The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘air’

Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say Aol. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com.

Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you’ll see all of the content that user publishes on those networks, and Lifestream automatically pulls in content from people you already follow on those various social networks, so you don’t have to create yet another new friend list. Lifestream isn’t yet integrated with Google Buzz, but Aol says it may be coming soon.

Users can filter out content from specific networks if they like, on a per user or broad basis. A way to think about this – “noise cancellation for social networks.”

Lifestream also lets users publish back to social networks. Status updates posted to Lifestream can be posted back to Facebook, Myspace and/or Twitter. Lifestream also optionally notes your location in your status updates via GPS on mobile devices, or you can manually add it instead.

That’s not it though. Users can sign in to Lifestream using their Facebook account via Facebook Connect, making it unnecessary to remember separate account and credentials for the site.

You also have a variety of choices in how you use Lifestream. You can access it via the website, an AIR application, or via iPhone and Android applications. As I said above, the mobile applications are particularly useful because they auto-note your location for easy check-ins, and you can post pictures you take from the phone.

That mobile version of the product is what excites me most. You can see where your friends are checking into on, say, Foursquare, click through to a place page and then go there yourself and check in. And Lifestream allows you to follow places just like people, so you can see whenever someone checks in to your local cafe or bar. That ability to follow places is probably the single best reason to use Lifestream.

The Lifestream product is simple, intuitive and really, really useful. Frankly it’s what Google Buzz should have been – both an independent social network on its own, but very deep integration into all of the other social networks you are likely to use daily. It’s nice to see actual innovation coming out of Aol.

Google just launched a new feature on the mobile version of Google Product Search which could take local shopping search startup Milo out at the knees. Whenever you do a Google product search from a mobile phone, blue dots will appear next to items which are in-stock at nearby stores. The image at right is from a search I just did for “HDTVs.”  The blue dots are subtle, but they certainly distinguish those results. Google has partnerships with Best Buy, Sears, Williams-http://www.crunchbase.com/widgetSonoma, Pottery Barn, and West Elm to show local inventory, and it is inviting other merchants to apply to participate as well. Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra previewed the local product search last December, but it is now live.

Highlighting local inventory in product search results is exactly what Milo does, although it works on the Web as well as mobile. Milo will have to try to keep one step ahead of Google now that its business has been targeted as a feature of Google Product search.

The good news for Milo is that nobody really uses Google Product Search. It is not even highlighted as one of the products on the Google iPhone app, for instance. Maybe that will change, now that it has a geo-enabled set of results.

When you are looking for stuff to buy, it always helps to know where you can buy an item nearby. The vast majority of people who shop on the Web actually just use it for research, and then go local to buy.

Milo CEO Ted Dziuba responds via a Tweet:

Google Product Search has availability for 5 retailers vs. Milo’s 49. Super cool web service, bro.

How long before Google closes that gap?

Google Product Search has availability for 5 retailers vs. Milo’s 49. Super cool web service, bro.

In January, private company stock marketplace SecondMarket published data on private company stock sales that they helped complete in 2009. And February’s report showed the transactions that took place in January, which showed a strong demand for consumer products and services startups. The majority of transactions in January were sales of Facebook stock. SecondMarket just released its February report, which you can download here.

Transactions more tripled in February, from $13 million in sales to $43.8 million in sales last month. A full 48% of the transactions were sales of Facebook stock, compared to 38% in January. And last month, we reported that sales are being completed for as high as $40 per share (or a $17.6 billion valuation). But we learned this week that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in no rush to take the company public. LinkedIn took 18% of the transactions, and sales of both Twitter and Zynga stock were each 15% of the total. LifeLock rounded the group out with 4% of the total.

The transactions concentrated mainly in consumer products and services (85%) and media and entertainment (15%). Similar to January’s trends, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter attracted the most transactions on SecondMarket.

On the buying side, Facebook led the way with one-third of all buyside demand followed by Twitter (7%) and LinkedIn (5%). Interest in Zynga (3%) also rose in February. On the seller side, ex-employees of start-ups stepped up their selling activity in February, comprising over 80% of sales, the highest percentage in the past nine months.

Noticeably missing from the report was Tesla, which filed for a $100 million IPO in late January.

TechCrunch_Private_Company_Presentation_Final_2010_03_09

Brands are engaging in the conversations that are taking place on social media sites now more than ever. But in order to tap into the social conversations that are taking place on the web, brands and agencies need to have a powerful tool to track, measure and engage sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others. One of the leaders in the social media tracking space, Radian6, is launching a new Engagement Console to streamline this process.

A desktop client built on Adobe AIR, the engagement console lets your both track and engage in the conversation taking place on blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, Facebook fan pages, public discussion groups, and mainstream news sites. The site also allows for assigning of tasks from within the platform, enabling users to access workflow from within the client.

You can customize a tracking grid of social media sites by breaking out your conversation into stacks by broad or specific topics, tagged customer lists, or even user assignment. Stacks can also be separated out by media type.

Th workflow feature allows you to tag, assign, and route posts to team members, and track the status of the assignments. Any conversations a user engages in, whether it be on Twitter, Facebook or with a co-worker, will be recorded for both the user and the administrator. And of course, the console allows you to Tweet, reply, retweet, and send direct messages, shuffle through user profiles, and follow new contacts right from the platform. Similar to many of the consumer focused social media clients out there, Radian6 allows for unlimited accounts and includes a URL shortener.

With respect to Facebook, the client allows users to respond to status updates, wall posts, comments, and “likes”. Users can also view news feeds for Facebook friends, and see new photos or videos that have been uploaded from within the console. The dashboard also provides analytics from within the console, such as post volume, and engagement stats.

Radian6 has had considerable success in terms of serving big-name clients. The company is currently helping over 10,000 brands track social media sites, including Comcast, MTV, Dell, UPS, GE and Microsoft. And this engagement console has all the bells and whistles to make any brand marketer content. The console, we are told, will be in private beta until April. That being said, there are plenty of other offerings for companies and agencies to track social media and this is a competitive space. Radian6 faces competition from a number of startups including Scout Labs, Visible Measures, Viralheat, HootSuite and PeopleBrowsr.

I’ll say this about Brazilian startups—they’re certainly not dominated by Web copycats. Perhaps it’s because there aren’t a huge number of Brazilians who’ve made it big in the Valley transmuting the local way of doing things back home or because there’s not a lot of US venture capital flooding into the country. Perhaps it’s the country’s noted isolationist streak, or perhaps it was just the startups I lucked into meeting.

But whatever the reason I saw fewer “We’re-the-fill-in-the-blank-Web-company-of-Brazil” ventures than I have in any other market to which I’ve traveled in the last few years. Many Brazilians I spoke with said it’s just part of their nature, that they’re not competitive (tell that to fans of opposing soccer teams), and that they’d rather chase “green field” – or, as they say, “blue ocean” – opportunities. See, they don’t even use the same color to describe opportunities.

No matter the reason, after nearly 30 weeks of emerging market travel it was refreshing to go to a country and see things that are unequivocally new, even if risky and a bit, well, wacky. To make the point, here are three of my favorites: Companies that make bugs, houses and diamonds.

The World’s Ickiest Factory: Bug is one of most aptly-named companies in the world. This company makes bugs. No really, I saw the factory: Millions of eggs, and jars and jars of larvae and cocoons. There’s a “cook” on staff who makes up the peanut-buttery solution these bugs feed on and each room is kept at an optimal temperature for that stage of bug development. Like something out of a sci-fi movie, the company is growing natural predators for common agricultural pests, so that farmers can move away from pesticides in accordance with a growing wave of worldwide safety regulations and the organic food movement. It’s combating a caterpillar with a wasp—like nature intended– but rather than selling live wasps, it sells wasp-infected caterpillar eggs and cocoons. Think of them like thousands of little Trojan horses being dropped into Brazil’s sugar cane, tomato, and soybean fields.

Brazil is the second largest agricultural country in terms of exports and the largest pesticide user in the world, recently overtaking the United States. The company is only doing a few million in revenues but is hugely profitable. That’s the good thing about growing something found in nature—it’s pretty cheap once you figure out the optimal way to do it.

But even without all that, I would love this story because Heraldo Negri, one of the co-founders, is just obsessed with bugs. Since he was 19-years-old he’s photographed pictures of bugs in every stage of life. He has albums and albums of them and even started a niche publishing house to produce his bug books for the masses. He doesn’t seem to think this is weird at all. When he handed me a stack of his books on bugs he exclaimed, “Your husband will love these!” (Note: My husband has a horrible fear of spiders.) That’s Negri above, standing on the left. What you can’t see from the picture is that he’s holding two fistfuls of larvae. Here’s a close-up….

Negri—a former college professor who lives several hours outside of Sao Paulo— always wanted to be an entrepreneur but says he never quite had the guts to take the plunge. But the sheer obsession with the idea and technology drove him to take a sabbatical (which he intends to be permanent) from his university teaching job to run this company full-time.

Bug is funded by Fundo Criatec, a government-sponsored venture fund. It’s one of its hottest companies and Francisco Jardim (standing to the right in the main photo), who’s in charge of the fund’s deals throughout the state of Sao Paulo, drives out to Piracicaba meet with them several times a month.

Bug was a risky investment deal in a country that doesn’t take a ton of venture risk. The technology was there, but several VCs walked from negotiations because the company didn’t yet have local certification to sell to farmers. Now, it is one of the only ones that does, and its biggest problem is meeting demand, so it’s investing in better, larger bug-growing facilities. (Right now they’re largely using a series of houses and an old supermarket.) Certification is a process that takes several years, and tellingly, some big multinationals and other upstarts recently applied for certification, Jardim says.

How to Build a House in One Day: It doesn’t take much travel to see that millions of people in the emerging world need better housing—hell, you could just watch “City of God,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” or earthquake footage from Haiti. Or just visit 16th and Mission in San Francisco. Much of the emerging world is living in makeshift structures that are missing walls, doors or decent ceilings. That’s what makes BS Construtora so potentially exciting not only for Brazil but the entire emerging world.

BS Construtora was started 14 years ago and for many years was just a small business known in agriculture sectors for its ability to build structures such as silos faster than the competition. 2006 was a bad year for agriculture in Brazil, and the company had to look around for other customers. The founder Sidnei Borges dos Santos, a former brick layer, was looking at a shoebox when he had the idea for how to build a prefab house quicker than the competition. Rather than pre-make parts and assemble them wall-by-wall and beam-by-bean, what if he made a mold that could lay the concrete for the whole room in one big piece, add the shutters, paint it and throw it on a truck? The molds leave room for plumbing and lighting and plop the houses on the ground just like the inspiration–an upside-down shoebox.

Today the company can build a house in 24 hours. It’s currently building a whole city complete with 1,600 houses, electricity, phone lines, Internet access, schools, a hospital, a police station, a fire station and a shopping mall in the Amazon for a crew building a hydroelectric dam. The photo of the village I saw looked eerily like where “The Others” live in Lost, but a house built on the cheap in 24 hours isn’t for show—it’s for necessity and speed. And there’s a ton of need in the world for this product. The company is meeting with governments of South Africa, Ghana, other parts of Latin America and Asia to talk about expansion.

The problem is thin margins. So far BS Construtora has been financing itself mostly through working capital while trying to dramatically increase capacity. It can build 20,000 houses in a year and CEO Marcelo Miranda wants that up to 30,000. In another year, the company will start looking at raising some funding to help grow faster, he says. For now, he wants to give the valuation some time to build, given all the growth the company is seeing. The houses go for between $15,000 and $140,000, for nicer-non-Lost-like models. The company is also developing some new four-story models to get farther into the commercial market.

BS Construtora gets a few big corporate or government funded projects like the village described above—a $120 million-plus project—but the bulk are developed and sold on the real estate market. The former is likely lower margin but less volatile, and the latter is the opposite. Between the two, though, the company generated an impressive $100 million in revenues last year – made all the more impressive by the fact that this is a startup that hasn’t received any external funding, operating in an emerging market.

In a decline-of-America-side-note, Miranda is a recent Stanford MBA grad who got 13 other job offers upon graduation, including some impressive ones to head up multi-national divisions in Brazil. (He asked me not to disclose specifics.) He gutsily chose to take this rather uncertain post at BS Construtora last year—at nearly half the pay he was offered elsewhere– despite the fact it was mostly an idea with little execution.

Why’d Miranda go back to Brazil? Part of it was a desire to build something in his homeland. Part of it was when he interviewed at companies in the US they intimated that there was pressure to hire only Americans. “It was the wrong time to be there,” he says. “The feelings were not good for a foreigner like me.” Looks like that brain drain isn’t limited to India and China.

Drilling Your Teeth the P-Diddy Way: Another Fundo Criatec investment is CVD. (I know, it’s not nearly as well named as Bug.) This company makes man-made, multi-crystal diamonds, with technology spun-off from the Brazilian equivalent of NASA, INPE. Aeronautics was big during the dictator days and there was a need for super-hard materials that were durable and wouldn’t corrode, so it started experimenting with growing diamonds and using them in space. Much like the early days of NASA gave American things like the EKG and Tang, Vladimir Airoldi (left) is working to make this diamond technology applicable to everyday life.

The key to CVD’s edge isn’t so much the diamond itself, it’s the way it preps the diamond to be adhered to another surface. The first product is tips of dentist drills. Diamond powder is already used on drills, but it doesn’t stay on well. Because CVD’s adhesives are so much stronger it can drill with an ultra-sonic, not rotational motion, which means no pain, no bleeding and no anesthetic, the company says. Early adoption has been a challenge. Dentists are trained a certain way and don’t like to deviate. So far just 5,000 dentists in Brazil have tried it and 3,000 are still using it. Another early use is drilling into the earth. CVD did a pilot-sale of some diamond-adhered drill tips to Petrobras a few months ago.

The hope is to turn CVD into a platform company that can spin out lots of these ideas, and partner with others to take them to market. Obviously, the challenge here will be the latter. The technology is there, and Airoldi, a CalPoly grad who got his ideas about tech transfer from his experience in California, can come up with dozens of use cases of the top of his head. Focus is going to be a key for this company.

But, like Bug and BS Construtora, CVD is trying to introduce new technology into industries that many other entrepreneurs have forgotten about. If that’s going to be the new green field – or blue ocean—opportunity, Brazil is a good place to bet.

Last October, developer Loren Brichter set the App Store on fire with the sequel to his brilliant iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie. It looks like he’s about to do the same to the Mac.

Brichter sent out a series of teasing tweets today indicating that Tweetie Two is coming soon for the Mac. One, from his atebits account, reads:

Ready… ready?! News about Tweetie Tw… ROOOOOAAAAR!! NOOOO DON’T EAT M *BLAM BLAM*. *CHOMMMPP* Aaaaararrrrrgghhhhhh.

While clearly he’s about to say “News about Tweetie Two,” that in and of itself isn’t very useful. The more useful tweet comes from his personal Twitter account, where he links to a “leaked” screenshot, “Shhh, @atebits doesn’t know I’m leaking screenshots.” To which he replies to himself, “Damn you @lorenb!” Cute.

Better is the screenshot itself (below). While it doesn’t show much of anything beyond what seems to be a frame for Tweetie Two (which he humorously calls “Tweetie Too”), the fact that it’s far enough along to for him to feel comfortable leaking anything is a good sign.

Brichter released Tweetie for Mac last April, following the success of Tweetie (the first one) for the iPhone. It costs you $20 for the ad-free version, but it is well worth it if you’re addicted to Twitter want want a native, non-AIR app (though Echofon has a nice one as well).

So what else do we know about Tweetie Two for the Mac? Brichter actually set up a Formspring.me account where he has answered some questions himself. Notably, the pricing for Tweetie Two will be the same as the first one. Brichter basically spends all his time on the project. And he even designs it himself. Also, “The interface is going to be substantially different,” he writes.

Finally, when asked if he plans to develop for the upcoming iPad, Brichter has just two words, “Hell yeah.” Tweetie for iPad, anyone?

U.K. startup Skimlinks is hoping to revolutionize the affiliate model by turning normal product links into affiliate links. The startup gives publishers access to affiliate programs of thousands of merchants across a number of affiliate networks. Each time a user clicks through and makes a purchase, the website earns a commission from the retailer. With Skimlinks, a publisher can set which links should be affiliate ones or not. The publishers makes money from content via affiliate fees and Skimlinks takes a 25% cut of the commissions. Today, the startup is launching a nifty discovery tool for publishers to search for affiliate links by keyword.

The desktop tool, called a Skimkit, is powered by Adobe AIR and is essentially a live searchable database of millions of products from Skimlinks merchants. The tool lets publishers research, find and link to products they are writing about, with immediate access to deeplinks and image URLs.

So, If a website publisher is searching for a link for red shoes, the user can search for red shoes on the Skimbit. The startup will produce results from retailers who have affiliate programs for links. SkimKit also features a service that creates shortened, monetized links for use in Twitter and email newsletters. SkimKit is available for free to Skimlinks publishers.

Skimlinks, which was born from Skimbit, is already being uses as a monetization service on more than a half million sites worldwide and has raised a total of $2.5 million in funding. Publishers using the affiliate service include Elle.com, The Daily Mirror, and a number of fashion blogs and sites.

Image recognition technology startup Kooaba yesterday released an API that definitely deserves some developer attention.

The Swiss company aims to unlock its library of over 10 million images, ranging from album covers to books and movie posters, and provide access to all that precious data via the cloud.

Kooaba hopes that the launch of the API will trigger third-party developers to develop more mobile applications – iPhone and Android versions exist already – or tools that tap into social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, etcetera.

Here’s a video of Kooaba for iPhone in case you’re familiar with the company and its offering:

Although the iPad was a disappointment to us as far as what we were expecting, I’m still excited to try one out because I know it will be one of the devices that really helps introduce and popularize the tablet computer.

View original here: 
Wired’s iPad tablet app: lookin’ good

While Apple is being lamented here and there for not supporting Flash on its shiny new iPad – boy does Cupertino have a strong dislike for the platform – Adobe has already responded to the news on the official Flash Platform blog.

The blog post, unambiguously titled “Building iPad Applications with Flash”, is mostly just to remind people of the company’s Packager for iPhone product, which will enable developers to make Flash apps function on the iPhone / iPod Touch through a work-around whereby Flash apps can be easily converted into iPhone apps using Creative Suite 5 (CS5).

We’ve written before that this could turn 2010 into the year when approximately 2 million Flash developers could potentially start cooking up stuff for the iPhone en masse. You can now add the iPad to that, it seems.

The company notes:

We announced the Packager for iPhone at MAX 2009 which will allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications and will be available in the upcoming version of Flash Pro CS5. This technology enables developers to create applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad (though applications will not initially take direct advantage of iPad’s new screen resolution). It is our intent to make it possible for Flash developers to build applications that can take advantage of the increased screen size and resolution of the iPad.

For that latter part, Adobe points to this article by Christian Cantrell, Product Manager and Application Developer on the AIR team. The article goes in depth about how developers can build apps using Flash with authoring with multiple screen sizes and resolutions in mind.

You won’t be able to fire up, say, Hulu through your browser on the iPhone or iPad any time soon, but Adobe appears determined to show the world that Flash has its place on Apple’s products one way or the other.

And it’s also sending a message to Flash developers that they can and should stick to the platform rather than look at other ways to join the App Store goldrush.