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Powerful and easy to use, this is probably the best cross-platform enthusiast photography management software out there — though navigation and organization aren’t the most intuitive. Version 3 adds some useful features, but whether they are useful enough for you to upgrade is for you to decide.
When the 33 Chilean miners emerged from 68 days of subterranean captivity, one man here in California had a professional reason to be glued to CNN.
Nick Woodman, the CEO of GoPro had spotted one of his company’s super-robust cameras (designed to be worn by extreme sports enthusiasts) strapped to the top of the rescue pod, streaming live footage of the miners’ ascent to the world.
So, now that anyone with a $250 camera can broadcast from anywhere on – or beneath – earth, have we crossed the final frontier of citizen journalism? We invited Woodman on to WITN to give us his take.
Video below.
Of all the movies made in the 1980s, Top Gun is definitely one of the best. It has everything you need in a movie: California, drinking, jets, tragedy, Kenny Loggins, cheesy one-liners, and, of course, volleyball. And it’s about to take flight once again.
Yes, just like another 80s classic, Wall Street, the products/director behind the project are said to be prepping for a sequel (hopefully one better than the Wall Street sequel which was meh). And sources tell NYMAG.com’s Vulture that screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (of The Usual Suspects fame) is going to work Tom Cruise’s iconic Maverick character into the movie, in a lesser role.
So what does any of this have to do with tech? Well, admittedly, not a lot. But it is interesting why this sequel is getting made. Apparently, it’s basically due to the son of Oracle founder, ultra-billionaire, and sometimes HP antagonist, Larry Ellison.
27-year-old David Ellison, who was all of 3 when Top Gun came out in 1986 (not that I can talk, I was 4), is apparently also a huge fan of the film. And not just that. He’s also a film producer and a pilot as well. And he makes movies about flying. Oh, and he just happend to raise $350 million dollars from JPMorganChase to co-finance a slate of films with Paramount — the movie studio behind Top Gun. The first of those films? Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible 4.
Yep, it’s like a match made in Top Gun sequel heaven.
To recap: Man obsessed with Top Gun. Son of the sixth-richest man in the world. Movie producer. Stunt pilot. Helping out Paramount. Helping out Tom Cruise. Yeah, this movie is so getting made.
Let’s just hope young Ellison’s ego isn’t writing checks that his body can’t cash.
Now for some gratuitous Top Gun clips:
[image: Paramount]
Some 1.8 billion people have internet access in the world today, but 1 billion people lack access to adequate amounts of freshwater. Harsh realities about water inspired Blog Action Day this year, an initiative led by Change.org, to rally bloggers to explore the global problem, to raise awareness and money to help solve it. The issues around water in 2010 concern scarcity, access, pollution and more.
But it’s not all grim. There are new opportunities for tech startups, engineers, investors and creative people to solve problems around the water crisis. Water and waste water technology is a hot market that could get hotter.
Eight companies in this subcategory of cleantech ranked on the 2010 Global Cleantech 100 list which we reported on earlier this week: Aqwise, Danfoss AquaZ, Emefcy, NanoH2O, Oasys Water, Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies, TaKaDu and WaterHealth.
A few others that were funded this year include: two water filtration companies Clean Filtration Technology and Quench; and an antimicrobial tech company, HaloSource which treats recreational and industrial water and aims to make drinking water safe.
We ran a story earlier today (that’s double Blog Action Day for TechCrunch) about i2O Water. The UK company was funded last year by First Capital and Swarraton Partners, and uses grid technology to save freshwater that would otherwise be lost through inefficient pipes, bursts and leaks in water systems.
We expect to see more startups and deals around water-related subcategories of cleantech, given the startling facts about global water supply and demand that are revealed in a comprehensive new Living Planet report by the WWF and Global Footprint.
Don’t blame us if you decide to drop out of school, quit your day job or ditch that other startup to work on something water-related after reading this list:
Image via: Let Ideas Compete
Groupon takes one more step towards being a content company today and announces the launch of a series of beauty deals curated by InStyle editors. As an offshoot of the InStyle Beauty Black Book offering in the October InStyle issue, the magazine has curated a three day promotion offering half off or more discounts on each beauty related deal at six different salons and spas nationwide starting today.
Deals include such typical salon fare as Sunless Tanning session in Los Angeles and something called Brow Services in Boston and are presented on the Groupon site with the InStyle branding.
Again, this is notable because Groupon, which features some pretty interesting creative itself, is expanding its reach through media properties, having already partnering up with McClatchy and Media General and today InStyle on social shopping deals.
The future of media is in daily deals. I kid you not.
This interface has been talked about extensively before here and elsewhere, but it bears another look. It’s amazingly cool. Basically what you’re seeing is a gestural interface powered by a pair of gloves. It supports multiple hands – multiple pairs of hands, that is, so you and your friends can freak out – and it is so smooth and intuitive that it borders on magic.
The two demos here, Grabby and Erf, show only a few of the basic gestures and with a little imagination you can see where this sort of thing is headed. I doubt we’ll be waggling our hands in front of our laptops anytime soon (even though we’ll be waggling our hands in front of the the PS3 and XBox’s Kinetic this Christmas) but the demo is so futuristic that it’s scary.
A lot is said about the Apple marketing machine. Love them or hate them, there’s no denying that their ads are effective. But someone just one-upped them — with their own products.
Apparently, the band Atomic Tom was just riding the New York subway yesterday and got a little bored. So all four members decided to whip out their iPhones and put on a little impromptu concert for everyone else on the train. The result is fairly amazing.
Alright, so clearly all of this was planned — I’m not buying the “band had their instruments stolen” angle. The band had their iPhones hooked up to to some sort of speaker system — oh, and someone was clearly filming and got it up on YouTube awfully fast (under their official account). But still, the end result is what matters, and this is a brilliant. The video only has 300 or so views right now, but I get the feeling it’s going to have a lot more shortly. And the band was smart to link to their song on iTunes from the YouTube page.
The band also posted an account from an apparent bystander who was on the train when they started rocking:
“I saw Atomic Tom perform on the B train today… at first i thought they were going to bomb the train, but then they started playing and i was like ‘i love new york!’ liked them so much, i asked a stranger for the band name.” – Brittany Tucker
If I were Apple, I would buy this video and put it on television. Like, tomorrow.
This morning, CNBC’s Guest Blog is going to grab a whole lot of eyeballs: Eduardo Saverin, the Facebook cofounder who initially financed the company and later sued it for a settlement that left him with shares worth a reported $1.1 billion dollars, has penned an article called “What I Learned From Watching “The Social Network”. But don’t get too excited — despite what you might expect, the article doesn’t have even the faintest whiff of controversy or scandal.
Public awareness of Saverin is at an all-time high because of the film, which dramatically (and to some extent, fictionally) portrays how Saverin was betrayed, having his significant stake in the company whittled down considerably by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. So what does Saverin have to say about the hit film? Not a whole lot. In fact, he says so little about the movie itself that this reads almost like a PR olive branch — a display to the public that, despite the dramatic falling out the film ends with, he’s not still enemies with Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook.
Saverin kicks off his article by talking about his emotions as he began watching the film and the questions running through his mind: “Would it be accurate? Would it showcase our failures, as well as our successes?”. But he quickly pivots away from the movie itself, in favor of what it had to say about entrepreneurship:
What I gleaned from viewing “The Social Network” was bigger and more important than whether the scenes and details included in the script were accurate. After all, the movie was clearly intended to be entertainment and not a fact-based documentary. What struck me most was not what happened – and what did not – and who said what to whom and why. The true takeaway for me was that entrepreneurship and creativity, however complicated, difficult or tortured to execute, are perhaps the most important drivers of business today and the growth of our economy.
He continues on about the importance of entrepreneurship for a while, using broad strokes to explain why it’s fundamentally important to the worldwide economy, and what challenges it faces. But he only mentions Mark Zuckerberg once, and it’s in a positive light:
With Facebook, we built a product because we believed in it and its function, and wanted it to exist.
Today, Facebook affects the world in so many more ways than just its initial execution at Harvard. Mark Zuckerberg successfully developed an entirely new world for daily interactions. Today, the Facebook platform brings a social layer to many of the ordinary actions we conduct online everyday.
The creation of a business from the embryo of a concept is the genius of the entrepreneur.
All of this good will (or at least, a lack of complaints) from Saverin is especially interesting because reports indicate that he was actually the key source for Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, which the movie was based on. From Silicon Alley Insider’s coverage:
Eventually, sources say, Eduardo decided to attack Mark’s reputation.
He approached Ben Mezrich – the author of Bringing Down The House, a book about how a group of MIT students made it big in Vegas – and offered him a book about how a group of Harvard students made it big in Silicon Valley. Bringing Down The House makes its characters out to be rock stars and scoundrels; the Facebook book, Accidental Billionaires, does the same. The upcoming movie based on the book features cocaine, models, and dark, moody, lighting from the director who brought you Fight Club. It’s a character assasination.
After Eduardo began talking to Mezrich, he and Facebook settled their lawsuits. Facebook went from officially denying Eduardo’s status as a cofounder to listing him as one on its Web site. As a part of the settlement, Eduardo stopped talking to the press.
Another thing to note: according to reports (including the SAI article cited above), Saverin is not supposed to be talking to the press about Facebook. Which makes me wonder if this was run by some high-ranking Facebook executives (perhaps even Zuckerberg himself) for approval before publication. After all, $1.1 billion seems like a lot to risk. Then again, the article is about the film rather than Facebook itself, so he may be in the clear regardless.
Facebook’s had this to say about the article:
“We appreciate the sentiments and we wish Eduardo well.”
Google just announced an update of the reviews section of Google Places, which essentially separates reviews from sites like Yelp, Zagat, Citygrid and others into separate category, called “Reviews From Around The Web.” Places used to just list outside reviews under a “Reviews” section. Now you can click on the Yelp review and be taken to the review on the Yelp page for the establishment. On Places, you’ll also see now see a section dubbed “Reviews from Google Users.”
The big news here is that Yelp reviews are back after a passive aggressive battle between Yelp and Google over whether Google could list Yelp’s reviews on Places pages. Yelp has been publicly frustrated by Google’s decision to pump up its Places service with Yelp’s content— without Yelp’s consent.
Yelp complained and Google started to remove the reviews from the “reviews” section but still featured Yelp reviews in the “more about this place section,” —- which is the last section of a Google Place page.
It seems that with Google has come to some sort of licensing agreement (not sure if it is a financial agreement) with Yelp, and other reviews sites to post these reviews on Places with a link back to the actual content. Another observation—the “reviews from around the web” section is listed above the “reviews from Google Users section.”
Of course, the relationship between Google and Yelp is questionable after the startup walked away from a $500 million+ offer from Google late last year.
Here’s the official comment from Yelp:
We are in a continuing dialogue with Google to try to work together to ensure consumers are able to find Yelp content easily and fairly. Those efforts are ongoing.
For all the hair-pulling that too much venture money is being thrown at startups, the third quarter actually saw a 31 percent sequential drop in venture dollars invested in the U.S., according to a new MoneyTree report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (see charts here). In the third quarter, VCs invested $4.8 billion in 780 deals, down from $6.9 billion in 962 deals during the second quarter (note that they reported slightly different numbers at the time, but I am using updated numbers here). Even compared to the third quarter of 2009, VC dollars are down 8 percent.
The biggest reason for the decline is that the second quarter was a huge quarter for later-stage cleantech deals, which are more capital intensive. The dollars going into cleantech went from $1.5 billion in the second quarter to $625 million in the third quarter, or a drop of nearly $1 billion. There were also fewer cleantech deals, with 58 in the quarter compared to 78 in the second quarter. And compared to last year, VCs poured $916 million into 53 cleantech deals in the third quarter of 2009.
While the bumpiness of cleantech investments explains most of the decline from last quarter, it does not tell the whole story. Of the 17 different industry sectors the reoprt tracks, 14 were down. For instance, $652 million less went into biotech and medical device startups compared to the second quarter. Infotech was also down. Software startups raised $1 billion in funding during the third quarter, down from $1.2 billion in the second quarter, but up from $800 million last year. Of that $1 billion, $660 million was invested in Internet companies, down 25 percent from the second quarter and down 14 percent from a year ago.
But what about early-stage seed deals, where frothy valuations seem to be increasingly appearing? A full third of all financing rounds (255 deals) and a quarter of the capital ($1.2 billion) went to first-time financings. This mars the fourth consecutive quarter when first-time financings were more than $1 billion, and compared to a year ago, they’ve been growing as a percentage of all venture deals and dollars.
There seems to have been a rash of startups based on Twitter in London. Some of the best known are Tweetdeck and Tweetmeme, but others have appeared like Curated.by (which just moved out to the Valley). But one which has been bubbling under and, like curated.by is focused on curated realtime streams, nsyght.com. We covered their relaunch last year when they announced Angel funding from a group of investors which included Shawn Kernes (co-founder of Stubhub).
Nsyght’s approach is that the product retrieves information from a user’s entire social graph (Twitter, Facebook, digg, Vimeo, Stumbleupon, Flickr, Delicious etc). Turn on the “everyone” firehouse and it updates very, very fast, due to it’s own bespoke search engine. Nsyght differs from Curated.by in that it’s far more geared to archiving realtime streams – Curated.by search is still limited by the same limits Twitter has.
They’ve now released a new feature which focuses on making a combination of twitter’s saved searches and lists searchable. That makes sense. Have you tried making lots of Twitter lists? It’s a pain in the ass. Curating is all very well, but it takes effort. So on Nsyght you create a list and chose to have the list follow just you, then create lists very, very easily.
Just like junior prom, novel musical instruments can inspire both awe and awkwardness.
Exhibit A: the Eigenharp. Part keyboard sampler, part digital woodwind and drum machine, the veritable Franken-synth comes in three sizes: Alpha, Tau and Pico. The Pico is the smallest, cheapest (though still steep) and, in theory, most accessible of the trio. Not to say it’s a no-brainer.
The Pico hangs loose from a neck strap, like an after-hours tie, and has been likened to the Fanfar, the cylindrical thing tooted by a few dome headed-aliens in the Star Wars Cantina Band.
A plastic breath pipe with a reed curves from the top of the Pico. Two columns of nine keys each run parallel down its body, flanked by a touch-sensitive “ribbon” controller used primarily for pitch-bending and for bowing a software-modeled cello.
Each LED-decked, pressure-sensitive key of the Eigenharp is actually three keys in one: The concave center triggers a standard note, while the upper edge triggers a sharp and the lower edge a flat. Octaves can be raised or lowered by tapping on two smaller, circular buttons below the keyboard.
Two identical buttons above the keyboard serve different purposes. One turns the drum loop on and off, and the other — when held down — turns the keyboard into “main mode”: cycle through instruments, change scales, record and edit loops, add or subtract to the percussive beat, and manipulate a slew of other parameters.
Memorizing what triggers what in “main mode” mode takes a bit of fiddling. Luckily, several minimalist diagrams in a printed quick-reference guide — and a series of four video tutorials on a packaged thumb drive — flatten the learning curve a bit. The QuickTime tutorials are taught by optimistic-sounding Nick, “a musician and demonstrator at Eigenharp,” and they’re supplemented by an online support forum at eigenlabs.com.
Obviously you’re supposed to play the Eigenharp in front of your weirded-out friends, not a computer screen. Nonetheless, the firmware-free instrument has to be plugged into a computer by USB 2.0 to operate.
Therein lies a bummer. The scrollable EigenD browser, a software app that comes with the Eigenharp, helps visualize the Eigenharp’s internals. On it, you can change instruments, build different drum kits from a vast library of loops, add effects, etc.
(The company is also phasing in Belcanto, a “command and control language” in which “words are defined as short sequences of notes on the major scale” of the instrument. Not, probably, for novices).
The Browser is super simple to navigate, but the Eigenharp is a resource hog. It takes a buttload of RAM (2 gigabytes or more) to seamlessly jam. In our tests, the Pico’s lights often flickered on and off and just as often the instrument crashed, prompting much frustration and many MacBook Pro reboots.
The Pico comes preloaded with seven software-modeled default instruments: a Steinway grand piano, Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos, an easily manipulated Alchemy synth and — calling upon the breath pipe — a clarinet and a cello. All are stored as Soundfonts, an age-old audio format.
Users can add their own Soundfonts, but to convert existing sound samples you’ll have to purchase a third-party app such as CDXtract for $139. To our surprise, Eigenlabs doesn’t offer any recommendations for free, high-quality Soundfonts on the Web.
The Eigenharp has the power to both transfix and confound. When it’s not crashing, it’s like tickling Buddha: totally fun, even if it doesn’t make intuitive sense at first. Once the software bugs are worked out and the price slides down a bit, the Pico will live up to its promise.
WIRED Multidirectional velocity and touch-sensitive keys are a joy to touch, and leave you uncallused. MIDI support. Could earn you giant bags of Imperial credits if you’re busking in Mos Eisley.
TIRED RAM-demanding software takes up a lot of space, and lags. No physical on/off switch on the instrument. Zero WiFi support. More Soundfonts or an accessible dev tool, please.
I’m here in the i/o Ventures incubator, aka “a really geeky cafe” having just wrapped up a presentation of six i/o companies — some that we’ve written about before and some that haven’t yet launched (we’re looking at you Skyara). My rough notes on the companies presenting below:
App Bistro — A marketplace for Facebook business related apps, App Bistro attempts to circumvent some of the challenges around Facebook fan pages, giving brands an alternative to spending 1000s of dollars to market their apps, through an app store that lets users rate an review apps for businesses, which Facebook does not yet provid. Currently there are 20 million Facebook fan pages half of them for local businesses. App Bistro intends to monetize with a 70.30 revenue split, listing fees, sponsored placement.
Socialvision — Social Vision believes that the future of video viewing is in viewing parties and their consumer app, YouTube Social allows you to invite your friends through Facebook, and watch a video simultaneously. Currently partnering with Direct TV, Social Vision intends to monetize by proving platforms for content companies to hold their own viewing parties.
Anomaly — Anomaly is an attempt to “make the web personal” — an algorithm that provides personalized curated evolution of the web, which is a never ending firehose of information. The Anomaly algorithm finds out what you’re interested and serves it up in order of relevance. Their recent Twitter application thecadmus.com was hailed as “a newsfeed for Twitter” and apparently increased Twitter userstream engagement by a multiple of three.
Damntheradio — “If you’re going to promote anything you between have a social media presence,” says Johnny Hwin founder of loyalty and rewards based marketing platform Damntheradio, which has been cash flow positive since July. Capitalizing on the universal need to GET MORE FANS, Damntheradio helps businesses reward fans in exchange for their social actions. Currently just on Facebook, the Damntheradio social reward platform eventuallu wants tohelp businesses connect across all consumer touchpoints, social networks like Foursquare and Twitter, mobile, Google TV, Google car.
Skyara — Skyara, which hasn’t launched yet is an Etsy/Airbnb for experiences, targeting people who ask, “What is there to do?” Businesses who have experiences to offer can connect with people looking for things to do. An experience recommendation engine, Skyara has the potential to offer cool food experiences in SF beyond opentable, like going go to a beer tasting with i/o Ventures partner Paul Bragiel for example. Despite it’s still being in stealth mode, Skyara has already has a populated marketplace.
AppRats — AppRats are Facebook apps that cater to different brand of celebrity than that of TV, and radio, positing that celebrities need different set of skills for the Internet, providing platforms for celebrities who want to engage with fans via Facebook app. AppRats currently works with 50 our of the top 100 YouTube celebrities and hopes to add more to the list.
Stay tuned as I am covering this live and updating this post with our previous coverage, interviews and more info from the event.
We are inundated with so many social streams that it is easy to forget where exactly we read something. For instance, there was a story earlier today on Twitter showing better clickthrough rates than Facebook. I know I saw it somewhere, but was it Twitter, Facebook, or in an email? It’s easy enough to search the open Web, but how do you search all of your personal information streams at once?
Introspectr, a personal search engine still in private beta, is part of a new class of startups trying to tackle this problem. (The first 100 people to click on this link will get an invite). You give Introspectr access to your Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail accounts, and it indexes them for you, along with the content of any email attachments or the underlying pages of any links. Then you can just search for any term and up come all the Tweets, emails, and Facebook messages where that might appear.
Another startup in this class is Greplin, which is a Y Combinator startup we’ve covered before. I’ve tried both. Neither one gets it exactly right, but they both point in the right direction. For instance, Greplin does not index the pages that people you follow are linking to. So unless the keyword you are searching for is in their Tweet, you are out of luck. But if someone Tweets, “Check this out” with a link to an article about clickthrough rates, Introspectr should be able to catch that.
Introspectr, however, doesn’t seem to update its index in realtime. You have to do that manually if you are searching for recent Tweets, or emails. And it doesn’t yet search your Facebook News feed, only your inbox messages. Doing a few random searches of words in my Twitter stream, Introspectr is hit or miss (for some reason Greplin isn’t showing me any Twitter results even though it shows that my Twitter account is supposedly indexed). When it finds the right Tweets or emails, it’s great. But this is really a feature Twitter should have. As part of Twitter search, you should be able to search only your own stream. And Google or Bing should add a similar type of social search functionality to their larger search engines. It’s such an obvious feature. But until they do that (which could be years), startups like Introspectr and Greplin are paving the way.
A new class of personal social search companies aare tackling thsi
At least it did me. Touted by co-founder Sachin Agarwal as a one stop shop for all your sharing needs, the Posterous app (now available in the App store) is extremely intuitive to use, and you don’t even need a Posterous to use it to start uploading photos, video and text, which, if you’ve enabled the Posterous “Autopost” feature will also post to your Facebook, Twitter as well as 26 other social sites including Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, Vimeo and Tumblr.
While you might be experiencing iPhone share fatigue (Instagram, Twitter, Tumblrette, WordPress and many others allow you to upload content directly from your phone) Posterous has always modeled itself on providing its pretty fanatical userbase with ease of use, the original idea of the service being that you could send an email to [email protected] and get a blog back, to which you the could send any other subsequent posts to [email protected].
The Posterous mobile app takes off on this basic “no need to log in” philosophy, but supports geolocational tags, category tags and various levels of editing and privacy. And despite being buggy at points (one of my test posts posted twice, which was confusing), it’s pretty impressive how much you can actually do from the app (for example I set up my whole Posterous account) as opposed to WordPress, which has the effect of making you feel immobilized when blogging on the go because it does not allow you to upload media other than photos and lacks social sharing functions.
Winning “Keep It Simple Stupid” product strategy aside, it’s really hard not to root for the YC-backed Posterous; Their recent skuffle with Twitpic solidified them as champions of user portability which is always a crowd pleaser. Their user traffic has also risen accordingly boasting a 40% increase since June.
Currently funded at $5.14 million, Posterous’ future plans for the iPhone app include building the ability to directly edit posts from the app, landscape post viewing, multiple photo selection and showing attachments as actual thumbnails.
