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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 09:35 AM PDT
 Google just unveiled a boatload of new features for its fledgling Google+ social network, many of which will be sure to please fans of its Hangouts group video chat. First off, Google+ Hangouts is now available on Android phones, and it will soon be heading to iOS devices. You can also broadcast Hangouts sessions to the world via a new On Air feature, and collaborate with others during Hangouts by sharing your screen and working together on Google Docs or Sketchpad. Notably, Google+ is also opening up for anyone to join today without the need for an invite. The move comes after Google+ has been in field testing for 90 days. Google says it has added over 91 features to Google+ during its field test, and with its announcements today that number has jumped to 107 new features. Google has also finally added search capabilities to Google+. Typing in queries to the Google+ search box will get you relevant people and posts from within the social network, as well as popular content from around the net. “If you're into photography, for example, then you'll see other enthusiasts and lots of great pictures,” writes Google’s head of social Vic Gundotra. “If you care more about cooking, then you'll see other chefs and food from around the globe. In all cases, Google+ search results include items that only you can see, so family updates are just as easy to find as international news.” Developing, refresh for updates. Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 09:00 AM PDT
 Zynga only just launched its Adventure World game on Facebook. But now the company is moving quickly to unveil another game that is core to its future growth: Mafia Wars 2.Zynga has more than 2,500 employees as a result of making an acquisition a month for more than a year, so it’s not a complete surprise that it can launch new games at a fast pace. The real question is, why now? The answer may be a combination of things: more games are coming out of the pipeline, and Zynga has to launch more games to deal with reinvigorated competition on Facebook. Mafia Wars originally launched in 2009, when Facebook was still young as a game platform. In the game, you can team up with your friends to form your own mafia and complete tasks (such as taking out your real-world friends in rival mobs) to gain rewards and strength. It is one of the early free-to-play games on Facebook, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. To keep its initial public offering on track, Zynga needs to show consistent performance and continuous growth. That isn’t easy to do, given that the company can easily gain or lose 10 million monthly active users in a week. Whatever the motivation for announcing Mafia Wars 2, there is no question Zynga is moving fast. Zynga launched its combat social Empires & Allies game in June. And it launched its Adventure World game on Sept. 8. It also launched its latest expansion to FarmVille, one of its most popular games, dubbed Lighthouse Cove. The expansion allows FarmVille players to farm in a coastal village town. Meanwhile user numbers have been slipping on some of Zynga’s titles. On Sept. 8, the company had 275 million monthly active users, according to AppData. Now the company has 268 million. Zynga’s most popular game, CityVille, has fallen from 100 million users to 74 million. Meanwhile, Electronic Arts has come out of nowhere as it launched The Sims Social on Aug. 18. Before that game, EA had only 29 million monthly active users on Facebook. Now it has 93 million. That’s a huge swing. Meanwhile, Wooga has also grown quickly to 41 million users. And rivals such as Playdom, 6waves Lolapps, CrowdStar, and King.com also have a lot of users. To stay ahead of that pack, Zynga has to start taking more shots on the goal. Zynga’s original Mafia Wars had more than 28 million users at its peak, but it has since sunk to about 5.1 million. Here’s a video preview of the game.  Filed under: games, social         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 08:58 AM PDT
 Location-based social network Foursquare has quietly added the incredibly welcome ability to hide home addresses to its privacy features. One of the biggest problems I’ve always had when scanning my friends’ Foursqaure check-ins has been seeing people checking in at their homes. While theoretically you’re sharing with just friends, surely there are at least a few people you’d prefer not to show off their exact address. Furthermore, many people who are the “mayor” of their home have that info listed on their public profiles under “mayorships,” meaning anyone who knows your name could find your address. Thankfully this new update, which was first noticed by the About Foursquare blog, will help alleviate most of these concerns. Users can now obscure their address by categorizing it as a “Home” in the system. The picture above, for example, shows my friend Andrew’s home as just the general area in the part of Brooklyn where he lives. Of course, you have to take initiative to protect your privacy. Venues that aren’t categorized as a Home will still show exact addresses. If your home address is listed on Foursquare without your consent, you can use the Report a Problem link to let Foursquare staff know it needs to be categorized as a Home. Social networks that include location elements have always struggled with privacy. Location tagging on Twitter, for example, can be dicey because if you forget to turn it off and you tweet at home, the world will see where you live. But since social networking and location-based networks are still relatively young, we should see more privacy features like this one from Foursquare to help bring peace of mind to more users. Are you happy Foursquare has finally added this feature? Filed under: social         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 08:46 AM PDT
 Rovio Entertainment, the company behind Angry Birds, is in talks with Starbucks to bring the game to life in Starbucks’ retail locations.The gaming company is considering partnering with Starbucks to sell virtual goods and set up electronic leaderboards in the ubiquitous coffee shops. A similar partnership was reached over the summer with Barnes & Noble; the stores displayed leaderboards and added augmented reality gaming elements with a feature called “magic places.” Rovio senior vice president Wibe Wagemans told Bloomberg in an interview that the in-store promotions are an attempt to acquire new players and sell a wider range of Angry Birds-related products, especially in light of the company’s anticipated IPO sometime in the next few years. Wagemans said the company is already selling 1 million Angry Birds stuffed animals every month, and being able to increase the types and amount of merchandise offered might significantly impact Rovio’s bottom line. Right now, Angry Birds gear comes in a plethora of shapes and sizes. Of course, there are the aforementioned Angry Birds plushies (always good for a little “pummeling therapy” in the VentureBeat writers’ lounge) and T-shirts. You can buy Angry Birds mobile accessories, Halloween costumes and myriad cheap plastic items of questionable licensing and origin. Rovio is also working on an Angry Birds feature-length film. Currently, the game has seen more than 350 million downloads. Mobile players are in the game for more than 300 million minutes each day collectively. Rovio wrapped up a $42 million fundraising round in March and is reportedly working on a new round with a $1.2 billion valuation. Filed under: games         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 08:30 AM PDT
 The Wall Street Journal launched a new Facebook app today that allows people to read the publication’s content exclusively on the social network.The app, called WSJ Social, filters the publication’s content through Facebook’s social graph to yield a collection of news tailor-made for each person. “[I'm] really excited about news apps on Facebook and how it has the potential to change the reading and news consumption experience on the platform,” said Facebook Journalist Project Manager Vadim Lavrusik on his Facebook wall. The app itself features articles that are arranged in tiles that consist of a thumbnail image, a headline and a few smaller thumbnails of people who have “liked” that particular link. At the top left-hand corner, the news app displays the total number of WSJ stories you’ve liked and saves them for later viewing. Beside the “likes” link is another “readers” link, which lets you follow particular editors and such. I’m not entirely sure how useful this feature will be because I don’t know any WSJ editors — especially any that frequently use Facebook. As you can see from the Dell and Intel logos in the screenshot, the app is ad-supported. This is an interesting twist considering that the bulk of WSJ content is now behind a paywall. Filed under: media, social, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 08:16 AM PDT
 “All people decisions at Google are based on data and analytics” says Kathryn Dekas, a manager in Google’s people analytics team who spoke at O’ Reilly Strata yesterday.Those decisions cover compensation, talent management, hiring and all other HR issues. With 28,000 employees and a constant stream of new hires, HR is a an important topic at Google but true to its engineering roots, HR, just like any other area, needs to produce data to justify decisions and policies. This led to the creation of the people analytics team, a hodge-podge of data miners, psychologists and MBAs. One of the team’s better known endeavours is Project Oxygen, Google’s quest to build a better boss, or at least identify what makes a good one. Project Oxygen initially set out to determine if managers matter. In the very early days, Google got rid of all managers. Although they were later reintroduced, a belief persisted within the company that managers did not really make a difference. So the analytics team looked at a combination of performance review data and employee surveys, where employees review their bosses, to determine whether there were significant differences between the impact of the best and worst bosses. The answer from the data was a resounding “yes”. The people analytics team pushed on to try to determine the common characteristics of the best managers and how to improve the skills of the worst. The conclusion was a list of the 8 skills of a good manager, at least according to Googlers. One surprise was that their boss’s technical expertise was much less important to employees than a manager who took a genuine interest in their lives and careers. The best bosses didn’t micromanage, had a clear vision for the team and were results-oriented. The worst managers also had some behaviours in common. Googlers generally like having regular, one-to-one meetings with their manager. “One thing that was consistent among the struggling managers was that they were not consistent in who they offered one-to-ones to” explains Dekas. “They may have been meeting with people who weren’t performing well, or with those who were performing exceptionally well”. One best practice that Google introduced, based on the insights from Project Oxygen, was to institute one-on-one meetings with all team members. The company also completely redesigned its training for new managers in line with the results. One year after project Oxygen reached its conclusions, “75 percent of our struggling managers have significantly improved.” Dekas reports. Another project undertaken by the team was to forecast the future organisational structure of Google based on current hiring and promotion practices. It turned out that if Google continued to promote at the current rate, it would end up “fat in the middle”, with many middle-ranking employees and fewer opportunities for junior hires to advance. So Google implemented a new practice where the company doesn’t directly replace employees who are promoted or leave the company but instead hires new employees at a lower level. The people analytics team forecast that this would make career advancement easier for junior employees. Debunking HR myths also turned out to be an important function of the analytics team. Like any company, Googlers had persistent, but often erroneous beliefs, about HR issues. Typical myths were that employees at Google’s headquarters were promoted more quickly than those in other Google offices or that Googlers who worked on “shiny projects” were more likely to be promoted. The data showed that neither of these hypotheses was actually true but the analysis did reveal that getting feedback from senior peers was the most important factor if you want to be promoted within Google. Google’s HR process is currently the acme of data-driven people management. I asked Dekas if any room remains at Google for gut feeling or intuition. “You can’t have an algorithm for everything” says Dekas. “You use data to inform but you don’t rely on the data to make the decision.” Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 08:00 AM PDT
 Podio, a company that lets anyone easily create Web apps tailored to their business workflow, today officially launched an iPhone app to bring its user-created work apps mobile.The app, which has actually been available for a few weeks on the iTunes Store, continues Podio’s mission to empower its users to be more productive. It gives customers complete access to apps they’ve created in Podio’s desktop Web interface, thereby giving any company the power to tap into a mobile workforce. The company’s app builder, which launched back in March, lets users without any technical background easily create business apps, and they also have access to over 200,000 apps available in Podio’s app store. The Podio platform includes capabilities such as project management, group collaboration and social intranet. It allows users to pick and choose which capabilities they need, so Podio apps can quickly be shaped to best suit different organizations and purposes. Podio points to a swimming pool repair company in Kuwait, Atlas Blue, which has built an app to let its workers in the field easily update work orders, add photographs, and share data with their colleagues back in the office. You can get a better sense of what Podio’s iPhone app offers in the video below. The company also has an Android app available, which appears to offer the same benefits as its iPhone sibling. Copenhagen-based Podio has raised $4 million in funding from Sunstone Capital, in addition to an earlier angel round.  Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 07:28 AM PDT
 Amazon-owned Quidsi has already made a name for itself with specialized online markets for diapers, toiletries and pet supplies. The next market it’s tackling is toys with the aptly named YoYo.com.Quidsi thus far has taken an incredibly user-friendly approach to how it sells products online. Its Diapers.com and Soap.com sites were so good that Amazon bought the company in November for $540 million. Since then, Quidsi has successfully launched Wag.com for pet supplies. YoYo.com uses similar tactics to those sites in its approach to selling toys. The site looks slick, is easy to navigate and feels tuned to adults specifically trying to find the perfect toy for their child rather than a general marketplace. There’s a search tool called Toy Finder on the homepage that makes it possible to select age, gender, budget and use all results or YoYo’s suggestions. Other ways YoYo offers to help parents are with discovery features like “top 10 toys by age” lists and a search filter for award-winning, eco-friendly, no assembly required and no batteries required products. It takes another cue from Diapers.com and Wag.com by offering free 1-to-2 day shipping on all orders over $49. Because toiletries are less expensive, Soap.com has free 1-to-2 day shipping on orders over $25. Users can shop also across all Quidsi sites using the same shopping cart and orders using more than one site qualify for free shipping at over $39. YoYo.com also claims to have the widest selection of toys on the Web, even more than Amazon. The company says YoYo has more than 20,000 items including toys, video games, books and collectibles. What do you think of Quidsi’s sites? Do you think YoYo.com will be a hit with parents? Filed under: VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 07:07 AM PDT
 Editor note: Some story spoilers.The season for epic games has begun. Gamers worldwide start shooting and save the world. Epic Games‘ Gears of War 3 launches today and it brings closure to a sci-fi shooting game series that has kept millions of fans loyal to the Xbox 360 video game console.  Gears of War 3 is one of the blockbusters of the all-important fall selling season, and it has sold more than 13 million units, or more than $780 million at retail, since its debut in 2006. It is one of Microsoft’s major exclusives for the Xbox 360 and will help Microsoft fend off rivals Sony and Nintendo in the coming months. I’ve completed the game on its most difficult level and am glad to say that the ending to the three-part series is going to be a memorable one for Gears fans. The game introduces its first female characters among the grunts known as Gears, and it brings home a story that had gone down many different tunnels over the years. Gears of War 3 is the kind of game that has helped lift the coolness of brands like the Xbox 360 and Microsoft in the gaming business. Gears of War 3 should help the series ascend into the pantheon of some of the best loved and most lucrative video game franchises of all time. Like Microsoft’s Halo, Gears of War has become a cultural phenomenon, where celebrities and fans alike brag about their enthusiasm for the game. Gears of War’s contribution to video games is that it raised the bar for what we mean when we say a game is “movie like,” since the action and the film-like sequences are seamlessly interwoven. Only a handful of blockbuster titles such as Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Halo: Reach have delivered these kinds of experiences for gamers, where it’s hard to tell where an animated film sequence ends and the game action begins. Little did we gamers know that the purpose of the film sequences is to give the Xbox 360 hardware enough time to stream in the next bits of the 3D environment. In any case, the immersive feel of single-player campaign game is what I enjoy about the Gears games, in contrast to its multiplayer combat. Will this game be the bestselling yet? Probably so, since there are now almost 56 million Xbox 360 consoles in the market, much more than when Gears of War debuted in 2006 and when Gears of War 2 debuted in 2008. But at the same time, video games have been in a funk this year in the U.S., with sales down in part because gamers have so many choices for content these days, such as iPads, smartphones and social networks. If any game can overcome these cross-currents, it is a Gears of War title. The series has spawned four bestselling novels and is the subject of an upcoming film. It has given gamers a reason beyond Halo to buy an Xbox 360. And the competition has steered clear of the Gears of War 3 release. Resistance 3 debuted on the PlayStation 3 on Sept. 6 and id Software’s Rage won’t come out until Oct. 4.  Aiming for a bigger hardcore game marketAs we noted in our preview story, Gears has been a tale about hope, survival, and brotherhood. The player assumed the role of Marcus Fenix, a marine who was imprisoned and let loose as a last-ditch effort to save humanity. The game is a third-person shooter with a cinematic style and rivers of blood. The violence and blood are so pervasive that it almost seems like you’re in a violent Quentin Tarantino film, such as Kill Bill. That is part of the appeal of the game, since it is so bloody it is almost comical. Add to that the swagger and the funny banter among the marines, or Gears, and you have a witty and self-aware work that holds the attention of gamers, who have been conditioned to have a sick sense of humor. The characters seem like real grunts from our own modern era, as the dialogue is full of foul language, put downs, wisecracks and comebacks. Only they have to deal with enemies worthy of the scariest horror movies. In a brilliant piece of game marketing, Microsoft created a commercial for the original game using the depressing “Mad World” song as sung by Gary Jules. That set the tone for the relentlessly downbeat struggle that the player had to fight in a world of “destroyed beauty,” where a beautiful planet was in ruins. That video was so popular that it was watched by millions on YouTube and it multiplied the marketing budget for the game many times over. This time, musicians Ice-T and Body Count have created an exclusive new song for Gears of War 3. The music is just a small part of a calculated marketing campaign. The overall goal is to get to as many users as possible; that’s why the game includes a more accessible casual mode. “We’ve made the game easier to play,” Rod Fergusson, executive producer of the game, told us in an interview. “We made it more accessible with a casual game setting and a casual multiplayer mode as well. If there’s one Gears of War game you’re going to play, we want it to be this one. For everyone who hasn’t tried it yet, this is the version to try.” Filed under: games, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 07:00 AM PDT
 Slacker Radio on Tuesday announced it has teamed up with ESPN Audio to create user-customized sports stations, just in time to appreciate the beginning of the NFL football season and the start of post-season MLB baseball. Streaming music services have been making quite a few headlines as of late with the hyped U.S. launch of Spotify, MOG and Rdio offering free versions, and the upcoming launch of a Facebook music service. But one thing often missing from these streaming services is content dedicated to U.S. sports fans. Users of the free Slacker Basic Radio service now have access an interactive, programmed ESPN station, while Slacker Radio Plus and Slacker Premium Radio subscribers get extra goodies. Those extras include an ad-free general ESPN station and the ability to create personalized stations “based on favorite sports, teams or ESPN programs.” Paid subscribers also get the ability to turn on hourly SportsCenter updates that can be inserted into any of genre-based or custom Slacker station. The new sports service claims to offer dedicated coverage of “all major sporting events and top news stories on both a local and national level,” while also offering up sports talk programs including Mike and Mike in the Morning and The Herd with Colin Cowherd. Unfortunately, to get the most out of the service you have to be a Slacker Radio Plus and Slacker Premium Radio subscriber. Slacker Radio Plus runs $3.99 a month and Slacker Premium Radio runs $9.99 a month. Slacker Premium Radio is a recently launched on-demand offering that provides access to a catalog of eight million songs. What do you think of Slacker Radio? Are you interested in premium sports radio content or is $3.99 too much? Filed under: media         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 06:41 AM PDT
 The inevitable layoffs for workers in HP’s webOS division began this week, with the company planning to let as many as 525 workers go, reports All Things Digital.After HP killed its webOS hardware business out of the blue in August, the company had made it clear that downsizing was inevitable. While the company says it’s still committed to webOS as a software platform, that doesn’t mean much for the workers in the webOS hardware division. HP confirmed to All Things Digital that layoffs were happening: “As communicated on August 18, HP will discontinue the development of webOs devices within the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2011, which ends Oct. 31, 2011," a spokesperson said. "As part of this decision, the webOS GBU is undergoing a reduction in workforce. Today's actions are part of this initiative. During this time, we stand by our commitment to our webOS customers and will work to ensure that support and service for customers are not adversely affected. HP is exploring ways to leverage webOS software." While expected, it’s still sad to see HP’s webOS team breaking apart. I’m not sure how the company will be able to keep its remaining webOS employees on task when it’s fairly obvious the mobile OS, which HP snagged as part of its $1.2 billion Palm purchase last year, doesn’t have much of a future. The company has discussed licensing the OS to other manufacturers, and a number of companies are rumored to be eyeing a webOS purchase. Filed under: mobile         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 06:03 AM PDT
 GetGlue, the social network that lets you check in for all things entertainment, is rolling out a big update to both its iPhone app and website today.The update pulls in conversations about different kinds of entertainment (TV shows, movies, games, etc.) from around the Web and surfaces the most interesting pieces. “Usually, conversation about entertainment is drowned out by lots of noise,” said GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold. “The new features we’ve added brings people only the most relevant and interesting conversations in real-time.” With the update, users land on the conversation stream after every check-in. That stream shows both recent check-ins from friends who are watching the same show as well as interesting check-ins from everyone else. GetGlue has also added a Friend Leaderboard feature for every show, movie, artist, book or topic. which shows users a list of their top 10 friends around any piece of content ranked by the number of check-ins. It basically adds an element of competition while also surfaces new content. The new features will also be available on Android in the future, according to the company. The new updates brings GetGlue into closer competition with services like Miso as well as differentiates itself from check-in services like Foursquare, which just added a way for users to check in to movies and concerts. GetGlue has 1.5 million users and the company recorded 11.5 million check-ins in August. The number of check-ins through the application has increased 130% between May and August, according to the company. New York, N.Y.-based company has received funding from Union Square Ventures, RRE Ventures, TimeWarner Investments and a number of prominent angel investors. The company raised $6 million in December last year.  Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 05:00 AM PDT
 Mobile ad monetization firm Tapjoy is launching Tapjoy Videos today as part of a new way for game developers to make money and advertisers to reach a smartphone audience more effectively.The move will help Tapjoy cash in better on mobile video ads, which are expected to grow to more than $20 billion by 2015, according to market researcher Gartner. The program will allow advertisers to buy pay-per-view video ads within Tapjoy’s mobile app universe. That is, the ads will run in the games and other apps that have integrated Tapjoy’s monetization platform via its software development kit. Tapjoy will provide a native video player on the iPhone and Android smartphones that will play videos all the way through completion and do so without any annoying delays. “We can deliver a much better result for the advertisers and the users,” said Linda Tong, Tapjoy’s vice president of products, in an interview. Users can view the video ads to fulfill special offers, or ad deals where a user watches a video in order to earn a reward such as a virtual good inside a free-to-play mobile game. Rather than pay real money for the virtual goods, the user can do something of value to the advertiser, such as watching a movie trailer. Tapjoy, Flurry, and AdColony offer such video offers already. But with the Tapjoy Videos native player, Tapjoy will be able to cache videos, so that the videos will start playing immediately. Tapjoy will also be able to monitor whether a user has completed watching a video or not, and the advertiser will pay only if the viewing is completed. Consumers can benefit because they can get their virtual goods in a game and also get to watch something that they choose to see, said Tong. Tong said that the Tapjoy mobile platform can help advertisers reach more than 50 million people, giving them the same reach as some TV advertising. But the engagement with the audience is much higher and much more targeted, compared to TV ads. That’s why TV ad revenue is expected to be flat while mobile ads will grow 25 percent to 36 percent annually over the next three years, according to market researcher eMarketer. But eMarketer notes that only 38 percent of online video ads are currently viewed to their completion. San Francisco-based Tapjoy calls this a “mobile value exchange” because both the advertiser and consumer get something that they want. And the native app player does not steer the user away from the experience of the original app, keeping the developer happy. Users can engage further with the brand by sharing videos on Twitter or Facebook. Tapjoy has had a string of announcements lately. Most recently, it hired former PlayStation marketer Peter Dille as its chief marketing officer. Tapjoy has raised $70.5 million since 2007 (including the Offerpal business that merged with Tapjoy). Tapjoy's investors include J.P.Morgan Asset Management, Rho Ventures, North Bridge Venture Partners, InterWest Partners and D.E. Shaw Ventures. Tapjoy has 75 employees. Filed under: games, mobile, social         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 04:30 AM PDT
 Watching videos on smartphones is getting more and more popular. But it isn’t necessarily getting easier and easier. That’s where Klip comes in. The mobile video startup is launching an app by the same name today that reinvents the way you watch video on a mobile device.The app could help us deal with the flood of video coming to the web. Cisco predicts that there will be 7.1 billion mobile connected devices by 2015, or one for every person on the planet. The Klip app organizes your videos and the videos of your friends in real-time, making it easy for you to watch and share videos. One cool feature is that you can swipe your finger across a video cover image and then watch still frames of the video appear from throughout the video. Just by swiping your finger across an image, you can see at a glance whether you really want to watch that video or not, said Alain Rossmann, chief executive of Klip, in an interview. “We’re using some core innovations to bring a better user experience,” Rossmann said. “We make video more fluid, engaging, and easier to discover.” Klip also immediately starts playing a video when you tap on it, eliminating the buffer time and other delays that stop you from watching a video instantaneously. When you want to want to scroll through a collection, you just flick up or down and the thumbnail video cover images run fluidly across the screen. Some of these features are present in Apple’s programs such as iMovie and iPhoto, but Klip takes some of those best features and makes them generally available as an app. You can share your videos on Facebook, Twitter, email, or your own YouTube channel with a single tap. It’s easy to watch “klips” from around the world and follow other “Klippers.” You can “like” content shared by friends easily as well. It all happens fast, Rossmann said, because Klip has invested heavily in having a fast backend infrastructure, or cloud technology. Rossmann says Klip addresses video discovery, fast playback, and adaptive video streaming. The latter checks your device’s internet connection every few seconds to determine how fast it can play back video for as smooth an experience as possible. The user interface is strikingly simple. The response time is about 100 milliseconds, or essentially a split second. You can find content via hashtags, much as you can on Twitter. And once you find something you like, you can use it as a channel for finding similar things. The popular hashtags that you follow appears as buttons you can tap at the top of the user screen. The thumbnail pictures for videos are never pure black or blue; they’re always a picture of something in the video. Global smartphone shipments are expected to hit 1 billion annually in 2016, up from 302 million in 2010, according to Juniper Networks. And today, two-thirds of smart phone users say they have watched video on their devices. Market researcher In-Stat forecasts mobile video consumption will surpass 693 billion minutes by 2015. Rossmann founded Palo Alto, Calif.-based Klip in April and raised $2 million from himself and Matrix Partners. The team includes a variety of executives from companies such as Google, YouTube, Yahoo and Apple. This is now Rossmann’s sixth startup. Three of the others went public and two were acquired. Rossmann is known as the father of the wireless access protocol (WAP) that enabled the first mobile phones to access the internet. His past companies include PSS Systems, Vudu, Zonbu, Openwave, Unwired Planet, and EO. He was once head evangelist at Apple and he has 37 patents. The Klip app works with iOS devices running iOS 4.0 or later. It is not yet available for the iPad. “We think there is an opportunity for a whole lot of growth here,” Rossmann said. “And we are laser-focused on providing an engaging user experience.” The company has 20 employees. Rivals include Flipboard, Apple, YouTube and others. Here’s a YouTube demo of Klip. Filed under: cloud, mobile, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 04:30 AM PDT
 Cloud video editing service Magisto on Tuesday announced it has received $5.5 million in second-round funding, with the intention of automating the painstaking editing process for the masses. “Video editing is not just challenging — for 99 percent of people, it’s a barrier,” Magisto CEO Oren Boiman told VentureBeat. “We’re the first company to make automated video editing into an easy-to-use service.” The funding round was led by superstar Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing‘s Horizon Ventures, along with participation from Magma Venture Partners. Magma originally funded Magisto’s first round with undisclosed terms. “We think of Li Ka-shing’s investment as more than just venture capital,” Boiman said. “It opens doors and positions us in such a way that we could be integrated into other services.” Magisto’s free (for now) service automates the video editing process for newbies, making it possible for people to submit video clips to the service and let it do the work of cutting the video in an interesting fashion. Magisto scans the clips for noteworthy action and packages it with tricks like transitions and split-screens. Then users simply give the video a title and pick a soundtrack, and the video is ready to share on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or e-mail. “You don’t want to share a video, you want to share an event,” Boiman said. “We turn your video into something that isn’t boring.” Videos on Magisto are edited down to under two minutes. Eventually, Boiman said, Magisto will offer a premium paid version that allows for longer clips. The premium version will also remove Magisto’s branding, allow for video downloading and give the user the ability to tweak the video if they choose. The service has had 20,00 users in its closed beta that started in April. Boiman said the response has been extremely positive and he sees users creating an always-accessible clip library of personal events. Even if users don’t widely share a clip, they can come back to the Magisto library to access their clips. Cloud video editing appears to be a hot topic this year. Cloud video editor WeVideo also launched recently with a full video-editing suite in the cloud. WeVideo was one of the most promising and talked about companies from the DEMO Fall 2011 conference. When it comes to Magisto, we’ll have to see how it evolves. After watching quite a few Magisto videos, I believe the service can do good things for share-worthy clips. The only problem? Not all videos are actually that interesting. For example, a skateboarding video with a not-so-great boarder isn’t fun to watch even with editing tricks. So while Magisto won’t necessarily make your boring video magical, it can help you make a memorable video ready to share in a short amount of time. One of the better Magisto-made clips I’ve viewed can be seen below:  Filed under: cloud, media         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 20 Sep 2011 01:04 AM PDT
 Lots of people use their iPads as companions when they surf TV channels. But Logitech‘s Harmony Link device takes that one step further, turning the iPad or smartphone itself into a one-touch remote control for your TV.The product being announced today is a fresh take on how to integrate a traditional TV with a touchscreen tablet that is a more natural user interface than a remote control with too many confusing buttons. As such, Logitech may have one of the most interesting new TV accessories on the market this fall. You can use it on an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android smartphone as well. With the Harmony Link, you plug in a small wireless device next to your TV. Then you use the iPad to connect to the Harmony Link via a Wi-Fi wireless network. When you use your finger to change a channel on the user interface on the iPad, the Harmony Link translates your finger stroke into a command for the TV. The Harmony Link sends an infrared signal to the TV, completing the channel change.  To get it to work, you need to download a free Logitech Harmony Link app for your iPad. After setting it up, the Harmony Link and the app work together to delivre a personalized schedule of your favorite TV shows, channels, and genres so that you can find something good to watch. When you finish browsing and find what you want, you can use the iPad rather than a remote control to switch to the right channel.The benefit of using the big screen of the iPad is that you can find out a lot more about your show through the web-based interface that appears on the iPad. You can read a longer description of the show that is on your current channel. There’s a big “watch now” button that you can tap on the screen when you choose to view it. Over time, Logitech learns which shows you like and how to organize them for you. Logitech found that many people are using their iPads while sitting on the sofa watching TV, said Ashish Arora, vice president and general manager of Logitech’s Digital Home Group. You can use the iPad to control various devices via “watch a movie” or “listen to music” controls. You don’t have to manually switch the input source for your TV (such as switching from HDMI port 1 to HDMI port 2 so you can watch a Blu-ray movie or a TV show). The Harmony Link automatically handles that switch for you, so you don’t have to fumble with multiple remotes. The Harmony Link can control up to eight devices via the Wi-Fi network. It’s about the size of a hockey puck and only has to plug into a power outlet. The Harmony Link can also connect with more than one iPad at a time, so that multiple family members can use their own iPads to control the TV, rather than fighting over a single remote. There isn’t a huge delay in translating the control input from the iPad to the TV. Initially, smartphones have somewhat less functionality, since they will not receive personalized program guides from the downloadable app. But Harmony Link has all the remote control functions. You can pause a show with the iPad and start it again using a phone. Logitech teamed up with Rovi to provide program guide information for the Harmony Link app. Rovi has data such as synopses, movie reviews, and images to go with the programs. The Harmony Link will go on sale in the U.S. in October for $99.99. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 08:35 PM PDT
 The once popular social network Myspace has scraped plans for its summer press event to show off the revamped music-focused version of the site.The purpose of the event was to show that the social network still had life in it yet, despite much lower traffic numbers and interest from advertisers. Myspace attracted a mere 33 million visitors to the site in August — a 44 percent decline compared to a year ago, according to comScore. Changes to the site were “incremental” and not moving fast enough for a summer reveal, according to a Wall Street Journal report. In June, former Myspace parent company News Corp. sold the social networking site for $35 million to Specific Media, who also announced a partnership with music artist Justin Timberlake (also an investor). The new plan is to reveal the revamped site at the Advertising Week event in New York next month, which will apparently feature a concert hosted by Timberlake and others. Irvine, California-based Specific Media was founded in 1999 by brothers Tim, Chris and Russell Vanderhook. The company operates many offices around the world. Filed under: social, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 08:28 PM PDT
 It used to be that integrated graphics chipsets could barely run a simple DVD properly. But come next year, the integrated graphics in Intel’s upcoming Ivy Bridge processor will be able to power eye-bleedingly sharp 4K high-definition video at massive 4K resolutions, VR Zone reports. In comparison, Intel’s current Sandy Bridge graphics chipset only supports a maximum resolution of 2,560 by 1600. The additional graphics horsepower in Ivy Bridge means that a mere laptop will be able to power huge pro-grade displays, as well as have the ability to decode 4K HD video. To match that performance today, you’d need to invest in expensive graphics cards (and forget about doing it on a laptop). Sporting a resolution of 4096 by 2304 pixels or more, 4K HD is the next major leap in video quality after 1080p HD video, the standard resolution for Blu-ray video, and the current maximum resolution for most HDTVs. With support for the 4K HD built-in, computers running Ivy Bridge processors will be able to play back massive video files without a sweat. In fact, according to Intel, Ivy Bridge will be able to juggle multiple 4K videos at once. Of course, Intel’s Ivy Bridge graphics will also feature faster 3D graphics capabilities, but its support for 4K resolutions will likely be a good investment over time. We’ll likely be seeing 4K computer displays become more affordable within several years (right now the only such entry costs around $36,000 dollars), and 4K will eventually make its way into our living rooms (home projectors supporting 4K are just now being announced). Filed under: media, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 08:00 PM PDT
You’re a US hotel and you need to know what customers think of you. Are bed bugs a bad thing? Did they like the bidet?
German Radian6 competitor TrustYou purchased Review Analyst and received a $5 million first round of funding today to help hotels make the most of their reviews. TrustYou analyzes the thousands of hotel and restaurant reviews made available through sites like Trip Advisor and Yelp. The company focuses on sentiment analysis, or understanding whether a word means something negative or positive. For example, someone saying the hotel food made them “sick,” is negative, where a “sick” king sized bed is positive.  After identifying the sentiment, TrustYou packages and provides the hotel with a review summary. This is done through an application programming interface (API) that allows the hotel to use its summarized data and display it on its site. TrustYou’s APIs are not public, however, and can be accessed with payment.TrustYou also used the APIs to create a semantic search, which allows people to find relevant hotels based on words like “romantic” or “spooky.” “The problem we have currently is there’s so much data out there that no one can make sense out of it all,” TrustYou chief executive and co-founder Ben Jost told VentureBeat.  The company started trying to “make sense of it all” in Europe where it began selling “global review scores,” aggregated reviews from all over the world offered as a client-specific product. TrustYou decided it wanted to work in verticals, as opposed to general topics, so it chose the hotel and restaurant industry, since both see a huge influx of reviews. TrustYou won’t just serve one hotel brand, such as Hilton, however. Instead, it analyzes reviews of individual brands and properties such as a location-specifc DoubleTree. According to Jost, main competitor Radian6 has never taken business away from the company. “Radian6 comes from a very generic point of view. It’s pretty easy to scale because it’s just generic,” said Jost. “Over the years we saw vertical players because if you specialize in verticals, you can get much more quality data.” “It’s more work, it’s more granular, but at the end of the day if you can solve that, it’s more rewarding.” TrustYou is up against more competition in the US market, however. Companies like ViralHeat are also doing semantic analysis, and have big plans of their own, such as products to help businesses know whether a customer may actually purchase or not. Not to mention a bevy of other social analysis websites such as SocialNuggets, which analyzes was Jost calls “unstructured data.” Jost described that with all the European success, TrustYou needed to make an entrance in the US market. But because of culture and business practice differences, the company decided to acquire Dallas-based Review Analyst instead of forming its own office on American soil. TrustYou first partnered with Review Analysis in 2010, and asked the company to come on-board this year. TrustYou is not disclosing the amount of money paid for Review Analyst, but does say that part of its $5 million round of funding will go toward the acquisition. The rest of it will be focused on research and development for its sentiment analysis product as well as on marketing and hiring for the US office. TrustYou was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Munich, Germany. Clients include Hard Rock Cafes, Starwood Hotels, Best Western Hotels, and Omni Hotels & Resorts. Credit Agricole Private Equity funding this round. Filed under: VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 05:42 PM PDT
 No animals were harmed in the making of this pornographic website. In the wake of new top-level domain option .xxx’s release, animal-rights group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) announced today it is launching its own .xxx site to save the critters.“A lot of organizations were gun shy about the triple-x domain, but when PETA saw it we thought this would be triple-extra effective,” Lindsay Rajt, director of campaigns for PETA told VentureBeat. Reuters reported the story, saying the anti-animal cruelty organization is staking its claim to peta.xxx, which will serve as an animal cruelty awareness and pornography site. Peta has pushed the limits of its animal cruelty ads often in the past with near-nudity, racy slogans and a lot of shock value. Indeed, shock value seems to be PETA’s way of waving its arms for attention. This porn site is no exception. “As soon as people land on the site they will see some explicit content, those tantalizing images they they’ll be hoping for,” Rajt said of the site’s content. As they go deeper into the site, however, visitors will find graphic images of animal abuse. It seems the .xxx site will serve up both violence and sex. “It can be a pretty depressing subject,” Rajt said about animal cruelty, “We hope it’ll grab people’s attention, get them talking, and ultimately get them to ask questions.” Rajt believes that PETA generates awareness for all kinds of people, and thinks this is just one avenue to reach a subset of its potential audience. The .xxx domains are open to the public in a “sunrise period,” where companies have 50 days to bid for its domains. PETA has met a lot of opposition before, with anti-PETA groups forming around its cause. These groups include PETA Kills Animals and Vegans Against PETA, which is specifically “concerned about the misogynist…tactics used by PETA.” Even the Superbowl rejected a PETA advertisement claiming “vegetarians have better sex.” Perhaps now we’ll find out. See below for a PETA produced video of famed porn star Ron Jeremy talking animal cruelty.  [Photo provided by peta.com] Filed under: VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 02:29 PM PDT
 Identified launched a search engine for professionals today, in a move that makes the founders either a) crazy b) smart or c) both. The startup will be competing with giant social network LinkedIn for the attention, and participation, of people busy at work or busy looking for work.“There are a bunch of problems with LinkedIn,” said Brendan Wallace, co-Founder and CEO of Identified, in a VentureBeat interview (pictured on the left). “They don’t give you relevant results. They just give you lots of results. We see a better opportunity to do what LinkedIn wanted to do.” Identified’s goal is to create a professional search engine that helps people connect with companies and vice versa. It uses Facebook’s professional information to create 50 million professional, company and university profiles. Instead of returning a ton of data when you search for a person or company, Identified strives to provide relevance. Wallace says Identified is based on a professional graph, unlike Facebook which is based on a social graph. Some would say that makes Facebook a less-than-ideal place to harvest professional information. Less than 50 percent of Facebook profiles contain professional information, reports Tech Crunch, but Wallace said this isn’t the case. “We’re seeing closer to 80 percent,” he said. “For people in their 20s, it’s like 90 percent. Sixty percent of people under 30 are filling out their work profile information on Facebook and this information is kept up to date, unlike on LinkedIn where people only login and update when they are looking for a job.” Identified uses search algorithms to filter millions of user profiles by assigning a relevance score, similar to the way Google assigns websites a page rank. Relevance scores are based on where you studied, degree level, work experience and the quantity and quality of your social network. Companies and schools are also scored with this algorithm, with is constantly recalculating. An institution's score is the weighted average of the scores of its members. “On LinkedIn, there’s no way to interact with a company,” said Wallace. “Using the interactive Facebook ecosystem, you can introduce the identity of tens of thousands of companies and universities to professionals.” Identified says hundreds of companies already use the service to search for professionals, including Google, Disney, Sequoia Capital and MTV. Wallace founded Identified with fellow Stanford Graduate School of Business grad Adeyemi Ajao (pictured on the right) in 2010. They have raised $5.5 million from Tim and Bill Draper, Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors and a handful of angel investors. That’s the kind of seed funding and investor portfolio that makes a company look more smart than crazy. Filed under: social         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 01:50 PM PDT
 Multimedia software maker Arcsoft on Monday announced it has raised a $20 million round of funding, with the intention of creating mobile and cloud-based browser applications, and investing in core technologies.“We want to be more aggressive in areas like imaging, video, gestures, facial-recognition and 3D,” CEO Michael Deng told VentureBeat. “Our codecs and software greatly improve many devices being used today, and we can do more.” The $20 million in funding was led by Intel Capital, which is Intel’s global investment arm, and Tudor Ventures, the venture capital unit of Tudor Investment Corp. “We’ve been in talks with Intel and Tudor about possible investments for two years,” Deng said. “Finally, we’ve made this happen so we can develop next-generation imaging and multimedia solutions.” Arcsoft is best known for bundling its software with new desktops and laptops from computer manufacturers like HP and Dell, and it has expanded its reach to phones, digital cameras, scanners and printers. Its mobile hardware partners include Nokia, Samsung, LG and Motorola, but Deng declined to say which specific devices from those OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) had Arcsoft technologies inside. The company does not have any consumer-facing mobile apps at the moment, but the new funding will help the it produce iOS and Android apps. “We’ve been focused on the OEMs for a long time, but we see this as an area worth dedicating resources toward,” Deng said. The most popular PC software titles from Arcsoft include PhotoStudio, Print Creations, DVD Slideshow, Panorama Maker and TotalMedia Theater. Deng said the company plans to launch similar apps but for the cloud. Deng also noted that the company would have more announcements related to this software in the next few months. Fremont, Calif.-based Arcsoft has been around since 1994 and is privately owned. The last time the 800-employee company received funding was a $10 million round in 2001 from the likes of Panasonic and Seiko Epson, signaling the company’s ability to thrive without the need for outside investments. Filed under: cloud, media, mobile, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 01:19 PM PDT
 Microsoft is committed to securing a spot in your living room. The technology giant is in talks with both Comcast and Verizon to make its Xbox 360 gaming console a set-top cable box, according to a report from Digiday that cites anonymous sources familiar with the company.Microsoft first announced that a live TV service would be coming to the Xbox at E3 in June, but the company didn’t offer up many details. Of the information it did share about the service, it sounded a lot like a direct partnership between cable TV providers. Microsoft said the live TV service, which is expected to be available this fall, would have access to local channels, sports and more. The market for set-top boxes has definitely grown in the past few years. Popular boxes like Roku, Boxee, Apple TV and various Google TV enabled devices are currently dominating the market. Yet, none of those options come close to the kind of value that an Xbox offers its customers. Making the Xbox a viable set-top box would be an excellent move for Microsoft. Not only does the console itself compare in price to other options ($149- $199 for an Xbox verses $60-$199 for others), but it also brings the company’s other services into clear view in a way that wasn’t possible before. Filed under: media, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 12:27 PM PDT
 Netflix today spun off its mail-order DVD business into a new service called Qwikster, which will include mail-order video game rentals. Given Netflix’s immense success with the movie business, you might expect the games rental business to fare just as well.But this is not the early 2000s, and the game rental service will face stiff competition from what might be one of the biggest revolutions in gaming since the advent of digital distribution: cloud gaming. That could give Netflix’s newest games rental service a short shelf life as cloud gaming companies gain more traction, M2 Research analyst Billy Pidgeon told VentureBeat. “It’s definitely a short game,” he said. “It’s likely that the game rental by physical mail companies will be an early victim or an early sector to be replaced by games on demand.” Cloud-based gaming companies like OnLive, Gaikai and Otoy are all working on different ways to “stream” video games to computers through the Internet. It basically amounts to running a game (or part of a game) on a remote server and then streaming the video data from that game to a browser or client that the player can interact with. Those servers have the advantage of carrying some beefy hardware that can run games with better graphics and at higher frame rates. With the processing located in the cloud, that means players can play these games on any streaming-capable device, such as tablets and potentially smart televisions, without requiring powerful processors. All you need is a decent internet connection. Services like OnLive are still in their infancy, but they show a lot of promise — particularly with high-profile launches of games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution (which I played through exclusively on OnLive without too many issues). OnLive has also secured deals with THQ to launch Saints Row: The Third and Batman: Arkham City, two of the most anticipated games of the holiday season, at the same time they launch in retail stores. OnLive was last valued at $1.8 billion in February after a funding round led by Taiwan-based smartphone manufacturer HTC. With cloud-based games, gamers don’t have to wait for them to arrive in the mail. They can play those games at 12:01 a.m., as soon as the games pass their official release date. Hastings himself should know that, based on his experience with movies: He said Netflix would thrive on a “streaming only” model thanks to the company’s success in launching Netflix as a streaming-only service in Canada. "With the strength of streaming only internationally, we got convinced that we can thrive on streaming only,” he said in the company’s most recent earnings call. Hastings also said that there was a place for the company’s mail-order DVD business and that it could succeed “for a long time” if it were given the resources it needed. That could indicate that Hastings also saw the mail-order DVD business as a short-term game as the company rapidly began expanding its streaming service — which has a lot of traction thanks to its presence on video game consoles like the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii, he said on the company’s recent earnings call.  But Netflix has a massive infrastructure for its mail-order DVD business, which it can simply duct-tape game rentals onto, Perlman told VentureBeat. That could give Netflix a quick, early advantage over other mail-order game rental services like Gamefly and Blockbuster. Even OnLive chief executive Steve Perlman (pictured left), one of Netflix’s potential fierce competitors, said it was a smart move.“They already have the distribution infrastructure in place for discs in the mail, and as their movie rental business declines, this can continue to make use of that infrastructure,” Perlman said. There will always be a place for retail sales because they don’t require an Internet connection and because game publishers have some skin in the game, Pidgeon said. There’s also some wiggle room in the physical game market due to some early growing pains streaming services like OnLive face. Those services require fast internet connections and the quality of the service varies from place to place across the country. And there’s the charm of opening a game for the first time and smelling a freshly-printed disc. “If they follow the same rental market model, and don’t innovate, then it’s same old same old, but I’m not convinced that they’re that stodgy quite yet,” Double Fine productions — the company behind games like Brutal Legend — vice president Zack Karlsson told VentureBeat. “Don’t underestimate people’s desire to put a disk in the console, particularly the enthusiast.” Netflix has a good track record even before spinning off its mail-order rental service. The company’s net income rose 57 percent to $68 million in the second quarter this year from $44 million in the same quarter a year ago. The company expects to have between 14.6 million and 15.7 million domestic DVD subscribers and between 21.6 million and 23.3 million domestic streaming subscribers by the end of the third quarter this year. But the company will still have to tread carefully, even if mail-order rentals are a short game, Pidgeon said. And while cloud-based gaming is still in an “early adopter scenario,” Pidgeon said on-demand games would begin to make their mark on game distribution within the next 5 years. “We all know that enough people have taken a swing at it and Netflix has been successful with disruptive business before — witness the demise of Blockbuster,” Karlsson said. “Netflix is going to have to get this just right or it will go the way of Used Games at Walmart.” Filed under: games         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 12:20 PM PDT
 Media Predict is a marketplace where people get paid to place bets on which media will fly and which will flop.As we publish this story, Media Predict is launching a real-money Netflix futures market (image below). It lets people with a Media Predict account put down real money and bet if Netflix will have more or fewer than 20 million users in the fourth quarter of 2011. After recent pricing changes and last night’s announcement that it will shift its DVD rental business into a new company named Qwikster, Netflix customers have been posting thousands of negative comments on CEO Reed Hastings' blog and other social forums. VentureBeat has a summary post of the Netflix drama. Perhaps it will help you place your bet. Media Predict also lets members bet on the success and failure of each week’s television premiers and movie releases. The Media Predict business formula is based on the concept that an individual in a hot seat is worse at predicting the success of books, movies or TV shows than a group of people free from the crushing risk of a solo failure. Based on cumulative decision, the cream of the media crop should, theoretically, rise to the surface. “People bet on sports and politics and whether your friend can get a date,” says founder and CEO of Market Predict Brent Stinski, in an interview with VentureBeat. “You prove your smarts and it makes things interesting. But the bigger reason here, why I created Market Predict, is to be heard. If you’re good [at betting] and make it into the real-money site, not only can you make some cash but some very big companies will be paying attention to what you say. Also, the other qualifiers will be people who have proven their smarts too. It should be a competitive, intense little community.” When you first start on Media Predict, you can’t use real money. You can place bets with a fake bank account, but you need to work your way to an invite into Media Predict Real Money. You do this by being an active user who makes good predictions. Some categories weigh more on invitation decisions. For example, Stinski says if you bet well in television and film topics, you are much more likely to be invited than those who participate in reality show eliminations. You can also be invited into Real Money based on demographics like gender and location. The competition and real money-aspect of Media Predict will encourage people to make smart bets that media executives can use. This is what market research is supposed to do, according to Stinsky, but test audiences and focus groups haven’t really been dependable enough to earn executives’ trust. Media Predict provides markets which, according to Stinski, have a remarkable track record of success. He points out The Iowa Electronic Markets have outperformed the AP and the Gallup polls in forecasting election outcomes. Stinski says markets have consistently predicted television cancellations and box office flops. For example, a handful of movie executives may have thought “Green Lantern” would be a hit. The super hero action flick cost at least $200 million to produce yet it brought in less than $220 million worldwide. Perhaps a dozens of executives, or hundreds of critics, present at early screenings would have predicted the flop and maybe even prevented it. “It’s not a crystal ball. They’re not perfect,” he says. “They’re just better than everything else.” One risk Media Predict faces in predicting media outcome is groupthink, a social psychology theory where a group of people makes a bad judgment because group pressure blocks out reality and moral judgment. Basically, groups of people affected by groupthink ignore logical alternatives. According to the theory, a group of people with similar a background — be it ethnic, economic, religious, etc. — are insulated from outside opinions. This could certainly happen in regards to media judgement. Consider the difference between a group that raves about “Dolphin Tale” and a group that thinks “Machine Gun Preacher” is the best film of 2011. Media Predict hopes to overcome the risk of groupthink by introducing the financial factor. “All markets work the same — people make money if they make correct predictions,” explains Stinski “They lose money if they don’t. So profit motive makes everyone tell the truth. With surveys and focus groups, people have no incentive whatsoever to give good information. We’re the first method ever to get away from that.” Stinski believes media companies will release anything to see if it works, as long as these are commercially viable. It’s like testing spaghetti noodles against a wall to see if they’re done. “Good media is a good thing,” says Stinski. “That’s what the research showed — if more people have media they love, they’re more psychologically sound and more aware of the world around them. I mean — Media Predict is a business that makes money and serves clients. But if we can help make media content a little better, we’ve done a good thing.” Media Predict has offices in New York and Los Angeles. Oh, and Stinski is hiring.  Filed under: media         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 12:14 PM PDT
 Rockets, electric cars, motion-sensing interfaces, free math education for all, and a social network that’s closing in on a billion people. Don’t you wish you could ask the legendary innovators behind these great ideas what it really takes to change the world with technology? We got the opportunity to do just that, and here’s what we learned. Too often in the tech world, we focus on innovation to the point of ignoring whether or not that innovation affects global change and growth. Today, we’re bringing you advice from four of the most influential tech teams and entrepreneurs in the world on how they managed to affect real change and how you can apply those lessons to your own life and work. At a recent Churchill Club ceremony in Silicon Valley, Facebook, Microsoft’s Kinect team, Tesla founder Elon Musk and Salman Khan of the YouTube-based Khan Academy were rewarded for their contributions to society as well as to the tech community. The Churchill Awards recognize companies, individuals and products in technology that are as beneficial as they are cutting-edge. Throughout the awards, each recipient was asked to speak with an interviewer and the audience about the details of his or her success. Here’s what we gathered from those interviews. Facebook: Think about people, not computers. Facebook earned a Game Changer award for indispensable technology and business innovation. The Churchill Club said the spirit of the award was, “You changed how things are, and there’s no looking back.” Katie Mitic, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, was present to accept, and she was interviewed by Margit Wennmachers of Andreessen Horowitz. Mitic pointed out the shift from a static Internet of web pages and the current version of the Internet, which seems to be alive and rippling with human interaction. Facebook, she said, “has fundamentally changed how the Internet works for all of us. “The nodes aren’t computers of machines; they’re people.” Mitic continued to say that transforming the web from a technical entity to a human and social entity has been the company’s overarching goal. “That transition from the what to the who is bigger than us. We’ve engaged the world in that mission,” she said. And by focusing on the needs and desires of normal people, Mitic said the company has grown to 750 million users, 70% of whom live outside the United States. “I don’t think any of us really understands what it means to have nearly a billion people connected to other people around the world,” she said. Kinect: Attract world-changing talent. Often, we hear (and spout) common wisdom about the “A team” — the top-flight group of geniuses that can turn even a “B product” into a successful company. But the Microsoft Kinect team, which won the Club’s Magical Team award for collaborative breakthroughs resulting in an irresistible product, said that getting an A team is all about attraction, not promotion. Accepting the award were Microsoft Research’s Mihai Budiu and Todd Holmdahl, the company’s corporate vice president of hardware. The duo was interviewed by Geoffrey Moore, a well-known Silicon Valley author, speaker and adviser. Moore first noted that the Kinect team was actually made up of seven teams in seven separate disciplines. Holmdahl said that those team members were not actively recruited. Rather, he said, “once people saw what we were trying to do, they started voting with their feet, just coming in to work on it and voluntarily working through the night.” Budiu was one such volunteer. “I was working on cloud computing at the time,” he said. “And I saw demos [of Kinect] at E3, and I got excited. I said, ‘What can I do to help?’” Salman Khan: Focus on the money last. When Moore introduced Khan, winner of the Global Benefactor award for irrepressible vision and positive impact on society, he called the YouTube star “a compulsive tutor-er.” Khan began tutoring his young relatives via voice conferencing and online drawing apps. As he scaled his now-famous tutoring to YouTube as videos on subjects from third-grade math to advanced history, he recalls naysayers who told him that content couldn’t scale and that he’d never be successful. “But the more you move forward, you realize that nothing is as intractable as people say it is,” Khan told the audience. He saw his tutoring not just as a hobby or as a way to make money but as a desperately needed public service. When venture capitalists approached him to apply a freemium model to his tutoring videos or to use the videos as lead generation for test prep services, Khan recoiled. “If you have a cure for cancer, you shouldn’t be charging the people who are dying of cancer,” he said. At one point, Khan was living on his savings (which were rapidly dwindling), when benefactor Ann Doerr made a substantial contribution to help Khan pay his bills and continue to make his videos. Next the Gates Foundation called and started making contributions, as well. Eventually, Google kicked in some funding, too. And not too long after that, the Los Altos School District called on Khan to redesign its curriculum in a revolutionary pilot project. In a word, if you set out to change the world and you succeed, the money will come. Elon Musk: Think insanely big. What kind of lunatic would press forward with creating electric cars after the larger auto industry had already decided the electric car was dead? Or commercial space exploration when the government has basically declared its own space program economically impossible? Elon Musk, who created PayPal before going on to found commercial space exploration company SpaceX, design the Tesla Roadster and lead SolarCity as its chairman, took the stage to accept the Legendary Leader award for inspirational leadership and contributions to others’ innovation and success. Musk, who appeared to accept the award in spite of battling a vicious flu, was interviewed by Steve Jurvetson of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Musk revealed that SpaceX is preparing a mission to dock with the International Space Station at the end of December or beginning of January. He said this will be the first commercial space mission to interface with the space station. The company is also building the world’s largest space rocket, which can carry two times the payload of a space shuttle. “At the beginning, it all sounded completely insane,” Musk told Jurvetson. “Our competitors were Boeing, Lockheed and the U.S. government. Internationally, there’s the Chinese government, the Russian government, the European collective government… It wasn’t exactly a winning proposition.” Nevertheless, Musk persevered. Currently, all three of his companies are at 1,500 employees each and “growing quite quickly,” Musk said. Speaking to the Kinect team’s point, Musk noted, “When you’re trying to attract the world’s best talent, it helps to have a challenge that’s world-changing.” And for Musk, the world-changing challenges he started seeing a decade or so ago were the Internet, clean energy and interplanetary exploration. Ambitious? Yes. Insane? Probably. But not impossible. Filed under: VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 11:48 AM PDT
 Twitter is adding to its network of data centers with a new East Coast location that should help the service keep pace with its over 100 million (and growing) active daily users, reports Data Center Knowledge.In the past, Twitter has struggled to keep up with its growing user base, and in 2010 it built a data center in the Salt Lake City area to provide a long-term fix to down-time related issues. The new data center aims to avoid down-time before it happens. Twitter will rely on Quality Technology Services (QTS) based in downtown Atlanta as the site of its new East Coast data center, according to the report. The new facility covers 990,000 square feet and is one of the largest data centers in the world. With the boost in active users as well as a new $400 million investment round, the move for Twitter to grow its data centers comes as no surprise. Filed under: social, VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 11:16 AM PDT
 A few lucky people got a peek at the future of online advertising recently, thanks to a Y Combinator event. Close to 200 entrepreneurs, marketers, publishers, and venture capitalists packed Y Combinator headquarters in Mountain View on Sept. 14 for the startup incubator's first ever Ad Innovation Conference. The two-hour event was open to the public and designed to showcase companies developing ad-related technologies. What with Demo, TechCrunch, Intel Developer Forum and Microsoft Build last week, we didn’t get a chance to publish this post until today. Plus, we had some difficulty embedding the videos (see below). So here’s the news from the event. YC co-founder Paul Graham kicked off the program by sharing his list of online advertising trends. Here’s a summary of what Graham said:
Companies presenting at the event included DoubleRecall, Crowdbooster, Polleverywhere, GinazMetrics, Twitch.tv, Tagstand, Vidyard, Optimizely, Loopt, Mixpanel, Paperlinks, PageLever, GazeHawk and MixRank. Sequoia Capital's Ron Hornbaker attended the event and said the startups are headed in the right direction. "The message is clear to me that ads are still broken and there is room for tons of innovation. Ads don't have to be a bad thing," Hornbaker said. "They can be a good thing. That was one of the key takeaways from me today." Hornbaker, now an entrepreneur-in-residence at Sequoia, founded online gaming company FooMojo, which produced virtual pets and online ads. He estimates the total size of the online ad market discussed is about $50-60 billion. McKinsey consultant Luis Arellano was in the crowd filling the Y Combinator gathering room madly taking notes. Arellano's favorites were MixRank, PageLever, and Paperlinks. Wells Fargo and Red Bull were among the companies in attendance. And advertising agencies were well represented, with people from AKQA, Goodby, Weiden+Kennedy, Sapient, WPP, Omnicom, Cadreon, VivaKi, Beeby Clark + Meyler, BN Interactive and Jess3 all at the event. For a closer look at the event, check out the videos below hosted by Vidyard, one of the presenting companies. Vidyard is an online video platform that aims to be the "YouTube for business." We’ve produced two videos from the event. If the embedded videos below don’t work, please click on the links below to watch each one. Ron Hornbaker of Sequoia Capital appears in the first video. And here’s Luis Arellano of McKinsey & Company. Videos and photo by Alexa Lee. Disclosure: Lee was attending the event as a PR consultant for Crowdbooster. Filed under: media, VentureBeat, video         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 11:05 AM PDT
Tribalfish, a social network focused on real-time, interest-specific dialogues, announced a Twitter browser plugin today, allowing for long form conversations on the 140-character site.
 “The whole story is that we hope to extend the billions of interactions that take place on social networks and news sites or e-mail,” Lyle Ball, chief executive of Tribalfish told VentureBeat. Once installed, the Tribalfish plugin shows a button next to tweets saying “discuss on Tribalfish.” When you click the button and enter your content, a discussion opens up below the tweet. The conversation occurs on the tweet’s designated page (see below image), not in the stream, and allows for anyone to participate if the comment is public. Comments can also be made private to specific Twitter users or Tribalfish groups, but you don’t need a Tribalfish account to post. You only need the plugin. You can access the same conversation on the Tribalfish site, however, should you have an account. You can also tweet out a link and direct people to your discussion. Most of our social networks task us with limiting expressions to a short and sweet format. Facebook’s statuses, though not as length-policed as Twitter, are meant to be a quick read on a news feed. Business social networks such as Yammer also keep the conversation minimalist. While you can reply to these messages, even on Twitter, you’re hard pressed to pontificate. Because comments made through the Tribalfish plugin remain on Twitter, they truly do become an extension of the conversation, as opposed to a stream-clogging “@” war or separate instant message.  There are long form tweet options, however, such as Deck.ly, which haven’t been seeing the love from Twitter. Only a few days ago, Twitter’s management product TweetDeck killed off its Deck.ly integration, holding strong to the 140 character limit. Twitter has also recently taken on some integrations of its own such as photo uploads, casting off some third party developers such as TwitPic. The social network is, however, allowing third party developers to play with the photo application programming interface (API). We’ll have to wait to see if Twitter will turn its eyes on the browser plugin. This is just the first in a planned line of integrations for Tribalfish. Next, the company wants to attack the news market and team up with publications to enhance the relationship between Tweets and news content. The company is also looking to raise its first round of funding and is planning for a range between $500,000 and $2 million in capital. Tribalfish launched at the DEMO conference in Spring 2011 as Speaku. The company has raised a seed round under $100,000 from its founders. Filed under: DEMO, social         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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Posted: 19 Sep 2011 10:20 AM PDT
 AT&T is reportedly approaching Sprint, MetroPCS, Dish Network and others to help the telecom giant save its proposed purchase of T-Mobile.Today, Bloomberg said sources close to the matter have been involved in private talks between AT&T and the aforementioned companies as well as Leap Wireless and CenturyLink. The sources say AT&T wants these companies to buy certain assets, including customers and wireless spectrum, in order to break the company up just enough to make the T-Mobile acquisition palatable to the U.S. government, which is currently attempting to block the purchase on antitrust grounds. According to the aforementioned sources, Bank of America is advising AT&T on how best to sell the assets and on which resources should go where. If the maneuvers are successful and the T-Mobile purchase is completed, AT&T would become the country’s largest wireless operator. However, the U.S. Justice Department argues that the merger would "substantially lessen competition" in the wireless market, and it filed a lawsuit to that effect at the end of last month. AT&T first announced it wanted to buy T-Mobile in March 2011. At that time, the price had been set at $39 billion. Even at that time, AT&T acknowledged there would be antitrust concerns with the deal but said, "The U.S. wireless industry is one of the most fiercely competitive markets in the world and will remain so after this deal." In a separate interview, AT&T president Ralph De La Vega stated, "I think that the appropriate authorities will find there will still be plenty of competition left." Nevertheless, several entities in addition to the Justice Department have thrown flags on the deal. Earlier this month, Sprint sued to block the deal, and so far, seven U.S. states have joined the federal suit to prevent the acquisition from going through. If the deal doesn’t close, AT&T may be liable for a $6 billion break-up fee to be paid to Deutsche Telekom, the current owner of T-Mobile. Image via Creatista/Shutterstock. Filed under: VentureBeat         This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
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