This is a good article called New York Hardware Buffs Weigh In On China, Embracing Niches, And How To Start Making Things:

Published on: 2012-05-23 15:58:13

Earlier this morning, our own John Biggs was joined on stage by a handful of New York-based makers who have made a name for themselves by building physical things (or in one case, building something that builds other things). Biggs kicked off the panel with a simple question: — can we bring manufacturing back? Bre Pettis, CEO of Makerbot Industries , has two shifts of workers putting together all of his Makerbots in Brooklyn, and had a bit of advice for hardware creators looking to shift production to China. He recommended that until makers need to produce runs of 50,000-100,000 units, they’re much better off keeping the production process in the United States. It helps to keep makers intimate with their tech, not to mention makes it easier for them to handle any unexpected issues faster. The process of launching a product was tackled too — interestingly enough, Amol Sarva of Peek fame revealed that if he had to take his email gadget to market now instead of a few years ago, he would’ve gone a completely different route. Instead of going big and pushing to get his devices on store shelves around the country, he instead would have gone with the grassroots approach — making a few devices and trying to build buzz around them. Another recurring theme of the panel was the notion that makers should embrace niches. “There may not be mass market ideas, and that’s OK,” said Peter Semmelhack of Bug Labs . He noted that people can put hardware and devices together that aren’t meant to reach millions and millions of people (they could even use a Makerbot if the production run size was modest enough), and these small markets were still worth going after. Plus, you can never really tell just how niche some niches are. Duncan Frazier of Bit Banger Labs knows that all too well — he and his team developed a sleep mask that aims to help its users lucid dream, and put together a Kickstarter campaign for it. They expected they would have to make a few hundred units at most, but the niche was much bigger than they thought. By the time their campaign was over, they had exceeded their $35,000 funding request by orders of magnitude. The discussion then turned to the question of whether or not we could build something akin to a sprawling Foxconn campus in somewhere like Iowa . “Here in the U.S., as a culture, we’re not really focused on [manufacturing],” Pettis noted. “Our children are the only priority lower than manufacturing.” There was little question that using Chinese facilities for manufacturing has its advantages — namely sheer output — but some were curious as to how long that would remain the case. Pettis pointed out that wages in China have doubled over the last year, a trend that (if continued) may eventually lead to a shift away from relying on China. The panel ended on a slightly more inspirational note, with each of makers chiming in with advice for young upstarts who want to start making things. On this, everyone seemed to agree — the best approach is to just go out there and start going it. Ayah Bdeir, CEO of littleBits , specifically pointed out that a young person who had $50 and an Internet connection had no shortage of places to turn for inspiration — Instructables and Hack A Day, for instance. “You learn by making,” she said. Pettis recommended that wannabe makers should just “jump in” to the process, and if they eventually decide to go the Kickstarter route, Frazier emphasized the importance of a solid video because that’s the only place the product exists as far as the users are concerned.

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New York Hardware Buffs Weigh In On China, Embracing Niches, And How To Start Making Things

Published on: 2012-05-23 13:00:23

TechCrunch has discovered and confirmed that software giant Oracle has bought social marketing platform  Vitrue  for $300 million. [ Update : A press release has confirmed the buy at an undisclosed price, though we know it to be $300 million.] As if Oracle didn’t offer enough products and services already, the acquisition will give it a strong Facebook marketing platform to offer its enterprise clients. Vitrue had taken $33 million in funding over the years and grown to become one of the most popular solutions for big companies trying to win Facebook fans and push out marketing messages to the news feed. Vitrue, according to a source, was on course for revenues of just under $100 million this year, although we have other sources disputing it may have been that high. TC understands there were a lot of potential acquirers interested. Several bidders approached the company but Oracle was the most aggressive. Oracle is no stranger to massive acquisitions. It bought talent management solution Taleo in February for $1.9 billion . Beyond Facebook, Vitrue helps marketers manage their presences on Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram , and other platforms. One of the hallmarks of Vitrue has been it’s ability to rapidly integrate with new partners like Klout to give it talking points for dissuading clients from going to competitors.  Vitrue is “nearly profitable” and was projected to reach profitability in this fiscal year, said our source. TechCrunch understands that Reggie Bradford, the CEO, will “very much remain part of the equation” when Vitrue becomes part of Oracle. His exact title is to come. The purchase  continues the trend of large, old-world Internet marketing companies buying their way into social after being slow to adopt. Adobe bought social advertising provider Efficient Frontier for $400 million in November 2011, just a few months after Efficient Frontier had bought Facebook marketer and application developer Context Optional for a reported $50 million. With time, social has proven too important to ignore. Rather than scrambling to build something and trying to pull brands away from established social marketers, Oracle will instantly gain a massive list of notable clients along with Vitrue. Oracle will also inherit Vitrue’s ongoing battle with competitors like Buddy Media, Wildfire, Involver, ThisMoment, and more for social marketing supremacy.

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Social Media Marketer Vitrue Has Been Bought By Oracle For $300 Million

This is a new post called The onset of 21st Century has paved way for the im…:

Published on: 2012-05-22 21:10:47

The onset of 21st Century has paved way for the improvement in our technology. Along with this, services through the internet has also boomed. Businesses are one of the benefactors of these advances. It is no surprise that more business owners today use the internet to advertise their services. shopping center directory

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Published on: 2012-05-22 18:02:23

I found this post I found for this blog. Read it here – Update: Someone Is Asking The USPTO To Invalidate Zuckerberg’s News Feed Patent, But Yahoo Says Not Us

One idea  floated when Ross Levinsohn took the reins as the interim CEO of Yahoo is that he might represent a kinder, gentler phase in the Internet company’s contentious patent fight against Facebook. There was even a suggestion that the two sides might even be able to settle. Today, some news that could point to a different approach — at least for now. Some documents have emerged at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that indicate someone, just yesterday, requested for the USPTO to re-examine a patent owned by Facebook concerning news feeds, and to declare it invalid. This happens to be one of the same patents that Facebook has named in its counter-suit against Yahoo , and one patent expert believes that the re-examination request, which questions the validity of the patent, could be coming from Yahoo. To be clear, the documents do not anywhere mention Yahoo by name. They have been filed by Gregory Hunt, from the law firm Jenkins, Wilson, Taylor and Hunt. One patent lawyer tells me that typically these requests are made by companies that are getting sued by the patent holders, as a defensive move to neutralize the suit. At the time of writing, the only company that is getting sued by Facebook over patent infringement is Yahoo. Update : Yahoo tells us that is has not filed any requests for re-examination. Even if the re-examination request has not come from Yahoo, it could represent a problem for Facebook, if it gets approved, because this is one of the patents in its countersuit. The circumstances of the filing are, in typical legal/patent fashion, pretty confusing but here is the gist: According to the documents we have embedded below, Hunt’s client is questioning patent number 7,669,123, which is a patent for “dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network.” The patent is registered by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, along with several others (it’s embedded below, too). The re-examination filing from yesterday says that this patent should be rendered invalid because it is based on another patent that is still the subject of an application — not yet approved — which was filed before the one that was approved. That patent is number WO 2007/0052285 and was filed some months before the 7,669,123 application. Patent number 7,669,123 was named, along with 10 in all, by Facebook in its counter-suit against Yahoo, which it filed in response to Yahoo suing Facebook over several social-media-related patents. It is not clear whether these other patents will also get questioned by Hunt’s clients. Why the secrecy of who is behind the suit? It’s not clear but our patent expert offers this explanation: “I think they wanted to avoid the side effects of naming themselves so they’ve picked the anonymous route. This is what we used to do in the old days.” We have reached out to Facebook and Yahoo for their responses to this and will update this story as we learn more. The full whack of patent documents is embedded here: View this document on Scribd

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Update: Someone Is Asking The USPTO To Invalidate Zuckerberg’s News Feed Patent, But Yahoo Says Not Us

This is a good post called Video: YouTube’s 7th Birthday Celebration:

Published on: 2012-05-22 04:58:12

May 21st 2012 marks the 7th Birthday of YouTube, and to celebrate they’ve compiled a video showcasing everything that has made them great to this very day, including a host of great statistics about what happens on YouTube. Thanks Alicia. Here’s just a few YouTube stats for 2012: There are over 4 Billion Videos viewed Related Digital Buzz Posts: Twitter: 5th Anniversary Celebration Video/Stats Infographic: Instagram Statistics 2012 Infographic: 24 Hours on the Internet

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Video: YouTube’s 7th Birthday Celebration

Published on: 2012-05-22 03:00:46

I think you should check out this article I found for this blog. Read it here – Philippines has indeed used the internet for the b…

Philippines has indeed used the internet for the best of their interest. Some use it for buy and sell in the Philippines site through blogs or social media networks. It's good that they could generate money from the internet.

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Philippines has indeed used the internet for the b…

Published on: 2012-05-21 23:12:19

I found this article I found for this blog. Read it here – Disrupt NYC Day 1: Your Startup Battlefield Companies

Our very first day of Disrupt NYC is over and the conference started off with a bang. We had memorable chats, dove into fashion for a bit, hung out with the Startup Alley companies and witnessed 15 startups launch their products in our first day of the Startup Battlefield. Even though we will have brand-new companies launching tomorrow while fighting for the ultimate prize of $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup, we wanted to take a moment to highlight all that we saw today. There were some brilliant companies, so be sure to check all of them out below. The Internet was buzzing with positive words about each. This is going to be a tough battle. Which company was your favorite? Session 1: Disrupting Learning and Decision Making SpokenLayer Read the web with your ears. SpokenLayer delivers the written web as audio. Instantly. Read by authors, real people and really smart robots. In your pocket, on your time. Answer Factory Cyfeon invented Answer Factory to improve how businesses made decisions and understand their data. Answer Factory immediately operationalizes any data source, regardless of its format, size or location, resulting in improved answer quality. Ark Ark is a search engine for people. With Ark, you can search for new people, old classmates, new business contacts, and even search your friends across multiple social networks. Koemei Koemei is a self-service cloud-platform and API for automated transcription and captioning of video content at large scale. Incident (gTar) Incident is a consumer electronics company aiming to make creating and interacting with music as enjoyable and casual as listening to it. Session 2: Disrupting Processes UberConference UberConference is a simple, free and visual conferencing tool. BroadPeak Partners BroadPeak Partners brings you K3, an interface harness that standardizes interfaces without the complexity of EAI/ESB. CallApp CallApp was founded in 2011 by a group of passionate industry experts, well funded VCs and angels. CallApp makes each call more fun and productive. Powered by a Universal Crowdsourced Contact-Genome, CallApp provides the Ultimate Calling Experience via its Social Phone CRM & Interaction Platform. Open Garden Open Garden lets you share your mobile Internet among all your devices. KurbKarma KurbKarma delivers a social network for parking that connects people with killer parking to people seeking parking. This mobile app facilitates a peer-to-peer exchange and rewards both parties – parking karma at your fingertips. Session 3: Disrupting Media Punch! Punch’s interactive publishing platform radically reduces the cost, time and risk of creating apps for tablets by removing the need to code. It also enables Punch’s original entertainment iPad app, the “Punch! Culture Shelf”. StyleSaint Designer goods for under $100. An online eTailer where the community sets the trends. Stevie Stevie turns online video and social graphs into a broadcast-like TV experience, creating entertainment that is personal and social across platforms. TagBrand TagBrand is the service for people who love brands. Babelverse (Startup Alley Audience Choice Winner) Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and, with little notice, ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters: it means anyone can be an interpreter.

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Disrupt NYC Day 1: Your Startup Battlefield Companies

Published on: 2012-05-21 21:47:36

We spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn’t work work, but it’s not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch and watching TV. That’s where a new startup called Stevie comes in, with a website launching today at Disrupt, along with mobile apps that function as remote controls. Stevie looks at content shared in your social network feeds and elsewhere on the Web, and it assembles that content into TV shows that you can watch, shows with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Celeb TV. Naturally, the shows incorporate video content that your friends have shared, but they also include things like Facebook status updates, tweets, shared headlines, and birthdays, running mostly as tickers under the video. Essentially, it’s a way to watch Facebook and Twitter on your TV. Co-founder and Chief Creative Technologist Gil Rimon argues that this is the right way to do “social TV.” Apps like GetGlue, which offer check ins and other social interactions around existing TV content, aren’t a good fit for how people watch TV now, because they ignore its essentially passive nature. Stevie takes the opposite tack — instead of trying to encourage new types of behavior, it’s introducing new content into the traditional couch potato experience. Rimon compares the app to Pandora. In the same way that Pandora learns your musical tastes and preferences, automatically delivering music that’s tailored to your tastes, Stevie uses something that the team calls “The Stevie Factor” to look at your social data (such as Facebook Likes) and automatically stitch together the videos and other content that you’ll probably enjoy. When Rimon demonstrated Stevie for me, I was particularly impressed by the look and feel. Granted, I don’t watch much TV aside from Game of Thrones and Doctor Who , but the video content struck me as quite bubbly and polished, especially for something that was being algorithmically assembled on-the-fly. Rimon’s experience in TV writing, editing, and presenting probably helps with that. I expect Stevie will become even more appealing when it’s available on connected TV devices. The company has raised $300,000 in angel funding from investors including Jeff Pulver and Gigi Levy, and it’s participating in the Microsoft Accelerator for Azure program in Tel Aviv. Oh, and if you’re interested in couples who run startups, here’s another one — Rimon is married to his co-founder and CEO Yael Givon. You can visit the Stevie website here , download the iPhone app here , and download the Android app here . (Again, the apps aren’t standalone experiences, but remote controls for watching on the browser.) Disrupt Q&A Q: How do you connect the Internet to the TC? A: We’re not delivering hardware — it’s a web-based experience, with more devices (starting with iPad) coming soon. Q: Who is your competition? A: No direct competition, though of course there are other video discovery companies. But they’re not replicating the TV experience. The real competitor might be old-fashioned TV channels. Q: Why hasn’t connected TV taken off? A: That’s changing — see, for example, the growth of Apple TV.

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Stevie Turns Your Social Feeds Into TV Shows

Published on: 2012-05-21 20:35:26

What if you couldn’t just share your Internet connection with the few WiFi devices tethered to your phone or hotspot, but with pretty much everybody around you? Open Garden , which is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, lets you create a mesh network that ties together all the Open Garden-enabled devices around you into one large network that then automatically shares Internet access and bandwidth between all of these devices. Basically, Open Garden wants to become a crowdsourcing platform for mobile connectivity. For now, Open Garden works on Android, Windows and Mac (it will be available in the Google Play store after today’s Disrupt demo). In the long run, Open Garden also hopes to make an iOS application available. The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2011 and has assembled quite an impressive team. Co-founder Micha Benoliel, for example, worked at Skype before starting his own company, and co-founder Stanislav Shalunov has a deep background in Internet infrastructure, including work at Internet 2 and BitTorrent. The company’s third co-founder, Greg Hazel, was previously the lead programmer of the popular BitTorrent client μTorrent. One especially nifty aspect of this project is that Open Garden used its own networking and P2P expertise to built (and patent) its own discovery mechanisms so devices that run its software can easily detect each other. Given the proprietary nature of this, the company doesn’t talk about the exact details of how it does this publicly, though. Right now, Open Garden only uses one Internet offramp for the whole mesh network (though it’s worth noting that it breaks down large networks into smaller ones with about ten nodes as well). If the network detects multiple offramps, it currently selects the fastest one available and switches to another one if that node goes offline or slows down. Soon, says Benoliel, it will also support multi-channel bundling to create a higher data throughput by using multiple on-ramps. Ideally, this could even work if your phone isn’t on a mesh network, as it would allow you to use a WiFi and 3G or 4G network simultaneously. For now, though, the company’s focus is squarely on getting its beta out into the market and making the overall experience as seamless as possible. The obvious question about a project like this, of course, is about how the carriers will react. Benoliel told me that he isn’t too worried about this, though. He likened it to the arrival of VoIP, a technology that the carriers have now embraced. Carriers will just have to adapt to concepts like this and figure out the best ways to make use of them. The Open Garden team believes that, in the long run, the carriers will understand that they can benefit from being part of Open Garden’s open network. Ideally, of course, an ad-hoc mesh network like this could also help carriers offload more data from their 3G and 4G networks. While the company didn’t disclose any details, Benoliel told me that Open Garden already has an agreement with one “forward-looking European carrier.” Other companies that will likely have a hard time appreciating this project are paid WiFi networks like Boingo or GoGo. A phone running Open Garden, after all, could easily provide basic web access to everybody at an airport gate or even on a WiFi-enabled plane. The company, which is probably one of the first to be based on San Francisco’s Treasure Island, has raised some money in a seed round so far and expects to add on to this round or raise a larger VC round soon. Disrupt Q&A Q : Is the plan to sell the app? A : We want to keep it free. Shooting for a freemium model with extra features like VPN access for business users. Q : What about security and privacy? A : The mesh network is encrypted. The device doesn’t let you monitor the traffic on the network. Q : What about the implications on battery power? A : Most of the power consumption comes from the data transmission. Open Garden can also help you save some battery by offloading to WiFi, which uses less power than a 3G or 4G connection. Q : How do you get around the freeloader problem. A : Open Garden has been thinking about moving to a credit system. Q : Do you have competition today? A : We have built a lot of IP. We have a strong competitive advantage there. Competition is in the carrier network offloading business. That’s mostly hardware manufacturers building femotcells etc.

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Open Garden Lets You Crowdsource Your Mobile Connectivity

This is a new article called CallApp Uses Social Data To Build A Smarter Smartphone Contact Book:

Published on: 2012-05-21 20:23:35

One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn’t in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won’t know until I pick up. CallApp , a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It’s creating what CEO and co-founder Oded Volovitz calls a “universal social contact book.” It’s drawing data from social networks and other data sources to give users more context about phone calls and other communication. The data also comes from CallApp users — users can edit CallApp listings, and if they choose, they can add their contact book into the company’s general database. So when you get a phone call, even if it’s from someone who isn’t in your contact list, you should be able to see information about them — say a photo, their most recent update on Facebook, and your most recent email exchange if you’ve corresponded with them. Of course, if your phone is already ringing, you’ve only got a few seconds before you need to pick up, but at least you can glance at your screen and go into the call with some basic context. CallApp should be even more useful when you’re about to make a call. Then, the social network updates can give you a way to start off the conversation, or tell you when someone has traveled out of the country, so maybe now isn’t the best time to reach them. You can also attach personal reminders to CallApp contacts, share your location with them, or set up a meeting. In some ways, the concept is pretty similar to an email plugin like Rapportive ( recently acquired by LinkedIn ) or Xobni. However, Volovitz says that bringing this information to the smartphone puts it in a different context. After all, when he gets a phone call, “I cannot wait until I can go to the Internet to see who is calling me. This is about giving you real-time, immediate, the most relevant information you can get, and the tools to execute on that information.” Volovitz also says CallApp, despite the name, isn’t just about phone calls — he estimates that he only uses it for phone calls 50 percent of the time. The app also lists and connects to other ways for reaching people, like WhatsApp Messenger and Viber. The core of the experience isn’t the phone call but the contact itself, Volovitz says. Nor is CallApp limited to personal contact listings. It includes businesses too, showing you things like Yelp reviews, Google Street View, or a menu for a restaurant where you’re thinking about making reservations. Moving forward, Volovitz says the company will be adding features that are more about encouraging “serendipity.” The app is available on Android phones (you can download it from Google Play here ). CallApp is developing a version for iPhones too, though Volovitz estimates that it will have 80 percent of the functionality of the Android version, due to “some technical issues.” Volovitz says the company isn’t monetizing the app (which is free) yet, but there are a number of possible business models, including affiliate fees. The company has raised $1 million in funding from undisclosed venture capital firms and angel investors. Disrupt Q&A Q : How does the iOS app differ? A: There are more limitations than in Android, like you have to use the built-in dialer rather than any dialer you want. Q : What are the viral hooks? A: If you use CallApp to share information with someone, they get an SMS message linking to the content and asking them to download the app. Q: Tell us about the technology. A: What we do is artificial intelligence, big data. The system knows how to link the right person to the right number, for example using location to narrow the search. Q: Why do other improved contact books fail, and why will you succeed? A: It’s all about the execution and the ambition. If you build an app on the client side, you only get a limited amount of information about contacts on your phone, versus CallApp’s crowdsourced, cloud-based approach.

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CallApp Uses Social Data To Build A Smarter Smartphone Contact Book