Path, Google+ And Jack Dorsey At The 2011 Crunchies: Comebacks Win

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The world loves to celebrate comebacks from failure, but the Crunchies and the companies it features are all so new that the show hasn’t done much of that. That changed last night at the 2011 Crunchies, with Jack Dorsey, Path and Google+ winning big.

Path’s story hits home the most for me.

My first tech blog post ever, back in early 2007 at VentureBeat, was about the rise of the Facebook. It featured an interview with Path founder Dave Morin, who at the time was leading the company’s barely launched developer platform. Soon afterward, Facebook exploded, I managed to get a full-time job as a tech blogger… and within a couple years, as is the way of things here in Silicon Valley, Dave and I moved on to new jobs.

Then, I watched Path launch as a photo-focused app last year… and struggle to meet high expectations.

When Dave got in touch right after I joined TechCrunch about covering the pending launch of Path 2.0, I excused myself by telling him that other writers who had been following Path more closely were better suited for the job. But we both knew I was also being a skeptic, unlike the first time we talked.

Path 2.0, however, turns out to be awesome. The mobile app perfectly combines photos, check-ins, status updates, and other key elements of top social services in an intimate setting, in a way that displaces Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and other leading social services today. I’ve been kicking myself about not covering the relaunch ever since, but that’s what I get for not believing. It very much deserved the Best Design award.

Google Plus is the search engine’s latest of several social efforts over the years, but the first one that looks anything like a Facebook contender. Orkut turned out to be a sideshow, the various Friend Connect and OpenSocial platform/standard attempts never really hit it big with developers, and Google Buzz sputtered when the company tried to force it into Gmail in 2010. The guys who got on stage last night had been a part of at least some of the previous launches, so it was vindications all around.

The one I know best is Joseph Smarr, who I’ve covered over the years as he worked through his former employer, Plaxo, to build open standards for social sharing. Since moving to Google, he’s been the mastermind behind private lists feature Circles and other key social parts of Plus, that have helped make it a uniquely good fit for what many social network users have wanted. After a decade of work building social products, he earned the Best Social Application the hard way.

Jack Dorsey has perhaps gone through the toughest redemption process of all. Having created Twitter in 2006, he left in 2008 as the service struggled to: maintain uptime, roll out new products, and make money. But then he launched payment company Square, which has become a key new way for all sorts of small businesses to take credit card payments. And then, he came back to help lead Twitter last March, while staying on at Square. Since then, Twitter has rolled out a series of product changes that helped make it more mainstream, and in the second part of last year it began growing faster than it ever has before. Even its revenue plans are looking more promising. He got on stage twice last night, once for the social impact that Twitter has made as a key way that people share information around the world, and again because of the job he’s doing leading product development at the companies he founded.

The best victories are the ones you have to fight for the hardest.

More TechCrunch

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

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Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google gets serious about AI-generated video at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google reveals plans for upgrading AI in the real world through Gemini Live at Google I/O 2024

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade

At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .

Google’s generative AI can now analyze hours of video

The AI upgrade will make finding the right content more intuitive and less of a manual search process.

Google Photos introduces an AI search feature, ‘Ask Photos’

Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially…

Apple touts stopping $1.8B in App Store fraud last year in latest pitch to developers

Online travel agency Expedia is testing an AI assistant that bolsters features like search, itinerary building, trip planning, and real-time travel updates.

Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning

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The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

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Facebook once had big ambitions to be a major player in enterprise communication and productivity, but today the social network’s parent company Meta will be closing a very significant chapter…

Meta is shutting down Workplace, its enterprise communications business

The Oversight Board has overturned Meta’s decision to take down a documentary revealing the identities of child abuse victims in Pakistan.

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