Crazy For Tech - Gadgets,Cell Phones,Cameras » technology

Juniper Networks Invests In Video Conferencing Startup Vidyo, Bringing Total Funding To $97M

Budowniczy425 — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:01:42 +0000

Video conferencing startup Vidyo announced Tuesday that it has received a strategic investment from Juniper Networks as part of the network equipment vendor’s Junos Innovation Fund. The funding comes alongside existing Vidyo investors such as QuestMark Partners, Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures, and Four Rivers Group. Vidyo makes video conferencing software that allows organizations to very efficiently and effectively make and receive video calls across any number of connected devices. Its video compression technology is based on H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which can be used to deploy high-quality video conferencing, even on constrained mobile networks. The company sells some video conferencing equipment directly to enterprises, but it also has a large and growing OEM business, with partners such as HP, Google, Ricoh, Hitachi and others licensing the technology to put in their own products. The Juniper investment could signal either a possible acquisition at some point in the future — or at the very least a much closer partnership, which could mean integrating Vidyo’s video conferencing technology directly into its networking equipment. Juniper partnerships and strategic investments that have turned into acquisitions include Ankeena, which was also part of the Junos portfolio before the network equipment manufacturer acquired it outright in 2010. Juniper also integrated the technology of Packet Design , another company in its portfolio, into its networking equipment. And Juniper was rumored to be looking to buy portfolio company Cotendo before it was acquired by CDN competitor Akamai. Vidyo is headquartered in Hackensack, NJ, but has 12 other offices and 225 employees worldwide. While terms of the Juniper funding weren’t disclosed, they bringing total money raised to $97 million since being founded in 2005.

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Juniper Networks Invests In Video Conferencing Startup Vidyo, Bringing Total Funding To $97M

Punch! Launches A Platform For Building Interactive iPad Apps, Sans Developers

admin — Tue, 22 May 2012 02:24:02 +0000

It’s a familiar story in the tech world: A company wants to build a consumer product, finds that the necessary tools aren’t available, creates its own tools, then realizes it has created a broader platform. David Bennahum offers some examples: Zip2 . Vignette . TypePad . And yes, his startup Punch! , where Bennahum is co-founder and CEO, and which is launching its publishing platform at Disrupt. Earlier this year, I wrote about the launch of the Punch! app , which offers current event themed games, usually with a satirical bent. (Or, as Bennahum describes it, “culturally relevant content that could only exist on a tablet.”) Some of the early games included one where players choose the wardrobe of then-presidential candidate Rick Santorum, and a general pop culture quiz with challenges like ranking Farrelly Bros. movies based on box office success. Behind the scenes, Bennahum says the challenge was to add content in a timely manner, so that it was “topical and relevant” — relatively easy for a newspapers or magazines that are only uploading new articles and other content, but harder for Punch!, which doesn’t create articles but rather “mini apps.” To introduce new content at the right pace, Punch needed to cut down on the development time, and it needed to avoid triggering the App Store review process whenever it added a new game. So that’s what the Punch! publishing platform does. It offers a content management system where companies can create apps without writing any code in Objective C. Like Punch! itself, these apps shouldn’t just offer a tablet-optimized version of a printed product, but instead include interactivity and gaming. It includes templates for content types like maps, “drag to fill,” and games and quizzes. And Bennahum says that by “creating an environment that sends scripts to effectively render these app-like experiences,” publishers can introduce mini apps without adding code, which means that once they get the initial approval from Apple, they don’t need to wait on further approval for every new piece of content. The Punch! platform will allow publishers and other media companies to pay Punch to license the technology and, optionally, to provide additional services to help get them get started. As for the Punch! app itself, Bennahum says it has now seen 35,000 user sessions. The next challenge is getting on a more regular publishing schedule, which should hopefully happen in the next few weeks. You can read more about the publishing system here . Disrupt Q&A Q: What existing tools is this replacing? A: To create app-like experiences, most publishers are hiring app development studios. Or they’re using tools that are replicating the print experience. Q: Tell us more about the pricing. A: $15,000 license for the year, versus $150,000 on average for app development. Q: Who are the ideal clients? A: Media/entertainment companies that have already experimented with tablets and been frustrated with what’s available. Also, brands that want to engage their audiences. Punch! could also partner with companies to create new publications. Q: What about distribution and discovery tools are you offering? A: None yet. This is probably for customers who are already engaging an audience on another medium.

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Punch! Launches A Platform For Building Interactive iPad Apps, Sans Developers

CallApp Uses Social Data To Build A Smarter Smartphone Contact Book

jos — Tue, 22 May 2012 01:23:35 +0000

One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn’t in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won’t know until I pick up. CallApp , a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It’s creating what CEO and co-founder Oded Volovitz calls a “universal social contact book.” It’s drawing data from social networks and other data sources to give users more context about phone calls and other communication. The data also comes from CallApp users — users can edit CallApp listings, and if they choose, they can add their contact book into the company’s general database. So when you get a phone call, even if it’s from someone who isn’t in your contact list, you should be able to see information about them — say a photo, their most recent update on Facebook, and your most recent email exchange if you’ve corresponded with them. Of course, if your phone is already ringing, you’ve only got a few seconds before you need to pick up, but at least you can glance at your screen and go into the call with some basic context. CallApp should be even more useful when you’re about to make a call. Then, the social network updates can give you a way to start off the conversation, or tell you when someone has traveled out of the country, so maybe now isn’t the best time to reach them. You can also attach personal reminders to CallApp contacts, share your location with them, or set up a meeting. In some ways, the concept is pretty similar to an email plugin like Rapportive ( recently acquired by LinkedIn ) or Xobni. However, Volovitz says that bringing this information to the smartphone puts it in a different context. After all, when he gets a phone call, “I cannot wait until I can go to the Internet to see who is calling me. This is about giving you real-time, immediate, the most relevant information you can get, and the tools to execute on that information.” Volovitz also says CallApp, despite the name, isn’t just about phone calls — he estimates that he only uses it for phone calls 50 percent of the time. The app also lists and connects to other ways for reaching people, like WhatsApp Messenger and Viber. The core of the experience isn’t the phone call but the contact itself, Volovitz says. Nor is CallApp limited to personal contact listings. It includes businesses too, showing you things like Yelp reviews, Google Street View, or a menu for a restaurant where you’re thinking about making reservations. Moving forward, Volovitz says the company will be adding features that are more about encouraging “serendipity.” The app is available on Android phones (you can download it from Google Play here ). CallApp is developing a version for iPhones too, though Volovitz estimates that it will have 80 percent of the functionality of the Android version, due to “some technical issues.” Volovitz says the company isn’t monetizing the app (which is free) yet, but there are a number of possible business models, including affiliate fees. The company has raised $1 million in funding from undisclosed venture capital firms and angel investors. Disrupt Q&A Q : How does the iOS app differ? A: There are more limitations than in Android, like you have to use the built-in dialer rather than any dialer you want. Q : What are the viral hooks? A: If you use CallApp to share information with someone, they get an SMS message linking to the content and asking them to download the app. Q: Tell us about the technology. A: What we do is artificial intelligence, big data. The system knows how to link the right person to the right number, for example using location to narrow the search. Q: Why do other improved contact books fail, and why will you succeed? A: It’s all about the execution and the ambition. If you build an app on the client side, you only get a limited amount of information about contacts on your phone, versus CallApp’s crowdsourced, cloud-based approach.

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CallApp Uses Social Data To Build A Smarter Smartphone Contact Book

K3 Server Is Making Enterprise Application Integrations More Efficient, Reduces Work By Half

admin2 — Tue, 22 May 2012 01:09:30 +0000

How is data moved between systems? In the enterprise environment, point-to-point application interfaces are either handled with expensive and cumbersome utilities or, more likely, with custom code…and frankly, a lot of manual labor. BroadPeak Partners has a better idea. The company is today introducing its application known as K3 Server , a system that aims to disrupt the traditional enterprise interface market by making it easier for I.T. to build, and for end users to tweak, the way code is handled, transformed, reconciled, mapped and enriched as it moves in between systems. BroadPeak is a software consultancy formed in 2006, whose founders have backgrounds in energy trading and capital markets. The idea for K3 Server came to them last year, when they saw the difficulties in how trades were being brought off an exchange and managed for one of their clients. “It really wasn’t about retrieving trades from that exchange,” explains co-founder Vivek Pathak, “it was about moving data from one system to another system effectively, in a way that was transparent for the business users, and that had fail safe mechanisms to alert when things went wrong (as always does in big tech enterprises), and to give a way for a simple business user to manage the logic of that integration thereafter.” And so K3 was born. But the product isn’t just meant for moving data off an exchange – the technology BroadPeak designed can be used for anything. Containing 140 open source components which are initially put to work by in-house I.T., the system can be purposed for moving and managing data between just about anything, from data stores in price repositories to electronic health records. The system offers three main functions: transparency (allowing you to see what data goes through and what fails, so you can act upon that), mapping (field x in System A maps to field y in System B) and rules (if data meets this criteria, then take this action). For IT, K3 Server means they no longer have to re-invent the wheel every time they need to translate data between two systems or develop a failover routine, for example. The framework allows them to call up the component instead of coding these pieces from scratch every time they’re used. But while the main data highway, so to speak, is set up by IT, the interesting thing about K3 Server is how the data is handled afterwards. In a traditional environment every little tweak or adjustment would have users scrambling back to developers with a change request. But K3′s “Rules Manager” offers a GUI interface that lets end-users customize their own “if/then” statements for how the data needs to be enriched afterwards (add this reference, set this field, e.g.) Pathak says that in early beta testing, the GUI was simple enough for an end-user to handle, even though this was someone for whom using an Excel spreadsheet was considered a technical feat. Plus, the company claims that using the K3 Server system instead of traditional processes results in a 50% reduction in deployment, operation and maintenance of enterprise integrations. And who doesn’t love less work, right? Given BroadPeak’s wide client connections from their consultancy practice, they’re not worried about signing up their first users. However, others interested can sign up to beta test here . For those waiting for the public launch, it’s very close, we’re told, and the system will then be licensed on a per-server basis, renewed annually. BroadPeak bootstrapped their efforts, spending around $500,000 on K3 Server’s development, and is not looking to immediately raise funding. Disrupt Q&A Judges: Adrian Aoun, Fritz Lanman, Dave Samuel & Michelle Zatlyn MZ: What are the benefits of this? A: Fast to deploy, really after replacing custom code. Market is around trading, primarily. Can move 30K trades per second through K3. Benefit to business: gets data to right place at right time. AA: You know it’s not just about wrapping data, it’s about taking actions on data. How much extensibility is in the UI? And what happens when you pass the limits of that? A: Have 65 integration patterns, plus open source components. We know that in the future we need to create UI transparency into those integration patterns. FL: Which verticals are being targeted? A: Trading is a great place to start, because there’s a low tolerance for losing data. Also looking at healthcare and CRM. FL: Risks in sales process? A: Developers are used to developing their own stuff. Wish I could say it’s been easy. Sales cycles are about 6 months. DS: More about the team? A: Trading biz and tech for long time. (See above) AA: Is it easy to pitch CIOs? A: Most boring part – mapping – is the bane of CIOs, they’re backed up all the time.

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K3 Server Is Making Enterprise Application Integrations More Efficient, Reduces Work By Half

The Story Behind Payment Disruptor Stripe.com And Its Founder Patrick Collison

admin2 — Mon, 21 May 2012 05:00:36 +0000

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Derek Andersen , who is the founder of StartupGrind and Vaporware Labs , and is a former entertainment development manager at Electronic Arts. Paypal created a cost effective way to safely accept payments 10 years ago, but the web has changed dramatically and accepting payments has not. Enter Stripe, a company that in my opinion is going to get very influential over the next few years. At a recent Startup Grind event I interviewed 24-year old Irish co-founder Patrick Collison who has raised $18MM from Sequoia Capital and others. Patrick is leading a company poised to completely disrupt the online payment industry starting with your website. Background Patrick has the most valuable of Valley technology skillsets. He’s a technical prodigy having won numerous prestigious awards including Ireland’s 41st Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005 , a national science competition which boasts hundreds of submissions each year from the country’s brightest young scientists. But he also has the personality and presence to be a leader and CEO. His two brothers are equally impressive. John is one of Stripe’s co-founders not to mention a Harvard dropout and one of the first engineers at Auctomatic. His youngest brother, Tommy , is a teenage blogger and writer that probably has more Twitter followers than most of us. Y Combinator and Paul Graham Patrick holds the distinction of literally being the face of Y Combinator. He’s the skinny red headed guy you see on the front of their website. While attending MIT at age 18, he and his brother decided to build a better version of eBay. After applying to YC they merged with Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar to build Auctomatic. They moved to an apartment in San Francisco, raised angel funding, and went to work. After launching and getting initial user traction, the company was acquired by Live Current Media and the founders moved to Vancouver to build the product. From start to finish the company’s pre-acquisition life span was just 10-months. Stripe was also eventually funded by YC. Patrick said that YC’s founder network is one of its most valuable assets. “Having all these other people building startups and having them want to help us because we were a fellow YC company, that was super valuable for us.” He added that perhaps the greatest advantage to YC is that, “Paul and the (other) partners are just really smart. There is no question that they are very top tier.” Because of the sheer quantity of deals and companies that they interact with combined with those smarts, they’re able to offer both specific and strategic feedback that is second to none. What makes Paul special? According to Patrick, Paul Graham is able to make surprising ideas and connections that other investors and advisors simply aren’t able to make. What isn’t Paul Graham so good at? Patrick says, “He’s not good at feigning interest.” Solving Hard Problems “The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe , or rather Stripe’s idea. For over a decade, every hacker who’d ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world’s infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.   Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking “should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?” and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved.” – Paul Graham, SchlepBlindness . John and Patrick first started working on Stripe in early 2010. The inspiration came when Patrick, who was working on a few side projects, kept complaining about how difficult it was to accept payments on the web. The two quickly developed a simple solution and within 2-weeks they had processed their first transaction. Over the next 6-months they showed it to friends, watched people interact with it, and iterated as fast as they could. In the beginning they weren’t sure how big the market was or whether they could accomplish their goal of addressing issues like fraud and non-US payments in a user-friendly way. They originally partnered with a payments company, but quickly realized that the only way to control the entire experience was to control all aspects of the process. That’s when they brought everything in house. By the fall of 2010, Stripe had become their full-time jobs. They thought about bootstrapping it, as they had to that point, but soon realized that as a payment startup they would need the kind of institutional credibility that only a top-notch investor could provide. “Even Turkeys Can Fly In A High Wind” Stripe’s most requested feature is to expand beyond the United States, which is something he assured me they’re working on. The team also recently moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco to accommodate their rapid expansion. To date the company’s growth has been completely organic. Before they publicly launched last fall they had more than 1,000 developers on a waiting list and have grown almost exclusively by positive word of mouth. For those wondering why they haven’t heard of Stripe, it’s because true to Steve Blank’s Customer Development process, they have planned to turn on the marketing as soon as they were sure the product was right. Quoting from a Kleiner Perkins founder Eugene Kleiner saying, “Even turkeys can fly in a high wind.” Watch the full interview here .

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The Story Behind Payment Disruptor Stripe.com And Its Founder Patrick Collison

Marketing Lessons Startups Need to Learn from Google’s Project Glass Concept Video

user — Sat, 19 May 2012 19:00:09 +0000

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics and blogger at QuickSprout.com . You may have seen it by now… Google’s concept video about its new Project Glass . These glasses will do what your smart phone will do only without having to hold anything…you actually see your options at the side of your view. You can get directions, send and receive texts, make calls, schedule tasks and even share your view with another person. It’s a really exciting idea…especially if you love technology. But the actual product is easily years out from becoming a reality. Was Google wise to release an idea so early ? And should startups do the same? Concept videos give you constructive criticism At this stage Project Glass is nothing but a video…and may not be a reality for a long time. Augmented reality experts point out that there are huge hurdles the Google has to overcome . So why did Google unveil so early? It all boils down to the fact that they wanted feedback on the product. Google wanted to learn the good and bad things people had to say about the glasses. The video currently has gotten over 15 million views which suggests that there is a lot of curiosity in the product… but not necessarily interested buyers. It’s just like when Drew Houston released his Dropbox video . There was no coding…just a screen cast of how Dropbox would work. While Dropbox was certainly fishing for feedback on how to improve its product more importantly it was looking for how many people would adopt and use it. The Digg community responded : But more importantly, there were thousands of people who signed up to be notified for the release of the actual product on the first day of the video’s release. And then thousands more after that. Clearly Drew learned that there was a huge need out there that DropBox could fulfill. Concept videos gauge interest You’ll more than likely get in-depth comments from the innovators and early adopters . The early and late majority will typically just vote up or down on it. While the input from the first group is critical for building a better product…hearing from the second group is critical to knowing if you are creating a product that will have mass adoption. But don’t get discouraged if you only hear from the first group during the first round of your prototype video. While keeping costs low, make the suggested changes from the first group to the product and then release a second video. However, if you don’t hear from the second group the second time around…then you may have a product that nobody wants. Concept videos build your brand Another reason for doing a concept video is to make your company look like it’s a company that is on the cutting edge and is doing cool things in secret. The concept video is a powerful marketing strategy for companies that have long production time tables between products…like cars or iPads. Apple will release concept videos like this one on the iPad 3 that keep people in anticipation of the real product. Otherwise they may fade into the background and no longer seem like the cool technology company it is. This is also why Google released their concept video. Remember, however, that this strategy doesn’t always work with small businesses. It’s a lot more risky for a startup to engage in a concept video if the technology is years out from entering the market. The startup without an established reputation or brand is better off just building a superior product behind closed doors . A concept video that gets a poor reception could easily sink their reputation. When should a startup use a concept video? A concept video is a great idea for a startup when two conditions are met: You can keep costs down – Google’s Project Glass video is a high-quality production that probably cost thousands to produce from the sheer man hours alone. Your video doesn’t have to be that slick. Drew Houston achieved his results with something a whole heck of a lot cheaper. You want feedback from focus group – If you are a startup building a killer product behind closed doors you will definitely at some point want to get feedback from real live users and learn from their suggestions . You can do this with a concept video that you only share in private. This will protect you from premature scrutiny from the public. Make sure though you use testers who you trust and can be confident they won’t leak your product early. So how do you create a successful concept video? Here are some tips. Involve the viewers In my opinion the genius of the Google Glasses concept video was in that it shows you exactly what the product could do for you by putting the viewer into the lead role of the video. From the start of the video the camera moves around like it is you looking out from these glasses. This is a great example of allowing someone to demo a product without actually having the product! Highlight the benefits of the features The basic purpose of a concept video is to show potential users how its features will make the life of the user better. This means you have to give examples of ways your product can make the user smarter, more efficient or happier. The DropBox video gave tons of examples on stuff people could store. But then it went on to give scenarios of how DropBox could be used to solve common storage problems people have. Isolate the new features If you have an existing product like the iPad…then how can a concept video help you? In this case most people will be familiar with the general features of the product. What Apple’s concept video needed to do was show off the new features. This could be done without any narration as the action communicated clearly what a person could do with new features like connecting two iPads together, a holograph display of movies and an augmented reality keyboard. Tell a story Another reason the Google video was a success is that it told a story. It was a simple story of a day in someone’s life. It showed him eating breakfast, trying to catch the subway, meeting a friend for coffee and playing the ukulele for his girlfriend…and how Google Glasses was involved the whole time. That narrative…and how seamless Google Glasses fit into that narrative…keeps you glued to the screen! It’s critical to understand that your product must fit seamlessly into the story. If it feels crammed or out of place then this approach won’t work. Create a mechanism to capture leads Finally, if you are going to create a concept video then you need to create a way to capture the leads that you generate, which usually involves driving them to a unique landing page… This is what I think was Google’s biggest failure. They missed…and are missing…an opportunity to capture something like 14 million possible leads of interest. If anything by capturing leads with a basic field that allows someone to join a list of updates on Project Glass will help them to see how many potential customers there are, which would give you quantifiable data to determine if it will be a profitable market. For the startup who doesn’t have the financial resources that a Google has, this is an absolute must. Create a mechanism to capture an email address. Final thoughts The concept video is a wonderful marketing tool on some many levels. However, it may not be the best approach for every startup. You need to evaluate your needs, your resources and what you are trying to accomplishing before jumping in with both feet. However, if and when you do decide, I truly believe that it’s a great way to help you save money and reputation…leading to a killer product in the end! What other advantages are there to using a concept video?

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Marketing Lessons Startups Need to Learn from Google’s Project Glass Concept Video

Facebook IPO Day: The Scene At NASDAQ in NYC’s Times Square [TCTV]

ACMAir — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:56:34 +0000

In case there was any confusion after Facebook’s eight years in business and its recent geographic expansions, it was cleared up today: Facebook’s home and heart lies in Silicon Valley. TechCrunch TV saw that first-hand this morning at NASDAQ’s Marketsite in New York City’s Times Square. We were on hand there for the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, but as expected , Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took advantage of the option to ring it remotely from his company’s Menlo Park, California headquarters. NASDAQ is a fully digital stock exchange, unlike for example the New York Stock Exchange, so it doesn’t have a physical trading floor and the bell-ringing is really just a ceremonial gesture. Nevertheless, there were throngs of reporters, some die-hard Facebook fans, and a few bewildered-looking tourists gathered in Times Square around the NASDAQ Marketsite to see the action. An Eerily Quiet Times Square But as you can see in the video embedded above, that “action” was negligible. NASDAQ played a short, two- to three-minute simulcast of Zuckerberg before and during the ringing of the bell on massive television screens, but there was no sound from the event piped into Times Square — so for the duration of the broadcast the crowd fell eerily silent, just watching the screen together. There was a brief countdown shown, but no one called out the numbers or anything. New Year’s Eve it was not. My colleague Anthony Ha found the scene at Facebook’s headquarters this morning to be “underwhelming,” but from where I stood it looked like a downright rager compared to the environment in NYC. In fact, I’m pretty sure this was one of the only occasions I’ll be able to say with near certainty that Menlo Park, California was a louder and more bustling place than Times Square. The Power Shift From Wall Street To Silicon Valley? Someone could easily see the whole event as a let down, but after thinking about it a bit I actually feel like it was the opposite. The scene at NASDAQ today strikes me as just the latest sign of an ongoing shift in power from the finance industry to the technology industry — from the proverbial Wall Street to the proverbial Silicon Valley. Now, I don’t mean that literally, of course. We all live digitally these days, so power is by no means not actually moving geographically from East to West (or even being centered in the United States at all.) But it is a palpable shift in mentality. So for those of us who work and live in and around the tech industry, the silence in Times Square this morning represents something very exciting indeed.

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Facebook IPO Day: The Scene At NASDAQ in NYC’s Times Square [TCTV]

TC/Gadgets Webcast: The Avengers, Nerf, And Kickstarter Tips

kram412 — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:52:33 +0000

Is The Avengers worth your money? Do the disc-blasting Nerf guns leave a welt? How do you pull a Pebble and reign in $3 million on Kickstarter? In this week’s TC/Gadgets webcast, we answer all this and more. John and Matt argue over the value in one of this summer’s tent pole movies, The Avengers. John finds it boring, while Matt thinks “it’s fun for everyone.” And while I can’t say I’ll be buying a ticket to The Avengers any time soon, I can say with great certainty that I’ll be at one of the opening day showings of Prometheus. Who doesn’t love space, right? The gang also discusses Nerf’s disc-blasting guns , and how they may or may not be used at this weekend’s Disrupt Hackathon . Last year we saw a raucous group of hackers start an all-out war with bungee darts . None of the TC editorial staff was injured (nor were the hackers), but this year we’ll at least have some Nerf Vortex and Vulcan guns slung over our shoulders. You know… Just in case. In the words of the recent Game Of Thrones trailers, “War is coming.” Finally, but likely most importantly, Matt, Chris, John and I offer up some tips as to what we cover on Kickstarter. Matt is done with iPad cases, and though I echo the sentiment, I’ll probably be more willing to make exceptions than he. John prefers the “little tweaks” to things we already use and enjoy, like the automatic bike light that knows when you’re moving. I encourage a strong video, as marketing is a huge driver of any business. But the geeky stuff has its place too — Chris thoroughly enjoyed the electron microscope project that significantly reduced the cost of looking at really, really tiny things.

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TC/Gadgets Webcast: The Avengers, Nerf, And Kickstarter Tips

China’s Tencent To Restructure Into Six Groups, Here’s Why

A D M I N — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:49:32 +0000

China’s Internet juggernaut Tencent announced today that it would undergo a restructuring of its business units into six groups. Ren Yuxin was also named as the new chief operating officer and will head up the media and social-networking groups. The six groups include: TEG – Technology & Engineering Group, comprised of Tencent Research and operating divisions. SNG – Social Networking Group, comprised of its Internet business lines and some divisions from Tencent Research. CBG – Creative Business Group, formed by Tencent Guangdong R&D Center and its corporate development arm. IEG – Interactive Entertainment Group, original Interactive Entertainment service. MIG – Mobile Internet Group, made up of wireless services and some divisions from Tencent Research. OMG – Online Media Group, namely its portal business. The most profitable Chinese Internet company and its red scarf clad penguin mascot, has been growing into quite the force by competing with other Chinese Internet companies on many fronts like portal business (rivals with Sina, Sohu and NetEase), online games (Sohu, NetEase and Shanda), social networking service (Sina, Renren), software and anti-virus services (Qihoo 360), online video (Qiyi, Sohu Video), eCommerce (Taobao), travel booking (Ctrip), online payment (Alipay) and search (Baidu and Sogou). Just to name a few. In the firm’s freshly released Q1 2012 financial results, the company turned a profit of US $470.6 million on revenue of 1.53 billion, a 2.8% increase from this time last year. All of its major offerings are still seeing big growth, for example, its instant messaging system QQ now boasts 751.9 million accounts, up 11.5% YOY. Both QZone and Pengyou.com, Tencent’s approach to social networking to date claims 576.7 million and 214.5 million users respectively, up 9.7% since last quarter and a stunning 30.2% YOY. And the Shenzhen-based company’s profit-making businesses including QQ Game Open Platform, Internet value-added service, wireless Internet value-added service as well as online advertising business all pulled off decent growth in the past quarter. However, there’s always more than meets the eye. For starters, Tencent’s investment spree last year hasn’t brought on too much revenue, for example, it still lags behind Alibaba/Taobao on the eCommerce front in spite of all its recent acquisitions. Starting last year, Tencent invested in a handful of eCommerce services, like Gaopeng (think Groupon), China’s Zappos OKBuy.com, the Chinese OTA elong.com, diamond dealer kela.cn, 3C etailer 51buy.com and so forth, with elong.com being the only one turning a profit. Furthermore, Sina Weibo, which is like a Chinese mix of Facebook and Twitter, is posing a real threat to Tencent’s dominance in social networking. Just like Tencent built its empire on QQ, Sina has been working relentlessly on Weibo to reinvent itself from the traditional online media company to the leading social media outlet by adding a swath of innovations to the platform like Weibo Open Platform, Enterprise Weibo, Weibo gaming center and so on. At the same time, Tencent’s search effort Soso has been long-rumored to be facing serious downsizing, which shows that a company that seems as strong as Tencent can still have weaknesses. Soso hasn’t had any major breakthroughs since its inception six years ago. It currently accounts for 1.5% of China’s search market in the first quarter of this year, according to a report by Beijing-based market researcher iResearch. Tencent should be wary of the rise of its peers and an organizational restructure might help it be more responsive to market change and be nimble in execution.

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China’s Tencent To Restructure Into Six Groups, Here’s Why

Google Just Got A Whole Lot Smarter, Launches Its Knowledge Graph

A D M I N — Wed, 16 May 2012 22:00:46 +0000

Today, Google is launching one of its most ambitious and interesting updates to its search engine in recent months. Starting in a few days, you will start to see large panels with additional factual information about the topic you were searching for take over the right side of Google’s search result pages. The panels are powered by what Google calls its new “Knowledge Graph” and they will serve two different functions. Google will use this space to show you a summary of relevant information about your queries (think biographical data about celebrities and historical figures, tour dates for artists, information about books, works of art, buildings, animals etc.) as well as a list of related topics. In addition, Google will now allow you to clarify what exactly you are looking for and will use these boxes for disambiguation. Thanks to this, you will soon be able to tell Google you were looking for the L.A. Kings ice hockey team and not the Sacramento Kings when you searched for ‘kings.’ The company has actually been working on the semantic technology that drives this knowledge graph for quite a few years. This specific project, Google told me earlier this week, has been in the works for about the last two years. During this time, the company has been working hard on creating the vast database of structured knowledge that powers the features it is launching today (though Google’s acquisition of Freebase . Today, the knowledge graph database currently holds information about 500 million people, places and things. More importantly, though, it also indexes over 3.5 billion defining attributes and connections between these items. “Strings to Things” As Google Fellow Ben Gomes told me yesterday, the company really wants to move beyond just understanding the characters you are typing into its search engine to getting a better understanding of what it is you are really looking for (“strings to thing” is what Gomes likes to call it). To do this, Google is using both its own and other freely available sources like Wikipedia, the World CIA Factbook, its own Freebase product, Google Books, online event listings and other data it crawls, but it is also using some commercial datasets (though Google wouldn’t reveal which companies specifically it is working with here). Here is what this will look like in practice. Google is currently pretty good at understanding general search queries, but some terms are just too ambiguous. When you search for ‘andromeda,’ for example, it just can’t know if you are searching for the TV series, galaxy, or this Swedish progressive metal band . Now, whenever you type in one of these queries, Google will show you a box on the right side of the screen that lets you tell it which one of these topics you were really looking for. Once you pick the topic, the search result page will reload and show you the results related to what you were really looking for. So if you were looking for the TV show Kings, the search result page will show you images related to the show, the right Wikipedia entry and links to episodes that are available for online streaming. If you were looking for the Sacramento Kings, though, you will get the latest box scores and other information related to the basketball team. That’s only one part of what the Knowledge Graph now allows Google to do. The second part involves Google’s new automatically created topic summaries that will appear when you look for a topic that’s well defined by the Knowledge Graph. Say you search for the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, for example. Instead of having to click through to Wikipedia to find out when he was born, you will now see his biographical data right there on the search result page. As Gomes told me, Google, of course, knows what kind of facts around a certain person, place or event people usually search for, so it these summaries will also highlight these topics. According to Gomes, you will see these summaries about as often as you currently see Google Maps in your search results. To put this into perspective (and sadly we couldn’t get Google to give us more concrete numbers), this launch is significantly bigger than the entire launch of Universal Search combined – and that was one of the company’s largest launches in this field. What makes these summaries even more interesting, though, is the fact that they also highlight other relevant information. For Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, the summary will give you links to some of his most famous projects, as well as a short list of related people Google’s users tend to search for. Click on these, and you will get to their respective summaries. Inside the summaries, Google will also highlight other entries that you can use to dig deeper (family members, band members, albums, schools, a TV show’s director etc.). This, says Google, will allow you to search more naturally across a topic. Google is aggregating this data from a large variety of sources. It will typically feature a short summary from Wikipedia or a similar service at the top of the summary and specifically link to the source. For the rest of the data, though, it will often just draw upon its own Knowledge Graph database and not specifically link to where it found a person’s birth date, for example. In case Google gets something wrong, by the way, you can report errors with just a few clicks. Looking Ahead Google, of course, has been adding bits and pieces of semantic search smarts to its search engine over the last few years (and so has Microsoft after its acquisition of Powerset). With Google Squared , one of its recently shelved experiments, it also once launched a pretty ambitious project to understand information on the web and then display it in a table (some of this technology likely lives on in the Knowledge Graph now). Today’s launch, however, represents Google’s most ambitious move in this direction. As Gomes as told me, now that Google’s algorithms have access to this structured data and can understand it better, the next step will be to understand more complex questions like “Where can I attend a Lady Gaga concert in warm outdoor weather?” For now, though, it is worth noting that this update isn’t about natural language processing and answering questions so much as about displaying relevant data in It’ll be interesting to see how this new feature will influence how people search and what links they click on. I wouldn’t be surprised if this had quite a negative influence on traffic to Wikipedia, for example. At the same time, though, the disambiguation feature may just help drive more relevant traffic to the sites Google links to as well.

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Google Just Got A Whole Lot Smarter, Launches Its Knowledge Graph