Category Archives: Technology

Funding, Intel Capital, Internet, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, RSS Investors Fund, Technology, Transcosmos & Business Development Inc, Web 2.0

Edgeio closes doors after burning $5M in one year

Leave a comment

In a final board meeting last evening Edgeio’s board members have decided to shut down operations of the company.

This failure is sort of symbolic for the Web 2.0 sector. Why? What Edgeio is interesting with? First off it has been co-founded by Michael Arrington from Techcrunch, an influential, probably the most, blog that is symbolic itself for the web 2.0 age and Arrington himself is the editor there and one of the most influential people on Web today, according many sources, including but not limited to Wired and Forbes. He is also mentoring, advising, consulting and probably brokeraging companies across the Silicon Valley and is generally well known technology evangelist. He expanded his Crunch Network with Crunchboard, Crunchgear and Mobilecrunch and is rapidly becoming the most influential journalist in the tech scene nowadays.

Aside Edgeio Michael Arrington is also having active participations in the following companies.

  • He is an investor in a stealth company called Daylife, based in New York.
  • He became an investor in Dogster on September 14, 2006
  • He is also an investor in Omnidrive since December 2006.
  • He is also an investor in Dancejam since the spring of 2007 and
  • An investor in Seesmic from November 2007, a video upstart launched by a French entrepreneur.

Aside Michael Arrington the company was also co-launched by Keith Teare and is said to be a great tool for bloggers and buyers alike. Using content from RSS-enabled sources, Edgeio is able to take millions of listings and categorize them in a central location. Early employees of Edgeio also include Vidar Hokstadt, Matt Kaufman and Fred Oliveira. Michael Arrington was not an executive but instead he served the company as a board of directors’ member.

Edgeio is all about edge publishing. It is Edgeio’s belief that services that try to restrict how users create and consume information cannot ultimately be successful. Users own their data, and services exist not to silo that data, but rather to add value to it. That is what Edgeio is setting out to do. Good mission. Simply put Edgeio will be focusing on classified listings of any type to start.

Blogs and other websites syndicating their content through RSS are an ideal place to post classified listings. Not only is the publisher in complete control of the content (what to include, when to change or update it, when to delete it and how to syndicate it for other services), but the website itself gives valuable context to readers of the listing. Unlike anonymous listing services, listings on blogs controlled by the publisher give readers an idea of who they are dealing with. That additional information is an important factor for readers in deciding if and how to interact with the publisher.

Very few blogs publish classified listings today. Most blogs have a relatively small group of readers, including friends and family, and are not able to effectively reach the larger audience needed to effectively market their listings.

That’s where Edgeio comes in. They promised to find edge published listings if they include the category or tag “listing” within the post or content. The listings will be indexed through the blog’s RSS feed and aggregated with other “listings from the edge”. Users of the Edgeio service will be able to search through listings and communicate directly with the publisher. Edgeio will also make aggregated listings available though a web service to other Internet sites and services that would like to include edge listings.

Edgeio promised to never attempt to silo or control publisher data, or restrict the ways that listings can be used by others.

The company has also launched a Chinese language version of its web site named mulu100.com (which in Chinese means catalog of catalogs). The Chinese service has initially formed a partnership with edeng.cn, a China based listings site, similar in many ways to craigslist.com.

Edgeio recieved $1.5 million in angel funds from the likes of Louis Monier, Frank Caufield, the RSS Investors Fund, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, Michael Tanne, Auren Hoffman, Sam Perry and Bill McCabe.

In October 2006 Edgeio Closed $5 Million Series A Funding led by Intel Capital and also included an investment from Transcosmos & Business Development Inc, a Japanese public company with a Silicon Valley investment arm focused on Internet-based U.S. technology companies expanding into the Japanese marketplace.

The company burned through that money according to plan, meaning they ran out this month. The product roadmap was fulfilled; meaning development lags didn’t hurt the company. No revenues came in and the user/partner milestones weren’t met and no one else was going to put more money into the company.

Employees will be let go but will be fully paid according Michael Arrington.

When being asked from a commenter on his blog what the company spent the money for Michael Arrington jokingly replied “parties, scotch, hookers, blow. You know the usual.”

The company seems to have failed even though Edgeio got a serious amount of coverage and in-context mentions on Techcrunch over the past years. All entries can be found over here: http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/edgeio

De-facto it also affects another initiative of Techcrunch the Crunchboard.com, which will also undergo restructuring in the next days as they say. 

Michael Arrington also has said ”it is unwise for a company to spend a lot of money building out infrastructure before a product proves itself as well as they always had problems with the PayPal API, which is a total piece of crap”

Here are some more interesting thoughts for food.

Advertising on TechCrunch is not cheap – $10,000 per month and Edgeio is known to have been an advertiser at TC for quite long period of time. The site was also used in TC’s job site www.crunchboard.com, which in our understanding did also cost money for the Edgeio. Having an influential company the rank of TechCrunch adopt and use your company’s services or products in our view is more expensive than having a banner rotating on the TC’s blog network.

The company was recently caught (September 2007) to be spamming Bloggers, which was even criticized by Arrington himself calling it ”Bad Idea”.

It is really interesting to see how things in SV tend to work. You have an idea, find an angel or two, prepare for the series A funding, raise the money, give it a try, if it work things out fine, if not then also fine, you close shop, go home, take some rest and try again later with another start up.

Indeed the company looks very good and healthy to us. Well done technology, good idea/concept, good numbers, was well funded, high-profile people involved and engaged and beyond. Quantcast reports for over 150,000 unique visitors from US alone while Compete is showing very healthy number of visitors – 348,797. Edgeio has access to over 100 million listings in 1,484,953 cities and 166 countries, 9,190,705 listings from 1,405 edge-direct feeds and 2,736 listings from 134 Classified Boards.

So what went wrong?

Why the company did not take a series B round of funding or tried to sell itself before crashing down? The business plan to start generating revenues was too pushful and unrealistic, in less than one year after funding? The company seems to have been given with less than a year to break-even? By contrast I remember another company that got coverage on Techcrunch Mahalo, started out by Jason Calacanis and was said that the company is having enough money to survive for at least 5 years without making any money at all. The company could have even been sold or profitably liquidated in one way or another and not simply closed.

So is there anything behind the scene that the public is not aware of?

Well, the very simple conclusion we can draw here is that a company success is not always guaranteed solely by who the investors or founders are… The DNA of the success with a company probably lies somewhere else and is a complex of factors, interests and events. 

Via

[ http://www.edgeio.com ]
[ http://wiki.edgeio.com/display/ExternalWiki/Home ]
[ http://blog.edgeio.com/2006/10/23/series-a-financing-china-web-site-and-patent-filing/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/06/edgeio-to-shut-down-in-the-deadpool/ ]
[ http://www.crunchbase.com/company/edgeio ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/30/edgeio-spams-bloggers-bad-idea/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/edgeio ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/24/edgeio-closes-5-million-series-a-financing/ ]
[ http://venturebeat.com/2006/10/23/edgeio-gets-5-million-to-expand-web-20-classifieds-site/ ]
[ http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/10/edgeio_has_been.html?campaign_id=rss_blog_blogspotting ]
[ http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2006/10/24/edgio-gets-5-million-in-vc-money/ ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/edgeio.com ]
[ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/edgeio.com/?metric=uv ]
[ http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/CompanyDetail.aspx?CompanyID=49351685&cs=QGC8QwFIE&pc=compete ]
[ http://rexdixon.wordpress.com/2006/10/24/edgeio-secures-5-million ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/about-techcrunch/ ]
[ http://www.crunchboard.com/ ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Arrington ]
[ http://www.teare.com/category/keith-teare/edgeio ]

Acquisitions, Adobe's venture capital group, Public Companies, Software, Technology, Web 2.0

Adobe Systems Acquires Buzzword, a web-based word processing software

Leave a comment

Adobe Systems has acquired Virtual Ubiquity, the parent company of the Buzzword web-based word processing software.

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Virtual Ubiquity and its ground-breaking online word processor, Buzzword. The acquisition furthers Adobe’s commitment to foster a vibrant ecosystem for rich Internet application (RIA) development that delivers breakthrough experiences built on Adobe AIR. Separately, Adobe added a new file sharing service to its current online document services. Codenamed “Share,” the beta service will make it easier than ever for people to share, publish and organize documents online.

Virtual Ubiquity is based in Waltham, Massachusetts. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of November 2007. The addition of Virtual Ubiquity is not expected to have a material impact to Adobe revenue and earnings in fiscal year 2007.

Virtual Ubiquity had taken funding from Adobe’s venture capital group. At this point there is no disclosure on the size of the buy-out.

One may ask why? Well, Buzzword is built using Adobe Flex and runs in the Adobe Flash Player, making it a logical fit for the software company. Additionally, users can use Buzzword both online and offline using Adobe AIR. Much like Google Docs and Zoho, Buzzword also includes features for collaboration and sharing documents.

Buzzword, an elegant online word processor, enables individuals to work together to create high quality, page perfect documents. Because it was built with Adobe Flex™ software and runs in the Adobe Flash™ Player, Buzzword enables greater document quality, outstanding typography, page layout controls, and robust support for integrated graphics, regardless of the browser or device. The application also will run on Adobe® AIR™, offering users a hybrid online/offline experience and the ability to work with both hosted and local documents. The powerful collaboration capabilities in Buzzword enable multiple authors to edit and comment on documents from anywhere, at anytime, while document creators can set permissions that virtually eliminate version control chaos. For more information on the acquisition and access to Buzzword beta software, please visit http://www.adobe.com/go/buzzwordfaq.

Buzzword is a stunning achievement in design. Of all the PC-compatible word processors available — including the desktop dinosaur Microsoft Word — Buzzword is the easiest on the eyes and has the most elegant user interface.

The founders of the company will be joining Adobe as part of the deal.

So, is this an employment through acquisition? It could also be a well planned, funded and executed internal deal in the domain of the PR for Adobe in order to promote, proclaim and popularize its new products as Adobe Flex software, Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR, all trademarks owned by Adobe Systems Incorporated.

The deal comes in moment when the company announced the launch of the new Adobe Flash Player.

Via

[ http://www.buzzword.com/ ]
[ http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom…/100107VirtualUbiquity.html ]
[ http://mashable.com/2007/10/01/adobe-buzzword/ ]
[ http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/ ]
[ http://www.adobe.com/go/buzzwordfaq ]
[ http://about.buzzword.com/ ]
[ http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/productivity/0,1000001108,39289750,00.htm ]
[ http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2007/10/adobe_buys_web.html ]

Business, Google, Internet, Society, Software, Technology, Web 2.0

Dmoz.org – a falling star

1 Comment

While researching over the popular business directories business.com and allbusiness.com, both recently acquired, I came across some very interesting details about Dmoz.org – the famous Open Directory Project (ODP).

Once mythical site millions of web sites were desperately relying on for Web authority, today Dmoz.org is declining in every aspect you can imagine of – from traffic, site usage, indexation level, PageRank(tm) to overall authority, trustworthiness and beyond. All traffic measurement companies are revealing similar and very unpleasant trend for the old web directory. Quantcast is reporting for slightly above 1.7 Million visitors per month. The situation at Compete is even worse – 1.5 Million where huge 33% decline is seen from the previous year on month-to-month comparison basis. Even the not-so-accurate Alexa is showing significant decline in the Dmoz.org’s popularity – once used to be close to Alexa 100, as far as I remember, today’s Alexa rank is in the 680 range. Just like to outline the negative trend the site’s yesterday rank (Dec 05, 2007) was 1143. If you take a look at the traffic’s graph from Alexa (shown below) for Dmoz.org you will see there is a constant decline in popularity over the past 6 months, at least. Just like this is not enough, even Google’s indexation level has dropped to only 211,000 pages, out of millions before, as we last checked it out. The Google PR has also dropped down from 9 to 8.

In matter of honesty we do believe the real traffic is bigger than what is shown on the sites above yet it appears the traffic today is times less than what Dmoz.org used to have in the past.

While the site is still claiming to have 4,830,584 sites, 75,151 editors and over 590,000 categories we are sort of agreeing only on the part of the number of sites and the categories. The active human editors in our belief are way below the number shown on the web site. For example, there were 7407 active editors during August 2006 (Open Directory Forum – General – Analyzing editor numbers – page 1, 13 August 2006).

I cannot help but ask why? What’s happening with Dmoz.org anyway? While there are potentially many reasons for the current situation behind Dmoz.org and we claim no accuracy here at all, I will try to summarize some of the issues below:

  1. The Open Directory Project’s main strengths, today, seem to be turning into its main shortcoming and its greatest weakness. Dmoz.org has always been run by volunteer human editors ensuring that listings remain high quality. However, this fact is fast becoming Dmoz.org‘s downfall most notably in the last 6 months.
  2. There have long been allegations that volunteer ODP editors give favorable treatment to their own websites while concomitantly thwarting the good faith efforts of their competition. Such allegations are fielded by ODP’s staff and meta editors, who have the authority to take disciplinary action against volunteer editors who are suspected of engaging in abusive editing practices.
  3. Dmoz.org.org has been accused a number of times by tens of thousands of small web sites and individuals in elitarism and corruption in how they were listing and delisting the web sites in the directory. 
  4. According to the masses pointing fingers at the ODP, some editors’ heads have become too big for their body. These rumors are also backed up from some Dmoz.org editors themselves. Allegedly, some editors have become too lazy to do their jobs properly. More serious allegations joined the fray. It became clear that editors have become petty and have started declining the applications for Dmoz.org listing for no valid reason. Other claims of corruption in the ranks of the listings became widespread. This began another round of rumors that said editors have turned dictatorial in their approval to protect their own interests; that is, if an editor perceives a site to be his competition, that web site isn’t going to get approved at all, and there’ll be no explanations given for the rejection.
  5. Other alleged abuses have occurred at the executive level, with company management leveraging the link value from ODP to accelerate new privately funded projects. Although site policies suggest that an individual site should be submitted to only one category, as of October 2007, Topix.com, a news aggregation site operated by ODP founder Rich Skrenta, has more than 10,000 listings*.
  6.  Early in the history of the ODP, its staff gave representatives of selected websites, such as Rolling Stone magazine, editing access at ODP in order to list many individual pages from those websites.
  7. ODP’s paid staff has imposed controversial policies from time to time, and volunteer editors who dissent in ways staff considers uncivil may find their editing privileges removed. One alleged example of this was chronicled at the XODP Yahoo! eGroup in May of 2000. The earliest known exposé was Life After the Open Directory Project, later appearing as a June 1, 2000, guest column written for Traffick.com, by David F. Prenatt, Jr. (former ODP editor “netesq”) after losing his ODP editing privileges. Another example was the volunteer editor known by the alias The Cunctator, who was banned from the ODP soon after submitting an article to Slashdot on October 24, 2000, which criticized changes in ODP’s copyright policies.
  8. We have been witnessing many corporate, brand and social battles and wars on Dmoz.org over the past years, similarly to what is today happening with Wikipedia.
  9. As we said above the number of active editors is getting lesser and lesser over the years while the backlog of web sites in the queue waiting to get listed is increasing. There were websites that had to wait years before they got listed. When Dmoz.org was first established listing could take a matter of a few weeks. Over time as Dmoz.org popularity grew so did listing times.
  10. It became known that some categories inside Dmoz.org did not even have any editors. In other categories editors became inactive and the backlog of submissions just continued to mount up.
  11. Many Dmoz.org editors are believed to have moved to Wikipedia through out the past 2 years.
  12. Dmoz.org began taking more flak when people started saying that the reason Dmoz.org is so lacking in editors – which leads to some categories not having editors at all for a great length of time – is the fact that the powers at Dmoz.org are reluctant to admit new editors to their ranks.
  13. Uninhibited discussion of ODP’s purported shortcomings has become more common on mainstream Webmaster discussion forums.
  14. On October 20, 2006, the ODP’s main server suffered a catastrophic system failure that prevented editors from working on the directory until December 18, 2006. During that period, an older structure of the directory was visible to the public.
  15. Many site submissions were found to be in conflicts with the financial interests of the category editors.
  16. Underlying some controversy surrounding ODP is its ownership and management. Many of the original GnuHoo volunteers felt that they had been deceived into joining a commercial enterprise. As ODP’s content became widely used by most major search engines and web directories, the issue of ODP’s ownership, management and governance became of greater importance to the public interests.
  17. Dmoz.org listings are also a powerful force in the world of expired domain traffic. Due to the popularity of the Open Directory and its resulting impact on search engine rankings, domains with lapsed registration that are listed on ODP have attracted domain hijacking, an issue that has been addressed (at least tried) by regularly removing expired domains from the directory.
  18. Competition. Dmoz.org clearly has missed the web 2.0 evolution and was left behind by better organized (semantic approach), bigger in size and more effective (contextual links) modern directories, an example of which is LinkedWords with its more than 38 Million English categories, sub-categories, phrases and words to get listed with. Basically LinkedWords is large-scale contextual platform which has similarity with Dmoz.org in its huge ontology directory structure but is entirely built up upon the spirit of web 2.0 with greater flexibility (adding pages, categories, sub-categories in real time), functionality (automated creation of contextual listings, yet there is zero spam) and technology (maximizes contextual linking among web sites, not just lists them). Having the web sites listed on its platform contributing, on daily basis, to the popularity of LW with in-text contextual links spreading around the Web is yet another advantage. This way sites like LinkedWords are not only helping more the web sites involved by connecting them together on a contextual basis but they are also helping the algorithmic robots find, classify and organize the information in context (following the in-context linked words) and not last the common users are also given with a chance to find the information in-context and on demand while reading around the web by clicking on the same in-text linked words.
  19. Google has begun to disassociate itself from the Open Directory Project. Nothing can be more symbolic than Google’s relegation of the directory from a prominent position in Google’s site to a position reserved for ordinary ‘worth checking but not really that important’ type of site, regardless of the high page ranks of most of the categories at Dmoz.org.
  20. Since the clamor of discontent has reached such a high degree and Dmoz.org’s staunchest ally – Google, has begun to keep its distance, Dmoz.org is like a decaying dinosaur that other animals are steering clear of it to avoid the vultures that are expected to feast on the beast when it dies. The death toll has been sounded for Dmoz.org.

While many of the points listed above may be arguable in one way or another – depending on points of view and interests – since they are gathered from the public Web during our research, they reveal the true picture behind Dmoz.org and it is easily to understand why the decline is so huge in the Dmoz.org’s village.

All of the above raises the reasonable question, how can Dmoz.org remain useful when people no longer trust its human editors?

Money makes the world go round they say. In 2007 it is also true that money makes the World Wide Web go round. In a world where online businesses can easily sell for a billion dollars the original lure of Dmoz.org for both webmasters and editors is waning. Today, Dmoz.org is still being used when web masters want their web sites listed. However, people no longer attribute much importance to it.

That pretty much sums up ours and a million other people’s sentiments about the current status and usefulness of this Open Directory Project. Sweeping changes and general reform, from political to technological, are required for the ODP to change from a Web 1.0 decaying dinosaur into a modern and effective directory with web 2.0 functionality.

For the people who do not know what Dmoz.org is, below we will include some basic information and historic facts about the ODP project. No, not everybody knows about Dmoz.org. In our basic estimate there are probably more than 400 million online users today that have no idea what the ODP project is.

The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.

The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as Dmoz.org (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.

ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

ODP was founded as Gnuhoo by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel in 1998. At the time, Skrenta and Truel were working as engineers for Sun Microsystems. Chris Tolles, who worked at Sun Microsystems as the head of marketing for network security products, also signed on in 1998 as a co-founder of Gnuhoo along with co-founders Bryn Dole and Jeremy Wenokur. Skrenta was already well known for his role in developing TASS, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems. Coincidentally, the original category structure of the Gnuhoo directory was based loosely on the structure of Usenet newsgroups then in existence.

The Gnuhoo directory went live on June 5, 1998. After a Slashdot article suggested that Gnuhoo had nothing in common with the spirit of free software, for which the GNU project was known, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation objected to the usage of Gnu. So Gnuhoo was changed to NewHoo. Yahoo then objected to the usage of “Hoo” in the name, prompting them to switch the name again. ZURL was the likely choice. However, before the switch to ZURL, NewHoo was acquired by Netscape Communications Corporation in October of 1998 and became the Open Directory Project. Netscape released the ODP data under the Open Directory License. Netscape was acquired by AOL shortly thereafter, and ODP was one of the assets included in the acquisition. AOL later merged with Time-Warner.

By the time Netscape assumed stewardship, the Open Directory Project had about 100,000 URLs indexed with contributions from about 4500 editors. On October 5, 1999, the number of URLs indexed by ODP reached one million. According to an unofficial estimate, the number of URLs in the Open Directory surpassed the number of URLs in the Yahoo! Directory in April 2000 with about 1.6 million URLs. ODP achieved the milestones of indexing two million URLs on August 14, 2000, three million listings on November 18, 2001 and four million on December 3, 2003.

I find similarities between Dmoz.org and Wikipedia.org. So, is it possible the same to happen with Wikipedia at future?

Via

[ http://www.Dmoz.org ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Directory_Project ]
[ http://www.quantcast.com/Dmoz.org ]
[ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/Dmoz.org/?metric=uv ]
[ http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/Dmoz.org ]
[ http://www.skrenta.com/2006/12/Dmoz.org_had_9_lives_used_up_yet.html ]
[ http://www.newswriter.us/ShowAdminArticle-17.htm ]
* [ http://search.Dmoz.org/cgi-bin/search?search=topix (accessed on 18th October 2007)]
[ http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/xodp/messages/1 (XODP Yahoo! Group Message Archive)]
[ http://www.traffick.com/story/06-2000-xodp.asp (David F. Prenatt, Jr., Life After the Open Directory Project, Traffick.com (June 1, 2000))]
[ http://slashdot.org/articles/00/10/24/1252232.shtml (CmdrTaco, Dmoz.org (aka AOL) Changing Guidelines In Sketchy Way, Slashdot (October 24, 2000)]

Amidzad, Foundation Capital, Peter Thiel, Search Engines, Semantic Apps, Semantic Web, Software, Technology, The Founder's Fund, Web 2.0

Powerset – the natural language processing search engine empowered by Hbase in Hadoop

2 Comments

In our planned series of publications about the Semantic Web and its apps today Powerset is going to be our second company, after Freebase, to be featured. 

Powerset is a Silicon Valley based company building a transformative consumer search engine based on natural language processing. Their unique innovations in search are rooted in breakthrough technologies that take advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language. Using these advanced techniques, Powerset is building a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search. By making search more natural and intuitive, Powerset is fundamentally changing how we search the web, and delivering higher quality results.

Powerset’s search engine is currently under development and is closed for the general public. You can always keep an eye on them in order to learn more information about their technology and approach.

Despite all the press attention Powerset is gaining there are too few details publicly available for the search engine. In fact Powerset is lately one of the most buzzed companies in the Silicon Valley, for good or bad.

Power set is a term from the mathematics and means a set S, the power set (or powerset) of S, written P(S) P(S), or 2S, is the set of all subsets of S. In axiomatic set theory (as developed e.g. in the ZFC axioms), the existence of the power set of any set is postulated by the axiom of power set. Any subset F of P(S), is called a family of sets over S.

From the latest information publicly available for Powerset we learn that, just like some other start-up search engines, they are also using Hbase in Hadoop environment to process vast amounts of data.

It also appears that Powerset relies on a number of proprietary technologies such as the XLE, licensed from PARC, ranking algorithms, and the ever-important onomasticon (a list of proper nouns naming persons or places).

  

For any other component, Powerset tries to use open source software whenever available. One of the unsung heroes that form the foundation for all of these components is the ability to process insane amounts of data. This is especially true for a Natural Language search engine. A typical keyword search engine will gather hundreds of terabytes of raw data to index the Web. Then, that raw data is analyzed to create a similar amount of secondary data, which is used to rank search results. Since Powerset’s technology creates a massive amount of secondary data through its deep language analysis, Powerset will be generating far more data than a typical search engine, eventually ranging up to petabytes of data.
Powerset has already benefited greatly from the use of Hadoop: their index build process is entirely based on a Hadoop cluster running the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and makes use of Hadoop’s map/reduce features.

In fact Google also uses a number of well-known components to fulfill their enormous data processing needs: a distributed file system (GFS) ( http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html ), Map/Reduce ( http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html ), and BigTable ( http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html ).

Hbase is actually the open-source equivalent of Google’s Bigtable, which, as far as we understand the matter is a great technological achievement of the guys behind Powerset. Both JimKellerman and Michael Stack are from Powerset and are the initial contributors of Hbase.

Hbase could be the panacea for Powerset in scaling their index up to Google’s level, yet coping Google’s approach is perhaps not the right direction for a small technological company like Powerset. We wonder if Cuill, yet another start-up search engine that’s claiming to have invented a technology for cheaper and faster indexation than Google’s, has built their architecture upon the Hbase/Hadoop environment.  Cuill claims that their indexing costs will be 1/10th of Google’s, based on new search architectures and relevance methods. If it is true what would the Powerset costs then be considering the fact that Powerset is probably having higher indexing costs even compared to Google, because it does a deep contextual analysis on every sentence on every web page? Taking into consideration that Google is having more than 450,000 servers in several major data centers and Powerset’s indexing and storage costs might be even higher the approach Powerset is taking might be costly business for their investors.

Unless Hbase and Hadoop are the secret answer Powerset relies on to significantly reduce the costs. 

Hadoop is an interesting software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data.

Here’s what makes Hadoop especially useful:

  • Scalable: Hadoop can reliably store and process petabytes.
  • Economical: It distributes the data and processing across clusters of commonly available computers. These clusters can number into the thousands of nodes.
  • Efficient: By distributing the data, Hadoop can process it in parallel on the nodes where the data is located. This makes it extremely rapid.
  • Reliable: Hadoop automatically maintains multiple copies of data and automatically redeploys computing tasks based on failures.

Hadoop implements MapReduce, using the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) (see figure below.) MapReduce divides applications into many small blocks of work. HDFS creates multiple replicas of data blocks for reliability, placing them on compute nodes around the cluster. MapReduce can then process the data where it is located.
Hadoop has been demonstrated on clusters with 2000 nodes. The current design target is 10,000 node clusters.
Hadoop is a Lucene sub-project that contains the distributed computing platform that was formerly a part of Nutch.

Hbase’s background

Google’s  Bigtable, a distributed storage system for structured data, is a very effective mechanism for storing very large amounts of data in a distributed environment.  Just as Bigtable leverages the distributed data storage provided by the Google File System, Hbase will provide Bigtable-like capabilities on top of Hadoop. Data is organized into tables, rows and columns, but a query language like SQL is not supported. Instead, an Iterator-like interface is available for scanning through a row range (and of course there is an ability to retrieve a column value for a specific key). Any particular column may have multiple values for the same row key. A secondary key can be provided to select a particular value or an Iterator can be set up to scan through the key-value pairs for that column given a specific row key.

Reach

According to Quantcast, Powerset is basically not popular site and is reaching less than 20,000 unique visitors per month, around 10,000 Americans. Compete is reporting the same – slightly more than 20,000 uniques per month. Considering the fact the search engine is still in its alpha stage these numbers are not that bad.

The People

Powerset has assembled a star team of talented engineers, researchers, product innovators and entrepreneurs to realize an ambitious vision for the future of search. Our team comprises industry leaders from a diverse set of companies including: Altavista, Apple, Ask.com, BBN, Digital, IDEO, IBM, Microsoft, NASA, PARC, Promptu, SRI, Tellme, Whizbang! Labs, and Yahoo!.

Founders of Powerset are Barney Pell and Lorenzo Thione and the company is actually headquartered in San Francisco. Recently Barney Pell has stepped down from the CEO spot and is now the company’s CTO.

Barney Pell, Ph.D. (CTO) For over 15 years Barney Pell (Ph.D. Computer science, Cambridge University 1993) has pursued groundbreaking technical and commercial innovation in A.I. and Natural Language understanding at research institutions including NASA, SRI, Stanford University and Cambridge University. In startup companies, Dr. Pell was Chief Strategist and VP of Business Development at StockMaster.com (acquired by Red Herring in March, 2000) and later had the same role at Whizbang! Labs. Just prior to Powerset, Pell was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Mayfield, one of the top VC firms in Silicon Valley.

Lorenzo Thione (Product Architect) Mr. Thione brings to Powerset years of research experience in computational linguistics and search from Research Scientist positions at the CommerceNet consortium and the Fuji-Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory. His main research focus has been discourse parsing and document analysis, automatic summarization, question answering and natural language search, and information retrieval. He has co-authored publications in the field of computational linguistics and is a named inventor on 13 worldwide patent applications spanning the fields of computational linguistics, mobile user interfaces, search and information retrieval, speech technology, security and distributed computing. A native of Milan, Italy, Mr. Thione holds a Masters in Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Board of Directors

Aside Barney Pell, who is also serving on the company’s board of directors, other board members are:

Charles Moldow (BOD) is a general partner at Foundation Capital. He joined Foundation on the heels of successfully building two companies from early start-up through greater than $100 million in sales. Most notably, Charles led Tellme Networks in raising one of the largest private financing rounds in the country post Internet bubble, adding $125 million in cash to the company balance sheet during tough market conditions in August, 2000. Prior to Tellme, Charles was a member of the founding team of Internet access provider @Home Network. In 1998, Charles assisted in the $7 billion acquisition of Excite Network. After the merger, Charles became General Manager of Matchlogic, the $80 million division focused on interactive advertising.

Peter Thiel (BOD) is a partner at Founders Fund VC Firm in San Francisco. In 1998, Peter co-founded PayPal and served as its Chairman and CEO until the company’s sale to eBay in October 2002 for $1.5 billion. Peter’s experience in finance includes managing a successful hedge fund, trading derivatives at CS Financial Products, and practicing securities law at Sullivan & Cromwell. Peter received his BA in Philosophy and his JD from Stanford.

Investors

In June 2007 Powerset has raised $12.5M in series A round of funding from Foundation Capital and The Founder’s Fund. Early investors include Eric Tilenius and Peter Thiel, who is also early investor in Facebook.com. Other early investors are as follows:

CommerceNet is an entrepreneurial research institute focused on making the world a better place by fulfilling the promise of the Internet. CommerceNet invests in exceptional people with bold ideas, freeing them to pursue visions outside the comfort zone of research labs and venture funds and share in their success.

Dr. Tenenbaum is a world-renowned Internet commerce pioneer and visionary. He was founder and CEO of Enterprise Integration Technologies, the first company to conduct a commercial Internet transaction (1992), secure Web transaction (1993) and Internet auction (1993). In 1994, he founded CommerceNet to accelerate business use of the Internet. In 1997, he co-founded Veo Systems, the company that pioneered the use of XML for automating business-to-business transactions. Dr. Tenenbaum joined Commerce One in January 1999, when it acquired Veo Systems. As Chief Scientist, he was instrumental in shaping the company’s business and technology strategies for the Global Trading Web. Earlier in his career, Dr. Tenenbaum was a prominent AI researcher, and led AI research groups at SRI International and Schlumberger Ltd. Dr. Tenenbaum is a Fellow and former board member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a former Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford. He currently serves as an officer and director of Webify Solutions and Medstory Inc., and is a Consulting Professor of Information Technology at Carnegie Mellon’s new West Coast campus. Dr. Tenenbaum holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D. from Stanford. 

Allan Schiffman was CTO and founder of Terisa Systems, a pioneer in communications security Technology to the Web software industry. Earlier, Mr. Schiffman was Chief Technology Officer at Enterprise Integration Technologies, a pioneer in the development of key security protocols for electronic commerce over the Internet. In these roles, Mr. Schiffman has raised industry awareness of role for security and public key cryptography in ecommerce by giving more than thirty public lectures and tutorials. Mr. Schiffman was also a member of the team that designed the Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) payment card protocol commissioned by MasterCard and Visa. Mr. Schiffman co-designed the first security protocol for the Web, the Secure HyperText Transfer Protocol (S-HTTP). Mr. Schiffman led the development of the first secure Web browser, Secure Mosaic, which was fielded to CommerceNet members for ecommerce trials in 1994. Earlier in his career, Mr. Schiffman led the development of a family of high-performance Smalltalk implementations that gained both academic recognition and commercial success. These systems included several innovations widely adopted by other object-oriented language implementers, such as the “just-in-time compilation” technique universally used by current Java virtual machines. Mr. Schiffman holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Rob Rodin is the Chairman and CEO of RDN Group; strategic advisors focused on corporate transitions, customer interface, sales and marketing, distribution and supply chain management. Additionally, he serves as Vice Chairman, Executive Director and Chairman of the Investment Committee of CommerceNet which researches and funds open platform, interoperable business services to advance commerce. Prior to these positions, Mr. Rodin served as CEO and President of Marshall Industries, where he engineered the reinvention of the company, turning a conventionally successful $500 million distributor into a web enabled $2 billion global competitor. “Free, Perfect and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands”, Mr. Rodin’s bestselling book, chronicles the radical transformation of Marshall Industries. 

The Founders Fund – The Founders Fund, L.P. is a San Francisco-based venture capital fund that focuses primarily on early-stage, high-growth investment opportunities in the technology sector. The Fund’s management team is composed of investors and entrepreneurs with relevant expertise in venture capital, finance, and Internet technology. Members of the management team previously led PayPal, Inc. through several rounds of private financing, a private merger, an initial public offering, a secondary offering, and its eventual sale to eBay, Inc. The Founders Fund possesses the four key attributes that well-position it for success: access to elite research universities, contact to entrepreneurs, operational and financial expertise, and the ability to pick winners. Currently, the Founders Fund is invested in over 20 companies, including Facebook, Ironport, Koders, Engage, and the newly-acquired CipherTrust. 

Amidzad – Amidzad is a seed and early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in emerging growth companies on the West Coast, with over 50 years of combined entrepreneurial experience in building profitable, global enterprises from the ground up and over 25 years of combined investing experience in successful information technology and life science companies. Over the years, Amidzad has assembled a world-class network of serial entrepreneurs, strategic investors, and industry leaders who actively assist portfolio companies as Entrepreneur Partners and Advisors.Amidzad has invested in companies like Danger, BIX, Songbird, Melodis, Freewebs, Agitar, Affinity Circles, Litescape and Picaboo.

Eric Tilenius brings a two-decade track record that combines venture capital, startup, and industry-leading technology company experience. Eric has made over a dozen investments in early-stage technology, internet, and consumer start-ups around the globe through his investment firm, Tilenius Ventures. Prior to forming Tilenius Ventures, Eric was CEO of Answers Corporation (NASDAQ: ANSW), which runs Answers.com, one of the leading information sites on the internet. He previously was an entrepreneur-in-residence at venture firm Mayfield. Prior to Mayfield, Eric was co-founder, CEO, and Chairman of Netcentives Inc., a leading loyalty, direct, and promotional internet marketing firm. Eric holds an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where he graduated as an Arjay Miller scholar, and an undergraduate degree in economics, summa cum laude, from Princeton University.

Esther Dyson does business as EDventure, the reclaimed name of the company she owned for 20-odd years before selling it to CNET Networks in 2004. Her primary activity is investing in start-ups and guiding many of them as a board member. Her board seats include Boxbe, CVO Group (Hungary), Eventful.com, Evernote, IBS Group (Russia, advisory board), Meetup, Midentity (UK), NewspaperDirect, Voxiva, Yandex (Russia)… and WPP Group (not a start-up). Some of her other past IT investments include Flickr and Del.icio.us (sold to Yahoo!), BrightMail (sold to Symantec), Medstory (sold to Microsoft), Orbitz (sold to Cendant and later re-IPOed). Her current holdings include ActiveWeave, BlogAds, ChoiceStream, Democracy Machine, Dotomi, Linkstorm, Ovusoft, Plazes, Powerset, Resilient, Tacit, Technorati, Visible Path, Vizu.com and Zedo. On the non-profit side, Dyson sits on the boards of the Eurasia Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Santa Fe Institute and the Sunlight Foundation. She also blogs occasionally for the Huffington Post, as Release 0.9.

Adrian Weller – Adrian graduated in 1991 with first class honours in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met Barney. He moved to NY, ran Goldman Sachs’ US Treasury options trading desk and then joined the fixed income arbitrage trading group at Salomon Brothers. He went on to run US and European interest rate trading at Citadel Investment Group in Chicago and London. Recently, Adrian has been traveling, studying and managing private investments. He resides in Dublin with his wife, Laura and baby daughter, Rachel.

Azeem Azhar – Azeem is currently a technology executive focussed on corporate innovation at a large multinational. He began his career as a technology writer, first at The Guardian and then The Economist . While at The Economist, he launched Economist.com. Since then, he has been involved with several internet and technology businesses including launching BBC Online and founding esouk.com, an incubator. He was Chief Marketing Officer for Albert-Inc, a Swiss AI/natural language processing search company and UK MD of 20six, a blogging service. He has advised several internet start-ups including Mondus, Uvine and Planet Out Partners, where he sat on the board. He has a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University. He currently sits on the board of Inuk Networks, which operates a IPTV broadcast platform. Azeem lives in London with his wife and son.

Todd Parker – Since 2002, Mr. Parker has been a Managing Director at Hidden River, LLC, a firm specializing in Mergers and Acquisitions consulting services to the wireless and communications industry. Previously and from 2000 to 2002, Mr. Parker was the founder and CEO of HR One, a human resources solutions provider and software company. Mr. Parker has also held senior executive and general manager positions with AirTouch Corporation where he managed over 15 corporate transactions and joint venture formations with a total value of over $6 billion. Prior to AirTouch, Mr. Parker worked for Arthur D. Littleas a consultant. Mr. Parker earned a BS from Babson College in Entrepreneurial Studies and Communications.

Powerset.com is the 2nd Semantic App being featured by Web2Innovations in its series of planned publications where we will try to discover, highlight and feature the next generation of web-based semantic applications, engines, platforms, mash-ups, machines, products, services, mixtures, parsers, and approaches and far beyond.

The purpose of these publications is to discover and showcase today’s Semantic Web Apps and projects. We’re not going to rank them, because there is no way to rank these apps at this time – many are still in alpha and private beta.

Via

[ http://www.powerset.com ]
[ http://www.powerset.com/about ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_set ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset ]
[ http://blog.powerset.com/ ]
[ http://lucene.apache.org/hadoop/index.html ]
[ http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-hadoop/Hbase ]
[ http://blog.powerset.com/2007/10/16/powerset-empowered-by-hadoop ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/04/cuill-super-stealth-search-engine-google-has-definitely-noticed/ ]
[ http://www.barneypell.com/ ]
[ http://valleywag.com/tech/rumormonger/hanky+panky-ousts-pell-as-powerset-ceo-318396.php ]
[ http://www.crunchbase.com/company/powerset ]

Games, Social Networking, Society, Technology, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0

Troubles and security issues in SecondLife and other virtual worlds

Leave a comment

The Mercury News has a story where savvy security researchers have found a flaw in Second Life virtual world that allows them to strip a user’s character of all of its in-world money.

Charles Miller and Dino Dai Zovi, two experienced hackers, claim they have found a vulnerability in the way Second Life protects a user’s money inside the virtual world from being stolen. It has significance because that currency, dubbed Linden dollars, can be converted into real world dollars. But the risks for Linden Lab, the San Francisco operator of Second Life, are limited because the researchers say the flaw can be quickly patched.

Miller, a researcher at security firm Independent Security Evaluators in Baltimore, gained some notoriety this summer when he found a way to hack Apple’s iPhone. He said that he and Dai Zovi found the flaw by exploiting a known problem with Apple’s QuickTime movie playback software, which is used to play movies inside the virtual world. That QuickTime flaw was exposed on Monday and the pair completed their hack in a few days. That gave an opening to Dai Zovi and Miller, who had been mulling over Second Life security for months.

The exploit works because Second Life allows users to embed videos or pictures on their character’s or their virtual property. When someone comes nearby and is within view of the object, the Second Life software activates QuickTime so it can play the video or picture. In doing so, QuickTime directs the Second Life software to a web site. By exploiting the flaw in QuickTime, the hackers can direct the Second Life software to a malicious web site that then allows them to take over the Second Life avatar.

When we last tried to reach the page at ISE where the security problem is said to be explained in details the page http://www.securityevaluators.com/sl did not open.

In another story Swedish authorities said in January 2007 they would clamp down on Swedes earning money through Internet games such as Second Life.

Indeed, while Second Life may have started as a utopian world where gamers, geeks, and technophiles could gather and immerse themselves into the pure and innocent escapism of a genuine second life, the rocketing popularity of Linden Lab’s online world has now begun attracting the attentions of people that intent on destruction, and even violence, reports the Concorde Monitor.

Here are some recent incidents that happen at SecondLife’s and other virtual worlds around Internet.

  1. Australian broadcaster ABC has its luxury island turned into a crater by angry hackers.
  2. Worrying reports of rape and child abuse have started to gather around the supposedly idyllic existence to be ‘enjoyed’ in Second Life.
  3. The above mentioned rape incident, which took place earlier in 2007, caused outrage when with one virtual avatar sexually assaulted by another.
  4. The police in Belgium opened an investigation into, not who perpetrated said rape, but whether an actual crime had been committed.
  5. 17-year-old Dutch teenager was arrested this week on suspicion of stealing furniture worth £2,800 from a hotel room in the three-dimensional world Habbo Hotel, a children’s game that only exists on the internet.
  6. German authorities have also homed in on an incident of sexual abuse involving live images of a child avatar having simulated sex with an adult avatar.
  7. Virtual gangs killing off lone in-game players and stealing their wares, which are later sold on for real-world profit.
  8. Shanghai-based 41-year-old Legend of Mir 3 online gamer stabbing another cheating player repeatedly in the chest after he stole an in-game weapon reportedly worth some $850 USD.
  9. British cops will be going undercover in Second Life to investigate depictions of adult-child sex and track down pedophiles

All of this, of course, promotes the question of whether a virtual world such as Second Life should be governed by a virtual police force.

Independent Security Evaluators‘ mission is to provide the outside technical resources companies need to control their technology risk. The experts at ISE have vast experience in every facet of security. The team includes computer scientists, electrical engineers, and cryptographers. ISE experts have testified before Congress, served as expert witnesses, participated in creating standards, and evaluated systems for both government and private industry.

ISE researchers have published several influential books and dozens of scientific papers in the top refereed conferences and journals. They have also analyzed and helped repair several widely used commercial systems. ISE was formed to offer this expertise to the private sector.

On the other side, in respond to the security issues pointed out by the hackers, Joe Miller, VP, Linden Lab in San Francisco, CA has replied:

I want to reiterate that this is an Apple QuickTime issue, not a flaw inherent in Second Life, and as such, affects all platforms and browsers that use QT. Second Life remains a viable environment for conducting business, with a stable economy and the appropriate Resident and economic controls in place.

Linden Lab alerted all Second Life Residents of this exploit both on the official Linden Lab blog and at log-in on Friday afternoon. In addition, the Second Life community is doing a great job of spreading the word, and letting their fellow residents know about the potential issues surrounding the use of QT. I can assure you that no other affected platform is communicating with their customers as thoroughly as we are.

We have measures in place to deal with this type of exploited vulnerability – including the ability to log and track URLs, identify the attackers and take the appropriate measures, as well as making sure that affected Residents are reimbursed if they should lose any Linden dollars.

We’re hopeful Apple will remedy this problem as soon as possible, and we pledge to alert Residents as soon as the fix has been made.

According to the Second Life’s website, there were 6,491,898 residents in its alternative reality.  Second Life, created by San Francisco technology company Linden Lab, has attracted several real-world companies, including car manufacturers and sports clothing makers, which created 3-D stores.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of Residents from around the globe. From the moment you enter the World you’ll discover a vast digital continent, teeming with people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity. Once you’ve explored a bit, perhaps you’ll find a perfect parcel of land to build your house or business. You’ll also be surrounded by the Creations of your fellow Residents. Because Residents retain the rights to their digital creations, they can buy, sell and trade with other Residents. The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world unit-of-trade, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online Linden Dollar exchanges.

Other virtual worlds include:

Entropia Universe ( http://www.entropiauniverse.com/ ), the Swedish virtual world, which had a turnover of $365m last year.

Habbo ( http://www.habbo.com/), owned by a Finnish company, Sulake, boasts more than 80 million members today.

VOY Plaza Virtual ( http://www.voyplaza.com/vpv.html )

There.com ( http://There.com.com )

Club Penguin ( http://www.clubpenguin.com/) recently sold to Disney.

Active Worlds ( http://www.activeworlds.com/ )

Barbie Girls ( http://www.barbiegirls.com/ )

Cyworld ( http://us.cyworld.com/ )

Dubit ( http://www.dubitchat.com/ )

Faketown ( http://www.faketown.com/ )

BBC’s Adventure Rock ( http://bbc.co.uk/cbbc/adventurerock )

World of Warcraft ( http://worldofwarcraft.com )

Gaia ( http://www.gaiaonline.com/ ). The game has just got funded by Sony Pictures.

IMVU ( http://www.imvu.com/ )

Kaneva ( http://www.kaneva.com/ )

Millsberry ( http://millsberry.com/ )

Mokitown ( http://www.mobile-kids.net/ )

Neopets ( http://www.neopets.com/ )

Red Light Center (NSFW) ( http://redlightcenter.com/ )

Webkinz ( http://www.webkinz.com/ )

Zwinktopia by InterActiveCorp ( http://www.zwinktopia.com/ )

Openlife Grid ( http://www.openlifegrid.com/) Public Grid with Opensim Technology.

ViOS – ViOS 3D Internet Viewer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViOS )

Whyville ( http://www.whyville.net/top/index.html )

Citypixel ( http://www.citypixel.com/ )

Weblo ( http://www.weblo.com/ )

  

Via

[ http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/takahashi/2007/11/30/exclusive-hackers-say-they-can-pick-pockets-of-characters-in-second-life-virtual-world /]
[ http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/659761 ]
[ http://www.securityevaluators.com/sl/ ]
[ http://secondlife.com/whatis/ ]
[ http://www.thelocal.se/7347/20070518/ ]
[ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/nov/17/internet.crime ]
[ http://metasecurity.net/2007/06/05/crime-rife-in-virtual-second-life/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/05/virtual-world-hangouts-so-many-to-choose-from ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_world ]
[ http://www.virtualworldsreview.com/ ]
 

Acquisitions, Business, Microsoft, Multimedia, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0

Microsoft Acquires WebFives, yet another multimedia sharing site

Leave a comment

Microsoft has acquired yet another photo/video and audio sharing site called WebFives.

The agreement has been reached during November 2007 and according it Microsoft has acquired all rights to WebFives technology, patents pending, trademarks, and software to incorporate into its products and services over time. In order to make WebFives’s wind down process as easy as possible for their users, Microsoft has agreed to provide them with a license to continue operating WebFives until the end of the year, giving their users time to copy any information you would like to keep to your own PCs or another service prior to the end of the year.

WebFives has initially been founded by a former Microsoft engineer Mike Toutonghi as Vizrea, which later became WebFives. Vizrea launched in 2006 and is based in Seattle and had a handful number of employees in both locations Seattle and Prague (Czechs Republic). Originally they idea is known to have started in August of 2003 with a vision of making video, photo, music sharing, and blogging easy and accessible to everyone from any device. The company launched with the support from some early Microsoft executives. Mike Toutonghi was the engineer who initiated the Media Center version of Windows at Microsoft before leaving for the startup world.

The company realized that building a great sharing and social network means serving the community at first place. They are making it possible for anyone who creates videos, pictures, or music to easily share their creations in stunning quality to the entire world or just a small group of friends. WebFives includes advertising so they can offer you a great, free level of service for creating and sharing videos, pictures, blogs, and audio on your own personal WebFives website. Users are provided with standard social networking profile pages complete with blogging, and have the option of accessing their sites via computer or via a WAP specific page.

Some of the site’s fundaments:

1 WebFives is Quality
The video you watch and share on the web doesn’t have to be fuzzy and low quality any more. WebFives can deliver full-screen, digital-TV quality video, and CD quality audio. It’s high quality on mobile phones too.

2 WebFives is Everywhere
Easily share what you create. You and your friends can use the web browser on almost any phone to upload to WebFives, and watch WebFives video or listen to WebFives music. You can also use multimedia messages (MMS) to send movies and photos directly from your phone to WebFives. (Your web address is: webfives.com/username, your mobile address is: wap.webfives.com/username. It really is as simple as that.) Plus, for some phones we have additional, optional software.

 3 WebFives is Friendly
Already using another service? No problem, WebFives likes them all. Easily put your high quality WebFives media on other sites like MySpace, Xanga—or even on all of them at the same time. Send a video from your phone to WebFives and it’ll update for all of your friends right away.

4 WebFives is the Whole Enchilada
It’s got everything you’d expect from a sharing service—video, music, blogs, comments, ratings, tags, ‘friends,’ fast and easy search, and more—on both PCs and mobile phones.

5 WebFives is You
It’s designed from the ground up with you in mind, so it’s easy and fun to use. You can whip out great looking, custom web pages in minutes, and decide who can see them. (People who can’t see them don’t know they exist.)

Other prominent acquisitions within the sector are Photobucket by MySpace (News Corp/Fox Interactive), Flickr by Yahoo and Picasa by Google some years ago. In just recent weeks American greetings has acquired Webshots Inc, one of the leaders of Photo sharing sites. 

The deal terms and the acquisition price were not disclosed and typically for big buys (Microsoft, Google, etc.) the site stopped working and current users are given with 30 days to have their content downloaded and moved away from the site.

Via

[ http://mashable.com/2007/12/01/microsoft-acquires-photo-sharing-site-webfives/ ]
[ http://www.webfives.com/whatis.aspx ]
[ http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/258559_vizrea07.html ]
[ http://blogs.zdnet.com/mobile-gadgeteer/?p=723 ]
[ http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/brierdudley/2007/11/microsoft_buys_toutonghis_seat_1.html ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/30/microsoft-acquires-mobile-focused-social-networking-site-webfives/ ]
 

Bay Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Business, Customer Relationship Management, Funding, Investments, Public Companies, Software, Technology

Force.com takes $25 million from Bay Partners & Bessemer Venture Partners

Leave a comment

Bay Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners have teamed up with Salesforce to invest $25 million in businesses building on the recently announced Force.com application platform over the next three years. Investments will be around $500,000 each where some convertible notes are also included. Investments may go as high as $2 million depending on the company’s stage and needs.

Force.com is owned by Salesforce.com, Force.com is presented and offered as platform as a service (PaaS).  Force.com is the world’s first Platform as a Service (PaaS), enabling developers to create and deliver any kind of business application, entirely on-demand and without software. It’s a breakthrough new concept that is making companies radically more successful by letting them translate their ideas into deployed applications in record time.

With Force.com Salesforce is planning to enter the custom software market. It is a new platform that will allow developers to create database driven applications and deploy them as services. So if Salesforce doesn’t offer what you are looking for, and no one has built it for you on Salesforce’s AppExchange, you can simply build it yourself using the Apex framework.

Basically there is a number of rival start-ups that are focused on offering users easy way to create and deploy database driven applications – DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, Rollbase (from former Taleo executives), LongJump, Coghead  and WyaWorks, among others. Unlike some experts predicting that this is sort of game ending for some of the start-ups above, we think this is just a step towards improving the custom software market’s environment and competitiveness among the players from which the end users would only benefit from. Also, some of the smaller companies within the sector are cost-effective and are positioned towards different market niches by targeting different customers when compared to the Salesforce.com. To me it looks more like a beginning of the game.

Many experts in enterprise SaaS right now know that ultra-configurable platforms such as Force.com are the envy of the industry for many reasons. Suffice it so say they enable extremely rapid expansion of the core and beyond into adjacent market segments as well as completely new markets – even long-tail micro-markets driven and executed entirely by end-users.

Bottom line is that users are being given more and more power to develop their own on-demand apps. This is a mega-trend in enterprise software and all significant players will need a strategy to deal with it. Users are becoming much more empowered to design, build, deploy and even distribute their own custom business apps without even knowing how to program.

Highly configurable do-it-yourself SaaS for business users is the future of software and Force.com is a fantastic example of where things are headed. Just about every enterprise software company, especially those targeting SMBs, will want to be running on their own version of this kind of platform over the next several years in order to compete.

Again, this is by no means a game-ending proposition for any of the companies working in this space. Oppositely, some great strategic acquisitions will emerge here as enterprise software companies figure out how to deal with this phenomenon. Multi-tenant, meta-data-driven, configurable SaaS is difficult stuff to build right. The startups that can and are doing a good job now will command a premium in the near future.

On the other hand Salesforce.com has always been seen and known as an aggressive company.

Salesforce.com is the worldwide leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) services. More companies trust their vital customer and sales data to salesforce.com than any other on-demand CRM company in the world.
 
Why? Perhaps it’s because we deliver integrated, completely customizable enterprise applications for companies of all sizes. Or maybe it’s because Salesforce is so easy to learn and use, and thanks to the power of the on-demand Force.com platform, it can be up and running in weeks or days—not the months or years required by traditional client/server CRM software. Or it could be the unprecedented speed with which our customers see real, tangible ROI. Or maybe it’s because of our 100-percent dedication to the success of our customers.

In fact, more than 35,500 companies worldwide depend on Salesforce to manage their sales, marketing, customer service, and other critical business functions. We are proud to be contributing to the success of companies of all sizes, in all industries, around the globe including:

  • Corporate Express
  • Daiwa Securities
  • Expedia Corporate Travel
  • Dow Jones Newswires
  • SunTrust Banks
  • Kaiser Permanente

Salesforce.com was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, who pioneered the concept of delivering enterprise applications via a simple Web site. Salesforce.com is constantly building on that legacy by improving and expanding our award-winning suite of on-demand applications, our Force.com platform for extending Salesforce, and our one-of-a-kind AppExchange directory of on-demand applications.

Salesforce.com has received considerable recognition in the industry, including:

  • Technology of the Year (InfoWorld, 2004, 2005, 2006)
  • Editors’ Choice Award (PC Magazine, 2002, 2003, 2004)
  • Visionary Award (SDForum, 2004)
  • Best of the Web (Forbes, 2003)
  • CRM Excellence Award (Customer Inter@ction Solutions, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006)
  • Top 100 Innovators Award (BusinessWeek, 2006)
  • Innovation Award (AMR Research, 2005)
  • CODIE Award for Best CRM (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006)

The growing list of global business partners dedicated to providing complementary products and services to salesforce.com customers includes IBM, Microsoft, BEA Systems, Sun, TIBCO, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Miller Heiman, and dozens more.

It is believed that the partnership will provide Bay and Bessemer early leads to new companies and Saleforce’s assistance during due dillegence.

Bay Partners have already invested in many Appexchange integrated companies (Xactly, Eloqua, Cornerstone, eProject) and are looking to get in earlier this time around. Notably, Bay Partners has also invested in Facebook’s platform by putting aside funds for 50 investments. So far they’ve closed three, as far as we know.

The investment program has been underway over the past couple of months. Bay has been looking at 12 deals and already committed to one. The deals are judged on a case by case basis.

The Force.com venture program is being led by Neil Sadaranganey and Salil Deshpande from Bay Partners and Byron Deeter from Bessemer Venture Partners.

Saleforce.com is one of the first web based companies to go against the practice to sell software as a product. Instead, they do believe that the software is best to be offered as a service – Software as a Service or so called SaaS. Marc Benioff is salesforce.com’s Chairman & CEO. 

The company is publicly traded on NYSE.

 SALESFORCE.COM INC (NYSE:CRM)  
 
After Hours: 56.73 0.00 (0.00%) on 11/30/07
 
Last Trade: 56.73
Trade Time: 4:02PM ET
Change:  1.47 (2.66%)
Prev Close: 55.26
Open: 55.62
Bid: N/A
Ask: N/A
1y Target Est: 59.36
 
Day’s Range: 55.29 – 57.73
52wk Range: 35.55 – 58.00
Volume: 3,314,902
Avg Vol (3m): 1,694,100
Market Cap: 6.70B
P/E (ttm): 630.33
EPS (ttm): 0.09
Div & Yield: N/A (N/A)

The company’s current market capitalization is more than $6 Billion. Larry Ellison is one of the early investors in Salesforce. 
 
Ok, when people speak for SaaS (Software as a Service), we should take into consideration the following aspects, as some SaaS entrepreneurs are pointing out.

1. Enterprise Software companies which have not yet switched to SaaS are feeling the pressure and in many cases this is already affecting their bottom lines.

2. In order to adopt a SaaS strategy a quick way to do this is to partner with SaaS and build on the Force.com platform, but this is not an end-game strategy, it is a stop-gap measure. Ultimately Salesforce will want to own all major categories, Benioff (Salesforce.com’s Chairman & CEO) wants to build the next SAP/Oracle/PeopleSoft on – demand and why wouldn’t he? However, this causes a fundamental conflict with a partner who would ever consider Force.com their primary platform.

3. It is hard to believe that other enterprise software companies out there are going to bow down to Force.com, give up, and hand over the keys to Benioff. Every enterprise software company will need a strategy to compete with this kind of platform and allow their own applications to be customized, expanded, and even new apps created in an ecosystem, in order to remain competitive. And there is much more of a business case for a successful stand-alone enterprise software company to build or buy to get there versus give up and run on Force.com. There could also be a number of consolidations within the sector of some of the smaller players.

Force.com is a fantastic platform, but it represents a very new very big change that is happening in enterprise software today. It represents an incremental shift in power to end-users in terms of their ability to customize and build applications specific to their business needs. It is the intersection of the do-it-yourself web with enterprise software (e.g. YouTube ==> YouSoft). To say that Salesforce.com has and will continue to have a monopoly on this sector is short-sighted.

Some of the Salesforce.com’s latest press releases, news and announcements:

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff Named 2007 Agenda Setter and Top Ten Business Leader for Championing Software-as-a-Service (http://investor.salesforce.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=141811&p=irol-newsArticle&t=Regular&id=1081407&)

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff Named 2007 Agenda Setter and Top Ten (http://investor.salesforce.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=141811&p=irol-newsArticle&t=Regular&id=1081140&)

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff Named 2007 Agenda Setter and Top Ten Business Leader for Championing Software-as-a-Service (http://investor.salesforce.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=141811&p=irol-newsArticle&t=Regular&id=1080863&)

Salesforce.com Executive Vice President of Products and Marketing to Present at the Credit Suisse Technology Conference
(http://investor.salesforce.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=141811&p=irol-newsArticle&t=Regular&id=1081140&)

Toyota Motor Europe Standardizes on Salesforce across Europe (http://investor.salesforce.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=141811&p=irol-newsArticle&t=Regular&id=1080863&)

Via

[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/30/bay-and-bessemer-add-25-million-in-monetary-muscle-behind-forcecom/ ]
[ http://www.salesforce.com/company/investor/ ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/13/salesforce-enters-custom-application-market-with-forcecom/ ]
[ http://www.salesforce.com/company ]
[ http://www.salesforce.com/platform/ ]

Business, Google, Search Engines, Semantic Apps, Semantic Web, Social Networking, Social Search Engines, Technology, Web 2.0

Is Google trying to become a Social Search Engine

2 Comments

Based on what we are seeing the answer is close to yes. Google is now experimenting with new social features aimed at improving the users’ search experience.

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that Google claims this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.

There seems to be features like “Like it”, “Don’t like it?” and “Know of a better web page”. Of course, to get full advantage of these extras as well as to have your recommendations associated with your searches later, upon your return, you have to be signed in.

There is nothing new here, many of the smaller social search engines are deploying and using some of the features Google is just now trying to test, but having more than 500 million unique visitors per month, the vast majority of which are heavily using Google’s search engine, is a huge advantage if one wants to implement social elements in finding the information on web easily. Even Marissa Mayer, Google’s leading executive in search, said in August that Google would be well positioned to compete in social search. Actually with that experiment in particular it appears your vote only applies to what Google search results you will see, so it is hard to call it “social” at this time around. This may prove valuable as a stand-alone service. Also, Daniel Russell of Google, some time ago, made it pretty clear that they use user behavior to affect search results. Effectively, that’s using implicit voting, rather than explicit voting.

We think, however, the only reason Google is trying to deal with these social features, relying on humans to determine the relevancy, is their inability to effectively fight the spam their SERPs are flooded with. 

Manipulating algorithmic based results, in one way or another is in our understanding not much harder than what you would eventually be able to do to manipulate or influence results in Google that rely and depend on social recommendations. Look at Digg for example.

We think employing humans to determine which results are best is basically an effective pathway to corruption, which is sort of worse than to have an algorithm to blame for the spam and low quality of the results. Again take a look at Digg, dmoz.org and mostly Wikipedia. Wikipedia, once a good idea, became a battle field for corporate, brand, political and social wars. Being said that, we think the problem of Google with the spam results lies down to the way how they reach to the information or more concrete the methods they use to crawl and index the vast Web. Oppositely, having people, instead of robots, gathering the quality and important information (from everyone’s point of view) from around the web is in our understanding much better and effective approach rather than having all the spam results loaded on the servers and then let the people sort them out.

That’s not the first time Google is trying new features with their search results. We remember searchmash.com. Searchmash.com is yet another of the Google’s toys in the search arena, which was quietly started out a year ago because Google did not want the public to know about this project and influence their beta testers (read: the common users) with the brand name Google. The project, however, quickly became poplar since many people discovered who the actual owner of the beta project is.

Google is under no doubt getting all the press attention they need, no matter what they do and sometimes even more than what they do actually need from. On the other hand things seem to be slowly changing today and influential media like New York Times, Newsweek, CNN and many others are in a quest for the next search engine, the next Google. This was simply impossible to happen during 2001, 2002 up to 2004, period characterized with a solid media comfort for Google’s search engine business.  

So, is Google the first one to experiment with social search approaches, features, methods and extras? No, definitely not as you are going to see for yourself from the companies and projects listed below.

As for crediting a Digg-like system with the idea of sorting content out based on community voting, they definitely weren’t the first. The earliest implementation of this we are aware of is Kuro5hin.org (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin), which, we think, was founded back in 1999.

Eurekster

One of the first and oldest companies coined social search engines on Web is Eureskter. 
Eurekster launched its community-powered social search platform “swicki”, as far as we know, in 2004, and explicit voting functionality in 2006. To date, over 100,000 swickis have been built, each serving a community of users passionate about a specific topic. Eurekster processes over 25,000,000 searches a month. The key to Eurekster’s success in improving relevancy here has been leveraging the explicit (and implicit) user behavior though at the group or community level, not individual or general. On the other hand Eurekster never made it to the mainstream users and somehow the company slowly faded away, lost the momentum.

Wikia Social Search

Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia’s founder) and Angela Beesley in 2004. The company is incorporated in Delaware. Gil Penchina became Wikia’s CEO in June 2006, at the same time the company moved its headquarters from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Menlo Park and later to San Mateo in California. Wikia has offices in San Mateo and New York in the US, and in PoznaÅ„ in Poland. Remote staff is also located in Chile, England, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and also in other locations in Poland and the US. Wikia has received two rounds of investment; in March 2006 from Bessemer Venture Partners and in December 2006 from Amazon.com.

According to the Wikia Search the future of Internet Search must be based on:

  1. Transparency – Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses and open content + APIs.
  2. Community – Everyone is able to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), strong social and community focus.
  3. Quality – Significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience.
  4. Privacy – Must be protected, do not store or transmit any identifying data.

Other active areas of focus include:

  1. Social Lab – sources for URL social reputation, experiments in wiki-style social ranking.
  2. Distributed Lab – projects focused on distributed computing, crawling, and indexing. Grub!
  3. Semantic Lab – Natural Language Processing, Text Categorization.
  4. Standards Lab – formats and protocols to build interoperable search technologies.

Based on who Jimmy Wales is and the success he achieved with Wikipedia therefore the resources he might have access to, Wikia Search stands at good chances to survive against any serious competition by Google.

NosyJoe.com

NosyJoe is yet another great example of social search engine that employs intelligent tagging technologies and runs on a semantic platform.

NosyJoe is a social search engine that relies on you to sniff for and submit the web’s interesting content and offers basically meaningful search results in the form of readable complete sentences and smart tags. NosyJoe is built upon the fundamental belief people are better than robots in finding the interesting, important and quality content around Web. Rather than crawling the entire Web building a massive index of information, which aside being an enormous technological task, requires huge amount of resources and is time consuming process would also load lots of unnecessary information people don’t want, NosyJoe is focused just on those parts of the Web people think are important and find interesting enough to submit and share with others.

NosyJoe is a hybrid of a social search engine that relies on you to sniff for and submit the web’s interesting content, an intelligent content tagging engine on the back end and a basic semantic platform on its web visible part. NosyJoe then applies a semantic based textual analysis and intelligently extracts the meaningful structures like sentences, phrases, words and names from the content in order to make it just one idea more meaningfully searchable. This helps us present the search results in basically meaningful formats like readable complete sentences and smart phrasal, word and name tags.

The information is then clustered and published across the NosyJoe’s platform into contextual channels, time and source categories and semantic phrasal, name and word tags are also applied to meaningfully connect them together, which makes even the smallest content component web visible, indexable and findable. At the end a set of algorithms and user patterns are applied to further rank, organize and share the information.

From our quick tests on the site the search results returned were presented in form of meaningful sentences and semantic phrasal tags (as an option), which turns their search results into — something we have never seen on web so far — neat content components, readable and easily understandable sentences, unlike what we are all used to, some excerpts from the content where the keyword is found in. When compared to other search engines’ results NosyJoe.com’s SERPs appear truly meaningful.

As of today, and just 6 or 7 months since they went online, NosyJoe is already having more than 500,000 semantic tags created that connect tens of thousands of meaningful sentences across their platform.

We have no information as to who stays behind NosyJoe but the project seems very serious and promising in many aspects from how they gather the information to how they present the results to the way they offset low quality results. From all newcomers social search engines NosyJoe stands at best changes to make it. As far as we know NosyJoe is also based in the Silicon Valley. 

Sproose

Sproose says it is developing search technology that lets users obtain personalized results, which can be shared among a social network, using the Nutch open-source search engine, and building applications on top. Their search appears to using third party search feeds and ranks the results based on the users’ votes.

Sproose is said it has raised nearly $1 million in seed funding. It is based in Danville, a town on the east side of the SF Bay Area. Sproose said Roger Smith, founder, former president and chief executive at Silicon Valley Bank, was one of the angel investors, and is joining Sproose’s board.

Other start-up search engines of great variety are listed below:

  • Hakia – Relies on natural language processing. These guys are also experimenting with social elements with the feature so called “meet others who asked the same query“.
  • Quintura – A visual engine based today in Virginia, US. The company is founded by Russians and has early been headquartered in Moscow. 
  • Mahalo – search engine that looks more like a directory with quality content handpicked by editors. Jason Calacanis is the founder of the company.
  • ChaCha – Real humans try to help you in your quest for information, via chat. The company is based in Indiana and has been criticized a lot by the Silicon Valley’s IT community. Despite these critics they have recently raised $10m in Series A round of funding. 
  • Powerset – Still in closed beta and also relying on understanding the natural language. See our Powerset review.  
  • Clusty – founded in 2000 by three Carnegie Mellon University scientists.
  • Lexxe – Sydney based engine featuring natural language processing technologies.
  • Accoona – The company has recently filed for an IPO in US planning to raise $80M from the public.
  • Squidoo – It has been started in October 2005 by Seth Godin and looks more like a wiki site, ala Wikia or Wikipedia where anyone creates articles on different topics.
  • Spock – Focuses on people information, people search engine.

One thing is for sure today; Google is now bringing solid credentials to and is somehow legitimating the social search approach, which by the way is helping those so many smaller so-called social search engines. 

Perhaps it is about time for consolidation in the social search sector. Some of the smaller but more promising social search engines can now become one in order to be able to compete with and prevent Google’s dominance within the social search sector too, just like what they did with the algorithmic search engines. Is Google also interested in? Anyone heard of recent interest in or already closed acquisition deals for start-up social search engines?

On the contrary, more and more IT experts, evangelists and web professionals agree on the fact that taking Google down is a challenge that will most likely be accomplished by a concept that is anything else but not a search engine in our traditional understanding. Such concepts, including but not limited to, are Wikipedia, Del.icio.us and LinkedWords. In other words finding information on web doesn’t necessarily mean to search for it.

Via:
[ http://www.google.com/experimental/a840e102.html ]
[ http://www.blueverse.com/2007/12/01/google-the-social-…]
[ http://www.adesblog.com/2007/11/30/google-experimenting-social… ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/straight-out-of-left-field-google-experimenting-with-digg-style-voting-on-search-results ]
[ http://www.blogforward.com/money/2007/11/29/google… ]
[ http://nextnetnews.blogspot.com/2007/09/is-nosyjoecom-… ]
[ http://www.newsweek.com/id/62254/page/1 ]
[ http://altsearchengines.com/2007/10/05/the-top-10-stealth-… ]
[ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/business/yourmoney/…  ]
[ http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05… ]
[ http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Search_Wikia ]
[ http://nosyjoe.com/about.com ]
[ http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2005/11/08/sproose_up_your… ]
[ http://nextnetnews.blogspot.com/2007/10/quest-for-3rd-generation… ]
[ http://www.sproose.com ]

Accel Partners, Business, Funding, Greylock Partners, Hutchison Whampoa Limited, Meritech Capital, Money, Peter Thiel, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0

Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing Invests $60m in Facebook. Funding totals $338.20M to date

Leave a comment

Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing Invests $60m in Facebook. Facebook now has $338.20M in cash to play with. Plans are the company to go public in 2008 or 2009 according to some rumors within the sector.

Facebook is hugely popular social networking site, second only to MySpace in terms of users. Other popular social networking sites are Bebo and Friendster, the second one tried to acquire Facebook in 2004 for just $10M.

The latest comScore metrics, we have seen, revealed that Facebook is actually site #16 (others claim it is #6 today) in US with nearly 70M unique visitors per month and more than 50M registered and active users.
 
Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and managing partner of the Founders Fund was the first angel investor in the company. He invested $500,000 into Facebook in early 2004. Later Accel Partners poured $12.7 million more in funding, at a valuation in the $100 million range.

The next year [2006], Facebook received $25 million in funding from Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital, as well as returning investors Accel Partners and Peter Thiel. The pre-money valuation for this deal was in the $525 million range.

Facebook is reported to have turned deals down from Friendster, Yahoo, Viacom  and the mighty Google a couple of months ago when Zuckerberg has chosen Microsoft to partner with. Microsoft de-facto has invested $240 million into Facebook for just 1.6 percent of the company in October 2007. This put the company’s valuation at over $15 billion on just $150 million in annual revenues.

Mr. Li Ka-shing is the Chairman of Cheung Kong (Holdings) Limited and Hutchison Whampoa Limited. Cheung Kong (Holdings) Limited is the flagship of the Cheung Kong Group which has business operations in 55 countries around the world and employs about 250,000 staff. In Hong Kong alone, the Group includes eight listed companies with a combined market capitalization of approximately HKD981 billion (31 October 2007). Hutchison Whampoa Limited is a Fortune Global 500 company.

It would be interesting to find out what’s the equity position Mr. Li Ka-shing has secured for his $60M considering what Microsoft has bought for their $240M. 

Via

[ http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook ]
[ http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/30/another-60-million-for-facebook/ ]
[ http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071130/facebook-nabs-60-million-investment-from-li-ka-shing/ ]
[ http://www.hutchison-whampoa.com/eng/about/chairman/chairman.htm ]

Semantic Apps, Semantic Web, Technology, Web 2.0

Freebase: open, shared database of the world’s knowledge

3 Comments

Freebase, created by Metaweb Technologies, is an open database of the world’s information. It’s built by the community and for the community – free for anyone to query, contribute to, build applications on top of, or integrate into their websites.

Already, Freebase covers millions of topics in hundreds of categories. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC archives, it contains structured information on many popular topics, including movies, music, people and locations – all reconciled and freely available via an open API. This information is supplemented by the efforts of a passionate global community of users who are working together to add structured information on everything from philosophy to European railway stations to the chemical properties of common food ingredients.

By structuring the world’s data in this manner, the Freebase community is creating a global resource that will one day allow people and machines everywhere to access information far more easily and quickly than they can today.

Freebase  aims to “open up the silos of data and the connections between them”, according to founder Danny Hillis at the Web 2.0 Summit. Freebase is a database that has all kinds of data in it and an API. Because it’s an open database, anyone can enter new data in Freebase. An example page in the Freebase db looks pretty similar to a Wikipedia page. When you enter new data, the app can make suggestions about content. The topics in Freebase are organized by type, and you can connect pages with links, semantic tagging. So in summary, Freebase is all about shared data and what you can do with it.

The Company behind

Metaweb Technologies, Inc. is a company based in San Francisco that is developing Metaweb, a semantic data storage infrastructure for the web, and its first application built on that platform named Freebase, described as an “open, shared database of the world’s knowledge”. The company was founded by Danny Hillis and others as a spinoff of Applied Minds in July, 2005, and operated in stealth mode until 2007.

Reach

According to Quantcast, which we believe is very accurate, Freebase is basically not popular site, despite the press attention it gets, and is reaching less than 5000 unique visitors per month. Compete is reporting for slightly more than 8000 uniques per month.

The People

William Daniel “Danny” Hillis (born September 25, 1956, in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a company that developed the Connection Machine, a parallel supercomputer designed by Hillis at MIT. He is also co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, Applied Minds, Metaweb Technologies, and author of The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work.

Investors

In March 2006, Freebase received $15 million in funding from investors including Benchmark Capital, Millennium Technology Ventures and Omidyar Network.

Freebase is in alpha.

Freebase.com is the first Semantic App being featured by Web2Innovations in its series of planned publications where we will try to discover, highlight and feature the next generation of web-based semantic applications, engines, platforms, mash-ups, machines, products, services, mixtures, parsers, and approaches and far beyond.

The purpose of these publications is to discover and showcase today’s Semantic Web Apps and projects. We’re not going to rank them, because there is no way to rank these apps at this time – many are still in alpha and private beta.

[ http://freebase.com ]
[ http://roblog.freebase.com ]
[ http://www.crunchbase.com/company/freebase ]
[ http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_semantic_apps_to_watch.php ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Hillis ]
[ http://www.metaweb.com ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaweb_Technologies ]

Semantic Apps, Semantic Web, Technology, Web 2.0

The Semantic Web and its Applications Today

3 Comments

Since Web 2.0 Innovations is all about discovering and showcasing the innovation on web, we think the Semantic Web is playing a significant role of the next web transformation. Therefore in a series of publications we will try to discover, highlight and feature the next generation of web-based semantic applications, engines, platforms, mash-ups, machines, products, services, mixtures, parsers, and approaches and far beyond.

We are not going to try to explain in details what Semantic Web is after all. There has been plenty of information on web as to what does really that term mean. First off it is the Tim Berners-Lee W3C led initiative that touts technologies like RDF, OWL and other standards for metadata. Basically it promises to change how the web works in first place, to meaningfully connect the different datasets around web in a readable and usable format for both humans and robots.

The Semantic Web is a web of data. There is lots of data we all use every day, and it’s not part of the web. One can see his/her bank statements or travel arrangements on the web, and the photographs and one can see his/her appointments in a calendar. But can one see his/her photos in a calendar to see what one was doing when she or him took them? Can one see the bank statement lines in a calendar?

Why not? Because we don’t have a web of data. Because data is controlled by applications, and each application keeps it to itself.

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

Some of the very basics Semantic components include:

— XML provides an elemental syntax for content structure within documents, yet associates no semantics with the meaning of the content contained within.

— XML Schema is a language for providing and restricting the structure and content of elements contained within XML documents.

— RDF is a simple language for expressing data models, which refer to objects (“resources”) and their relationships. An RDF-based model can be represented in XML syntax.

— RDF Schema is a vocabulary for describing properties and classes of RDF-based resources, with semantics for generalized-hierarchies of such properties and classes.

— OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjoint ness), cardinality (e.g. “exactly one”), equality, richer typing of properties and characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated classes.

— SPARQL is a protocol and query language for semantic web data sources.

Here are some more links to plenty of resources that can get you to the basics and fundaments of the Semantic Web.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

http://www.w3schools.com/semweb/default.asp

http://infomesh.net/2001/swintro/

http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/Primer (Getting Into RDF & Semantic Web Using N3)

http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Semantic (Semantic Web Roadmap)

http://purl.org/swag/whatIsSW (What Is The Semantic Web?)

http://uwimp.com/eo.htm (Semantic Web Primer)

http://logicerror.com/semanticWeb-long (Semantic Web Introduction – Long)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html (SciAm: The Semantic Web)

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/03/07/buildingsw.html (Building The Semantic Web)

http://infomesh.net/2001/06/swform/ (The Semantic Web, Taking Form)

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Activity (SW Activity Statement)

http://www.w3.org/2000/01/sw/ (SWAD)

If by any chance you are working for or being a part of, or just know about, a company or a team deploying Semantic Web in one way or another drop us a short note at info [at] web2innovations.com and we would love to feature your work here.

Business, Dell, Money, Technology

Michael Dell is returning; reshaping the industry?

Leave a comment

As we have seen today across multiple news reports Michael Dell is returning to the company and is in charge again of the troubled computer company he founded 23 years ago.

After a two-year absence, Michael Dell is back as CEO of the PC maker he founded in 1984.

Why troubled? Here are some facts as we know them explaining the situation behind Dell, Incorporated.

In August 2006 his company ordered the recall of 4.2 million batteries. Dell launched an internal investigation into accounting practices, which uncovered padding of profits by midlevel managers; after the SEC announced its own investigation the company restated its books to erase more than $92 million in net income.

In late January 2007 Dell booted Kevin Rollins, who was the chief executive since 2004, and James Schneider, the company’s chief financial officer. More startling, perhaps, was what he told his 82,000 employees: “The direct model has been a revolution but is not a religion.” It amounted to a repudiation of the gospel Dell himself wrote years ago, a business built on dealing directly with customers via the phone and Dell.com — brashly cutting out all retailers and wholesale dealers. For years the model worked brilliantly. Since going public in 1988 Dell has seen sales, net profit and share price all climb at compound annual rates between 28% and 33%.

The company is also overhauling customer service division after struggling with complaints. Also lowered PC prices, dropped Intel-only policy.

A little bit more about the company: Dell, Inc. designs, develops, manufactures, markets, sells, and supports computer systems and services that are customized to customer requirements. The company is based in Round Rock, Texas. Their stock information is enclosed below:

Price $ 26.13 Change 0.00
Open 0.00 % Change 0.0%
Prev Close 26.13 Volume 500
Market Value 58 bil P/E Ratio 20.7
Bid 26.25 EPS 1.26
Ask 26.28 Dividend 0.00
High 0.00 Yield 0.0
Low 0.00 Shares Out 2.24 bil
52wk High 30.77 52wk Low 21.61
Industry: Personal Computers
Sector: Technology

How Dell appears on the Forbes Global 2000: Sales Rank: 90; Profits Rank: 201; Assets Rank: 603 and Market Value: 142.

In less than ten months Michael Dell has made many changes, some of them drmatic, focusing on flashier products and marketing, new Web sites to handle customer complaints and ideas and a bigger push to sell value-added services. During that short timeframe the company has managed even to achieve a handful of interesting acquisitions. Nonetheless Dell is slimming down, starting to cut 10% of its workforce on every level, a move that could save $750 million a year, says Christopher Whitmore, a tech analyst at Deutsche Bank.

On the other side Dell has attracted a number of high profile names as executives. Mark Jarvis, the former marketing chief at Oracle. Steven Schuckenbrock, former president of EDS. Michael Cannon who was president of components maker Solectron.

The biggest step however seems to be the Dell’s push to move into the retain space by putting products in 10,000 outlets like Wal-Mart, Staples and chains in Japan, China, Russia and the U.K.

In other news Hypermarket chain Carrefour said it will sell Dell’s consumer PCs through its stores in France, Spain and Belgium beginning next year. Dell chose Carrefour because it is the world’s second largest supermarket chain, after Wal-Mart, and is present in numerous European countries. Carrefour also has operations in Latin America and China, which would be useful if Dell ever wanted to extend the relationship there.

Dell is also in a virtual war with Apple CEO Steve Jobs starting when Jobs first criticized Dell for making “un-innovative beige boxes”. On October 6, 1997, when Dell was asked what he would do if he owned then-troubled Apple Computer, he said “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Dell would regret these words after Jobs returned as Apple CEO in 1998. By early 2006 Apple was worth more (based on market valuation) than Dell. By October 2007 Apple was worth more than twice Dell’s value (AAPL:$160B – DELL:$62B). Dell resumed the CEO duties (replacing Kevin Rollins) at his troubled company in January 2007, and market value increased 11% in 9 months. During that same time Jobs’ Apple increased its market value 92%. Michael Dell said in late January of 2007 that his company would be worth more than Apple by the end of the year.

What’s intersting here to pay attention to is the fact that since Dell returned and replaced Rollins the company’s market value increased 11% in 9 months.

As of 2007, Forbes estimates Michael Dell’s net worth at $15.8 billion, making him the 30th richest person in the world and the 9th richest American. Dell currently resides in Austin, Texas with his wife, Susan, and their four children. Dell also owns one of the most expensive houses built in Texas. He is also rumored to be buyer in International Paper’s recent sale of 900,000 acres of timberland.

Videos from Dell, Inc.  

Here are some Videos form the Dell Vlog account on YouTube which highlights some of the transformations takign place at Dell, Inc.

Dell about the Re-Generation

Walk in Video from Dell Oracle OpenWorld Keynote

Opening video from Dell’s Oracle OpenWorld Keynote

Complexity in the Industry – OOW Keynote Section 1

The Future is Simple – OOW Keynote Section 2

The Future is Virtual – OOW Keynote Section 3

The Future is Connected – OOW Keynote Section 4

The Future is Green – OOW Keynote Section 5

~~~~ 

[ via Forbes ]

[ via Forbes List ]

[ via reseller.co.nz ]

[ via Wkipedia ]

[ via Michael Jung ]

[ via USATODAY ]