Women Entrepreneurs Pitch Their Companies at Stanford
Women 2.0 held its second pitch event today on the kempt grounds of the Stanford Golf Course Grill. It was a chance for five private tech companies with at least 50% female ownership to compete for a prize suite of business services collectively worth $15,000, plus a chance to meet with Esther Dyson.
The five finalists - Koollage, Gaiagy, Skillshop, Webvet, and Passive Devices - were chosen by 20 professional investors out of a pool of over 125 submissions. They each had 10 minutes to pitch their companies to attendees and a panel of 9 judges, after which the judges picked an overall winner and the crowd voted for a People’s Choice winner.
Koollage took home the main prize with its mashup service that focuses on delivering content to mobile devices, and the iPhone in particular. Users can create widgets called “pods” that mix different types of digital media such as video, images, and search results. These pods will be marketed primarily to bloggers who want to get their content and related media onto mobile devices. A freemium pricing scheme will provide two options: a free version with a revenue split on ads, and a paid version with no imposed advertising. Tumblr is said to be the closest non-mobile competitor.
People’s Choice winner Gaiagy will give building owners (both individuals and businesses) personal recommendations for how they can most economically make their operations more “green”. The site will focus on three primary areas: space heating and cooling, water heating, and lighting, with a beta version of the lighting tool slated for launch at the end of the summer. Gaiagy will not only recommend building products that can be bought directly online, but it will also rate and refer the installers who are needed for many eco-friendly upgrades. A second version of the service with recommendation tools for 6 products will be launched by 2009.
Of the three other presenting companies, WebVet was the most promising web service. The site aims to be “WebMD for pets” - a place where people can find professionally produced and organized information about animal health issues. The company will license content from industry experts as well as employ 25 writers. While people often use WebMD for self-diagnosis, Webvet wants to avoid the fate of attracting visitors only when their pets are sick, so it will provide additional content relevant to pet ownership such as human interest stories and breaking news.
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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/287855397/
The iFund Has Competition: $150 Million Blackberry Fund To Be Announced Soon
The platform wars are going mobile. Whether it’s the iPhone, Blackberry,Android or Windows Mobile, the mobile platform that will win in the end will be the one with the best and broadest collection of applications. To give developers a little extra financial motivation, funds are being set up to invest in them. Google announced a $10 million Android challenge back in November, and Kleiner Perkins announced its $100 million iFund for iPhone-only startups in March. Now, it looks like Research in Motion is about to announce its own $150 million Blackberry Partners Fund (site not up yet) to spur applications and services for its mobile device.
At least, that is what VentureBeat reports in an item that appeared in its feed, but has since been pulled from the site (see headline here). According to that post (excerpt):
Research In Motion, the RBC and Thomson Reuters have invested in an $150 million venture investment fund, called the BlackBerry Partners Fund, to support developers of applications running primarily on the Blackberry.
The announcement will be made in Orlando at a convention on Monday.
The venture firm backing the fund is Canada’s JLA Ventures, a Montreal and Toronto firm active in mobile. That firm will co-manage the investing process, together with the investment group of Canada’s largest bank, RBC Venture Partners. RIM, RBC and Thomson are anchor investors in the fund. Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO, Research In Motion, is on the advisory board of JLA Ventures.
The fund will focus on Blackberry apps, but will also be free to to invest in startups that develop for other mobile platforms as well. That’s smart because no startup should restrict itself to just one device.
But doesn’t it seem like everyone thinks they need to dangle money in front of startups to attract them to their platform these days? (See also the fbFund for Facebook startups and and the MySpace incubator spinoff Slingshot Labs). What ever happened to simply building the best damn platform in the world and letting the app developers come to you because that’s where all the users are?
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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/287797294/
How to make a music video
Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1020-how-to-make-a-music-video
Powerset’s Dilemma: Go For It, Or Sell
San Francisco based search startup Powerset will be launching shortly. For now, Powerset will query only Wikipedia and Freebase. But as I said when the product was demo’d to me a few weeks ago, it is compelling nonetheless: “When I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search.”
But now the company may have to make a hard decision: sell now to one of the big Internet players looking for a point of differentiation in search, or take the risk of going it alone and possibly getting a huge, multi-billion dollar payoff down the road.
According to our sources, Powerset is exploring both options. They hired Dave Wehner, a Managing Director at investment bank Allen & Co. (he’s the guy who sold Bebo for $850 million to AOL, and is working on LinkedIn’s huge financing), to represent them in a possible sale or financing.
CNET is reporting today that Microsoft may be bidding for the company. According to our sources, those discussions have been going on for well over a month, and their most recent bid is “around $100 million.”
That probably won’t be enough to convince Powerset and their investors to sell. The big question is whether Google will step in to try and keep Powerset out of Microsoft’s hands, and start a real bidding war. That could drive the price significantly higher. Google, however, has publicly dismissed the notion of contextual search as a revolutionary step forward.
Whether that’s true or not is yet to be seen. But Powerset may find itself as a valuable chess piece in the emerging search war between Google and Microsoft. And if Google bets wrong, they could find their commanding lead in search eroded over time. A relatively small acquisition to keep Powerset out of Microsoft’s hands, even if just a hedging move, may suddenly be attractive to them.
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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/287645689/
Facebook Raises Another $100 Million
Facebook is raising $100 million in debt, reports VentureBeat and Business Week. bringing their total capital raised to nearly half a billion dollars.
This most recent round will be used to scale the service via another 50,000 or so servers. Facebook now has over 70 million active users and around 109 milliion monthly visitors, and the site is at times very slow.
Compare that to Google, which operates at least a million servers (and is adding 500,000 per year, says Business Week), and Microsoft, which is adding 200,000 servers per year.
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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/287542036/
Three’s Company Or Three’s A Crowd? Google To Launch “Friend Connect” On Monday
Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.
MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).
Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.
The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).
If what we hear is correct, Google’s offering may not be as attractive as MySpace’s and Facebook’s. Google may be keeping a tighter reign on data, requiring third parties to show it directly from Google’s servers in an iframe. By contract, MySpace and Facebook are sending data via an API and trusting third parties not to abuse it (with strict terms of service in case they violate that trust). That flexibility also allows those third parties to do more with the data, including combining it with their own data before displaying it.
We’ll have to wait until Monday for the exact details, though. But what’s clear is that Google wants to get in between social networks and the web sites that want to access their data. By controlling the flow through Open Social and the new Friend Connect product, they can effectively become a huge social network without actually having a, well, social network (unless you count Orkut).
Google’s been scrambling for partners to announce on Monday as well. So far our understanding is they have their own Orkut and Plaxo. Compare that to MySpace (Yahoo, eBay and Twitter, plus their own PhotoBucket) and Facebook, which announced Digg as an early partner.
Another limiting factor with Google’s product is that, unlike Facebook and MySpace, they do not already control user profiles for tens of millions of active users. That means they’ll quickly need to get big partners on board as well. Will MySpace help them? They may - MySpace is already part of Open Social and said on Thursday that they will adopt Open Social initiatives in this space once they are defined. We’ll see.
More details as they come in.
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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/287313237/
Spotplex Suffers Identity Crisis, Stumbles Into DeadPool
We introduced Spotplex in February 2007 as a potential Digg killer that served up popular stories by monitoring how many people read them. Somewhere along the way, it also turned into an Alexa-like analytics service. Unfortunately, neither market worked out for them and they’ve been forced to shut their doors.
The Digg-style service used JavaScript that was embedded on participating pages to track how often posts were read, and top-read posts were featured on Spotplex’s homepage. The service set itself apart from Digg by requiring no intervention on the reader’s part to promote a page. On the other hand, Spotplex only recorded hits on blogs that had embedded the Javascript snippets, which severely restricted its sources of content.
Spotplex’s JavaScript embeds were also used to offer an analytics service that was designed to contend with sites like Alexa and Compete. While the addition of this service marked a shift to a very different market, both of Spotplex’s services leveraged the same backend.
CEO Doyon Kim says that the company’s ultimate failure was due to a lack of adequate funding. The company underestimated the resources that were required to build and maintain its service, and it neglected to seek venture funding after its $450,000 seed round. This is surprising given Kim’s experience in the industry: he co-founded DialPad, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.
Spotplex is now in the TechCrunch Deadpool.
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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/287209101/
100 Invites to Yahoo SearchMonkey Developer Preview
Want to be one of the first to customize your site’s search results using Yahoo SearchMonkey? Sign up for the developer preview here and tell them TechCrunch sent ya.
The first 100 people to mention TechCrunch in their application will obtain access to the service. They will also get tickets to the SearchMonkey launch party on May 15th in Sunnyvale.
SearchMonkey allows web publishers to create applications for Yahoo Search that customize the way their results are displayed. The semantic tool can be used to replace traditional result descriptions with relevant links, structured information, and even images. See our detailed review of the service.
The Yelp example below shows how it could be used by that website to surface better information about local joints:
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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/287189250/
Exclusive Mastering Dojo Chapters
Craig Riecke, Rawld Gill, and Alex Russell, along with the Pragmatic Programmers themselves have been kind enough to give the Ajaxian community some exclusive extracts from the Mastering Dojo beta book.
What do we have on the docket?
First, we have details on the Dojo DOM Apis. Specifically, the author takes us through a challenge involving interview questions and manipulating the DOM for them. We end up seeing code that uses dojo.query, and class addition such as:
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function layout1(){
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dojo.addClass(dojo.query("form> p")[0], "formTitle");
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dojo.query("div.questions p").forEach(function(node, i) {
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dojo.addClass(node, (i % 2) ? "lightBand" : "darkBand");
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});
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}
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It then delves into the intricacies of dojo.query and beyond.
Secondly, we have Ajax the Dojo way which takes us on a trip down dojo.data and dojox.Grid lane... two differentiating features that Dojo comes with. The chapter builds a wishlist system using these features.
There is a lot lot more in the book, which the table of contents covers for you. There are 400 pages of material here that cover the huge variety that exists within the Dojo community.
Thanks to the authors and the editor for sharing this with us.
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/287177795/exclusive-mastering-dojo-chapters
Sneak Peak At Android Apps Out of MIT
A class at MIT built some mobile apps for Google’s Android operating system and presented them today. CrunchGear’s own superblogger Doug Aamoth reports on the seven apps—loco, Flare, GeoLife, Re:public, Locale, Kei, and snap—that he saw. Below is a slightly edited version of the original post:
loco
Loco is a mobile social network built on top an Android phone’s contact manager, so anyone in your contacts is already your friend, so to speak. You’ll be able to view and track where your friends are located using Google Maps and real-time geolocation.
So, in essence, you can check out the scene at a few places before you commit to going all the way across town. I’m done with “scenes” since I’m now married, but this would have been cool for College Doug. He was a pretty awesome dude.
Flare
Flare is a geolocation tracking system aimed at small business owners who want to keep tabs on their employees. The demonstration given was that of a pizza delivery boy who has five pizzas to deliver. If a couple of customers call up to ask why they haven’t gotten their pizza yet, the delivery guy’s manager can use any web-based system to check out the location of his driver.
What’s more, he can give an ID number and PIN code to the customers, which the customers can then use to track the pizza guy themselves. Thankfully, that PIN code can be set to expire after a certain amount of time and/or each customer’s specific tracking privileges can be cut off by the manager or the driver himself.
GeoLife
GeoLife is basically your to-do list on top of Google Maps. When you get within a certain range of something you need to pick up, it alerts you.
It also works as a traditional to-do list for things that aren’t location-based. The team that put this together is also working on a route-creation system wherein you could pick a few important items from your list and then have a route plotted out for you to follow that day.
RE:Public
I thought that RE:Public was a brilliantly funny idea. It’s basically a location-based social networking service for finding new friends once you get tired of your old ones. You connect locally based on a radius that you feed into the program and meet people based on dovetailing interests.
The real brilliance lies in the fact that you can rate and tag each friend and the system automatically updates each friend’s score based on how much time you spend near each other. So after a while, you can see who your “top friends” are.
Tags that are given to people on the network can be voted up and down by other users, so if one person tags me as “jerk”, all my real friends can vote that tag far enough down that it eventually disappears. That, or I’ll find out that my friends actually think I’m a jerk and I can start finding new friends. It’s the circle of life!
Locale (winner of the Android Project - top 50)
Locale actually just finished in the top 50 applications for Google’s Android Project competition, so congratulations to the team. Nice work, indeed.
Locale is a dynamic settings manager. You set up different settings for your phone based on time and location. So when you’re at home, you can automatically have all your calls forwarded to your home phone line. When you’re at work, you can have your phone set to silent mode and have your phone’s background screen set to a constantly updating work chart. That kind of stuff.
There’s already an API available for other developers to tap into Locale to set up profiles and settings for events and itineraries.
KEI
KEI has been a dream of mine for some time. It’s basically a Bluetooth key for all your stuff. In this early version, it was demonstrated as an automatic car starter and unlocker so you don’t have to try to find your car keys all the time.
It’s built so that multiple people can control the same car and/or multiple cars can be controlled by a single phone. Security is handled via 128-bit encryption and there will be an administrative interface so you can cut your ex-lover’s access off when the two of you break up.
snap
Snap is kind of like Digg on a map. People can tag certain places and then other users can vote that particular attraction up or down.
So if you’re in a new city, you can pull up your current location and find things around you that other people think are interesting.
If there’s a particular user that’s uploaded a bunch of cool stuff, you can subscribe to his or her stuff. Arrows on the map change color the more popular they get. Very cool.
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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/287160965/