Belgium-based Twistory launched into private beta today at MobileWebCamp. It’s a very simple tool, built by Tijs Vrolix to show off his coding and design skills: Subscribe to messages from any Twitter user in any popular desktop or online calendaring application (iCal, Google Calendar, etc.). Those messages are then automatically added to the calendar, at […]
It’s a very simple tool, built by Tijs Vrolix to show off his coding and design skills: Subscribe to messages from any Twitter user in any popular desktop or online calendaring application (iCal, Google Calendar, etc.). Those messages are then automatically added to the calendar, at the appropriate day and time.
Useful? I don’t know. It’s certainly useful to closely monitor/stalk people (or yourself). If you want to add my daily words of wisdom to your calendar, my page is here (which also includes a graph of total twitter usage by day.
By Andrew Liszewski It seems more people are getting tattoos these days to show loyalty to a particular brand or product than for traditional rebellious reasons. We’ve all seen our share of Nintendo, Apple or even Zune tattoos, but none of them come even close to the ink that one Spiderman fan had done. The tattoo […]
By Andrew Liszewski
It seems more people are getting tattoos these days to show loyalty to a particular brand or product than for traditional rebellious reasons. We’ve all seen our share of Nintendo, Apple or even Zune tattoos, but none of them come even close to the ink that one Spiderman fan had done. The tattoo is designed to look like the guy’s skin is actually being torn away to reveal the Spiderman costume underneath. While I personally think having the Superman logo revealed on his chest would’ve been slightly cooler, this tattoo is still an impressive piece of work.
You can check out the thread that this tattoo spawned on Emptees.com, but I’ve to warn you that some of the other tattoos are definitely not safe for work.
By Evan Ackerman It vaguely amazes me that mail is able to find its way from point a to point b, when it has to pass through points c through z to do so. For all I know, a tribe of pixies lives inside each mailbox and magically teleports my mail where I want it to […]
By Evan Ackerman
It vaguely amazes me that mail is able to find its way from point a to point b, when it has to pass through points c through z to do so. For all I know, a tribe of pixies lives inside each mailbox and magically teleports my mail where I want it to go, over a period of 7-10 business days. If I was the curious type, I could get myself a Micro GPS Mail Logger, which is a letter sized (and bendable!) gadget that will record its position, along with timestamps, to a MicroSD card for you to peruse. For, um, about $700.
I’d be willing to pay that price, perhaps, if I was mailing something extremely valuable (say, my pet snake) and wanted to know where the package was at all times. Unfortunately, you don’t get any of the info until the GPS Mail Logger arrives at its destination and you download it. And, of course, GPS doesn’t work anywhere not under the clear blue sky… You can pretty much bet that when they lose your mail, it’s not going to be anywhere were GPS can find it.
My advice: just get a tracking number and keep your fingers crossed.
Silicon Alley Insider reports that Twitter is looking to raise a Series C round. They’re hearing that the company wants $15M at a $60M valuation, probably from former investors Union Square Ventures and Charles River Ventures, and perhaps from Spark Capital as well. Twitter raised over $5M in funding last July. Digital Garage also invested in the […]
Silicon Alley Insider reports that Twitter is looking to raise a Series C round.
They’re hearing that the company wants $15M at a $60M valuation, probably from former investors Union Square Ventures and Charles River Ventures, and perhaps from Spark Capital as well.
Twitter raised over $5M in funding last July. Digital Garage also invested in the company this past January as part of Twitter’s expansion into Japan (the only market where Twitter is actually making money).
Skype is now available on many leading mobile phones, although depending on where you live you can’t use it to call people. The java based mobile thin Skype client works on around 50 of the most popular Java-enabled mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. The standard feature set includes chat, group chat, presence, […]
Skype is now available on many leading mobile phones, although depending on where you live you can’t use it to call people.
The java based mobile thin Skype client works on around 50 of the most popular Java-enabled mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. The standard feature set includes chat, group chat, presence, receiving calls from Skype users, and through SkypeIn. The half pregnant part: Skype-to-Skype and SkypeOut calls are initially only supported in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
It’s a big step forward for Skype; the company has a partnership with the 3 network and offers Skype enabled phones (and even a Skype phone) in Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Macau, Sweden and the United Kingdom, but Skype on handsets outside of these markets has been the domain of third party go-between services until now. For eBay, getting Skype on more phones means increased use of the service, and hopefully enough profit to keep it from selling Skype at the end of the year.
Skype notes that this release is “expected to last several months, after which a public version of the application will be made available to millions of mobile phone owners around the world,” by which we’d hope is a fully fledged Skype client for everyone.
Less than a year ago Alex Le and Siqi Chen were working at one of the web’s most ambitious startups, semantic search engine PowerSet (Due out soon). But last December they made the tough choice to quit it all and go full time for their own side project, a quickly growing little Facebook application called […]
Less than a year ago Alex Le and Siqi Chen were working at one of the web’s most ambitious startups, semantic search engine PowerSet (Due out soon). But last December they made the tough choice to quit it all and go full time for their own side project, a quickly growing little Facebook application called “Friends For Sale”. That project has grown into a full blown venture backed startup ironically named “Serious Business“, which just raised $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners (double digit pre) and currently draws over 600,000 daily active users on Facebook. Steve Newcomb, formerly of PowerSet, will be taking a seat on their board.
True to its name, “Friends for Sale” is an application that lets you virtually buy and sell your friends. The game is an ego driven form of “poking” (virtual nudges) that makes it abundantly clear who the most desirable players are, by listing a leader board of your most expensive friends. Every one of your friends, whether they have the app or not, can be purchased as a “pet”. Everyone starts at a base price that rises with every resale. You get more cash when you log in, are sold, or have one of your pets bought away from you. Users can spend that cash on kicking their pets, give them funny tag lines, or even virtual gifts.
That one game has also been supporting the growing company’s resources (20 Ruby on Rails servers and growing) through a mix of banner advertisements and sponsorships. While the company declined to state their earnings, they estimated the company could grow to 12 engineers without raising any financing. The financing allows the company to significantly ramp up their expansion plans.
But Lightspeed didn’t invest in Serious Business just for a single game. Founder Alex Le cites “Friends for Sale” as the first in a series of of games built directly around your relationships with friends. The idea is to create games for all social networks (Facebook, OpenSocial) that rely on leveraging social skills to win, instead of your twitch reflex or poker proficiency. While they’ll have some games to announce in the next 30 days, the founders briefly threw out the example of a battle game where your friends are the soldiers and success depended on your social skills.
Serious Business is not without competition. Zynga and SGN are well funded social gaming startups. However, Serious Business has a much larger hit than either, so far. “Friends for Sale” has also already been cloned as “Owned”, which draws about the same level of traffic some days. “Friends for Sale” itself is a variation on an earlier game “Human Gifts”. These startups are also in competition with the cycle that most applications follow on Facebook, amongst other potential difficulties. Applications tend to explode for a brief period (if at all) before settling at a lower activity level or completely dying.
German site PlayMyGame, the first of a wave of make your own flash based game sites we reviewed in May 2007, is on the market. Founder Samuel Wulf described the circumstances in an email to TechCrunch: Due to a lack of time and staff shortage the past weeks we have not been able to proceed with our […]
German site PlayMyGame, the first of a wave of make your own flash based game sites we reviewed in May 2007, is on the market.
Founder Samuel Wulf described the circumstances in an email to TechCrunch:
Due to a lack of time and staff shortage the past weeks we have not been able to proceed with our Web 2.0 project PlayMyGame.com the way we would have liked to. As we think this problem will not be solved shortly we have decided to sell the project to someone who has the time, the passion and the staff to proceed with PlayMyGame.com, because we are convinced that the idea still has a huge potential.
The stats for the site are reasonable: over 360,000 games created, 185,000 game plays a month with 80,000 monthly visits to the site. PlayMyGame comes in Chinese, English, German, Polish and Spanish, and there’s a Facebook application for the site as well.
We’ve seen eBay exits before, but Sedo is an interesting choice as the service is better known as a domain seller as opposed to a marketplace for established sites. Those interested can make an offer here: it should be noted that this isn’t an auction but a “make an offer” process, something I only understood after I offered $60 for the site, thinking I was coming in at the minimum bid. No harm done. Usually we’d put a site like this in the deadpool, but I think PlayMyGame will find a happy home with someone with spare cash on hand.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data—keyword search—will one day break down in its ability to deliver the exact information we want at our fingertips. In fact, some argue that keyword search is already delivering diminishing returns—as the slide above by Nova […]
As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data—keyword search—will one day break down in its ability to deliver the exact information we want at our fingertips. In fact, some argue that keyword search is already delivering diminishing returns—as the slide above by Nova Spivack implies. Spivack is the CEO and founder of semantic Web startup Radar Networks and is pushing his view that semantic search will help solve these problems. But anyone frustrated by the sense that it takes longer to find something on Google today than it did even a year ago knows there is some truth to his argument.
“Keyword search is okay,” he says, “but if the information explosion continues we need something better.” Today, there are about 1.3 billion people on the Web, and more than 100 million active Websites. As more people pile on, the amount of information on the Web keeps growing exponentially to accommodate all those seekers, and they themselves feel compelled to put their own personal and social information onto the Web as well.
At a certain point, with billions and billions of Web pages to sift through, keyword search just won’t cut it anymore. It’s a needle-in-the-haystack problem, with the haystacks just getting bigger and bigger every second.
Spivack explains:
Keyword search engines return haystacks, but what we really are looking for are the needles . The problem with keyword search such as Google’s approach is that only highly cited pages make it into the top results. You get a huge pile of results, but the page you want—the “needle” you are looking for—may not be highly cited by other pages and so it does not appear on the first page. This is because keyword search engines don’t understand your question, they just find pages that match the words in your question.
So how do we get beyond keyword search and Google’s PageRank? There are many approaches being tried: social search, tagging, guided search, natural-language search, statistical methods, open search, semantic search, and (way out there) artificial intelligence. They all have their problems. Tags are too messy and inconsistent. Natural-language requires too much computing power, is difficult to scale, and doesn’t deal with structured data well. Semantic search is perhaps the most promising, but it essentially requires every single Webpage to be re-written.
Spivack covered these issues during a presentation earlier this month at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. It was one of the clearest explanations of the semantic Web I’ve heard so far (I’ve embedded his full slide show below). The semantic Web is nothing more than a set of standards that, if broadly adopted, would help computers extract meaning from the flood of data on the Web. But instead of a brute software approach, it puts intelligence into the data. “All you need to use that data is carried by the data itself,” says Spivack. Dumb software, smart data. That is an approach that scales no matter how many billions of Web pages are created.
The point, says Spivack, is:
To do for data what the Web did for documents.
You are turning the Web into a database, and your data becomes a part of it. Your data becomes part of the worldwide database. The semantic Web will let you move from data record to data record, just like you go from Web page to Web page.
There are many obstacles to the adoption of the semantic Web, but its goals are something worth striving for. What is certain is that search needs to evolve, and Google and Yahoo and Microsoft with it. Of course, they can adopt whichever approach or combination proves most effective.
The question is: Will they, or are they too wedded to keyword search to move beyond it?
I want you to cease what you are doing right now and go try Presdo. It is a deceptively easy on the web scheduling assistant that’s a prime example of what a modern Web app should be. It only shows you what you need to see at the moment that you need to […]
I want you to halt what you’re doing right now and go try Presdo. It is a deceptively simple online scheduling assistant that’s a prime example of what a modern Web app should be. It only shows you what you need to see at the moment that you need to see it. And it comprehends what you want to do based on normal (and not-so-normal) English that you type in.
“We actually threw a lot away,” states founder Eric Ly, who previously was a co-founder of LinkedIn and its first chief technology officer. He wrote most of the code himself and bootsrapped the entire site with only $35,000 of his own money. “I left LinkedIn on a Friday, and started Presdo on Saturday,” he tells me. That was back in April, 2006. He had to develop his own natural-language algorithm to deal with events, times, and scheduling, and the words people use to describe those things. The whole site is built with Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and the LAMP stack.
The home page is a plain, Google-inspired box. But instead of typing in what you’re looking for, you type in what you want to do and with who: “Coffee with Eric in SF,” “Movie with Nadia Fri night,” “Meeting with Henry at 2:30 pm.”
It then takes you to a page with pre-populated fields based on what you typed in: when, who, where, what. You can refine the details further on this page. If you typed in the person’s email in the first box, it appears in the “who” field. If you didn’t, you can enter it at this point.
Presdo lets you pick a location by searching through local listings on a Google map. You can pick one near you, near the person you’re meeting, or in between. (It helps if you first register with your own email and location.)
Or you can look at a list view of nearby places instead.
Presdo guesses what day and time you meant and puts those in as well. But you can offer up substitute times and grant the other party to pick the best one or advocate their own.
When you’re satisfied with what you’ve, you hit “Send Invite.” The other person gets an e-mail with the details and a link back to Presdo, where they can change the time or place. You can also add a message. All the messages back-and-forth are recorded on the event page.
Once everything is set, you can export the meeting to your calendar (Presdo supports Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, and Yahoo Calendar).
Each time you schedule an event with a new person, Presdo remembers who they are for the next time. You can also use Presdo as a to-do list. There are some obvious features Ly needs to add, such as support for other forms of messaging beyond email including mobile text messaging and Twitter. But he’s off to a good start. The service is free, and he hopes to eventually charge for premium subscriptions. You can try it out now, and tell us what you think in comments.
By Evan Ackerman Practical? Of course not. Awesome? Heck yeah. Like the website says, it’s too funny not to share, and if you want a piece of the action, you’ll be able to buy a Leave Me Alone Box of your very own sometime soon for an undisclosed price… Leave your email at the site to […]
By Evan Ackerman
Practical? Of course not. Awesome? Heck yeah. Like the website says, it’s too funny not to share, and if you want a piece of the action, you’ll be able to buy a Leave Me Alone Box of your very own sometime soon for an undisclosed price… Leave your email at the site to be notified when it’s ready to go.
Belgium-based Twistory launched into private beta today at MobileWebCamp. 
Skype
That one game has also been supporting the growing company’s resources (20 Ruby on Rails servers and growing) through a mix of banner advertisements and sponsorships. While the company declined to state their earnings, they estimated the company could grow to 12 engineers without raising any financing. The financing allows the company to significantly ramp up their expansion plans.
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