“Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to see the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not as far-fetched as it may seem.”
Thus begins this video of a 1981 KRON report predicting the rise of news reporting on the internet.
You need to see this, it’s pure gold.
My favorite quotes:
David Cole (S.F. Examiner): “This is an experiment. We’re trying to figure out what it’s going to mean to us, as editors and reporters and what it means to the home user. And we’re not in it to make money, we’re probably not going to lose a lot but we aren’t going to make much either.”
KRON reporter: “This is only the first step in newspapers by computers. Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer, but that’s a few years off.”
Adobe has announced that they’ve recorded 100 million successful installations of Adobe AIR, the company’s cross-platform runtime environment for RIAs, at the same time boasting that the newest version of Adobe Flash Player (10) was installed on over half of computers worldwide in just the first two months of its release.
The company made the announcement at the Adobe MAX Japan event, notably less than one year after the official release of Adobe AIR.
Adobe says the 100 million mark for Adobe AIR installs is a minimum for the total install base of the AIR runtime (read: they think it’s actually more than that) since they only count the ones that are deemed 100% successful (i.e. they can be confirmed by code running after the installation). As for developers building Web applications using the Adobe Flash Platform, the company claims that in the last 12 months there have been over 1 million downloads of the AIR software development kit (SDK), open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex Builder. → Read More
Normally I wouldn’t write about this. I’d keep my head down, hoping that someone else would say what I might. Many of the people cited in Rafe Needleman’s post are friends, professional colleagues, and actors in the Web 2.0 comedy. But this stuff isn’t funny, trading in the politics of personal destruction is not professional, and letting this slide is not an act of friendship. Writing or producing or performing for a living opens us up to the slings and arrows of those who feel helpless, unrepresented, or disrespected. The way the Internet works, anonymity is a shield to hide behind. The only thing worse than that anonymity is the fix for it: digital numbers tatooed on every arm. As we found out in the last administration, destroying our human rights to torture the potentially innocent backfires when we all are presumed guilty. If anonymity is worth the cost, we have to find some other ways to keep the discourse at what my father used to call a low howl. As a father of two children (15 and 8) my responsibility is to leave them with a sense of what is the right thing to do. My father has been dead for 34 years, but I can conjure up at any moment what he might think about any action I’ve ever taken. Of course, I’m really just mapping my sense of what’s right on top of what he taught me to honor. The actions of the haters in the virtual world may be excused as a function of the distancing of technology, but I think that’s just blaming the tools — guns don’t kill, bullets do. We all know better than to revel in the tyranny of the whisper, the flexing of the innuendo, the bullying of the vulnerable. But as parents, we fail when we let the hatred pass as just another day’s work, a kind of wink and a nod that excuses the drumbeat of thoughtless banter and real fear slipped in along with the childish and class cut-upping. Do we really have to let this get as far as death threats before we realize how seriously off the rails we are? It shouldn’t be this way, but it is. And since it is, it’s time for a trip to the principal’s office, not for the kids but for us parents. The kids don’t know better, but we → Read More
Glam Media has acquired AdaptiveAds, a startup based in Mumbai, India that serves display ads targetable by the demographic characteristics brand advertisers understand (such as “Women 24-40, Fashionista, Beauty”). It calls its contextual display ads BrandWords. They will now be called Glam AdaptAds.
The purchase price was not disclosed, but AdaptiveAd was shopping around a series B round with a valuation in the $25 million to $40 million range when Glam entered the picture and snapped them up. The three-year old company raised $2 million in late 2007, and then another $1.5 million ina series A, for a total of $3.5 million. Draper Fisher Jurvetson is an investor in both AdaptiveAds and Glam Media. → Read More
Google ended the year with 63.5 percent market share of all search queries performed in the U.S., estimates comScore. And that market share has inched up steadily from 58.5 percent in January, 2008. But the market share numbers mask the absolute growth in searches and how Google has ben able to Gobble up all of that growth.
The chart above tells a clearer story. It comes out of the comScore 2008 Digital Year In Review, and shows the share of raw number of search queries in the U.S captured by the five major search engines. All the lines are pretty flat, except Google’s (the purple one). Of the 137 billion estimated total searches performed in the U.S. last year, 85 billion were done on Google.
What’s even more impressive is that nearly 90 percent of all the growth in search volume was also captured by Google. Most of that growth came from increasing the number of searches per person, rather than bringing more people to Google. → Read More
Of the top 100 sites on the Web, which ones grew the fastest in 2008? In a report it is preparing to release tomorrow, The comScore 2008 Digital Year In Review (which you can sign up for here), comScore ranks the 20 fastest-growing Web properties. These are out of the largest 100 sites overall. They are shown below, as measured by growth in unique visitors. (Interestingly, in a separate list of the ten largest sites, only eBay showed a decline from 2007).
Most of the big gains among the fastest growers came because acquisitions (CBS acquiring Cnet, Everyday Health acquiring Revolution Health, JPMorgan Chase acquiring Washington Mutual) or traffic and business partnerships (Break Media, Glam Media, and Everyday Health with Drugstore.com).
If you strip out all of those, which denoted by asterisks, you get the sites that grew organically, including Infospace, Wordpress, Weatherbug, Answers.com Sites, Facebook, Hearst Digital Media, and Mozilla. Here is the full list by rank and annual growth rate (same as the first chart below) → Read More
VirtuOz, a company that develops virtual support agents, has closed a $11.4 million Series B funding round led by Mohr Davidow Ventures, with Galileo Partners and Eric Hahn with Inventures Group also participating. The company’s “Virtual Agents” are basically intelligent chat bots that can walk users though sales, help, and support questions automatically. Virtual Agents generally appear as chat avatars (you can see one below), and are apparently so realistic that the company says that 69% of customers end their conversation with a “Goodbye”.
Avatars are continuously tweaked for each company, offering regular status reports that let administrators know how effective they are. Agents run through a complex series of algorithms meant to help with their designated objective, and can ask customers for further information to build up a gradually growing knowledge of each customer’s problem as it tries to reach a solution (it’s not just a series of if/then statements). Agents are also capable of simultaneously handling thousands of customer support issues at the same time. The company’s software has already been deployed by a number of major sites, including PayPal, Chegg, and eBay (which claims that 88% of support questions were resolved instantly by their VirtuOz agents). → Read More
It’s true what they say: Little kids love the BlackBerry. Imagine the message you’re sending to your kids by having your own big boy BlackBerry glued to your face all the time. They want to be like mommy and daddy and mommy and daddy have two kids and two BlackBerries, which equals a family of six. Naturally, your little ones want their own QWERTY-enhanced handhelds. → Read More
As I said on the podcast earlier this afternoon, the U.S. military has retrieved that MP3 player that was loaded with sensitive information. The guy who bought the player made out pretty well: the U.S. embassy there gave him a shiny, new MP3 player in exchange for the old one. Best $10 he’s ever spent? Could be. → Read More
It’s really more half-a-Triscuit-sized. This little 1.2″x0.7″ $20 board is a good solution for your home projects that require a little computation but not a lot of space. Say you want to put a little RFID detector in your door that unlocks it when you come near. Don’t need a big hard drive-sized package nailed to the door; with a Teensy you could practically embed the system in the doorknob. → Read More
Scrapblog, a startup that lets you build rich Flash-based online scrapbooks, has closed a $4 million funding round led by Disney’s Steamboat Ventures and Longworth Venture Partners. The round brings Scrapblog’s total funding to $7.5 million.
Scrapblog offers an online editor that allows users to decorate their scrapbook with text, images, colorful themes, and other embellishments, which can then be shared on the web or printed out. The company was first introduced back in 2006, briefly went offline, and relaunched in March 2007. Now it has grown to nearly 2 million registered users who have created over 4 million scrapblog pages. The site has partnerships with major media sites including Disney, Discovery, Photobucket, and ABC. → Read More
You guys read about gadgets all day, right? Some of you probably have great ideas for products you’d like to see that haven’t been invented yet. If you share those ideas with Hammacher Schlemmer you could win a minimum of $2,500 plus 20 years worth of a percentage of every product sold through the catalog. → Read More
I’ve always been a fan of techno but I’ve always only played folk guitar. What’s a fella to do? You go get the Korg Kaossilator, that’s what.
This amazing little box, $199 on ThinkGeek, is a tiny sequencer/synth that is considerably smaller than the average guitar tuner. It has 100 audio presets which are basically generated sounds synthesized using an X/Y touchpad. For example, for synthesized wind instruments you can change the pitch and loudness by pressing on different parts of the touchpad. For drums you hit different quadrants for different instruments – tom, high hat, etc. → Read More
Google announced today that it will give end users the tools to figure out whether internet service providers are interfering with their broadband connections by blocking or “throttling” certain applications.
In a move that will undoubtedly ignite the issue of network neutrality, the company has partnered with the New America Foundation and Planet Labs to further devlop Measurement Labs, an open-source platform that researchers can use to find out information about broadband connections. → Read More
Yesterday, we took a look at the Space Shuttle’s cockpit with it’s almost vintage look. Today, we have a look at the first privately funded sub-orbital vehicle’s cockpit. It looks a tad different. In fact, I dare say you could count all the buttons and switches on two hands within SpaceShipOne’s interior. Got to love the off-the-shelf GPS mounted above the main screen too. Classic. → Read More
This is turning out to become quite the trend.
Yesterday, we reported that the MindMaker iPhone application was acquired, and today we learn that Coupons Inc has acquired one of the most popular lifestyle programs for the iPhone / iPod Touch, Grocery iQ (link to iTunes App Store).
Grocery iQ is a neat grocery shopping application published by Free State Labs that comes preloaded with a database over 130,000 items commonly found in supermarkets across the U.S., enabling users to search them and organize personal shopping lists by store, aisle, buying history, favorites, as well as customizing item sizes. → Read More
Intacct just launched the Winter 2009 edition of their SaaS based financial accounting system. Major highlights include a Global Consolidations product for real-time financial reports across international boundaries, integration with QuickArrow for managing professional services teams, and a plethora of partnerships with other SaaS providers. In some ways, this isn’t big news–just the latest iteration of a SaaS product. But corporate accounting has seen little innovation in the last two decades. (Barring experimentation with throughput accounting.) It may be the heartbeat of an enterprise, but it’s also typified by boring legislation, non-user-friendly ERP addons, and infrequent software upgrades. So I asked the Intacct folks how using the SaaS paradigm changes things: Currently, financial reports happen on a monthly or quarterly timeline. For international companies, gathering this data is further complicated by exchange rates and varied government regulations. By providing a SaaS back-end, we provide real-time financial dashboards–even across national boundaries and differing on-premise accounting solutions. We’re trying to change the clunky enterprise software model. SAP’s integration of services is hugely attractive to IT, but a pain for users. By using SaaS, we can seamlessly partner with other cloud services–and our average client is now using five SaaS products. Lastly, we’ve changed the incentive model for resellers. The majority of accounting software sales comes through the reseller channel. By giving resellers a portion of our subscription fees, they’re incentivized to keep clients happy with better on-premise support–without costing the client more. The reseller channel currently accounts for 50% of our new business, up from 20% last year. We project that to grow to 80% very shortly. CrunchBase Information Intacct Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Since Apple is now defending its multi-touch patents with the ferocity of an enraged mother mongoose, developers have one more reason to pursue non-multi-touch solutions for touchable user interfaces. It was always a good idea, since not every touchscreen is capable of, or good at multi-touch (G1 anyone?), and seeing single-input touchscreens get the kind of intuitive interfaces they deserve is satisfying.
Check out this little demo of a “wax on, wax off” control system that I hope to start seeing around. → Read More
