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Posts Tagged ‘implementation’

Israeli startup Siano Mobile Silicon, a developer of mobile digital TV receiver chips, has just raised a $23.5 million in funding from Jerusalem Venture Partners, DFJ Tamir Fishman, Star Ventures, Walden Israel, and Bessemer Venture Partners. This brings the startup’s total funding to $75.5 million.

Founded in late 2004, Siano develops and markets silicon semiconductor chips for reception of digital TV on mobile, portable and hand-held devices. The company’s chips are mainly used for the implementation of mobile TV in emerging markets such as China, Brazil and Europe. The company supplies its chips to Samsung, Motorola, ZTE, Huawei, Mio, Garmin, Dell and others. The new funding will be used for product development and market expansion.

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Twitter has just activated the retweet button a a small number of accounts, according to a blog post. The new retweet functionality was originally announced back in August. Below, you’ll find a picture of what it was slated to look like when it was previewed back in September. (We haven’t actually seen this latest implementation yet, but feel free to send us screen shots if you are one of the lucky ones who has the retweet button activated.)

As we’ve written in the past, Twitter has been tweaking this new functionality for a while, making a pretty significant change to the API prior to launch. Previously, Twitter was requiring third party developers to check whether a tweet has already come in or not in any users’ stream to see if they should collapse it under the new retweet structure. Now, Twitter has built its own mechanism to check for those duplicate tweets into the API. This will ensure that only the first tweet is shown and the retweets go under it automatically.

We’ve already previewed how the new retweets will look in one third-party app, the as-yet-unreleased Tweetie 2.1. This implementation looks pretty nice, and is not as cluttered as the one previewed by Twitter itself.

Previously, it was also stated that the retweet function will only gather up to 100 retweets, which is limiting.

Here’s the text from Twitter’s post today:

“We’ve just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild. Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. In turn, we hope interesting, newsworthy, or even just plain funny information will spread quickly through the network making its way efficiently to the people who want or need to know.

You may remember that we shared the mechanics of this feature with developers a while back so they could think about how to work it into Twitter apps. Now we’re ready to start trying it on Twitter. The plan is to see how it goes first with this small release. If it needs more work, then we’ll know right away. If things look good, we’ll proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100%.”

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Twitter’s Trending Topics area is one of the easiest things to game on the web. Even when trends start out as real items, spammers often latch onto them with bogus tweets hoping to ride the wave and get some people seeing their spammy nonsense. Today, Twitter is acknowledging this.

In a post on its blog, Twitter notes that the “noisiness of the conversation” has led Trends to be less interesting. So beginning today they’re going to be experimenting with ways to surface more relevant tweets in this area. While they don’t come out and say it, the implication here seems pretty clear: They’ll be in some way curating the topics and the tweets. It’s not clear if this will be algorithmic or manual yet.

Actually, Twitter has kind of been doing this with topics for a while. When a spammy topic gets into Trends, Twitter quite often will remove it. But this sentence, “Specifically, we’re working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful,” seems to suggest that it will be curating tweets within trending topics as well. And that it may even in some way rank tweets to show more relevant ones for the topic at hand.

Twitter notes that users may not notice the improvements at first, but soon they will. Their wording is also interesting in that they note that this is about “unearthing more value in search.” Again, that would seem to suggest that Twitter is thinking about the bigger picture of how to rank tweets based on relevancy (not just in Trending Topics). That could be by user authority, which has been a sticky issue in the past.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

During the video interview with OpenID evangelist Chris Messina I recorded earlier this year at a German conference about the state of OpenID, he expressed his wish that the Obama administration would soon start to embrace the decentralized, single sign-on method as a way for citizens to engage with the U.S. government online. Four months later, it looks like his dreams are becoming reality.

Later this morning at the Gov 2.0 Summit, Federal Government CIO Vivek Kundra will talk about data.gov and other governmental transparency initiatives, and will also be making an announcement regarding the launch of a open identity initiative featuring the use of both OpenID and InfoCards in a special pilot program.

Make no mistake about it: this has the potential to change the way citizens participate in and communicate with the U.S. government.

The OpenID Foundation has recently published a letter from executive director Don Thibeau as well as a fairly detailed white paper (PDF) on the subject of open frameworks for open governments that you might want to read for background. While the ‘Participating Providers in the U.S. Government Pilot Program’ section on the OpenID Foundation’s website hasn’t gone live yet, the Information Card Foundation provides more details about the pilot program on its blog.

Google, Yahoo, PayPal, AOL, VeriSign, Citi, Equifax, Acxiom, Privo and Wave Systems will be the ten organizations to act as digital identity providers using OpenID and Information Card technologies in the first pilot programs designed for the American public to engage in open government.

The programs are being conducted by the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. The participating companies are said to be getting certification under non-discriminatory open trust frameworks developed under collaboration between the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) and the Information Card Foundation (ICF) and reviewed by the federal government.

As an example, we have learned that VeriSign – a founding member of the OpenID Foundation – will serve as an identity provider for a pilot program with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services and regarded as one of the world’s foremost medical research centers as well as the Federal focal point for health research. Thanks to this implementation, citizens will be able to more easily provide input on public policy and access their own tax and Social Security records with OpenID:

In essence, this initiative will help transform government websites from basic “brochureware” into interactive resources, saving individuals time and increasing their direct involvement in governmental decision making. OpenID and Information Card technologies make such interactive access simple and safe. For example, in the coming months the NIH intends to use OpenID and Information Cards to support a number of services including customized library searches, access to training resources, registration for conferences, and use of medical research wikis, all with strong privacy protections.

Dr. Jack Jones, NIH CIO and Acting Director, CIT, notes, “As a world leader in science and research, NIH is pleased to participate in this next step for promoting collaboration among Assurance Level 1 applications. Initially, the NIH Single Sign-on service will accept credentials as part of an “Open For Testing” phase, with full production expected within the next several weeks. At that time, OpenID credentials will join those currently in use from InCommon, the higher education identity management federation, as external credentials trusted by NIH.”

Likely, we’ll learn more from Vivek Kundra’s scheduled speech at the Gov 2.0 Summit later today, but one thing is crystal clear: this is a big win for both the OpenID Foundation and the Information Card Foundation.

Who would have predicted say, 5 years ago, that you would some day be able to use commercial identities on government websites?

P.S.: also read Tim O’Reilly’s guest post on Gov 2.0 as a platform.

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When in the course of human events people lose their jobs and their ways to pay for bags of random stuff and close-out smoke detectors, it behooves all good men to approach shopping site Woot.com with trepidation and distrust. The result? A steady decline in traffic from the post-holiday period of 2009 until about May 2009. Now, however, that is changing. If I can draw your attention to this graph, you’ll notice that yes, traffic is going up. Everything is going to be OK.

The general trend at Woot has been heading down since 2008 and seems to be rolling back up this summer. Obviously none of this stuff is set in stone and absolutely accurate but it’s fairly clear that Woot is turning around. But what does this mean?


Woot is obviously cyclical and is a direct pointer to the pocket change of a certain technical class who may be interested in lasers and walkie-talkies from China that didn’t sell. That said, one would assume said walkie-talkies would be more desirable when you’re in a job than when you’re out of one and/or when you have a little disposable income.

So to recap: Woot traffic took a dive in January and is slowly creeping up. This means it is more popular. As it is a shopping site I suspect the folks visiting aren’t like street urchins in some Victorian novel, their noses pressed up against the glass of a sweet shop dreaming of toffees and crumbles. They are actually shopping.

In short, while I wouldn’t stake my dissertation on this trend, Woot’s ability to predict a financial rebound should not be dismissed and that trend is going up. Also they’re selling a Bluetooth headset with case right now for $30 clams. Not a bad price.

[Thanks, Thomas!]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The CEA represents the CE industry and runs CES. The CE industry likes to make and ship thing but it doesn’t like to recycle them.

More here: 
CEA members don’t like carting away garbage, try to beat NYC recycling laws

Today, Yahoo died as a search engine. If the deal with Microsoft is approved, what will replace it will be Bing, the search engine that Microsoft launched only two months ago. Within a few months time, Microsoft will go from owning 8 percent of the U.S. search market to 28 percent (comScore). That is still less than half of Google’s 65 percent, but it could give Microsoft a fighting chance in the search wars against Google.

While the agreement was a long time coming, Bing was the cherry on top, so to speak. Earlier today, I spoke with the two executives who oversaw the negotiations for both sides, Yahoo EVP Hillary Schneider and Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi. I asked how big an impact Bing’s sudden success had on bringing the deal to a close. “Seeing Bing as a live experience was a nice assurance,” says Schneider, “but did not change our rationale or timing. This was a conversation that went on over several months. Bing was introduced after we had material momentum in how we wanted to approach this partnership.”

Yet Bing was able to gain market share in its very first month, and it took it from Yahoo, not Google. And Bing is just going to get better. Yahoo faced the very real prospect of market share erosion from below as well as from above. Now in one fell swoop, Microsoft will control all of Yahoo’s search volume. In a conference call today, Steve Ballmer explained how important market share is in search:

Do we think we will have better algorithms for relevance? Yes we do. There is a feedback loop in search. the more searches you serve, the more you learn about what people click on. Scale drives knowledge. There is a return to scale from seeing that much activity than Yahoo or Microsoft sees independently.

Microsoft will measure the success of this deal in two ways: increased market share with advertisers and increased market share with consumers. When I asked Mehdi what success would look like a couple years out, he defines it in terms of “shares of queries and spends.” Even before mentioning gaining share with consumers, he says: “Success is a smooth transition for advertisers as they shift more share of wallet from traditional media and competitors to get the better ROI.”

Microsoft will also become the new home for Yahoo’s search technologies. That is a good thing because even before this deal was announced, the spirit of technology innovation at Yahoo which produced projects such as Yahoo Boss and Search Monkey seems to have fizzled. These efforts will now be passed on to Microsoft. The fortunate news is that Mehdi says he wants to keep those projects alive. “For Search Monkey and Boss, we will integrate that technology and determine how to take that forward. There is a lot of goodness there.” At least Microsoft knows a good developer platform when it sees one.

So the deal is good for Microsoft. It puts them in the game, and they didn’t even have to pay $1 billion upfront. But is it good for Yahoo?

Instead of that upfront payment, Yahoo is getting 88 percent of search advertising revenues on Yahoo-owned sites every year for the next five years (at which point the so-called TAC rate will be renegotiated for the last five years of the deal). “This is a materially higher TAC than any of the previous arrangements,” says Schneider. But it’s also not much higher than what big affiliates like AOL are believed to be getting from Google today. And Yahoo needs to keep paying its sales force, but can only keep 88 percent of the revenues they generate. (Although there are some revenue-per-search guarantees baked into the deal to protect Yahoo on the downside).

Investors aren’t thrilled with the deal, and it is not just because they tend to value cash over potential. This is a ten-year arrangement between two lumbering giants that is filled with execution risk. It is a very complicated deal. Yahoo’s sales team has enough trouble communicating with its own engineers. Now they have to learn how to talk to Microsoft’s.

The two companies will work hard to pull this off. Their futures depend on it. And the deal is structured in a way that makes sure both sides make more money the more searches and advertising dollars Bing generates. Getting to that ideal state, though, won’t be easy. In the meantime, as they work through all of the implementation issues, Google could strengthen its position and take even more share.

No matter what happens, Yahoo just took itself out of the search game. It got Binged.

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Time Warner released it second quarter results today, and the numbers aren’t good. Overall, revenue was down 9% versus the year-ago period as poor results from the publishing, film and yes, AOL dragged down the numbers for all. CEO Jeff Bewkes remarks are telling:

At the same time, we’re continuing the reshaping of Time Warner that we started last year. We’re on track to spin off AOL to our stockholders around the end of the year. Separating AOL will benefit both companies – enabling Time Warner to concentrate fully on our core content businesses and improving AOL’s operational and strategic flexibility.

That’s three AOL mentions in three sentences. Clearly, Time Warner is happy to let everyone know that it will only have a couple more quarters of dealing with that division’s nosedive.

How bad was AOL this quarter? Revenues dropped 24%, to $804 million, versus the year-ago period. The service saw a 21% decrease in advertising revenues, attributable to both display and search ads on its own sites, as well as on third-party sites using its platform.

And the loss of dial-up subscribers continues to hurt the company. It lost over a half million in this past quarter, and some 2.3 million from the year-ago period. Revenues from subscriptions declined 27% from the year-ago period.

In preparation for the AOL spin-off, Google recently sold back its 5% stake in the company, at a $700 million discount from its initial $1 billion investment. However, thanks to the search deal over these past several years, it looks as if Google was much closer to break-even on the deal.

And while AOL’s numbers were awful, Time Warner’s print and film divisions hardly fared better. The print division headed up by Time, saw a 26% decrease in ad revenue from the year-ago period, and an 18% decrease in subscription revenue.

Meanwhile, the film division was hurt by the slide in DVD sales. While movies like The Hangover exceeded expectations at the box office, those profits were wiped out by DVD numbers being down across the board.

Highlighting The Hangover in the results is interesting. One could say Time Warner’s experience with AOL these past several years after the $164 billion mega (or perhaps “drunken”) merger in 2001 (remember, it was AOL that actually bought Time Warner at the time), has been similar to The Hangover. Based on the repurchasing price Time Warner paid for Google’s AOL stock, AOL is now worth less than $6 billion.

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The web has been abuzz the past few weeks with chatter about Microsoft’s announcement today at its Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans about the new version of Microsoft Office 2010 . There’s even a mini-movie about its debut.

See original here:
Everything you want to know about Office 2010

Every year at Basel, the big watch show in Switzerland, companies trot out their latest R&D projects along with a plethora of new watches. The watches are what sell but the R&D products are what get the press

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Machine à Ecrire le Temps: French for “You have too much money”