AllThingsD » Stanford

Startup's Deep Roots: Stanford

Amir Efrati — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 22:20:29 +0000

In one of the largest exoduses from Stanford University’s computer-science programs, more than a dozen students have left to launch a startup called Clinkle Corp. that aims to let other students — and eventually anyone — use their mobile devices to pay for goods and services.

Several professors also are funding and advising the company, in what may be the epitome of a Stanford-fueled startup.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Stanford to Work With EdX Open-Source Learning Platform

Liz Gannes — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 04:01:07 +0000

Stanford University has helped spawn much online learning activity (see our D10 interview with its president), but the school itself is now throwing its weight behind the open-source, not-for-profit EdX platform, which was founded last year by Harvard and MIT.

This is more complicated than you might think it would be. Stanford actually isn’t joining the 12-school EdX consortium, but rather integrating into the EdX platform when it is open-sourced on June 1.

Former Stanford professors are behind Udacity and Coursera, two venture-funded for-profit MOOC (massive open online course) providers that are partnering with professors and universities to teach classes as well, including ones from Stanford.

Stanford is expected to incorporate EdX tools into its online classes this fall, which run on a separate Stanford-built open-source MOOC platform called Class2Go.

Life After Steve

Voices — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:59:44 +0000

Weird.

– The one-word answer given by Apple chairman Arthur D. Levinson Tuesday afternoon at Stanford Business School, when he was asked about his experience since Steve Jobs’s death

In a Twist, Udacity Will Offer Cheap, Remedial Public School Algebra Courses

Liz Gannes — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 06:42:02 +0000

Over the past year, Udacity has established itself as a provider of free classes, mostly in computer science, offered online to large audiences across the world.

Now it’s going to do something quite different. In partnership with the state of California, Udacity will teach remedial and introductory courses on algebra and other topics to public university and community college students, for a vastly reduced fee.

Udacity co-founder Sebastian Thrun (the former Stanford professor and ongoing Google X autonomous car leader) and California Governor Jerry Brown are to announce the program at a press conference at San Jose State on Tuesday morning. A pilot program to adapt MOOCs — massive open online courses — for this purpose will open this month.

The New York Times describes the partnership as a way for the state to help address the fact that many of its students lack academic preparation for college. San Jose State has already been experimenting with MOOCs — it offered an electrical engineering class with edX this past fall. However, professors remain wary of being replaced by online education’s combinator of videos and “mentors.”

But the deal also benefits Udacity, which has massive dropout rates — the estimate for all MOOCs is that 90 percent of students who register drop out.

So, rather than its normal syllabus of aspirational personal enrichment classes, Udacity will be inserting itself into a more core part of education.

Thrun told the Times that he saw the program as an opportunity to figure out how to retain motivated students.

GoldieBlox: A Construction Toy With a Story Line Builds Girls' Interest in Engineering

Lauren Wilson — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 12:49:06 +0000

The story goes that Goldilocks searched for the perfect bed by breaking into the home of an innocent family of bears.

GoldieBlox, however, will just build a bed by herself.

GoldieBlox is a construction toy designed by Stanford University engineer Debbie Sterling and aimed at young girls. To use it, users read along with Goldie and build the machines the titular inventor builds to solve problems in her line of books.

It’s part of an effort to solve a much bigger problem. According to the National Science Foundation’s 2011 report, women have half as much presence in science and engineering fields as they do in the workforce as a whole. Another NSF study finds that only 4 percent of women enter college with plans to pursue an engineering degree. That figure falls to 0.4 percent for those intending to major in computer sciences.

In her mostly male field, Sterling said, she hopes to inspire a new generation of female engineers with her new girl-centric construction toys.

That’s why Sterling believes it’s crucial to break occupational gender norms — traditionally, girls flock toward the social sciences and humanities, while boys gravitate toward math and sciences. And, although her father was a software engineer, Sterling admits she had no clue what engineering was while she was growing up.

That’s where GoldieBlox comes in. With its pretty pastel coloring and spunky heroine, the toy eschews the notion that engineering is a cold, “manly” field. This may sound sexist to some, but Sterling is simply being realistic about appealing to little girls. In the future, Sterling plans to expand Goldie beyond mechanical engineering to e-books that would teach older girls basic coding.

At Stanford, Sterling initially dreaded her first engineering course, Mechanical Engineering 101, which she enrolled in on her high school math teacher’s suggestion.

“I really thought it was going to be my first F,” said Sterling, who holds a degree in mechanical engineering and product design. “But it was totally creative, building, collaborative and problem solving — all these things I liked.”

After quitting her job as the marketing director of a jewelry company last December, Sterling researched existing construction toys and observed how girls interacted with them.

One aspect stuck out to her in particular:

“I started noticing this thing where the girls weren’t interested in building what was on the front of the box, and would kind of get bored. So I would ask them what’s their favorite toy, and they would run upstairs and bring me back down a book.”

That’s when she realized she needed a way to synthesize little girls’ love of characters and books with the hands-on component of Legos and Erector sets.

Thus was born GoldieBlox, a girl engineer who guides readers through stories about building. But what should they build? Sterling looked up homemade physics and science projects, and settled on a basic belt drive, which became the basis of the first book.

She made the project more enticing by calling it a “spinning machine” that would twirl all the characters in the story, much like her favorite ride at Disneyland, the spinning teacups. Goldie’s spinning machine is comprised of thread spools, ribbons and a peg board.

“As soon as the narrative was introduced, the girls were totally engaged and really wanted to build the machines,” Sterling said. “Not to build the machines, but to spin the friends.”

Sterling received expert mentorship along the way, including from former college adviser David Kelley, the founder of Ideo. When Sterling showed Kelley her work, he immediately connected her with Brendan Boyle, a fellow partner at Ideo and head of its toy department.

“What I like about [GoldieBlox] is, No. 1, the company has purpose; and, No. 2, it has a strong point of view,” Boyle said.

Sterling hopes to expand the GoldieBlox brand over time by developing Goldie’s friends and adding to the complexity of their engineering tasks. In book two, Goldie builds a parade float; in three, a pulley elevator. She believes the strength of the brand lies in her strong protagonist.

“The most important [thing] is that she is an engineer role model,” she said. “With the other girly toys, they have beauticians, nurses and stuff. Those are all the typical role model characters that everybody’s already seen. Goldie’s an engineer, a tinkerer — you know she’s a maker and she’s cool.”

Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook's Early Days: Go Hard or Go Home

Mike Isaac — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 20:06:53 +0000

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Like any young start-up, the early days of Facebook were thin and scrappy. Its very first server back in 2004 cost $85 to rent. They didn’t spend more than they had in the bank. They were small, tight and still had everything to prove.

To do that, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, the company needed to test its mettle against its existing competitors. And back then, those weren’t MySpace or Friendster, but the existing social networks inside U.S. universities.

“We first went to schools that were hardest to succeed at,” Zuckerberg said on Saturday morning, kicking off the Y Combinator Startup School event in Palo Alto, California. “If we had a product that was better than others, it would be worth investing in.”

Zuckerberg spoke to a packed house in the Stanford Memorial Hall auditorium, with an audience mostly composed of twentysomethings, the veritable next wave of young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The conference is geared toward the young and idealistic, those who may build the Facebooks or Twitters of tomorrow. Hence, Zuckerberg focused on the challenges of turning a rough-and-tumble outfit into the 1-billion-user-strong social giant it is today.

So if you’ll hearken back to 2004, Facebook’s first days were limited to college students alone, those who had verified university email addresses. It was a play for an early conception of true online identity; unlike other existing networks, you were supposed to be yourself on Facebook.

After first growing Facebook inside of Harvard’s network, then, the plan was essentially to go hard or go home — to launch the network at universities like Columbia, Stanford and Yale. These were the schools, Zuckerberg said, that had the most integrated social networks campus-wide. If Facebook caught on here, it’d be safer to assume that scaling to less-integrated schools would be a downhill battle.

That’s exactly what happened. Facebook spread from school to school, moving slowly to cope with the early scaling issues that popular services often face (Twitter and the Fail Whale, anyone?).

Much of the other advice Zuckerberg offered to the young crowd was the usual platitudes — listen to your users, stay simple, be reliable.

But his most important point was clear: Punch above your weight class. If your product is better than anything out there, the users will let you know it.

Trifacta Aims to Make Big Data Useful, Lands $4.3 Million From Accel Partners

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 14:19:45 +0000

We hear a lot about big data these days. It’s the IT industry catch phrase of the moment, and describes the notion of capturing and analyzing data from many quarters in order to find patterns and other information that is useful in making business decisions.

One part of that equation is easy to solve: Moore’s law and the persistent march of storage technology have made the number-crunching and storage of all the data relatively easy and inexpensive.

The other part is hard: Gleaning actual information by interpreting, recognizing and then deciding on a course of action from the data. In the end, that requires a person. And people are a little complicated.

A study by McKinsey reckons that the demand for people with deep analytical skills will exceed the supply by about 140,000 people to 190,000 people by 2018. So, while computing engines will become incrementally more powerful and cheaper, the people available to understand all that data being gathered will be going up.

That fact was an epiphany to Joe Hellerstein, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and to Jeffrey Heer, a professor in the Human-Computer Interaction research group at Stanford University. Why not make that analysis — the bits that only a human can do — easier and more accessible?

The result of their research is Trifacta. The start-up came out of stealth mode today and announced a $4.3 million Series A investment from Accel Partners led by Ping Li, head of the firm’s Big Data Fund. The company also has investments from X/Seed Capital, Data Collective and angel investors Dave Goldberg, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman.

Trifacta’s aim is to help close that analysis gap by making data science more efficient, by making the data itself more easy to manipulate and rearrange. A lot of data analysis is simply asking what would happen if one condition or another were different, or if one or two key assumptions change. How might sales of a widget suffer if the gross domestic product of a certain country drops next year by a few basis points? How might the yield of a certain crop be better or worse if the mean temperature during the growing season is one or two degrees hotter? Those are super-simple examples that I’m making up off the top of my head, but you get the idea.

Tackling that problem requires expertise in three areas: Database systems, data visualization and machine learning. As it happens, Trifacta has assembled a team of some of the best experts in all three.

Hellerstein is Trifacta’s chief executive officer and a professor of computer science at Berkeley. He’s also a leading authority on data-centric systems. Heer, the chief experience officer, is known for his work at Stanford on open-source data visualization libraries such as Protovis and D3.js. Sean Kandel, Trifacta’s CTO, is a former financial analyst who did his dissertation work at Stanford studying analyst behavior and designing tools to improve productivity.

They’ve assembled a team of advisers that include Michael Bostock, a data visualizer with the New York Times; and Jeff Hammerbacher, founder and chief scientist at Cloudera, the start-up focusing on the open-source big-data engine Hadoop. Other advisers include Sam Madden, a computer science professor at MIT; Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media; and DJ Patil, the data scientist in residence at Greylock Ventures.

Trifacta’s technology takes data found in small files or huge petabyte-sized data troves in Hadoop, and makes it possible to manipulate it through a guided, iterative process.

Accel’s Li, who is taking a board seat at Trifacta, summarized his interest like this: “The world doesn’t need another Hadoop or SQL company. The biggest problem with big data is around the ability to get information out of it. That gap is huge, and it’s not going to be solved anytime soon. This is really the soft underbelly of big data right now.”

More Data Beats Better Algorithms -- Or Does It?

Omar Tawakol — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 17:00:56 +0000

Binary code illustration by Matej Pavla

Anand Rajaraman from Walmart Labs had a great post four years ago on why more data usually beats better algorithms. He cited a competition modeled after the Netflix challenge, in which he had his Stanford Data Mining students compete to produce better recommendations based on a data set of 18,000 movies. It turned out that the winning team had a very rudimentary algorithm but won because it appended data about the movies from outside the original data set (they used IMDb). With that simple study, it conclusively demonstrated that inferior algorithms with more data beat better, sophisticated algorithms with less data.

According to this line of thinking, Google proved this same lesson years ago when it showed that PageRank could outperform keyword extraction techniques (used by other search engines at that time) by leveraging data from outside the page itself (i.e., the votes that page creators made by choosing their outbound links, which defined the network topology of the Web). History is repeating itself now with Facebook, which is using detailed data about friendships (which defines the social network topology of the real world) to give it a leg up over other media companies. It is this same underlying notion that led Alex Rampell, the CEO of TrialPay, to say, “Payment data is more valuable than payment fees.” According to Alex, “Connecting the bank accounts of buyers and sellers will never be as valuable, nor defensible, as connecting buyers and sellers.”

Is this love of more data really well-founded? When do you know enough? In a world in which the amount of existing data is doubling every year, when do you shift your focus from yet another incremental attribute to writing a better algorithm to help you handle the deluge? How do you avoid being overwhelmed by the noise? Is there a tipping point at which more is less?

To better illustrate the problem, we need only remember Solomon Shereshevsky — a man with an unusual mind, who remembered in great detail everything that happened to him. His problem was that even though he remembered every detail, his brain failed to create high-level connections between the details. For example, if he saw a face, he remembered it exactly, but he failed to connect that memory to a memory of the same face with a different expression. Therefore, he had trouble connecting these faces with the person they belonged to. Similarly, when you spoke to him, he could memorize every word you said, but he would have trouble understanding your point. (A.R. Luria, “The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory.”)

A healthy mind, on the other hand, has a more successful strategy for dealing with what could otherwise be data deluge. According to Leonard Mlodinow, the author of “Subliminal,” our brain processes 11 million inputs a second. It does so gracefully, because when we experience something in the real world, we aren’t just adding an isolated memory into our minds. The brain quickly connects the salient features of the memory to an entire lifetime of connected memories, including images, smells, sounds, touch and emotions. Think about how many times a smell has helped you retrieve a memory about an event. A simple fact can be transformed instantly just by being associated with other facts. That is why someone who records every fact but fails to extract the meaningful connections is at a severe disadvantage.

This leads us to our central point. Algorithms shouldn’t be one-way filters that take data out and put them to use outside of the system. Rather, the algorithm output is itself data which enhances the data asset. Even though BlueKai processes one trillion data transactions a month, we believe that the real value isn’t in the raw volume, it is in the degree of connectedness that is analytically overlaid onto the data to make it more interrelated. For example, the addition of data on sport water bottle purchase intent doesn’t just enhance the water bottle category — that might be rather uninteresting. By analyzing the behavior, for instance, of people who purchase water bottles for biking, we learn that these same people tend to own high-end vehicles. Apparently, people who like biking for sport tend to have the drive and money to enjoy a more expensive vehicle. These bicyclists also tend to take more island vacations, and, not surprisingly, so do their friends. Therefore, an isolated behavior, when evaluated and connected, can produce unexpected value.

This brings us back to the original question. If you have to choose, having more data does indeed trump a better algorithm. However, what is better than just having more data on its own is also having an algorithm that annotates the data with new linkages and statistics which alter the underlying data asset. That way, the addition of each new algorithm radically improves the underlying data asset, just like the addition of a sensory input improves the way we experience the world around us.

Are you living in a world in which more data provides diminishing returns (like Solomon Shereshevsky), or are you living in a world in which more data truly is better?

Omar is the co-founder and CEO of BlueKai, the industry’s leading data activation system that supplies both Fortune 100 companies and leading publishers with solutions for managing and activating first- and third-party data for creating highly effective customer and marketing campaigns. Omar’s previous roles include Chief Advertising Officer for mobile search and advertising solution Medio and Chief Marketing Officer for early behavioral data leader Revenue Science.

Stanford President John Hennessy Talks Backstage at D10

Drake Martinet — Thu, 31 May 2012 20:45:28 +0000

Stanford President John Hennessy presides over one of the most prominent educational institutions on the globe, and he spent time onstage at the D conference talking about the future of costs, formats and education systems. Backstage, he talked with AllThingsD’s Katie Boehret about being smart, working hard, and Catholic nuns:

[ See post to watch video ]

#ATD10 Kicks Off With Apple's Tim Cook -- Also Adding Online Education to Mix With Khan and Hennessy

Kara Swisher — Tue, 29 May 2012 18:24:04 +0000

The All Things Digital team is all set down in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., under sunny skies and with a lineup of tech and media speakers that are even more stunning than the spectacular view here.

We begin tonight with the first major interview that Apple CEO Tim Cook has given since he took over at the iconic tech powerhouse last year.

There will be lots to talk to him about in the session of more than an hour onstage in front of a long-sold-out crowd — from Apple’s next products to the situation in China to patent wars to his take on what it is like to run the world’s most valuable and influential tech company.

Before taking over from the late and very great Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Cook ran vast and critical swaths of the company already, so it will be interesting to hear about the state of the company under his leadership.

Along with Cook, other speakers over the three-day event include Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Zynga’s founder and CEO Mark Pincus, Kleiner Perkins Mary Meeker, Hollywood phenom Aaron Sorkin and many more. We also have many killer demos of new products.

Plus, we just added what Walt Mossberg and I consider a critical session on online education, with Stanford President John Hennessy and the Khan Academy’s founder and executive director Salman Khan.

In addition to running one of the most influential educational institutions around and a Silicon Valley powerhouse, Hennessy wrote the book on computer architecture design.

Literally. First as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford and later as an administrator, Hennessy has brought Silicon Valley and the university closer than ever. Even as president of Stanford, his research continues to push out the boundaries around the architecture of high performance computers.

“Each one, teach one” is a laudable goal, but it led Khan to tutor his young cousin in math, even though the two of them were not in the same town. So, he devised video tutorials that went viral on YouTube, and now Khan’s eponymous Khan Academy has each one teaching thousands every day.

Since launching three years ago, the Khan Academy has provided 150 million lessons over the Internet and is the most-used library of videos on the Web. According to its Web site, the lessons are open to all, even “a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology.”

We have one more big speaker to add for our primo second night slot, so watch this space.

Full D10 Conference Coverage

Harvard and MIT Launch $60M Nonprofit Online EdX Platform

Liz Gannes — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:00:14 +0000

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today are launching a nonprofit, open-sourced joint online learning venture called EdX, with the first courses to start in the fall of this year.

Basically, Harvard is jumping in as an equal partner to a previously announced project called MITx, with each school contributing faculty leaders and putting up $30 million in funding.

EdX (which was pronounced both “ed-ex” and “ee-dee-ex” at a press conference this morning) will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free; in the future, other schools will be invited to join.

The two Boston-area schools are essentially leapfrogging Stanford University, where a set of online classes last year gave rise to the creation of two for-profit companies led by the Stanford professors who taught the classes — Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity and Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng’s Coursera. Stanford is still figuring out its own approach to online learning.

EdX will bring MIT and Harvard courses to students around the world, with no admissions requirements, free classes, and “a modest fee” for credentials earned by students, according to plans posted today.

The open source platform will include “self-paced learning, online discussion groups, wiki-based collaborative learning, assessment of learning as a student progresses through a course, and online laboratories.”

The first courses have not been chosen yet, and many other details have yet to be figured out.

“Online education is not an enemy of residential education, but rather a profoundly liberating and expanding ally,” said MIT President Susan Hockfield at a press conference this morning.

EdX is also an opportunity to push forward education research, said the project’s leaders.

EdX President Anant Agarwal

EdX is inspired in part by Sal Khan’s Khan Academy, and will include videos made in his style, said Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Agarwal will be the first president of EdX.

Of other online learning initiatives, including those that are for profit, Agarwal said, “Of course, all of us are looking at each other. At the end of the day, I think the more online educators there are, I think the better off the whole world is.”

The Five-Mile Rule

Bo Kim — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:01:10 +0000

To simplify the search [for the next great companies], I suggest you look within a five-mile radius of Stanford.

– Stanford graduate Peter Thiel, in conversation with Reid Hoffman

Interviewing Tech's Best Multitaskers: Sebastian Thrun and Jack Dorsey

Liz Gannes — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:00:18 +0000

Charlie Rose aired a pair of interviews this Wednesday with Sebastian Thrun and Jack Dorsey, two tech guys who have much in common: massive ambition, unparalleled juggling skills, and a lot of things recently going their way.

Sebastian Thrun

Thrun wore his Google Glasses prototypes through his interview — as he says he does all the time — and talked about that project, Google’s self-driving cars, Google X in general, and his new online education start-up, Udacity. Dorsey talked Twitter and Square, as well as his angel investment in Instagram.

Both videos (each less than 20 minutes) are worth watching, but here are couple of comments that stuck out for me:

Of Google’s glasses, Thrun said, “People talk a lot about augmented reality — looking at objects and faces and finding information — but the compelling use case for us is the sharing experience.”

What does that mean? Taking pictures and sending them to Google+ (via the press of a button and a quick nod, as Thrun demonstrated), phone calls, notifications, email dictation and email reading.

Portrait of Charlie Rose, taken with Google Glass prototype by Sebastian Thrun

Google X has been “overhyped,” Thrun protested somewhat halfheartedly. He said it’s a research group like at any other company, with a slightly different focus — it’s “not for the sake of writing research papers, but for the sake of impacting society.”

For instance, the Glasses project was based on hiring University of Washington professor Babak Parviz and giving him all the resources and engineers he needed to build something interesting over the past two years, Thrun said.

Meanwhile, when asked to describe the next era of technology, Dorsey said it was tools that disappear from sight when they’re irrelevant and only reappear when they’re relevant — like push notifications.

He also spoke a little bit about the myth of the founder, and told Rose it’s not a bad thing that none of Twitter’s founders are the CEO anymore.

“You can have a very shallow view and you can say there were three founders, only at the beginning. But the truly great companies have multiple founding moments through their history, and the truly great companies are constantly reinventing themselves all the time with the people they bring in, with the ideas they have around the table — and with Twitter, with our users. A lot of what you see in Twitter today was invented by our users.”

Dorsey also had some interesting and telling comments on Instagram, in which he was one of the first angel investors — and which Twitter had also made moves to buy, before Facebook acquired it for $1 billion.

“It makes sense that Facebook would pick it up,” Dorsey said. “Facebook’s core competency is photos, but Facebook is known for the past tense. Photos are in the past, they’re in albums, they’re something that you have to maintain; you have to maintain relationships. Instagram represented the now, it represented the present — it represented a lot of the ideas that Twitter brought to the world. Even in the constraints — [Twitter has] a constraint of 140 characters, Instagram has the constraint of the square.”

Cloud-Based Phone Software Start-Up Twilio Taps Former Jive Exec as Its CMO

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:30:54 +0000

There’s a certain kind of geek who gets excited about Twilio. Who among software developers wouldn’t jump at the chance of adding voice-calling and text-messaging options to a public-facing application? Companies like eBay unit StubHub, Salesforce.com and Airbnb have used it to create some custom apps that include the use of a phone.

This creates curious opportunities for fun. When Twilio was in the process of raising its most recent funding round — a $17 million series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures — Bessemer partner Byron Deeter created a Twilio-connected number and asked CEO Jeff Lawson to call it. As recounted by VentureBeat, when Lawson called, he heard automated voice messages asking him to press 1 for $5 million, 2 for $10 million and 3 for $15 million.

Hijinks like this say a lot about the culture that surrounds Twilio, but it’s not well known outside the developer community. Addressing that will be job one for Lynda Smith, its new chief marketing officer, who joined the company on April 23.

Smith is joining Twilio from Jive, the social enterprise software concern, where she was senior vice president of marketing until last fall. As CMO, she’ll be responsible for Twilio’s marketing strategy around the world.

“I think the Twilio brand is huge among developers because it gives that community a chance to play with something they haven’t had before,” Smith told me. “But it’s also getting a lot of traction within the telephony industry. … Voice and messaging are still a big part of the worlds that we live in, but they’ve been difficult to bring into new-world software applications because it’s still tied to some old-world things like hardware and protocols.” First priority, she says, is making sure that people outside the developer world know what Twilio is and what they can do with it.

Before Jive, Smith held a number executive slots at Genpact, Nuance, Genesys and Lockheed Martin. She’s a graduate of Simpson College, and has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. She’s also on the faculty at Stanford University, where she lectures on global entrepreneurial marketing.

Twilio is definitely on the move: It landed $17 million in that C round late last year, bringing its total capital raised to about $34 million. It also just announced its second conference in San Francisco, in October. Time to get serious about marketing.

Glassmap and Highlight Take on the Next Frontier of Location Sharing: Doing It All the Time

Liz Gannes — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:00:45 +0000

Remember when everyone in social media said it was time for location apps to go “beyond the check-in”? Well, it’s happening. While early leaders like Foursquare try to evolve to turn check-ins into local intelligence, some new apps like Highlight and Glassmap are going all in on helping people passively share their locations.

The new location-sharing apps promise to provide more value to users than ever — but they will surely teeter awfully close to the edge of creepy for many people.

Unless you go to Stanford or one of the 10 other colleges where it’s been tested, Glassmap may not have crossed your radar.

The stealthy-till-now company came out of the Y Combinator program last summer, and it’s specifically focused on colleges, families and tight groups of friends. The Glassmap app for iOS and Android constantly shares users’ locations and shows them on a map.

Glassmap founder Geoff Woo says his company’s secret sauce is the work it’s done around managing battery drain, a common problem with smartphone apps that use GPS. This is done through careful management of pushing and pulling data from each user’s client version of the app.

Woo contended that Glassmap is also “more social” than other passive location-sharing services that are not for dating, like Google Latitude and Apple’s Find My Friends. He noted Glassmap features such as integrated text messaging, calling and virtual “waves” (like Facebook “Pokes”). Outside of college campuses, Woo said he sees the app being used among families and close groups of friends.

Meanwhile, another new app that’s getting some attention in Silicon Valley is Highlight, which, like Glassmap, constantly transmits users’ locations, but is very different in practice.

Highlight tells iOS app users when they are in the vicinity of their Facebook friends and other people they might want to get to know, based on common friends and interests.

Highlight explicitly does not show users on a map, but rather pinpoints moments when two users are in close proximity to each other (within 150 meters). The idea is to increase serendipity.

“Highlight makes people friendlier,” co-founder Paul Davison told me.

“The real world is like Facebook where every profile is just a single photo,” Davison said. And so Highlight — which Davison started as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital — aims to put those faces in context.

Okay, sure, but what about the creepy factor? “If you build this simply enough with the right privacy controls, it could be useful to everyone in the world,” Davison argued.

I personally think Highlight is interesting, especially in the run-up to the location-sharing mecca of SXSW Interactive in Austin next month. But even in this young space, the claws are already out.

When I asked Woo what he thought of Highlight, he quickly dismissed it by saying, “You could just talk to people on the street if you really wanted to. In the mainstream world that’s not something people want to do.”

Watch: Sebastian Thrun Leaves Stanford to Teach Online

Liz Gannes — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:00:03 +0000

One of the most memorable sessions at this year’s DLD conference in Munich was a presentation by Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor who recently led development of self-driving cars for Google.

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)

Larry Page Visits His Younger Self (Comic)

Nitrozac and Snaggy — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:06:06 +0000

Treehouse Turns Learning to Build a Web Site Into a Game With Code Racer

Liz Gannes — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 22:39:06 +0000

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.

Happy 20th Anniversary to Silicon Valley's First Web Site

Liz Gannes — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:46:34 +0000

Where were you 20 years ago today? Paul Kunz remembers vividly.

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.

Lytro Comes Into Focus (AsiaD Demo)

Drake Martinet — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:54:31 +0000

For a generation now, camera development has been measured in megapixels, but Lytro, which demoed today at AsiaD, is hoping its new camera will constitute the biggest leap in imaging since we swapped film for digital.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AllThingsD‘s Ina Fried contributed from Hong Kong.

Lytro Light Field Camera Revealed

Drake Martinet — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:59:27 +0000

Today in San Francisco, digital camera and imaging start-up Lytro is unveiling a consumer digital camera that it claims will be the biggest technological jump since we started talking megapixels over 20 years ago.

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.

Want to Lunch Like Larry or Snack Like Sergey? Kitchit Launches the NetJets for Personal Chefs. (Video)

Drake Martinet — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:01:42 +0000

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:

[ See post to watch video ]

Wheelz Up: Another P2P Car-Sharing Service Launches

Liz Gannes — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:33:25 +0000

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.

Qwhisper Is Looking to Solve Social Search With a Dose of Uber-Geek

Drake Martinet — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:01:15 +0000

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:

[ See post to watch video ]

Great Expectations: Going Off the Social Media Grid

Liz Gannes — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 10:00:01 +0000

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.