Category: Tech news

Since the beginning of Twitter time, the company has used sequential IDs for tweets. This has helped some third party services come up with rough estimates as to the total number of tweets there were on Twitter (though it was always a bit inaccurate since they’ve done huge jumps a few times). But starting today, that will change as Twitter’s new status ID system, Snowflake, is in the process of rolling live.

Twitter Developer Advocate Matt Harris reminded developers of the change late last night in a Google Group posting. The roll-out was scheduled for 10 AM PT today, but an update from the TwitterAPI account notes that “Snowflake is on ice for the moment” and promises an update soon.

So what exactly does Snowflake mean for people? Twitter had a post back in June on their engineering blog explaining that as they moved away from MySQL to Cassandra, they needed to come up with a new ID system since Cassandra has no built-in unique ID generator. So Twitter dreamed up Snowflake, an ID system based on timestamps rather than sequential numbering. As Harris explained last month:

Snowflake still uses 64-bit unsigned integers but instead of being sequential they will instead be based on time and composed of: a timestamp, a worker number and a sequence number. For the majority of you this change will go unnoticed and your applications will continue to function without the need for any changes.

But Harris also noted that Snowflake meant tweet IDs would no longer be useful for data analysis. Tweet numbers will still be roughly sortable (as long as two tweets are less than one second apart), but you won’t be able to tell how many tweets apart they were.

Harris’ key points for the Snowflake change:

• Status IDs will be unique
• Status IDs will continue to increase – Tweets created later in the day will have a higher ID that those created in the morning
• Order will be maintained for Tweets allowing you to sort by Status ID. The accuracy of the sort will be to approximately 1 second, meaning Tweets created within a second of each other have no order.
• All existing API methods will continue to work the same as before
• Previous status IDs will be unchanged
• There will be a noticeable jump in the numerical value of status IDs when we change.

As a sidenote, you may have noticed that with the rollout of New Twitter, the service began inserting “#!” into every tweet URL. This is simply to ensure that the pages will get indexed by Google with the new (AJAX) system in place — otherwise the tweet ID system would be ignored.

[photo: flickr/puliarf]

According to a form D SEC filing submitted today by Zynga, it appears that the gaming giant paid at least $6.3 million for recently acquired video game developer Bonfire Studios. We reached out to Zynga and they would not comment on the filing, which indicated that the company sold over $6 million in stock.

Zynga’s been on a buying spree over the past few months but we rarely get glimpses of how much Zynga pays for its acquisitions as the company is usually tight-lipped about how much it spends on each studio. And there could have been additional cash involved, which would not be disclosed in this filing. Earlier this year, another filing indicated that the company paid at least $20.5 million for Austin gaming studio Challenge Games.

Along with Challenge and Bonfire, Zynga has bought XPD in Beijing, Unoh Games in Tokyo, Conduit Labs in Boston, and Dextrose AG in Frankfurt, Germany in the past six months.

Of course, the company has more than enough cash to pay for all of these acquisitions. The company has received massive cash infusions the company from Google, Softbank, and others.

After unprecedented user backlash as well as a majority vote on a recent poll on whether Digg should bring back the controversial “Bury” button, new Digg CEO Matthew Williams today confirmed that the social news aggregator would be bringing back many of the beloved Digg Version 3 features in the coming weeks, essentially bringing back the old site with new code. As far as we can tell from his post the part about officially bringing back the “Bury” button is new information,  but the “Upcoming” section has been back for about a month, which makes Williams’ “In the past two weeks ..” statement inaccurate.

“Recently, we’ve been reinstating a number of the features that many of you loved about Digg. In the past two weeks we’ve brought back the “Upcoming” section, started restoring user profiles from the previous version of Digg, and made small but important tweaks to the site including better pagination. In the next few weeks we’ll bring back the bury button, restore all user profiles (including comment and submission history), add filters and navigation for videos and images, provide a tool for users to report comment violations, and update the Top News algorithm and overall site design based upon your feedback. The result will hopefully be a much better web site experience.”

 

It seems as though post-revolt Digg is now treading carefully with regards to user feedback, to the point of providing users with a full-on survey regarding Digg Version 4 changes. Early reaction from users is mixed with the basic sentiment being “too little too late.”

Says one power user who wished to remain anonymous, “I fear that a couple little small changes now, although they MIGHT be a helpful, don’t do anything to really bring back the people who have left the site… and that’s what the people who use the site care about. Digg has scared away so many people now, that it is very hard to stick with them, especially when sites like Reddit are providing better user experiences and have happier communities.”

Solar is likely to surpass one gigawatt of installed, power-generating capacity this year in the U.S. — that’s enough capacity to power 200,000 homes — according to a report released today by the Solar Energy Industries Association and GreenTech Media Research.

The researchers believe that photovoltaic (PV) and concentrating solar power (CSP) installations in the states are on the rise thanks to decreasing prices and continued government support of domestic solar projects. One large CSP project and several large PV projects contributed to the robust forecast.

The Israeli-developed, California-based clean tech company BrightSource Energy attained federal approvals this year to build a major, 370 MW CSP installation in Southern California, including about 10 “power towers” on federal lands. This Ivanpah project has created high hopes for a BrightSource IPO this year, though a 2011 IPO is more likely.

BrightSource is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Morgan Stanley and VantagePoint Venture Partners, Alstom SA (ALS), Black River Asset Management, BP Alternative Energy, the California State Teachers Retirement System, Chevron Technology Ventures, Google.org and StatoilHydro, and as Dow Jones Venture Wire reported, it received the largest loan guarantee that the federal government has issued to any clean-technology company.

PV projects took off, too. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) tracks these PV projects in the US via an open source map project, OpenPV.NREL.gov. A quick search reveals some of the larger projects installed this year, including a $71 million plant in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center, consisting of 35,000 solar panels that should power more than 1,000 homes.

SEIA’s industry report predicts that of the 945 megawatts of solar electric capacity that is expected to be added domestically this year, 91% should come from PV and 9% from CSP installations. Last year, just 441 megawatts of solar electric capacity were added domestically from PV and CSP combined.

Political support for solar is also strong. The newest SCHOTT Solar Barometer Survey, conducted by SEIA and Kelton Research, found that 94% of U.S. citizens think it is important for the nation to develop and use solar energy, across all political parties and 80% agree that Congress should consider reallocating federal subsidies from fossil fuels to solar.

In the first six months of the year, California took the lead among states with solar electric capacity installed adding 120 megawatts. New Jersey, Arizona and Florida followed. Across the U.S. 341 megawatts were installed in the first half of the year.

The U.S. is also expected to reach 3 million square feet of installed solar thermal collectors for solar water heating, compared to about 2.6 million square feet in 2009. Newly installed collectors should provide hot water for nearly 50,000 homes, businesses and other facilities across the country.

Hawaii installed the most square feet of solar water heaters, followed by Puerto Rico and California in the first half of 2010. Within the solar water heating industry, the solar pool heating segment is expected to grow by 7% in 2010, with installations of approximately 11.5 million square feet.

Image via: OpenPV.NREL.gov

Online advertising is showing healthy gains this year. During the first half of 2010, online advertising revenues were up 11.3 percent to $12.3 billion, according to a new report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (embedded below). At this rate, the report estimates that online ad revenues for the full year should surpass the 2008 peak of $23.4 billion.

On a quarterly basis, online ad revenues for the second quarter $6.2 billion. That was 13.9 percent higher than last year, and 4.1 percent better than the first quarter of 2010, but still not quite as high as the peak in the fourth quarter of 2008.

The report also offers the following stats (all numbers are for the first half of 2010):

• The top ten online ad-selling companies account for 70 percent of revenues.
• Search accounts for 47 percent of online ad revenues, the same as a year ago (to $5.8 billion).
• Display grew its share to 36 percent from 34 percent a year ago (to $4.4 billion).
• Digital video (which is part of display) grew its share to 5 percent from 4 percent a year ago (to $627 million)
• Classifieds stayed flat at 10 percent ($1.2 billion)
• Lead generation declined to 5 percent from 7 percent ($642 million)
• Email ads are also flat at 1 percent ($120 million)
• The biggest advertisers come from retail (20%), telecom (14%), financial services (12%), automotive (11%), computing (10%), packaged goods (8%), and travel (7%).
• Performance-based pricing now makes up 61% (up from 58% a year ago).
• Impression-based pricing is 35% of teh market (down from 38% a year ago).

The real estate bust is still dragging down the economy, but some startups are making the best of a bad situation. Real estate search engine Trulia, is still growing by zeroing in on subscription services for real estate agents. CEO Peter Flint tells me the company edged into profitability two months ago—six years after the company was founded. He won’t give specific numbers, but says that revenues are doubling from a year ago and almost half comes from real estate agents who pay for Trulia Local Ads and the premium Trulia Pro service to help market their listings.

Traffic to the site is up more than 50 percent from last year, up to 9 million unique visitors a month, according to Flint. ComScore estimates a smaller number—6 million U.S. visitors in September—but even stronger growth of 155 percent (Zillow grew even faster at a 200 percent annual clip to 7.6 million uniques, so it’s not just Trulia that is doing well here). Trulia’s growth comes from expanding its listings to rentals earlier this year, and in general trying to help people make smarter real estate decisions with all sorts of tools and data.

Demand for Trulia’s private shares on SecondMarket are among the fastest-growing. Flint plans to expand further in 2011 with new products aimed at the real estate market. He still has some catching up to do, however. Zillow, Yahoo Real Estate, and Realtor.com are all still larger sites.

On AMC’s Mad Men, whenever ad agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce needs qualitative market research they arrange a focus group, usually a small collection of women, with the ad executives looking on via a two-way mirror.

Now, more than forty years later, many companies are still relying on similar methods: expensive in-person panels, which can be labor intensive to set-up, yield variable success and lack in cost effectiveness.

Denver-based GutCheck is trying to offer an alternative with its self-described do-it-yourself platform for qualitative market research and they’re building up a warchest to convert the unconverted. The startup, founded by CEO Matt Warta, Carl Rossow and Jen Drolet, has just raised $2 million in a Series A round led by Highway 12 Ventures. Village Ventures (where Warta was formerly a partner) and a few other individual investors also participated in this round.

GutCheck’s goal is to be the SurveyMonkey for qualitative research by simplifying the process and bringing it all online.

This is how it works: A marketing agency, a brand manager or any other enterprise client signs up for an account on GutCheck’s website and describes the target demographic.  GutCheck has roughly 4 million subjects in its pool, which are supplied by large partners who get a cut of the revenues. Once you’re signed up, you can begin to build your project, a chat guide (the objectives and questions) and set specific parameters (i.e. age, behavioral, custom questions) for the type of person you want to survey. Once you’re ready to commence your research— at a price of $40 per 30-minute interview— you prompt GutCheck to find your target demo, a qualified subject is brought to you via the web-based client, and then you can immediately start interacting and using the chat guide to push pre-scripted questions to the interviewee. (See below for their video demo.)

I love the sleek interface and at $40 a pop, GutCheck does provide a low-cost alternative to in-person panels, but I wonder whether this deep, one-on-one model will still be in high demand several years from now.

Companies will always want to comprehensively understand their market and potential consumers but will the vast array of social media tools, like Twitter and Facebook, (and the seemingly infinite consumer touch points on the web) provide them with enough data, to render services like GutCheck obsolete?

Understandably, Warta doesn’t believe so.

He thinks companies can get a good picture on their current consumers from the web’s social tools but that these tools lack sufficient qualitative data on potential consumers. “If you look at social media today and how it plays in market research, most marketers and researchers will give a nod to Facebook,” he says, “but if you start extrapolating [only] from that group, you’ll make some bad decisions that’s not reflective of the average consumer out there who doesn’t use your product.”

The startup is currently in the beta testing phase but should be ready to officially launch their product in the next few weeks.

I just don’t get people who live on the East Coast. On the one hand you’ve got Newsweek’s Dan Lyons saying Silicon Valley isn’t tackling the hard problems any more (our response is here).

And then when we find out that Google is actually working on some seriously science fiction type stuff (self driving cars), New York financial analyst and blogger Henry Blodget asks “Why is Google developing this technology?”

I get what Lyons and Blodget are saying. Lyons thinks Zynga, Twitter and Facebook are a waste of engineering resources. Those people could be working on “more important stuff.” And Blodget isn’t anti-self driving cars, he just wants Google to focus on its core business.

I say this – who cares!

Everyone has a fix for Silicon Valley, but what tends to work best is when people just leave Silicon Valley alone. The crazy (perhaps diseased) manic pipe dreams of entrepreneurs, guided by basic market forces, has gotten us this far. And it will work just as well from now on, too.

I love the fact that Google is working on cars that drive themselves. I’m not a shareholder, but if I was I’d still love it. If Larry Page decides this is what he’s passionate about right now, Google definitely doesn’t want him starting some new company to pursue it.

Keep it at Google. If it doesn’t work, he’s scratched his itch. If it does, they can spin it off later. In the meantime, Google benefits because people know they’re working on new technology that can change the world, not just how to make more money from keyword ads. There are engineers that may take jobs at Google just knowing that they’re doing stuff like this that otherwise take jobs at one of those companies that Lyons is mocking just to get pre-IPO stock.

We want our entrepreneurs to try crazy new things. In a hundred years who knows, Google may be thought of as a car company, not a search company. Crazier things have happened. It wasn’t all that long ago, for example, that Nokia was known as a manufacturer of rubber galoshes. If Blodget had his way, they’d still be at it.

In November 2009, Ben Tseitlin was driving along on the 280 highway between San Francisco and Palo Alto when he noticed something weird. There was a Toyota Prius next to him with a weird spolier-like thing on the roof. And on top of that was some sort of spinning contraption. It was weird enough that Tseitlin decided to take a video of it and posted it to his Facebook page, guessing it was sort of test wind-powered Prius. Little did Ben know at the time, it was actually something much more.

What Tseitlin captured, of course, was the Google self-driving car. The secret project, which Google revealed for the first time today, is a combination of different technologies developed by Google that will allow a car to drive itself — yes, even on the highway. Google has disclosed that they’ve been testing these cars “recently“, but they’ve clearly been testing them for longer than that, as Tseitlin’s video proves. The fact that these specially-equipped Priuses (and one Audi TT) have racked up over 140,000 miles (1,000 of while have been completely human-free) on the road, suggests a longer cycle of testing as well.

One of the most interesting aspects of this whole project is that local authorities were fine with Google road-testing these cars. “We’ve briefed local police on our work,” Google noted today and said that human beings are always present in the driver’s seat when the cars are on the road just in case a manual override is needed. The only accident over all these months involved someone else rear-ending one of the cars.

Tseitlin tells us that he’s actually seen the cars around a few other places as well in the past several months. A commenter on his Facebook post notes the same thing.

Google’s secret project has been driving next to many of us all these months and we never ever realized it. That won’t be the case anymore. Watch Tseitlin’s video below.

Update: And none other than Robert Scoble caught the car on video in January 2010 — but he assumed it was the new Street View car. His comment on the video page is funny:

They must be testing the latest Mapping car a lot lately. Seems I see them on almost every trip. I’m not sure what company they work for, I’ve always assumed Google but I see these cars quite frequently in Silicon Valley. This time I had my HD camera ready. Note that there’s two cameras on top: one that looks like it’s recording video (the black thing on top) and one that’s recording stills (the rotating camera). Also note that they didn’t like me shooting video, when they noticed me they slowed down quickly.

There was a reason they didn’t like him shooting that footage. Also – eyes on the damn road, Robert! This is exactly why we need these cars.

(thx Datadude)

Google made a stunning revelation this morning: the existence of a secret self-driving car project. Even more amazing: it has been in testing for months, on actual roads across California, and things seem to be running smoothly. Fans of Total Recall, Minority Report, and Knight Rider are hyperventilating at the prospects. And while the technology is likely still a long way from being widely implemented (The New York Times piece on it suggests eight years), there is one big question: why?

Google’s answer seems to be a “betterment of society” one. “We’ve always been optimistic about technology’s ability to advance society, which is why we have pushed so hard to improve the capabilities of self-driving cars beyond where they are today,” Google engineer Sebastian Thrun, who spearheaded the project (and also runs Stanford’s AI Labs, and co-invented Street View), writes today.

That’s great. But Google is still a public company in the business of making money for its shareholders. So one can’t help but wonder what, if any, money-making prospects there are here?

“The Google researchers said the company did not yet have a clear plan to create a business from the experiments,” according to the NYT. Further, they quote Thrun as saying that this project is an example of Google’s “willingness to gamble on technology that may not pay off for years.”

We know Google has a history of idealism — co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in particular — but this project cannot come cheap. And the fact is that Google remains basically a one-trick-pony when it comes to making money. They are so reliant on search advertising revenues, that if something suddenly happened to the market, they’d be totally screwed. Android may prove to be their second trick, but it’s not there yet.

But there may be more to these automated cars than just an awesomely cool concept. At our TechCrunch Disrupt event a couple weeks ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a speech about “an augmented version of humanity.” He noted that the future is about getting computers to do the things we’re not good at. One of those things is driving cars, Schmidt slyly said at the time. “Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense,” he noted. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.”

If your car can drive itself, a lot of commuters would be freed up to do other things in the car — such as surf the web. One of Google’s stated goals for this project is to “free up people’s time”. That matched with Schmidt’s vision of mobile devices being with us all the time every day, likely will translate into more usage of Google.

That may sound silly and not worth all the R&D an undertaking as huge as this will require, but don’t underestimate Google. This is a company who cares deeply about shaving fractions of a second off of each search query so that you can do more of them in your waking hours. Imagine if you suddenly had an hour or more a day in your car to do whatever you wanted because you no longer had to focus on driving? Yeah. Cha-ching.

Or imagine if your on-board maps where showing you Google ads. Or you were watching Google TV in your car since you didn’t have to drive. Or you were listening to Google Music with Google ads. It’s all the same. This automated driving technology would free you up to use more Google products — which in turn make them more money. Make no mistake, Google will enter your car in a big way. And automated driving would up their return in a big way.

And, of course, none of this speaks to what, if anything, Google would actually charge for such technology implementation. You would have to believe that if and when it’s available, this automated driving tech would be built-in to cars. Would car manufacturers pay Google for it and pass off some of the costs to customers? Or would this all be subsidized by the above ideas?

It’s way too early to get into that, I’m sure. And in 8 years, there will be things out there that we can’t even imagine right now. But it’s interesting to think about. The Google Car.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have little doubt Google is being sincere in their broader hopes for such a technology. Here’s their key blurb on that:

According to the World Health Organization, more than 1.2 million lives are lost every year in road traffic accidents. We believe our technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half. We’re also confident that self-driving cars will transform car sharing, significantly reducing car usage, as well as help create the new “highway trains of tomorrow.” These highway trains should cut energy consumption while also increasing the number of people that can be transported on our major roads. In terms of time efficiency, the U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that people spend on average 52 minutes each working day commuting. Imagine being able to spend that time more productively.

That first part is awesome. If we could halve the number of traffic deaths each year, it would be world-changing. And if energy consumption could be cut, it could re-shape economies and save our future. But again, don’t gloss over the last part. Freeing up those 52 minutes a day to be productive — that’s a lot of potential money for Google.

And that’s great too. If Google can spend the time and money working on such amazing technology they should be rewarded for it. There’s no rule that says you shouldn’t be able to make money by changing the world. And Google can’t be praised enough for trying.

More:

• Google Has A Secret Fleet Of Automated Toyota Priuses; 140,000 Miles Logged So Far.
• Google’s Self-Driving Car Spotted On The Highway Almost A Year Ago [Video]

[images: Dreamworks and TriStar Entertainment]

It all makes sense now.

At our TechCrunch Disrupt event a couple weeks ago in San Francisco, Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage to give an impressive speech across a wide range of topics. But the most interesting thing he had to say what about automobiles. “It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers,” he said. “Your car should drive itself. It just makes sense.”

Well guess what? Surprise, surprise: Google has been working on a secret project to enable cars to do just that.

As they’ve revealed on their blog today, Google has developed a technology for cars to drive themselves. And they haven’t done it on a computer, or in some controlled lab, they’ve been out on California roads testing this out. “Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research,” Google engineer Sebastian Thrun (the brainchild of the project who also heads the Stanford AI lab and co-invented Street View as well) writes.

Further, The New York Times, which has a bit more, says a total of seven cars have driven 1,000 miles without any human intervention (the 140,000 mile number includes occasional human control, apparently). These cars are a modified version of the Toyota Prius — and there is one Audi TT, as well.

So how does this work? The automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors, and a laser range finder to locate everything around them (these are mounted on the roof). And, of course, they use Google’s own maps. But the key?

This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.

Google says it gathered the best engineers from the DARPA Challenges (an autonomous vehicle race that the government puts on) to work on this project. They also note that these cars never drive around unmanned in the interest of safety. A driver is always on hand to take over in case something goes wrong, and an engineer is always on hand in the car to monitor the software. Google also says they’ve notified local police about the project.

So has it worked? Apparently, yes. There has been one accident so far, but it was when someone else rear-ended one of these Google cars.

Google notes that 1.2 million people are killed every year in road accidents — they think they can cut this number in half with the tech. It will also cut energy consumption and save people a lot of time.

I want this yesterday. This is all kinds of awesome.

But don’t get too excited just yet. “Even the most optimistic predictions put the deployment of the technology more than eight years away,” according to NYT.

More:

• World-Changing Awesome Aside, How Will The Self-Driving Google Car Make Money?
• Google’s Self-Driving Car Spotted On The Highway Almost A Year Ago [Video]

[image via NYT]

A cluster of computers on Carnegie Mellon’s campus named NELL, or formally known as the Never-Ending Language Learning System, has attracted significant attention this week thanks to a NY Times article, “Aiming To Learn As We Do, A Machine Teaches Itself.”

Indeed, the eight-month old computer system attempts to “teach” itself by perpetually scanning slices of the web as it looks at thousands of sites simultaneously to find facts that fit into semantic buckets (like athletes, academic fields, emotions, companies) and finding details related to these nouns. The project, supported by federal grants, a $1 million check from Google, and a M45 supercomputer cluster donated by Yahoo, is trying break down the longstanding barrier between computers and semantics.

This is not the first time researchers have tried to tackle one of the great, elusive white whales of the programming world, but as the NY Times points out, the way NELL proactively creates and continues to expand its knowledge base is unique.

And yet despite all of NELL’s initiative and innovation, she needs help.

She is accurate 80-90% of the time, according to Professor Tom Mitchell, the head of the research team (see our demo with Mitchell above). For that 10-20% where NELL misses the mark the results can be somewhat comical— for example, according to NELL, AOL’s parent company is CarPhone and the Palm Treo is an Apple product. Mitchell and his small team are trying to clean up errors as they surface but with nearly 400,000 facts and counting, it’s a gargantuan task.

That’s where the online community comes in.

Currently, you can access NELL’s knowledge base, via the “Read The Web” project homepage. Here you can peer into NELL’s brain by searching for terms or download the entire database, if you so desire. The next step is turning readers into pseudo-editors. Starting sometime next month, Mitchell will open NELL ‘s database to anyone who wants to help edit and flag errors. “We’re soon going to be adding some buttons by these beliefs, as you browse, so if you see a mistake you’ll be able to click a button and say I don’t believe this… I think that will be very valuable to us,” Mitchell says. “

While this may remind you of Wikipedia’s model with its crowdsourced method of submission and editing, the NELL community will be tinkering with the content and more importantly, the engine. Every correction helps NELL “learn” about facts, relationships and the mechanics of language, which will help it avoid future mistakes. By unleashing the power of the internet on NELL, the system’s intelligence has a chance to grow exponentially, which will help the CMU researchers achieve one of their ultimate goals: to get computers to read, fully understand and return complete sentences.

To help with this process, Mitchell is also looking at alternative avenues to up NELL’s IQ, including gaming mechanics. He gave TechCrunch a first look at an upcoming game he plans to launch called “Polarity,” created by Edith Law, Burr Settles and Luis Von Ahn. In this game, a user will be randomly assigned to another user on the web. Each player will be given a keyword like “longtail salamander,” one user will have to click on the words that describe the keyword, while the other user will have to click on the words that do not describe the keyword. All these answers will feed into NELL’s engine and augment the system’s understanding of relationships.

So why should we care about NELL,  a computer system that is still riddled with errors and so far seems pretty useless compared to Wikipedia or Quora? Because the engine behind NELL, and similar computer systems, could dramatically alter our relationship to computers and the web, the way we search (Google’s participation is no coincidence), how we gather information, or get our morning news. Although NELL doesn’t exactly “learn as we do”—- I don’t know many people that scan thousands of webpages simultaneously for statistically relevant information— this project is about helping machines comprehend the world the way we do by building a knowledge base that mimics the ones we (as individuals) spend decades building.

As someone who ostensibly tries to keep fit, I’ve found the best way to pretend to lose weight is to fiddle around with iPhone apps during my workout. First, it reduces the mind-crushing pain of exercise and allows me to go to a place in myself where I can avoid the boredom of exertion.

To that end I decided to test out the new Nike+ GPS app alongside an old favorite, RunKeeper.

Both apps have their pluses and minuses. Clearly RunKeeper is aimed squarely at the professional or at least obsessive runner, while the Nike+ software is aimed at a more casual user. Both have their value in the training arsenals of the average runner, and many of the hardware-specific features of Nike+ have been stripped out of the new GPS version, thereby putting both apps on equal footing.

Continue reading…

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Penelope Trunk.

My company, Brazen Careerist, is moving from Madison, WI, to Washington, DC, where our new CEO lives.

Running the company has been absolute hell. Not that I didn’t know it would be hell. It’s my third startup. Each has had its own hell before we were solidly funded, but this one was so bad that my electricity was turned off, and I really thought I was going to die from stress.

So while my company moves its center to DC, I’m staying in Wisconsin. I just married a farmer and my two young sons and I are learning to live among the wonders of pigs and cattle and corn.

I thought I would be sad that the company is moving. It’s weird to be the founder of a company and not be where all the action of the company is. But honestly, I’m relieved.

There is good evidence that you have to be crazy to do a startup. Jeff Stibel, writing in the Harvard Business Review, calls entrepreneurship a disease. Because you are not likely to make money – you are likely to die broke. And you work insane hours – longer than any other job – and you do it over and over and over again. This is not sane.

In fact, David Segal reports in the New York Times that there is a mania that entrepreneurs exhibit that is very attractive to investors. The trick is to make sure you’re investing in someone who is on the border of insane, but not insane.

So I had a going away party. To say goodbye, but also to acknowledge that I am officially not crazy enough to spend another year missing out on being with my kids. There is still an office in Madison, but the company is running well enough that I don’t have to be the center of it.

It’s hard to not be the center, but I want to be the center of my family. There are enough articles in the last year alone to fill a book (not to mention conference panels) about why women don’t get funding for startups. But really, you could tell that story on one page: Startups move at break-neck pace, under a lot of pressure to succeed bigger and faster than any normal company. And women don’t want to give up their personal life in exchange for the chance to be the next Google. Or even the next Feedburner. Which is why the number of women who pitch is so small, and, therefore, the number of women who get funding is small.

Did you know that in Farmville, women make colorful, fun farms, and men make big, sprawling farms? And I don’t think it’s a social pressure sort of thing. My sons are under no pressure from me to beat each other up with anything that they can turn into a sword, which is everything. And the girls who visit are under no social pressure to sit quietly, and watch. Boys and girls are fundamentally different even before they get to Farmville.

Women are under real pressure to have kids, though. They have a biological clock. So women who are the typical age of entrepreneurs—25—need to be looking for someone to mate with. Think about it. If you want to have kids before you’re 35—when your biological clock explodes—then you need to start when you’re 30, allowing for one miscarriage, which is more probable than most young people think. If you need to start having kids when you’re 30, you probably need to meet the guy you’re going to marry by the time you’re 27, so you can date for a year, get married, and live together for a year before kids. If you need to meet that guy by 27, you are very distracted during your prime startup time. (I have done years of research to come to this conclusion. Here’s the post.)

And I’m not even going to go into the idea of women having a startup with young kids. It is absolutely untenable. The women I know who do this have lost their companies or their marriages or both. And there is no woman running a startup with young kids, who, behind closed doors, would recommend this life to anyone.

For men it’s different. We all know that men do not search all over town finding the perfect ballet teacher. Men are more likely to settle when it comes to raising kids. The kids are fine. Men are more likely than women to think they themselves are doing a good job parenting. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Men have to trust that the kids will be okay so that they can leave and go get food or make more kids.

Before you tell me there are exceptions, I’m going to let you in on a secret: I’m a magnet for high-powered women with stay-at-home husbands. And when the men aren’t listening, the women always tell me that their men don’t pay enough attention and they (the women) are really running the household. They would never say this to the men. It would de-motivate them. So even the most child-oriented men are not as child-oriented as their wives.

And this is why women don’t have startups: children. It’s not a complicated answer. It’s a sort of throw-back-to-the-50’s answer. You could argue the merits of this, but you could not argue the merits of this with any woman who has kids and has a startup.

There’s a reason that women start more businesses than men, but women only get 3% of the funding that men do. The reason is that women want a lifestyle business. Women want to control their time, control their work, to be flexible for their kids. This seems reasonable: Women start more lifestyle businesses and men start more venture-funded businesses. This does not, on face value, seem inherently problematic.

But wait, let’s ask why so many men with kids are doing startups? Why aren’t they with their kids? A startup is like six full-time jobs. Where does that leave the kids? We use social service funding to tell impoverished families that it’s important for dads to spend time with their kids. But what about startup founders? Is it okay for them to leave their kids in favor of 100-hour weeks? For many founders, their startup is their child.

My startup is me and a bunch of twenty-something guys. And if you’re a woman launching a startup, my advice is to stick with this crowd. They never stop working because it’s so exciting to them: the learning curve is high, they can move anywhere, they can live on nothing, and they can keep wacky hours.

The problem with that mix is that someone who is not a guy in his 20’s has different priorities. And that’s something we saw really clearly at Brazen Careerist. The more I became focused on my personal life, the more annoyed everyone got with me. Sure, they understood, but they were pissed also.

I think our new setup will alleviate much of that stress. I’m on the farm, Ryan Paugh is in Madison, and Ryan Healy is in DC. It’s not how I imagined the company evolving when we started it, but that’s part of the fun of entrepreneurship: you never get what you imagined, ever.

Oh Quora! You’ve done it again. This time with the utterly fascinating “What startups have been started by former Yahoo employees?” thread which provides a pretty comprehensive list from AClevertwist.com to Ycombinator.com (Quick, some ex-Yahooer start a Z-word startup!) of startups founded by former Yahoo employees, which, as we’ve already pointed out, are a force to be reckoned with.

Inspired by the sheer scope of Yahoo defector startups (Hunch! Ycombinator! Tunerfish! Tinyspeck! Onetruefan!) we and the folks at Pearltrees are working on the above visualization, which currently runs through “M.” So go ahead, click on one of the nodes and explore the ever expanding house that Y! built.