and pull that Mason hopes will move “Groupon 1.0″ to the next level.

More importantly, Groupon Now is the start-up’s attempt to thwart rivals hot on its heels, as well as grow into the gazillion-dollar valuations being bandied about for its possible IPO.

But all of those competitors have moved into the real-time space too, from LivingSocial Instant to offerings from OpenTable, SCVNGR to Yelp to Foursquare. And, of course, there are also big efforts coming from both Facebook and Google, whose $6 billion offer Groupon turned down.

Now, no surprise, everyone is second-guessing that decision, putting a lot of pressure on both Groupon and, especially, Mason.

Who–despite all the hype and attention he has received–still has that prenaturally calm Midwestern affect.

“It is more important that we are the ones bringing relevant deals to consumers from our merchants,” he said. “That is all that matters.”

Google's Decision to Get Into "Real Time" Ads Was Really Smart, Says Google

Peter Kafka — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 17:48:53 +0000

Google makes almost all of its money selling search ads. But it is pushing hard into display ads, along with technology that lets marketers buy display ads in “real time.” Great idea, Google says.

That’s the upshot of a new blog post from the search giant, summarizing the state of the display ad market, and specifically a growing interest into “real-time bidding” for display ads.

Google has been focused on real time–which lets buyers and sellers match up specific pieces of ad inventory, at great volume and speed–for a couple of years now. That’s why it relaunched DoubleClick as the AdX exchange, which specializes in RTB, in 2009. And that’s why it bought Invite Media, which helps buyers use RTB, last June.

All of that prep won’t help Google unless ad buyers actually embrace the technology, but Google says that’s coming. Here’s a sample from Google’s post, which cites a survey of ad buyers that Google and Digiday conducted in the last few weeks (RTB = “real time bidding”):

88% of buyers plan to buy via RTB in 2011, up from 75% last year.
47% of media buyers say that the benefits or RTB will increase their overall digital advertising budget this year (16% said it would not, 37% were unsure).
Spending on RTB is quickly moving out of the “test budget” range: 79% of buyers estimate that more than 10% of their digital display budgets will go to RTB in 2011. 33% estimate that 50% or more of their digital display budget will go to RTB. And 7% estimate 90-100% of their digital display budget will go to RTB.

Worth noting that while Google is slapping itself on the back for its foresight to get into real time, these numbers should also hearten the entire crop of ad tech start-ups focused on real time (and their investors, who have been plowing serious money into the field).

And another aside: While Google and other real time proponents play up the efficiencies the technology creates, lots of publishers I talk to are wary about real time, because they assume that “efficient” equals “less money spent.”

Google’s retort: No way! Or, more specifically: Yes, some inventory may get cheaper–but some may get more expensive, as buyers find exactly what they want and pay up for it. And overall, the spend is going up for real time right now: It says its publishers that use real time are seeing revenues jump 188 percent compared to the money they make using traditional ad networks.

To me, that sounds a lot like the pitch that ad networks themselves have made (“We’ll turn your unsold inventory into cash”). And now lots of publishers are uneasy about the effect that ad networks have had on their pricing power. But if Google’s right, they’re going to adopt real-time pricing sooner than later.

Hewlett-Packard to Acquire Data Analytics Firm Vertica

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:07:03 +0000

Hewlett-Packard said today it had reached an agreement to acquire Vertica, a privately held, real-time analytics platform company based in Billerica, Mass. HP said Vertica will enhance its capabilities in real-time business analytics for large and complex sets of data. HP expects the acquisition to close in the second quarter of its fiscal year 2011. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Google Latitude Adds Check-Ins (How 2009!)

Liz Gannes — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:13:14 +0000

Today Google Latitude will give users the ability to share their location with friends and strangers by “checking in” to a particular establishment.

Many of the major location-based social networks launched in early 2009, including Latitude. But Latitude was different: Instead of asking users to manually check in, it continuously displayed their locations on a map in real time. The specificity of that information meant Latitude was primarily used for location-sharing with close friends and family.

Due in part to Google’s heft, the service is relatively popular; now available on all the big smartphone platforms, it has 10 million users who participate each month, compared with six million registered users for Foursquare.

Still, in the past year, just about every local-social pundit and competitor has announced a desire to go “beyond the check-in.” In that context, Latitude’s move to catch up seems oddly timed.

Ken Norton, senior PM for Latitude, justified today’s change by saying Latitude users have been asking for check-ins. Plus (and this is no small thing), Google is associating check-ins with its Google Places project, which means Latitude now has a business model: Connecting its users to local merchants.

Google is not facilitating Latitude-specific deals yet (as companies like Facebook and Foursquare already do), but Norton said there’s nothing stopping merchants from giving a discount to people who check in frequently.

What’s different about Latitude’s version of check-ins? There are a few innovative tweaks that some users may prefer. Google will automatically detect when users are stationary in a place it considers a business, and send them a notification asking if they want to check in.

Also, (with user permission) Latitude supports automatic check-ins for common venues, as well as supporting “checking out” of a place when the users’ location indicates they’ve left the building.

However, users cannot add locations; so, for instance, they can’t check into their homes (unless their homes are already businesses with Place pages).

And while Latitude is hopping on the trend, how about a sprinkle of gamification! Based on their participation, users can qualify to be a “Regular,” “VIP” or “Guru” of a specific establishment. However, there is no leaderboard or public acknowledgment of such users, yet.

Users can publish their locations to their public-facing Google Profile, if they want to share beyond their Latitude friend network. It’s expected that Google will increasingly include these public profiles in new social product launches.

The capability to check in on Latitude is only available on Android to start (through the new Google Maps 5.1 app), but should be coming to the BlackBerry, Symbian and iPhone, said Norton.

Collecta: Another Real-time Search Engine Bites the Dust

Liz Gannes — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 02:09:05 +0000

Los Angeles-based start-up Collecta has shuttered its real-time search business, including a destination site, API and publisher widgets. The two-year-old company isn’t closing down, but will pivot to unannounced and related projects, said CEO Gerry Campbell in a phone conversation today.

Asked whether creating a real-time search engine is a viable start-up business, Campbell answered quickly: “No.” His company’s pivot is the latest of multiple efforts in the space; last year, OneRiot gave up its search business to pursue real-time advertising, and Ellerdale sold to Flipboard to help add relevance analysis to its social magazine app.

The exit of Collecta and its competitors from real-time search is remarkable given they had swarmed to the space only a couple of years ago.

In 2009, many entrepreneurs and their investors bet that real-time search was the next frontier, recognizing that search engines were having trouble handling the onslaught of status updates and fresh information streaming onto the Web from Twitter and elsewhere.

Given the companies’ emphasis on speed, perhaps it’s not surprising that they failed and moved on so quickly.

Campbell would not say how many employees Collecta had laid off as part of the change, but he maintained the company has plenty of money in the bank from the $4.7 million it raised last spring from Dace Ventures and True Ventures. Mashable reported earlier today in its story about the Collecta changes that co-founder Jack Moffitt is no longer with the company.

Campbell said Collecta will apply its “very serious technology” to other real-time projects, but it will not become a real-time ad engine like OneRiot.

Who’s left in real-time search? There are still a few, including Wowd and Topsy.

Topsy’s tweet search is much more comprehensive than Twitter’s own, and it serves half a billion queries per month, mostly through its API, Topsy co-founder Rishab Aiyer Ghosh told NetworkEffect via email today. And while Google and Bing also index tweets (and Bing has an extensive relationship with Facebook), they have not fully incorporated social updates into their core search engines.

“With TweetMeme, CrowdEye and Collecta all pivoting out of it, Topsy may be the only real-time/social search engine left,” Ghosh said. He maintained that there’s still an opportunity to build an independent real-time search engine “done right,” despite the competition dropping like flies. Topsy has raised $15 million in funding from investors including BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners and the Founders Fund.

DocVerse–Now Google Cloud Connect–Head Shan Sinha Talks About Web-Based Biz Apps

Kara Swisher — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:22 +0000

Earlier this week, I motored the Mini down to the Googleplex in Silicon Valley to visit with entrepreneur Shan Sinha.

He headed the start-up DocVerse, which was acquired by the search giant in March for a reported $25 million to $30 million.

Since then, Sinha has been ferreting away on scaling up DocVerse’s product, which allows users of Microsoft Office documents to collaborate in real-time on the Web.

Its new name: Google Cloud Connect.

About 4,000 companies quickly signed up to be early testers in the preview program, and Google said it had thousands of requests to be notified when it becomes available, which will be in a few weeks.

DocVerse was founded in 2008 by Sinha and Alex DeNeui, who both used to work at Microsoft. It raised only $1.3 million in venture funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal and Naval Ravikant.

Google’s acquisition of it was yet another shot across Microsoft’s software bow, along with a range of mashups of cloud computing and productivity applications.

For example, Google has been pushing its own cloud-based Google Docs to compete against the Office juggernaut.

For its part, Microsoft has committed itself to moving its hugely popular productivity suite–which includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel–into the cloud, in order to protect its software hegemony.

Why? Simultaneous group-editing and collaboration online is the future of Office.

Clearly, the race for productivity applications is in the cloud.

So–along with Cloud Connect –Sinha has been put in charge of deploying a $50 a person package of them, including Sites, Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Video, to millions of business users.

Here is Sinha talking about all of that and more in the video interview I did with him:

[ See post to watch video ]

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Chartbeat Says the Rise of the Machines Won't Be So Bad if You're a Cyborg

Peter Kafka — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:46:17 +0000

Tony Haile has a vision of the future, and it involves turning people like me into cyborgs.

And Haile thinks this is a good thing! It’s part of his pitch for Chartbeat, a Web analytics start-up: He says that very soon “content producers” like yours truly are going to be faced with the choice of becoming robots–that is, replaced with algorithms and machines–or sticking around and injecting ourselves with big helpings of technology and data.

Chartbeat is supposed to help people like me with the cyborg route, by providing real-time information about the way the stuff I make performs on the Web: How many people are looking at a given story, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, etc.

Until now, most of Chartbeat’s 3,000 customers have handed that information over to managers and editors. But now Haile is rolling out Newsbeat, a tweaked version of the service that’s supposed to be delivered directly to rank-and-file stuff-makers like me. He’s been working with Web publishers like Gawker Media, Fast Company and Time Warner’s Time Inc. to get the rollout ready.

I’m not entirely opposed to my coming transformation, by the way: Unlike some of my peers–and these tend to be older peers–I like the idea of knowing more about the way people consume the stuff I make.

And it’s inevitable, anyway. On the Web, it’s impossible not to be exposed to performance data. The only question is what kind of data, and how much.

But still. I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do with all of this data. The version of Chartbeat that All Things D already uses gives me plenty of personalized information about my stories, and it’s narcotizing to sit around and watch my numbers flick up and down all day.

And if I were running a very big Web site, like, say, the Wall Street Journal, which also uses Chartbeat (and, like this site, is owned by News Corp.), I could put some of that data to work. I could figure out which stories I might want to highlight on the homepage, and try to analyze why others aren’t performing as well as they could, etc.

But from my worm’s-eye view, I don’t know what I’m really supposed to make of my Chartbeat report. Chartbeat tells me that my scooplet this morning on Rock Band is doing well, which is gratifying. But I could also get that information, with a longer delay, via services like Adobe’s Omniture or Google Analytics.

And in any case, then what? That information can’t help me make more scoops, or more interesting stories. And in the end, I’m pretty sure that’s the only way I can I do a better job.

Haile disagrees, of course. So let’s let him make his own case in this interview, which we conducted in the semi-busy hallway outside his office yesterday.

[ See post to watch video ]

Holy Start-Up Pileup! Social Networking Gets Professional.

Liz Gannes — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 14:30:09 +0000

The same variety of apple has apparently been falling from trees all over Silicon Valley, hitting Web entrepreneurs on the head and inspiring them to create better ways to connect personal and professional social networks.

Beyond the directory-style LinkedIn, that could mean facilitating professional profiles on social sites, pushing job postings through networks, introducing contacts, soliciting referrals and sharing resources.

Part of the reason this idea has been so resonant with Web entrepreneurs–and investors too–is the trouble they’re having with hiring qualified people to work at their own companies.

(Unlike in other parts of the world right now, unemployment rates are not as much of a problem among techies.)

Assetmap, a pre-launch San Francisco-based start-up, for example, wants to help companies and nonprofits understand what assets they may have at their disposal through their networks.

These connections already exist, but they’re often unexploited, according to Assetmap co-founder Nathaniel Whittemore, who let me in on a bit of what he’s doing.

Whittemore told NetworkEffect the failings of sites like LinkedIn include “forcing a distinction between personal and professional that is becoming less and less obvious and failing to recognize that the one-to-one friend-based social graph isn’t the only graph that has value for business.”

Whittemore and co-founder Danny Moldovan hail from the world of social entrepreneurship. Former Northwestern classmates, they had both been at the fast-growing activism platform Change.org.

They have teamed with Jayson Vantuyl, co-founder of Engine Yard, the Ruby on Rails hosting service. At the moment, they are funded by friends and family while looking for outside capital, and plan to launch this spring.

There are many early companies in this space with fancier pedigrees.

Top Prospect, a social recruiting site that rewards users with $10,000 or more for helping friends find jobs, was funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, Ron Conway, David Goldberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Rick Thompson, Chamath Palihapitiya and other angels.

Also based in San Francisco, Top Prospect was founded by Rotem Perelmuter, who formerly sold an online radio service to MTV Networks during the dot-com boom (and more recently ran a hedge fund). The site is currently in open beta.

Delicious founder Joshua Schachter’s Tasty Labs, which has gotten money from Union Square Ventures, hasn’t said much about what it is doing, but is also working on something similar to the idea of an asset map.

Elsewhere, BranchOut, which bills itself as offering “your professional profile on Facebook,” raised $6 million from Accel Partners, Floodgate, Norwest Venture Partners and many angels.

And Hashable, a network for introductions, raised $4 million, also from Union Square Ventures.

And Namesake, from Ad.ly and Newroo co-founders Brian Norgard and Daniel Gould, offers a pretty site for “opportunity routing,” with features such as a real-time stream and chat.

It goes on–other young start-ups in the space include Sumazi, Pursuit, Identified and Gild. (You knew this would happen: Gild turns the social recruiting concept into an online game.)

It wouldn’t really make sense to combine social and professional networks by starting from scratch, so these sites are built on top of existing networks like LinkedIn and particularly Facebook. If you want to try them out, be prepared to cough up those Facebook Connect credentials a whole bunch of times.

(Cute explainer graphics above from Assetmap, Top Prospect and Identified, respectively.)

Gogobot CEO Travis Katz Talks About Beta Launch of Social Travel Site

Kara Swisher — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 16:00:12 +0000

Last week, BoomTown sat down with former Myspace exec Travis Katz to talk about the private beta launch of his new start-up, Gogobot.

No, it’s not a robot from Google–it’s a social travel site, which uses friends to enhance the travel-planning experience.

The name means nothing really except that it sounded energetic and adventurous to Katz, with a bit of tech mixed in.

While in a bit of a stealth mode, Gogobot has been a bit of an open secret in Silicon Valley.

Katz and CTO Ori Zaltzman–most recently the chief architect of Yahoo BOSS–started the company earlier this year with a small team.

It garnered $4 million in venture funding from Battery Ventures, Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and angel investors Chris DeWolfe, Keith Rabois and Oren Ze’ev.

Gogobot rides on top of social networking behemoths such as Facebook and Twitter.

Said Gogogot in its press release:

“Unlike other travel sites, Gogobot connects users with friends and people like them for travel advice and links the advice they give in real-time with maps, pictures, pricing and descriptions.”

Essentially, it feels like Facebook for trips, but with really good images.

Currently, Gogobot links users to hotels and other information, but eventually its business plan is to complete reservations and garner lead generation revenues.

We’ll see how it goes, but the online travel business, despite being huge among consumers, certainly could use some updating and organization–and some innovation.

Here’s the video interview I did last week with Katz–who ran international operations for Myspace–talking about where Gogobot is traveling to:

[ See post to watch video ]

And here are a pair of screenshots for the service (click on the images to make them larger):

Exclusive: SB Nation Raises $10.5 Million in Khosla Ventures-Led Series C Round

Kara Swisher — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:02:36 +0000

SB Nation, the Washington, D.C.-based sports blog and news start-up, has just completed a $10.5 million Series C round, which is being led by Khosla Ventures, according to sources.

SB Nation has already raised about $13 million in total venture funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company and Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as from angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

Accel and Comcast will also be participating in the new funding, sources said.

People familiar with the situation said SB Nation’s post-investment valuation, after its most recent round last summer, was about $30 million, making the new one at least double–if not triple–that.

The big new investment is predicated on the boom in traffic to sports blogs, such as SB Nation, which recently launched 21 regional sports sites.

With a mix of professional and user-generated content aimed at engaging passionate fans, SB Nation now has 290 topical sites and real-time content–all with a big dollop of social tools to spur online conversations and engagement.

While it has been around since 2003, founded by Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas and others, the start-up has been aiming more recently, under the leadership of former AOL exec Jim Bankoff, at the sweet spot of local sports coverage in newspapers.

The new funds will be used to fuel growth, enabling more investment in SB Nation’s technology platform, its bloggers, mobile, local, advertising sales and a few relevant acquisitions.

Here is a video interview BoomTown did in May with Bankoff about where SB Nation was headed:

[ See post to watch video ]

The My-Fill-In-the-Space Reset Is Here, as Struggling Social Network Morphs Into Entertainment Hub

Kara Swisher — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 05:56:52 +0000

Empty bracket or no empty bracket: Will it work?

That’s pretty much the big question at News Corp. tonight, as its much beleaguered social networking site, Myspace, rolls out a new beta version aimed at shifting its fortunes.

And how will it do that? By moving dramatically away from its roots as a social networking site–and far, far away from powerhouse Facebook–and becoming a “social entertainment” hub aimed directly at the Gen Y audience.

That means heavy emphasis on the sharing and discovery of music, television, movies, games, videos and photos from within Myspace and without. There is also an upcoming new mobile site and better apps for smartphones and tablets.

And it also includes a new logo that features “my” with an actual fill-in-the-space bracket after it.

By the way, it’s now “Myspace”–dropped second cap–rather than the old “MySpace,” and the new color palette is black, not blue.

It is a bold, if risky, move, which could result in a dramatic decline of users or–despite the grim reality of second acts on the Internet–reset Myspace to begin a new cycle of growth.

For sure, as you can see from the screenshots below, it is a cleaner, hipper and much more attractive offering, with a tile format, ridding Myspace of its longtime cheap and noisy feel.

You can still toggle to a list or video view of the homepage.

Still, Myspace continues with the irksome moving parts, such as continually updating live notifications and real-time rolling number tickers that move constantly as people share various content.

It sort of reminds me of that national-debt clock in Times Square in Manhattan, but not as riveting.

Amid the better ability for bands and artists to more easily attract fans and promote themselves on Myspace, regular users can also become social arbiters–called “curators”–by active and useful sharing of their tastes.

And, perhaps most important of all, you can bring in a lot of outside sources, broadcast out to Facebook and have a two-way feed with Twitter.

Behind the scenes, Myspace has also done a major overhaul of its tech structure, which has been much maligned. In fact, it was once described to me as being made of “bubblegum and baling wire.”

Here’s an appalling stat, for example: There have been 117 different Myspace logos created for the service.

We’ll see how it goes, but here are videos Myspace did about the launch, including a logo-ganza:

And here are more screenshots than you ever would want (click on the images to make them larger):

Finally, here is the official press release:

MEET THE NEW MYSPACE

Myspace Debuts New Brand, Beta Website and Suite of Products That Focus on Social Entertainment for Gen Y

Beverly Hills, October 27, 2010 – Today Myspace announced a new brand, beta website and a suite of products that together redefine the company as a social entertainment destination for Gen Y. Myspace is creating a rich, highly personalized experience for people to discover content and connect with other fans who share similar interests. The entertainment experience will span music, celebrities, movies, television and games and will be available through multiple platforms, including online, mobile devices and offline events.

“This marks the beginning of an exciting turning point for Myspace. Our new strategy expands on Myspace’s existing strengths–a deep understanding of social, a wealth of entertainment content and the ability to surface emerging cultural trends in real time through our users,” said Mike Jones, CEO of Myspace. “Myspace is unique in that it is powered by the passions of our users, who program the site by expressing interests, sharing tastes and knowledge around particular topics, and scouting out up-and-coming subcultures. This is the just the first step and there will be many more features, programs and improvements to come.:

Specifically, Myspace will provide people with the ability to:

Discover and engage with Myspace’s broad array of programming, including originals, exclusives and content from around the Web.

Express, collect, and display their creations and interests on their profiles and through sharing tools.

Connect to other fans with similar tastes.

Myspace will also focus on promoting curators–a subset of its audience whose reputation and knowledge around particular entertainment topics and emerging cultural trends make them uniquely influential–by supporting them with the resources, tools and a platform to expand their reach within the Myspace community.

Newly Designed Beta Site

Myspace has completely rebuilt its website, with a new visual identity and product features that put content center stage. From the color palette to the way the site is organized to the improved navigation, everything has been redesigned to help people easily find relevant content.

The redesigned Myspace welcome page showcases fresh content as it bubbles up across the beta site in real time. Additionally, once a user logs in to Myspace, the page will instantly populate with content based on the individual’s interests, creating a unique, contextually relevant discovery experience.

Registered users can now also toggle between three different views of the homepage, each specifically designed to display their stream in the way that resonates most. These include:

List view: Traditional view

Grid view: A magazine-like format

Play view: A video format that allows users to watch, forward and resize their updates to full screen

To complement the online experience, Myspace will soon release a mobile version of the beta site, accessible on any mobile browser. A new Myspace app for iPhone and Android devices will follow later this year.

New Products

Myspace has released a suite of initial features that empower people to discover, collect and display entertainment content, while also offering tailored recommendations. These features include:

Topics–Myspace features more than 20,000 entertainment-focused, dynamic pages organized around topics. These pages provide a centralized location to view aggregated information about specific subject matter from a wide variety of news sites and blogs including MTV, Los Angeles Times, Access Hollywood, New York Times, Village Voice and Just Jared.

Content Hubs–These comprehensive entertainment destinations are specifically dedicated to movies, television and celebrities. The pages combine programmed editorial with trending articles that feature news, videos and photos from various content partners. Additionally, each individual article within the hubs recommends related content and topics. Hubs focused on games, comedy, sports and fashion will be revealed in the coming months.

Personalized Stream–The new stream automatically learns what to feature based on a user’s preferences and habits, so they see more of what they love and less of what they don’t.

Recommendations–This feature recommends relevant topics and other fans based on algorithms that learn the type of content a user views, listens to or watches and from whom or where they discovered it.

‘Right now on Myspace’–This feature shows trending content in real time on Myspace, helps fans find recently added music and videos, and lets them listen or watch right from the interactive chart. Myspace uses these trends to inform recommendations that promote discovery and engagement.

Discovery Tab–This always accessible tab combines videos that friends are watching with what’s trending in real time on Myspace. Scroll to the top of any page and the new Discovery Tab drops down as a horizontal film strip.

My Stuff TabMy Stuff is an easy way to see all that’s personal to a user – their profile, photos, videos and uploaded content, structured as a drop-down menu with different content areas.

Badges–This feature recognizes and rewards curators and fans for their social activity around entertainment topics on the beta site and promotes them with badges – graphic icons that appear in a user’s stream.

New Brand Identity

Myspace has also introduced a new logo that captures its revamped brand identity and values. The bracket in the logo represents a space where people can express themselves, enabling users to personalize the logo and make it their own–just as they can throughout Myspace.

The newly-designed Myspace begins rolling out today in beta and will be available to all users worldwide by the end of November. New users will have immediate access to the beta site. For more information, please visit www.myspace.com/newmyspace

Using Twitter to Read Investors' Minds

Beth Callaghan — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 21:20:51 +0000

Keywords and patterns in the torrents of data sent each day via Twitter might be the key to predicting the movement of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, according to researchers from Indiana University and the University of Manchester. They’ve developed an algorithm to determine the mood across the service, and are working on tying it to real-time data.

BoomTown as Judge Judy, Um, Judge BigApps

Kara Swisher — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:37:04 +0000

With All Things Digital Global HQ located in the heart of the Castro in San Francisco, BoomTown tries hard not to judge–even that dude who likes to come into the Starbucks (SBUX) naked.

But I made an exception to be a judge for an innovative civic geek contest that New York City is doing for the second year called BigApps 2.0.

Get it? Big Apple…BigApps!

In any case, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is opening up a whole mess of government information–350 data sets from more than 40 agencies–and letting software developers have at it.

According to NYC:

“The City continues to open more data on the www.NYC.gov Data Mine as part of transparency initiative. The Data Mine was established for last year’s competition and, as part of the City’s efforts to promote transparency across agencies, all data will remain available for public use after the conclusion of the competition. Additional datasets will be made available throughout the year.”

Some of the new juicy data includes: CompStat data, buildings complaints and real-time traffic numbers.

The winners for the best apps created to help New York City citizens will get cash prizes totaling $20,000.

Last year, there were 84 apps, including a winner from Big Apple Ed, a guide to schools there.

The new winners will be announced in March of 2011, after fellow judges of mine–including Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Hunch CEO Chris Dixon and Betaworks CEO John Borthwick–decide who is the best.

And how much do you want to bet there will be a bed-bug app submitted this year?

Here’s the official press release from NYC:

MAYOR BLOOMBERG Launches NYC BIGAPPS 2.0 COMPETITION

More than 350 Datasets Provided by More than 40 City Agencies and Commissions, Doubling Last Year’s Availability

Competition Builds on Citywide Efforts to Increase Government Transparency and Provide Greater Public Access to City Data

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Robert K. Steel and Deputy Mayor for Operations Stephen Goldsmith today launched NYC BigApps 2.0, the second annual contest for software developers and members of the public to create web or mobile applications using City data. Building upon the success of the inaugural NYC BigApps Competition launched in October 2009, the City has roughly doubled the number of datasets available, bringing the total to more than 350. These datasets provide developers and programmers with additional material, including public safety data, buildings complaints, and real-time traffic numbers from which to create new digital applications. Last year’s winning applications are today helping New Yorkers find mass transit routes, review public school information and gather an array of information based on their current location. This year’s winning applications will receive cash prizes totaling $20,000. Deputy Mayor Steel will detail the program this evening at NY Tech Meetup, a monthly meeting of tech entrepreneurs where companies and developers demonstrate new technologies. Deputy Mayor Steel will be joined at the announcement by New York City Economic Development Corporation President Seth W. Pinsky, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Carole Post and Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment Commissioner Katherine Oliver.

“NYC BigApps combines two of our Administration’s important priorities: making civic information more readily available to New Yorkers and promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in New York City,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “The inaugural NYC BigApps competition yielded an array of creative uses for City data, and–with nearly twice as much data formatted for application use this year–there are even more possibilities with version 2.0.”

“The most important thing that the public sector can do to help create jobs through technology innovation is to provide our talented entrepreneurs with the tools to create new products,” said Deputy Mayor Steel. “The BigApps competition does this by providing open access to City Data. Through the competition, we encourage the development of applications that can then be commercialized, spurring job growth and economic development in New York City.”

“NYC BigApps is redefining the relationship between City agencies and enterprising citizens, all while delivering value to the public,” said Deputy Mayor Goldsmith. “Last year, NYC BigApps contestants came up with innovative applications that would have never been created in the normal course of business. There is more data available for use in this year’s competition, so the potential for new and innovative tools that can benefit New Yorkers is even greater.”

“Last year’s Big Apps competition was an enormously successful way to achieve multiple goals: supporting the City’s important technology sector, giving entrepreneurs opportunities to create new products, and increasing the accessibility and transparency of City government,” said New York City Economic Development Corporation President Pinsky. “This year’s expanded contest promises to promote even more innovation and creative thinking among the vibrant and growing tech community in New York. We look forward to seeing the results of their efforts.”

“NYC BigApps, and the DataMine site that supports it, sits at the heart of the City’s open data efforts,” said Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Post. “This effort complements the many other ways we’ve worked to bring technology to life for New Yorkers, including 311 Online and the 311 iPhone app. Beyond today’s competition, we’ll continue enhancing the functionality of DataMine and expanding the amount of data available there for use across the City and around the globe.”

“At the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, we’re exploring new ways to share information about City resources and services across multiple platforms,” said Commissioner Oliver. “Already we’ve reached new audiences through QR codes on the Staten Island Ferry and on the sides of sanitation trucks, and we’re making the content of our online Video On Demand player available on various mobile devices. The NYC BigApps Competition is the perfect opportunity to further communication between the government and the public.”

The NYC BigApps Competition is open to individuals, and companies and non-profit organizations with fewer than 50 employees. More than 160 datasets have been added to the 190 compiled for the inaugural competition. New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications coordinated with over 40 City agencies and commissions to provide the datasets, with 15 new City agencies, including the Department of Environmental Protection, the School Construction Authority and the Campaign Finance Board, participating in Data Mine for the first time. New data on public safety, the City budget, complaints to the Department of Buildings, and real-time traffic information will all be available for download today at www.nyc.gov/data .

The Data Mine was established for last year’s competition and, as part of the City’s efforts to promote transparency across agencies, all data will remain available for public use after the conclusion of the competition. Additional datasets will be made available throughout the year. Information and updates on the NYC BigApps competition, as well as official rules, can be accessed at the competition website: www.NYCBigApps.com .

Fourteen winners will be chosen in total, including two new prizes–best application created by a high school, college or full-time graduate school student; and a Large Organization Recognition Award for organizations with 50 or more employees, which will not eligible for a cash prize. A panel of judges from the technology and venture capital community will select winners for Best Overall Application (Grand Prize, Second Prize, Third Prize and five honorable mentions), Investor’s Choice Application, City Talent Award, Student Award, and the Large Organization Recognition Award. Two Popular Choice Application awards will be determined by public voting. Judging criteria will include the benefit to residents, visitors and City government; the quality and implementation of the idea; and potential commercial value.

All submissions are due on January 12, 2011. The Popular Choice Application winners will be selected by public vote through www.NYCBigApps.com between January 26 and February 26. Winners will be selected and announced at an awards ceremony to be held in March.

Last year’s winners included: WayFinder NYC–an application that allows users to find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and New Jersey PATH stations; Taxihack–an application that allows users to post live comments on New York City taxis and their drivers via email (alert@taxihack.com) or Twitter (@taxihack); Big Apple Ed–an education application that provide residents with an easy-to-use guide to schools in the City, including school searches, top ten lists , analyses , comparison charts , and detailed school profiles ; and NYC Way–an iPhone application that bundles more than 30 New York City resources and provides information sorted by the user’s current location. The developer of NYC Way, MyCityWay, received the first investment by the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund, a $22 million seed and early-stage investment fund established by the City and managed by FirstMark Capital.

The judging panel is comprised of: Dawn Barber, Founder, Tech Meetup; John Borthwick, CEO, Betaworks; Chris Dixon, CEO & Co-founder, Hunch; Esther Dyson, Chairman, Edventure; Stuart Ellman, Co-Founder & General Partner, RRE Ventures; Lawrence Lenihan, Founder, CEO and Managing Director, FirstMark Capital; Danny Schultz, Co-founder & Managing Director, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham Ventures; Naveen Selvadurai, Co-founder, Foursquare; Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, AllThingsD.com; and Union Square Ventures Partner Fred Wilson.

“We are thrilled to be powering the second NYC BigApps competition, with significantly more data made available for software developers and the general public,” said ChallengePost Founder and CEO Brandon Kessler. “We were wowed by the creativity of the apps in the first competition, and we look forward to giving new entrants the great exposure they deserve.”

“New York is home to some of the world’s best developers,” said Foursquare Co-founder Naveen Selvadurai. “It is great to see the City rewarding this talent and taking advantage of it to increase transparency and make the wealth of information on NYC.gov more easily accessible.”

Viral Video: Chilean Miners Rescued as Real-Time Web Watches

Kara Swisher — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 07:10:46 +0000

While some television networks and cable channels are doing a lot of coverage, the Chilean miner rescue is unfolding minute by agonizing minute on the Web.

And also on social networking sites, such as Twitter, which you can see below, along with live Web video from CBS (CBS) News on Ustream.

CBS has been doing the feed since early yesterday and presumably will continue until all the miners are out.

Truly, given how well it has turned out, enjoy:

Windows Phone 7: It's Now or Never

John Paczkowski — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 10:15:56 +0000

“In the short run, people gotta want these phones. I think they’re going to look pretty good. That’s the most important thing. If we start the popularity chain, and start kind of the buzz around these things, we’ll be able to make some money off of them.”

– Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

With the launch of Windows Phone 7 today, Microsoft is taking another shot at a market even its CEO, Steve Ballmer, concedes it stumbled in. “We were ahead of this game and now we find ourselves No. 5 in the market,” he said during our D8 conference in June. “We missed a whole cycle.”

Badly, too–as this exchange at the company’s 2009 Public Sector CIO Summit painfully illustrates.

Questioner: With platforms like the Google phone and iPhone coming out, it’s really tough to continue to stand behind Windows Mobile when our employees are bringing these consumer devices into our environments,” the questioner explained. And in your presentation you put Windows Mobile right in the center there, but it was a phone that doesn’t work in America and an operating system that you haven’t released. I’m wondering what your commitment is to continuing to get newer versions of the operating system in our hands so that we don’t have to fight this battle on the ground.”

Steve Ballmer: We have a significant release coming this year. Not the full release we wanted to have this year but we have a significant release coming this year with Windows Mobile 6.5….We still don’t get some of the things that people want on the highest-end phones. Those will come on Windows Mobile 7 next year. Certainly I’m not, um–there’s opportunities for us to accelerate our execution in this area, and we’ve done a lot of work to really make sure we have a team that’s going to be able to accelerate. With that said, we did sell more Windows Mobile devices last year than Apple did iPhones–just an important factoid to have. Blackberry was a little bit ahead, and Google was nowhere to be seen, except in Silicon Valley, I’m sure. But we’ll do our best to help you with that challenge.”

But Microsoft’s “best” at that point wasn’t nearly enough.

Intended as a stopgap, Windows Mobile 6.5 ended up being another damning monument to Microsoft’s failure to innovate in mobile and the ugly strategic misstep that made it an afterthought in a market that had already lapped it once and was well on its way to lapping it a second time. Just last week Verizon (VZ) President and COO Lowell McAdam dismissed Microsoft as a player in the mobile market. “We like our relationship with Microsoft,” he told News.com. “But clearly in the U.S. there are three major mobile operating systems: RIM, Google, and Apple….Microsoft is not at the forefront of our mind.”

If Windows Phone 7 doesn’t put it there, Microsoft (MSFT) might as well hand its fast-diminishing portion of the smartphone market to Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) and RIM (RIMM), because they’ll take it soon enough.

But that’s not likely to happen. Because from what I’ve seen, Windows Phone 7 is as slick an OS as has ever come out of Microsoft–easily enough to keep the company in the mobile game, assuming it hasn’t lost it already.

For one thing, WP7 is not simply a rejiggering of Windows Mobile 6.5, it’s an entirely new OS. For another, its interface is unique enough to differentiate it in an already crowded market. It’s smart, too–perhaps even smart enough to give it a leg up on some rivals. Its hubs and tiles GUI, which aggregates applications and content according to subject and delivers real-time information to the home screen without the need for user involvement, is elegant and intuitive.

Add to this a media experience basically identical to Zune HD, very smart social media management, seamless Xbox live and SharePoint/Office integration and high minimum hardware requirements for OEMs and you’ve got a pretty compelling OS–even if it doesn’t yet support cut-and-paste and true multitasking (the company tells me those are coming). The challenge for Microsoft will be to convince a market that saw Windows Mobile made a laughing stock by iOS, Android and webOS, that Windows Phone 7 isn’t just more of the same.

That shouldn’t be too hard given the nearly half-billion dollars in marketing the company is rumored to be throwing at it (check out one of the first ads below) and the quality of the OS itself.

My colleague Peter Kafka will be covering the New York City launch of Windows Phone 7 later this morning. Join him here at 6:30 am PT/9:30 am ET for live coverage.

Twitter Puts "@EarlyBird" Down for a Long Nap

Peter Kafka — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:25:58 +0000

As Twitter continues to roll out new revenue products, it is also putting some away. Twitter is “setting aside” its “@earlybird” shopping promotional product, COO Dick Costolo said today at an Advertising Week event. Costolo left open the possibility that Twitter could revamp the product and bring it back, but I wouldn’t count on it–too much work to do on its primary products: Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends, which will be joined shortly by Promoted Accounts. Meanwhile, Costolo gave at least one hint of nonrevenue products the company is working on: It’s trying to figure out a better way to let people know about real-time Twitter coverage of events, he said.

To Advertisers, Twitter's a Fledgling

Emily Steel and Amir Efrati — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:20:49 +0000

Twitter Inc.’s foray into advertising is receiving mixed reviews among marketers, underscoring the challenges of turning the popular micro-blogging service into a highly profitable enterprise.

The popularity of Twitter has fueled expectations that marketers could use the service to target relevant ads to consumers interested in real-time information about breaking events and other topics. Since launching its much-anticipated advertising products in April, Twitter has signed on more than 30 big-name brands, including Coca-Cola Co. (KO), Virgin America and Starbucks Corp. (SBUX), to test them.

Some marketers say that early results are promising but that advertising on Twitter remains an experiment. Other marketers, including PepsiCo Inc.’s (PEP) beverage brands and Best Buy Co. (BBY), who tested out Twitter’s new advertising products—some without cost—haven’t made new ad buys. Marketers say they definitely aren’t ruling out advertising on Twitter in the future, but that it’s still early days and they are figuring out what works.

“The jury is out” on whether Twitter can become a home for brand advertisers, said David Cohen, an executive vice president at Universal McCann, a media-buying agency owned by Interpublic Group of Cos.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Exclusive: Facebook and Microsoft Deep in Talks About Deepening Search Ties

Kara Swisher — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:05:08 +0000

Facebook and Microsoft are discussing an agreement that would significantly expand the search relationship the pair have shared for many years, said several people with knowledge of the situation.

According to those sources, that includes the possibility for the software giant’s Bing search service to mine anonimized data from consumer usage of the social networking site’s recently introduced Like buttons.

The Like button, which Facebook has been trying to proliferate around the Web, allows users to indicate an interest in a page with one click that then tells their Facebook friends.

While the deal is not closed and talks could end without result, such information might yield a treasure trove of insight for both search users and advertisers.

That’s because it represents search based on what people are actually interested in rather than just crunching massive amounts of information and muscling it into something useful.

And it would also presumably give Bing a little leg up on Google (GOOG), since data will be available on it that is not available on the search giant, made more important as Facebook’s information-generating audience grows ever larger.

But because of Facebook’s many privacy snafus, sources said that any expansion of the search relationship will never involve providing any information except that which users have agreed to make public.

Facebook and Microsoft (MSFT) already struck a nonexclusive agreement almost a year ago to integrate Facebook’s real-time feeds of public status updates into Bing.

It’s part of a longtime search–as well as investment–relationship between Microsoft and Facebook that stretches back for years.

Currently, Bing provides global Web search to Facebook, yielding branded results whenever someone searches within the service.

Microsoft also invested $240 million in Facebook in late 2007 and has since had a mostly cooperative relationship with the fast-growing Silicon Valley company.

It also has provided a hedge against Google for Facebook, as that pair’s relations has worsened over the years due to intensified competition.

What Will Be the Big Tweet from Twitter Event Today? A New Search Offering Would Be Nice….

Kara Swisher — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 12:08:08 +0000

Yesterday–presumably so as not to be left out of the dueling press gatherings that Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) and Facebook have all had in recent weeks to show off fancy new stuff–Twitter lobbed out an an invite for an event this afternoon:

We’d like to invite you to come to Twitter HQ for an event tomorrow afternoon (Sept 14)…Please be there by 3:45pm. RSVP below.

See you there.

So, what, oh, what are those little elves at the microblogging service going to show off?

It could be a lot of things, from a new advertising shiny object to the results of recent promoted tweet efforts to updated mobile products.

Or perhaps it is introducing some more video capability into its tweets.

And maybe Twitter bought some pretty little start-up or is annoying a whole new fascist country.

So, because BoomTown always reads to the last page of mysteries to get to the ending first, here is my best spoiler guess of what Twitter could announce: An updated search offering.

Well, at least, I hope the company will finally fill in what has become what I consider to be one of the very biggest holes in its service.

Right now, Twitter’s real-time search engine uses technology from Summize, which it bought in 2008.

And, simply put, it remains pretty lousy–with an index that only holds tweets from a few days and has no massive archive.

In fact, results have been better from others, such as Google and the Microsoft (MSFT) Bing search service, both of which did deals to license Twitter’s flood of tweets about a year ago.

And Google recently upped the ante with its dedicated real-time search offering, made up, in large part, of Twitter’s index archive and including a coolio timeline.

It is long past time for Twitter to keep up here, in terms of simple innovation, given these tweets are its own content.

What would be interesting to see is if Twitter needed the help of a search giant such as Google or Microsoft to help power such a service–sources said its execs had been putting feelers out many months ago on the subject of such aid.

Then again, it could all be home built, too.

In any case, let’s hope Twitter gives its tweets the respect they deserve.

Or else introduces its own mobile device called the Tweetphone that vibrates every time you are mentioned on Twitter.

Until then, here is the video of the very funny “Tweet Tweet” rap song from Jimmy Kimmel and Drake that debuted in late June:

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What Will Be the Big Tweet from Twitter Event Today? A New Search Offering Would Be Nice….