Thrun announced on stage that he is giving up his tenured position at Stanford to teach online courses at a new start-up he’s founded, called Udacity. Here’s the video of the session. (I can’t seem to extract embed code from the Livestream site, but when I do, I will post it directly here.)

Udacity is funded by Charles River Ventures, and already has a staff of 10.

Inspired by the video-and-quiz teaching work of Salman Khan at Khan Academy, last year Thrun co-taught an online course on artificial intelligence, based on the curriculum of one of his Stanford classes. It signed up 160,000 students, and was transformative in many of their lives.

Thrun showed emails from a student who took the AI class, when he could get Internet access, amidst mortar and rocket attacks in Afganistan; and another, a single working mother, who refused to quit the class because it gave her a sense of accomplishment.

Thrun said his experience disproved the common wisdom that small class size is best, and that he hopes to teach 200,000 in each of his Udacity courses. Students frequently watched the AI class videos 30 to 40 times, he said. Of 248 students who received perfect scores in the class, none of them attended the Stanford version; all were online.

“Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” Thrun said, describing his decision to leave Stanford as a choice between a red pill and blue pill, a la “The Matrix.” (This bit comes just about exactly 20 minutes into the DLD video, if you want to skip ahead.)

Udacity’s first two free seven-week courses will start next month, and will cover building a search engine and programming a robotic car. Here’s a description of the search engine class:

(Photo courtesy of DLD)

Learning to code could be this year’s hot new pastime. Codecademy signed up 320,000 people for its 2012 “Code Year” New Year’s resolution. Stanford signed up 50,000 students for a free online CS101 class starting next month.

Now, Treehouse is looking to help people learn the very practical skill of building a Web site. Code Racer, which launched today, is an online game that pits newbie coders and designers against each other to demonstrate their basic skills — as fast as they can.

Users log in via their Facebook credentials and are paired with other competitors. The music starts, the pulse rises and the race is on.

“You’re going to learn HTML by the sheer force of typing it over and over,” said Treehouse CEO Ryan Carson.

Code Racer is a promotion for Treehouse’s premium products, which consist of exercises and short videos taught by instructors. Facebook, Living Social and Automattic have said they’ll recruit interns based on Treehouse achievement badges.

Lessons cost $25 per month, or $49 per month with additional video resources.

Carson said that Treehouse, which only launched in November, is on track to make $2 million this year and growing quickly.

Treehouse is backed by investors including the Greylock Partners Discovery Fund and The Social+Capital Partnership.

On Dec. 12, 1991, Kunz set up a Web interface based on a Web server to search a popular database of particle physics literature at Stanford, and sent an email to Tim Berners-Lee about it. It was the first Web site in North America and one of the first dozen in the world.

Berners-Lee called Kunz’s site “the killer app” for the Web, because it helped bring the Web’s value home to a larger audience — in this case, physicists.

The nice folks at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center connected me with the now-retired Kunz to take a walk down memory lane.

Kunz was a physicist at SLAC who was a NeXT computer enthusiast, which is how he connected to Tim Berners-Lee, who was based at SLAC counterpart CERN in Switzerland.

Kunz didn’t realize at the time just how interesting the World Wide Web was. Berners-Lee begged Kunz to come visit him, and even after Kunz realized the potential of accessing the SLAC physics database (called SPIRES) in the fall of 1991, he took three months to make it happen. And then after the site was up, Kunz moved onto other projects and left maintenance of the site to a group at SLAC that called themselves the WWW Wizards.

But Kunz does remember when he first saw the potential of the Web, on that 1991 visit to Berners-Lee in Switzerland.

“Physicists from all of the world wanted to access SPIRES to do reference searches, and we’d have to physically log into the mainframe, which was a foreign operating system to most people, and then issue commands,” Kunz said. “You’d have to send us an email. And if you got a search term wrong, do it again to get it right. I saw the Web would make a much easier interface.”

At the time, Kunz asked Berners-Lee if such a thing would work well over the Internet, and Berners-Lee said sure, “but he couldn’t demonstrate because all the world’s Web servers were in the same building that his office was in,” Kunz recalled.

Kunz said that the 10-year anniversary of the SPIRES site back in 2001 was a much bigger deal. There was a reunion conference at SLAC and articles about SPIRES in some 25 newspapers across the world. This year, I was the only one who came calling, after a PR person from SLAC suggested it.

Twenty years later, Silicon Valley keeps making world-famous Web sites. It’s getting harder to remember a time before that was so.

Kunz, who bought a smartphone a couple years ago and joined Facebook last year, said his favorite Web innovation is online airline reservations.

Here are some more resources about the SPIRES site, put together by SLAC.

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.

In case you haven’t been following along, here’s a quick rundown of what’s expected today:

Lytro, founded by Ren Ng in 2006, is an outgrowth of his Stanford University PhD research into what is called “light field photography.”

Without getting too technical, a light field camera captures light all throughout the scene in front of the lens, as opposed to the cameras consumers are used to, which bring a particular thing into focus first.

The result is an image that can be focused after it is taken, and, Lytro claims, a camera that is faster from power-up to capture, and has exceptional performance in low light, even without a flash.

Lytro claims it has spent the last five years and nearly $50 million from several of Silicon Valley’s heaviest-weight VC firms working to pack all that technology into a camera small enough to compete with the myriad point-and-shoots currently available.

Join us as we see for the first time if Lytro has gotten the picture.

View the slideshow

Liveblog:

11:17 am: They’ve let us into the event. No action yet, just a bunch of tech reporters tweeting away.

11:32 am: We’re underway. CEO and founder of Lytro Ren Ng is coming up now.

11:33 am: Lytro grew out of Ng’s Stanford PhD work in light field imaging.

11:33 am: Ng starts with some stats on digital cameras.

He says that at the end of the day, both film and regular digital cameras record the same data — a flat image.

11:34 am: “The light field is all the light traveling in all directions at every point in space,” says Ng.

11:35 am: Still on the tech, Ng says his focus at Stanford was on miniaturizing the camera technology. At the time, the only light field cameras were huge arrays of cameras in labs.

11:37 am: We’re on the history of his research now — Ng says the first camera he built was a one-off medium format camera.

11:39 am: The important takeaway here is that this camera is as much about the computer science behind it as it is about the optics and the hardware.

11:41 am: Ng moves on to the features of this technology for the user.

11:42 am: 1. Shoot first, focus after. 2. Ability for third parties to interact with the picture after it is put online.

11:43 am: Ng shows what appears to be a screenshot of his Facebook page, with a Lytro interactive image embedded.

11:44 am: Ng says that all Lytro images can also be viewed in an “immersive 3-D.”

11:45 am: Now we get to see the camera. It’s called the “Lytro.”

11:45 am: 8x optical zoom, with an f 2.0 aperture.

11:47 am: It’s an 11 “megaray” camera — which means it captures 11 million rays of light, says Ng.

11:49 am: It’s a metal rectangular tube, maybe 4 inches long. The lens is at one end and the small touch screen at the other. It’s unlike any camera design I’ve ever seen.

11:50 am: Ng says another benefit of the camera is how fast it turns on.

11:51 am: The camera doesn’t need to focus before it shoots, so time from activation to capture seems pretty instant.

11:52 am: Now he’s going to take a picture of the room — we’re being posed, no joke.

11:52 am: They will come in 3 colors — redish, blueish and grayish.

11:53 am: Ng is plugging in the camera, showcasing the software that comes with it. The camera uses micro USB.

11:54 am: Liveblogging solo here, but there are a few pictures I’m putting up on twitter (@withdrake).

11:55 am: Software seems to be pretty snappy. All the pictures are square format.

11:56 am: Ng says you can refocus the image on the camera, in the computer software, or on the web, wherever you embed the image.

He says you can post to Facebook from inside the Lytro computer software.

11:58 am: Ng just posted something to Facebook from the software. Facebook friends can zoom and refocus the image right in Facebook.

11:59 am: The camera will come in 8GB and 16GB versions.

11:59 am: 8GB version can capture 350 light field images.

12:00 pm: Ng says that the camera will ship in early 2012.

12:01 pm: Now he’s dancing around price.

12:02 pm: It will be $399 for the 8GB version.

We’re wrapped up. Moving on to the demo station. … See gallery of pictures above.

Imagine lifting the silver lid on a carefully prepared, elegantly plated and perfectly seasoned culinary masterpiece, only to realize … your dog is pawing at your leg, begging for a bite.

That experience, or something like it, is precisely what the new start-up Kitchit is trying to bring to its users’ homes.

Launching today, in invite-only beta, the Web service allows anyone with a credit card to book a top-tier chef to prepare the meal at their next dinner party.

The company, which was part of Stanford’s StartX incubator program, just finished raising a seed round of funding. The value of the round is undisclosed, but it counts super-angel Dave McClure among the early investors.

The three founders — CEO Brendan Marshall, CTO George Tang and Chief of Product Ian Ferguson — came together months ago to build a business around the idea of “democratizing fine dining,” said Marshall.

Buzzwords aside, Kitchit is opening up what was a previously gray market of transactions made by foodie insiders — or people who happened to have the connections necessary to find chefs who were looking to make extra money cooking outside the confines of their primary jobs at high-end restaurants.

With Kitchit, even a fish-stick aficionado can arrange for such a meal.

It’s the exact same kind of hidden economy that companies like Airbnb have built a business on disrupting.

But what does this new opportunity mean for the user/eater?

Potential diners visit Kitchit.com and pick from a stable of preapproved chefs — about 40 at last count — who will prepare their haute cuisine in the client’s home for any number of guests.

Kitchit takes care of billing, scheduling and making the connection with the chef, taking a cut of the payment.

The end result, said Ferguson, is “a five-star meal cooked for you and your guests in your home, for less than you would pay in a restaurant.”

And while the prices fluctuate with the cost of ingredients and demands of individual chefs, Ferguson’s math does seem to hold, even if it doesn’t promise an enormous bargain.

He explained that the average per-plate cost of a Kitchit dinner party is somewhere between $50 and $100.

Still, being able to eat at home and drink wine without a restaurant’s precious liquor markup must mean some savings, right?

While it’s tempting to draw an immediate correlation between Kitchit and a company such as Airbnb, CEO Marshall insisted the two were after different markets.

“We’re really more like NetJets for now,” he said.

Beyond the initial focus on high-end dining, Kitchit faces some sobering costs of scaling that Airbnb doesn’t.

For one, the cost of onboarding new chefs is high.

Ferguson noted that many chefs “don’t do a great job of writing their own bios, and few have enough high-quality photos of dishes they’ve prepared — but that’s also exactly why Kitchit can succeed.”

Kitchit, in a sense, has to serve two masters, at least according to Ferguson.

“Our chefs need to see value in using Kitchit, as well,” he said. “It has to make their lives easier, and make it possible for them to make extra money more reliably than other methods.”

And while the eating public never sees it, Kitchit provides a management interface and a host of other services to chefs who book events using the platform.

Kitchit has also started negotiating bulk deals on certain expensive ingredients, such as caviar, so that it can drive the cost of dinner parties down further.

As for what’s next, its founders said the company will spend its time and money growing the stable of chefs and expanding to other markets.

That’s in addition to plenty of “delicious business development meetings,” said Ferguson.

The trio of well-fed founders recently sat down for a fairly lengthy video chat about the launch of Kitchit and the difficulties of building a tech business that sells such an analog service:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110930/want-to-lunch-like-larry-or-snack-like-sergey-kitchit-launches-the-netjets-for-personal-chefs/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110928/wheelz-up-another-p2p-car-sharing-service-launches/ http://allthingsd.com/20110928/wheelz-up-another-p2p-car-sharing-service-launches/#comments Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:33:25 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=125933 Wheelz, a peer-to-peer car-sharing service in the vein of Getaround and RelayRides, launches today at Stanford. The Wheelz team comes from electric vehicle infrastructure company Better Place and includes the former CEO of Mercedes-Benz’s North American R&D.

That car-specific leadership experience — which CEO Jeff Miller said expresses itself in excruciating attention to detail and reliability — is actually somewhat unusual among next-generation transportation companies, which are often more philosophically driven by a desire to reduce the world’s dependence on oil.

Okay, but there still are a heck of a lot of people doing what seems like exactly the same thing, right? “We have a team that’s better equipped to build a technology solution for the problem we’re trying to solve,” was Miller’s response in an interview this week.

Miller said he also thinks he has an edge with Wheelz’ strategy of launching in the trusted environment of a college campus, where .edu email addresses and Facebook friends of friends can help car owners feel comfortable lending out their vehicles. He added that Wheelz will continue to launch on college campuses before it takes on the rest of the world. So far Wheelz has just 18 cars in its Stanford system, but it’s adding more each week.

Atherton, Calif.-based Wheelz has been in development for about six months and includes in-car hardware with a card for unlocking it, a $1 million insurance policy, and a Web site and iPhone app for managing bookings. In the photo above, Miller is demoing unlocking the car with his Wheelz iPhone app. The company is funded with $2 million from backers including former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya and Felicis Ventures.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110928/wheelz-up-another-p2p-car-sharing-service-launches/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110916/qwhisper-is-looking-to-solve-social-search-with-a-dose-of-uber-geek/ http://allthingsd.com/20110916/qwhisper-is-looking-to-solve-social-search-with-a-dose-of-uber-geek/#comments Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:01:15 +0000 Drake Martinet http://allthingsd.com/?p=121481

Sometimes a start-up’s product is pretty, sometimes it’s from famous founders and occasionally it’s dead simple.

Qwhisper is none of those things — in fact, it’s barely even a product at this point. But its team of founders are attacking a devilishly hard problem.

The company and Web app of the same name attempt to search and categorize social media updates with an accuracy that even the sector’s giants have been unable to deliver thus far.

“Search for social is really tough. When someone mentions Mars, you don’t know if they mean Mars the planet, the god, Bruno Mars, the rover, or the candy bar,” said Qwhisper co-founder Eldar Sadikov. “With Web pages, there are all kinds of context clues to help you figure things out, like links and other data. Social content is just so much shorter — you have to be very sophisticated to [make sense of it].”

What that means for us avid Twitterers is that, as of now, searching for a category of tweets is not a useful endeavor — and forget about searching for tweets about a simple but amorphous topic such as “popular music.”

But Sadikov’s Qwhisper, which is in private beta, makes use of some new search algorithms to reorganize a user’s social streams.

Its founders claim the search and sort technology of Qwhisper can reliably deliver tweets to the user based on a topic, category and search term.

So, how does Qwhisper do it?

Sadikov made an attempt at outlining just how complex it is for a computer to make sense of a stream of single tweets:

“You need much more sophisticated natural language processing technology [for social] than what is needed for Web pages. [The system must] understand words like “lol,” “cuz,” “gonna,” “gotta” — because there is so much colloquial language in social content, compared to Web sites.”

Only after dealing with those problems, which are in themselves complex enough for several research papers, can Qwhisper layer in the really complex processing to answer such contextual questions as: What does this person do normally? And, what does that person normally talk about?

But every start-up with a search component boasts custom algorithms, so why should users be confident that Qwhisper’s are superior?

Qwhisper is touting the company’s intellectual pedigree.

Sadikov and some of the other co-founders left their PhD programs at Stanford’s InfoLab to start Qwhisper — the same InfoLab where Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed some of the early parts of Google.

Sadikov also spent time at Google, where he worked on building an algorithm for organizing small sets of words together in contextually relevant groups.

Not too long after, he gathered a group together to launch Qwhisper using some of the same concepts.

If Qwhisper or the engine that powers it proves successful, the consequences could be far reaching.

Delivering tweets and other social content in contextual channels could mean a whole new class of applications — and advertising — all built around social content.

But complex graph-modeling and multivariate algorithms aside, the litmus test for Qwhisper will be simple user interaction.

“Ultimately, if I post something like ‘saw inception last weekend – amazing,’ the system needs to recognize what that is about … even though it says nothing about movies or genre,” said Sadikov.

I caught him and one of his co-founders, Montse Medina, at the recent Stanford StartX incubator demo day to talk more about Qwhisper:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110916/qwhisper-is-looking-to-solve-social-search-with-a-dose-of-uber-geek/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110822/going-off-the-social-media-grid/ http://allthingsd.com/20110822/going-off-the-social-media-grid/#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2011 10:00:01 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=112504 Last week I set off for the Trinity Alps of Northern California, leaving an out-of-office tweet and a vacation auto-reply on my email.

I was essentially offline. I didn’t do much to connect to the rest of the world while I enjoyed my time in the mountains. Well, besides reading a few Instapapered articles on my airplane-mode iPhone in my tent, Wikipediaing some wildflower names on the drive back into town, and Instagramming a post-backpacking-trip celebratory margarita.

Nobody was expecting much more from me, so that was fine. But I came home today to a widely shared story about how social media helped activate a search for a Stanford student feared missing in Malaysia after he stopped sending frequent updates about his whereabouts via outlets like his Google+ account.

Once those expectations are set, going off the social media grid can have as much of an impact on the recipients of a person’s status updates as it does on the traveler.

According to various reports, 22-year-old Jacob Boehm’s parents got worried after they hadn’t heard from him in a week, so they asked friends to help get the word out on Facebook. And it worked: Amidst a flurry of translation, brainstorming and promotion that was coordinated online, a search party got sent out into the jungle by someone in the Malaysian Prime Minister’s office whose son also goes to Stanford. Boehm was found; he called his parents to say he was okay.

The full details haven’t come to light yet, but at this point it seems that Boehm was actually out on a guided hiking trip.

The main cause for concern seemed to be that Boehm set extremely high standards for communicating while he was traveling — his Google+ tagline is “traveling in south east asia as you read” — and then he suddenly stopped posting photos, videos and notes.

In retrospect, Boehm was probably less lost and better connected than a lot of people in the world. Maybe he just couldn’t get Internet access for a few days. His mother, Nancy Luberoff, posted on Facebook, “The real story here is not that we “lost” Jacob, but that thousands of people worked together to find him. We are so grateful for this spontaneous community and outpouring of support. I hope it becomes a model for others.”

Given my own recent experiences, Boehm’s story also makes me think of the implicit contracts we make when we actively tell people where we are and what we’re doing. At some level beyond any specifics, we’re simply assuring our friends and followers that we have a pulse.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110822/going-off-the-social-media-grid/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110621/meet-the-stealthy-start-up-that-aims-to-sharpen-focus-of-entire-camera-industry/ http://allthingsd.com/20110621/meet-the-stealthy-start-up-that-aims-to-sharpen-focus-of-entire-camera-industry/#comments Wed, 22 Jun 2011 02:00:27 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=89216
Lytro.com / Richard Koci Hernandez

A Mountain View start-up is promising that its camera, due later this year, will bring the biggest change to photography since the transition from film to digital.

Ordinarily, I’m turned off by such hyperbole, but after having seen a demo from Lytro, that statement seems downright reasonable.

The breakthrough is a different type of sensor that captures what are known as light fields — basically, all the light that is moving in all directions in the view of the camera. That offers several advantages over traditional photography, the most revolutionary of which is that photos no longer need to be focused before they are taken.

This means capturing that perfect shot of your fast-moving pet or squirming child could soon get a whole lot easier. Instead of having to manually focus or wait for autofocus to kick in and hopefully center on the right thing, pictures can be taken immediately and in rapid succession. Once the picture is on a computer or phone, the focus can be adjusted to center on any object in the image, also allowing for cool artsy shots where one shifts between a blurry foreground and sharp background and vice versa.

“A really well-composed light-field picture can tell a story in a new way,” says Ren Ng, the company’s founder and chief executive (pictured above with an early prototype light-field camera).

Lytro’s camera works by positioning an array of tiny lenses between the main lens and the image sensor, with the microlenses measuring both the total amount of light coming in as well as its direction.

The technology also allows photos to be taken in very low-light conditions without a flash, as well as for some eye-popping three-dimensional images to be taken with just a single lens. To view photos in full 3-D, users still need some sort of 3-D display, such as a 3-D phone, PC or television. However, even without such a display, a certain amount of 3-D is visible.

Once images are captured, they can be posted to Facebook and shared via any modern Web browser, including mobile devices such as the iPhone.

To get a glimpse of this, check out the photo above, as seen from two focal points, or try changing the focus yourself on the image embedded below. Once the photo has loaded, try clicking on different parts of the image to change the focus. (For those who really like this, I’ve included a few more images at the bottom of the story.) There is also a video interview with Ng, where he explains the technology and shows it in action.

Lytro.com / Jason Bradley

The interesting choice that Lytro has made is to go into the camera business itself, rather than license out its technology to established camera makers. It hopes to have a point-and-shoot model on sale later this year. The device will be “reasonably priced,” but Lytro didn’t offer further details.

“It will be a competitively priced consumer product that fits in your pocket,” Ng said.

Of course, going into the camera business means that Lytro has a lot of work ahead of itself. The company currently has about 45 employees, mostly in Mountain View, though it also has a few at a newly opened office in Hong Kong. To fund the effort, Lytro has raised roughly $50 million in funding over the past couple of years, most recently in a Series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Early investors include Intuit’s Scott Cook, VMware’s Diane Greene and venture capitalist Charles Chi, who is now working at Lytro.

“Lytro’s breakthrough technology will make conventional digital cameras obsolete,” Andreessen Horowitz general partner Marc Andreessen said in a statement. “It has to be seen to be believed.”

Ng didn’t go quite that far in our interview, but he did say he hopes that Lytro will reinvigorate — and eventually transform — the entire camera industry. Digital cameras are still big business, to be sure, but many people are finding they are carrying their camera — especially those of the point-and-shoot variety — a whole lot less.

In large part, that’s due to the rise of the smartphone. But Ng hopes Lytro will change all of that.

Lytro isn’t the only company pursuing camera technologies that go beyond the traditional snapshot. There are, of course, lots of 3-D cameras coming to market on cellphones, notably the soon-to-ship Evo 3D from HTC and Sprint. Meanwhile, Adobe has also explored the implications of light-field technology and its former CEO, Bruce Chizen, is on Lytro’s technical advisory board.

Light-field technology was developed back in the 1990s, and initially required 100 cameras attached to a supercomputer. During his graduate studies at Stanford in the mid-2000s, Ng looked at how the technology could be both miniaturized and commercialized. After graduating, he founded the company now known as Lytro, which got seed funding back in 2007, and has been quietly working to get the technology mature enough for the consumer market.

The key will be how quickly — and at what price — Lytro can bring its technology to market. The company isn’t offering a lot of details beyond confirming it plans to bring out its first camera later this year. That device, Ng said, will only take still images, though there is the potential to use light-field technology for videos, as well as for scientific and medical imagery, down the road.

Lytro.com / Eric Cheng

Lytro.com / Richard Koci Hernandez

Lytro.com / Richard Koci Hernandez

Lytro.com / Eric Cheng

Related posts

• Meet the Stealthy Start-Up That Aims to Sharpen Focus of Entire Camera Industry
• BlackBerry’s Fuzzy Forecast and Pictures That Never Are (Video)
• Its Goal in Focus, Camera Start-Up Lytro Takes a Moment to Celebrate (Video)
• All Lytro coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110621/meet-the-stealthy-start-up-that-aims-to-sharpen-focus-of-entire-camera-industry/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110502/fired-facebook-acquisitions-exec-lands-at-twitter/ http://allthingsd.com/20110502/fired-facebook-acquisitions-exec-lands-at-twitter/#comments Mon, 02 May 2011 17:02:32 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=6148 Mike Brown, the former Facebook corporate development executive who was dismissed for buying its stock on secondary markets, has taken a similar job at Twitter.

Brown, who had helped negotiate many of Facebook’s so-called “talent acquisitions” is to be Twitter’s director of corporate development and will report to Kevin Thau, VP of business development. He starts today, Twitter confirmed.

While the issue of insider trading of private companies is a sensitive one, Twitter was apparently able to see Brown’s side of the story.

Brown had purchased Facebook shares on the secondary market last fall out of an apparent desire to take a bigger stake in the company he pitched to many entrepreneurs. Facebook fired him in February based on its policy against insider trading by employees.

Brown stayed out of the spotlight until a report about him surfaced that suggested the stock purchase for which he was fired was based on knowledge of Facebook’s coming $1.5 billion funding round from Goldman Sachs. In a public statement, Brown admitted to the stock purchase but said he had “absolutely no knowledge” of the Goldman Sachs funding.

According to sources, Brown had also been in talks with Google about a role on its corporate development team before accepting the job at Twitter. After Brown was fired, Facebook hired Google corp dev executive Amin Zoufonoun.

That Twitter is hiring Brown presumably means it will step up its efforts to make acquisitions. The company has previously made something like seven start-up purchases, most of them quite small, including Summize, Mixer Labs, Atebits and Smallthought Systems.

It’s also notable that Brown has jumped to Twitter, given it is one of Facebook’s main rivals. (According to LinkedIn, there are 11 former Facebook employees who currently work at Twitter.)

Brown (like many other new Twitter hires, in our experience!) has recently stepped up his tweeting, with eight tweets in the last month or so compared to zero in the year before. He tweets at @mikeisbrown.

Prior to joining Facebook in 2009, Brown had been a venture capitalist with Foundation Capital and Partech International. He is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110502/fired-facebook-acquisitions-exec-lands-at-twitter/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110425/wael-ghonim-visits-silicon-valley-but-leaves-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20110425/wael-ghonim-visits-silicon-valley-but-leaves-google/#comments Mon, 25 Apr 2011 17:00:43 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5869 Wael Ghonim, the Google executive detained by the Egyptian government who reluctantly became the face of the Egyptian people’s revolution after helping organize protesters using social media, will leave Google to start an NGO. Ghonim tweeted this weekend, “Decided to take a long term sabbatical from @Google & start a technology focused NGO to help fight poverty & foster education in #Egypt.”

Ghonim had been in Silicon Valley last week to visit Google, Twitter, and Dogpatch Labs. Googlers gave him a standing ovation at an appearance at a company staff meeting that was described as “emotional.”

In a speech at Stanford University organized by the school’s Muslim Student Awareness Network, Ghonim “spent the bulk of his talk outlining practical steps that can be taken to rebuild Egypt, calling upon his audience to mimic the ‘independent initiative’ of the protestors,” according to a campus newspaper report. He also invited attendees to sign up to help Egypt on a Google Doc.

Ghonim has given much credit to the Internet and specifically Facebook for helping facilitate the Egyptian uprising.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110425/wael-ghonim-visits-silicon-valley-but-leaves-google/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110422/early-adopter-from-the-hacker-who-brought-you-youtube-instant-instant-fm-launches-today/ http://allthingsd.com/20110422/early-adopter-from-the-hacker-who-brought-you-youtube-instant-instant-fm-launches-today/#comments Fri, 22 Apr 2011 15:51:21 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=39229

Internet fame is fleeting. But techies with memories longer than their daily Twitter feeds probably recall some fuss last year over the Stanford University junior who created YouTube Instant–a riff on Google’s then-new instant search function.

Twitter went nuts. So did the hacker forums, and YouTube Instant earned creator Feross Aboukhadijeh over one million hits in 10 days, and a job offer from YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley himself.

Aboukhadijeh didn’t take the job, and this morning, he and co-creator Jake Becker launched Instant.fm, a service that marries YouTube Instant to music playlist sharing, forming a mash-up so obviously cool that one wonders why Apple or YouTube haven’t done it already.

The idea is simple: drag a playlist from someplace, iTunes included, and Instant.fm queues up YouTube videos of the songs in the list, playing them in the playlist’s order.

“I wanted to make it the easiest place on the Internet to share a playlist,” said Aboukhadijeh.

Users can even make a playlist right on the site, and, in a few clicks, anyone within tweeting distance can be listening to the same songs.

Depending on the user’s needs, though, Instant.fm delivers a little more than just playlist sharing.

Users can hit play, blow up the YouTube window to full screen, and instantly have their own nightclub-style music video machine.

“You even get artist and song background info thanks to a few publicly available music information APIs,” Aboukhadijeh added.

The whole thing is fairly polished, especially compared to YouTube Instant, but a decent user interface doesn’t quite make Instant.fm an iTunes killer.

Instant.fm users are at the mercy of YouTube’s large but incomplete music video library. And depending on the quality of the uploaded video, the audio won’t be up to MP3 standards.

So, why give up the Silicon Valley dream of being another famous Stanford drop-out?

Aboukhadijeh said it wasn’t just about seeking more instant success.

“I definitely want to get my degree, and I guess right now I’m really excited about building things really fast and iterating,” he said.

As for the future, Aboukhadijeh is thinking a little larger about Instant.fm than he was about his first viral hit, even if he still has no plans to turn it into a business.

(In any case, he has accepted a summer internship at conversation start-up Quora.)

“If you think about it, playlists are just lists of your favorite songs. And if you add them all together, you get your music library,” said Aboukhadijeh. “So, eventually, you just have a whole library in your Web browser. I know there are a lot of cloud services trying to do the same thing, asking you to upload your mp3s, but we can do it easily.”

I met up with the excitable Aboukhadijeh, and co-creator Becker, on campus at Stanford University. Watch the video to hear the development story straight from the hackers’ mouths:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110422/early-adopter-from-the-hacker-who-brought-you-youtube-instant-instant-fm-launches-today/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110218/to-the-trilateral-commission-and-its-new-leader-watson/ http://allthingsd.com/20110218/to-the-trilateral-commission-and-its-new-leader-watson/#comments Fri, 18 Feb 2011 17:05:44 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=58113 The White House has posted a single photo from the Silicon Valley dinner President Obama attended last night. Beyond confirming the guest list that made the rounds Thursday, it’s largely unremarkable–unless you’re inclined to see great import in the seating arrangement at the dining table.

At the president’s right hand, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; at his left, Apple CEO Steve Jobs. And when Obama looked across the centerpiece, there were the piercing eyes of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Note that Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt are safely separated, in keeping with the first rule of dinner-party seating–avoid fistfights.

The theme of the evening’s conversation? Said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, “The president specifically discussed his proposals to invest in research and development and expand incentives for companies to grow and hire.”

[Image credit: Flickr/WhiteHouse]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110218/to-the-trilateral-commission-and-its-new-leader-watson/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20110217/why-of-course-ill-sign-your-ipad-zuck/ http://allthingsd.com/20110217/why-of-course-ill-sign-your-ipad-zuck/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:07:29 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=58033 Oh to be a fly on the wall at this gathering….

President Obama will dine with Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and a handful of other top Silicon Valley executives at a private dinner at the home of venture capitalist John Doerr. The conversation topics of the evening: American innovation, education and clean energy, and quite a few others, I’m sure, given the guest list.

According to a White House official, other attendees include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Cisco CEO John Chambers, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Stanford president John Hennessy, chairman and former CEO of Genentech Art Levinson, and Westley Group’s managing partner and founder Steve Westly. Oddly absent: HP CEO Léo Apotheker. Perhaps, Ellison’s attendance canceled his out….

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110217/why-of-course-ill-sign-your-ipad-zuck/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110112/longtime-facebook-biz-dev-leader-ali-rosenthal-to-depart/ http://allthingsd.com/20110112/longtime-facebook-biz-dev-leader-ali-rosenthal-to-depart/#comments Thu, 13 Jan 2011 05:00:56 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2318 Alison “Ali” Rosenthal, a veteran of the Facebook business development team, will leave the company at the end of this week, she told NetworkEffect.

Rosenthal had focused on mobile business development in recent years, overseeing Facebook’s relationships with some 300 mobile operators around the world. She is not departing for a specific opportunity, though she said it was likely she’ll end up involved in another start-up.

Rosenthal had joined the company in February 2006, making her one of its earliest remaining employees. She’s the latest of many early Facebookers, including the three Facebook co-founders other than Mark Zuckerberg, to depart over the years.

“I’ve started to feel the pull of some new ideas,” said Rosenthal, adding that she felt Facebook had “unlocked real opportunities at the convergence of mobile and social” that she wants to explore.

By way of explanation for her own and other early-Facebooker departures, Rosenthal contended it’s just that Facebookers tend to be entrepreneurial, and recognize opportunities to extend the social Web in new directions outside of Facebook’s core mission. “It’s very alluring to try a specific idea in an industry you’re passionate about,” she said.

But for now, Rosenthal wants to take some time off. The only specific future plan she would share is to ditch her smartphone for a feature phone for a while in order to “extract myself a little from technology.”

Rosenthal has her MBA from Stanford and previously worked at General Atlantic Partners and Zazzle. She said her replacement has not yet been found, but that Facebook is hiring internationally to have biz dev folks overseeing carrier relationships on a local basis from offices in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.

Other significant recent Facebook departures have included ad sales head Mike Murphy, engineering director Aditya Agarwal and PR head Brandee Barker.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110112/longtime-facebook-biz-dev-leader-ali-rosenthal-to-depart/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101216/bonobos-raises-18-5-million-to-sell-better-fitting-pants/ http://allthingsd.com/20101216/bonobos-raises-18-5-million-to-sell-better-fitting-pants/#comments Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:45:09 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=741 Bonobos got its start three years ago promising men “better-fitting pants” sold over the internet.

Now it has raised $18.5 million in venture capital to tell more people about it.

The funds raised today will give the New York-based company the cash to add a sales and marketing team. The goal is to increase its relatively small customer base of 32,000 customers to 100,000 in 2011.

Bonobos, which is named for a kind of chimpanzee, was started by Andy Dunn while he was at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Dunn himself professes to like clothes, but not shopping.

Despite its tiny footprint, Bonobos is on pace to have $15 million in annualized revenues, and in the past six months alone has tripled its business. It has a 50 percent return rate based on selling well-fitting, comfortable clothes and offering great customer service.

Investors participating in the round include Lightspeed Venture Partners and Accel Partners, along with a handful of angels. To date, the company has raised $26.25 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101216/bonobos-raises-18-5-million-to-sell-better-fitting-pants/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101202/jennifer-granick-lawyer-to-hackers-joins-zwillinger-genetiski/ http://allthingsd.com/20101202/jennifer-granick-lawyer-to-hackers-joins-zwillinger-genetiski/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 18:58:42 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=85 San Francisco lawyer Jennifer Granick, until recently civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is joining the Washington D.C.-based law firm of Zwillinger Genetski.

The firm’s clients include several prominent Internet companies, including Yahoo, social gaming giant Zynga, Myspace (a unit of News Corp., parent of this Web site) and Cablevision.

Granick gained a reputation as a lawyer willing to defend accused computer hackers. Her clients have included the hacker-turned-journalist Kevin Poulsen. I wrote this profile of her for Forbes.com in 2000, describing her as the person you might call if your day begins with an FBI raid.

About the same time, she gave a heavily attended talk on “Hacking and the Law” at the DEF CON 8 hacker conference in Las Vegas. She went on to become executive director at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society. She also taught at Stanford.

I caught up with her yesterday, and she said part of her role will be to help establish ZwillGen’s office in San Francisco. The firm has been adding legal talent at a rapid clip. In June it added three lawyers: Elizabeth Banker, a former associate general counsel at Yahoo; Bart Huff, a former assistant United States attorney in Chicago with a history of prosecuting computer crime; and Leota Bates, a former associate at Perkins Coie in Washington, D.C. Granick is the firm’s eighth attorney.

Will she still have time to take calls from hackers staring down FBI agents? “I think I’ll still be able to do that,” she said. “They wanted me because of my experience and because of who I’ve represented.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/jennifer-granick-lawyer-to-hackers-joins-zwillinger-genetiski/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101116/gravity-wants-to-instantly-personalize-any-content-site/ http://allthingsd.com/20101116/gravity-wants-to-instantly-personalize-any-content-site/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:45:44 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=441

Today Gravity is unveiling its plans to be an information filtering service. The idea is to combine social and semantic understanding of users to identify content they are likely to be interested in.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company is demoing this idea as a personalized newspaper app called The Orbit (to be released soon). The Orbit takes a user’s Twitter account and computes the topics a person is interested in and the network she is connected to. For any one Web page, Gravity might look at how recent it is, how popular it is, how relevant it is to a person’s interest and how many of that person’s friends have shared it.

Eventually, said Gravity CEO Amit Kapur, the company wants to offer personalization services to publisher sites. So when I go to the New York Times with Gravity enabled, for example, I would be able to get a view of the site’s content that’s weighted to what I am likely to be interested in.

I think that’s an awesome idea (though I do appreciate the roles of editorial curation and serendipity in bringing me my news). This is similar to what Facebook is trying to do with its controversial Instant Personalization product, where a user logged in to Facebook arrives at a new site that already knows who his friends are.

The problem is, what Gravity is setting out to do–both the natural-language processing and computational side, and the nitty-gritty of integrating into other peoples’ Web sites–is really freaking hard. And, no offense guys, but the Gravity team’s big experience to date was working at Myspace–not exactly a pinnacle of technical achievement.

When the company briefed me on what it was doing, it prepared a poster-size personal interest graph based on analysis of my Twitter account (that’s it at the top of the post; click to enlarge). Well shucks, guys–it seems to be just a bunch of words and topics I’ve mentioned in Tweets over the last few years, connected by lines. Doesn’t really convince me that you understand that much about me and what I want to read.

Still, Gravity has quite a bit going for it: A good idea, and $10 million from top investors at Redpoint Ventures and August Capital, plus advising by machine learning and computational linguistics professors at Stanford and UC Berkeley.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101116/gravity-wants-to-instantly-personalize-any-content-site/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101108/this-day-in-robot-history/ http://allthingsd.com/20101108/this-day-in-robot-history/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:31:38 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32156 When robots finally gain enough communal sentience to establish their own cultural holidays, this date might be one of them. Today is the third anniversary of the open-source Robot Operating System, born out of Stanford’s STAIR project, developed and nurtured by personal-robot maker Willow Garage, and now used in projects around the world. For a quick sampling of the work being done with this platform, here’s a video montage.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101108/this-day-in-robot-history/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101011/facebooks-social-chief-pushes-human-interaction/ http://allthingsd.com/20101011/facebooks-social-chief-pushes-human-interaction/#comments Mon, 11 Oct 2010 07:00:35 +0000 Geoffrey A. Fowler http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=30916 Sitting in the cubicle next to founder Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook Inc.’s headquarters is a young executive who is taking on a critical challenge for the world’s largest social network: making it more social.

Chris Cox, Facebook’s 28-year-old vice president of product, manages the teams of programmers and designers behind last week’s unveiling of the social network’s newest feature–the ability to sort small groups of friends–as well as other recent additions like check-ins at real-world places.

In a company filled with often reclusive programmers, Mr. Cox is an extrovert who plays in a reggae band. His top job is deepening Facebook’s role in the lives of its users while toeing the line on privacy concerns by making the site hew to real-world social norms.
A Stanford-trained software engineer who joined Facebook in 2005 after dropping out of a graduate-degree program, he takes a social approach to designing products. Humans, not computer formulas, Mr. Cox insists, can make Facebook and the Internet more useful.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101011/facebooks-social-chief-pushes-human-interaction/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100911/youtube-instant-dude-cant-go-to-work-for-chad-hurley-because-hes-already-working-for-mark-zuckerberg/ http://allthingsd.com/20100911/youtube-instant-dude-cant-go-to-work-for-chad-hurley-because-hes-already-working-for-mark-zuckerberg/#comments Sat, 11 Sep 2010 12:00:47 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=23360 There are lots of ways to become famous on the Internet. It took Feross Aboukhadijeh three hours of coding.

When he was done, he had built “YouTube Instant,” a great riff on Google’s (GOOG) own Instant search service. On Thursday night he told a couple hundred friends about the site via Twitter, and from there it went to Y Combinator’s Hacker News, and then to this site, and then on to the rest of the Web.

So far, the most tangible benefit Aboukhadijeh has gotten from his instafame is a job offer, via Twitter, from YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley. But the Stanford junior can’t take him up on it–he’s already working for Mark Zuckerberg, as a Facebook intern, working on something “really cool.”

Here’s more on Aboukhadijeh, via a quickie email interview we put together on Friday. He was a little time-pressed: In addition to class, and work at Facebook, he had to figure out how to keep his site running under a crush of traffic.

Peter Kafka: Great site. What’s the inspiration?

Feross Aboukhadijeh: I decided to do this after hearing about Google Instant. I thought that instant search for YouTube videos would be really cool. My roommate bet me that I couldn’t code it up in an hour. It ended up taking three hours, so he won the bet.

Kafka: What’s the goal here?

Aboukhadijeh: I think YouTube Instant makes sense if you’re looking for a serendipitous video browsing experience. It’s not as useful as Google Instant if you know exactly what you’re looking for, since you’re shown distracting YouTube videos on the way to your destination. But I think this is perfect for many Internet users. :)

Kafka: What are you specializing in at Stanford?

Aboukhadijeh: I’m a Junior in the Stanford CS program. I’m interested in Internet technology, building Web sites, and computer security. I really enjoy building products that entertain and delight people, like YouTube Instant.

Kafka: Besides this, what’s your favorite project you’ve worked on?

Aboukhadijeh: I’ve been working at Facebook as a software engineer intern for the summer. Right now, we’re building something really cool that’s going to be released soon, but I can’t share any details because it’s top secret! :)

Kafka: I’m assuming you used the YouTube API to build this, correct? Any reaction from them so far?

Aboukhadijeh: I built YouTube Instant using a combination of the YouTube API and scraping YouTube search suggestions. No reaction from Google so far, but I think they’ll probably get a kick out of it. The YouTube CEO actually offered me a job on Twitter, he liked it so much.

I initially ran into some issues when Google automatically blocked my server for making too many repeated requests, but I just rewrote the site to query YouTube directly using Javascript on the client-side. This means that all the magic happens in each visitor’s browser, so it’s faster and Google can’t block it.

Kafka: What’s the plan after you graduate?

Aboukhadijeh: One day, I’d like to start a company that becomes the next Google and fundamentally changes the world for the better.

I like the ambition! Meanwhile I like YouTube Instant a lot. FYI, this classic is what the site suggests if you type in “Facebook”:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100911/youtube-instant-dude-cant-go-to-work-for-chad-hurley-because-hes-already-working-for-mark-zuckerberg/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20100818/qotd-329/ http://allthingsd.com/20100818/qotd-329/#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:15:41 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=46665 Dell’s last shareholder meeting was an unpleasant one for Michael Dell. An SEC filing released Tuesday revealed that about a quarter of investors–25.1 percent–withheld their votes for his return to the board of directors, giving him the lowest tally of supporting votes among the 11 directors at Dell.

A nasty blow for the company founder, but one that’s not all that surprising, given the decline in Dell’s (DELL) earnings per share over the past two years and discontent over the company’s settlement of SEC allegations that it manipulated accounts in order to meet business performance targets and broke “negligence-based fraud provisions” in its dealings with Intel.

“Mr. Dell is quite properly an iconic figure at the company,” Stanford professor and corporate governance expert Joseph Grundfest told The New York Times. “It is extremely rare to have that amount of shareholder disaffection directed toward an executive who is so central to the company’s past, present and future.”

Well, not that rare. Yahoo (YHOO) co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang didn’t fare so well during the company’s 2008 shareholder vote (better than Dell, though), and we all know what happened to him. Not that Dell will follow a similar path. As company spokesman Jess Blackburn reminds us 25 percent of votes withheld is quite an endorsement if you look at it the right way. Said Blackburn, “The Dell board had expressed its confidence in Michael Dell’s leadership and the majority of shareholders agreed with them.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100818/qotd-329/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100806/but-im-working-honey-why-do-you-need-to-reformat-the-drive-right-now/ http://allthingsd.com/20100806/but-im-working-honey-why-do-you-need-to-reformat-the-drive-right-now/#comments Fri, 06 Aug 2010 16:48:34 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=28017 The private mode built into the major browsers is supposed to let you cruise the Web without leaving any trace of your travels on the machine, providing peace of mind to people using public PCs or poking around the sketchier online neighborhoods. Now some Stanford researchers have rattled that peace, finding that even in private browsing mode, certain user settings, plug-ins and webmaster techniques can leave identifiable tracks behind. The study also confirmed that the nickname “porn mode” is rightfully earned. As the researchers wrote, “We find [private browsing mode] to be more popular at adult sites and less popular at gift sites, suggesting that its primary purpose may not be shopping for ‘surprise gifts.’”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100806/but-im-working-honey-why-do-you-need-to-reformat-the-drive-right-now/feed/ 0