Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Bye bye SiliconBeat, Welcome VentureBeat

It is now official! Matt Marshall has removed the password of his new blog/site and has announced the launch of his own independent venture: VentureBeat. He will keep on covering the venture capital and startup world that he had covered with a lot of talent over the past few years - as a newly minted entrepreneur. I had lunch with Matt last Friday and he was both excited and nervous as he was putting the final touches of this launch. In his inaugural post on the site, Matt clarifies his motivation for going solo and some elements of his plans:

On Friday, I will serve my last day at the San Jose Mercury News and will no longer be blogging at SiliconBeat. VentureBeat has become my sole occupation and focus.

My Mercury News colleague Michael Bazeley and I launched SiliconBeat.com almost two years ago, in an effort to respond to the new reality of online media. The blog began as an experiment, taking up an hour or so of my day. Soon, it became much more: Baze and I found ourselves spending several hours daily on a blog that was supposed to be outside of our day jobs at the Merc. Baze, showing more sanity, pulled back from SiliconBeat and has taken a job managing the Mercury News’ Web site. For me, SiliconBeat continued as a labor of love, a way to filter the goings-on of this fascinating place we call Silicon Valley. Yet I was doing too much. So I approached the Mercury News, and told them I wanted to go out on my own.

To my delight, the Mercury News has become my first customer. It will syndicate the content I produce here. It has the right to run it in the paper, and to put it on their Web site. For me, it is a great deal. The Merc is the valley’s paper of record. It is my first read in the morning, and what I do here at VentureBeat is linked with the Merc’s mission. Like most of the people at the Merc, I care about the community in a broader sense. That is why I’m covering things from a geographical standpoint, as opposed to an industry niche.

As I said in my comment on the “old” SiliconBeat: Smile Matt, you are now an entrepreneur like the startup guys that you have been covering. Congratulations for the move!.

Update: in irony, poor Matt is facing one of the worst nightmares of the startup CEO whose service is launching and ends up being taken down by traffic or bugs. VentureBeat.com has been down since this morning, and shows no sign of immediate recovery. I was with David Hornik this afternoon and he could help but chuckle “That's why people host their blogs on TypePad” - which is also going down sometimes, but that's another story.

Tags: siliconbeat, venturebeat

Typepad gets a few useful feature additions

Typepad New Features
Originally uploaded by jeffclavier.

Six Apart just announced a few new additions to TypePad that are worth noting:

• The most important one - by far - was the ability to link your TypePad feeds to your FeedBurner managed feed, which I blogged about upon release. For the first time, bloggers know exactly how many subscribers they have across their numerous feed incarnations – and that is important to their ego .
• I like the ability to feature a post temporarily. This one (related to the World Cup) will be up until Sunday. And then I stop blogging about sports - I swear. It would however be great to somehow mark the post as “Featured” since the current implementation does not make it explicit.
• Finally, the ability to edit multiple posts in one go, like closing comments or trackbacks, is pretty useful.

Next requirement: getting some of the Vox editing features in Typepad, like the picture insert widget, would be great.

Any other favorite feature request of yours ?

NewsGator for Windows Mobile: I like it but...

Just saw this on my friend Brad Feld's blog: NewsGator for Windows Mobile Beta Available, and decided to give it a try.

To be honest, I am not too sure that I want to be hooked to my Cingular 8125 much more than I already am, but I might like to check a few feeds every now and then.

You can download the program through a Windows EXE file that installs a .cab on your device, or you can download the .cab directly on your phone. A few remarks about the (beta) product:

• We need a bit more information as to which platform/device should be using the PPC or the smartphone version. I tried both on my phone and they both work, even though the Smartphone version seems to have more options.
• It is great that the Mobile version synchronizes with the NewsGator back-end, like FeedBurner and NetNewsWire. However, I don't want to read my 300+ feeds on that device and I would like to be able to select the subset of feeds or folders that I want to download. NewsGator provides the notion of "Location" that would allow me to do so, but it can only be changed on a per feed basis - which is very cumbersome. I would either want to set the Location per folder or/and on a bunch of feeds at the same time.
• The user experience and workflow need to be improved, especially when it comes to navigation. It is mandatory to use the phone stylet to navigate back to the global feed view once a given feed has been read. I know that it is challenging to build a "one size fits all" navigation when phones and PDAs running Windows Mobile are different, but it would be nice to take advantage of the keyboard more than today. For example, I should be able to open a folder containing feeds with the <CR> or the main navigation key.
• I am not clear whether feeds refresh automatically on a given timer, or if I have to force a synchronization every now and then. I would set that timer to 30 mins by default.
• A bit of user documentation would be nice, since I don't know what the ""Clip Post" function does (for example).
• A few additional options, such as "No Beep" when opening a feed would be nice.
• Removing the program in "Removing Programs" actually does not remove it. Which means that after a re-installation, you end up with two instances of the program and I have not found how to fix that.

Don't get me wrong though, it is a good first step and without these navigation glitches, that product is going to be very useful. I just hope that it will be priced more sensibly than the previous Mobile HTML reader that was bundled with a lot of other things, which made it too expensive given the functionality.

Tag: newgator, mobile

EBay partners with Kaboodle to launch collectibles bookmarking site

Kaboodle  and eBay will launch on Monday, at eBay Live 2006, a new collectibles web site, powered by Kaboodle. Essentially eBay users will have the opportunity to leverage Kaboodle features to promote their collection, interact with the community through comments, etc. You will hear more about this new site from the eBay side as their marketing machine kicks in to promote it.

Mike Arrington got a preview of the new site from Kaboodle Manish Chandra and eBay’s GM of Collectibles Laurence Toney, and just blogged about it on TechCrunch.

I will also mention the site during my panel at the eBay Developers Conference, as an example of how social tools can be used by eBay, over and above the blogs and wikis they have already announced.

Congrats to Manish and the Kaboodle team for developing this key relationship, since collectibles is one of the most active category for eBay. And this is one of the first “Web 1.0 partners with Web 2.0” relationship.

Additional coverage of the news:

• Elinor Mills, CNET: eBay, Kaboodle collaborate on collecting
• The TechMeme thread is here.
• Gary Price’s comments are here. He points to issues of ambiguity with tags being used on collectibles that will be worked upon.
• Pete Cashmore’s comments are here.

Tags: kaboodle, ebay, mycollectibles

Disclosure: Kaboodle is one of my investments.

Social Innovation Conversations: Reinventing the world together - one conversation at a time

This tag line could very well be related to "An Inconvenient Truth", Al Gore’s thought provoking movie that I recommend everyone to go watch, and ponder upon. But it is actually the tag line of the podcasting channel that the Stanford Center for Social Innovation is launching tonight on Doug Kaye’s Conversations Network: Social Innovation Conversations.

The Center, which is part of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, seeks to build a community of people actively engaged in social innovation, and strengthen the capacity of individuals and organizations to develop innovative solutions to social problems for a more just, sustainable and healthy world. It is part of the curriculum of the Standford MBA program, and does research work on organizational aspects of non-profits.

The purpose of “Social Innovation Conversations” is to be a collaborative online platform for experts, community leaders, and scholars to share their knowledge across sectors for multi-disciplinary learning. The Center will offer conferences, faculty lectures, speaker events and expert interviews. In addition, leading professional and other academic institutions will be invited to contribute content to the channel to raise public awareness about the grand challenges of the world.

Topics covered by the channel include: Corporate Citizenship, Philanthropy, Responsible Investing, Social Entrepreneurship, Sustainability, International Development and Disaster Relief.

Not only is it a very interesting program, it is also something close to my heart since the founding Producer for the channel, and Program and Marketing Manager of the Center, is none other than my beloved wife, Bernadette. So here goes for the family plug .

Tag: social+innovation+conversations

Wikio opens its door to 5,000 beta users

Not to be mixed up with Wikia, Jimmy Wales’ new company, Wikio is the new startup of another Internet entrepreneur, Pierre Chappaz. Pierre is famous in France and Europe for having founded and developed Kelkoo – a European shopping comparison engine – to a half-billion USD exit to Yahoo a couple of years ago. After taking a year off, Pierre joined Index Ventures (the new star VC firm in Europe) as an EIR, and started Wikio – which has now a dozen developers and editors.

What is Wikio ? Topix.net meets Digg meets Memeorandum with a zest of Wink – sort of. And all in French – for now. The private beta-site just opened last night to 5,000 members of the “Francosphere”, but has an ambition to launch throughout Europe. No decision has been made regarding a US version according to Pierre, who has bootstrapped the development to date. Like so many consumer Internet plays, the idea of Wikio came about because existing tools: Google News, Technorati, etc. did not provide homogeneous search across blogs and traditional news, offering correlation between stories and the ability for users to comment and contribute.

Wikio today aggregates stories from 10,000 sources (in French), eventually growing to 50,000 across European languages. Blogs and traditional news outlets are manually selected, reviewed and classified by a team of editors based on quality and content. Upon reception of a story, the system is extracting semantic elements that will be used to correlate stories automatically, as well as generate topical tags. At least a portion of the tags are organized in a comprehensive taxonomy – not clear how this will scale, but the blend of folksonomy/taxonomy seems to work well.

The user interface provides a powerful navigation: top categories (Economy, Business, Technology, etc.), tags, most recent, most relevant to a topic and most popular. The popularity comes from a Digg-like voting system that allows readers to vote for a given story. Searching for a given keyword either delivers a straight keyword search or if the keyword matches an existing category or tag, displays the “landing page” for that keyword. In the latter case, it is also possible to restrict the scope of a search to a level of the taxonomy.

Beyond voting, users can comment on a story as well as contribute one through a standard blog-like interface.

I have to play more with it, but I find the service full of good ideas – bringing the strength of many services I use every day in a single one.

There are questions about how different Wikio is from Google News, Technorati, Digg, Wink, etc. Here are a few thoughts:

• First, as I just wrote, it integrates feautures from all the above, making it more powerful.
• Second, and this is more a business issue, Wikio might well decide to remain in Europe and cater to local language requirements that are traditionally not always well served by US companies.
• Third, Wikio is an interesting mix of editorial selection, user generated voting and content, on top of a unique blend between taxonomies and folksonomies.

You can register for access to the beta site here, and read more about the service on the Wikio blog. And if you really want to take a look, leave a comment, I am sure that Pierre will arrange a few more beta accesses.

Almost forgot: I have no financial interest in Wikio, but I am delighted to write about a French startup for once.

More:

• Pictures (clicking on them will blow them up): the first one shows the wikio home page, the second shows Web 2.0 related topics, and the third shows the publication interface.
• And of course, TechCrunch has an extensive review – en francais dans le texte :-)
• Actually, Ouriel has also pointed me to the English version of his post (thanks).

Tags: wikio

Edgeio just opened its doors and announced its Angel financing

One of the most exciting and scary moments for a startup is the moment it ships its product/service for the very first time “for real” – without any password, limitation, etc. It is often the result of months of effort by a dedicated team, and gets you to deal with a new constituency: users. Tonight is Edgeio’s turn, and this is indeed an exciting moment.

As Om Malik wrote, Edgeio has received a lot of coverage already and therefore I won’t get too much into a lot of detail of the functionality: Edgeio extracts listings (classifieds, jobs, etc.) made available via RSS feeds, and tagged “listing”. Once a listing has been taken into account, the publisher can add metadata such as the main category under which the item should appear, its price and additional tags. Users can search the marketplace, or use tags and location as filters. There is quite a detailed FAQ here. Here is the item I just posted on my blog listed in Edgeio, and check the Edgeio widget on the right side of my blog.

I became aware of Edgeio months ago upon reconnecting with Keith Teare (who I had met years ago), and meeting Mike Arrington as he started TechCrunch. The concept of edge aggregation of semi-structured data was clearly the next logical step in pushing RSS beyond text syndication, hence the appeal of the Edgeio solution.

Disclosure: I was lucky (and grateful) that Keith and Mike asked me to get involved in the company as a (paid) advisor about six months ago. More recently, I also invested in the $1.5M angel round that was just announced.

A lot has been said about Edgeio, and a number of questions and suggestions will be addressed by the team in the coming weeks – and there are still a lot of interesting features coming up. In the meantime, take a look at the service and send us your feedback.

A bonus: here is the end of the IM chat we had with the team just after opening the site. Congratulations again to you guys.

More:

• Keith Teare announces the launch
• Fred Oliviera, who designed the Edgeio UI, chimes in
• If you are interesting in keeping track of Edgeio’s development, the blog is here
• The TechCrunch review is here, written independently by Nik Cubrilovic

Tags: edgeio

Blogon: Eurekster launches swickis - configurable community-influenced search

If you check my blog, you will see a new search box and tag cloud on the right hand side. It is a swicki powered by Eurekster, a new product which has just been launched at Blogon 2005 – and yes, it is in beta.

What is a swicki ? It is a community-powered focused search. Like Rollyo, one has the ability to create a search engine only using only a specified set of sources. You can also specify a set of keywords describing your interest/business, which are in turn used in a tag cloud.

I have created an Early Stage Venture Capital swicki, including all the VC blogs in my blogroll as sources. And my keywords are the tags displayed on the back of my new business (tag)card, describing what I am interested in. The initial tag set is augmented by the search terms submitted to the engine.

Whilst the current implementation is sort of one way (I select the sources and the keywords), the tool will be eventually enhanced to integrate feedback from the community to influence the results.

You can find out more about swickis on this FAQ page.

PS: The swicki seems to only search my site… for now. It turns out that I made an error when setting up the swiki, misunderstanding that web searches were restricted to the URLs I selected and that I had to include these to get the intended result. The explanation came in an e-mail from the VP of Engineering of Eurekster who also explained that the search engine was changing the ranking of results based on user clicks, electing to promote the posts that are clicked upon to a higher position.

Thanks for the note, Julian!

Tag: blogon

Yahoo releases an integrated blog search - sort of

Yahoo’s release of its own blog search was expected to follow Google’s, and it is now up and running. Kinda.

Yahoo has made the choice to differentiate itself by trying to bring “blogs to the masses”, essentially mixing blog search results with news articles. The concept, which is interesting, is to make people aware of these additional content sources by displaying them as a right side bar. In the enclosed example, a search on “Yahoo Search Blog” brings results from both sources.

I see two issues with the current implementation: 1) the “blog search only” option is not directly available, you have to click on “More Blog Results” in the blog results window and then you have to change the keyword part of the URL manually to search for a new term, and 2) the depth of the index seems fairly limited.

Trying an ego search on my name just leads to a couple of dozens results, against hundreds with other search engines. On the positive side, the integration of Flickr pictures is cool. However this is a feature Technorati has had for over a year.

So all in all, whilst I buy the interest of mixing both sources, I don’t understand why Yahoo decided to launch with a sub-par product, especially given the excellent podcast search they launched… yesterday. Jeremy is rationalizing this on the basis of providing something different, but this integration should be offered as a plus, not an alternative to providing solid blog search.

More:

• The official announcement on the Yahoo Search Blog
• Om also thinks that the release is too little too soon
• Search Engine Watch thinks that “Yahoo's blending of news and blog sources is a nice way to get perspectives on current events from both professional and amateur sources”
• Niall Kennedy has a detailed first look 

 

Yahoo launches a free podcast service

I was at the TechCrunch HQ tonight (see their post here) and learnt about the latest embargo expiring at 9PM PT tonight: Yahoo was about to release a free open podcast search and directory service, which will be available on podcasts.yahoo.com once the URL resolves (hint: if you were using UltraDNS, it would after a few minutes :-). The announcement has come by way of  an exclusive podcast interview of Geoff Ralston, Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer, just released by PodTech.net’s John Furrier.

Since the directory is was not yet available, the only thing that can be done is read through the transcript of the interview. Besides offering functionality similar to iTunes 4.9 in an “open world” of multiple devices (discover, subscribe, deliver,…), Yahoo has reportedly taken the bold step to integrate podcasts throughout their properties:

[…] We think that podcasts should show up where it makes sense on Yahoo. They will be integrated across Yahoo. Right now we’ve done an interesting integration into the Yahoo Music engine where you can have the same kind of experience on the web directly on the Music engine, or you can download it to your device right there. You’ll start to find podcasts showing up throughout Yahoo if it makes sense like in Yahoo News. There (Yahoo News) you have blogs, so why wouldn’t you have podcasts? Take Yahoo movies, for example, there is already some great podcast out there like Ebert and Ropet and others by a bunch of guys just talking about movies. Why shouldn’t those be findable by Yahoo Movies? And, if you’re interested in a particular set of podcasts, we think there ought to be a personalized experience for you. So when you go to Yahoo Movies, and when we know that it’s you, we should show you the podcasts that you’re interested in.

It is interesting to note that Yahoo decided to release this just a few days after the Web 2.0 conference, maybe to make sure that there is no interference around the buzz that this will no doubt generate. Let me guess the headlines: “After Apple, Yahoo brings podcasting to the masses”, “Yahoo does not get podcasting”, “Bye bye Odeo”. How do I know ? Because this is what we have had every time a major actors launches a Web 2.0 functionality: praise, disgust, doom for at least one Web 2.0 company if not all of them.

I find quite cool that Yahoo reached out to the podcasting community by doing a podcast announcement. Bravo to John Furrier for pulling this one off.

Update: the site is now available, and the first thing that I see missing is an "Import OPML" functionality that would allow me to load up my subscriptions (from Odeo in my case).

Searching for one of my favorite shows "For Immediate Release" leads to a result page listing two feeds and a few shows. Clicking on the feed with the largest number of podcasts leads to this feed page. From there, it is possible to download or listen to individual shows, leave a rating or a review and tag the feed. Reviews are manually  moderated, so they don't appear immediately.

Subscribing to a feed gives the choice of using iTunes or the Yahoo Music Engine, which has been modified to deal with podcasts. This in turn will take care of the automatic downloading of shows and synchronization with a portable device.

The podcast directory also includes instructions to publish shows, but this does not seem to include any automation of the process - yet. This actually shows how challenging the process of publishing a podcast is without tools.

And since Yahoo is about to bring podcasts to the mass market, they also tell you about "what the heck is a podcast"? Feeds and shows can be searched through categories, tags or keywords.

Besides the lack of import functionality, this sounds pretty complete to me. The integration of podcasts throughout Yahoo is really what I find most notable.

The Yahoo Search Blog adds some interesting data points:

Our web-based player makes it simple and painless to listen right through your web browser. An accelerated playback feature (IE only) lets you "scan" a program at 2x speed to get the gist of it faster. You can use Yahoo! Podcasts with aggregators like iPodder (thanks to Andrew Grumet), with desktop media players like the Yahoo! Music Engine (the integration is beautiful!), iTunes, and with the latest version of iPodder, the Windows Media Player and even Winamp. Or, you can download the shows you want to any mp3 player, such as the iPod, iRiver, Dell DJ, Creative Zen, etc.

But wait, there's more ahead… We're already working on personalized podcast recommendations and friendly, easy-to-use tools so that anyone can create and publish a podcast or audio blog and share it with friends, family, coworkers, and the World Wide Web.

 

More:

• AP: Yahoo tunes into podcasting craze

Web 2.0: Jason Shellen demonstrates the Google Reader

Google Reader is a web-based  RSS aggregator, with lots of Ajax UI components, offering integrated access to BlogSearch. I have uploaded my OPML file, and it is apparently busy loading up my 220+ feeds (they have not shown yet).

I have uploaded my feed manually in order to check out the interface. Cute. I like the fact that you can navigate posts through keyboard commands.

Using the Search functionality, you can get a list of feeds/posts that you can subscribe to -  optionally adding labels (= tags, a term they want to get rid of). These "labels" actually allow you to categorize your feeds. I'll ask Jason whether these are personal or they can be shared, like Rojo's Jason confirmed to me that they were personal, but they were thinking about the shared model.

Like Bloglines, the display of pictures does not respect placement statements (I always put mine on the right side of posts, and they appear on the left).

Interestingly items can be displayed by date, or relevance. Not sure what the latter means. The relevance is based on an analysis of your blogroll, and surfaces posts that relate to your areas of interest (this is reportedly work in progress).

Will add more thoughts once my feeds have been uploaded. Still nothing after 30 minutes.

Bye bye Bloglines ? Not exactly yet, since customary speed of Google mainstream products is not there yet, but scaling is something that these guys do well. But Bloglines has had its issues very recently.

Mark Fletcher is on another panel and shares that Bloglines has doubled its user base in six months, and tripled the number of blogs covered, sucking in 2.8M posts yesterday. He explains that the architecture they had originally built did not scale to these kinds of numbers, and sort of hints that they are re-architecting - which explains why no new functionality has been seen for a while now.

Congrats to Jason and team (but please, get me my feeds).

More:

•    Official announcement from the Google blog: Feed the world

Tag: web2con

Web 2.0: Jeremy Allaire unveils the Brightcove service

Jeremy Allaire is officially launching Brightcove’s services at Web 2.0: distribution services for content producers, consumer services to search and access content, and monetization services (Advertising, Premium Content, Syndication).

The service will launch in the coming weeks, through a controlled beta process.

Brightcove will offer a rich application, developed in Flash (why am I not surprised ?) for maximum reach, allowing content owners to assemble, package and deliver media for target audiences. The packaging involves adding metadata that will be used by search engines and end users: title, producer, genre, etc. A piece of packaged media can include videos, photos, music, animations, etc. Different quality and size of videos are supported.

Brightcove allows content owners to create white labeled players that will include the publisher’s brand, choice of functionality, and  specific advertising. The player can then be integrated in any  container through a piece of HTML code, and play the content that has been packaged through the service. This is very similar to what client Userplane offers to 8,000+ communities in the real-time communication space.

This NY Times piece contains an interview from Jeremy, who clearly has ambitious goals:

As with his earlier ventures, Mr. Allaire intends to shake up an industry - this time, the world of television - by allowing all types of video producers, from media giants to anyone who has a camcorder, put their work on the Internet and make money if anyone watches it.

Tag: web2con

Web 2.0 Launchpad: ZVents - local and events search

ZVents just presented during the Launch Pad of  the Web 2.0 Conference. Zvents is a local and event search startup that extracts and aggregates events information from unstructured and semi-structured sources. They then offer a simple What/Where/When search interface allowing users to enter queries like “jazz music”,”san francisco, ca”,”tonight”. Results are displayed as a list, a Google maps mashup or a calendar.

Features of the beta version look pretty solid, and there are some coolio ones like the ability to embed scheduling information directly on a blog – which I have not managed to get working yet  (Ethan, the CEO of Zvents, explained how to do this).

Zvents also offers a set of web services, the expected social networking functionality, etc. What I like about it ? Like Trulia, it provides instant gratification.

Tag: web2con

The 24 Hour Laundry has closed, and is replaced by Ning

Remember the story of the stealth startup that sucked ? Well, it is now out of stealth mode, and  has officially launched as Ning. From their FAQ:

What is Ning?

Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for people to build and run social applications. Social "apps" are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people.

Our goal with Ning is to see what happens when you open things up and make it easy to create, share, and discover new social apps. These might include for any city, your own take on Craigslist...for any passion, your own take on Match.com...for any interest, your own take on Zagat...for any event, your own take on Flickr...for any school, your own take on the Facebook...for any topic, your own take on del.icio.us...for any mammal, your own take on Hot or Not or Kitten War.

You choose the app, decide for whom it's most relevant, create the categories, define the features, choose the language - or just clone an app that's already up and running on Ning - and be on your way.

So after being offered a large number of social media applications, we are now into the meta-framework to build social media applications. The notion is interesting:  as we have come to expect that any consumer application will include some element of social networking, collaborative filtering, tagging, etc., Ning has the first shot at claiming platform status in the social phenomena by offering building consistent building blocks (though wikis could probably claim anteriority). The list of applications is a bit limited for now, but there are certainly a number of interesting ideas.

I have asked for a developer account, and presumably I will grok more on the service when I get it. Fred over at TechCrunch thinks that it is potentially significant, and as has been in the past when users have been turned into developers.

However, having used over the years Lotus Notes, Groove, and having built the equivalent for the financial markets (now called Reuters 3000 Xtra), these kinds of platforms are only as good and interesting as the best applications that have been developed using their framework.

I guess that we can expect a catalog of great applications that will show the power of the platform, and allow users/developers to copy code, tweak and deploy. This one looks a bit similar to wondir for example.

There is actually an interesting knock-on effect here: web 2.0 applications just got potentially even cheaper/easier to develop.

Congratulations to “Mobile Monday” Mike and Diego for working hard with the rest of the team to deliver this interesting (meta) application/platform/framework.

Lots of new good from Buzznet

Quite a buzz today around the official launch of Buzznet and Flickr photo printing powered by our friends from Qoop, even if the functionality has been available to Buzzneters for at least a month (press release here). Posters are a particular favorite of mine, especially for $10 a piece (plus tax & shipping).

I thought that this was a good opportunity to summarize some of the features Buzznet has added over the same period.

So, have been added:

• Journals, so that you can publish your thoughts and personal diaries alongside your photos. And links to pictures can be added to text posts with just a few clicks. New journal posts are displayed on your Buzznet home page.
• A new search interface: keyword search and a powerful people search. The keyword search is also integrated in your home page (below your list of galleries).
• Presence: you can now see who in your friends list in online.
• QuickEdit of galleries has been enhanced to batch edit all data related to a number of pictures in one go.

Many more functionality to come in the next few weeks, as well as the much expected overhaul of the back-end server infrastructure.

And if you are in LA on Sept 1st (tonight), don't miss the Buzznet Party (the first 300 Buzzneters showing up will get a free admission).

Disclosure: I am a shareholder and consultant to Buzznet Inc.

Introducing the SDForum Search SIG

We're back! After the smashing (let's keep it modest) success of Vertical Leap, the SDForum Vertical Search conference, Dave McClure and yours truly have agreed to co-chair the SDForum Search SIG, and we are excited to announce the first event - taking place on Sept 14th on the Yahoo campus in Sunnyvale: "Audio Search : Selling Picks & Shovels at the Podcast Gold Rush". If you don't understand Dave's English, it means that we'll talk about Podcasting Search and Directories.

For our readers outside of Silicon Valley, the SDForum is a key local non-profit that is organizing a large number of events around different technologies, and a SIG (for Special Interest Group) focuses on a given technology or market. The Search SIG is all about, well, Search... and its tag line will be (until we find something more catchy) “the Search for Search".

The purpose of the Search SIG is to offer a communication and collaboration platform to the Search ecosystem: search engines, marketers/advertisers, users and developers. Through a series of monthly events, the SIG will cover a large diversity of topics: from the latest developments in search to the needs of brands and advertisers, through the issues and key learnings of starting, funding, building, and exiting a search company.

We plan to use different formats for the SIG as well: fireside chats with key executives of the ecosystem, panels, presentations + Q&As, unconference - i.e the panel is the audience, etc. Once thing we request, demand, beg for, is the participation of the audience.

We also want to give companies the opportunity to introduce themselves, launch their products, in short segments of 5 to 15 minutes max. And at the end of each session, anybody having an announcement to make will be able to do so.

The Search SIG will take place at a few locations in Silicon Valley, and rotate amongst them, most likely on a quarterly basis.

We are set for the first two sessions, September and October (Mobile Search - a joint event with our friends of Mobile Monday) , beyond that we are welcoming your input.

• Fireside chat with a search engine Founder
• Unconference format + holiday bash (kind of what we have in mind for December)
• Search and the law of very large numbers - a look at the architecture of a search engine

So let us know what you think, topics you would like to see covered, and if you want to use the Search SIG as a launch pad for your Search startup, get in touch with us.

We can be reached through searchsig [at] gmail [dot] com.

Tag: SearchSIG

Just tested Google Talk: neat, still a bit basic, more open and as clear as Skype...

which is not surprising since they are reportedly using the same technology from Global IP Sound.

As you can see, the Windows client is pretty basic, but functional. It is necessary to have a gmail account to sign up for the service – by invitation it sounds like. I just tried a voice call with my friend Dave, and was quite impressed by the sound quality. And since it picks up default devices, it is very easy to connect. The online help concerning the service is here, quite comprehensive for something that has just been released.

The client also acts as a Gmail notifier, which displays rather large popup messages when a new email arrives. This can be turned off by users who like me, pop their email out of Gmail.

As pointed out by Om and Niall, it is possible to connect other IM clients to the service through a Jabber/XMPP interface. This is the list of compatible clients, which can also be found here:

The fact that they are using XMPP is notable since the non-interoperability of IM services has historically been a big pain in the b..t. I wonder if they will get into offering access to “the others” through back-end plugins, or if Trillian will be the stop-gap solution (which is a great stop-gap, even for the $25). And the reported interoperability "under way" with SIP signaling and the Gizmo Project is also worth noting.

As rumors that Skype’s growth is stalling develop, Google jumping in with both feet with a solution that looks more standard is not without consequence. Update: Skype just released a suite of IM APIs, so Google can only claim more standard, not more open - for now.

Competition is always good… even for making free phone calls. And thanks to my friend Adam, the co-founder of Truveo, for being the first one to send me an invite.

Tag: googletalk

More:

• SiliconBeat just published a long piece, including interviews from Googlers.
• Russ tells us more about Jabber and XMPP
• TechCrunch's Mike Arrington points us to the Wikipedia entry of Google Talk
• Dave McClure calls Skype "Dead Meat"
• SkypeJournal provides a detailed account of the functionality: available and missing ones
• Off topic, but the NYTimes has a "Google Baaaddd" article that is worth a read - from darlings to borgs - in one year

 

Introducing the Glendor Jobs Search Showcase

I have done tens and tens of product launches in my 15+ years in the software industry, but they always look the same: even with a lot of planning, you end up spending the last night polishing the final details, and sending bunch of emails to your poor team members who’d like nothing but relaxing a bit after having been under pressure for a long time. And the excitement of unveiling something that you have been working on for months or years is (thankfully) always there.

It is therefore my great pleasure to announce the official launch of the Glendor job showcase, developed by one of my clients, Glenbrook Networks. Glenbrook was founded in 2001 with the objective to deliver a next generation search technology, one that would enable the extraction of information in a given vertical market with a high degree of precision. The company has developed over the past four years a unique technology platform that automatically extracts unstructured data from Internet sources (company web sites, online publications, semi-structured feeds,…) and turns them into structured facts that can be aggregated and stored in a database. Unlike standard search engines, theirs are capable of providing precise answers to complex business or temporal queries. The business of the company is currently to license its products and data services to search engines and large information providers, and will include at some point the development of its own vertical search engine(s) in specific markets.

One of the common issues one deals with in the search and information extraction space is that you need to demonstrate, at some scale, the capabilities of your product. It is even worse when you have a platform that can be equally be used in a number of verticals. That’s why we have decided a couple of months ago to develop a vertical search engine showcase – in the jobs market. Why a showcase, and not a beta? Because it does not intend to cover hundreds of thousands of companies, and millions of listings – just enough to prove that the technology delivers on its claim to fame: automatically extracting job listings from “the long tail”, which in the jobs market refers to individual company web sites and local classifieds sites. So the initial scope of the showcase is to extract jobs from hundreds of Bay Area company web sites, local jobs from one major board, and eventually a classifieds site.

Why the jobs vertical market – which is already well served by talented teams ? Because extracting listings from company web sites exercises all aspects of our technology to produce quality, structured results: surface and dynamic web crawling, layout recognition, natural language processing,... And we believe that the “deep web”, guesstimated at 500B+ documents a few years ago, is where the action is going to be: extracting information available behind dynamic forms and DHTML rendering, and delivering high quality results. And this deep web crawling requirement can be found in local search, travel search, fraud detection, etc. – and is a tough nut to crack automatically, mixing AI and search algorithms.

We’ve also strived to build this showcase as a (modest) Web 2.0 application: we deliver search results through RSS, and we map job listings onto Google Maps. Yep, a first in the jobs listings space – for a few days or weeks, now that the API has been released we expect that most of the players in the space will add that cool functionality (our engineers built this application without the API). And we have a couple of other things up our sleeves that we will be rolling out in the coming weeks.

So enough said: have a go at the jobs showcase, make sure to try the mapping of jobs (and play with the zoom), do let us know if you find any issues, and give us your feedback. We also have a blog that will talk about the showcase and the typical challenges one is facing in developing a vertical search engine. It will also relay interesting news related to the development of the vertical search industry - which is booming, if you consider that Vertical Leap gathered almost 300 people for its first edition last week.

You can also find some information about Glenbrook's technology and products. Feel free to get in touch to find out more about the showcase, or what we can do to help.

And congratulations to the Glenbrook team for this great work.

Update: Glenbrook Networks, and its Deep Web trawling technology, have been featured in the San Jose Mercury News. Read about it here.

Stealth Start-Ups Suck ? Yeah, right.

I have genuine respect for Mark Fletcher and what he has accomplished with ONEList and Bloglines, and therefore consider that he has credibility when writing about entrepreneurship. His ETech presentation on the topic was actually very practical and interesting. That's why I was surprised with  the title and the content of his post: Stealth Start-Ups Suck. Because in most startup cases, I believe in the contrary.

Mark contends:

[...] Here's the thing, stealth mode for a web start-up is the kiss of death.

Stealth mode is when a company is operating in secret for some length of time before launching their product or service. In many industries, creating a new product or service takes significant time and effort. During this time, being in stealth mode may make a lot of sense. But creating a new web service is not rocket science and does not take a lot of time or money. My rule of thumb is that it should take no more than 3 months to go from conception to launch of a new web service. And that's being generous. I'm speaking from experience here. I developed the first version of ONElist over a period of 3 months, and that was while working a full-time job. I developed the first version of Bloglines in  3 months. By myself. It can be done. And I suck at it! Just ask all the engineers who have had to deal with my code.

Why go fast? Many reasons:

• First mover advantage is important.
• There is no such thing as a unique idea. I guarantee that someone else has already thought of your wonderful web service, and is probably way ahead of you. Get over yourself.
• It forces you to focus on the key functionality of the site.
• Being perfect at launch is an impossible (and unnecessary and even probably detrimental) goal, so don't bother trying to achieve it. Ship early, ship often.
• The sooner you get something out there, the sooner you'll start getting feedback from users.

[...]

Why is this post a dangerous generalization ? Because this "advice" only applies to certain types of startups, in certain markets/features, led by certain teams. Mark's "3 months to build" rule does not work with companies having to develop "deep IP" algorithms and complex implementations.

I fully agree that involving users as early as possible in the development process is an absolute must, but doing it too early can also be "the kiss of death". There are so many applications, services, cool web sites out there - crying for our eyeballs and attention - that launching something in front of users that is half baked, limited or too unstable might turn them off for a while, or for good. And will certainly not generate the positive buzz that is required for viral marketing to work.

The second argument for laying low is that your ideas might not be unique, but your overall product approach, and implementation, might be - for a period of time. Since very early stage startups generally don't have a lot of development "manpower", coming out of the closet too early might make it very easy for competitors to replicate some of these (good) ideas.

There might cases where Mark's suggestion is applicable, but I don't see them as being majority. And then I would ask whether these companies are the ones that are "built to flip".

Update: Paul Kedrosky also disagrees.

I have been browsing through the Slashdot thread on the topic, and there seems to be a bit of confusion around building 1) a startup in stealth mode and 2) being open and leveraging standards, 3) engaging with customers/users and 4) using a short/iterative production cycle.

I am advocating that not being stealth until the product is in some form of alpha or pre-alpha form is only applicable to a portion of the startups out there. These might be open source (Monty Widenius announced his intention to build an o/s SQL database to gather requirements, and co-development support), category creators or first movers (like Bloglines as a Web-based RSS readers "for the masses"), etc. Feel free to suggest any other "non stealth mode" candidate.

But I am totally for 2), 3), and 4) as characteristics of early stage startups.

Update: Just came across the account from SiliconBeat on the whole 24 Hour Laundry "saga". Be sure to check the comment left by Gina Bianchini, the CEO of 24HL.

And let's leave them in (stealth) peace.

Yahoo!360 is out of the oven

And my first impression is that Y!360 is not bad - at all, very MSN Spaces like, with a cool integration of Yahoo services. A bit challenging to setup though, I have to agree with Dave Winer on this one.

One question now: who is this service targetting, and who is planning to use it ? Is it like MSN Spaces, i.e getting Yahoo and Yahoo SBC users into blogging ? Deploying an alternative service to Blogger (which given the instability of the service nowadays might be feasible) ? Need feed syndication, trackbacks, pings, stats, referral lists, etc. though. Any timeframe for that ?

Here is my 360 home page. And my initial rant feedback on the service, cross-posted from my 360 blog:

It is a bit overwhelming to setup all the elements of the Y!360 account, as I do consider myself quite familiar with all these blogging, SNs, photoblogging capabilities.

  A few things:
- WHY ON EARTH CAN'T I ENTER MORE THAN TWO LINES IN MY PROFILE ? At least tell me how much words or characters I can enter, as opposed to telling me that my text is too long.
- Lots of fields are displayed even if they are empty (like locations for current jobs).
- The caption of pictures should be displayed instead of the filename.
- I want to put links in my profile to point to the companies I worked for, etc.
- Navigation is sometimes confusing because you keep on switching between edit mode and view mode.
- If I put HTML links into apost, I want these to be usable in the "My Page" syndicated view.
- Will be great to import OPML files as opposed to re-enter the blogroll.
- It would be great to be able to do "bulk invites" in the list of people who are already on the service, but I suppose that this would lead to abuse.
- The multi-layered privacy/visibility is great, but I am wondering whether it is bit too complex to grasp for "casual" users.
- I tried to edit this post in HTML (clicking "View HTML Source") and my CPU went 100% for 3 minutes, until I turned the option off. I am using Firefox. Actually this happens in regular Edit Mode as well.
- The integration of multiple Yahoo services is great, but their settings should eventually be accessible through the 360 "portal", at least the basic ones. The navigation from 360 into another service back to 360 needs to be figured out.
- The People search needs to include filters like "people who have joined since you last logged in", like LinkedIn basically.
- The "Beta Feedback" should be implemented as a forum so that we can see what others report, and get information about fixes and changes. I am particularly annoyed that I got an automatic message stating that my feedback would *not* be answered to.

Oh, and it is great that you do not get any email confirming the sign-up of people you have invited. LinkedIn should do the same :-).

Update: And as usual Chris Allen is doing a fantastic job at testing all the features, and finding quite of a few issues. Hopefully the good Yahoo folks will get to read them.

Some more:
- The blog editing panel is too small. Should have a way to increase its size (at least double).
- The moblogging functionality expects blog posts to be sent from an email address phone_number@carrier_url which is too limiting. The usual email validation + secret keyword should be used instead, or as a complement.
- There is a bug in the search functionality where the 3rd (or nth ?) result page can't be displayed ?
- Boy, I want that Outlook address book import , and I want to see who is already in Y!360.

And finally:

1. Allow me to edit a review I have entered (I know it is Yahoo local)
2. The top message bar at the top of My Page is cute, but I should be able to review previous messages (of the day ?)
3. Is there a blog for 360 support, feedback, announcements ?
4. Figuring out who is inviting you is sometimes very tricky if one does not disclose his/her lastname or email address (See Esther's comment).

I am happy to invite people to the service, but here is the catch: like for LinkedIn, we need to have met in the "real world" for me to invite you. Send me an email or leave a comment below if you are interested.

Back to work now. Spent about two four hours on this thing today.

Hey, it sounds like you can get emoticons in TypePad by copying them from Y!360 and pasting them into your post. Must be a feature of the WYSIWYG control that has been turned off. Cool!  These are simply gifs loaded from the Yahoo web site.

Brightcove: Jeremy Allaire is back in the startup saddle

Jeremy announced it on his blog: he has officially launched Brightcove, a startup aiming at the "democratization of media" and "hoping to help producers and publishers of video take us into the emerging era of Internet Television".

There is a flash narrative on the website, supposedly clarifying the company's strategic intent.  Sort of... Products and services are not specified at this point, but it is apparently about offering an alternate distribution channel for video and tv content, direct-to-consumer. Looking at the management team, it offers a mix of rich media technology and tv content relationships (ATG, Sky TV, etc.).

The company was stealth until now, after being launched last summer. It had been mentioned last December that General Catalyst Partners had seeded the venture. Jeremy has been for some time a technologist in residence at General Catalyst , where like entrepreneurs in residence, he was looking at his next move. Brightcove board directors include General Catalyst's David Orfao, and Accel Partners' Jim Breyer, these two firms having (now officially) invested $5.5M in the company last December.

I was lucky enough to have Jeremy chair an infrastructure panel  at the tech conference I co-produced, RVC SoftEdge. He has great insights and a fine track record, having brought to market ColdFusion, JRun and HomeSite through the Allaire Corporation, a company he co-founded with J.J., his brother (now the CEO of OnFolio, another interesting startup), and sold to Macromedia for $360M.

An interview published today in the Boston Globe confirms the value proposition:  an alternate distribution channel for independant films/producers to access consumers directly, through the rental or purchase of video downloaded to a set-top box or a MediaCenter PC.

Definitely worth putting the company on your radar as it discloses its services, and add this blog to your blogroll.

PS: For an interesting "read" on David Orfao, check out this ITConversation "Memory Lane" podcast.
PPS: Om offers a great analysis regarding Brightcove.

A9 Yellow Pages are out, with pictures - Old concept, cool implementation

Many posts around about A9 releasing an interesting implementation of Yellow Pages functionality. First post I read was Om's, with some comments from Techdirt and Russ, and a full story from CNET. John Battelle then pointed to the story he wrote for Business 2.0.

As Russ mentioned for Spain, French yellow pages have had that feature for a while (here is one of my favorite restaurants in Paris, le Bistrot du Sommelier). The experiment actually started back in 1999, with 7 cities. The company which developed the technology is France-based SNV, which launched the concept back in 1994, and took two years to develop the coverage of Paris. The company was bought by Wanadoo (the ISP arm of France Telecom) in 2000. It then covered Madrid in 2001, and stopped there the European expansion.

So nothing new on the concept, but the implementation is quite nice. Key additions seem to be:

The granularity of picture shots (less than 10 feet from one picture to the next ?).

The fact that you can submit the "Best picture" for a given address. What is not clear to me is how they will sort out potential conflicts, but this idea of involving users in improving the quality of data is interesting.

The ability to add your own picture to an existing business, provided that an existing Amazon user. The moderation of such addition remains to be clarified.

The display of all shops on a street is also pretty cool.

JotSpot: The Application Wiki

Joe Kraus, one of the co-founders of Excite, has unveiled today his new company: JotSpot at the Web 2.0 conference. Joe had joined the blogosphere a couple of months ago, creating a blog focusing on entrepreneurship (and cookies).

He is up there on the podium, claiming that he has not slept for two days… That's what happens when you officially launch your company, and your product (in beta). The company also announced a $5.2M funding by Tier 1 VCs: Redpoint and Mayfield. Geoff Yang (who backed Joe at Excite) and Allen Morgan (also an investor in Tribe.net and Pluck - which announced today the close of its $8.5M series B) have joined the board.

Wikis have been around for a while, and have gained increased visibility in the enterprise, noticeably through the efforts of Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText (someone at the Web 2.0 conference came across him and said "Oh, the wiki man"). According to Joe, wikis have been growing in popularity over the past year (25.000 downloads in May 04, counting the 8 most popular wikis - 6 times more than a year ago).

Bill Gross unveils Snap at Web2.0: Now THAT looks like a next generation search engine

Bill Gross, from the Idealab fame, has presented today his latest creation: Next Generation search engine Snap. In his rapid chatting style, he pleased the attendance of the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco by very quickly demonstrating the key differentiation points of this TRULY AMAZING technology. It was as though suddenly many of those features that we had been wishing for as search engine users had finally been delivered to us, in one fell swoop.

Disclaimer: I have not had time to check the relevancy of results, the breadth of the index, etc. But it really looks cool.

Bill Gross explained that the challenge was to provide more relevant, actionable, results. And whilst the breakthrough brought by the current generation of search engines was to build an index of the accessible web, and use prices and link strength as a way to rank results, more was required.

Microsoft launches MSN Newsbot in the US, powered by Moreover Technologies

As posted by John Battelle in MSFT Newsbot: Take That, Google News, Microsoft has launched its own version of Google News in the US. The press release mentions that Newsbot leverages the crawling and clusterization back-end of Moreover Technologies. The first phase of the beta program was launched in Europe last february.

This is a great achievement for Jim Pitkow and the team. Congratulations!

Disclosure: I am an investor in the company as a former General Partner of RVC.