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Amazon Web Services Not Just for Early Adopters

Brigid Gaffikin — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 23:54:28 +0000

Amazon Web Services’ platform is increasingly gaining popularity beyond Web 2.0 and video companies. Case in point is the Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge, whose seven finalists are a diverse group of companies, among them Knewton, which provides live online educational testing prep services; remote health record management software firm MedCommons; Pixily, which digitizes paper documents and stores them for later retrieval; and Zephyr, an enterprise software testing services firm. The range represented by these startups is in sharp contrast to last year, when the challenge was dominated by early adopters of AWS. And it’s a good sign for Amazon, offering proof that its vision of cloud computing has started to spread beyond the cozy and sometimes narcissistic confines of Silicon Valley.

The winner of last year’s inaugural competition was web video company Ooyala, an entrant in the busy video platform space. This year’s grand prize winner, to be announced in November, will get $50,000 in cash, $50,000 worth of AWS services and mentoring from an AWS executive — and may even snare an investment offer from the company itself.

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Google: Money for Nothing and Your Spectrum for Free

Brigid Gaffikin — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:18:25 +0000

Google may be getting all the advantages of the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to start opening up more radio spectrum without even having to bid big at an expensive spectrum auction. The FCC’s decision earlier this week to open up white space spectrum, the slivers of bandwidth between what’s being made available for the coming digital television stations, could eventually net the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant as much as $5 billion more a year. Google President and Co-founder Larry Page said today at the Wireless Communications Alliance conference in San Jose., Calif., that using those so-called white spaces for broadband could lead to 20 percent to 30 percent more revenue — which means Google’s vocal support of spectrum openness is already looking like money in the bank. The company pulled in revenue of $16.6 billion in the last financial year.

Google has been frank about why it wants better public access to broadband, but Page made the case again. If it’s easier for people to search the web, he said, “we’d make a lot more money without changing anything about what we do as a business.”

During both an on-stage tete-a-tete with FCC chair Kevin Martin and a press conference afterwards, both men agreed there’s a general trend in industry, and even among regulators, to address ways to bring cheap and widely available broadband to as many people as possible. Verizon, for example, has to stick by FCC conditions about allowing gadgets other than its phones to operate on its network when it comes to its recently acquired 700 MHz-band win. But the company would probably extend those conditions to other bandwidths it owns, Martin said.

In terms of devices, Page argued that making $5 Wi-Fi radio chips that talk on all bands and protocols would help the push for openness. “We should do that. And we probably can,” he said. That also means regulators need to look more closely at where current spectrum policy is outdated, he added.

Image courtesy of Paul Kapustka.

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On the Web, Obama Is Hot

Brigid Gaffikin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:30:09 +0000

Barack Obama is a hot ticket to high sales online, according to the latest rankings on Amazon.com. The president-elect’s “The Audacity of Hope” and “Dreams From My Father” are the two top bestsellers among Kindle e-books and paperbacks on the site and his September policy pitch “Change We Can Believe In” is ranked No. 11. Sales of an Obama tie have soared and Obama t-shirts from some of Amazon’s independent retailers are jostling with iTunes accessories and Levi’s jeans for the top spots in the apparel category.

But it’s not all about Obama. Sales of Mickey Edwards’ “2008 Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost — And How It Can Find Its Way Back” have climbed to 131st place from way down at No. 23,190 just a day ago.

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For Conversations, No Place Like The Well

Brigid Gaffikin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:52:48 +0000

Neither the blogosphere nor Web 2.0 social networking services provide the kind of intellectual community that drives innovation, according to Google.org‘s executive director, Larry Brilliant. As a result, there’s room for growth for companies that can find ways to foster productive intellectual exchange — and facilitate it for themselves.

Brilliant made his comments at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. In his view, The Well, an online community he founded back the public Internet dark ages of the 1980s, remains unparalleled as a forum for the sharing of new ideas because it doesn’t promote a linear, chronological conversation the way a blog does, but lets people drop in and add to the discussion already underway.

In fact, there are no forums online where the big issues of the day — whether climate change or homelessness — are being hashed out, Brilliant said. That’s despite a broad hunger for communities where people can have coherent conversations about issues that impact our lives. Companies need to tap into this desire for public conversation about big ideas by connecting to people’s emotional intelligence, he said.

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Mobiles Can Dial Virality for Money

Brigid Gaffikin — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:31:41 +0000

[qi:020] New research from Flirtomatic, provider of a mobile and web-based messaging service available in the UK and Germany, suggests viral marketing via mobile phones has plenty of room to grow. A majority of the 5,800 Flirtomatic users who responded to the survey said they primarily use their mobile phones, not the web, to access the service. And nearly 84 percent of those surveyed said they use their phones as their primary Internet connection at home. More importantly, some 38 percent have invited a friend to join Flirtomatic, and only 5 percent said they wouldn’t pass along invitations to others.

While this data only pertains to Flirtomatic, it is proof that the right kind of service can tap into the viral marketing gold mine on mobile phones. While Flirtomatic has no plans to include advertising in messages, Mark Curtis, CEO of Handmade Mobile, the company behind Flirtomatic, said other mobile messaging companies could take advantage of the opportunity suggested by the company’s research.

Mary Meeker, who leads Morgan Stanley’s global technology research, just spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit, where she pointed out that ads are ultimately going to follow eyeballs. Meeker said the growth of Opera’s mobile web browser — which CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner told us is quite healthy — illustrates mobile growth overall. Taken together with Flirtomatic’s survey data, the future of mobile advertising looks very bright indeed.

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Mobuzz Asks Its Audience to Help Keep It Afloat

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:51:44 +0000

Mobuzz, a four-year-old Madrid-based web studio, says the economic downturn has starved it of the €50,000 ($65,235) it needs each month to run the company and has pitched its users a call for €120,000 Euros in donations by this weekend to keep its five daily shows up and running.

The company’s three tech news shows are five-minute roundups along the lines of Webb Alert and Rocketboom but in localized Spanish, English and French editions. In March, Mobuzz also launched separate Spanish gossip and news shows, bringing its total production run to 100 shows a month.

While advertising revenue is growing — €250,000 so far this year, up from €80,000 in 2006 — founder Anil De Mello said, it doesn’t cover salaries for the 16 staff or the company’s distribution, hosting and content delivery budgets. De Mello, who has largely bootstrapped Mobuzz with the help of angel funding and advertising revenue, said an investment round that appeared set to go ahead in September fell through because of the financial crisis. The economic downturn also prompted Mobuzz’s original investor to pull out.

At four years old, the videoblog is a grandaddy, and with several major industry awards under its belt it has definitely already found its feet. There are about 2 million downloads of Spanish content each month from the Mobuzz site, 1.5 million downloads of the English show and 300,000 of its French counterpart, according to De Mello. The YouTube editions of the shows get around 500,000 total views a month, he said.

The call for help is a clever pitch to a loyal audience, and a purely user-generated revenue stream isn’t a new idea. But during our conversation De Mello also said the company could, with new funding, be profitable by early 2009, and that it’s already talking to potential investors, including a major media company in Spain (he wouldn’t give specifics). That promise of new funding suggests user support will be more of a vital stopgap measure for an old hand, rather than a new revenue model for a stripling show.

That said, the outpouring of donations — around 14 percent of the target amount within a day — has had De Mello reconsidering a subscription-based revenue model. He said he’s been surprised by the outpouring of support — Europeans aren’t typically as culturally predisposed to charitable giving as Americans are, he noted.

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Election Results for the Impatient

Brigid Gaffikin — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:02:24 +0000

From the news reports of long lines, it looks like voter turnout will soar above the anemic 35-50 percent of presidential elections past, and anyone eager to track early indications of how the outcome will swing can turn to the web for clues. Judging by Google’s hot trends ranking chart election-related web searches are already well underway. We’ve put together a short list of some of the best places online to track results live.

Google’s election results map mashup is part of its broader elections coverage
AOL has a nifty browser toolbar to track elections-related news, including add-on buttons for Senate and House race updates.
A pollster on the polls: Democratic pollster Mark Blumenthal will live-blog results at Pollster.com beginning around 5 p.m. EDT.
The left-leaning blog Talking Points Memo has an election results map that will begin streaming results live at 6 p.m. EDT.
Cascade Software makes an iPhone app, Election, that will update results as they come in.
Electoral-Vote.com will start liveblogging results and update its electoral college map.

Related stories:

Image courtesy of Google

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Dell Sees Future in Services

Brigid Gaffikin — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:28:13 +0000

Despite the pressures of the economic downturn and caution among most of its customers, Dell continues to see opportunity in its enterprise infrastructure and service business, Senior VP Paul Bell said at the Dreamforce conference today. He noted that Web 2.0, social-networking companies and other firms that are adding users need to scale up and are continuing to spend on infrastructure services, while financial services companies are trying to find ways to tighten analytics while paring down extraneous costs.

Bell said reports the company would shrink its manufacturing operations were speculation. But he said Dell’s ongoing move into providing infrastructure as a service is part of a business direction that will cut back on the more labor-intensive service model of the past, in favor of, for example, the remote support services the company now offers.

While the consumer market still accounts for just 15 percent of the company’s revenue, Bell said its existing laptop personalization features are going to expand to allow “true individualization” of the outside of laptops, but he wouldn’t give specifics. He hinted at other areas the company was looking at in PC personalization but didn’t give details, and he also declined to comment on the likelihood of a Dell phone.

But Bell did say the company doesn’t buy into the idea that consumers want complete convergence of Internet devices. Handheld and laptop devices won’t end up as one device everyone uses, he said, and the company is testing out whether netbooks in developed markets will end up complementing rather than replacing fullsize PCs. For now, that means the company is focused on larger screens and keybords rather than smaller devices.

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Social Search Engines Wink, Reunion to Merge

Brigid Gaffikin — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:00:19 +0000

Wink, a Mountain View, Calif., people search site is merging with Reunion, a Santa Monica, Calif., social networking site. Combining Wink’s 700 million individual profiles and web-crawling capabilities and Reunion’s membership of about 50 million, the new company thinks it has a head start in the social search market. But any firm aiming to unseat search kings like Google will have a tough time persuading people to switch to a site geared specifically toward social searching. This was one of the reasons we were highly skeptical of the people-based search trend back in 2005, when Wink announced its offering.

The new site, launching some time in February, will pull personal information from sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, as well as other public records online, but will retain Reunion’s social networking and friend-finding features. Neither company gave details about how much searches will cost users; right now Reunion uses a freemium model.

Web users don’t always grasp the privacy settings on the sites they populate, and the argument that the data scattered across the web is publicly available anyway won’t entirely remove the creepy factor of finding so much personal information in one place. But branding the site as a social networking nexus could ease some of the concerns and draw in users — as long as the results are at least as accurate as those provided free by Google.

In terms of raw user numbers, Reunion already has an edge on other players in the social search space. The company says it has about 12 million unique monthly visitors. Compete.com put that number at 9.5 million in September, versus some 889,000 on Spock.com, 283,000 on Wink.com, 261,000 on PeekYou.com and 25,000 on newcomer 123People.com. Reunion is adding 1.6 million new members each month, according to CEO Jeff Tinsley. He notes that the site is most popular with users over the age of 25.

Reunion, which is profitable, raised a $25 million Series A round from Oak Investment Partners in April 2007. Wink raised $6 million from Greylock Partners, Founders Fund and Cambrian Ventures, according to CEO Michael Tanne. The new company says it will double its staff in Mountain View (to about 24) and boost its Santa Monica staff, currently about 120, by 25 to 30 percent.

Related Posts:

People Search Engine Shootout, WebWorkerDaily.
People Power Versus Google, GigaOM.

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GigaOM Readers' Top Election Web Resources

Brigid Gaffikin — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:00:22 +0000

Our post about the top 10 web tools for the election got some great suggestions from readers, so we’ve packaged them up for you here. Thanks to everyone who sent in their picks — and don’t forget to vote!

Track voter rights news and resources at the nonpartisan Election Protection coalition’s 866ourvote.org.
Check out a map-based overview of voting machines used in each state from VerifiedVoting.org and the Verified Voter Foundation, both run by technologists advocating for reliable and publicly verifiable elections.

Read up on candidates on the non-partisan Govtrack.us and On the Issues.org
Call the soapbox at Social42.com and leave your rant or rave about either major candidate; your message will be posted on the site and others can listen — and rate and comment on it.
Upload photo messages about the election, the candidates and the issues to Giveusahope.com.
Follow and contribute crowd-sourced election stories and add your two cents on media bias at Skewz.com.
Take a look at the aggregation of election-related news stories, blogs, polls, video and commentary on Electicker2008.com.
Check out interactive electoral college maps at 270towin.com.
Contribute election-related news stories and video and blog posts to Politics.com.

Image courtesy of VerifiedVoting.org.

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