March 13th, 2010 by admin
Our top stories this week were about cutting the strings that tie us to our desks. And also about stalking celebrities at SXSW. Read on for our coverage and analysis. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010, including Real-Time Web, Mobile Web and Internet of Things.
Note: We’ve refreshed the format for our longest running feature, the Weekly Wrapup. It now focuses more explicitly on the key trends that ReadWriteWeb is tracking in 2010, as well as giving you the highlights from the leading story of the week. Let us know your thoughts on the new format.
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Story of the Week: Leaving your desk for the cloud, a bike or someplace you’d rather not say.
Put.io Turns Torrents Into Streams [Invites]
Bicycling Directions, Trails Come to Google Maps
Chatroulette Creator Coming to America?
6 Thoughts About Location Madness
SXSW 2010 for Web Celeb Stalkers
More coverage and analysis of location-based technology
Announcing the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit
Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services, augmented reality, native app vs. browser-based, commerce and marketing, mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com,
Register now for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit and get early bird rates – only $295.
Mobile Web
Twitter Location? Thanks, But No Thanks
Is the iPhone Still More Personal than Professional?
Japan’s Largest Telco Goes OpenID
More Mobile Web coverage
Historic Conversation in NYC: Ai Weiwei, Jack Dorsey & Richard MacManus
On March 15, at the prestigious Paley Center in New York City, a conversation will take place between Chinese
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March 12th, 2010 by admin
Aviary, the online creative platform is a visionary tool. When it launched a few years back, the irony of a Flash based Photoshop competitor was, well, ironic.
With the launch of Aviary in Google’s App Marketplace, we can say that the company is close to making lightening strike twice, this time around creating a home for the creative professional and their most important assets.
We want this to work – so we ran it through the paces. Here we got a front-line view on where cloud app meets cloud. We looked forward to counting the pixels that get wasted in the process.
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Aviary and Google will disrupt Microsoft (the default filesystem for the world), and along side it Apple and Abobe, with this simple joining of services that allows users to create, share, publish and present with a simple Web based client and “always available” files.
It feels like the tide has changed and soon it will be hard to imagine an app not defaulting to file storage in the cloud. In a world of cloud-hosted apps, writing to a PC filesystem just seems wrong and goes against the grain of a mobile workforce. The creative professional’s cloud is going to be in vivid color and available from the local coffee shop.
As a clear sign of preparation for these applications, Google Docs
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March 12th, 2010 by admin
We’re seeing a lot more discussion on the topic of single-sign on for SaaS environments. The issue is becoming more important as security emerges as a top concern for companies considering making the move to cloud-based environments.
OneLogin is a new company that offers single sign-on, cloud-based service that allows for small and mid-sized companies to enjoy the same level of security as large enterprise companies.
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Most small companies do not deploy security methods that employ SAML, (Security Assertion Markup Language) an XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains. It’s expensive to deploy. Open-source tools do exist but require someone to understand how it works and deployed in a work environment.
OneLogin configures a browser to give the experience of a single sign in. It bypasses the traditional user name/password system, which often has gaping security holes.
To us, this is a big reason why the new breed of SaaS services are not taken seriously by security conscious enterprise customers. The security can not be trusted.
With OneLogin, a person would be directed to a login page that would automatically fill-in the information for the person. The person is provided their own OpenID account. OneLogin knows the person’s session so no second authentication is required.
OneLogin’s infrastructure sits in the cloud, which means that a customer does not have to maintain dedicated servers and people to keep the system working.
There is no install. Rackspace hosts the web server and the database.
Two-factor authentication is available. People may use a Yubi key, which used a USB port to plug in and activate a random number authorization. People may also soon be able to use Verisign’s VIP service that gives a mobile device the capability to generate a new password every 30 sec. You then input the number within 30 seconds to receive
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March 12th, 2010 by admin
Once upon a time, smartphones were mostly about connecting busy professionals with their email accounts while on the go. Now that smartphones have reached the mainstream consumer market, however, people are looking for more than just email access – and a surprisingly large number of smartphones hardly ever leave their owners’ homes.
According to a new study from Web analytics firm Compete, 74% of smartphone owners now primarily use their devices for personal reasons, and they often spent the most amount of time with the device at home.
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As we noted last October, when they leave their homes, a lot of consumers with iPhones and phones that use Google’s Android operating system are now also using their devices to compare prices and look up reviews while they are out shopping. Compete looked a bit further into this market and found that more than 35% of consumers with smartphones would be interested in receiving coupons on their devices. Another 29% would like to be able to scan barcodes with their phones and get more information about the product as well as access to coupons and other promotions.
Location-Aware Coupons
While it doesn’t come as a surprise that a lot of consumers would like to receive coupons, one surprising result from Competes report is that 21% of respondents would like to get SMS alerts with promotions when they walk by a store. Another 15% also would like to receive ads via SMS. Chances are that a lot of marketers would like to offer these kinds of location-aware ads and coupons that catch a consumer while they are already out shopping and close to a retailer. At the same time, though, most modern smartphones don’t allow developers to create these kind of applications. The iPhone, for example, doesn’t (yet) allow developers to run application in
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March 12th, 2010 by admin
Kaiser Kuo presented today at SXSW about Google in China. He spoke about how the Google situation will impact Chinese Internet users, other companies and the Chinese government.
In the presentation, Kuo (who also spoke to ReadWriteWeb a week ago) clarified how censorship in China works. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the Great Firewall that has the most impact in China – but something China calls "self-discipline." Kuo also discussed what the next moves will be from Google, since he believes that the ball is in Google’s court and Beijing won’t push the situation.
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History of Google in China
Before getting down to the nitty gritty of the current Google-China standoff, Kaiser Kuo gave some valuable context to Google in China.
In 2005 Google started to hire aggressively in China, he said. Google’s decision to enter China with a censored product immediately brought grief to Google, with some pundits describing it as a "black day for internet freedom." Google defended its actions at that point by saying that not providing search to a fifth of the world’s population would be a greater loss than having censored results.
At first Google had a notice on their search results stating that they were censored. Kuo also pointed out that Google only ommited results that users wouldn’t have been able to view anyway, had they clicked through (because the pages/sites were blocked). At that point, Google didn’t host Gmail, personal search history, Blogger or other services that had personal information. Google in China also protected their employees, Kuo noted.
Google never had an easy time of it in China. For example many Chinese users couldn’t spell the word "google." Regulators made it difficult for them, as did their Chinese competitors. Google did manage to make good revenues and market shares, but never "moved the needle" against
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March 12th, 2010 by admin
Everyone has been talking about how this year’s SXSW will be the “year of location” as Foursquare and Austin-based Gowalla go head-to-head in a location-based battle royale. Location, however, is not the only emerging technology that will be on display in Austin; American auto maker Chevrolet announced it will be debuting new augmented reality promotions at SXSW this year.
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Festival attendees can download the Chevy iReveal application on the iPhone which will allow them to participate in a scavenger hunt-like game that blends augmented reality with location-based functions. A map in the application shows the location of Chevy vehicle promotions around Austin where users can “unlock” the ability to view 360-degree 3D models of the cars in an AR view using the phone’s camera.
Using AR to promote vehicles with 3D models is nothing new, but this is one of the first versions to reach consumers on their phones. The automotive industry has been one of the leading areas pushing desktop webcam-based AR experiences that have allowed users to interact with 3D models of cars from their homes. This new promotion from Chevy is unique in that it allows customers to have the same experience on their iPhones.
According to the App Store, AR iPhone application developer acrossair has produced the application for Chevrolet. The interesting thing about this experience is the way it blends the dichotomous features of mobile and webcam-based AR. The 3D model manipulation we are used to seeing on the desktop is wisely mixed with the location-based map info seen in most mobile AR applications. By taking the best of both worlds, acrossair and Chevrolet have opened the door to a new breed of mobile AR advertisements.
Augmented reality isn’t the only emerging technology Chevrolet is experimenting with at SXSW; quick response (QR) codes, which are like a technological cousin
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March 12th, 2010 by admin
Real-tme feed publishing startup Superfeedr has quietly turned on automatic location data in the feeds it republishes from around the web, we confirmed with the company today. Founder Julien Genestoux explained the feature using Twitter as his example, but the same content extraction and analysis is being done on all kinds of feeds run through the service.
“If you turn geolocation on in Twitter, then your feed will include geolocation in your Tweets and we’ll just push that through,” he said. “If you don’t do that but you Tweet about Austin, we will deliver the latitude and longitude for Austin in the XML.” In other words, developers building apps on top of Superfeedr’s real-time feeds will now know programmatically what geographic locations are discussed in the content coming through the feeds. Future feature? Subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL.
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Genestoux says he is using a number of 3rd party services to extract this data, including the Yahoo Placemaker API. Along with this location data, the service also offers automatic language identification and is working on entity extraction and sentiment analysis.
The prospect of subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL is an exciting one, though Genestoux says he’s just beginning to develop it. Could that facilitate a location data stream that crosses and goes beyond the siloed location based social networks so widely discussed these days? We suspect that it could.
Superfeedr could be described as “FeedBurner 2.0″ – for a more real-time and meta-data savvy web. The company was funded this Fall by real-time incubator Betaworks and media mogul Mark Cuban. Betaworks announced today that it has raised $20 million more to build out its portfolio of companies like Superfeedr, Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Tumblr and more.
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March 12th, 2010 by admin
As we profiled in our Never Mind the Valley series last month, New York is increasing its stronghold on the east coast startup scene. The city’s rich media and international business ecosystems make it the perfect launch pad for startups looking to leverage these markets. One other reason the city has seen successful growth of entrepreneurship is the holding company Betaworks, which shows no signs of slowing after raising $20 million from Intel, AOL, RRE Ventures and several others.
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It is a little harder to place a label on Betaworks compared to other similar entities that some would call incubators. The important thing to know is that Betaworks considers itself a holding company and will not only invest in companies but will hold and operate some of them as well. Having previously raised $8 million in 2008, the company has put their money to good use; Betaworks’ history includes helping start companies like Bit.ly and Chartbeat, while investing in other real-time Web apps like Tweetdeck, and helping in the sale of others like Summize, which was acquired by Twitter in 2008.
Needless to say, the company seems to know which horses to bet on, which is likely the reason why several corporations and investors teamed up to refresh their capital. Along with Intel, AOL and RRE, investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Softbank and The New York Times Company all contributed to help Betaworks keep moving forward.
The real-time Web is a trend we’ve been following very closely at ReadWriteWeb as evidenced by last fall’s Real-Time Web Summit. For startups in this space, especially those on the east coast, Betaworks is a great resource and potential investor. The new funds will not only go toward helping bolster their already impressive list of companies, but also to bringing fresh new companies on board. As with the
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March 12th, 2010 by admin
MySpace has taken a bold step and put a large quantity of bulk user data up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps. Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month. Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis.
This user data is intended for crunching by everyone from academic researchers to music industry information scientists. Will people buy the data and make interesting use of it? Will MySpace users be ok with that? Is this something Facebook and Twitter ought to do? The MySpace announcement raises a number of interesting questions.
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The 22 sets of data being made available are cheap. Prices range from $10 for raw dumps from the MySpace API to $300 for everything broken out by latitude and longitude. Subsequently derived data sets can be put on sale by InfoChimps users as well, with a revenue split.
Analysis coming from the data could include things like music trends per zipcode, popular URLs being shared, etc.
MySpace is generally thought of as a social network on the decline, but if it is able to position itself as the place to do music still then its hundreds of millions of users could remain engaged. Will data scientists want this data, though? Time will tell, but MySpace has long done cooler things with data than competitors Facebook and Twitter and people haven’t gotten terribly excited about it.
Bulk user data has tremendous analytical potential and both Facebook and Twitter have thrown the breaks on 3rd parties offering
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March 12th, 2010 by admin
If you visit the DreamHost blog today, chances are you’ll give a quick guffaw, shake your head in dismay at the state of the Internet and quickly close the browser tab. But if you take a moment to read all the way to the end of the post, you’ll find that the company has just announced the implementation of a one-click install for its open-source, white label microblogging service Status.net.
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The blog, which features a tattooed beer belly and a cat sitting at a keyboard, is really showing off the proof-of-concept (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek site, PetStatus, a micro-blog for pets.
Buried down at the very bottom of the post is the following nugget of exciting information:
Status.net, our new one-click software package, powers the entire operation. DreamHost customers can now install Status.net to their own domains with a single mouse click – making specialized Twitter clones at whim in a matter of seconds!
The company just announced the launch of its public beta last Tuesday. And our Own Alex Williams just took a closer look at the service’s future in the enterprise last week and argued that it “has the features that the enterprise customer wants and it has a strong developer community.” A one-click installation means we may start seeing specialized Twitter-clones reproducing like rabbits across the Internet.
We can only hope that PetStatus isn’t an omen of what’s to come.
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