Category: Tech news

We’re creatures of habit. We go where we’ve already gone. That’s why Facebook’s new Suggested Events feature I just discovered is so powerful — it knows where we’ve been thanks to our checkins. Replacing the old Friends’ Events sub-tab of the home page’s Events bookmark, Suggested Events helps you discover things to do that take place at venues you’ve checked in to, that friends are RSVP’d to, that are hosted by Pages you Like, or a combination. The feature could reduce the need third-party event discovery apps, and get more people out of their houses to attend concerts, club nights, and conferences.

By promoting offline interaction, Suggested Events should quiet critics who say Facebook weakens real human relationships and leads people to sit at home. It has huge potential to generate good will for Facebook and make the service seem even more indispensable. If you go to a great show, have a fun night out with friends, or meet someone new at a suggested venue, your perception of Facebook’s value to your life will undoubtedly improve.

Sure, you should branch out and find new places to go, but new events at your favorite places are still unique experiences. The feature exposes you to events that are relevant and that you might drag friends to, even if you weren’t invited to them and don’t have friends already RSVP’d.

“What should I do tonight?” is a very prevalent question lots of startups are trying to answer. Just this month we covered the launch of UpOut for real-time discovery, and SeatGeek’s Columbus that’s a “Pandora for live events”. Established players include Plancast and EventBrite, the latter of which closed a huge $50 million funding round and also suggests events your Facebook friends are going to.

But the problem with these services is that they can’t produce as relevant suggestions because they don’t automatically know where you spend your time, which is a proxy for what type of events you go to. Facebook’s Suggested Events adapts to your preferences.

I go to lots of concerts, and Facebook effectively knows this because I check in to the venues or the events themselves thanks to a mobile feature added last year (possibly to collect data for this). Now, Suggested Events recommends me concerts taking place at my favorite venues. The music industry stands to gain a lot from the feature, since concerts are thrown frequently, and occur at Places people commonly check in to.

If you’re in college, Suggested Events might recommend parties at campus dorms, whereas professionals might get clued in to meetups or conferences at local convention halls they visit. The feature also alerts you to Events hosted by Pages you Like, which could encourage more venues, performers, or production companies to officially host the events they throw. One day the feature might be able to show events where a band I Like was mentioned in the description.

With third-party apps you enter your preferences or upload them via Facebook Connect, but then also have to remember to visit. Facebook’s new native event discovery feature makes finding fun things to do a seamless part of every day browsing. That means more outings, more moments, more memories. And you know where you can display the photos, checkins, and status updates about those memories? Timeline.

At this point quite a few internet companies have protested H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in creative ways. Held by many to be the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet if it passes, SOPA would makes it really easy for copyright holders to force sites offline that they think are offending, among other things.

While the judiciary vote has been delayed until next year, the list revealing the companies who support the act was released yesterday, and many startups, such as Reddit, have begun to drill down into boycotts of individual companies like domain provider GoDaddy.

The company boycotts  have sparked a thread on Hacker News, where user Solipsist posted a link to the list with the comment, “While I understand your sentiments towards SOPA, are you really going to distance yourself from all of these companies?”

To which YCombinator founder and investor Paul Graham replied,

“Actually that’s exactly what I thought when I saw the list yesterday. Several of those companies send people to Demo Day, and when I saw the list I thought: we should stop inviting them. So yes, we’ll remove anyone from those companies from the Demo Day invite list.”

Disinviting offending companies to YCombinator Demo Day? That takes, um, guts. Graham told me in a followup email that he was indeed serious and had just given the list of SOPA supporters to the people in charge of the Demo Day invites, ”I don’t know exactly which companies had people on the list.  But I know which will now: none of them.”

When asked if that boycott extended to investors in those companies, Graham responded, “Several of the companies on the SOPA list have venture arms.  I encourage startups to boycott them.  We’ll certainly encourage all the startups we’ve funded to.”

The rationale? “If these companies are so clueless about technology that they think SOPA is a good idea, how could they be good investors?”

The next YCombinator demo day is scheduled for March 27th, 2012.

Update: So which companies on the SOPA list are being denied YC invites? Well no one except Demo Day organizers knows for sure, but as BI’s Matt Rosoff points out, Comcast/NBCUniversal’s Comcast Ventures has a stake in YC company CarWoo and listed companies like CBS Disney, GoDaddy, News Corp., Sony, Time-Warner, and Visa have all made tech investments in the past.

I’ll admit to lobbing a few mortars at RIM (alright, maybe more than a few), but it looks like things may be even worse than expected. BGR reported earlier today that RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis lied about the the reason their first BlackBerry 10 devices would be delayed even later into 2012.

Lazaridis said during RIM’s recent earnings call that they were waiting for a specific dual-core LTE chipset to be available before their new BlackBerrys would see the light of day in late 2012. It was a strange announcement, considering that RIM has never really fared well in the specs arms race, although they I don’t blame them for trying. What I do blame them for is dragging their feet when it comes to innovation, but that’s a story for another time.

The chipset situation may have been a ruse, if BGR’s high-level source is to be believed. According to him, the real situation behind the delay is even more dire — the devices in question may not even exist yet.

”RIM is simply pushing this out as long as they can for one reason,” the source said. “They don’t have a working product yet.”

It’s a serious accusation to level at RIM, and if it’s true, then they may have already sealed their own fate.

Or did they? RIM has just now weighed in on these claims, and their response is pretty much exactly what you’d expect. When it comes to the notion that the company’s first new BlackBerrys are essentially vaporware, RIM flatly denied the rumor:

“As explained on our earnings call, the broad engineering impact of this [chipset] decision and certain other factors significantly influenced the anticipated timing for the BlackBerry 10 devices. The anonymous claim suggesting otherwise is inaccurate and uninformed.”

There we have it, straight from the horse’s mouth: it’s a parts problem. The release goes to say that the chipset in question is “required to deliver a world class user experience” and that “any suggestion to the contrary is simply false.”

Of course, even if the claims were true, RIM wouldn’t broadcast the news of their failure to every media outlet with a pulse. They’d do — well, they’d do exactly what they’re doing now. They would deny everything, and (hopefully) get in gear behind closed doors to make sure none of this gloom-and-doom forecasting ends up being right.

Ultimately, I doubt that either side is offering the entire truth. Information Week points out that the leak could be the work of a disgruntled RIM employee, and RIM’s PR team would do their best to manage a situation like this before it led to another crisis for an already-beleaguered company. Things inside RIM may be even worse than we know, but if they can succeed in delivering a user experience that’s worth waiting for, all of this he-said-they-said business will have been for nothing.

Let’s just hope the longer wait pays off.

After notching a spot on the NASDAQ, TripAdvisor’s Stephen Kaufer carved out a few minutes for Founder Stories, with host, Chris Dixon. In episode II of this interview, the two discuss their mutual disdain for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Kaufer offers advice to founders.

Highlighting a piece of advice, Kaufer tells Dixon a good way for “a consumer facing, web-based business” to capture what “your visitors really want” is to run a live test with a non-working link. Calling these “404-tests” he says “before you build the darn thing … see how many people click it. It goes nowhere, it says broken link to the user [but] your log file says how many people” checked it out.

While the marketing department may not love the practice, Kaufer says it “solves umpteen meetings worth of powerful debate and logical arguments.”

More advice follows – be sure to hear it all by watching the entire interview and watch episode I of this interview here.

If you missed a past episode of Founder Stories, you can get caught-up here. Guests include leaders from BirchBox, Foodspotting, GroupMe, DropBox, Tumblr and KickStarter.

 

If you are a big TinTin fan, you probably know that Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of TinTin opens today in theaters. But if you are a really big fan, there is also a companion coffee table book called “The Art of The Adventures of TinTin.” But don’t get the $39.99 print edition. Get the $5.99 iPad app instead. It has all the same art work, plus a whole lot more—3D models of the characters ond vehicles from the movie that you can spin around, HD video clips, and immersive 360-degree experiences. (Watch the video below for a run-through of the app’s features, with an intro by Spielberg).

The app was published by HarperCollins in partnership with Holopad, one of Edo Segal‘s startups (part of his bMuse operating company), which is the developer that provides the technology platform. All of the artwork comes from WETA Workshop, Peter Jackson’s motion-capture art and special-effects studio, which is effectively the author of the book. (This would be amazing for The Hobbit).

It has all sorts of immersive features. “You blur the line of what is a book and movie because all of these images become movie clips,” says Segal. “The whole book becomes a treasure trove you are exploring.” For instance, you can “scrub” some of the illustrations to fade between the original comic book and the artwork for the animated movie. Every image is a separate element on the page which can be tapped and seen in full-screen. My favorite part is there are a few places, like TinTin’s room, that are complete 3D spaces. You can tap into those images and move the iPad around like a window into this other world. Depending where you point the iPad, using the gyroscope, it shows different parts of TinTin’s room, or the captain’s cabin.

Although the app was produced by taking the same Adobe file that was used to create the print book, that was just a starting point. It took Holopad about another month and half to add all the extra immersive elements. “It was very clear to us that what we had to do was not an enhanced e-book,” says Shane Norman, director of interactive marketing at HarperCollins. The TinTin iPad app will be the first of many such projects. “I definitely see it as a model for how we treat an interactive book,” he says.

I’ve said this before, but digital books and magazines are best thought of as apps. Segal has similar views on the future of media. Tablets are a new software-defined medium. As such, an iPd book they requires more than just text and images, and maybe some video.

A new startup is launching out of incubator YouWeb today that aims to make watching movie trailers more social. MoviePal, an iOS app, allows you to watch movie trailers and share them with friends.

The MoviePal app allows you to watch movie trailers via your phone. The app sources trailers from YouTube, Flixster and other video sites that post trailers. But in case you don’t want to filter through all the trailers available and listed, you can use a Shazam-like feature to tag a movie trailer that you are watching on TV or in the movie theatre.

Instead of having to sort through all the available trailers in the app, you can press a button on the app, wait 10 seconds for it to analyze and ID, and then save the trailer for later. MoviePal identifies a trailer, much like Shazam does to recognize music. You can also see which movies are playing in a theater near you, and the app will keep track of the movies you want to watch and alert you when a movie you tag comes out in theaters.

From the app, you can watch the trailer again, share it with your friends on Facebook and Twitter and set a time to meet up to go to the film once it opens. MoviePal says it is targeting the $4 billion dollar movie trailer advertising industry to make it more interactive and social.

MoviePal is the brainchild of YouWeb EIRs Suneet Shah and Rohan Relan (who is YouWeb founder Peter Relan’s nephew). MoviePal faces competition from YC-backed Can’t Wait.

The biggest hindrance to consumer adoption of 3D technology thus far has been a lack of content, and price, of course. While I can’t vouch for their price tags quite yet, it would seem that Stream TV Networks has come up with some new 3D technology that could make that whole limited content thing much less of an issue.

How, you ask? Well, for one thing the new Ultra-D tech converts 2D content to 3D. But it gets better. Not only will that content be brought over to the third dimension, but you won’t have to wear any clunky glasses to enjoy it. Ultra-D technology also converts 3D content to autostereoscopic (sans glasses) 3D. It also works with just about any format, from Blu-rays and DVDs to PC games to cable and satellite content, and all the conversion is done in real time.

Stream TV Networks, under the Ultra-D brand, has 3D-capable products coming out for TVs, converter boxes, tabs, PCs of all shapes and sizes, smartphones, and even digital signage and picture frames. The technology also allows for the user to customize the 3D effect, letting users increase or decrease the real-time 3D rendering effect.

Products will be announced at CES, and we’ll be there to keep you in the loop. ‘Til then, pop on those glasses.

Luis von Ahn has a pretty impressive track record when it comes to Google acquiring his companies. Not many entrepreneurs can count two exits to the search giant. Google acquired von Ahn’s ESP Game, which crowdsourced people to look at images and label them to improve image search, in 2005 and renamed it Google Image Labeler. In 2009, Google bought von Ahn’s Captcha startup Recaptcha as well. And now, von Ahn’s latest project, Duolingo, is finally launching in private beta.

von Ahn explains to me that computer language translation is a broken system. It can be very expensive to pay for quality professional translators to translate web applications and pages on a large scale. That’s the problem Duolingo is trying to solve.

von Ahn’s solution is to help people who want to learn a new language while also helping websites translate their copy. Duolingo 100% free language learning site in which people learn by helping to translate the Web, and companies can get quality translations for less.

From the learner’s standpoint, Duolingo provides the ability to learn a language in exchange for translating copy. So if you are looking to learn Spanish, Duolingo will give some easier sentence to translate, and you can translate the sentences in Spanish into English. If you don’t know a given word, you can hover over it to get the translated word. The more you learn, the more complicated the translations are, says von Ahn.

In order to quality check each translation, each sentence is translated by multiple people. People actually vote on which translation is best, and Duolingo throws in some wrong translations in these tests to weed out people who are poor translators.

In terms of monetization, Duolingo hasn’t finalized an exact plan for web publishers.. But von Ahn is leaning towards providing free translations for creative commons content, and paid translations for everything else.

He tells me that he feels Duolingo has a “compelling learning experience,” and already early users are testing as well as language learners who took Rosetta Stone online classes. For now, the site is in private beta but will be rolling out additional invitations soon.

Perhaps best known for the Air Display iOS app, Avatron is at it again with new a iOS dictation app called (what else?) Air Dictate. But of course, Avatron wouldn’t just cook up a straightforward dictation app — there’s a twist.

Instead of just taking your voice input and transcribing it into a file on your iDevice, it actually syncs with your Mac and dumps the interpreted output into your text field of choice. As long as both devices are on the same wireless network, the connection yields quick and (mostly accurate) transcriptions.

According to Avatron, these accurate transcriptions have Siri to thank. Even though Apple has yet to release a public API for their intelligent agent, Avatron has seemingly whipped up their own way to interface with Siri, and the results are pretty impressive

Setup is dead simple — download the $.99 app from the App Store, and install the free Air Dictate receiver on your Mac. Once the two apps are paired up (a process which takes no more than a few seconds), you’re ready to get your gab on. Transcriptions were surprisingly accurate, although it does have a tendency to stumble with similar sounding words (“he’s” vs. “is,” for example). A little extra focus on enunciation should clear that up fairly quickly, though.

Is this going to replace your fancy Dragon Dictation setup? Probably not, but if you’ve already got your share of Apple devices laying around, there are far worse ways to go.

Pinterest’s growth over the past six months has been nothing short of astounding. We’ve noted this before, but some new data today from Hitwise confirms the trend. Last week, Pinterest attracted 11 million visits, up almost 40-fold from just six months ago. Pinterest is now one of the top 10 social networking sites Hitwise tracks.

These stats are estimates of visits, not visitors, so you’d have to divide by how many visits per visitor Pinterest gets in a week to get the number of people going to the site. Pinterest is daily habit for many people, which is why it’s pageviews are going through the roof. Hitwise doesn’t break out estimates for visitors, but comScore has Pinterest at 4.9 monthly uniques in November, up from 3.3 million in October.

The visually-pleasing pinboarding site encourages members to collect photos and links to products. It is a socially curated shopping catalog, and it is addictive. It is also viral because everyone follows their friends’ pinboards.

Visitors tend to be female (58 percent), between 25 and 44 years old (59 percent). A lot of the visitors are from California and Texas, but Pinterest has mainstream appeal distributed across the middle of the country, with strong activity coming from Alabama, Tennessee, and Utah.

Today, SetJam, a company that describes itself as “building the future of TV,” has announced it has been acquired by Motorola Mobility. The company’s products currently include a customizable TV and movie widgets designed for embedding on websites, plus developer-friendly tools like a REST API and XML download of the SetJam database.

The TV widgets are designed to be context-sensitive and offer full CSS-styling, so they blend in with the website where they’re placed, while also allowing the site’s owner to increase revenue through affiliate income that comes from clicks to third-party sources. The company’s widgets include links to iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and others, which would be the source of this affilate income. A list of the supported content sources found on the company’s homepage also includes Cartoon Network, MTV, Disney, Nickelodeon, Adult Swim, Spike, TBS, CBS, WB, FX, South Park Studios, Crunchyroll, Fox, TNT and Crackle among those SetJam offers.

For those with longer memories, you may recall SetJam was once a consumer-facing web service, similar to Clicker, which aggregated videos from around the web. It later shifted its focus, becoming the B2B service that Motorola Mobility acquired.

The announcement of the acquisition arrived from Ryan Janseen, formerly SetJam CEO. It reads:

I’m writing to let you know that today SetJam was acquired by Motorola Mobility.  We are all very excited about this transition here at SetJam.  Motorola and SetJam share the vision of making content delivery, discovery, and consumption seamless across any screen, and as a world leader in video technology, Motorola will provide us with unprecedented levels of reach and distribution.

I want to take this moment to personally thank you for your continued encouragement and support over the past two years. None of this success would have been possible without your backing and belief in us.  While this acquisition was in process, we’ve had to be far less communicative than we normally would be.  We greatly look forward to reconnecting with all of you in the New Year.  In the mean time, we wish you a happy and healthy holiday season!

Cordially,

Ryan

Ryan Janssen
(Former) CEO, SetJam

The announcement comes at a time when Motorola Mobility itself is being acquired by Google for $12.5 billion. Given Google’s own TV intentions with its Google TV service, one has to wonder if there’s a connection between the two moves.

RightNow Technologies this morning announced that, at its special stockholders meeting, nearly everyone voted in favor of the previously proposed merger with Oracle, who agreed to buy the cloud-based customer service company for $1.5 billion (or $43 per share) in cash at the end of October 2011.

From the press release announcing the overwhelming approval:

Approximately 99.8% of the shares voting at today’s Special Meeting of Stockholders voted in favor of the approval and adoption of the merger agreement, which represented approximately 87.0% percent of RightNow’s total outstanding shares of common stock as of the November 8, 2011 record date for the Special Meeting.

RightNow’s solutions help companies handle customer interactions across a multitude of channels, including call and contact centers, the Web and social networks.

Its products are used by nearly 2,000 organizations across the globe, the company says.

With the acquisition, which is still subject to regulatory approval, Oracle will thus be adding a robust cloud-based customer service offering to its own Public Cloud solution – more info on that here.

Verizon will be rolling out a new Media Server product for its FiOS customers later next year, which will be a single hardware device that will eventually eliminate the need for a set-top box altogether. The server will be capable of streaming HD TV to all devices in the home, including the TV, of course, but also gaming systems, mobile devices and tablets like the iPad. Although the company has not officially announced details, timeframe or pricing, we were recently given a sneak peek into the company’s plans.

You can see the Media Server in this promotional video discussing Verizon’s focus on the energy efficiency of its products. Here, Tushar Saxena, Director of Technology at Verizon, talks about the upgrades Verizon’s set-top boxes have seen in recent months. He shows a big box that’s an example of outdated tech (hey, that’s my box!) and a more compact, 30% more energy efficient model. Saxena then shows off new set-top boxes, yet to be released, which are even smaller, and will soon be small enough to “velcro behind your TV,” he says.

But what’s interesting is that these tiny set-top boxes are meant for the additional TVs in the house – your main TV will be attached a larger Media Server, also shown in the video, underneath the stack of set-top boxes. The server will stream media to other Internet-connected devices, including laptops, Xboxes, PlayStations, tablets and mobile devices like the iPhone, the video explains. Saxena says that the plan is to eventually eliminate the set-top box altogether by providing applications to all the IP-connected devices, including TVs, that can directly communicate with the server over Wi-Fi. This transition should occur in a “few year’s time,” he notes.

Getting rid of set-top boxes means increased energy efficiency of course, which was the point of the video. But a Verizon spokesperson tells us that the Media Server itself will be released in late 2012.

Verizon is also running tests involving streaming 3D HD TV over Wi-Fi, using the same media server technology. Routers in Verizon’s test labs have successfully transmitted a 3D HD FiOS signals (40 Mbps) over 200 feet, through sheetrock and steel walls, without the loss of video quality. There’s a demo of that in action here using routers with multiple antenna arrays streaming over the 802.11n standard in conjunction with the media server hardware.

During a time when everyone is thinking of cutting the cable, so to speak, it’s interesting to watch developments like this which are more correctly envisioning TV as a service that should be available on any screen in the home.

Now here’s hoping Verizon’s pricing hits the mark, too.

Rocket Internet, the Berlin-based incubator best known for German-language clones of US startups like Zappos and Groupon, now has big ambitions in the online furniture space according to information passed to TechCrunch Europe.

In a confidential email sent by Oliver Samwer which we have confirmed is genuine, the head (with his brothers Marc and Alexander) of European Founders Fund and the driving force behind Rocket, says their strategy is to become “number one” in the ecommerce sector for furniture over the next year. But the language he uses – including the world “blitzkrieg” – indicates an aggressive and potentially insensitive management style which appears to be a ‘modus operandi’ of Rocket Internet culture. Samwer has since apologised for using the term.

Interview Street has been busy building out new ways for developers to prove their skills to potential employers, and now it’s introducing a 48-hour contest to help them show off their skills. Think of it as part of a next-generation way of finding the right employer

The site already offers a web-based integrated development environment, where developers can choose from dozens of challenges, lets them input answers, then get immediate results. If they’re successful, recruiters from a variety of leading technology companies can then contact them about getting hired.

The new contest is called CodeSprint (it’s the second in a series), and it’s basically an online hackathon. Individual developers are given 48 hours to come up with solutions to as many programming challenges as they can get done, including both theoretical challenges as well as real-world problems. Cofounder Vivek Ravisankar tells me he expects that developers will be able to get about ten done within that time. “Everything will be based on performance — how fast they code, how many they get right.” Developers can also indicate which companies they hope to work for, which the companies will then see at the end of the contest. Each participant will also be able to show off their scores and resumes. You can sign up here and get more information here. The contest will begin on January 6th, 2012, at 8pm Pacific Time.

I wish there was something out there like this for prospective bloggers, since speed and accuracy are also crucial in this business. When I told that to Ravisankar, he responded by saying that in fact that was already the vision — to build out this type of service across verticals to figure out the optimal candidates for any type of job. And by the way, CodeSprint also sounds like a good experience for anyone who’s thinking about starting their own company instead of getting hired.

The company has also recently launched a beta that lets developers take a 24-hour real-world problem challenge. They’ll get a server instance and be asked to build a prototype solution within the allotted time. Check out the main site for a selection of theoretical and real-world problems.

Participating companies include Amazon, Facebook, Quora, Dropbox, Airbnb, and other hot tech companies and startups. Interview Street has angel funding from Y Combinator and Morpheus Venture Partners. Competitors for this type of developer challenge service include CodeEval and Gild.