Since its inception, one of the biggest problems with Digg has been that users often submit the same content over and over again. This makes it harder for cool content to become popular because some users digg one submitted story, while some digg another. Today, Digg is releasing “several major updates” to its duplicate (known as a “dupe”) detection system.
The solution sounds fairly intensive. “To better understand the nature of the problem, we analyzed the types of duplicate stories being submitted. Most common are the same stories from the same site, but with different URLs. Our R&D team came up with a solution that identifies these types of duplicates by using a document similarity algorithm,” Digg’s Director of Product Chris Howard writes in a blog post. He goes on to say that there will be a follow-up more technical post to explain a bit more about how this actually works, but says that it has proven to be a reliable system so far.
Earlier this month, Flickr started flirting with Twitter integration by allowing users to link their Flickr accounts to their Twitter accounts. The experiment was only for email uploads, which simultaneously created a Tweet with a short http://flic.kr link back to the photo on Flickr. Now that integration is an official feature called Flickr2Twitter.
In addition to email uploads, Flickr now lets you Tweet out any photos directly from the site. After linking your accounts, whenever you click on the “Blog this” button on any photo on Flickr, your Twitter account will be one of the distribution options. This works for both photos you’ve uploaded and other photos you find on the site. I have a feeling you are going to be seeing a lot of http://flic.kr links on Twitter pretty soon.
As many of you know, a lot of the sites that use Rackspace as their hosting provider were down for about an hour yesterday. That’s because Rackspace went down. Apparently, it was a power outage at a data center that caused it, an incident report that we’ve obtained explains.
While Rackspace has backup systems in place, a series of events apparently caused those backups to fail, resulting in the servers going down. Here’s the key nugget:
FriendFeed now lets you individualize your account with six new designer themes. When you select a theme, your FriendFeed account will always include your theme, and other people looking at your profile page will see it in whatever theme they have chosen.
FriendFeed says that it plans to allow users to customize themes down the line as well as give users the ability to create an entirely new theme. Twitter and Gmail also let you add themes and designs to your homepages but some of FriendFeed’s themes have a nicer design, in my opinion. On the other hand, Gmail has a good amount of variety when it comes to choosing a theme. The advantage to Twitter’s themes is that you are able to choose multiple designs in different colors.
High Gear Media, the publisher of automotive media sites, has secured $5.5 million in Series B funding led by DAG Ventures with Accel Partners and Greylock Partners participating. The company raised $6.5 million in Series A funding in November 2007 from Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.
High Gear will use the funds expand its media network and acquire other media properties. High Gear owns and operates 38 auto websites including
TheCarConnection,
GreenCarReports.com, AllCarsElectric.com and AllAboutPrius.com.
Mozilla today released Firefox 3.5 into the wild. Not surprisingly, it’s flying off the virtual shelves. And unlike when Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 last year, its servers are staying up and reliable, so the rate of downloads is pretty incredible. This site, run by Mozilla, shows the download stats for the new browser. Overall downloads are now approaching 1.3 million worldwide, with over 350,000 of those in the U.S. But even more amazing is the number of downloads occurring each second, it’s ranging from 59 to 95 right now. Again, that’s every second.
Outside of the U.S., the browser is moving quickly in Germany, France and the UK. The claim is that it’s much faster than the previous iterations of Firefox, and based on just a quick run-through of my favorite sites, I’d say that is in fact the case. Though, to be fair, it’s hard to know if that has something to do with the fact that just about all my browser plugins are not yet working with this version.
Back in 2007 I did a column on TBD, a social network aimed at baby boomers. I’d spent some time looking at the space, and thought TBD was the best designed site, avoiding Eons age restrictions and fascination with death and building something a bit broader than Gather. The site borrowed heavily from what worked on sites like Yelp and Facebook, the design was delightful and it gave you fun, addictive get-to-know-me activities. I was also incredibly impressed by its founder Robin Wolaner.
But there was still a central question: Would a social network aimed at baby boomers appeal to the demographic? As it turned out, no. The site is shutting down. Below is the letter to users from Wolaner. (Pictured)
I still think “Enterprise 2.0” is a meh business trend with a horrible name. It’s not that social media/collaboration tools don’t have a role in business, and I agree there are some situations where consumer tools aren’t the right fit. A great example is Twitter versus Yammer. (Oh, if you only saw the conversations that happen on TechCrunch’s Yammer feed…)
But I don’t see Enterprise 2.0 becoming a big area of corporate spending. The tools are too cheap and easy to replicate with tons of free alternatives, and many of the vendors are just not ready for prime time. One exception might be blogging software, but don’t most companies who want a corporate blog have one by now? Rather than the next Oracle (who by the way was one of the study’s underwriters) or even Salesforce.com emerging from this space, I’m betting that existing software-as-a-service companies incorporate the functionality themselves or you get a lot of built-in-house code.
There’s also the problem that nearly 20% of executives have no idea what “Enterprise 2.0″ is. That comes from a new study that’s actually talking up the adoption of Enterprise 2.0. It points out that 40% didn’t know what it was at the beginning of the year, so at least that’s progress. What’s more it says that 50% of those surveyed consider enterprise 2.0 to be “very important” to their business success. (Of course, I think working out everyday is “very important” to my weight loss goals…doesn’t mean I actually do it.)
Still, given that number is so high, it stunned me that the study also said only 7% of people over the age of 45 think that Twitter is an important rapid-feedback tool for business. Sadly, it’s not much better among younger folks: Only 27% of those between the ages of 18-30 say Twitter is an important rapid-feedback tool for business. What? Really? You may think we obsess about Twitter too much on TechCrunch, but clearly most business folks aren’t getting the memo.
Let’s put aside for a moment that there are pretty well proven test cases on how Twitter utilization has helped companies like Dell and Comcast. Paying for outreach or collaboration tools without first checking out what a free, easy tool like Twitter could do is missing the entire point of the cheap flexibility and ubiquity of social media. Put another way (and to paraphrase James Carville): It’s a recession, stupid. Try the free tools first.
Around this time last year we saw a stream of high ranking employees leaving Yahoo as the web portal reached new lows following the fumbled Microsoft deal. Now, we’re beginning to see a similar trend from MySpace, the once-shining social network that has been recently hit by stagnating growth, waves of layoffs (both in the US and abroad), and the ousting of its co-founder CEO. The latest member of the executive team to leave is SVP Engineering Allen Hurff, who annouced his decision to leave the company on Friday. A tweet he sent out that day confirms his departure.
Hurff was with the company for over four years, where he and former SVP Operations Jim Benedetto were largely reponsible for building up MySpace’s technology team (Benedetto left the company in March). Hurff also played an integral role in MySpace’s adoption of OpenSocial, serving as Chairman of the foundation. The OpenSocial platform, which allows for the integration of third party applications in MySpace, will likely play a key role in the site’s success moving forward, so this is a big loss for the social network.
If information is power, the first step to gaining power is to get the right data. The Obama administration is a big proponent of opening up government data and making it digitally available. Today at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, the government’s new chief information officer Vivek Kundra announced USAspending.gov, a new site which launched today that tracks government spending with charts and lists ranking the largest government contractors (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc.) and assistance recipients (Department of Healthcare Services, New York State Dept. of Health, Texas Health & Human Services Commission, etc.). There is also the Data.gov project, which is attempting to digitize government data and make it available in its raw form for citizens and companies to sift through.
While Kundra agrees in principle that all public government data should be online, he also cautions that the reality is government data sits in more than 10,000 different systems, many of them written in COBOL or are still locked in dusty paper archives. But at least the government is starting to tackle the problem. The government collects a wealth of data, and the more accessible it becomes the more transparent government itself will be (not to mention the opportunities to startups which can tap into this data to offer new services). The State Department is also using the Internet, and Youtube specifically, to reach out directly to citizens of other countries every time Obama or Hillary Clinton travel abroad. They record video messages to citizens of other countries, which are distributed in multiple languages. Call it YouTube diplomacy.
MojoPages, a local listings search engine, has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Austin Ventures. MojoPages’s search technology powers local business listing search engines for local newspapers, and TV and radio stations.
Originally a stand alone search engine site for business listings, the company found that it could not compete with bigger players like Citysearch and Yelp. So Jon Carder, CEO of MojoPages, decided to overhaul the site’s business model and offer white label, branded local search engine technology to media companies. The site’s listings are similar to Yelp in that they offer user reviews and ratings of businesses. To date, MojoPages has contracted with more than 1,000 media sites to create branded local business search engines.
A couple weeks ago, we wrote a post detailing why there needs to be some sort of iPhone app recommendation system. Just like iTunes has its “Genius” feature for music and movies, with over 50,000 apps now in the App Store, there needs to be a way to filter out what you don’t want and find what you do. If you have a lot of friends with iPhones or iPod touches, AppsFire may offer just that.
The service, launching in private beta today, allows you to share your favorite apps with anyone. Now, to be clear, I don’t mean actually share the apps themselves, but rather share the names of the ones you like and give others one-click access to download them also, from the App Store. So, say I have 100 apps on my machine, but I only really would recommend 15 or so, I would select those 15, and could send them out to friends on the various social networks.
Intel Capital has led a Series B funding round in Sense Networks, a NY-based developer of nifty machine-learning technology that allows for digital indexing and ranking of real world locations based on movement data. According to Venturebeat, which broke the news before the weekend, the amount invested was about $6 million in a ‘hotly contested deal’ that left Sequoia pulling the short straw.
Having recently witnessed a panel discussion at the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference on ‘Context’, which Sense Networks CEO Greg Skibiski was a part of, I’d wager it’s a smart investment.
With a webcam built into or sold together with nearly every computer that goes over the counter nowadays you’d expect direct video-based communication to have massively taken off by now, but the reality is that it’s far from being as ubiquitous as some proclaimed it would become in the past.
But maybe it’s just that there’s isn’t always that good a reason to video chat with your friends and family when you can just as easily use voice call or text chat to communicate with them directly. After all, once you’re connected you can just as easily get your message across without actually seeing someone.
But Israel-based 6rounds thinks that there is a demand for a video platform that offers additional layers of fun, social interaction and utility on top of the basics of video conversations, and they’ve raised the necessary funds to bring the idea to market.
If you’re like me, you always try to avoid storing or backing up files, even those that are important to you. It’s too boring, time-consuming and cumbersome to remember doing it regularly.
This is where a new service called quanp (short for “quantum paper” and pronounced “kwan-puh”), launched today in beta, comes in. Developed by Japanese technology giant Ricoh, quanp wants to become your online center for collecting and organizing all of your personal “digital life memories”.
Dropbox and many other services basically do the same, but the idea behind quanp is to turn storing and sharing pictures, music, videos, PDFs etc. online into a more enjoyable experience by making it more “visual”. The service is currently free and as Ricoh says, mainly aimed at US residents for the time being (in Japan, quanp is available in free and paid versions since March). The US version is being managed by a Ricoh office based out of Cupertino in California.
Yoono, an extension built to enhance both the Firefox and IE browser experience that comes in pretty handy when you go on the Internet mainly to interact socially with your peers and friends, has just released version 6.1 of its add-on, and revamped the interface along with adding a couple of useful features.
I’ve been trying it out for a couple of hours now, and I have to say I’d already miss it if it were gone from my Firefox browser (which, admittedly, I use less and less thanks to Google Chrome). Yoono is essentially a browser sidebar that aggregates and centralizes your online profiles, including from IM tools like Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk and AIM but also a wide variety of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed and more.
The latest version of the extension, next to expanding support for Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace as well as the ability to easily share pages, images, or videos from your browser across all networks at once, boasts another useful new feature: real-time search.
Disclosure: I have not bought an iPhone 3GS — I’m still unsure if I will. Apple gave me a review unit to play with for 60 days.
I’ve had the new iPhone 3GS for a little over a week now. Using it day-to-day over the course of that time, I have a pretty good feel for it. A good enough feel to answer the question that every single person seems to be asking: “Should I get it?”
The answer to that is not so simple. And so I’m going to break it down a bunch of different ways based mainly on the device’s functionality and who I think is considering buying it. I’ll lay out what someone may be interested in the device for, and then give a “yes” or “no” (or a couple “maybes”) answer on if I think it’s worth it. I’ll follow that up with an explanation.
Here we go:
Swedish software firm Global Gaming Factory X this morning announced it has agreed to buy file-sharing service The Pirate Bay for 60 million Swedish crowns (which currently converts to approx. $7.7 million). In addition, GGF has entered into an agreement to acquire the shares in Peerialism, a software technology company that develops solutions for data distribution and distributed storage based on new p2p technology.
The transaction is scheduled to be closed in August 2009.
Update: The Pirate Bay has confirmed the news (see their commentary below).
EurekaFest is a yearly event held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that showcases the prototype inventions of high school students from around the country. The inventions consist of various gadgets and devices aimed at helping solve real-world problems.
One of the more impressive ideas I saw during the two days I spent covering the event was a prototype “sensing” cane for blind people. The cane features sensors that can detect objects up to eight feet away, at which point the cane’s handle begins buzzing once per second and increases in intensity as objects get closer.
Mochi Media, the fast growing Flash game advertising network and payments platform that we covered last week, is in the midst of an internal battle over the fate of the company.
The company is mulling over an acquisition offer that would give investors Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures their original investments of around $14 million back, but not much more. Founders and other employees wouldn’t make much from the sale.
Normally this is an easy offer to turn down. The company is doing well and has “plenty” of money left in the bank, sources say. The founders obviously would want to continue to grow the business and hope for a good outcome.
But for some reason at least one investor, Ping Li from Accel, wants to close the deal and take his original investments off the table. He has been pressuring the founders and management team to accept the terms offered, multiple sources say.
That’s left the founders frustrated, who apparently turned down an offer from Time Warner to acquire the company for $65 million or so a year ago. Li convinced the founders not to take that deal, sources say, and instead raise more money to go for a “home run.” Now, a year later, Li wants to sell the company for a small fraction of that $65 million.
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