VentureBeat |
- Jack Dorsey: Twitter seeing 3 to 5 percent engagement on Promoted Tweets and Trends
- Author Andrew Keen cries out against Facebook and lost privacy
- The world’s most wanted pirate was also the No. 1 multiplayer player for Modern Warfare 3
- Find your startup’s voice: Why I hired a journalist to run my company blog
- Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012
- HeroEngine is the unsung platform behind Star Wars: The Old Republic
- Synaptics shows how touch controls will change in the next year
- Larry Page wasn’t lying about the Google+ engagement numbers
| Jack Dorsey: Twitter seeing 3 to 5 percent engagement on Promoted Tweets and Trends Posted: 22 Jan 2012 08:51 AM PST
Twitter’s Promoted Products — including Promoted Tweets, Accounts and Trends — are seeing 3 to 5 percent engagement, Dorsey said. “Advertisers are coming back … [the market] is proving that this is something people want to see more of.” The company’s Promoted Products offer advertisers a way to purchase their way atop search results and, more recently, to buy their way inside the Twitter streams of members who may or may not be following them. The company’s fledgling advertising suite of products has been moderately successful from a purely financial perspective — the company was projected to earn $140 million in revenue for 2011. During the DLD interview, journalists Holger Schmidt and David Kirkpatrick also peppered the Twitter founder and Square CEO about the information network’s place in the social ecosystem. Schmidt asked about Twitter’s place in relation to Google and Facebook, and Kirkpatrick queried the even-keeled entrepreneur as to whether Google+ constituted a threat to Twitter. Twitter, said Dorsey, is distinct because it hosts a public conversation in a public medium. Its future is not threatened by the existence of Google’s social network, he added. Dorsey also spelled out that Twitter’s primary objective is to become something so simple that the whole world can use it to consume information and find breaking news. Consumption and news discovery, not the act of tweeting, he said, is becoming an increasingly popular way for people, especially non-Twitter members, to discover information. Dorsey avoided saying anything inflammatory about Twitter’s social competitors, opting instead to focus on the company’s strengths as a service. Dorsey was, however, vocal about Twitter’s business model and its continued role as a medium for information exchange. When asked about whether Twitter is contributing to a new age of democracy (in light of recent developments around SOPA), Dorsey said that free access to information helps the world and humanizes mass events. Disclosure: The Digital Life Design conference paid my way to Munich. VentureBeat's coverage of the conference remains objective and independent. Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
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| Author Andrew Keen cries out against Facebook and lost privacy Posted: 22 Jan 2012 06:37 AM PST
Keen, the author of the soon-to-be-released book “Digital Vertigo,” delved into the actual and ideological dangers associated with the social web at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich. Keen ultimately called for web denizens to push back against the powers at be and collectively rehabilitate solitude. “We as the little brothers, we are the collective big brother of the 21st century,” Keen said. Keen believes that we, the social sharers of the world, have fallen victim to the seductive notion — he calls it “the cult of the social” — pushed forward by Facebook (and other social services) that we inherently want to be social. He spoke of this cultish way of thinking as a fallacy that leaves us victims to the whims of hungry advertisers. We’ve become the product, he said. “We’re selling ourselves.” Keen’s thesis of a collective resistance is a bit idealistic in nature, but it certainly provides one answer to the growing uneasiness around the idea of privacy, or lack thereof, on the web. His comments followed European Commissioner Viviane Reding’s keynote address on European legislation in development that is being designed to allow the free movement of personal data and the protection of that data. Reding spoke about a person’s fundamental right to be forgotten, or the right for an individual to withdraw their consent to personal data shared on the web. “Even tiny scraps of personal information can have a huge impact,” she said, speaking of the individual’s right to know what data is being collected, for what purpose and for how long. “The individual is in best position to protect their own data.” “I’ve got bad news for the Commissioner,” Keen said, unabashedly pointing to Facebook, and the social network’s mission to get the people of the world to reveal their real selves on the web, as that bad news. “We need to learn how to live alone,” Keen argued. But Keen’s decree may be more idealistic than plausible, especially considering that Facebook has become the center of what many experts have long called the next evolution of the web, where identity and social serve as the foundation for a personalized browsing experience. Big brother, be damned. Disclosure: The Digital Life Design conference paid my way to Munich. VentureBeat's coverage of the conference remains objective and independent. Filed under: social, VentureBeat        
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| The world’s most wanted pirate was also the No. 1 multiplayer player for Modern Warfare 3 Posted: 21 Jan 2012 11:46 PM PST Not only was Kim Dotcom on the top of the list of the FBI’s list of alleged digital content pirates. He was also apparently known as MEGARACER, the No. 1 player worldwide in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer. A few weeks ago, Dotcom, who was born Kim Schmitz, posted a video that showed him taking the No. 1 position in Kills and No. 1 in Leaderboards in Modern Warfare 3, which is the best-selling video game of all time. It’s an odd fact that Dotcom, who was the founder of recently indicted file-sharing company Megaupload, was the top player in a game for which he was also possibly the top pirate. Last year, Modern Warfare 3 was the second most-pirated game, according to the BitTorrent blog. Modern Warfare 3 discs were out in the wild, being pirated and uploaded to the web even before the Nov. 8 launch of the game. The game still sold a reported 15 million copies, and clearly Dotcom had a purchased copy, or else he would likely have been kicked off the online game play. Getting to the No. 1 spot amid so many players is a major feat. Dotcom reportedly has assets worth $175 million, thanks to his Megaupload business, which feds said made most of its money from illegally distributing copyrighted video and audio. He was arrested in Auckland, New Zealand, last week as part of a major sting against Megaupload. His assets included a Rolls Royce, numerous Mercedes-Benz cars, cash, and many guns. And apparently he was so rich, he had plenty of time to become a master of Modern Warfare 3. In the video below, MEGARACER celebrates as he takes the lead, noting he has more than 150,000 kills. The time-lapse video shows him winning match after match until he gets to the No. 1 rank. A cake shows the word MEGARACER in the shape of a “1,” confetti blasts, and friends cheering as he takes the top spot. He says, “Fuck man! No. 1.” Then the following words appear on the caption: “Don’t hate me because I beat you. Respect me because I teach you. Here’s Dotcom’s video showing him take the No. 1 spot as MEGARACER. The video was posted on New Year’s Eve. If Dotcom is going to jail, it might be quite painful for him if he isn’t allowed to play video games. Filed under: games        
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| Find your startup’s voice: Why I hired a journalist to run my company blog Posted: 21 Jan 2012 03:53 PM PST
I knew what I wanted to say in these posts but I struggled to find the right words to express my thoughts. I knew my blog needed an objective — a common thread between my posts that would drive home the bigger message. But finding the right chemistry between that objective, the words on the screen, and the tone and attitude that would define my voice was no easy task. Increasingly, it took more time and effort than my schedule allowed. So I hired a journalist. Actually, he's a former journalist; a longtime beat reporter and editor who has worked for some high profile publications and is pretty well-respected for his expertise. Unlike many of his newspaper colleagues, he was not handed a pink slip. Instead, he walked away from a journalism gig that was both high-profile and frenzied, and launched a business that offers "content strategy" services to companies looking to enhance their online voices. I was one of his first clients. Now, he and I collaborate regularly on my blog posts and other writing projects. We've developed a objective that centers around positioning me as an expert on safe online marketplaces. He reigns me in when it comes to tooting my own horn. He helps me practice some restraint and diplomacy when I feel compelled to blast my competitors. He makes sure that I'm not just repeating headlines but focusing my thoughts around particular news events. He's making me relevant. More importantly, he's charging me a fraction of what a PR firm might charge me for a bunch of other services that I might not really need. Because he's juggling a number of other clients, he's not devoting 40 hours a week to my blog strategy and content, and that's OK with me. My blog is an important part of my business but it's not a full-time element. We've agreed that payment by-the-hour or by-the-word isn't a good approach for us. Neither of us is interested in watching the clock or counting words. Instead, we have agreed upon a flat-rate price for a set number of posts, an approach that ends up costing me hundreds of dollars of per blog post instead of tens of thousands of dollars per month to retain a PR firm — not that a PR firm could even offer such expertise without former journalists on its staff. Granted, I could have hired some random freelance writer to help me blog, but I'm getting so much more with a traditional journalist on my team. Our conversations are filled with insight into the news business. He knows how newsroom editors think. He knows how to lure readers into online discussions. He knows which topics will spark some buzz and which ones will generate yawns. And yes, he says, headlines matter. From what he and I have been able to find, relationships like ours are pretty unique. We've heard of only a few instances of companies turning to former journalists to help them develop content for their sites, and most of that is project-based, instead of ongoing. We've also found — anecdotally, mind you — that journalists aren't necessarily out there hawking their skills and going after business relationships with companies. Truth be told, many of them don't recognize how much they bring to the table when it comes to meeting business needs. Journalists have made careers out of gathering information and then using words to clearly explain, inform and educate other. They become experts in their beats. And yet they aren't big on selling themselves or their expertise. A working journalist who covers the same field isn’t usually available to be hired by a company like mine, due to ethics and and the need to avoid anything that might compromise those values. However, media is a tough industry, and some writers are looking for a career shift into new fields where they can get paid to apply their journalism skills. The good news for these people is that companies outside of the news business are starting to recognize what they bring to the table. In the long run, as they put their hands on more content outside of traditional news outlets, the core values of journalism — along with some quality writing — could seep into this new, expanded blogosphere, raising its credibility and eventually changing the perceptions around blog posts as forms of journalism. Greg Collier is the founder and CEO of Geebo, an online classifieds site. He is a California native who now lives in McLean, VA with his family. Typewriter image via ShutterStock
Filed under: Entrepreneur Corner, VentureBeat        
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| Quantifying our lives will be a top trend of 2012 Posted: 21 Jan 2012 03:26 PM PST
As everything analog shifts to digital, we can collect a huge amount of data about ourselves. As I noted in our earlier story, the trend was spearheaded by researchers who wanted a "quantified self," or self-knowledge through numbers that measure things such as how long we sleep or how many stairs we can climb in a day. Most people don’t have the patience to sift through all the data that they could collect about themselves. But a number of new devices are making it easier to do, bringing us the opportunity both to improve our lives, have more fun, and think more about privacy issues.
For the narcissists among us, this is like heaven. WordPress.com, which hosts our VentureBeat blog, reported that in 2011, I wrote 1,787 posts consisting of 1,097,692 words. Now I know my goal for this year is to do 1,788 posts with 1,097,692 words. However, it was worth noting that I was the least efficient writer at VentureBeat, with 614 words per post and the least traffic per post compared to my fellow writers, who were less wordy and had higher average traffic per post. A lot of this trend started in video games, which have taken it to an extreme. In Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, for instance, I know everything about my performance in multiplayer combat since the game launched on Nov. 8. I have played the game for 27 hours and 39 minutes and achieved a multiplayer rank of Lieutenant Colonel II, or 58. I’m about 72 percent of the way through the multiplayer ladder and have 80 wins and 120 losses. In the multiplayer combat matches, I have 1,375 kills and 3,213 deaths, for a 0.427 kill/death ratio. I’ve had 93 headshots and 366 assists with a 9 percent accuracy rate. To my non-gaming friends, my dedication is impressive. Of course, other players know just how bad I am. My total score is 162,490, which places me at No. 5,518,786 in the overall Call of Duty multiplayer universe. On average, I score 826 points a match, which is kind of pathetic compared to my performance in Call of Duty Black Ops from last year. But that game had some much easier ways to kill, such as the remote-controlled exploding car, rewarded after I could get just two kills in a row.
“Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved,” Kelly wrote. “So we are on a quest to collect as many personal tools that will assist us in quantifiable measurement of ourselves. We welcome tools that help us see and understand bodies and minds so that we can figure out what humans are here for.” Alexandra Carmichael, co-founder of CureTogether, records 40 things about her daily life, including “sleep, morning weight, daily caloric intake, mealtimes, mood, day of menstrual cycle, sex, exercise, and other things. Now I can move on to more important measurements such as how much activity I engage in during the day. The Striiv “personal trainer in my pocket” tells me I am walking an average of 9,968 steps in a day, or about 4.7 miles. I burn 1,053 calories in a day for about 106 minutes in the day. That earns me 40,425 points in a day which I can use to play the Striiv game and motivate myself. My personal best was 17,983 steps in a day, or 7.8 miles, walked at CES. I burned 1,806 calories that day. I can compete against other Striiv users through daily challenges, which “gamifies” the exercise activity by making it into a social competition. You can get more information back from the Basis Band from Basis Science. Basis gives you a wrist band that tracks your heart rate, skin temperature, ambient temperature, and your galvanic skin response (GSR, or how much you are sweating). The sweat and the heart rate gives the added information about how stressed out you are. If you match this up to your Google Calendar, you could figure out which person stresses you out the most or how much your heart rate leaps when you are stuck in a traffic jam.
“There is a lot of interesting stuff happening in the quantified-self movement,” said Jeff Holove, chief executive of Basis Science, in an interview. “It is understanding ourselves better and measuring ourselves better and, in the case of health, using that data to inform our decisions on how we live our lives. We are gathering scientifically meaningful data and then translating it to a much broader audience than the people who have the knowledge and stamina to deal with lots of data.”
With sleep monitors like Gear4′s upcoming Sleep Clock (pictured left), you don’t even have to wear a wrist band to get more information about yourself. The Sleep Clock will use a Doppler radar to detect your breathing and movement during the night. It can calculate the exact number of minutes you slept in a night, how many minutes it took to fall asleep, and when is the ideal time to wake you up. It can tell the difference between when you are in a deep sleep, when it isn’t good to wake you up, to a light sleep. After a year of such data, it will be much easier to wake up at exactly the lightest point in your sleep cycle. There are downsides to knowing so much about ourselves. The problem is very similar to people “oversharing” information about themselves on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter. If the federal authorities got hold of your GSR data, they could figure out if you were lying during an interview, since GSR can be used in lie detector tests. George Orwell, the author of 1984, the seminal novel about Big Brother watching you, couldn't have planned a better way to capture everything that we do in a day. But because of the potential benefits, many people seem eager to be measured, as long as their privacy is protected. The space where you can operate privately is becoming more and more constrained.
Steve Jobs, the former chief of Apple, created some of the key technology for monitoring our lives with the iPhone and the iPad, which can measure our location, our movements, our cell phone usage, and other deeply personal kinds of data. Yet he railed against reporters who invaded his privacy by disclosing information about his deteriorating health. Will Wright, the world famous game designer who created The Sims and SimCity, believes that all of the Big Data collected about our personal lives can be used to create new kinds of mobile-based games which he calls “personal gaming.” Personal gaming is a game that is customized for each individual player, taking into account real-life situations surrounding the player that make the game more interesting to that player. “How can we make a system that understands enough about you and gives you situational awareness?” Wright said in a recent interview. “It could take into account what time of day it is, where you are, how much money is in your pocket. Imagine if you could open Google Maps and it shows you things that are interesting to you on the map.” Although he realizes many people are guarded about privacy, he notes that the younger generation is more comfortable sharing information about themselves. And they will willingly share it if they could be virtually guaranteed a great deal of entertainment in return. If you entice people with enough game-oriented entertainment, they won't mind sharing that information, he said. Wright has created a company called HiveMind to execute on this vision. "It blurs entertainment, lifestyle, and personal tools," Wright said. "With that data, the world and the opportunities for entertainment within it become more visible to you." "If we can learn enough about the player, we can create games about their real life," Wright said. "How do we get you more engaged in reality rather than distract you from it?" [body map image credit: thegood; TSA image credit: Palm Beach Post] Filed under: games, media, mobile, offBeat, security, VentureBeat        
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| HeroEngine is the unsung platform behind Star Wars: The Old Republic Posted: 21 Jan 2012 01:22 PM PST Star Wars: The Old Republic is one of the most ambitious undertakings in video game history. When the game launched in December, it was the fruition of six years of work by as many as 800 developers and an investment of an estimated $200 million. One of the secrets behind the successful development of the game was the HeroEngine, a development platform for building online games that was created by Maryland-based Idea Fabrik. The goal of the engine is to break down the barriers to good online game development by creating a free-to-use solution that lets creators take over and push the technology to the background. The Star Wars game is the first gigantic title to use Idea Fabrik’s HeroEngine, which was designed to enable designers of huge multiplayer games, or massively multiplayer online games, to quickly add content or update existing features on a continuous basis. While the Star Wars game required a huge number of developers, the HeroEngine tools helped streamline the process so that those developers could work more efficiently and so BioWare, owned by Electronic Arts, didn’t have to hire an even larger army of game makers. With the HeroEngine’s technology, developers log into the HeroBlade client, where they can code, drop in art assets and build the entire game. This is no simple task, as at least one company that tried to do something similar, Multiverse, failed and brought down a number of projects with it.
The company had to wait for a while until it got permission to talk about the Star Wars title. When we interviewed Neil Harris, chief operating officer, under the Simutronics company name a year ago, he mentioned it was also being used by ZeniMax for an unannounced MMO. Since that time, Idea Fabrik acquired the business from Simutronics. Alex Shalash, chief executive of Idea Fabrik, said, “We saw HeroEngine as a very powerful tool set where through some changes in technology and additions of complementary services we could provide a new business model for smaller game studios in both the MMO and social game markets." Idea Fabrik has now launched its HeroCloud service, which provides updated HeroEngine technology and a new service for smaller and medium-size game studios. It also supports developers after the launch with hosting and bandwidth to run games with lots of users. The free HeroCloud service also provides billing and marketing. Idea Fabrik gets paid via revenue sharing. The Star Wars game proved that the HeroEngine works. Now there are thousands of developers using HeroCloud. Harris said that developers are getting to the market much faster than the Star Wars MMO took. Other MMOs are able to ship games in as little as 15 months. The company has around 30 employees in Germantown, Md., as well as employees in Kiev, Ukraine and other offices around the world. Rivals include Unity Technologies, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, but Idea Fabrik is putting a lot more emphasis on its cloud-based HeroCloud business than those players are. Idea Fabrik has raised several million dollars in funding and is publicly traded on the Boerse Berlin. Filed under: games        
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| Synaptics shows how touch controls will change in the next year Posted: 21 Jan 2012 12:26 PM PST
In the picture at right, you can see that upcoming touchpads for laptops will be able to handle the simultaneous input from more than just two fingers. The image at the right shows how you can use five fingers on a touchpad at the same time. This enables apps like multi-finger painting or more complex gesture commands using your fingers. You can scroll with two fingers or flick an image from one part of the screen to another with four fingers.
Synaptics has technologies that it calls a TouchPad, or a touch-sensitive surface such as a laptop touchpad; a ClickPad, which can be used for scrolling and pointing just like a TouchPad but can also be used to replace physical buttons; a ClearPad, a touchscreen solution; and InterTouch, for multi-finger and multi-gesture support on touchpads, used in combination with TouchPads or ClickPads. Right now, ClickPads are shipping in Ultrabooks such as the Lenovo U300s, HP Folio 13, and the Acer Aspire S3. The InterTouch uses a faster connection within the computer to transfer more data at the same time. That’s why it allows for multiple-finger touches at the same time. It’s very responsive. In the touch painting, you can see little halos on the screen so you can see where your fingers are. With Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, Microsoft wants computer makers to use larger touchpads. Synaptics is recommending that computer makers use a large image-sensing ClickPad with a high-speed connection to get an optimal result. Synaptics is working as an engineering partner with Microsoft so that it can enable computer makers to design the bigger touchpads (at least 4.9-inch diagonal) into the limited space in the thinner laptops. The experience is intended to be the same as working with a smaller touchpad, so users don’t get confused when they move to Windows 8.
Intel believes that Ultrabooks will have touchscreens, though some people believe that’s not going to work so well. Synaptics is covered on both options, as it has touchscreen and touchpad technologies, Bergman said. Definitely, though, some machines will have both. Convertible laptops, for instance, will be used with touchpads when they are in a regular laptop mode. But they can be used as touchscreens when you twist the screen around and use them as tablets. Some of the desktop computers are also have built-in touchpads so that you don’t have to attach a mouse to the computer.
Philips has a dual remote where you can use buttons or a touchpad. It is shipping with Iomega TVs in Europe. Synaptics also has screens that can respond to both touch and pen input. Here are two videos where Jacqui from Synaptics shows us the variety of touch-oriented technologies that the company is working on touch concepts for the coming year. Filed under: mobile, video        
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| Larry Page wasn’t lying about the Google+ engagement numbers Posted: 21 Jan 2012 12:04 PM PST  we're very social animalsGoogle+ is a social network that is being built backwards. Hundreds of millions of people rely on Google, but not its social network. That makes things awkward in a lot of ways, and certainly Google’s efforts to find a foothold in the social space have seemed, until recently, feeble or forced. But while my colleague Rocky Agrawal is right that companies often try to woo journalists and their audience with misleading numbers, I think Larry Page’s statement that 60% of Google+ users engage with Google products once a day is in fact quite meaningful for the health of the search giant’s social efforts. As I’ve argued before, when discussing AOL’s disasterous purchase of Bebo, email charts a powerful social graph all on its own. My Gmail understands who my close family is, as opposed to my co-workers or my wiffle ball league. When I begin to compose a letter to one person in these group, Gmail startlingly accurate at recommending other, socially significant connections I might include. Like hundreds of millions of other Gmail users, I also rely on Google for instant messaging, chatting with friends, co-workers and sources. Mark Zuckerberg has said time and again that photos were Facebook’s killer app. Well Picasa has a ton of my photos, and can even auto-tag a lot of my friends and family through facial recognition. Search is also a powerful tool for Google to understand who I am. That’s why advertisers for mixed martial arts gear pay to reach me for searches about my favorite fighters. The music and movies I searched for through Google in the last few months are probably a far more up to date picture of my taste than what I listed on my Facebook profile, which I haven’t changed since a few years back. The point is that engagement with many of Google’s services, while logged into Google+, is as meaningful for the health of the social network, in terms of robust personal data, as actually going to Google+ and posting a message or comment. As the venture capitalist Fred Wilson argued, email is actually social media’s secret weapon. I would argue the same is true for the contacts in your phone. That particularly intimate social graph, the people you call and text on a regular basis, is now being woven into Google+ through Android phones, like the Galaxy Nexus in the video below. That’s why I think critics miss the point when accusing Larry Page of dishonesty and fluffing the growth numbers. If Google+ was a small scale project, that might be true. But it seems like Google is committed to integrating it into their core business, going so far as to sully their prized page rank with social results. And so its fair to consider how often Google+ users rely on other Google services like email, photos, calendar and chat, which represent a data rich portrait of their social lives. Filed under: VentureBeat        
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The market has vetted and confirmed Twitter’s Promoted Products business model, chairman Jack Dorsey confidently asserted today at the 
“I’m here as a crier, raising my voice in defense of lost privacy,” entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen said, directly attacking Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s 
.” It’s too bad he got arrested, as there is a
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