3ones
The Simplest Stable Structure
March 16, 2010
GigaOM
The mayor of Sarasota, Fla., went swimming with the sharks today yes, literally in an extreme effort to woo Google and land that sweet fiber network the company plans to dole out to some lucky town. And hes not alone. Cities across the country ...
There’s a battle looming in California over smart meters and energy prices. Google says the state should require its big utilities to give near real-time pricing information to every smart meter-enabled customer by the end of next year. California...
I don’t trust Yelp any more. And thats not a conscious decision. Ive largely ignored the well-publicized allegations of how the ad side manipulated ratings and reviews to drive sales, instead continuing to turn to the site for recommendations on ...
Sequoia Capital partner Mark Kvamme, citing examples from campaigns run on Funny or Die and AdMob, told an audience of marketers at OMMA Global in San Francisco today, If you can harness social media marketing, you dont have to pay for advertising...
If youve been cooking up a great business idea for how to use IT to fight climate change, you need to enter our Green:Net 2010 Launchpad! Were only accepting submissions until 5 p.m. PT on Friday, so make sure you and your colleagues enter soon. Y...
Communications networks are eating up a lot of power and with the proliferation of online video and data-rich mobile applications, such consumption is set to climb even further. According to the Smart 2020 report, information and communication technology services are currently responsible for a full 2 percent of the total carbon footprint; communications networks alone account for a third of that consumption. And the report estimates that given user demand and production, those numbers are going to double ...
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Music subscription services promise unlimited access to enormous libraries of songs, typically on the order of 6-10 million tracks. And while a few superstar artists are famously absent from streaming services as well as Apple’s iTunes -– the Beat...
Googles content comprises between 6 and 10 percent of global Internet traffic, making its internal network one of the top three ISPs in the world, according to Arbor Networks. The maker of deep packet inspection equipment, which runs a survey of i...
After having seen tremendous success with its geo-local app, Where, the Boston-based uLocate Communications today rebranded itself as Where. The company also launched a new web site that allows mobile users to sync information in the app between t...
Qualcomm plans to bid for a chunk of spectrum in Indias upcoming 3G auction, the chipmaker said today. Qualcomm is taking a page out of Googles playbook the search engine giant bid for spectrum in the U.S. but never had any plans to become a netw...
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has spoken to a YouTube team about the National Broadband Plan and tried to respond to questions from Internet users across the country. The answers were, to put it politely, nuanced at best. Regular reader Brent Gl...
The mobile application economy will be worth $17.5 billion by 2012, according to a report released this morning from analyst Chetan Sharma surpassing that of the worldwide market for CDs. But while all eyes here in the West are focused on the iPh...
Less than 0.2 percent of people who use Twitter wind up going to news and media sites from the social-networking site, according to a recent analysis by traffic-measurement firm Hitwise (although Hitwise just looked at traffic coming from the we...
After I participated in a rousing SXSW panel about content recommendations, Emmanuel Marchal, general manager of London-based LikeCube approached me in the hall to tell me about his company. I thought it was pretty cool, so I captured a video interview with him right there.
LikeCube was co-founded by a semantic web technologist and an anthropologist four years ago, and funded by the UKs National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts. It combines metadata, user activity and personalization to help c...
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If I were to describe the attributes of a smartphone platform to you, could you guess which platform it is? Lets try it and see. Heres your first clue: Applications for it can only be installed through one specific app store. Since everyone has an...
O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.
I've puzzled over Google's Fiber project ever since they announced it. It seemed too big, too hubristic (even for a company that's already big and has earned the right to hubris)--and also not a business Google would want to be in. Providing the "last mile" of Internet service is a high cost/low payoff business that I'm glad I escaped (a friend an I seriously considered starting an ISP back in '92, until we said "How would we deal with customers?").
But the FCC's announcement of their plans to widen br...
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When I blogged about truly open data, readers sent me a lot of interesting links. I've collected them all below. Enjoy!
- The Centre for Environmental Data Archival (CEDA) -- hosts a range of activities associated with evironmental data archives. (Director is on Twitter, @bnlawrence)
- CONNECT -- open source healthcare data exchange being developed with Brian Behlendorf, one of the original developers of the Apache web server.
- Phil Agre's Living Data -- prescient article in Wired from 1994.
- Factual -- web d...
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March 15, 2010
GigaOM
Earlier this morning during a keynote at SxSW, Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams announced the availability of Twitters @Anywhere platform. It is an identity system and is widely viewed as an answer to Facebook Connect. It allows Twitter su...
Quick, picture a tech startup founder: Are they male, maybe around 27 years old, a resident of Silicon Valley? Apparently thats what it takes to build a tech startup for a seed incubation program, at least according to the explicit and implicit wi...
March 14, 2010
GigaOM
TechStars, a seed stage investment program which has outposts in Boulder (Colorado), Boston and Seattle, recently decided to graded itself. So far, the group is not doing to badly. Out of the total 39 companies to come out of TechStars, 29 are sti...
Google, to its credit, is rolling with the punches thrown in response to its Buzz launch from last month, making changes to the product to address user concerns, and staying committed to it despite a messy launch. Members of the Buzz product team ...
March 13, 2010
GigaOM
How to deal with user privacy on social networks as they grow, mature and become more sophisticated has been a frequent topic of conversation at this years SXSW and not just in researcher Danah Boyds keynote address that argued aggregating public...
March 11, 2010
GigaOM
Rupert Murdoch, the legendary founder of News Corp., has always had a love-hate relationship with the digital world. Sometimes (read: during the bubbles) he loves it. Sometimes (read: during advertising recessions) he hates it. His recent moves ...
Ohai has grand ambitions of jumpstarting an industry for social massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. Think World of Warcraft crossed with FarmVille engaging and rich, but also easy to use and social. The San Francisco-based company has a gre...
March 10, 2010
GigaOM
One of the more solid and genuinely useful Internet startups out there, travel fare aggregator Kayak, was dissected in a report released today by NeXt Up Research for SharesPost. NeXt Up thinks that with a heavy advertising spend, Kayak should hav...
Not too long ago, Toyota reigned as the seemingly untouchable hybrid leader. That dominance in terms of both market share (50 percent of hybrids sold in the U.S.) and mindshare (no alt-fuel vehicle on the market is better known or more widely rec...
Foursquare, the New York-based location services startup, has more than 500,000 users and 1.4 million venues, it announced today, one year after it launched at SXSW. The company says it had its biggest day ever last Friday, with 275,000 check-ins ...
The iPhone has a number of advantages over its smartphone competitors, but one thing it hasnt had that users have been clamoring for is true multitasking. Push notifications were intended as a workaround designed to give users the ability to stay up-to-date with multiple apps without having to actually run them at the same time.
Its still only a partial solution, though, and one many iPhone users arent satisfied with. True multitasking is still high on the want list of many iPhone users, and really remains...
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Microsoft faces a tough assignment in trying to get back in the smartphone game. Nokias Symbian maintains a massive presence in overseas markets, while Apples iPhone and Googles Android have gained tremendous momentum in the superphone era. And Wi...
Betaworks, a New York City-based Internet company, has raised $20 million in new venture funding, according to company executives. Intel Capital and previous investor RRE Ventures led the current round, which included Softbank, Founders Collective...
Leading up to South by Southwest my inbox has been littered with friend requests on Gowalla, a check-in service that I can use to show those friends where I am at any point in time. Underneath each request is a line that reads: We recommend you ac...
When iTunes web preview pages first appeared for songs and albums the industry was abuzz with the possibility that iTunes could be migrating to the cloud. iTunes preview has so far had little impact on how we use purchased media content, but it ...
Verizon Wireless will bring its first 4G handsets to market by the middle of 2011, CTO Anthony Melone said in a Wall Street Journal piece (hat tip Engadget). But using those super-fast Long Term Evolution phones is going to cost you.
We learned l...
We know there are lot of entrants in the group deals space see my recent piece, Groupon and the Wannabes but now the competitors are seriously bulking up. LivingSocial which has more than a million daily email subscribers is today announcing i...
Digg, the San Francisco-based social media company, is dropping MySQL and instead betting its future on Cassandra, an open-source data store. Its just the latest sign of the growing popularity of the software, which was developed (and open sourced...
Faced with declining revenues and increasingly dismal prospects, some mainstream media outlets are adopting questionable tactics, specifically dead-end web pages stuffed with outbound links and pay-per-click ads. A liberally funded LA startup is ...
The future of media will be information consumed on superphones while on the go, said Rob Glaser, chairman of RealNetworks, today in his first public speech since stepping down from his CEO position. In the speech, given in Seattle at a Mobile Bro...
March 9, 2010
GigaOM
Did you know that Google Maps most-requested feature addition is biking directions, in large part due to a vocal 50,000-signature-strong group of Bike There petitioners? I wouldnt have guessed it! The petitioners wish is being granted tonight, wit...
Google Apps is moving closer to being an integrated corporate dashboard with the announcement tonight of Google Apps Marketplace at a developer event at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. The company will give vendors multiple hooks into it...
It goes without saying Google has gigantic ambitions. We hear a lot about its various products but it is hard to contextualize those efforts. A new video from Australian weekly news show Hungry Beast, is a graphical representation of Googles grand...
The Comedy Central-Hulu announcement last week made me recall my New Year’s resolution, one that I wanted to share publicly, and encourage you to embrace as well. It is simple in its concept, but epic in scope. It involves eliminating something f...
March 8, 2010
GigaOM
The FCC said today that as part of its National Broadband Plan it might allocate spectrum for a free or low-cost wireless broadband network as a means to help address the affordability of broadband for poor people. If all this sounds familiar to y...
Green:Net 2010 is the GigaOM Network’s conference where green and IT meet. While alternative energy gets a lot of attention at most green conferences, only Green:Net offers a specific point of view as to how entrepreneurs can leverage computing an...
Facebook plans to add friend location information as soon as next month, reports The New York Times Bits blog today. Honestly, this news is so expected that the fact that it was reported using anonymous sources attributed as several people briefed...
Apple has a default set of apps that come with every iPhone and iPod touch that you cant remove from the device, and that provide some basic features that are likely to appeal to a wide swath of users. The iPad will have a default set, too, but it...
Cisco has unveiled a new routing system that it claims can handle 12 times the traffic capacity of the nearest competing system. And its all about the video.
The company in a much-hyped announcement this morning introduced the CRS-3, a router that can move up to 322 terabits per second enough to download the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in one second, Cisco said, or deliver all movies ever made in about four minutes. The router has been tested by AT&T (s t) in a successful trial of ...
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The State of the Smartbook
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Quiet Khosla Ventures-backed startup Transonic Combustion has garnered attention over the last few days after revealing the geeky details of its scheme for a more efficient fuel-injection system. The company, which presented at the Department of E...
When you have a group of friends that likes to get together, the planning tools long email threads, calling people individually, SMS or Foursquare when youre already at a location arent ideal. Sure, if youre really on top of things you could cre...
Apple has secured a patent for a system that would enable consumers to use an electronic gadget say, um, an iPhone in place of keys to unlock their cars and front doors. Its an effort that could finally move the needle for the short-range wirele...
Where, a geo-enabled local search and recommendation service by Boston-based uLocate Communications has launched Where Ads, a hyper-local advertising network. The company is launching the new network because the company believes that its access to...
Since more than 30,000 people are coming here to Austin for South by Southwest, I figured Id offer up a list of local companies that members of the digerati should take the time to meet while theyre in town. Austin has a ton of startups, but I tr...
A few days ago, Jay Adelson, chief executive officer of San Francisco-based social media company, Digg, told me that his company now has hundreds of servers. And the size of its infrastructure was continuing to grow with its usage. And that is af...
When it was first unveiled, Apple’s new iTunes LP format -– codenamed “Cocktail” and introduced at a “rock and roll event” in San Francisco -– promised to give consumers a new reason to buy albums instead of individual songs. Offering expanded cov...
In the coverage of New York Times writer Zachary Kouwe, who resigned recently amid accusations of plagiarism, much has been said about the demands of writing for the always-on Web, and how this might have contributed to Kouwes missteps – something...
Now heres a killer app for the throngs of geeks about to descend on Austin later this week: TabbedOut. The iPhone application allows users to order, review and pay for their tabs at local bars. It sounds like the perfect fix for those full-to-the-...
March 7, 2010
GigaOM
Do you feel that Internet access is a fundamental right? Four in five adults in more than 26 different countries agree with you, according to a new poll sponsored by the BBC World Service. The poll asked more than 27,000 adults about their attit...