Ajax Girl

During his keynote conversation with Michael Arrington this afternoon at the TechCrunch40 conference, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will be launching a venture fund called fbFund with Accel and Founders Fund.

The size of the fund will be $10 million with anywhere between $25 to $250 thousand in grants available for each selected startup dedicated to developing Facebook applications. Founders Fund and Accel will get the right of first refusal for the first round of financing of any company in the fund.

Peter Thiel of Founders Fund and Jim Breyer of Accel will be involved in the fund. Josh Koppelman of First Round Capital, founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman, Rajeev Motwani of Google, and Mark Zuckerberg himself will be on fbFund’s board of advisors. Chamath Palihapitiya, VP of Product Marketing and Operations of Facebook, will be handling fbFund internally for Facebook

Zuckerberg’s announcement comes two months after Bay Partners decided to earmark millions of dollars for investment in Facebook applications. Bay Partners’ prospects will certainly be diminished as the result of Facebook’s move to fund applications built on its own platform.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/157843640/

Our live blogging coverage of the Keynote Conversation with Mark Zuckerberg, refresh for updates.

The boss (Michael Arrington) comes on stage to introduce Mark Zuckerberg. The conference space is packed: no matter what your views on Facebook, very few could argue that Zuckerberg has done simply amazing things, particularly for someone still so young.

Huge round of applause as Michael hands over to Zuckerberg.

Michael covers the Facebook story in brief. 4x growth over the last 12 months. Can Facebook sustain the growth?

MZ: it’s not that long since we’ve gone away from colleges. Growth is currently growing at 3% a week.

Feed feature is about 12 months. MA says that it reduces pageviews. MZ: our thinking is that if we give people more controls, they can share more information. As people shared more and more information, Facebook found that it creates a more component experience that brings them back to Facebook more often. Page views and traffic went up 50% within weeks of the launch of the news feed.

MA: there were complaints, what did you learn? MZ: we didn’t communicate the changes properly, Facebook’s fault. The right thing to do was to step back, empower users with more control, and to better explain what they were trying to do.

MA: May was the launch of Facebook platform. First question: what the hell is a social graph!: MZ: a social graph is a model for Facebook, we’re not trying to make new connections, but mirror the real world. On platform, the idea is providing more utilities for users, part of the bigger social graph.

MA: MySpace is focused on shutting out 3rd party apps, Facebook did the direct opposite, was it hard sell to investors and others? MK: by opening up, Facebook allowed others in to build on top of what we had already created. FB already had API’s available 6 months prior, so was already in part open.

MA: when do people expect to hear more on the advertising model with Facebook. MZ: we already have advertising in place, advertisers can already build a presence, that can be targeted. Over the next 3-6 months there will be a lot of innovation, cant talk about it now.

MA: what’s your fav 3rd party app. MZ: too many (laughter), likes the video app, calling it “beautiful.”

MA: problems with platform; apps had massive user adoptions, many with “black hat” activities, the apps process started up so open, and now it’s become less so. How is FB dealing with this. MZ: FB needed to decide whether or not to be open or partner. Decided on the open route. No terms of use, however the way to deal with the negative activity is to build the barriers into the system. It’s not perfect yet and they are still working on it, and they hope to continue working on it for the next 30 year.

MA: people say you are plugging holes as you see them, is this a bad thing? particularly given some have already benefited MZ: one thing FB did was adjust the metrics to be more reflective of activity, moving from registered users to active users.

MA: quick question, should a startup go Facebook only or web. MZ: binary question MA: some startups are only doing Facebook. MZ: the system isn’t the same as the rest of the web. Some apps work better on Facebook, some as stand alone sites. The system wasn’t setup to be one or the other, and FB always saw sites having a non-Facebook presence and FB presence.

MA: Users with RSS feeds, what’s the thinking MZ: In context with Facebook’s history is interesting. “We have a lot of building to do,” using 30 year example again. Empowering people, tagging photos…pushing and pushing to become more and more open, not there yet but the direction FB is heading in.

MA: Pet peeve is the messaging system, doesn’t like having to login to FB to access messages. FB recently open external emails, is this the first step towards a more generally functional open Facebook email system? MZ: started off at one message to a person at a time. Only recently could send more. It’s something FB is working on. Currently FB can prevent a lot of spam, which is a good thing. As FB expands it is looking at products like this, but primarily FB is not an email product.

MA: comment on funding rumors? MZ: we’re not looking to get acquired or go IPO.

MA: you’ve got a lot of small teams in the app creation base, how are you going to support them? MZ: I have something to announce….

MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT: FB wants to make it as easy for app developers to get started. FB Fund, in collaboration with FB investors, will have advisory board, any developers can submit app into $10m fund, grants of between $25,000-$250,000. Grant, not investments

See full details in our post here

Site not up yet but anyone can apply via platform @ facebook.com. About supporting the Facebook ecosystem. Criteria: ones most interesting, innovative. MA: profitable? MZ: innovative and interruptive.

Questions from floor, response from MZ: being open enables people to join in. Platform was about building the base and letting others build.

Q: why are you waiting on more accessable feeds. MZ: we want to offer more, we’re holding back because we don’t have the solution yet.

Q: thinking behind people search. MZ: people can search for anyone on the site, baring privacy settings. Only users in the network can see all details. Gives new users the ability to see who is on FB without disclosing a lot of information.

Q: hypothetically, News Corp buys Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, how would the merge. MZ: it will never happen (laughter).

Q: When can we say Facebook supporting more open formats such as microformats and Open ID. MZ: we’ve done a lot but we a still a small company, just over 300 employees. There are a lot of interesting things happening in that space, however don’t know when it’s going to be, and as a small company we have to prioritize things. Something for the future.

That’s the wrap.

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We’re live blogging each session, adding to the summary of each company direct from the floor of TechCrunch 40. Click Refresh to view.

Cake Financial

Cake Financial is a social investment service that lets people track all their investment portfolios in one place. The service allows individual investors to track and analyze their historical performance up to ten years. Users can also view the real-time portfolios and performances of their friends, family and top investors all without disclosing net worths, shares owned, portfolio sizes, etc.

Online investing service that offers social recommendations, without disclosing personal details. “There is nothing fake about Cake!”.

Homepage provides all the information usually found at the brokerage firm, but provides aggregated data from multiple firms.

Cake calculates annual returns across multiple brokers.

Interesting: you can chart your success against others, friend, associates etc.

Tools also allow you to look at trades other Cake members have made, the idea being that you can see what users with better results are investing in.

You can also see who is investing in a stock, eg: you can see everyone who holds Cisco, and then see what they are buying and selling as well.

DocStoc

Docstoc is an online community and professional network around user generated, professional documents. Users can store their own files or documents from anywhere around the internet. The files can be categorized and shared with various levels of read write accessibility. The documents can be searched by categories or by keywords and then previewed online or downloaded. Search results can be filtered by views, downloads, ratings and comments. Learn more about DocStoc.

Interesting introduction: fake customer testimonials from the audience.

A professional document service, comes with comments, profiles etc…

Docs can be found by keyword search, filters which include community filters, category search.

Documents can be previewed via popup and shared.

Includes registration for blogs as well.

Teach The People

Teach The People is a social network built around online education. The site lets anyone with specific subject knowledge or a useful skill set to share it with the Teach The People communities. Users can create individual profiles and contribute content to topics (computer programming, math or “Bob Marley’s Influence on R&B Music” are a few examples). The site encourages quality content by letting users become community creators and by giving users points for rating, referring friends and answering questions. Community creators help create content and run day-to-day community operations. They can charge other users fees for monthly community access, content views or content downloads. They can also share in site advertising revenues.

Starts with intro and rhetorical questions. About bringing learning to the time poor.

The product brings knowledge and people seeking that knowledge together, with the ability to monetize content.

Users get 5gb of storage space for lectures.

There is also an open questions section..Q&A model.

Teach The People is a “community model not a teaching model.”

CrowdSpirit

CrowdSpirit is a crowdsourcing community built around designing electronic products and staying involved throughout their product life cycle. Users submit ideas for innovative electronic products that the community fine tunes and votes on. The best ideas and their product specifications rise to the top where investors provide financing and development partners make prototypes. Once products have been made they are tested by the community and recommended to retailers. Users involved with product creation can earn a share of the product revenue. Typical products will include MP4 players, DVD players, computer peripherals, headphones, etc.

A Q&A community consultation service for problems and ideas that may be possible. Deeper than say Yahoo Answers, focus is on products and prototypes.

Ponoko

Ponoko is a personal manufacturing platform. On Ponoko members can collaboratively create new products and take them through design and prototyping all the way through to production. Ponoko can manage the full production and delivery process or deliver the parts to the creator.

An online toy creating site, make online and “make it real.”

Users are able to add designs, materials, color etc..

Expert panel: Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Rajeev Motwani, and Yossi Vardi

Ron Conway likes Ponoko. Rajeev likes Cake Financial.

2 minutes ago Jason Calacanis said how wondering the Wifi had become…at it’s been bad ever since, talk about jinxing it.

Yossi Vardi suggests that Cake should also track sexual prowess, to the merriment of the crowd.

Don Dodge likes Cake + Teach the People, asks question to Teach: selling content is a hard ask on the internet, particularly when you don’t know what you’re getting. TtP: they are running background checks on people offering lessons so they can rate the people offering the lessons.

Yossi asked Ron Conway whether he uses Cake (Conway is an investor). Conway says other people handle his money and Yossi asks whether it is his wife. Yossi follows up with “how many of the 162 companies you invest in do you use”…much laughter, Conway says 20%.

Summary: Cake Financial was the strongest idea according to the panel, and correctly so. Ponoko was the most original.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/157814361/

AOL is launching a new collaborative multimedia story telling service called BlueString at TechCrunch 40. The site ,is a Flex application that lets you pull in all your image, video, and audio content from across the web and mix them together into a multimedia slide show presentation. The shows can be embedded, shared, and edited by your friends.

There are dozens of user generated content sites out there for pictures, videos, and music. Running BlueString on top of all these open APIs instead of trying to stay a walled garden on Xdrive was a smart move on AOL’s part. They’ve assured us that they want to maintain an open system, but AOL will certainly benefit from frequent users that will find it easier to store their content on AOL instead of going through third party sites.

AOL will be demoing the product by mixing together some photos and videos of a road trip synced to music. All the content in the show either uploaded directly to the site and served from AOLs Xdrive or pulled from searches on Flickr’s public feed. They plan on incorporating more APIs in the future. Photos can also be auto synced to your account if you download their syncing program. All your saved files are organized in folders, where you can easily drag, drop, and reorder thumbnails of the content in the slide show’s time line. The shows can be synced to music, which fades out while video plays, and supports a few basic transitions between the slides.

When completed, you can share the shows with your friends by emailing them a permalink, embedding it on a site, or giving them write access to add their own content to the show. The site even lets you create a white list of sites your embed can show up on.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/157794806/

We’re live blogging each session, adding to the summary of each company direct from the floor of TechCrunch 40. Click Refresh to view.

Story Blender

Story Blender is an online collaborative video production platform where people can work together to “blend” their content into a new multimedia show. StoryBlend’s online editing tool lets users create videos by “blending” images, sound, text, and video clips. When users have created new video blends they can then share it with their friends and the StoryBlend community.

Session 3 starts. CEO is also the founder of Cyworld.

Online video mixing with friends, nice interface.Multi-level relationship model for contributions, friend of a friend sort of thing. Easy to use video mashing with lots of features

TripIt

TripIt is a travel organizer that helps do-it-yourself travelers manage their travel plans. Travelers manage their travel itinerary with TripIt by forwarding their purchase confirmation emails to the service. TripIt automatically creates master itineraries with travel plans and other critical information like weather, maps and driving directions, and destination information. You can print or access your itinerary from anywhere including online, in print and on their web-enabled mobile devices. They can also share itineraries and travel calendars and collaborate on planning trips with friends.

CEO and Founder is ex-Hotwire, along with most of the team.

TripIt wants to eliminate the vanilla travel folder, bringing the travel itinerary into the 21st century. Travel is an information management business, TripIt is not a booking service.

Users send their plans to plans@tripit.com, compiles online itinerary, a sort of travel plan aggregation.

TripIt supports export to iCal and other platforms, also looking at microformats

Friends can share travel calenders. TripIt believes a multi-functional travel planner with collaborative tools will be a much needed service.

Site is live today, out of beta. I’d like to see the site before I pass judgment, but in theory it’s a great idea.

Flock

Flock is a social web browser we have reported on extensively. With Flock, people can discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites. Flock is offering custom browser modifications as a revenue model. To date, Flock has shipped editions of its browser for Photobucket and Piczo.

Flock feels that the browser has not evolved over time, and that’s a market opportunity for them. So interesting new features, Facebook sidebar was something new to me. Drag and drop functionality has improved a lot since earlier versions.

I’ll be honest, I’ve not be a Flock fan previously, the new version demoed here (release in 2 weeks) really is something more than Firefox with plugins. I’ll be taking another look at Flock soon.

MusicShake

South Korean MusicShake is a online amateur music mixing service. The service lets users create their own professional quality music using various tools. They hope to provide personalized music for ringtones, and personal websites (blogs, profiles). The service is developed and distributed by SilentMusicBand Corp.

Korean company. Started with music and the speaker dancing on stage. Funny start, he danced worse than I do

Speaker asked whether it was a Britney Spears track…music was created by a 9 year old girl in Korea with no experience of real music…just like Britney Spears.

Demo of interface. Seems simple to us, based on mixing music tracks and sound effects. Tracks are recommended by “Nuba,” the robot behind Musicshake.

170,000 music tracks, 1 million by 1 million. Also a model for creators to make music and sell it on the 50/ 50 rev share.

One of the best presentations so far, big round of applause. Fun idea.

8020 Publishing

8020 Publishing is a media company that publishes user generated magazines. They currently have two magazines JPG and the yet-to-launch Everywhere. Members of the 8020 community can contribute and critique the content in the magazines. However, 8020 Publishing still fills normal publishing roles like choosing themes, putting the magazines together and providing the final vote on all published content. The community also gives them a built-in subscription base not to mention loyal online communities.

8020 is aiming to “make magazines better.” JPG Magazine is used as an example.

Launching “Everywhere” Magazine, the “insiders experience”…travel magazine that is submitted by the community.

All submissions are added to the website, best make the magazine. Geographic focused search.

Submissions 300-500 words to make it easy to participate.

Interesting model, you’ll like this if you like JPG Mag.

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Our live blog of the Keynote Speakers: Humble Beginnings Sessions from TechCrunch40.

Sequoia’s Michael Moritz introduces the three guests: Marc Andreessen, David Filo and Chad Hurley.

An amazing lineup: for those old enough to remember Andreessen was the CTO and Co-founder of Netscape, more recently he co-founded while label social networking startup Ning. David Filo was a co-founder of Yahoo, the first great internet company of our age. Chad Hurley is CEO and Co-founder of YouTube…and that story doesn’t need repeating.

Chad Hurley is first. First business was selling trying to sell paintings as a kid..apparently not a huge market in Philly.

David Filo was at Stanford..he selected Stanford due to the connections and possibilites.

Marc was from Wisconsin, middle America. First business was a lemonade stand when he was kindergarten. Distribution method was wrong though, he set up 10 miles out of town Went to U. Illinois, had no idea about business…he lucked out by being able to come to Silicon Valley.

Back to David Filo. Question: what made you leave Stanford with Jerry Yang. DF: when Yahoo started they weren’t thinking of it as a business. 6 months after they started they were still trying to come up with business ideas for new projects…they didn’t consider Yahoo as a business proposition.

DF had an early business relationship with Marc Andreessen and Netscape…Netscape provided data space when Yahoo was moving out of Stanford.

Back to Marc: question: did ppl know what Netscape would turn out to be. MA: it was a crazy idea, no one was doing this stuff in 94. 99% of ideas are crazy and fail as well, no one can say with any degree of confidence what will absolutely work.

Question: were there key things in the first 60 days of Netscape, MA: radical distribution model, the first with free for personal use.

Question to Chad Hurley: how long did it take to get YouTube up and running, CH: we sat down and thought out the problem, within a couple of months we had a working model. Within 12 months we’d closed funding to grow. Scaling was the hardest part, didn’t expect YouTube to grow like it did.

Q to David Filo: on growth, did it surprise you. DF: as said before we didn’t expect to make a business out of Yahoo, so yes it was surprising.

David Filo is asked what he does at Filo has he’s not seen at industry events that often. Broad laughter. DF says he covers data centers, growth etc..

Marc Andressen Q: what is it like being in top roles. MA: I’m not the CEO for a reason, I’m the chairman (laughter). MA talks about the stress and work involved with running a company. David Filo added that as soon as they realized that Yahoo was going to take off they hired a CEO. Chad Hurley takes running YouTube as being a challenge.

Q to Marc Andressen: what would he do differently, MA: things are different now (makes some jokes about Red Herring), advice is to not take too many people with you from company to company, it’s healthy bringing in new people.

Q to Chad Hurley: how did you cope with growth, CH: our first hosting company was setup to deal with us, so we had to go out and build our own data center, which was “scary.” Luckily YouTube never suffered from major outages, only scheduled downtime for maintenance, no longer required.

Q to Marck Andreessen: how close have you gone to going under, MA: 60 days with LoudCloud, we were burning too much cash, the crash had happened.

Q to all 3: what’s your worst business decision. Chad Hurley: we would have hired more people, more quickly to deal with the growth. David Filo: we underestimated the opportunities and hence like YouTube we would have bought on more people at Yahoo in the early days, we also weren’t taking a proper long term view. Marc Andreessen: we treated search money as free money, VC’s would give it to search companies who gave it to Netscape for traffic. With hindsight Netscape would have worked better as a content company as opposed to a service company.

Q: who do they admire outside of their own company. David Filo: Steve Jobs. Chad Hurley: Steve Jobs. Marc Andressen agree, Steve Jobs.

Q to all 3: what are your fondest memories. David Filo: it’s hard to pin down a particular time, I’ve enjoyed it all. Being able to shape the internet was exciting. Chad Hurley: when we started, it’s difficult to ever recreate that experience, a “special time” where YouTube didn’t know what would happen, or even how they’d pay the bills.

Thoroughly interesting sessions. Audience questions

q: tips for startups. Marc A: a founder should be CEO, don’t bring in CEO, professional CEO’s can dupe the company, second tip: beat off with a stick hiring to many people too soon, keeps burn rate down. Chad Hurley: small teams work because you can “aerate” more quickly and solve problems. Use the product yourself..important tip. David Filo: be passionate about what you are doing, even if you fail people will enjoy the experience.

q: 60% of traffic is global, how do accommodate that audience. Chad Hurley: at first it was mostly US traffic at YouTube, now much broader, but we were acquired by Google so we could handle the international traffic. Doing things like language support and tagging.

q: is there a myth or thing related to your company that isn’t true. Marc Andreessen: Al Gore never said he invented the internet.

Favorite sites: all 3 say TechCrunch then get serious, Chad Hurley likes Facebook, Marc Andreessen loves Amazon, David Filo Sequoia.

Session finishes. You don’t get that caliber of speakers at many conferences at all.

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Yahoo will announce the acquisition of open source online/offline office suite Zimbra this evening, we just heard through a very solid source. The price: $350 million, in cash, confirmed.

Our coverage of Zimbra goes back to 2005. They gained wide exposure at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference. Recently they launched offline functionality.

The company has raised $30.5 million over three rounds of funding from Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Accel Capital, Sumitomo and Duff, Ackerman & Goodrich. They announced 6 million paid mailboxes back in March, and more recently inked a deal with Comcast that brings another 12 million potential subscribers.

This was a very, very smart acquisition. In one quick move Yahoo is now in the race with Google for the next generation online/offline office suite. I would not be surprised to see them pick up Zoho next. That is, if they really want to dominate own this space and be a credible threat to Google Docs.

Update: Here is the Yahoo press release and Zimbra CEO Satish Dharmaraj’sblog post on the acquisition. And here’s the Yahoo official blog post.

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Session two as follows, including our live notes.

Cubic Telecom

Cubic Telecom is creating a global Mobile Virtual Network (MVNo). The company aims to drastically reduce international calling rates by lowering mobile roaming and call charges. Founder Pat Phelan a well known communications blogger “wants a world in which anyone can pick up their mobile phone wherever they are and call anyone in any country for as long as they like without worrying about the price.”

Nice start: global roaming rates suck: tell me about it!

Product launch is today “Maxroam,” allows you to add numbers to the sim. Esssentially calls are routed from one number in each place. Every call on the mobile becomes a local call.

This is a brilliant idea, didn’t mention the price though but said it was cheap. I want

Yap

Yap provides voice-to-text translation services for mobile phones. Users can say anything they like and Yap will send a text copy to anyone of their contacts. The service is completely automated so you won’t have intermediary Yap employees listening to your messages, typing them and then sending them out. They also have a text messaging application call Yap9 that allows you to keep in touch with friends, family, and co-workers. Users can also use the application to instantly query mobile web services just by talking. They can search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and YouTube, or interact with Facebook without using their phones’ miniature keyboards. GotVoice, Spinvox, and CallWave also offer speech to text.

Presentation problems: no audio on the video, but the music as they went on stage was an interesting touch: Singing in the Rain.

Mic pics up a heartbeat: classic.

Jason Calacanis jumps in to help with the presentation tech issues…deferring to next presentation. We’ll revisit Yap later.

Ceedo

Ceedo Technologies is a virtualization software company headquartered in Israel. Its patent pending approach to virtualizing the Windows’ desktop environment enables users to carry their PC-based work environment on portable devices such as USB flash drives, pocket hard drives, network drives and even mobile phones. Ceedo works well with the mobile device market. This is because it does not virtualize operating systems, which lets it load and operate more quickly while taking less drive space. Ceedo Mobile technology lets users connect their favorite mobile device to a PC without requiring installation or configuration.

Strong start to presentation: “self contained device” with broad user interface. Any PC can be turned into a terminal for any device.

Nice looking interface. Windows though, no mention of a Mac client.

Uses Picasa to blog, but posts via mobile phone, essentially Ceedo is offering the interface.

Virtualization space is secure: you can access the portable devices without leaving a trace on the PC. Portability is the key…I’m getting this more now.

Fairly cool idea: the ability to plugin a portable device and use the PC as essentially a dumb terminal, not sure how big the market will be for it but that doesn’t take away from the concept.

Yap Mk 2

Yap back on stage, see our notes above.

Presentation video shows the voice to text demonstration. Voice recognition engine works well, question is will SMS TXTing kiddies rather use voice? I would, but then again I suck at txting.

Yap also provides responses to things like Starbucks Coffee, flight arrivals at SFO. Full interface with Yap and mobile browser and other phone parts. Links into Amazon.

Loudtalks

Loudtalks is a free downloadable push-to-talk messaging application for nearly any phone. It supports real time private or group voice communication in the walkie talkie style. Loudtalks is based on the peer-to-peer architecture and capable to work behind most firewalls and NATs. The software is lightweight (installer is less than 1 Mb) and unobtrusive. Normally it runs in the background and can be activated with hotkey without switching the focus or popping up the application window. The advantages of Loudtalks over existing messaging systems include speed, asynchronous style and voice messaging.

Russian startup, lightweight client.

Messaging can be stored and played back.

Trutap

Trutap is a mobile social-networking application that enables users to stay connected with offline and online friends regardless of where they are in the world. The application also claims to work with all social networks, IM clients, network carriers and mobile phone devices. Trutap is accessible through a downloadable mobile application and their web browser experience synchronizes all Trutap messages, conversations and contacts. The application lets users communicate with individuals or groups via text, picture and instant messaging. The service also enables users to link to their social networks, upload pictures and update their blogs. Aka-Aki, Imity, MobiLuck, Britekite, and Loopt are some of the other mobile social networks.

Strong start: for once using a PowerPoint presentation is a good option over audio/ video…it just works

A slide shows there is no IM in Europe and China…WTF?

Trutap application showing: nice looking product, seems usable, presuming it’s a java app.

Jabber style IM client, links into major network.

Beta program opens today. API coming soon.

The Trutap developers are on stage signing a song…great stuff, clever way to break through the noise. Congrats to Trutap, good presentation.

Expert Panel: Ryan Block Chris Anderson, Marc Andreessen, Om Malik, and Marissa Mayer

Jason Calacanis said that the panel was too nice last time, and Om’s reputation is ruined

Om starts: presentations were “interesting”…laughter in the room. First question to Cubic from Om: how big could the business. Cubic: huge, anyone who travels, global roaming rates are absurd. $100 million business. Calls are made on the phone, not the PC.

Ryan Block asks about Sim cards. Not a BYO number product. Discussion continues about number forwarding, Om thinks most people dont know how to forward a phone.

Marc Andreessen asks about distribution…again (by his own admission though). Various turns, obviously everyone has a distribution model.

Om to Ceedo: how will you work when so many others have tried. Ceedo: we work with standard apps, simple to use, and cross platform…as long as it’s a flavor of Windows.

Talk about phones…Jason makes fun of Apple, trying to get something out of Marissa Meyer about the Google phone. MM changes topic as quickly as she can and says she likes Yap and Ceedo.

Ryan asks Trutap about a Nokia product that competes. Trutap says that they are already in discussion with handset makers.

Om: Trutap most likely acquired, Cubic is an outside chance of being around in 5 years, rest he is “reserving judgement”

Overall: Nick likes Yap due to the contextual tie in to other services. Cubic Telecom for me, if only because I’m paying $2.50 a minute to make a call if I use my mobile while I’m here for TC40 so it had the most personal resonance. The panel seemed to like Ceedo.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/157701671/

Delivering the first major company presentation at TechCrunch 40, Scott Moore and Bill Scott from Yahoo presented Yahoo Teachers, a new research focused service aimed at making life easier for teachers. Yahoo Teachers is a clip to database style service; users utilize the “gobbler” that is an online clipping service with a desktop interface client where they can drag research and reading materials when formulating lessons. Where it becomes an even more appealing service for teachers is with the sharing capabilities: think Wikipedia but written by school teachers with a focus on delivery to children.

Sure, it’s perhaps not the sexiest product release from Yahoo, and when some of the details leaked last week it was already written off as a product that is “a yawner.” But having spoken with a few teachers about the idea prior to today’s presentation, every single one of them thought it was a good idea. Folks without children can ignore this next line, but for those of us who do have kids, I think every tool that empowers and enriches the abilities of school teachers to teach our children are without doubt a good thing. I’ve got no idea whether this service will be as good as Yahoo makes it out to be, but here’s hoping it is.

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Session one as follows, including our live notes.

Powerset

Powerset is a natural language search engine that can use everyday phrases and grammer to conduct more accruate web searches by understanding the search query and the pages it indexes. Parsing phrases and grammer theoretically produces better results because the egine has a better understanding of the searches intended goal than with just keywords alone. For instance, a Powerset search for “politicians who died in office” returns information on the subset of politicians who died in office, rather than a group of pages that ranked highly with the phrase.

Powerset presentation begins: talk about semantics and search, “we parse the web”. Natural language search.

Announcement: Powerset labs, where users can explore tech demos, share ideas, feed the learning engine and “improve your search karma”.

Demonstration of natural language queries with a social voting style feature. Touches of other sites

Demonstration of Powermouse (see screen shot), information is pulled from Wikipedia into a semantic index.

TC40 attendees will be amongst first in private beta.

Overall: tough sell in the search vertical, but interesting take. Great start to TC40.

Cognitive Code

Cognitive Code makes artificially intelligent user interfaces. Their main product is the SILVIA (Symbolically Isolated, Linguistically Variable, Intelligence Algorithms) platform, which can add a human-like artificially intelligent interface to nearly any digital device. The SILVIA platform can learn and converse in natural language to carry out tasks for the user. Potential applications include children’s digital toys and personal assistants.

Flagship product: “silvia platform” Symoblically isolated linguistically variable intelligence algorithm. Laymens terms: AI.

Demonstration with AI on the screen, the AI system is having a conversation with one of the Cognitive Code. A couple of bugs in the live demo, but pretty cool.

Uses include embedding in toys, phones, websites “unlimited uses.” First major target market is “smart toys.”

Clever idea, if they can pull it off we’re seeing the future of toys.

CastTV

CastTV is trying to build one of the web’s best video search engines by creating a rich index of contextual data about videos and an easy to use interface for searching them. The engine pieces together context for a video based on it’s metadata, the content surrounding it, and the content of pages linking to the video. Notably, CastTV also searches paid video searches such as Apple iTunes. Their user interface allows users to sort results by shows (to weed out non-relevant stuff), host (such as itunes, CBS Innertube, etc to focus on a favorite service provider), by date, relevance, prices, etc.

Presentation begins: CastTV doesn’t host videos, they index them.

Britney Spears video search compared, Google, Yahoo and CastTV: CastTV results are pitched as being better, more accessible etc

Colts Titans next example. CastTV is using smart clustering for results, pulling video from MSM and user generated content. Nice results, even if I have no interest in American Football

FAROO

FAROO is a peer-to-peer web search engine that has no centralized index and crawler. Each web page visited by users is automatically included into the distributed index. Ranking of search results is based on a distributed usage statistics of the web pages visited by FAROO users, which leads to a more democratic, user centric ranking. FAROO also shares advertising revenues up to fifty percent with its users. The search engine uses privacy-protected behavioral targeting to increase conversion rates.

Interesting concept, P2P in a strict sense. Results are only pages that have been visited by users…I cant’ help but think the SEO crowd is going to love this

The presenter claims that the algorithms actually prevent manipulation: he doesn’t know the people I know. Nice results though.

Indexing via a desktop P2P client, demonstrated version on Windows. Faroo beta opens today.

Viewdle

Viewdle is a white-label platform for indexing, searching and monetizing video. The technology they are developing lets video producers algorithmically extract metadata from news, shows, movies, and Internet video. This is much more effective than the old method of text-based metadata indexing. Viewdle’s most notable feature is their facial-recognition technology that can create a create a “real-time index of true on-screen appearances”. They plan on building one of the largest databases of people-in-video references. Reuters is currently testing out Viewdle’s technology with their videos news inventory by letting people search their catalog for specific people.

Demo starts with 2 minute demo video. Slick, we’ll see if we can get a copy.

The facial recognition is always an interesting concept, but I’m remind of Riya. More Britney Spears examples, although they are pulling data from others in the video as well, it looks a step from previous tech, particularly give it’s video they are scanning, not just pics.

Product: Top Chance, scans on criteria, including date. Popularity search includes total video time and when. Platform (presuming API) will also be released shortly to plugin widgets etc.

Expert Panel: Ryan Block Chris Anderson, Marc Andreessen, Om Malik, and Marissa Mayer

First question Marc Andreessen to Powerset, great question, how do you break out, API’s etc. Good response.

Chris Anderson: what are the advantages of the various products to the user

Faroo responds first: we are by the user, for the user, it’s good because “they are doing the search together”

Om Malik to Faroo: most P2P systems people turn off, how do you overcome that, also how do you seed the network?

Faroo: it’s not a problem…not a particularly good response.

Marissa Meyer wants to know about the video search startups, scaling etc…classic

CastTV: we’re scaling, focus. Viewdle “we reference a point” hence can scale to billions, using “fusion engine”

Discussion continues around AI and natural language tools.

Jason asks Om: which one is the most viable. Om: CastTV. One to last: Cognitive Code. Middle of the road pick: Powerset. Faroo is “interesting,” Viewdle will be “acquired soon”

Jason Calacanis to Marissa Mayer: will people switch away from Google. Reply: most people use more than one search engine according to stats. Google’s advantage is being a one stop shop. JC: what did you think of CastTV, MM: nice interface, clustering for duplicate issues is good tech.

Marc Andreessen: I don’t want to be obsessed with distribution…but I am, how do companies deal with it
Powerset: we’re very aware of this…uploading to users (???), embeding on external sites (Google custom search style I’d think).

Conclusion: speaking to Nick and we agree that CastTV was the winner in a very competitive group, good tech which just works with a practical use. Cognitive Code had the coolest product, but the demo wasn’t great which lost it for them.

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Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/157662144/