Monthly Archive for July, 2010

Google & CIA invest in Analytics Venture

Published on July 30, 2010 in International Business. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm, have injected sums (less than $10 million each) into Recorded Future, a company that goes through “tens of thousands” of websites and looks for related actions and conversations between, for example, Twitter accounts, blogs and websites, and analyzes them in order to spot events and trends as early on as possible [Source].

Disney’s Digital Shopping Spree

Published on July 29, 2010 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: .

The purchase of game maker Playdom may help Disney’s brands with the Facebook generation

Four years ago, Bob Iger, the chief executive officer of Walt Disney, tried to build a cell-phone business. Disney created a family-oriented mobile service that included a global positioning system so parents could track their kids. Too few consumers signed up, and the company killed the operation after 15 months. Disney Interactive, the division that ran the ill-fated cell service, is still unprofitable. It lost $55 million last quarter.

Iger retains his enthusiasm for digital business and has switched strategies to buying rather than building. He wants to acquire social games and other online services that come with established customers and talented creators—and can help sell Disney’s famous brands.

“You don’t get the kind of growth we want by building from the inside,” he says.

[Full Story]

Interactive World Factbook

Published on July 27, 2010 in Ranting and Raving. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The CIA World Factbook is a data nerd’s dream and a crowning achievement in data gathering, highlighting every single country in the world, and presenting myriad facts ranging from GDP to important local industries. It’s also mind-numbingly boring and not terribly useful because there’s simply no way to summarize all that data.

IBM’s data-visualisation researchers leveled their resources at the problem, producing their own World Factbook, a sprawling online tool that lets you create thousands of charts on the fly.

For a similar–and even more ambitious–project, definitely check out the World Development Indicators 2010, which contains details about health, environment, and education of every country in the world.

Google Gets Semantic

Published on July 17, 2010 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

Google has acquired Metaweb Technologies, a five-year-old San Francisco startup that maintains a massive open database that details all sorts of real-world stuff in an effort to “build a smarter, more connected Internet.”

“The web isn’t merely words—it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities can help us deliver relevant information more quickly,” Google said in a blog post.

Google’s emerging rival Facebook recently announced the Open Graph, a way to map all objects on the web like movies and places and peoples’ relationships to them. The metadata required for this would create a rival structure to what Metaweb has built. And because Facebook has the “like” data recording the preferences of its 500 millions users, it would be in the best position to harness the metadata to create a compelling search product.

GE’s “Ecomagination Challenge”

Published on July 14, 2010 in Greentech and International Business. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Got a bright idea? How about an energy-saving one? GE announced today a $200 million “open innovation challenge” that invites inventors, entrepreneurs, and startups of all stripes to compete to develop the next-generation of power grid technologies.

Called the Ecomagination Challenge, this huge investment comes only weeks after GE announced a $10 billion injection into its own eco-R&D projects.Along with four VC firms that have pledged half of the $200 million to the challenge, GE is asking the public for innovative ideas in clean technology. From now until September 30, you can head to the Ecomagination homepage to submit a proposal or vote for other user-generated ideas.

GE explained earlier today that the $200 million investment could lead to acquisition or co-development opportunities, and even trademark and licensing deals. “This is wide-open,” said another investor in the challenge, who commented that the challenge should serve as a catalyst for novel ideas, regardless of who comes up with them, whether an individual or well-funded start-up [Source].

Facebook is Pushing a Platform Strategy

Published on July 14, 2010 in Global Strategy and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Facebook is going to go beyond rolling out standalone applications for iPhones, Google Android devices or feature phones and start considering itself a platform for developers to distribute mobile apps with.

“Where we’re going from here is a platform strategy. We’re going away from a one-off app strategy,” said Erick Tseng in his first public appearance since joining Facebook as head of mobile products. Speaking at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference today, he said the company will start building out this effort over the next several months [Source].

Investing in Green Technology

Published on July 13, 2010 in Global Strategy and Greentech. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The Bill Gates and Khosla Ventures dream team are swooping in once again to provide much-needed cash to a worthy sustainable startup. The pair recently injected millions into nuclear power startup TerraPower, and now they’re back again to invest $23.5 million in EcoMotors’s series B funding round.

EcoMotors builds a lightweight, high-efficiency, low-cost combustion engine that supposedly offer 50% greater fuel efficiency than similar conventional engines. The company’s Opposed Piston Opposed Cylinder (OPOC) engine can be used in everything from passenger vehicles to auxiliary power supplies–anywhere traditional gas and diesel-powered engines can be found.

World Cup Winners and Losers

Published on July 12, 2010 in Ranting and Raving. 0 Comments Tags: .

In case you weren’t one of the 700 million-plus fans to watch the World Cup Finals yesterday, Spain beat the Netherlands 1-0 in extra time. But the España football stars weren’t the only winners–and certainly the Holland footballers were not the only losers. Companies around the world were competing to increase brand awareness and boost profits–here’s FastCompany’s list of the winners and losers.

The Emerging Online Giants

Published on July 10, 2010 in Emerging Markets. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

At first glance the three firms could not look more different.

DST was created in 2005 when two Russian internet investors, Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger, pooled their interests in mail.ru, a Russian web portal. Today the firm controls many of the country’s leading websites and boasts an interesting mix of owners, including Goldman Sachs and Alisher Usmanov, a Russian billionaire, who holds 27%.

Based in Cape Town, Naspers is nearly 100 years old and is the publisher of the Daily Sun, South Africa’s biggest newspaper. But it is one of the most ambitious old-media companies anywhere in its move online. It still makes most of its sales—28 billion rand ($3.6 billion) in the year to March—from print and pay-television, but it uses the cash to buy online firms.

Tencent hails from Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. Founded in 1998, it had revenues of $1.8 billion in 2009 [Full article here].

O R A N G E FEVER!

Published on July 7, 2010 in Ranting and Raving. 1 Comment Tags: .