Content Farms 2.0: Can Robots Help Write the News?: Tech News and Analysis « In the media industry right now, there are few more terrifying words than “content farm” — a term used to refer to sites that thrive by producing vast amounts of cheap, disposable content. From a traditional media business perspective, everything about content farms seems terrible: Low-paid staff churn out low-quality content that’s often devoid of useful information, and typically aimed not at enchanting readers but at scooping as many of Google’s advertising dollars as possible.
It’s big money: Demand Media went public recently, and AOL’s leading the charge with its low cost Seed.com service and, arguably, its $315 million buyout of the Huffington Post. Journalists roll their eyes at this stuff, but content farms — for better or worse — are hard to ignore right now, driving down prices and flooding the market with stories.
But what if you took the content farm model even further — by crowdsourcing everything? Of course, there are caveats. Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d): Features - Forty-Five Minutes With Five Minutes. [In this interview, culled from lengthy discussions with pioneering Chinese social game developer Five Minutes -- creators of early and extremely domestically successful farming game Happy Farm -- you'll find a fresh look at the social gaming market.] Five Minutes may not have the same kind of brand recognition as Zynga in the U.S., but the company has the leading farm game in its territory. Happy Farm, which launched in late 2008, is huge on Tencent's Qzone social network. The company's stats on Facebook aren't as impressive, but as Ben Zao and Season Xu, co-founder and COO discuss below, they're making efforts to not just form the company's fundamental perspective on games, but explore the ways in which Five Minutes' titles can hit in the Western market.
"There's always a discussion whether you want to design a game from a whole bunch of objective data, or you make the call subjectively. Season Xu: In China it's definitely true. Ben Zao: I'm mostly focusing on Little War. Happy Farm. Supercomputer cracks sixty-trillionth binary digit of Pi-squared, gets beaten up by normal computers. 10 Business Models That Rocked 2010. How to build a tech startup outside of Silicon Valley. (Editor’s note: David Brussin is the founder and CEO of Monetate. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.) Contrary to conventional wisdom, Silicon Valley isn’t the only place to go when you get serious about building a new company in the technology space.Sure, it’s a great place to start this sort of business, but the case for moving your company there is not as strong as it used to be.
I’ve stared, run and sold many companies far from the Valley – with my latest venture firmly based in Philadelphia. Here’s why I’ve avoided ground zero for many tech companies: If you are currently located outside the Valley but in a so-called secondary market such as Philadelphia or Boston, Seattle or Austin, you may be well-placed to succeed without moving. Yes, Silicon Valley still has large amounts of human capital, venture capital, and deal-making expertise, but there are also a very large number of companies competing for it.
Of course, simply having access to money isn’t everything. GetJar 2011 Mobile Predictions: Consolidation, Democratization And More Revenue For App Developers. GetJar, the largest independent mobile app store, has just released its forecast for mobile trends in 2011. The app store, which has seen over 1 billion downloads to date, is also seeing more than three million downloads per day (which makes the App Store’s scale second only to Apple’s iTunes). GetJar projects consolidation amongst app stores, writing that in the next five years, only six major app store players will be around with that number dwindling to two or three in ten years. The startup also predicts that closed app systems (i.e. Apple’s iTunes) will open up or fail as these stores feel pressure from developers and consumers.
In the next five years, the startup says URLs will become obsolete, as consumers access more services via apps than the on the web. Brands will continue to flick to mobile platforms, developing apps for the iPhone and Android platforms. The 10 Most Innovative Companies in Video. 01 / YouTube For transforming itself from Google's folly into a global network. Moves such as nurturing original content partners that can attract an audience; hosting successful live events (concerts, Conan O'Brien's 24-hour live stairwell cam); developing Leanback, a more TV-like experience for viewers; and tailoring its advertising products to the site's offerings have made YouTube into web video's most powerful force, with some 3 billion views every day. 02 / Twitter >> For shaping the future of interactive TV. Twitter has become the home for real-time conversation about live programming, sometimes integrated directly into programming (see: on-air "tweet streams" during MTV awards shows and CNN news coverage). 03 / Netflix >> For leading the charge for cable cord-cutters (read: people who drop cable service in favor of streaming digital content to their TV) with its smart and aggressive dealmaking.
For a great run of high-quality, low-cost laffers. 05 / Funny or Die 06 / UStream. Startups Across America.
Art. Coca-Cola, Walmart sign up for Bloom’s new fuel-cell electricity service. In a carefully orchestrated series of announcements this morning, hot fuel cell company Bloom Energy announced a new electricity service that allows customers to buy electricity produced by its Bloom Box fuel cells without having to buy any of the hardware. It looks like Bloom’s attempt to expand its reach and offer more affordable options — it has been criticized in the past for the roughly $800,000 price tag of its Bloom Boxes. Bloom also announced today a number of customers — some of them returning ones — who have signed up for its new Bloom Electrons service: Walmart, Coca-Cola, Staples, Kaiser Permanente, and a two-megawatt installation at the California Institute of Technology, where it is livestreaming its announcement today at 10 a.m.
PT. It is also teaming with Southern California Gas to supply natural gas, which the boxes use to convert to electricity efficiently and nearly emissions-free. iPad 2 Rumor Round-Up: This Time It's Thinner, Quicker, More Photo-Friendly. We know the iPad 2 is coming--be it a feeling in your bones, a sign in the wind, or because it's typical of Apple's normal hardware update pattern. Now we have enough rumors to give us a shape to the idea, and hints about what it'll be like. Size and Shape Numerous leaked iPad 2 cases have arrived from China, and though the first ones were viewed suspiciously, enough have now arrived to suggest that Apple has shared some basic dimension data with its third-party manufacturer partners. iPad 2 is going to be slightly smaller than iPad 1, but much slimmer--that's the big take-away, which may imply that it's lighter than the first generation device (to tackle one of the few criticisms of the tablet). Its back is also flat, so it can rest on a table and not rock around when you tap at its screen, and the edges seem to be styled similarly to the iPod Touch so it keeps design consistency.
One thing we don't know is what it'll be made of? Non-Smudge Screen Tech Speakers and Ports Cameras Chips. Better Location Tracking — From Russia, With Love: Tech News and Analysis « The next generation of navigation chips inside mobile phones could take advantage of Russian satellites orbiting the globe, in addition to the more familiar GPS systems. Qualcomm, Broadcom and ST-Ericsson are building GPS chips with support for Russia’s Glonass satellite system. According to chip analysts at The Linley Group: A new feature in GPS chips is Glonass support. Glonass is the Russian equivalent of GPS, consisting of a separate set of satellites that are “visible” from around the world. It’s not entirely clear what’s behind the widescale adoption of Glonass support — although the Russian government now mandates such dual support, which may have forced the issue — but it has the potential to benefit consumers.
Still, device makers may not incorporate the Glonass-capable chips into their devices sold outside of Russia, and they may not subscribe to the databases they would need in order to determine where a phone is using the system. Image courtesy of NASA. Solve Media makes Captchas easier on your eyes with video ads. Even if you don’t know what they were called, you’ve probably been annoyed by Captchas — the often distorted letters and numbers that websites sometimes ask you to enter. Well, a startup called Solve Media wants to make that process a little less painful, while also creating a new moneymaking opportunity for websites — and it just announced a new ad format. Captchas help sites ensure that the person creating an account or purchasing an item is a human being and not some kind of automated program. The problem is that programs have become more sophisticated about scanning Captchas and picking out the codes, so the Captchas have to do more and more to distort them.
The end result? Codes where I have to keep squinting and wondering, “Is that an ‘I’? Solve Media, which is headquartered in New York City, solves that problem by replacing regular Captchas with ads. Today, Solve Media made a new format available to advertisers — 15-second videos. (Founder Stories) “Every Day, I Try To Get Rejected” If you meet a lot of CEOs and startup founders, you will notice a personality trait that many of them share. No matter how many people tell them they are wrong or stupid, they remain unusually optimistic, almost blindingly so. In the Founder Stories video above, which is an outtake from last week’s interview with Bnter CEO Lauren Leto, host Chris Dixon talks about the importance of rejection. “Every day, I try to get rejected,” he tells Leto. Sometimes this requires him sending emails to Steve Jobs that never get a response. But being able to handle rejection, and even seek it out, is a crucial skill for entrepreneurs.
Leto and Dixon also talk about pitching VCs and the need to own the room. NASA Will Start Flying Coach With “Commercial Crews” After the retirement of the Shuttle program, NASA will begin flying along with – and funding – multiple “commercial crews” including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin group and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. NASA is paying out $270 million to SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada (not the beer) and Boeing. This program, begun in 2009 and is now vitally important as it pairs NASA’s scientists and astronauts with commercial crews to perform spaceflights. There are two more scheduled spaceflights for the remaining shuttles. NASA already works with Russia’s space program and has booked 12 flights between now and 2016.
These “commercial” flights will replace the regular shuttle missions and hopefully bring the commercialization of space flight closer to a common reality. “The next American-flagged vehicle to carry our astronauts into space is going to be a U.S. commercial provider,” Ed Mango, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said in a statement. Via CNET.