The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘platform’

Every year, we come across dozens of new applications looking to capitalize on March Madness, when millions of basketball fans across the country try to predict the outcome of the heated 65-team NCAA tournament. One new app that’s launching today is called tweetBracket, which gives users an extremely easy way to share their picks with their Twitter followers. The application, while basic, is notable because it’s a preview of the technology being built by a Y Combinator startup called 140bets.

Using tweetBracket is simple. You sign in to Twitter using oAuth, and are presented with a random matchup from today’s games. Click the team you think will win, optionally tweet your choice to your followers, and repeat. The game keeps track of your picks throughout the tournament, and prizes are being awarded to the people with the most correct predictions for each round.

tweetBracket is built off of the platform that 140bets is currently developing, which makes it easy to build apps around a binary interface (the company has also put together a similar app for American Idol fans called Tweet Idol). CEO Jason Wilk says that the platform is still early in development, but that eventually it will be used for more real-time interaction (for example, you might keep it open as you watch a game and predict whether or not a player is going to make the free throw he’s about to take).

A few days ago we wrote about Mel Sampat, a member of the Windows Phone 7 development team who had chosen to leave the team to pursue his own endeavors, part of which included making third-party apps for the very platform he helped make. You might assume that his history with the platform would make developing things for it a bit easier — and, well, you’d probably be right.

Just two days after the general availability of the Windows Phone 7 development tools, Sampat’s company Mist Labs has just announced their first Windows Phone 7 application: Twikini. Besides being the company’s first app, it also gets to claim to be the first Twitter client announced for the platform.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

During his keynote at SXSW this afternoon (live blog here), Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced a new “At Anywhere” platform, which allows websites to more deeply integrate the service into their sites. The idea is to offer a more seamless experience to Twitter users navigating third party sites like the Huffington Post and the New York Times, giving them Twitter content without forcing them to jump off the page they’re currently viewing. The details on the new platform are still scant, but this is Twitter’s answer to Facebook Connect, which we reported on back in January.

Among the features:

• When you browse a site that uses @anywhere, people and brands that have Twitter accounts will be highlighted with a hyperlink. Mousing over that hyperlink will show a small box (a “hovercard”) containing their Twitter information, including their most recent tweet (in effect it means you don’t have to click over to Twitter’s homepage to see their Twitter profile)
• Publishers will be able to more deeply integrate their own Twitter profiles, making them easier for their readers to ‘follow’ them
• Sites will be able to implement @anywhere with a few lines of Javascript.
• The new platform is launching with a number of major sites and services, including the New York Times, Huffington Post, Meebo, Amazon, Yahoo, Bing, and eBay.

It looks like the platform may eventually be hosted at Twitter.com/anywhere, which currently features a placeholder Twitter account that tweeted “Stay Tuned”. Update This may actually be a Twitter account related to the platform — it just tweeted “If you’re a javascript guru and want to help us build @anywhere and work with publishers @jointheflock”.

From the Twitter blog:

We’ve developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.

When we’re ready to launch, initial participating sites will include Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page—and that’s just the beginning. Twitter has proven to be compelling in a variety of ways. With @anywhere, web site owners and operators will be able to offer visitors more value with less heavy lifting.

In an effort to sort out the state of the “Location War” going on here at SXSW Interactive 2010, I have been lucky enough to chat with several people behind the scenes of these mobile location based services. It’s funny to me calling the competition a “War” as everyone with whom I have spoken seems incredibly mellow and down-to-earth but there is a potential definitive moment going on here for that industry. I was able to catch up with Gowalla co-founder Josh Williams and talk a bit about the current state of Gowalla and their mobile app. Standby for more interviews with the some of the competition and a part 2 video of my conversation with Josh.

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.

Cascaad, which is billed both as an ‘awareness engine’ and a ’smart social media browser’ by the Italian startup behind the service, aims to make the realtime streams you tap into more about you.

Essentially, the tool is designed to filter the never-ending incoming message stream from your friends and millions of others by continuously distilling which part of the chatter is about stories, things and places that match your specific interests, context and social affinities.

Here’s how the service, currently only available as a beta iPhone app (iTunes link), gets pitched in their own words:

The goal is to potentiate your extended awareness of what is happening right now of personal relevance in your world. It is basically a very sophisticated realtime networked search, discovery and filter engine that distills automatically what both your friends and millions of other people are paying attention to on Twitter and other social platforms into the attention-grabbing stories, things and places that match personal interests and social affinities.

Cascaad will soon be releasing a full-fledged Web-based experience, and the company is also working on integrating new data sources and capabilities, including location awareness, as well as extending the platform’s reach. Last week, Cascaad released its first beta of what it calls the SuperTweet API, which it says will allow third-party Twitter applications to “add smart contextual information and monetization [...], including semantic entity markup, nonintrusive in-text affiliate commerce links, related content [and] social relevance scores”.

The startup was founded in 2008 by Erik Lumer (PhD Stanford, formerly at Xerox Parc and founder and ex-CEO of Internet TV startup Babelgum). The company’s R&D unit is based in Milan, employs 8 people and will be opening an office in Silicon Valley some time this quarter.

Cascaad has raised close to $2 million in financing over two rounds (one in November 2009, and one last month) from Italian VC firm Innogest Capital.

Another venture-backed startup doing similar things is Israel-based my6sense.

In the months following the iPhone App Store’s launch in July 2008, it became clear that the platform was turning into a gold rush.  Success stories of one-man companies earning $250,000 in a few months became common. And even though the odds of striking it rich were clearly much lower than the media portrayed, a huge surge of developers started building iPhone applications. Android Market, where meager sales have been the norm, was left in the dust.

Now Android Market is getting its own glimmers of hope. Edward Kim, who built the application “Car Locator” around five months ago, has just announced that he’s pulling in $13,000 a month from the application, which “started as a little side-project while [he] was vacationing with [his] family”.

Kim writes that the free version of the application has been downloaded around 70,000 times, while the paid application has been downloaded 6,590 times. The price was initially $1.99, but he moved it up to $3.99 (he notes that despite doubling the price, the number of downloads didn’t decrease too much).

So what was Kim’s secret to success? Well, a big part of it seems to have come from the fact that Car Locator is now a featured app on Android Market, which means Google more prominently displays it to users than ‘normal’ applications. Getting featured increased the app’s revenue by over four fold. This probably comes as bittersweet news to developers (you can’t exactly count on being featured by Google), but Kim says that he’s ranked between 100 and 200th place in the Market’s ‘Paid’ category, which means that there are probably at least 100 other applications seeing similar success.  Android Market is still far behind the App Store in many respects (except for openness), but it looks like it’s finally starting to mature.

Kim is very optimistic about the future of the platform, telling me “Android appears to have grown enough that developers can make some money off of it, but there’s not SO many developers that you’ll never get noticed.”

Here are some of Kim’s other observations:

• The application was netting an average of about $80-$100/day, until it became a featured app on the Marketplace. Since then, sales have been phenomenal, netting an average of $435/day, with a one day record of $772 on Valentine’s Day. Too bad I didn’t have a Valentines date this year — we would’ve gone somewhere real special!
• There appears to be clear peaks on the weekends and during holidays. This was always my hunch, but I think I can finally say this with certainty since the signal-to-noise ratio is much better now.
• Some may be quick to point out that a featured Android application is only able to net $400/day, while top iPhone apps make thousands. But the Android market appears to rotate applications in and out of the featured apps list in some psedo-random fashion. Every time I open the Marketplace app, the featured list is different and most of the time, I don’t even see my app on there.
• The price of the application was increased from $1.99 to $3.99. I ran a few price experiments and was surprised to see that though I doubled the price of the app, the number of purchases decreased by much less than half. Android users appear to have a willingness to pay more than a couple dollars for apps.
• Piracy appears to be an increasing problem. A quick search for Car Locator on Twitter reveals links where people can download the .apk file without paying. I tend to have the same attitude on piracy as Balsamiq, so I’m not too worried about it, but I would love to hear some typical statistics on Android piracy.

For web publishing startups like Scribd and DocStoc, premium content is the viable business model to monetize their platforms. For example. Scribd has signed a number of deals with publishers to sell online books to users on the site. Today, DocStoc is officially opening up its premium content channel, called the DocStore, addressing a lightly different sector, with a focus on selling professional documents to businesses and individuals.

DocStoc’s CEO and founder Jason Nazar says the one of the platform’s fastest growing user base segments are small business owners looking for free and paid documents for entrepreneurs, startups and professionals. Documents range from legal documents to real estate contracts to analysis to forms for business models. The DocStore also features documents in a variety of formats, including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files. The marketplace has been open to select partners since last summer (including TechCrunch), but today will mark its public debut.

On the seller side, the DocStore allows document sellers, such as LegalZoom, Career Press, and BK Publishers, to keep 100 percent of their sales for the first 60 days of a document’s lifetime on DocStoc. After that, DocStoc takes 50 percent of the sale price. DocStoc powers all of the payments (which can be made through credit cards) on the site and returns payments to sellers via check or PayPal. Sellers can sell their documents separately, or bundle them together as packages. For example, a business plan package could include an Excel spreadsheet, a PowerPoint presentation and a Word document. And sellers can monitor their sales, documents through a customized dashboard with reports, conversion rates and analytics. Nazar says that DocStoc vets all sellers and documents to ensure that each document is legitimate.

DocStoc will also be adding the ability for anyone to embed widgets with the for sale documents in blogs to collect affiliate fees, similar to the Amazon model. Affiliate revenue will be deducted from DocStoc’s 50 percent share of the ale, not the Seller’s sale. Lazar says that DocStoc is working to maximize conversion rates for sales, even offering a 1-800 customer service hotline for any potential buyers who have questions about documents for sale. And sellers can choose to turn of ads on pages where they are selling documents.

Additionally, Nazar says DocStoc will be adding more of its own self-curated content to to the platform, which will be available to users who have a paid subscription to the site. Users will soon have immediate access to over 1000 documents, which range from what to do when you get a DUI to marital settlement agreements.

With 3 million registered users, DocStoc is now profitable. Nazar says that the company is seeing 20 million uniques per month and is growing rapidly as a business focused site. It makes sens for DocStoc to cater to the professional community and its marketplace seems like a good bet, especially with the affiliate ecosystem.

Startup PBWorks, which was formerly known as PBwiki, specializes in helping businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions collaborate via wikis. The startup has been steadily adding real-time features to its platform over the past year, most recently integrating Twitter-like microblogging, tapping into the real-time stream and adding a template store. Today, PBworks is adding another collaborative feature: PBVoice, which is click-to-call conferencing from within the platform.

The platform, which received, an overhaul of its user interface and features last year, offers businesses a project management application and a customized wiki workspace, with mobile support, document management, access controls and more. Now, users can make a conference call from within the platform by simply clicking the names of the desired participants. Unlike most conferencing calls, there’s no dial-in number; PBVoice will call all the participants. Users can add new participants at any time, and each conference call is recorded and stored for later use and review. You can also send the recording of the call to any participants.

The beauty of the integration is that the conference calling feature is an extension of the collaboration platform. Users can call anyone with a single click who already has a PBworks profile or manually dial in any number. PBworks Voice runs on the open source FreeSWITCH telephony platform and phone systems are hosted in PBworks’ own datacenter.

For now calling is limited to the U.S. and Canada but the startup plans to enable international calls in the future. PBworks is launching a free beta period of the service today which is capped at 200 minutes for the next month. When the beta finishes, all PBworks paid subscriptions will automatically come with 200 minutes per month. For nationwide calls, 300 min per user per month will cost $5 per user. 2000 minutes for nationwide calling will amount to $20 per user per month.

Currently, PBworks manages 1 million hosted workspaces with over 3 million active users and has accumulated a loyal client base. The company serves teams from many of the Fortune 500, and was home to three presidential campaigns, the United Nations, The Financial Times and Harvard University. Like Salesforce, PBworks is a paid subscription service, with no advertising. The company has raised nearly $2.5 million in funding, with its most recent funding round of $2.1 million announced in 2007. Competitors include Microsoft Sharepoint, Jive, and Socialtext.