How JavaScript will lead the way to open video Editor’s note: This story is part of our Microsoft-sponsored series on cutting-edge innovation. Shay David is the vice president of business and community development at Kaltura, a company offering video tools for publishers. The “open Web”, a vision for the future of the Internet that is participatory, collaborative, and free from vendor lock-in is finally coming to fruition. Following Mozilla Firefox’s successful wedge of open Web standards into the browser platform, today we see every browser vendor and every web-enabled device gravitating towards supporting a vendor-neutral platform for rich media web experiences. Like many contentious agreements, the devil is in the details — and there are a lot of details. Businesses looking to take advantage of the promise of a single platform to deliver rich web experiences should also be looking towards middle layer solutions to help bridge the small gaps in rich media implementations. However, HTML5 requires a transition period.
The Current State of Web Design: Trends 2010 - Smashing Magazine The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world. So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. First, who does curation? Bloggers, of course, but blogging is curation for Web 1.0. But NONE of the real time tools/systems like Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, give curators the tools that they need to do their work efficiently. As you read these things they were ordered (curated) in this order for a reason. This is a guide for how we can build “info molecules” that have a lot more value than the atomic world we live in now. A curator is an information chemist. So, what are the seven needs of real time curators? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 1. 1.
A TC Teardown: What Makes Groupon Tick Editor’s note: Group buying sites are growing like mushrooms. In this teardown, guest author Steven Carpenter goes through a detailed teardown of the largest social commerce site, Groupon, and its competitors to see what exactly is going on here. Carpenter was the founder and CEO of Cake Financial, a TechCrunch40 Finalist that developed a service for mainstream investors to manage their investments, which was sold to E*Trade earlier this year. Much has been written about the rapid growth and success of Chicago-based local daily deal company, Groupon. The Teardown To find out, I did a teardown of Groupon’s business with data available on its website over the most recent quarter, compared my findings to what I calculated for the final three months of 2009, and then looked at how all of this compares to the top competitors. How Groupon Makes Money Groupon takes the old Entertainment Coupon Books that your mom used to buy and brings it to the social web. Traffic What Are People Buying?
The Age of the Mobile Mash-Up By Lars Erik Holmquist of the Mobile Life Centre, Kista, Sweden The rate of innovation in mobile services is just about to take a quantum leap. We are going from a divergent and messy ecosystem, where every new concept has to be made into a specialized ”app” that works only on a small sub-set of mobile handsets (even the mighty iPhone only has around 3% of the global mobile phone market), to an environment much more like the web. Today, new services can easily be composed out of existing components and run on a common platform – the browser. We are entering an age where the creation of a new mobile service – taking advantage of such features as the user’s location, social network, personal data, and even phone-specific functions such as the camera and accelerometer – can be mashed-up and put on-line just as easily as Web 2.0 services have been for several years already. So what does this mean? Today, of course, we could have done the same as an app and reached many more users.
chris dixon's blog / The problem with online “local” businesses One of the most popular areas for startups today is “local.” I probably see a couple of business plans a week that involve local search, local news, local online advertising, etc. Here’s the biggest challenge with local. Let’s say you create a great service that users love and it gets popular. Yelp has done this. Maybe Foursquare, Loopt etc. will do this. The problem is that, for the most part, these local business either don’t think of the web as an important medium or don’t understand how to use it. People who have been successful monetizing local have done it with outbound call centers. To add insult to injury, local businesses often have very high churn rates. Hopefully this will change in time as local businesses come to see the web as a critical advertising medium and understand how to make it work for them. * This is what I hear from industry sources.
Deep Packet Inspection Circles Back for a Second Look: Tech News « Deep packet inspection, a creepy and invasive targeting technology, is looking to make a comeback, this time armed with opt-in consent and incentives for users. The technology, which involves scanning data packets for information on where they come from and what they contain, fell out of favor a few years ago following consumer uproar and congressional hearings, after ISPs tried to use it to target subscribers with ads based on where consumers surfed online. But the Wall Street Journal says two major operators – Kindsight and Phorm – are ramping up their efforts, working with Internet service providers to deploy the technology. Kindsight, which is owned by Alcatel-Lucent SA, said six ISPs in the U.S., Canada and Europe are testing its service though no ad targeting is underway. Phorm, which touched off a firestorm in Britain, is actively working the market in Brazil, where it’s signed deals with two ISPs and is looking to expand to the U.S. and South Korea.
HTML5 Is An Oncoming Train, But Native App Development Is An Oncoming Rocket Ship HTML5 versus native apps. It’s a debate as old as — well, at least three years ago. And pretty much since the beginning of that debate, there has been a general underlying current among the geek community that HTML5 is good and native is bad. Native is what we have to deal with as we wait for HTML5 to prevail. But what if that never happens? Let’s be honest: right now, most HTML-based mobile apps are a joke when compared to their native counterparts. Developers often state their love of HTML5 and their commitment to it going forward. These days, if you’re going to do native apps, you at least have to support iOS and Android. Talking to developers, this is the single biggest pain point on the mobile side of things. But the fact that very few, if any, choose to go HTML5-only is telling. Let’s look at the debate from the perspective of the three hottest technology companies right now: Apple, Google, and Facebook. Apple is basically all-in on native apps. And that’s not all.
Kickstarted: How one company is revolutionizing product development 172inShare Jump To Close Kickstarter is funding an era of product development uncompromised by focus groups and committees The million dollar idea. We’ve all had it at one time or another, with very few luxuries to show for our sudden fits of brilliance. Enter Kickstarter, a thoroughly modern twist on the concepts of commerce and patronage; an approach so alluring that it now counts over one million people who have combined to pledge more than $100 million to fund ideas both big and small, serious and whimsical, since it launched in April of 2009. From the moment of its unveiling on September 1st, 2010, Scott Wilson, a self-described watch fetishist and former Global Creative Director for Nike, felt the desire to build a watch band for the 6th generation iPod nano. A few months later, Scott took a chance and placed his TikTok + LunaTik project on Kickstarter, earning more than $6,000 in pledges on its first day. What happened next is the stuff of crowd-funding legend. Brendan Dawes agrees.
The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile Editor’s note: Legendary investor Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures. You can follow him on Twitter at @vkhosla. All Khosla Ventures investments, as well as ventures related to Vinod Khosla, are italicized. We are in a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities. What you get as a result are the recent successes in the Internet/mobile space like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and others, all of which have reenergized both entrepreneurs and investors. A few will be successful, many will fail, some will be acquired for a piece of technology or for the team (acqui-hires). The post-PC always/everywhere platform will be defined by the many variations of mobile, always available, silent complementary standbys (like home or personal networks and agents) and more. Of course, it is hard to classify any startup into a single category.