SpokenLayer Wants To Ad...

What if you couldn’t just read an article on your favorite blog or news site, but also listen to it being read out aloud by the author or professional voice talent? That’s what SpokenLayer , which is launching its public beta today at TechCrunch Disrupt , is working on. The New York-based startup is partnering with a number of well-known publishers, including The Atlantic, National Journal, Engadget and TechCrunch. SpokenLayer is currently only available as an iOS application, but the company plans to add other platforms soon. What makes SpokenLayer different from your run-of-the-mill text-to-speech engine is that the company is working with professional voice talent and also lets authors record their own articles. Writers can use the company’s iOS app to just record their articles or, if they have better audio equipment at home, through SpokenLayer’s website. As the company’s founder and CEO Will Mayo told me last week, SpokenLayer plans to sign up more premium publishers in the near future, but is also working on its self-service platform at the same time. Working with voice talent, after all, doesn’t scale well in the long run (despite the fact that New York has a deep pool of local talent the company can draw from). The company also encourages authors to record their own text. This, says Mayo, allows readers to form a more intimate connection with the writers, who can also use this tool to emphasize some of the nuances in their texts. As there is obviously a bit of lag between the time a story is published and the time SpokenLayer can record it, the company first makes a basic text-to-speech version of the article available to listeners and the replaces it as soon as the recording is available. Mayo told me that he is quite aware of the speed at which stories move on the web these days and promises to get the high-quality recordings out before a story ever has a chance to go viral. As Mayo told me, the idea behind SpokenLayer was born out of his own needs. Dealing with dyslexia himself, he grew up listening to books and textbooks as audio. Then, after finishing graduate school, he started working on SpokenLayer, which he hopes will make “something [he] found so useful available for the largest body of content ever published, the web.” So far SpokenLayer has been bootstrapped and currently has four employees. Disrupt Q&A: Q : How many languages do you support? A : Currently it’s only available in English. Q : Why do you think podcasts never fulfilled their promise? A : Distribution was a problem and it never quite hit the mainstream Q : How difficult is this to add to publisher’s site? A : Listen buttons will be available for publishers, but the easiest way is for publishers to give SpokenLayer their RSS feed and be featured in the app. Q : Do you need publisher’s permission to record their texts? A : It’s a gray area, but that’s why SpokenLayer is working with a small set of publishers. Q : How did the founders meet each other? A : We ran into each other by coincidence and met at various hackathons and other events.

House Beautiful Tests P...

House Beautiful is hopping on the Pinterest bandwagon today courtesy of digital watermarking provider Digimarc , which has just introduced technology allowing consumers to pin magazine images from the real world to their Pinterest boards. While functionally similar to the online “Pin It” button, the Digimarc solution uses the company’s proprietary technology to embed an imperceptible watermark in a printed magazine image. When scanned, users are immediately taken to the pre-configured Pinterest page for the image, allowing them to then re-pin it to their own boards. The downside? Well, for starters, you have to use the Digimarc mobile app for this to work, or the magazine/advertiser can integrate Digimarc’s tech in their own app, if they choose. But the “pin from the real world” functionality is not available in Pinterest’s own mobile app, unfortunately, which is how most mobile users connect with the popular social network. Plus, this re-pinning process only works with magazine advertisers who have partnered up with Digimarc before going to print, obviously. In other words, you can’t just scan any ol’ image from a magazine and then “pin it” via the Digimarc solution. So, yes, kind of a lot of work for end users. That being said, Digimarc has kicked off the launch by partnering with House Beautiful Magazine, which they’re touting as the “world’s first Pinterest-enabled magazine.” In House Beautiful’s June issue, there’s a “Kitchen of the Month” editorial where the first page of the article is “Pinterest-enabled” using Digimarc’s watermarking. In this case, House Beautiful has actually integrated Digimarc’s tech within its own newly launched mobile app. Readers can either download the magazine app, or the Digimarc Connect app for iPhone or Android . They can then get connected to the House Beautiful “Kitchen of the Month” Pinterest pinboard by scanning the magazine photos with their phone’s camera. QR codes, heads up: you’re looking a lot dorkier now.

Newspaper Attacks UK Go...

UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, has decided to raise the issue of Google’s influence on the UK government, after uncovering the fact that Conservative party ministers have held meetings with Google an average of once a month since the General Election two years ago. There have been 23 meetings between Tory ministers and Google since June 2010, with Prime Minister David Cameron meeting Google three times and George Osborne – who as Chancellor of the Exchequer is supposed to meet with business leaders – four times in two years. The story needs to be a seen in a wider context. The Conservatives (as has the Labour party during its tenure) have recently come under fire for having too close a relationship to another powerful entity, News Corporation. A huge inquiry into Press standards has in large part focused on the ties between Rupert Murdoch’s media giant and the Conservatives. But what the report buries way down in the article, is the number of times the newspaper itself has met with the Government. A Google spokesperson told us: “It’s absolutely right that governments speak with companies about issues that affect their citizens. The British Government makes the list of those meetings publicly available – including the Daily Mail’s 34 meetings over the same period.” In other words, the Daily Mail has met with the Government almost one and a half times a month (on average) since they entered office – that’s quite a bit more than Google has. It’s likely those were high-level meetings, not editorial ones. That said, the issue does raise the question of Google’s closeness to the UK government and its ability to grab the ear of the Government on a number of topics. It’s the kind of access a lot of companies would be envious of. Culture minister Ed Vaizey has met the firm seven times. Culture Secretary boss Jeremy Hunt has held four meetings. In David Cameron’s first months as party leader in 2006 and 2007 (though not yet Prime Minister), he spoke to the annual Google Zeitgeist conference. Three senior figures have moved between the Tories and Google in the last few years. Rachel Whetstone is Global head of communications and public policy at Google and is married to David Cameron’s former chief of staff, Steve Hilton. Naomi Gummer was formerly adviser to Curlture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, but is now a public policy adviser to Google. Amy Fisher Was a press officer for Google, and is now a special adviser to the Evironment Sectretary Corline Spelman. On Hilton, the right wing Daily Mail newspaper has rarely missed an opportunity to attack his more radical attempts to shake up government thinking about technology and its affect on society. But it’s more likely that the Conservatives – in part driven by Hilton’s thinking – have realised that the world has moved away from the green-screen, big-IT projects which used to fill the coffers of the likes of EDS and others, towards embracing a more open standards approach. On the ground this has fed into attempts to open up government data, and led also the innovative project known as Gov.uk , which is taking a startup approach to government online, employing many of the UK’s best engineers and tech stars. It’s also quite something to see a sentence describing Hilton as the “shaven-headed son of Hungarian immigrants” – a phrase which betray’s the Mail’s antipathy to alternative thinking. In March it was announced that Mr Hilton was going to take an academic post at Stanford University in California to be near his wife who works at Google. He plans to return next year, though it’s not yet clear whether he will re-join the government. Of course, back in the real world, these West-Wing-like moves of advisers between big business and governments go on literally all the time. We don’t currently have the equivalent figures for meetings with Microsoft or Cisco, or Facebook, IBM or other companies, but I’d be amazed there were not similar factoids waiting to scurry forth if someone someone decided to lift a few rocks. Indeed, Microsoft, Cisco and many other large tech companies have appeared several times at the government’s ‘Tech City’ meetings. So quite why the Daily Mail has decided to home in on this issue is a little bit of a mystery. It may be that the story was placed as an attack by the Labour party. Their health IT scheme to store patients’ records failed spectacularly just before they left office, so they would have smarted at the suggestion by Cameron that a company like Google could probably do a better job. The newspaper quotes Helen Goodman, Labour’s media spokesman, who says “Of course it is important for ministers to listen to business, but a meeting with Google every month does look like the sort of privileged access that small businesses can only dream of.” Unfortunately, she neglects to mention the numerous tiny tech startups that have been invited to Number 10 Downing Street over the last couple of years as part of the government’s Tech City initiative, and its purchase of an entire building – Campus London – in East London which is housing small tech startups that have have nothing to do with Google. (As disclosure, I’m cofounder of a co-working space that’s a tenant in that building, but frankly, I’d point this out even if it wasn’t). Then again, Google doesn’t help it’s own cause. In Europe it does not have a great record on tax. As Goodman points out: “Ministers must disclose what they discussed. Did they challenge Google over their repellent tax avoidance, which was uncovered by the Daily Mail?” It’s here that criticism could land a big punch. Google has been oft criticised for paying tax on less than a quarter of its UK income. In 2010 it generated £2.1 billion in the UK but with its international operations based Ireland, where corporation tax is much lower than the UK, it escapes a great deal of tax. And Google hasn’t always helped its own cause. Last month Google executive Naomi Gummer, until recently a Conservative minister’s political adviser, caused a furore in the press when she implied (not unreasonably?) that it was the job of parents to stop children seeing adult content online, not Internet companies. Currently a debate rages in the UK about creating an ‘off switch’ at ISP level to block porn, allowing parents baffled by content settings or Net Nanny software to simply order a ‘clean’ version of the Internet direct from their ISP. A Conservative Party spokesman told the Mail: “All these meetings have been properly declared and it is normal for relevant ministers to meet with a company of this size.” Ultimately the Mail’s story does raise questions of perceptions over-all but as a major UK tech player, it would be extremely odd for it not to meet with whoever was in power fairly regularly. Neither Facebook not Twitter, for instance, have anything like the huge engineering bases and offices Google has in the UK. Do we want our politicians remain in a world view of tech dominated by the desktop and ‘licenses’ or one where developers, startups and apps can thrive? I’d hazard not.

Google’s Penguin Update...

Last week, a small business owner talked to me about his new marketing plan. It went something like this: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, MySpace, blog, blog outreach, YouTube videos, forum posting, SEO articles written and posted to Hubspot, Squidoo, every other article site then promoted on StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and every other appropriate sharing site. He figured someone could do this in ten hours a week. I told him he was in over his head. I told him he needed to focus on a few keys areas to start — Facebook and Pinterest since he was selling a very visual and colorful product. I also told him to forget article marketing, it not only wouldn’t help his business but it might actually hurt. I don’t think he liked my advice. Now, let’s all open our Wall Street Journal to the Small Business section: “ As Google Tweaks Searches, Some Get Lost in the Web. ” The story focuses on two small online business who have suffered devastating losses since the latest Google search update known as Penguin. The owner of Oh My Dog Supplies says his sales went from $68,000 in March (pre-Penguin) to $25,000 this month (expected based on current sales). He blames the loss in traffic on Google search and thinks it’s the result of two actions. He once paid for a large number of inbound links and he posts marketing articles to EzineArticles and Squidoo. Under the new Penguin reign, these kinds of marketing ploys are considered spam. Google sees them as ways of artificially inflating the relevance of a website. As such, they are not helpful to searchers and so Google penalizes the sites for being deceptive. The author of the article admits that some companies have gained from the Penguin update but those that took a hit are suffering, to the point of possibly losing their business. The people the Wall Street Journal profiled in the article are all legitimate, small business owners who were only doing what they thought was best. They followed advice (Did they know that buying links has always been a questionable tactic? Not likely.) and did all the things some marketers say you should do to get noticed. Marketing, however, is not their field. They’re people who simply wanted to share their passion for pets and sports and art and found they could turn that passion into profit. Now, though, you can bet that passion is waning as they scramble to regain what they lost through no fault of their own. I’m not saying Google is wrong. They’re right to want to clean out the spammers and the snake oil salesmen. I’m saying that it’s time to stop marketing based on the way it’s always been. The rules have changed and they’re going to keep changing. What business owners have to do is follow the path that makes the most sense for their company and forget the rest. You know what Google likes? Relevant, accurate, informative content that is better than what the competitor has to offer. That’s how you rise in the rankings and that’s how you stay on top the next time Google makes another update. What are your thoughts on Google’s Penguin update? Good news, bad news, or just another twist in the path? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Bitly Kinda Says It’s N...

Is link shortener Bitly raising $20 million in new funding? The Verge says it is . In response to my email, a company spokesperson denied The Verge’s story, but in vague enough terms that it could probably turn around and announce a new round in the next few weeks or months. Here’s what the spokesperson told me: Want to quickly let you know that they’re always discussing potential funding and stay in touch with potential investors on an ongoing basis. Though, this article is not based on any facts. I’ll work with the folks at bitly to connect with you for the next funding announcement, whenever that does happen. Wait, what does that actually mean?! Well, the first sentence is pretty ambiguous, but it hews closely to the standard non-denial denial that comes when a startup is raising money without having closed the round yet. The second sentence could be read as more definitive, but it might also mean, “Hey, the deal isn’t closed yet — technically we’re still just talking, so the funding isn’t a fact.” After all, what does it really mean to be “not based on any facts”? And what’s a “fact” anyway? Tough philosophical questions. Altogether, the statement suggests that Bitly has at least had discussions with its investors about raising funding. How far those discussions have gone, time will tell. The company raised an $8.9 million Series B in 2010. The Verge also says that Bit.ly, whose business has been more focused on enterprise services , is about to launch a new product aimed at consumers.