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Posts Tagged ‘barack-obama’

Kosmix, the reference engine that dynamically generates comprehensive topic pages as soon as you search for them, has just acquired a small startup called Cruxlux. Cruxlux has spent the last two years building an engine that can take any two people, places, or things and tell you how they’re related. Terms of the deals were not disclosed, other than that that it was in both cash and stock.

If you’re a fan of the classic game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon‘, you’ll love the Cruxlux engine. The company has built algorithms that will automatically figure out how various people, places, things, and topics are related through a handful of steps, using sources across the web. Say, for example, I wanted to see how TechCrunch is connected to President Obama: the site first says that TechCrunch was founded by Michael Arrington, who is connected to Stanford Law School (he went there). That in turn is connected to Harvard Law School (they both use non-letter grading systems). Which brings us to Harvard Law School, which Barack Obama attended. With each step, the site has a ‘how’ feature that tells you how the subjects are related.

Cruxlux has been in private beta until now, allowing you to type in any two topics to see how they’re related, and I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing around with it. Unfortunately, it isn’t going to be opening up to the general public, at least not in its current form. Instead, the service will soon be integrated with Koxmix, helping surface new connections as you browse through the site’s topics pages.

And really, the integration makes perfect sense. In its current form Cruxlux seems best for entertainment, not research — how often would you really take the time to plug in two topics to see their connections? Now that the relationship engine will be integrated with Kosmix, it will be much more useful, because they’ll be shown alongside every topic.

Cruxlux was founded in 2007 by Guha Jayachandran and Curtis Spencer, who met while they were students at Stanford.

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Recently launched ProfileSnaps allows for additional context for content on news websites and blogs, by providing in-text profiles that gives the reader a snapshot of information about a public figure. The information appears in a pop-up window, and is dynamically updated to provide the latest news and information about the person.

So if you clicked on Barack Obama’s ProfileSnap, you’d see an about section, which gives a short bio of the U.S. president; a Twitter section that shows his latest Tweets; a news section with headlines that relate to him; videos of him from YouTube and a photo section that shows a slideshow of pics of President. The profile also includes a links section to the individual’s Wikipedia profile and more. And ProfileSnaps can be saved by viewers, which will allow them to track and follow an individual’s profile, including a stream of all relevant news and social activity.

To enable ProfileSnaps, you embed a line of code into your post and another line of code around the individual’s name and the link to the profile will automatically be seen in the post. Once a site enables ProfileSnaps, it will scan a page for known names will include profiles for the people who the startup has information for. If there are names that aren’t in ProfileSnaps’ directory, the site will fetch information on those people from a variety of sources and combine them into a single mini-profile, building an on-the fly profile. Profile Snaps faces competition from Apture and SnapShots, which both provide conextual pop-ups for publishers.

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Forbes has a story today that Vinod Khosla is closing on $1 billion in new venture funds, $250 million for seed stage deals and $750 million for larger deals. There’s concern that these larger deals will largely go towards bailing out Khosla’s investments from the last fund that are struggling.

That’s highly unorthodox in venture capital circles– VCs usually reserve at least half of their fund for follow on investments because new LPs frown on their money bailing out deals that didn’t work the first time around. Khosla got around this by proposing a review committee for any follow on investments done out of the new fund. But there’s a better reason Khosla’s LPs shouldn’t worry: This is Vinod Khosla we’re talking about.

I don’t say that because he’s Vinod Khosla. I’m a big believer that picking winners in the 1990s, when information technology and the Internet were exploding with greenfield opportunties, doesn’t exactly make you a great investor today. Rather, as we’ve written before, it’s precisely Khosla’s willingness to be unorthodox that makes him such a good venture capitalist in these times.

In case you’ve missed it– the industry is in serious danger of 10-year returns dipping below the S&P 500 once stellar returns from 1999 and early 2000 fall off. What do most industries do when they’re under that kind of threat? Play it safe and hope they do just well enough to slip under the radar. Good deals are almost never made out of survival mode, especially in a business like venture capital where it’s the insane homeruns not the basehits that repay your investors. Simply put: Too many VCs are investing like they have too much to lose.

Khosla invests like a guy who has nothing to lose. Khosla runs his own firm so he doesn’t have to kowtow to partners, and he already donates 100% of his general partner profits to charity. So he’s not working for someone else, and he’s certainly not playing for money. What does still motivate him? Maybe it’s ego, maybe it’s legacy or maybe it’s just the intellectual thrill of proving he can still build another Sun Microsystems or Juniper Networks. But each of those things incents him to take huge risks.

As a result Khosla is one of the few people in the hightech foodchain that is unabashedly investing in unproven science. Big companies certainly aren’t. Even in the biotech space, big pharmaceutical companies mostly snap up smaller companies’ research on the cheap and usually only for drugs that can become huge blockbusters. The government has greatly curtailed research for the sake of research, although Barack Obama has talked a good game about getting that going again. And in the board rooms of Sand Hill Road, nothing can kill a partner’s deal faster than calling it “a science project.”

So what does that mean for Khosla Ventures? It’ll have spectacular flame outs, particularly amid the 30-or-so risky cleantech deals. But those flame outs will get it closer to finding a scientific breakthrough that does work. And in the venture business, it only takes one big home run to make everyone rich.

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The print magazine business isn’t doing so hot right now, but Sports Illustrated might just have found a new business model: selling an iPhone app featuring models from its 2009 Swimsuit Issue. Although the Swimsuit issue came out in February, the app just hit the iTunes store today (iTunes link). Marketed as the “World’s Sexiest App” with a 17+ age rating, it costs $2.99. I’m sure it’s going to make a mint.

What do you get for $2.99? Photos of 20 models including Brooklyn Decker and Danica Patrick in various states of bikini nothingness and “breathtaking bodypainting videos.” There are also other “intimate” videos for each model. Does Playboy have an iPhone app? It might save them too.

Oh yeah, and there’s also a sports calendar that sports fans keep track of up to six different pro and college teams, featuring a different Swimsuit model each month.

Azuki Systems created the app for Sports Illustrated. BlackBerry owners will have to wait until August for their swimsuit model fix.

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Face.com made a splash when it launched Photo Finder it’s first Facebook app back in March. The app employed some pretty impressive facial recognition that scanned Facebook photo albums to discover untagged photos of users and their friends. Even though it was labeled an ‘Alpha’ release the app worked remarkably well, identifying individuals in photos impaired by bad lighting, low resolution and obstructions such as sunglasses. Since its launch Photo Finder has scanned more than 1.5 billion photos, identifying more than 2.3 million faces—not too shabby at all.

Today Face.com goes a step further by launching another Facebook application called Photo Tagger, which harnesses the company’s core facial recognition technology and gives it a productivity spin: bulk name tagging made easy.

We have 300 invites to give away, but be warned, Photo Tagger falls squarely into the “time vampire” category—so don’t say we didn’t warn you. Get your invite here.

The purpose of Photo Tagger is a simple one, to speed-up tagging of faces in Facebook photo albums. While ideal for users that upload large amounts of photos, it’s also a perfect fit for plain users that are just too lazy to add the name tag meta-layer. You know who you are folks…

Luckily, no matter what category of user you fall under, Photo Tagger is a snap to use and much like Photo Finder, works really well. You begin by selecting an album which can either be your own or that of your friends’. You can both browse for an album, or search by username or for a keyword featured in an album title (i.e. birthday, vacation, bar, etc.). That’s when the facial recognition kicks in and the app will begin its attempt to recognize individual faces. All of this happens pretty fast and by my testing took no longer than 30 seconds, even on albums with over a hundred photos.

Once scanning is complete, Photo Tagger presents a results page with a summary header that displays stats regarding the tagging progress, and a “Save to Facebook” button (more on this in a moment). The Faces view below the summary displays faces grouped by similarity—both ones the app was able to recognize and those it could not. There’s also an “Ungrouped” section on the bottom with faces that the app could not match to others.

Now it’s time for the productivity aspect to kick-in. There are a couple of ways to accept or change the photo tags: The first, in a sweeping manner that applies to the entire group, performed by selecting the Approve or Change All buttons. The second, by dealing with each photo individually using buttons overlaid upon each thumbnail.

Back to the “Save to Facebook” button. All approved Photo Tagger tags can be turned into official Facebook tags. The condition however is that it must be accepted by the album owner. If the current user isn’t the owner, a request is sent asking the owner approve the tag. This by the way is standard stuff enabled through Facebook’s APIs.

When a tag is accepted through Photo Tagger its thumbnail’s frame will go green. If and when it’s accepted as an official Facebook tag, a small Facebook logo will appear in the corner of the thumbnail. All of this is pretty clear when used in the app.

Face.com’s CEO Gil Hirsch explains that Photo Tagger is a result of his team’s ability to add new face-clustering technology on top of their core facial recognition. He went on to tell me that with each album scanned, Photo Tagger will get better at identifying faces already tagged.

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There has never been a better time to be a “fan” online. Whether it be via Facebook, MySpace, or even through fan-based social networks like TopFans, fandom on the web is taking off now that fans have more ways of expressing themselves. Just look at the recently deceased Michael Jackson, whose Facebook page now has close to 8 million fans, surpassing the fan count of Barack Obama’s Facebook page (6.4 million fans). SuperFan is a new way for people to express their loyalty and admiration for a show, movie, celeb, professional athlete or politician. SuperFan is a social gaming network where users build their network around who and what their fans of and compete with other fans to become the top fan.

Users of the network can become Fans of all their “Faves,” which include everything from ABC’s show Grey’s Anatomy to tennis star Roger Federer. Fans tag their Faves and can then use credits (via a virtual currency) to become the “SuperFan,” which gives them special privileges in controlling the favorite item or person’s profile. The network has enabled a bidding system to motivates fans to prove they are the number one fan.

Fans can earn points as they contributing more to the site. The credits can then be used to send virtual gifts, posting site-wide messages, customizing profiles with skins and colors and becoming the ultimate “SuperFan.” Fans can also create, take and share quizzes about their Faves, create and post to blogs on their homepages, and create battles (posted to the community) between Faves to drive traffic to the their respective pages (think Angelina vs. Jen). Users are also given a compatibility score with other fans on the site, that recommends friends to you base on your mutual Faves.

SuperFan is the brainchild of the co-founder of Tickle (which was bought by Monster Worldwide for $100 million in 2004), Rick Marini. Marini says Tickle will make money mainly through advertising, e-commerce and afilliate campaigns (SuperFan has partnerships in place with iTunes, Amazon, TicketMaster, StubHub, ThumbPlay to sell products and tickets.) Board members include founder of F*cked Company and AdBrite Philip Kaplan and Napster founder Shawn Fanning.

SuperFan is a innovative and engaging way for users to express their “inner fan” but I worry about how site will amass actual users when many people are already using Facebook and MySpace as fan hubs. Marini says that the site has implemented integration with Twitter and Facebook Connect to allows users to publish news onto their other social network sites, and also possibly catch the attention of potential fans at the same time. Still, MySpace, especially when it comes to music, and Facebook have a relative monopoly when it comes to combining fans with social networks. But Marini counters that on Facebook anyone can create a fan page for a celeb, show, athlete etc, creating sometimes hundreds of pages for one person or item and distorting the ultimate fan experience. Users often don’t know which page is the official one. With SuperFan, all “Fave” pages are pre-set and monitored so fans cannot create new pages but only add to them.

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CoTweet, the web based Twitter collaboration platform for businesses, has announced a Series A round of funding totaling $1.1 million.  The investors are Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital.

CoTweet helps companies and brands, like Whole Foods, Microsoft, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and the City of San Francisco’s 311 manage their Twitter accounts as a marketing channel.  CoTweet makes it easy to manage multiple accounts and supports group access to the same acounts, so a marketing team can split up Tweeting duties among themselves but still keep a unified public voice on Twitter.

CoTweet also launched into public beta today — meaning anyone can now sign up for the service. Previously, CoTweet was an invite-only service, with invites being hard to snag.

Finally, CoTweet has announced that it has integrated directly with Bit.ly, enabling CoTweet users to access the real-time click tracking and analytics from the URL shortening service. CoTweet launched in 2008, and is based in San Francisco.

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Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that Wikipedia has a wealth of textual information but no videos and hardly any pictures? Take the Wikipedia article for Sony’s Rolly, for example, where the device is depicted as “an egg-shaped digital robotic music player.” If you have never seen a Rolly before, this cryptic description won’t help much. After reading about it in Wikipedia, you’ll then need to look it up on YouTube or Google Image Search to see what it actually looks like.

This is where a new service called Navify comes in. Launched in public beta today, Navify intends to enrich Wikipedia by adding pictures, videos and user comments to each article. And it actually works pretty well. Look up “Sony Rolly” using Navify and you not only get the original Wikipedia text but also hundreds of related pictures and videos (pulled in from Flickr and YouTube) by clicking on the tabs Navify puts on top of each article. Look up “Pulp Fiction” and the service retrieves the Wikipedia article itself plus screenshots, covers, posters and trailers from the movie. You get the picture.

The site is built upon Wikipedia’s platform with the idea of being a complementary media and discussion layer, similar to the way Friendfeed enables discussions about tweets originating from Twitter. Like Wikipedia, edits are anonymous; anyone can edit the images and videos associated with an article without registering an account. Navify CEO Alan Rutledge says what triggered development was the thought: “If people around the world can help each other by building a free collaborative encyclopedia, couldn’t we make it more useful for everyone by illustrating it together?”

What really sets Navify apart is the threaded comment system that allows visitors to discuss the nearly 3 million articles in the English database. Each article is a community waiting to happen- Barack Obama on Wikipedia received 770,000 visitors in the last month alone.

Just like Wikipedia, Navify appeals to a very broad target audience, but it looks like just the right online source for people like bloggers, journalists, scientists, students etc. who need to have various kinds of information and data related to a certain subject in one single place.

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A year and a half after launching at our first TechCrunch40 conference, document-sharing service is Docstoc is taking off its “beta” label with a homepage redesign, open APIs, and a new revenue-sharing model called DocCash. The service is growing at a healthy clip, with 3 million documents uploaded and 1.6 million unique visitors a month in the U.S., according to comScore. (The company’s internal Google Analytics shows 4.8 million unique visitors worldwide).

DocStoc is still much smaller than its rival Scribd, but hopes to catch up with some of its changes (as does Issuu, another document-sharing service that keeps adding features). In order to encourage more activity and higher-quality document uploads, DocStoc is introducing DocCash. The company will be splitting AdSense revenues 50/50 with anyone who uploads documents and wants to opt into the service. Right now the ads only appear on Docstoc pages, but will eventually include Flash ads in DocStoc’s embedded Flash player as well. (See video tutorial below).

DocStoc is also unveiling a new homepage with a much more blog-like feel. Featured documents a will be selected by an editorial team, more images will be highlighted, and different document categories are highlighted on the left (including business, technology, legal, and current events). Former TechCrunch writer and Website designer Mark Hendrickson worked on the new homepage. It looks much cleaner now, with topical documents and those related to breaking news now being highlighted (I’ve embedded Barack Obama’s tax return below—his income was $2.7 million last year!).

Finally, it is opening up its APIs so that other sites can integrate DocStoc functionality into their own sites. These APIs allow other sites to include previews and document embeds, document search, use DocStoc’s document viewer, and upload documents directly to DocStoc.

If DocStoc is ever going to catch up to Scribd, it will have to keep adding features and make sure the best docs are uploaded to it service. The APIs and DocCash might help, as well as little things like upload speeds (DocStoc seems faster to me). But with rising popularity also comes rising headaches. Already authors are beginning to complain about book piracy. Uploading copyrighted works is against the terms of service of both DocStoc and Scribd, but policing such usage becomes harder and harder with the number of documents getting into the millions.

Barack Obama 2008 Tax Return -

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Easily my favorite app on the Android platform is Imeem. It’s simple, fast and powerful, allowing you to listen to a huge range of music for free. And now it’s coming to the iPhone, we’ve learned.

The Imeem app has already been submitted for App Store approval and could be released any day, we’re hearing from a reliable source. In terms of what it will offer, you can probably expect it to be about the same as the Android version. That means access to Imeem’s library of music and perhaps more importantly, access to your own collection of songs from the cloud, if you use Imeem’s MyMusic service to put your music on their servers.

Of course, you have to pay for that. But if you’re willing to shell out $99 a year for their most premium plan, it means you can access 20,000 of your songs from your iPhone from anywhere (there are lower-cost version with less storage as well).That’s around 80GB of music, obviously a lot more than an iPhone or iPod touch can hold. But one tricky thing about this on the iPhone is its close ties with iTunes, which means that many of its users probably have some DRM-protected music, which won’t work over Imeem’s streaming service. But I assume the new iTunes Plus, DRM-free variety (which the entire iTunes store was recently converted to) will.

And I’m sure you’ll be able to buy new music you hear on the Imeem app with one click that takes you to the iTunes store on the iPhone. This has been working out pretty well for Pandora.

Cloud-based streaming of music makes a lot of sense. It gives you a single place to access your music from anywhere, without taking up valuable space on your devices. Lala is another service doing this with a still unreleased iPhone app that we got an early look at. It makes so much sense, in fact, that I suspect Apple will eventually get into this game as well. It almost has to with HD movies and television shows at some point because most people simply do not have enough storage space even on home systems to buy that content to their heart’s content — which of course, Apple would love. Naturally, Apple would want to have an option to pull your music off of the cloud to take on trips where you don’t have web access as well — that’s something that won’t work so easily with Imeem’s solution.

Imeem’s iPhone application will undoubtedly have another major downside that the Android version does not: The inability to run in the background. That’s one of the killer features of the Android version — I can turn it on and leave it on while I do something else. Compare this to Pandora on the iPhone which shuts off as soon as you exit it. Seeing as Apple doesn’t allow third-party apps to run in the background, that will be the case with Imeem too.

Still, given the range of music Imeem offers and this cloud-based option, I’m definitely looking forward to this iPhone app. The Android version actually won the Crunchie this year for Best Mobile Application — even beating out Pandora for the iPhone. Look for the iPhone version soon in the App Store.

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