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Posts Tagged ‘interactive’

My dialogue with those at the forefront of mobile, location based social networking continues here at SXSW Interactive 2010. Brightkite founders Brady Becker and Martin May were kind enough to take a moment and talk with me about some current and unreleased features of their service/software called Brightkite. They also showed me an unreleased demo of their new multi check-in web app. Stay tuned for some follow-up conversations soon.

We’ve talked a lot this week about the so-called “Location War” brewing at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas starting tomorrow. That war will happen, but actually, there are likely to be a lot of winners because a few of the location-based services should be able to leverage the exposure to gain usage after the conference. Those with real bloodlust should probably be watching another war: AT&T versus everyone in Austin on their network.

AT&T’s struggles to stay up last year are well-documented. CNN recently ran a piece about how AT&T hopes to avoid a similar fate this year. But actually, “struggles” is way too kind of a word. If you were at SXSW last year and happened to be on AT&T’s network — like, say, if you had an iPhone, like many festival-goers did — it was an absolute nightmare. You couldn’t make a call. You couldn’t send a text. Data? Ha. At a few points early on I seriously wondered if I had forgotten to pay my bill and AT&T had simply shut my phone off — except that it was happening to everyone.

AT&T has a funny word for the failure, they like to say “unprecedented.” As in, the usage of its network was at level previously unseen as a strong percentage of the over 10,000 festival goers (just the interactive part) were using iPhones. Well guess what? Word is that is year, there will be some 15,000 people there for the interactive part. As Samual L. Jackson’s character, Mr. Arnold, says in Jurassic Park, “Hold on to your butts.”

I’m leaving for Austin tomorrow and I’m terrified of what the AT&T situation will be when I get there. So much so, that I have a back-up plan (which Sprint sent me just in time to test out during SXSW after reading some of my rants against AT&T). With attendance up as much as 50% from the previous year, the number of iPhones in use is sure to be through the roof as well. Did I mention that just about every location-based service known to man is launching an app at the event and hoping every single one of those 15,000 people use it all the time? And based on the early signs, they intend to.

You’ll remember that after Mr. Arnold says the above line in the movie, he’s savagely ripped limb from limb by a velociraptor.

But there may be hope for AT&T. They’re clearly well aware of the failure last year, and did try to solve the issue to minimal effect towards the end of the conference. I asked a company representative what they’re planning to do this year, and they have a plan of attack.

Much of what they sent me is fairly technical, but basically, they now have a system around the Austin Convention Center (where SXSW takes place) that’s the equivalent of 8 cell sites, with 50 antenna nodes to cover the whole venue. Also, they’ve greatly expanded network capacity, moving from one radio network carrier to three, boosting the spectrum available for phones to use. They also say they’ve expanded the capacity of the so-called “high quality” 850 MHz spectrum, which works better indoors because those signals can go through walls more easily. They also have the new HSPA 7.2 software installed at all of the 3G cell towers now. But don’t be confused: that doesn’t mean their network has been upgraded to 7.2 Mbit/s speeds (sadly, at the peak, it’s still half that in almost all of the country), it just means that the upgraded software is in place and should be more reliable and efficient.

But there’s more. AT&T has brought in two Cells on Wheels (the so-called COWS that they brought in to help last year), and also a third rooftop temporary cell site. Each of these are equipped with both 3G and WiFi networks to help alleviate overall network strain. AT&T says these three cells are placed in optimal positions around the city of Austin where they expect the most strain.

All of that sounds great, but I’m still terrified. Why? Because I live in San Francisco. AT&T has known for months that the network is awful here, and while there have been baby steps taken to improve it in some areas, more often than not, it’s still awful. Take tonight, for example. So if AT&T knows it’s bad here, but still can’t seem to fix it, why should I believe Austin will be any different? I don’t. I’ll just have to hope I’m wrong.

Or I’ll have to kick back, relax, and take joy in the bloodbath as iPhones are magically turned into glistening bricks being hurled in anger left and right. As I boot up the Sprint Hotspot, of course.

[photo: universal pictures]

comScore has just released its US online video rankings for January 2010, and the results aren’t positive. Overall views dropped by around 2.5%, with  32.4 billion in January vs. 33.2 billion in December. And Hulu, which celebrated crossing the 1 billion view milestone for the first time in December, dipped back down to 903 million views. The drop can’t be blamed entirely on seasonality, either, — January 2009’s overall video views were up 4% over December 2008.  That said, video views are still up 119% year over year.

Rankingwise, there weren’t many changes. Google Sites (which is essentially YouTube) is still the reigning champion, with Hulu and Microsoft Sites still rounding out the top three. Fox Interactive Media fell from 4th to 6th place as its views dropped from 550 million December to 293 million in January — a drop of around 47%.

I suspect the drop in overall video growth will be shortlived, given the huge amount of video consumed online during the Olympics last month.

Here are the stats from January 2010:

And here are the stats from December 2009:

Former CEO of CBS Interactive Quincy Smith has joined with CBS Interactive EVP Michael Marquez and music industry veteran dealmaker Fred Davis to launch CODE Advisors, a new Silicon Valley and New York based investment bank.

As with all investment banks, CODE Advisors will look to advise companies on mergers and acquisitions and capital raising, for a fee. But the company also wants to be a long term partner for buyers and sellers, acting as a sort of outsourced business and corporate development group. This is something most banks promise, but few deliver on. Unless you’re a high velocity buyer like Google or Microsoft, in which case you get all the attention you want and more.

And these guys are certainly positioned to do that. Smith, Marquez and Davis are among the most connected people in the media and technology worlds. Smith and Marquez spearheaded the growth of CBS Interactive and its acquisitions of CNET and Last.fm, both of which are seen as successful buys, and both have deep experience in those industries.

Davis, a former music exec, is known for representing just about every online music venture over the last several years. When startups want to do business with labels and the other players in music, they go to Davis.

These guys literally know everybody. And they are also opinionated on which exactly what the world will look like when the old media and new media worlds finally collide. I sat down with the three partners on Tuesday for what I expected to be a 5-minute interview on the launch of CODE Advisors. When we were done, we had well over thirty minutes of footage. The conversation was mostly hovering around the future of online video and online music.

CODE Advisors already has several clients, including CBS, Comcast and Spotify (which was in the news yesterday).

We’ll have a full transcript of the video up later today, but the video is below.

Paris-based Semiocast, which helps brands understand and interact with real-time Web services, has performed a semantic and quantitative study of Twitter based on an analysis of 2.8 million tweets.

Turns out roughly half the tweets posted on the micro-sharing service are in English, down 25% from last year, even though the company is based in the U.S. and has more users and momentum in English-speaking countries than anywhere else on the planet. The analysis further showed that the top 5 languages used on Twitter are English, Japanese, Portuguese, Malay and Spanish.

Semiocast says the study was conducted on messages gathered over a period of 48 hours, from February 8 to February 10, with the sole aim of determining which languages were most often used on Twitter. The messages were processed with the company’s own analysis tools, which it says can identify the language used in short messages for some 41 languages, including Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, Tamil, etc.

English is still the most used language on Twitter, with 50% of messages, although Semiocast says this is a far cry from the two-third share they registered for English in the first half of 2009. Semiocast also forecasts that its share will grow thinner in the future, as Twitter becomes more internationalized (i.e. becomes available in more languages) and its pervasiveness spreads to Asia and Latin-America.

Japanese comes in second with 14% of messages. This isn’t all too surprising; Twitter has been addressing that market for almost two years now. The third most used language is Portuguese with 9% of all messages, mirroring the success of social networks in Brazil.

The rapid adoption of Twitter in Malaysia and Indonesia, where Twitter has partnerships with two mobile telcos in place, shows in the rankings as well. Malay languages, including Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia, now represent the fourth most used language on Twitter, with 6% of messages. Spanish comes in fifth with 4% of all messages.

The ranks six to eight are occupied by major European languages, namely Italian, Dutch and German, each accounting for about 1% to 2% of total messages. French represents a little less than 1% of total messages.

For your reference: Twitter earlier this week claimed that it was seeing about 50 million tweets per day now, so an analysis of less than 3 million messages measured over two days may not be super representative. Nevertheless, it only takes a peek at Twitter’s public timeline to see that there are lots of people using the service in a language other than English.

We recently came across The StartupBus, a Startup Weekend-like initiative, except that it involves a bus and a roadtrip. The program will bring together 12 strangers to drive from San Francisco to in Austin around the 12th of March, in time for the Interactive portion of the SXSW festival. The idea is for the entrepreneurs to present ideas and actually develop three different startups during the two to three day bus ride to Texas.

The founder of StartupBus, Elias Bizannes (he works for Vast.com) will handpick the twelve individuals. Bizannes thinks of it as a “startup camp” of sorts but on a bus. According to the StartupBus’s site, the bus will have lounges, bunk beds to rest, a kitchen, and WIFI. Any participating entrepreneur is required to put the startup they end up developing up for auction at the end of the process, to “enable people in the team to exit.”

A few weeks after the event, the entrepreneurs will hold an auction to buy the technology they’ve developed. StartupBus will also be holding an event at SXSW to present the ideas. This rule is designed to clear IP issues and reward the effort of those who are participating. About 20% of a final sale price will be put towards to cover costs of the experience. StartupBus is also looking to sponsors to help contribute to to event expenses. Bizannes says he already has enough people to fill the bus but needs to raise at least $10,000 to kick of the program.

As we’re written in the past, these sort of short-term, joint- startup development programs, such as StartupWeekend, can stir up emotions and controversy. We’ve seen more than a few situations that have occurred in the handful of cities that have had hosted a Startup Weekend event. And it’s no surprise that controversies will arise when a hundred or more people together for an intense working session and ideation, and money (in the form of stock) is potentially involved. Here’s a detailed description of how this has panned out in some cases.

Of course, the StartupBus only involves 12 people, so it has that in its favor. But, the entrepreneurs are stuck on a bus for a matter of days, in what sounds like a fairly enclosed space, which might exacerbate any tensions that are taking place. Details are still being ironed out, says Bizannes, but it should be interesting to see what comes out of the ambitious project.

Last year, Yahoo still dominated display advertising on the Web in terms of sheer number of ad impressions on its properties, but social networking sites MySpace and Facebook came on strong. Some new data from comScore in its just-released 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review ranks the top Web properties by the number of display ad impressions.

Yahoo served up an estimated 521 billion impressions last year, according to the report, followed by Fox Interactive Media (i.e. MySpace) with 368 billion, and Facebook with 330 billion. Microsoft sites (No.4) only served up 218 billion display ads, whereas Google (No. 6) served up only 70 billion. (These numbers do not include paid search text ads)

Here’s the full ranking:

Top Ten Publishers Of Display Ads
in billions of impressions (comScore)
1. Yahoo! Sites: 521 billion
2. Fox Interactive Media (MySPace): 368 billion
3. Facebook: 330 billion
4. Microsoft Sites: 218 billion
5. AOL: 192 billion
6. Google Sites: 7o billion
7. eBay: 36 billion
8. Glam Media: 25 billion
9. Amazon Sites: 22 billion
10. United Online: 20 billion

Obviously, the biggest sites with the most visitors serve up the most display ads. This year, Facebook doubled in size to the point where it is well past MySpace and catching up to Yahoo in audience size. It is already bigger than Yahoo in terms of pageviews.

Facebook has more advertising inventory than it knows what to do with, although not all of it is desirable. But Facebook is now selling all of its display ad inventory itself after it renegotiated its ad deal with Microsoft.

Biggest doesn’t mean most profitable. Facebook might be serving up more ads than almost anyone else, but they are still selling at very low ad rates because they perform poorly for the most part. If Facebook can figure out a way to make the ads on its site become more relevant and useful, it has a lot of room to boost its ad rates.

You can download the entire comScore report at this 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Reviewlink.

Since the launch of the Nexus One, early adopters have likely had one question lurking in the back of their minds: who to take the phone to if it broke. You see, when the phone was first launched, Google was directing people to either T-Mobile (Google’s carrier partner) or HTC (the device manufacturer) depending on the problem, which could lead to an endless circle of hold times and few results. Today, Google has just rolled out its solution: it’s launching its own phone support line specifically for Nexus One customers. Call 888-48-NEXUS (63987) and within a few minutes, you’ll be talking to a real live Google support tech (the line is open from 7AM to 10PM EST).

This is, of course, a fairly major departure from Google’s standard protocol of making it incredibly difficult to reach anyone for phone support for most of its products. It doesn’t come as a total surprise though — last week there were reports of a Google job listing for “Phone Support Program Manager, Android/Nexus One” to be based out of its headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

The news was first reported at TMO News, and we’ve gotten a response from a Google spokesperson explaining the company’s logic behind the support number:

By design, we focused initially on providing the best possible customer support through our on-line channel, and our experience in the four weeks since the Nexus One launch enabled us to significantly enhance that on-line support offering. We have been able to address a large majority of customers’ inquiries successfully through on-line support, in combination with phone support from our partners, HTC and T-Mobile. That said, our approach with our new consumer channel is to learn fast and continue to improve, and we have, therefore, also been developing our capabilities to provide a number from Google, 888-48-NEXUS (63987) for live phone support for the Nexus One. Live phone support from Google, combined with an optimized on-line support experience, enables a superior Nexus One customer experience.

In other words, Google probably would have liked to have gotten away with online-only support, but it quickly became clear that wasn’t going to cut it.

In other news, Google has also announced that the ETF charge for the phone is down to $150 from $350. But that’s still on top of T-Mobile’s $200 fee. The drop may have well been spurred by the ETF inquiry recently launched by the FCC.

We’re hitting the 2010 GSM World Mobile Congress again.

And TechCrunch Europe will be returning to Barcelona on Feb 17 for yet another interactive and live-video-streamed session.

We’ll be featuring some of the most innovative and interesting mobile startups and investors in Europe.

You can get your tickets to the event here.
Here’s the programme for the day so far.

Xsights is an Israeli startup that develops interesting technology that allows for transformation of static objects like billboards, posters, printed images and more into interactive multimedia experiences using your cellphone camera. Theoretically, you could use Xsights to dynamically obtain more information based on e.g. words from a newspaper article, a landmark, a photo of an actor on a movie poster, a street sign, etc.

This bares some resemblance to augmented reality applications for mobile phones, except that it’s not really real-time, since camera shots are analyzed in the background after saving photos to the phone.

By pointing the phone camera to objects and saving shots to the program, users should be able to gain information such as directions, prices, videos clips, audio files but also purchasing opportunities, digital coupons, and more.

At least, the technology seems interesting on paper. In reality, there’s a big caveat: all the associated content needs to be preset by third parties on beforehand. That means it currently doesn’t recognize stuff I tried to test the app, such as company logos (Sony), pictures of celebrities (Jennifer Connelly, Brad Pitt) and a couple of movie posters (easily identifiable ones like the ones for Batman and The Godfather). All I got was a cryptic error message because no one has associated the images with anything so far.

It’s a far cry from what the demo and this video makes the mobile application look capable of. Xsights is looking to set up B2B partnerships with publishers, other content providers and advertisers to expand their database of recognizable items.

Xsights is today also launching a user generated campaign for individual users, basically giving them the opportunity to add creative touches to their interactive experience by “attaching” video clips to invitations, greeting cards, photos or videos – making the associated interactive content personal.

Xsights is giving 1,000 TechCrunch readers exclusive invites to be the first users to upload to the UGC Campaign. Just head on over here; only TechCrunch readers will be able to upload at this point.

Additionally, users will now be able to watch trailers for new movies currently showing in local U.S. theaters by capturing an image of a movie poster with their camera phone. In contrast to my experience with random images, analyzing the posters listed here worked just fine.

Xsights supports 3 ways of connections: Video Call (clientless), iPhone, BlackBerry, and selected J2ME handsets, and also works with MMS on all mobile handsets equipped with a camera.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

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