Archive for the 'Real-Time Web' Category

A New Net

Published on February 6, 2012 in High Tech & Media and Real-Time Web. 0 Comments Tags: .

A startup called Nicira is launching a product today with the audacious goal of making all Internet services smarter, faster, and cheaper. With his startup, Nicira, Martìn Casado intends to make Internet services slicker by rewriting some of the rules of computer networking.

The crux of that supposedly unworkable idea was to take away the stubborn independence of the network hardware. All those routers and switches would take orders from one central piece of software; a single command could then reconfigure every piece of a network.

Casado’s PhD thesis showed that it was possible. By writing software that could reprogram routers and switches, he was able to turn computer networks into the secure channels that he had been asked for back in 2003. A different intelligence agency put up the money for further trials of the technology, and in 2007 Casado, McKeown, and Berkeley professor Scott Shenker founded Nicira. Rich entrepreneurs and two of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious venture capital funds soon put in money of their own [Source].

The Year on the Web

Published on December 28, 2011 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments

Social networking grew up in 2011, becoming more of a fundamental underpinning of the Web.

We’ve been living in the age of social media for a long time, but 2011 was the year that all the information we share online began to accrete into something greater than the sum of its parts. It is creating a layer of intelligence that anyone can mine in Web searches and that content creators can use to hone their services.

But all the while, our growing reliance on the Web is animating a debate about the potentially catastrophic effects of a cyberwar—an attack, or series of attacks, meant to disable consumer or military resources online. A top computer scientist recently suggested that the U.S. consider striking first against enemies who would be hard to pin down if they struck first. It’s a reminder of the limits of social networking: even as companies like Facebook map more and more of the online world, some sectors will remain in the shadows [Source].

Klout raising new $30M round at a $200M valuation

Published on October 28, 2011 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Klout, the startup best known for its ability to measure a person’s online influence, might be raising a new, third round of investment that would significantly add to the company’s total funding and valuation.

Klout works by measuring a person’s activity on a variety of social networks such as Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn Google+ and others. Based on that individual’s interaction within those social networks, Klout calculates the true reach of that person’s communications and issues them a 1 to 100 Klout score.

A company spokesperson told VentureBeat it doesn’t comment on rumors. However, the new round, possibly led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from IVP, might be as high as $30 million at a $200 million valuation, according to a report from Business Insider [Source].

Facebook reportedly partnering with Spotify for music service

Published on May 25, 2011 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Facebook plans to launch a new music-streaming service powered by Spotify in as little as two weeks, according a report by Forbes. The partnership will only be in countries that already have a Spotify presence, which excludes the U.S.

When launched, Facebook users in Spotify-enabled countries–such as Sweden, France, and the U.K.–will see a Spotify icon appear on the left side of their newsfeeds. Users that click on the Spotify icon will first install the service on the desktop and then allow users to stream millions of songs for free through Facebook.

Another interesting aspect of the service is the ability to let a user and his or her Facebook friends listen to music at the same time. It could be pretty neat to listen to new music and talk about it in real-time with multiple friends in one online spot [Source].

Twitter officially acquires Tweetdeck

Published on May 25, 2011 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

After plenty of speculation and reports, Twitter announced officially today on its blog that the company had acquired popular third-party client Tweetdeck.

“This acquisition is an important step forward for us,” the company wrote. “TweetDeck provides brands, publishers, marketers and others with a powerful platform to track all the real-time conversations they care about. In order to support this important constituency, we will continue to invest in the TweetDeck that users know and love.”

After Twitter’s purchase of iPhone app Tweetie and its partnership with TwitPic, it wasn’t exactly shocking to hear the company wanted to buy one of the most popular third-party Twitter clients, which has versions available for desktop, iPhone, iPad, and Android. The company has indicated in the past it wanted to better control the user experience, and such, acquisitions like this are the easiest way to accomplish that goal [Source].

Gearing Up for the Coming Tech Boom

Published on November 30, 2010 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .


Amongst others, VC firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is gearing up for the coming tech boom. That’s one of the reasons they hired famous Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker as a new partner on Monday [Source].

Meeker said: “We’re at the beginning of another great wave of tech innovation and I am incredibly excited by the opportunity to help the next generation of Internet technologies and leaders.” [Source]

Gordon (partner @ Kleiner) said he sees a big boom coming, not a bubble, much like Kleiner’s managing partner John Doerr, who said that we’re in the midst of yet another boom for internet investments at the recent Web 2.0 Summit. The reason is that he sees a lot of technologies that are changing the way we live.

“The world of digital media is being transformed,” Gordon said. “A bunch of new businesses can be reinvented, thanks to social graphs, the mobile internet, and the new shopping habits of the young. Those are going to create a whole generation of cool new companies.” [Source]

Read related articles:
Another Technology Bubble?
M&A to Hit $3 Trillion in 2011
Private Equity Thrives Again
The Web Is Reborn (HTML 5)
Web Browsing is turning into Social Browsing
US$250 Million sFund
The Future of the Internet
Google Gets Semantic
Facebook is Pushing a Platform Strategy

Facebook’s Platform will Rule them All

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

“Email–I can’t imagine life without it–is probably going away,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in June, citing how only 11% of teens use email daily.

That’s the same story parroted Monday by Sandberg’s boss, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who introduced the company’s new messaging service by suggesting a generational shift away from email.

Based on Sandberg’s and Zuckerberg’s comments, it’s no surprise the blogosphere proclaimed the social network’s new service a “Gmail killer.” But that’s entirely the wrong term to be using. For starters, Gmail isn’t that big a deal. It has only a 15% market share. Hotmail has double and Yahoo triple that userbase. Facebook isn’t interested in killing off any of them as a messaging platform–its goal is to rise above them all, contain them all, and thereby rule them all [Source].

Related stories:

  • Why Facebook Wants Your E-Mail [Click]
  • How Facebook plans to reinvent email and online messaging [Click]
  • How Facebook’s Messages System Helps It Win [Click]
  • Schimdt on Facebook Messages: Competition Is Good [Click]

Real-Time Measurement of Public Opinion

Published on October 26, 2010 in Real-Time Web. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Harvard-Developed Tool Measures Real-Time Public Opinion on Social Media.

Crimson Hexagon analyses online conversations about a given subject using its unique “statistical human-assisted approach.” Developed at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the technology originally began as the “hyper-accurate estimation, classification, and quantification of unstructured data,” says company CEO Scott Centurino, which, in non-science speak, just means the measurement of public opinion from unsolicited data.

The company uses sophisticated algorithms and dynamic dashboards to dig through and track massive amounts of information in real-time [Source].

“There’s a real value in tapping into these millions or billions of conversations online, where people are talking openly and honestly about what’s important to them,” says Centurino. “Our real kick comes from being able to understand the underlying themes from those conversations, so you can actually act on them. If all I know is that negative things are being said, what can I possibly do with that information?”

Facebook Unveils a Location-Based Service

Published on August 19, 2010 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

2010 is the year of location–at least in blogs focused on social networking, which is a Montana-sized “at least”–and Facebook’s entry into the increasingly crowded field has long been expected. Today, the company officially announced its plans, by the name of Facebook Places.

Facebook’s Places borrows heavily from location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, which allow users to check in at places and broadcast their location to friends. But those companies, as well as others like Yelp, said they saw Facebook’s Places as a complement to their own services and as an opportunity to gain additional distribution.

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.