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Posts Tagged ‘wikipedia’

You know all those share buttons across the Web? They are getting more and more social. What I mean by that is initially they were used to share stories or content mostly via email on a one-to-one basis, but over the past year or so services like Facebook and Twitter have been overtaking the way people use those buttons to share stories, videos, images, and links.

The way most people interact with these button is through widgets on publisher’s sites. But one of the largest sharing button networks, ShareThis, is about to turn that around and introduce a Share Stream which shows you what your Facebook friends are sharing across the Web. Soon your Twitter followers will be added as well (at launch you will only be able to see what everyone is sharing across Twitter). Of course, the Share Stream is also available as a customizable widget to show on any site.

A link at the bottom of each ShareThis widget will invite you to find out what your friends are sharing. When you click on it, you will be taken to a Share Stream where you can log in using your Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Yahoo IDs. There you will see what your else people are sharing from the site you just came from or about the same topic as the page you were on. The Share Stream can be filtered by trending or real-time topics, by source, by what everyone is sharing, or only by what your friends are sharing.

ShareThis gets its data from the 130,000 sites which use its sharing buttons and collectively reach 430 million unique visitors a month. Its No.1 competitor AddThis is somewhat bigger, but ShareThis recognizes the same users across sites and creates a semantic index of the every page where its buttons are placed. Using a taxonomy based on Wikipedia categories, ShareThis can figure out the topics associated with each page that is shared. Thanks to this topic knowledge, ShareThis can suggest other pages on related topics which are also being shared by your friends or more generally.

CEO Tim Schigel plans to create an ad network of sorts which will let publishers and advertisers target ads to people based on what they are sharing based on browser cookie data (yup, every time you share, you are being tracked, anonymously). He keeps data on engagement levels after people share content, and while the pageviews resulting from each click are still highest for email, Facebook is catching up. And Facebook has a bigger multiplier effect (on average three different people click on each shared link versus just one for email) which puts it over the top in terms of impact. Twitter’s multiplier effect is six times higher (18 clicks per link), but its engagement levels are much lower.

More importantly, people who follow a link from Facebook, says Schigel, “are 50 percent more engaged,” on average, than people who find the same page from search. Intuitively that makes sense because there is more hit or miss with search results compared to following a suggested link from someone you trust.

Like other sharing networks, ShareThis has seen Facebook soar to 42 percent of all sharing, beating out email (at 40.7 percent) for the first time in February. Twitter represents 8.7 percent of all sharing via the ShareThis button. So the Share Stream pretty much already exists on Facebook and Twitter alone.

A total of 19 Japanese startups were given the chance to show their services at TokyoCamp, a demo event held by TechCrunch Japan (one of the country’s biggest blogs) this Friday. The event, which was co-organized by hosting company KDDI Web Communications, was a blast and attracted over 200 people this time.

This was the third TokyoCamp (see here and here for my previous reports), and here are short profiles of all the startups that presented there. (Please note not all of the services offer English homepages.)

Demo 1:
AQUSH by Exchange Corporation
Launched by Tokyo-based Exchange Corporation in December last year, AQUSH is a peer-to-peer lending service that is similar to ZOPA in the UK. AQUSH aims to unlock some of the more than US$7 trillion of retail cash and bank deposits (that are earning nearly 0% interest) by offering individual investors access to the US$300 billion Japanese consumer loan market.

Lenders set their desired investment amount and interest rates from 4% to 15% for 5 classes of borrower credit risk, as denoted by AQUSH itself. AQUSH loan applicants are screened based on their credit histories, financial situation and FICO scores.

The service has been in operation for 2 months and so far the average annualized ROI for investors is 10.58% after fees. AQUSH says for borrowers, interest rates range between 25% to 50% cheaper than available from specialized consumer lending companies.

If you can read Japanese, there’s an in-depth (and fairly recent) article on AQUSH on TechCrunch Japan.

Demo 2:
Maysee by Mogura
Japan is business card country, which means that your average salary man collects hundreds of these cards in any given year. Maysee is a service that scans business cards for clients, corrects OCR errors manually and makes the data accessible via PCs or mobile phones through a web app (for $20 per month per user/$0.35 per business card). The company is currently looking for business partners overseas.

Demo 3:
Sketch Piston by Team Lab
Sketch Piston is the name of a “new game genre” created by Tokyo-based Team Lab. There are two “Sketch Action” games available at the moment, Sketch Piston 3 and 4 (both of which were made for Team Lab clients). Players can interact with characters in the Flash games by “sketching” various objects with a virtual pen, stamp and eraser. The games have no goal per se, but users can make and share creative gameplay videos on a dedicated platform.

Demo 4:
Cacoo by Nulab
Cacoo is a what appears to be a powerful online drawing tool that allows multiple users to create designs collaboratively and in real-time. The designs can be shared with certain users or published on the web, for example on blogs or wiki sites. If you make changes to the designs in Cacoo, the blog or wiki the designs were pasted into gets updated automatically and in real-time, meaning there is no need for another upload.

Mainly made for technical illustrations (wireframes, software design diagrams, network diagrams, UMLs etc.), Cacoo is completely browser-based, free and available in English.

Demo 5:
Link Knowledge by SAN SAN
Link Knowledge is an SaaS solution with a focus on CRM and SFA (sales force automation). Much like Maysee (profiled above), Link Knowledge digitizes information found on printed business cards, puts the data into context and stores it in the cloud for customers who can then access their data from anywhere they want.

Demo 6:
Wishcovery
Wishcovery aims at matching people who have the right skills with those who have uploaded requests or project proposals on the site. The service is scheduled to launch in alpha in April. TechCrunch Japan covered Wishcovery just last month after it won the “TechCrunch Japan Award” at the first Startup Weekend Tokyo event.

Demo 7:
Conyac by anydooR
Dubbed “social translation service”, Conyac is actally based on a virtual currency called “Conyac Points”. The way it works is that “requesters” need to pay a certain fee upfront, upload a text and indicate which languages the text should be translated into. Registered translators (who don’t need to get screened or examined) translate texts they think they can handle to earn Conyac points. Those points can then be converted into real money via Paypal, with the service itself getting a 20% cut.

Demo 8:
LIFEmee
TechCrunch50 demopit company LIFEmee presented a revamped version of their eponymous life management service that will go live early next month. Expect less clutter, a simplified UI, fresh features (i.e. a scheduler) and a new mobile version (scheduled for release next month).

Demo 9:
Mangaroo by Mobakids
Mangaroo is a free, social manga service that allows comic artists (amateurs and professionals alike) to upload and share self-created works with other users. Readers can just read the comics, leave comments, bookmark their favorite manga or rate them.

Here’s how a typical “e-comic”, submitted by a Mangaroo member, looks like (click to enlarge):

Each manga is based on Flash and can be embedded in other websites.

Demo 10:
meme memo by meme design
meme memo is a free, Flash-based “pin board” that can be covered with “virtual Post-its”. Each user can set up to ten pin boards (folders) and embed up to 1,000 Post-its (“cards”) to scrape, organize and share various information. Some cards require work by the users themselves (i.e. the ToDo card or the address book), but others get updated automatically once you add them to your folder (i.e. the Twitter card or the RSS card). Apart from pure text, it’s also possible to add videos (YouTube card), images or audio files to the pin board.

Demo 11:
TwitCasting Live by sidefeed
As one of the few iPhone apps that were shown at TokyoCamp, Twitcasting Live (iTunes link) is a free Twitter client that lets you broadcast (video and audio) live through your Twitter account. The app splits the iPhone screen in half: You can see what you currently broadcast on the top and access your Twitter timeline on the bottom. When you start the recording, Twitcasting tweets a link to your followers who can watch the live broadcast on their PCs or iPhones. The app works with both 3G and Wi-Fi and supports the 3G as well as the 3GS (click here for a demo video).

Demo 12:
Bang Me! by DigitalNomad
Let me explain the name first: Bang Me! is a wordplay of sorts on the Japanese word for “program” or “show”, which is pronounced “ban-gu-mi” (seriously). Provider DigitalNomad is marketing the downloadable software as a dead-simple video editing tool for beginners or online businesses that don’t have the budget to produce flashy promo videos.

Bang Me! was featured on TechCrunch Japan last month and appeared to be much better than the name suggests (I was told they will change it when the software goes on sale internationally).

Demo 13:
Hanashirabe by Knowledge System
In case you ever stumbled upon a flower whose name you either forgot or were interested to know, Hanashirabe is the solution for you. Just upload a picture of the flower in question, crop it, specify when you took it and the “flower recognition engine” will reveal the name of the flower in a heartbeat (demo video).

Demo 14:
Talknote
Pitched as “Yammer for private use”, Talknote is a micro social communication service that has yet to launch. The main selling point of the service is that it enables multiple users to text-chat across a number of different devices – virtually in real-time. Talknote will be the first service that allows iPhone users to communicate with owners of regular Japanese handsets this way (PCs, Symbian, Blackberry, Android etc. will eventually be supported as well). The conversations are stored as “talknotes” and can be accessed again anytime later. I was able to play around with the iPhone version, which looked pretty nifty already.

Demo 15:
Qlippy by SpinningWorks
Presented for the first time at TokyoCamp, Qlippy is an iPad application that extends to the web in the form of a social network for book lovers. The app will let users download EPUB-based ebooks off the web to read on the iPad. Provider SpinningWorks says readers will also be able to clip pictures or texts on the iPad to create their own scrapbooks. The clipped elements and scrapbooks can be shared with other people on the Qlippy website (demo video).

Here is an early screenshot (click to enlarge):

Demo 16:
waarp by Waaotn
Korean transplant Dong Yol Lee has presented a very early version of waarp, his 3D audio augmented, “eyes-free” social network system that eliminates the need for a visual UI.

Demo 17:
Video Analytics by sus4
Video Analytics is a freemium-based “Google Analytics for video” that’s especially geared towards e-commerce and education sites. The tool helps to analyze how visitors view videos by breaking down which keywords from search engines are the most effective, how many times a certain video was accessed, how many users watched it from beginning to end, at which points users pushed the stop button etc. All data is visualized online through a Google Analytics-like dashboard.

Demo 18:
mindia
mindia wants to be the online “encyclopedia of your mind”. The main idea behind the service is to provide a platform for people to share their viewpoints on any given keyword with the world (in Japanese, at least). Unlike Wikipedia, mindia encourages users to post what they personally think and makes all discussions public, with every member having a specific profile page (example). In other words, mindia is like Wikipedia with a social network built on top of it. The platform is free to use, but there’s also a solution for enterprises.

Demo 19:
Fastweet/Fastweet Live by Glucose
Tokyo-based startup Glucose presented three Twitter apps for the iPhone. Fastweet is one of the many, many Twitter clients out there and is available in the App Store as a free version (which stores just the latest 200 tweets) or as Fastweet 2K (for $1.99), which keeps the latest 2,000 tweets. Fastweet Live (iTunes link) is a good solution if you search for specific keywords or hashtags. The app then displays just the relevant tweets dynamically, which makes sense during an event or if you want to stay informed continuously on a current hot topic or a specific news item (demo video).

The next TokyoCamp will probably take place in April. Thanks to all attendees, startups and co-organizer KDDI Web Communications, and a sorry to the many people who couldn’t make it on the guest list this time!

Go to TechCrunch Japan’s Flickr account to see more pictures of the event.

According to a Tweet just sent from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Google has donated $2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation. Wales says the official announcement will be made tomorrow.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit that focuses on the development of free, multilingual content to wiki-based projects. The Wikimedia Foundation operates Wikipedia, but has also helped develop Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikinews, and Wikiversity.

Earlier this year, Wikimedia announced that it has raised $8 million for the 2009-10 fiscal, exceeding its goal for the year by $500K. The Foundation has received over 230,000 donations, up from 125,000 donations received during the 2008-09 campaign. It’s unclear if the $2 million from Google is bundles into the $8 million but I’m sure we’ll find out tomorrow.

The foundation recently added Craigslist founder Craig Newmark to its advisory board, which also includes tech visionary Mitch Kapor.

Wikia, a for-profit group of user generated wiki sites that was founded by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales in 2004, is now a profitable company. CEO Gil Penchina says the company’s revenues grew 4x in 2009 while they kept costs in check. Late last year the company reported strong financial results, but hadn’t yet reached true profitability.

He won’t disclose what revenues are, but the company currently has 40 employees and has open spots for a dozen more, he says (although I only count eight positions on their jobs page).

Wikia sites attracted about 21 million unique worldwide visitors in December (Comscore), and those visitors racked up over 2.7 billion page views. The company attracts around 8 million U.S. visitors monthly, they say.

The site makes money on ads surrounding content. They have a direct sales team and also pull ads from networks and Google.

Their largest site is lyrics.wikia.com, with over a million lyrics pages. answers.wikia.com, which launched a year ago, has 600,000 user generated questions and a million monthly visitors. A couple of months later the company ended its attempt to build a search engine that could challenge Google.

The company has raised $14 million over two venture rounds.

The history of P2P file sharing service Kazaa (which actually started life as “KaZaA”) is known to most of us born in the eighties or before, and consists mainly of copyright related lawsuits and adware-ridden software.

The gist of the story can be found on its Wikipedia profile, but what many seem to forget in present times is that the service is still around, serving users an unlimited amount of (licensed) songs for a $20 monthly subscription fee.

Recently, a Symantec security program apparently identified the Kazaa desktop client as high-risk, flagging the software as adware. This prompted Brilliant Digital Entertainment, the company that operates Kazaa, to issue a special notice / consumer alert to its customers.

And it isn’t pulling any punches.

While boasting about the fact that Kazaa is now a legitimate business offering over one million fully licensed tracks to its customers, Kazaa claims Symantec for the second time in recent weeks incorrectly identified it as being high risk. As a result, the company says, a subset of users were unable to use Kazaa because Symantec’s security software flagged it as adware. Some of its users were apparently “sufficiently spooked by Symantec’s unilateral action” after those warnings that they followed its advice to remove Kazaa.

In an angered statement, the company adds:

Symantec had justified turning off the music for some of Kazaa customers by flagging files in the Kazaa music plug-in application as high risk due to the files being used for serving advertisements. As a result Kazaa customers or subscribers running Norton AV are having these files stripped from the application which prevents them from using the service.

It continues:

Symantec’s error, hot on the heels of a similar mistake against Spotify, highlights the potential for anti-virus companies to do more harm than good in the effort to displace pirate operations from the on-line marketplace.

After the Spotify incident (Symantec classified the music streaming service as a Trojan about a week ago), the security software company apologized on Twitter. It’ll be interesting to see how they handle this notice from Kazaa.

Nsyght is a startup we broke just before the Christmas vacation which focuses on making realtime streams manageable and is similar in scope to Friendfeed and Cliqset.

It currently integrates accounts from Twitter, Facebook, digg, Vimeo, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Delicious, and Last.fm – with other networks planned – and has now introduced a bunch of new features.

Here’s the thing, my father-in-law is a hard-working UPS driver. He defines blue-collar. After a long day driving around in a brown truck and wearing a brown jumpsuit in the freezing Michigan winter, he wants nothing more than to come home and enjoy a random sports game — sometimes live, sometimes a re-broadcast

View original post here:
Can whoever is writing Charter’s cable guide stop spoiling classic sports games and ruining my father-in-law’s nights?

Here we are, on the eve of the Tablet’s unveiling, with only hours to go before we find out just how ambitious Apple’s latest creation is. Countless articles have been written about how the forthcoming Tablet could be the savior of old media. Supposedly, people will finally start paying for this content because it will be readily available at their fingertips. But the promise of the tablet does not lie in immediate access to content; the Internet can already do that, as can the Kindle, to some extent. The true revolution lies in the new medium the tablet will give us. Three months ago Dan Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, totally nailed it:

New technology spawns new ways to tell stories. That’s the really exciting thing here. Not the tablet itself, but what it means for news, for entertainment, for literature. Gasp. Geddit? Is the f***ing light going off yet? This is what Anton Chekhov meant when he said that the medium is the message. This is why the Tablet is so profound.

There is no point in moving to digital readers if we’re just going to do what we did on paper. That’s why Kindle is such a piece of shit. All they did was pave the cowpath. And that’s why we’ve held back on our Tablet — not because the technology wasn’t ready, but because the content guys are such f***tards that they still can’t create anything that makes it worth putting the Tablet into the world.

You Say You Want A Revolution

Now, I don’t think the Kindle is a “piece of shit” by any means. The Kindle is to text what the iPod was to music. It lets you store and easily carry a vast amount of content with you at all times. That’s in no way a bad thing — the iPod has been adopted by a significant portion of Earth’s population because its appeal is so universal. But the Tablet can break new ground. It won’t just be a new way to conveniently access content. It will be a new way to consume it. Last September, Gizmodo reported that Apple was urging publishers to create so-called hybridized content that “draws from audio, video and interactive graphics in books, magazines and newspapers, where paper layouts would be static. ”

When we hear talk of Steve Jobs saying this is the most important thing he’s done, I don’t think he’s excited about giving people a bigger screen to watch their movies on, or to play better games. I think he’s excited about changing the way we read and learn.

But it’s going to be tough. My concern is not that Apple will fail to deliver; I have little doubt that their product launch tomorrow will be stellar. My doubts lie with the content providers themselves. Yesterday, the LA Times ran a story that touched on this:

Although Apple has proved its deftness at creating trendy devices and a digital store in which publishers could sell their wares, Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner said there will be plenty of trial and error before newspaper, magazine and book publishers figure out the “fine art” of creating digital editions that take advantage of the device’s graphics and video”… “Where’s the opportunity? It’s creating book experiences. It’s taking a cookbook and adding video and author updates. That’s an opportunity, because you can charge extra for that.”

The question, then, is how long it will take publishers to figure this out for themselves.  Perhaps I’m a pessimist, but I think that this will be a long and frustrating process. Look at how long it has taken the large media companies to fully embrace rich, multimedia content on the web.

Old Media Is Still In Trouble

The online buying model for news and magazines isn’t going to save the publishers, any more than iTunes Music and TV downloads have been saviors for their respective content owners. Will consumers benefit? Absolutely. But they won’t be willing to pay a premium for content they can access on the web for free. And if old media shifts to a pay-only model, consumers will just switch to free online alternatives. There will be exceptions — publishers with high quality, exclusive content (say, the New York Times) will likely benefit. But the majority of newspapers and magazines? Not so much.

But what about this promised land of revolutionary hybridized content — won’t people be willing to pay for that? Thing is, that’s going to be time consuming and expensive to make. A handful of very large publishers, like the NYT, may be able to scrap together some compelling content on a regular basis. But it’s going to be difficult to quickly integrate additional supplementary material in a way that doesn’t feel tacked on.

So Who Will Benefit?

Textbooks. Guides. Biographies. Novels. Pretty much anything that has previously been offered in book form, but has been handicapped because it was restricted to paper. Few of these have ever been ported to the web in a rich media form, because they’re lengthy and it just isn’t fun to read a book on your computer screen. And even when textbooks have been digitized (like for the Kindle DX), they didn’t bring anything new to the table. But there’s so much room for improvement.

Imagine a biography of Abraham Lincoln that allowed you to pull up photos of every person and place mentioned in a single finger swipe.  Flicking the top of the screen would bring down an interactive timeline of Lincoln’s life, making it easy to get your bearings. The hybrid book could include comprehensive references for each person mentioned in the book. Not just a Wikipedia article, mind you, but information that is contextually relevant to the moment you’re currently reading about. The experience wouldn’t simply be one of jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink. All of this supplementary material would naturally flow into the reading experience, while you never left your place in the primary text.

There are plenty of other potential applications. Picture a chemistry textbook where you could freely rotate any molecule, tapping on a chemical bond to learn more about why it behaves the way it does. Or a Shakespeare play (in text form) where you could tap a piece of dialog to hear it spoken aloud, or perhaps even played in a video. Tapping a sidebar at any time would bring up a roster of characters and their allegiances, lest a love triangle leave you confused.

There are infinitely more possibilities ready to be unlocked.  Many of these things could be done were this content converted to a rich webpage, but up until now there hasn’t been much benefit to doing so because there was no way to comfortably consume it.

My guess is that come Wednesday, Steve Jobs will hold up a Tablet with a piece of content that lives up to this dream. Instant lookup of relevant information. An experience that simply has never been seen before. It won’t just be a webpage with a touchscreen — it will be a living book. It will be the future. And then we’ll have to wait years until we start seeing books that really live up to that promise. Apple can build the tools, but someone will need to deliver the content.

I’m still excited for the Tablet, I’m just not expecting it to live up to its potential for quite a while. The big publishers will figure out this new medium eventually. Well, maybe they won’t. But someone will.
Fake tablet image via Gizmodo

Do you find yourself constantly emailing stuff to your iPhone just so you can have it when you leave your desk? I do: emails, links, addresses, phone numbers, photos. Well, now there is an app for that. It’s called Pastefire, and it comes naturally enough from the app-sharing service Appsfire (which was co-founded by former TechCrunch writer Ouriel Ohayon). You can get the free app on iTunes here http://getap.ps/pastefire (if you click that link on your iPhone it will open up the App Store for you, and is another service AppsFire will launch soon which will combine short links for iPhone apps with analytics on conversions).

Pastefire lets you send links, phone numbers, email addresses, videos, and photos to your iPhone, and then it figures out what to do with them automatically. For example, after you sign up, you just add a bookmarket to your browser or go to the Pastfire “Copy Zone” and paste a link. Then if you fire up the app on your iPhone, it will open up that link in Safari. A phone number initiates a call. An email address opens up the Mail app addressed to that person. A photo URL lets you save the image to your phone’s image gallery. A video link opens up the YouTube app and plays the video. You can also post to Twitter, search in Google or Wikipedia, or save to a local clipboard.

If you turn on the automated mode, the app performs these actions automatically depending on what you send to your iPhone from your desktop. Or you can do it yourself in manual mode. More options are on the way, such as opening up a map for an address. And there are a few bugs which will be fixed soon as well. For instance, when you copy a photo to your gallery, it doesn’t open up the gallery. My other main complaint about the app is that you can only send one thing at a time. So if you want to send a bunch of links, emails, and photos all at once, you have to open up the app for each one and perform an action before you can move on to the next one. It should just store everything in the clipboard if things pile up. The other drawback is that you actually have to open the app. Here notifications would work really well, letting you send things directly to the top of your iPhone screen without having to hunt for the Pastefire app icon.

But these are minor quibbles. All-in-all, Pastefire is a solid productivity app and I’m going to be using it a lot.

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You would have been foolish to assume that Modern Warfare 2 would treat foreign cultures with any sort of reverence. First there was the rubbish accents in the Rio de Janeiro level(s)

Go here to see the original:
Urdu, Arabic, whatever: It’s all the same to Infinity Ward in Modern Warfare 2