Archive for February, 2008
MIAMI–The way people have been talking about e-mail at the Future of Web Apps conference, you’d think it were a cell phone carrier or a domestic airline. It’s antiquated, it’s backwards, and everybody hates it.
Kevin Marks, a Google engineer and Technorati veteran, said in a talk about the company’s OpenSocial project and Social Graph APIs that e-mail is a “strange legacy idea.”
“E-mail has died away for a group of users. for the younger generation, they don’t use e-mail,” he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. “They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day…they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank.” Marks pointed to technologies like OpenID that promote the notion that online identities these days are defined by so much more than e-mail addresses–URLs and social-networking profiles, to name a few.
Marks wasn’t the only one expounding upon e-mail’s suckiness. Earlier in the day, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg inferred that overwhelming volumes of spam were making Web users explore options other than e-mail.
And when a lively group of Web 2.0 elite (including Mullenweg, Digg’s Kevin Rose, Pownce’s Leah Culver, and Flickr’s Cal Henderson) tackled a panel led by TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld that involved creating the concept for a new web app in 45 minutes, their end result was a product that would make e-mail less of a headache by making sure that users reply to everything. (It was done in 45 minutes, so the specifics weren’t totally ironed out.)
To top it all off, when I had a meeting with Marks on Friday morning, we used Twitter direct messaging rather than e-mail to confirm the time and location.
That was before Twitter suffered a downage when the start-up’s architect, Blaine Cook, was giving a talk later in the day at FOWA and his phone kept ringing with calls from the site’s server administrators. Twitter’s unreliability is well-known, and certainly calls into question the fact that all these messaging start-ups and social-networking features that are supposedly killing e-mail still might not be stable enough to overhaul the way we communicate.
The recent high-profile e-mail provider crashes, however, provide a counterpoint.
Seattle photographer Ryan Welsh snapped this photo on Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus.
(Credit: RyanWelshPhotography.com)
If you can count on geeks for one thing, it’s a creative approach to traditional things.
For example, l33tspeak as an alternative to regular language. Or LOLCats as an alternative to the usual annoying pictures of cats.
That’s why I wasn’t surprised to find, over at Laughing Squid, a post about a site that is now collecting images of geek graffiti.
This, if you’re wondering, is a small, but growing, trend in which geeks–or folks taking on geek tendencies–tag some public place with some kind of tech-inspired message.
For example, on the West Bank side of the Israeli security wall–the same side that artist Banksy added his masterpieces of visual political commentary–someone spray-painted the oh-so-familiar term “Ctrl+Alt+Delete.”
Other examples are somone’s having tagged the word “Linux” over a Microsoft Windows logo in a subway station ad, and someone stenciling the binary code for the Spanish word “amor,” or “love,” on a Barcelona wall. At least, that’s what the photographer says the binary meant. Not being a proficient binary reader, I suppose it’s possible it said “hate.” What do I know?
The site that’s pulling these all together only has 13 examples for now, but I bet there are countless others out there, just waiting to be discovered. So if you find any really good ones, please send them to me and I might just post it here at Geek Gestalt.
Dublin–Some of the papers are calling it the 1,200 Euro phone.
Apple will bring its iPhone to Ireland on March 14, but the price the company will charge for the phone–particularly when the monthly service contact is added in–is raising eyebrows.
The 8GB iPhone sells for 399 Euros (including value added taxes) while the 16GB version goes for 499 Euros. Plus, users need to sign up for service from cellular carrier O2 for 45 Euros a month for a minimum of 18 months. The 45 Euros per month fee, by the way, is the minimum. After 175 minutes of call time and 100 text messages, the price starts to climb.
Thus, the 8GB phone goes for 1209 Euros while the 16GB version goes for 1309. The phones also run on slower, older networks than many other phones.
To put the price in newly devalued U.S. dollars, the 8GB equals about $600 while the 16GB version goes for nearly $750. With service fees, the 8GB sells for $1813. In England, the 16GB iPhone, when only hardware is considered, sells for about $100 less than in Ireland.
While the price may be steep, there does seem to be a lot of interest swirling around. Chris Armstrong, CEO of PortoMedia, a Galway-based company coming out with a movie download services, loves his iTouch, which as the same keyboard. The same goes for Ray Nolan, CEO of Hostelworld, a portal for booking rooms in hostels. I saw a few other people with the iTouch at the Irish Software Association’s annual conference this week.
SOMS Technologies claims that its engine filter will extend the life of engine oil by 30,000 miles, enabling drivers to use 75 percent less oil and save hundreds of dollars in maintenance per car.
“You could say this would be terrible news for Jiffy Lube, but we don’t look at it that way,” said company CEO Miles Flamenbaum, who presented at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco Wednesday. “It would allow them to charge a little bit more, take more of a margin from oil change costs, and do it less often.”
The company, based in Bedford, N.Y., has raised $900,000 in angel funding and seeks another $4 million.
Flamenbaum aims for the company to snag a share of the $7 billion U.S. market for oil filter and engine treatment products while also helping to reduce the demand for petroleum and cutting pollution from waste engine oil, which contaminates groundwater when improperly disposed.
Engine oil passes through conventional filters in one swoop, but SOMS Technologies’ system diverts some of the oil flow from the main filter into a finer filter.
“It’s more passive,” Flamenbaum said. “We’re just taking a little bit of the oil and treating it separately, without affecting pressure in the engine.”
The filtered oil comes out as clean as or even cleaner than new engine oil, he added.
The filter would cost about $15 and work with any combustion engine, including those in gasoline, biofuel, biodiesel and hydrogen cars.
It uses off-the-shelf components as well as an “advanced material” the company won’t disclose. Unlike many filtration systems being developed in labs, such as for purifying water, however, it does not involve nanotechnology.
There are 470 million filter changes each year in the United States, and 1.6 billion around the world, according to the company.
Flamenbaum sees the filter fitting into a growing green trend in automotive services. For instance, in November AAMCO launched its “Eco-Green” certification program to promote alternative fuels and reduce emissions at service centers.
Within a month, Green Earth Technologies’ motor oil made from animal fats instead of petroleum will hit the shelves of big box stores, according to its CEO Jeff Marshall.
In April SOMS Technologies’ filters will be tested in some 30 New York City taxicabs, followed by 20 school buses in upstate New York. SOMS Technologies plans to target such fleets first, with long-term sights on selling its filters in automotive service stores and big box retailers.
Flamenbaum sees a huge opportunity in developing countries where there’s little infrastructure for waste oil recycling.
“I was in China last week and literally saw somebody draining oil and dumping it on the ground,” Flamenbaum said. “If that guy was doing it there are probably another million like him out there.”
The company is working on agreements to distribute the product in China, as well as with the United States Postal Service.
“We have excellent timing,” Flamenbaum said. “There has been very little advancement in filter technology. Since the spin-on oil filter was invented in 1953, the biggest innovation is the pleated filter from the round filter to increase the surface area.”
SOMS stands for spin-on microfilter system.
The U.S. military says it has been steadily increasing its inventory of unmanned flying machines, such as the small, hand-launched Raven model seen here. It can be equipped with cameras that beam back views from above.
(Credit: U.S. Army/Staff Sgt. Raymond Piper)
WASHINGTON–The controversial surge in U.S. bodies to Iraq has dominated headlines in recent months, but the “unsung, unknown hero” isn’t even human.
Or at least that’s the assessment of Col. Donald Hazelwood, who runs the U.S. Army’s unmanned aerial systems project office.
Speaking Friday at a confab here hosted by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, Hazelwood said daily use of drones has “forever changed” the way soldiers see what’s around corners, detect improvised explosive devices, and fend off enemies in Baghdad and beyond.
“It doesn’t get any better that that, when soldiers tell you it’s easy to operate, it’s easy to train on, and it’s saving lives,” Hazelwood said.
Just before the surge, the U.S. Army bumped up the number of unmanned aircraft in those skies by 35 percent, Hazelwood said.
UAV use, of course, spans all of the military branches and continues to increase, officials said Friday. Overall, the Pentagon’s inventory of unmanned aerial systems has leapt from about 200 in 2002 to nearly 6,000 in 2008, said Dyke Weatherington, who oversees an unmanned systems wing of the U.S. Department of Defense. For the 2008 fiscal year, the Defense Department has a $15 billion budget just for unmanned systems, and a supplemental $500 million from Congress may also be on the way.
Beyond combat uses, unmanned vehicles are also being “used to give life,” said Jason Haines, a 19-year military veteran who has served as a lieutenant commander in Iraq.
On one hand, use of the drones “kept me and my men alive, that’s for sure,” he told conference attendees. “They kept us ahead of the game. There were no surprises to us.”
Testing has begun on a new, high-endurance, weapon-toting UAV called the Sky Warrior, which is built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. The Army expects to begin using it next year.
(Credit: U.S. Army)
On the other hand, UAVs flying high above dangerous territories are also relaying tactical information that can help protect civilians, such as humanitarian assistance crews on the ground delivering relief supplies, Haines said. The former firefighter and paramedic said he also saw promise for use of UAVs by local police and fire crews and disaster relief crews in, say, hurricane-wrecked zones. Weather watchers also say the unmanned craft can be used to fly into hurricanes to take readings in place of the people-toting aircraft that now pull that duty.
As fond as the U.S. military is of touting the growing role unmanned vehicles play in battle, officials said some dramatic changes in the technology remain necessary.
One challenge is getting the various different breeds of robot to share data with one another. Right now, for instance, a drone flying in the sky may be able to beam data to computers at a command center, but it can’t necessarily integrate data with, say, a ground-based robot.
Greater interoperability would permit soldiers to gather intelligence more easily from a number of different perspectives, rather than relying on one potentially limited source, said the Defense Department’s Weatherington. It would also foster more efficient operations in the long run–after all, cost, airspace, and radio spectrum constraints mean the military can afford to add only so many new vehicles over time.
Another tough issue is making sure members of the rapidly multiplying drone population don’t collide with one other–and with manned aircraft. Hazelwood said he was optimistic about the prospects for more military UAVs sharing airspace above the United States. The Army has already brought down its accident rates by 60 percent each year for the last three years, he said, so at that rate, “we ought to be able to fly in national airspace and convince the American public by 2012.”
WASHINGTON–For decades, U.S. government scientists have sliced specially equipped planes through hurricanes and other severe weather on a quest for crucial data to fuel weather forecasts. But in the future, drones are expected to do more and more of that work.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wants to tap more and more unmanned planes like this Aerosonde model, seen here during a 2005 demo in Florida, to gather data from severe storms in ways that manned vehicles can’t.
(Credit: NASA)
In the coming years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration envisions acquiring and leasing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), a senior official said Friday at a conference here put on by the Association for Unmanned Vehicles International. They’ll be tasked with monitoring everything from weather conditions and fires to ice melting in the Arctic and endangered marine mammals near Hawaii.
“We think the time has come,” said Scott Ryder, chief of staff for the NOAA’s unmanned systems division. “We’re going to do it with this technology, and we’re on our way.”
UAVs could prove a boon to NOAA’s operations because traditional hurricane-hunting mission using manned WP-3D Orion or Gulfstream-IV jet aircrafts face numerous limitations, Ryder said.
For one thing, they can’t descend too low in the storm because high winds can kick salt water up into the engines, causing damage and potentially endangering flight crews, although Ryder said fortunately no lives have been lost as a result of such accidents yet. Hurricane hunting aircraft also aren’t as adept at predicting storms that are more than 72 hours away, which is a problem, since the Federal Emergency Management Agency would like to be able to make evacuation calls 96 hours in advance, Ryder said.
By contrast, a high-endurance UAV can remain in the eye of a storm for several hours and stay at altitudes as low as 80 meters, about 50 percent lower than a traditional hurricane-hunter’s minimum altitude range.
Last November, NOAA sent an Aerosonde UAV into Hurricane Noel for 17 hours and 27 minutes collected 7.5 hours worth of data from the storm’s core. A
For now, the UAV program is in its infancy, but some other projects have already begun in “testbeds” in the Arctic, Pacific, and Gulf of Mexico regions, Ryder said.
Compared with the Defense Department’s $15 billion budget for unmanned systems this year, NOAA’s share of the pie is a miniscule $3 million. But the agency has requested double that for next year, and Ryder said he expects spending to swell to $25 to 30 million two or three years from now. (Ryder, for his part, did concede that as a political appointee, he most likely won’t be around at that point.)
Beyond hurricane research, NOAA also plans to use UAVs to fill “critical gaps” in its existing satellite coverage, Ryder said. For example, it’s not always possible to get complete climate information over the Pacific Ocean using satellites alone, he said.
Another potential use is monitoring so-called “atmospheric rivers,” which can caused flooding rains NOAA found contributed to a massive mudslides in southern California in 2005. It also plans to work with NASA during the next few years to conduct missions in the Arctic and Antarctic to gather data about climate change.
More headbutting between musicians and music labels; an inside look at the Wintel alliance, and the “MythBusters” come to life.
SAN FRANCISCO — Wikileaks.org may get its domain name back sooner than later.
A federal judge here has spent 90 minutes so hearing arguments from a raft of attorneys — two representing a Swiss bank who pulled the plug on the site, and about 10 who are trying to keep the site online — and has not yet reached a decision. Wikileaks is a whistleblowing site that focuses on posting leaked documents.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, who called a brief recess around 11:40 am PT, indicated he’s inclined to revisit his order from earlier this month that effectively pulled the plug on the domain name.
“The court has the obligation to get it right,” White told attorneys for Bank Julius Baer, or BJB. “I took an obligation to uphold the Constitution. The court has its own obligation to raise these issues. Contrary to what you say, my obligation is to look down the road and see where this thing is going.”
From the bank’s perspective, it sued Wikileaks in a federal court in California because the registrar, Dynadot, is located here. (Wikileaks alleges that the documents in question show the bank supports “ultra-rich’s (sic) offshore tax avoidance, tax evasion, asset hiding and money laundering.”)
But a host of free speech groups, including Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the ACLU, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are requesting to intervene in the case on behalf of Wikileaks.
They’ve thrown down a series of legal land mines against BJB, including that Wikileaks can’t be sued in a U.S. court by a foreign company because it consists of foreigners; that Section 230 of the Communications Decency act prevents any action against Dynadot; that the First Amendment prohibits an overly broad attack against a Web site just to delete a subset of pages; that Dynadot cannot refuse to transfer the domain name to another registrar; and so on.
Some of those filings amount to an implicit criticism of White, who granted the allegedly First-Amendment-problematic order in the first place. So the first thing White did on Friday was defend himself — more to the half-dozen reporters in the back of the room than to the attorneys.
He said: “The parties need to understand and those in this courtroom need to understand the status of this case. This is a case in which we had a (dispute) with named parties and the parties were duly served. One of which properly responded and came to this court with a proposed settlement in this lawsuit… Nobody filed any timely responses to the court’s order.”
One attorney for BJB said that there are no First Amendment problems, invoking a U.S. Supreme Court precedent dealing with an intercepted conversation played by a radio station, because: “We allege, your honor, that Wikileaks has actively solicited the theft of private information… they are participants in the illegality.”
BJB also said: “We’re talking about private banking inforamtion, account numbers, personal numbers ilke Social Security numbers… all this is private information that’s not newsworthy… None of the publishers here today would want their own banking information posted on the Internet.”
The judge replied: “Let me play devil’s advocate here. Is it newsworthy if some prominent citizen is… evading taxes, laundering funds? Wouldn’t that be something in the public interest?”
The hearing will resume around noon PT. We’ll have an update in the early afternoon.
MIAMI–Joseph Smarr, chief systems architect at Plaxo, has become somewhat of an icon of social media’s future. An ardent supporter of open standards, Smarr is arguably one of the biggest proponents of Google’s OpenSocial who can’t officially claim to be a Googler. So it’s fitting that Smarr has played a prominent role at the Future of Web Apps conference; CNET News.com had a chance to catch up with him on Thursday and find out some more about what “open” really means and what’s next at Plaxo.
Plaxo was the first major social site to implement Google’s OpenSocial. How has that been going?
Smarr: OpenSocial itself is still kind of a work in progress… (Critics) said OpenSocial was announced and then, “There’s nothing there, what happened?” But I think it’s important to remember that the timing had more to do with the fact that they (Google) saw all these companies saying, “Oh, we need our own platform” and there was all this fragmentation. That message of saying, “Wait a minute, guys, you don’t all have to do your own thing, why don’t we get together and do something together?” You sort of had to say that soon enough that it wasn’t too late.
When you talk to developers, what are the most frequent questions you get about OpenSocial?
Smarr: I think a lot of them are very interested in the sort of viral aspect of it because a lot of developers are doing this stuff because they really want to get in front of a lot of eyeballs…Facebook imposes all these limitations about how many invitations you can send out, who you can invite, who can see the stuff. They’re obviously doing that to prevent abusive use of the stuff, but it also potentially curtails legitimate use of it as well.
For example, a site like LinkedIn or Plaxo which caters in general to a more professional demographic, less kids, that sort of thing, there might be less of everyone wanting to throw sheep at each other and that kind of thing. You might be able to give people a little more rope to broadcast things, to show each other. I think everyone hopes through OpenSocial that they can encourage the right kind of sharing.
So would you let people throw sheep at each other on Plaxo?
Smarr: It’s unclear. But we do want Plaxo to be genuinely useful and about staying in touch between real people. I think there’s lots of things we could’ve done.
How has Plaxo evolved since you’ve been there?
Smarr: Well, I was their first employee. I’ve been there six years. When I joined, we were still being incubated out of Sequoia (Capital)’s offices while they were trying to close the first round of funding…it’s been a fascinating ride.
So what’s the transition been like from focusing on straight-up contact management to growing and evolving as the Web has become more social?
Smarr: The world really changed around us. If you think back to 2002, when we conceived of and launched Plaxo, there was no social networking, there was no Friendster, there was no Flickr. This notion of living your life online didn’t really exist. So I think in a way the business plan was oddly prescient. It was like, there needs to be this software that lives in a cloud that helps you stay in touch with people even though you’re all changing jobs and using different tools. It wasn’t called social networking, but it was (the same) pinpoint.
Facebook’s obviously having some issues these days with the “app spam” controversy. That’s sort of parallel to what Plaxo had some problems with early on. Would you say that they could learn a lesson from what you guys experienced?
Smarr: I wouldn’t say that that’s the case. I think the high-level lesson is there’s always this tension in start-ups between making everything very one-at-a-time opt-in but then having a hard time to actually get growth going, and trying to get things accelerated and do the right thing for your users but in a way that actually helps things take off. We’ve certainly learned over time about when it’s okay to go a little faster and when you have to sort of pull back.
Do you think that people would have the same “acquaintance spam” problems with Plaxo if it had emerged now rather than circa 2003?
Smarr: The stuff that has happened since is so much more egregious than anything we ever did. We were one of these victims of being one of the first people to do it right, and people weren’t used to it. So many of the social networks now will like, pull in your address book and just e-mail everybody without telling you, and use these very misleading tactics, and we never were trying to be shifty. I sort of marvel at what’s gone on since then…how many e-mail notifications have you gotten from Facebook or Twitter? If you actually look at the volume, just because of how many people use these things, it’s just huge amounts of e-mail.
Bacn!
Smarr: Exactly, right, bacn. And that’s what we think is one of the real opportunities with the stuff we’re doing now with trying to make an open social Web where everyone can communicate. Why does everyone ask me to confirm that I’m your friend as though I’ve never used any other site in my life? It’s only because they don’t talk to each other, the users aren’t empowered to take the connections they made in one place and use them in another place.
We’ve got all these initiatives and coalitions and standards that are starting to emerge. There’s OpenID, DataPortability, OpenSocial, and the like. You’re getting all these different standards. Are they going to run into compatibility problems?
Smarr: I think the good news there is that because most of these are these community-driven efforts, there are all these people who are talking to each other all the time. All these people who started OpenID and OAuth and OpenSocial and DataPortability, they all started for different reasons, and yet they’re all converging into this shared vision of a user-centric online identity kind of thing, and that’s one of the proof points in my mind why this is really the right way to go, why we can tell it’s going to win. The pieces just fit together, not because they were designed to, but because they all sort of have got the same vision…(it’s) just like a perfect storm. They’re all happening at the same time, and they’re all filling in the right pieces. It’s really cool.
How often are you faced with privacy concerns? Silicon Valley might be thrilled about having a single identity online, but some people might find that a bit daunting, frightening even.
Smarr: Privacy is at the center of everything we talk about. It’s not just about people seeing stuff you didn’t want them to see, it’s also about maintaining the right level of professionalism and signal-to-noise ratio. So it’s kind of like, people that I’m doing technical stuff with here and then they’re putting up photos of their kids. It’s not that they don’t mind me seeing a picture of their kids, but that’s not the relationship I have with them.
But if people have to curate their online identities like that, couldn’t that lead to more fragmentation because people are seeing different faces of each other?
Smarr: The problem is, right now, you can’t have it either way. Right now it’s fragmented whether you want it to be or not. A lot of these technologies are going to let you sort of consolidate your online identity. Now it’s either public or it’s private, but this is going to allow you to share different things with different people. I think it’s going to work really well. It’s certainly something users are going to have to learn how to deal with, but users have to learn how to deal with a lot of stuff online. But it’s fundamentally what users want.
Has there been any fallout over the whole controversy that took over blog chatter earlier this year when Robert Scoble was testing a Plaxo script on Facebook and got his Facebook account banned?
Smarr: The main takeaway from that was that as much as people want control over their data and the ability to make it portable, there still are some legitimate debates to be had about, say, if I’m sharing info with you in one context. How much should I be in the loop when you take it into another context? We thought it was a more cut-and-dry issue. I think ultimately you still want to be able to take people you’ve met in one place and put them in another place, so I don’t think there’s anything too crazy going on there, and we’re trying to do the same thing. But it’s still interesting how that all works. In the physical world, if you give me your business card, you wouldn’t tell me “Oh, you can put it in Outlook, but don’t you dare put it in Lotus Notes.”
The meta-goal of a lot of what we were doing was to raise awareness and get people talking about these sorts of issues. That, I’d say, was a resounding success.
Wait, so did you know that Scoble would get banned from Facebook?
Smarr: No, that didn’t play out at all the way we had originally intended. Scoble was being an early alpha tester of this feature since he’s got 5,000 friends on Facebook and that’s sort of a good “stress tester.”
Yup, and everyone knows he’s got 5,000 friends.
Smarr: And he’s obviously been very much a vocal supporter of the kind of stuff we’re working on. But then it triggered some rate limit on Facebook and got his account shut down, and then he blogged about it…when we woke up (the next day) we were kind of in damage control mode all day. I think if we’d gotten a chance to tell the story the way we wanted to, people would’ve seen that there’s sort of less than meets the eye here, that this is a useful and genuinely good and not privacy-scary sort of thing. But we certainly did intend it to be a conversation starter, but we were also actually trying to build a useful feature for our users. It’s one of our most-requested features.
Speaking of people with a lot of contacts, there’s been a lot of press about how Bill Gates has stopped using Facebook and now he’s signed on to LinkedIn. Does he use Plaxo?
Smarr: I actually don’t know. We don’t spy on our users. It’s not like Facebook where anybody can access anybody’s user records. We do have, I think, a lot of prominent people who use Plaxo, because we get anonymous statistical samples within Plaxo (about job title). “CEO” and “president” and “executive” and that kind of thing are at the top. So you might think of contact management as something that people at high levels would delegate to admins or something like that, but it’s clearly like, being successful has a lot to do with really staying in touch and knowing people, right, so it’s something that these people all sort of do themselves.
So how could Bill Gates use it?
Smarr: Bill Gates is such a special example it’s hard to know exactly, but I think he, just like anybody else, meets all these people and wants to see what they’re doing, it’s a really hard problem to stay in touch with all of the online content in particular that people are doing. In particular, if he had friends or colleagues or family he wanted to stay in touch with, I’m sure even he has aggregation problems. People are putting up photos on Flickr or Picasa or Microsoft or whatever it is, and just being able to say, you know, “Ray Ozzie posted vacation photos” would be really useful.
Recently there were some rumors that you guys had gotten bought. Where did that all come from?
Smarr: It’s Silicon Valley, I don’t know, it’s a very gossipy town and especially whenever they smell money in the water, everybody kind of goes crazy.
Invent a theoretical company who would be your dream buyer.
Smarr: I don’t think we need to be bought by anybody. I take it as a testament to the fact that what we’re doing is useful and relevant that all these people were talking about, “oh, these guys should be buying Plaxo.” Nobody was saying “That’s stupid, they’re not doing anything useful.” It’s kind of like reading your own obituary in a way.
What are we going to see coming up? Is the focus now going to be on getting OpenSocial in there, getting the developers on board?
Smarr: That’s one piece of it. Actually, the DataPortability piece is really what I think the future is for us. Pulse is doing great in its own right, but we really see the evolution of that. We really think Plaxo’s going to become a kind of dashboard for the social web where you sort of help manage and maintain relationships across all these different sites, see all the activity there. There’s just so much to do there. It’s so fragmented right now and most users aren’t just using any of it right now because it’s so hard to have to create your profile and do everything from scratch and stay in touch and all that. The fact that we can live inside the tools that you use every day, on your phone, on Outlook, all these websites, means that I think we can take all these people who are using that daily pattern and show them this whole world of content. That’s got such legs…It feels like we’re on the cusp of a whole new era of the web.
If you had to give one piece of advice to Mark Zuckerberg, what would it be?
Smarr: Open is good for business. I don’t think Facebook has anything to fear from being closed down to user control of data. I think they get that. A lot of them really do believe in openness and transparency, they just have to get there in stages. Ultimately I think they’ll be a great beneficiary of this.
Video-sharing site Veoh, which is backed by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, is rumored to be looking for $40 million in new investments, according to Silicon Alley Insider. The company has hired Bear Stearns to raise the funds, which would give Veoh a valuation of $150 million, according to the report.
If it raises the cash, Veoh would have a war chest of more than $80 million to compete with video rivals YouTube and Joost, among others. Its investors include Goldman Sachs, Spark Capital, and Shelter Capital Partners. Other backers include Tom Freston and Jonathan Dolgen, former executives at Viacom, a content partner of Veoh.
A Veoh representative declined to comment.
