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Quora Details Their New Answer Ranking Scheme; Their "PageRank", Of Sorts
Feb 06, 3:26AM
As you may have seen, last weekend, Robert Scoble worked himself into a tizzy because an answer of his was moderated into a collapsed state on Quora. The whole bitchmeme surrounding the incident was rather humorous. But there was at least somewhat of a point behind all of it: people began asking more questions about the methods behind Quora's ranking system. Today, we have some of those answers. Truth be told, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever previously stated that Quora was working on an algorithm to determine user quality well before Scoblegate happened. As he noted on January 21:
Readability Just Became Instapaper's Publisher Payment Layer
Feb 06, 2:36AM
Personally, I think the concept behind Readability is pretty awesome. It gives you a way to read all your favorite articles on the web without all of the clutter of the web — meaning, mainly, ads. And the recently-launched payment component is even more interesting because it gives you a way to pay back (in a very small way) your favorite writers/publications that you often read on the web. But as one such writer who works for one such publication, clearly I'm biased. I realize that this idea isn't for everyone. And it's going to be a fairly hard sell for some people. But that sell may have just gotten a little easier. When Readability re-launched last week, they noted a partnership with popular bookmarking service Instapaper. The main component of this integration was set to be a Readability mobile application that Instapaper's Marco Arment made (and will release soon) in Instapaper's image. This is great for Readability since Instapaper is already a hugely popular app on the iOS platform. But a small bit of news today is even better. As Arment announced today on the Instapaper blog, you can now send you Instapaper logs to Readability.
Everblue.edu Poised To Become The Kaplan Test Prep Of Sustainability
Feb 05, 10:29PM
Everblue Training (Everblue.edu) — an environmental education startup with offices in Berkeley, Calif. and Charlotte, N.C. — this week attained accreditation from the group that verifies the quality of non-collegiate, continuing education and professional training programs throughout the United States for the U.S. Department of Education, the Accrediting Council for Continuing Education. The chief executive and co-founder of Everblue, Jon Boggiano, says the endorsement allows his business to sell its services to: government veterans' education programs helping them adjust back to civilian life; large companies that seek to train and certify their employees in a variety of environmental topics; and professionals or students who use government grants and loans to afford their continuing education...
Please Read: A Personal Appeal TO Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales
Feb 05, 9:02PM
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Hunter Walk who spends way too much time researching 1980s hair metal bands on Wikipedia. His obsession with Wikipedia is unrelated to his day job leading the consumer product team at YouTube. Wikipedia is the world's 5th largest website, runs no ads and, depressingly, seems to be perpetually on the fringe of solvency. Google for "Jimmy Wales personal appeal" (Wales is Wikipedia's founder) and you'll see that there are 32,000+ results, which gives you a sense of the fundraising requirements for this user-generated encyclopedia. The question of whether they'll ever run ads in order to break this cycle is an ongoing debate. In fact there's a Wikipedia page devoted to this topic with discussion about ads, opt-in ads, search ads, etc. At 400+ million users worldwide, any of these options could certainly raise considerable funds used to support the technical and philosophical mission of this non-profit. But to date, Wales has been reluctant to introduce any advertising. So where do we end up? After hitting its 10 year anniversary this January, the question is: can Wikipedia sustain itself for another 10 years without a significant change to its business model?
Gillmor Gang 2.5.11 (TCTV)
Feb 05, 8:00PM
Egypt meets Google v. Bing on the Gillmor Gang, with Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, John Taschek, and Danny Sullivan. Sullivan broke the story of Google's sting operation on Bing scraping of search results, which struck some of us as saying more about Google being scared Schmidtless by Facebook. Egypt's second week without Twitter did nothing to slow down the realtime wave of governments resigning, news anchors hightailing it back to the ironic safety of New York, and iPadders trying to find something interesting in The Daily. Life in the Fast Lane. @scobleizer @dbfarber @dannysullivan @jtaschek @stevegillmor 
Weekend Giveaway: $200 Gift Card From JackThreads.com
Feb 05, 5:56PM
Jackthreads, a Thrillist company, is offering a sweet $200 so you can maybe get a nice pair of pants or a shirt to wear on Valentine's Day so you (and I mean this in the nicest way) won't look like huge slob. I mean really, whens the last time you bought a nice pair of pants? Maybe a shirt? Shorts and sandals might be fine for your Magic: The Gathering parties but not for going on. Ok. Ok. Don't get testy. Click through to see how to win.
In Praise Of Piracy
Feb 05, 5:29PM
I've had to think a lot about digital rights management lately. Not that I wanted to. But I recently did some eye-opening contract software development for a DRM-heavy media app, just as our government up here in the Great White North introduced a new and extremely DRM-friendly copyright law, and links to Don't Make Me Steal started popping up all over the Internet. You probably don't realize, unless you actually work on a software project laden with DRM, just how much Sisyphean effort goes into it. I estimate fully a quarter of the developer-hours that went into the app in question were devoted to building or dealing with the DRM, meaning a quarter of the total effort did not go into crafting a killer app. Similarly, the countless hours and dollars Sony spent on CD rootkits and impressively inept PS3 encryption did not go into building better products. All this effort lavished on restriction rather than creation reminds me of the great Ryszard Kapuściński's depiction of the Soviet economy:
Improving Sales: The Excuse Department Is Closed
Feb 05, 5:00PM
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a two-time entrepreneur who has gone to the Dark Side of venture capital at GRP Partners. Suster writes a blog at Bothsidesofthetable and can be found on Twitter at @msuster. Most technology startups seem to be funded by product people or business people. Specifically what is often not in the DNA of founders are sales skills. Nor do they exist in the investors of early-stage companies. The result is a lack of knowledge of the process and of sales people themselves. My first startup was no different. I had never had any sales training so everything we did for the first couple of years was instinctual. While we did fine learning on the fly, it turned out that a lot of what we did was wrong. I've started writing up some of those sales & marketing lessons and I plan to continue to build that section out over time. As we grew into several millions of dollars of sales per year it was no longer acceptable to "wing it." So I did want any rational person who wants to improve does—I hired a coach. We focused together on improving our sales methodology, our training and our comp plans. These days there are even startups to make this easier for all of us. Back then it was a larger than life ex-country manager from PTC named Kai Krickel. He taught me much‚most of it unconventional. Most of it worked and his philosophies have proved enduring to me. He called his business TEDIC. The Excuse Department is Closed. 
Social Commerce And The New Rules For Local Businesses
Feb 05, 2:08PM
Editor's note: Guest writer Craig Donato is the CEO of Oodle, a social maretplace that powers the Facebook Marketplace. Ecommerce today is imbued with the same DNA that runs through Google. It's automated. It's algorithmic. It's certainly not human. And the marketing campaigns that are built with this DNA are similarly data-driven. They employ number-crunchers to capture their leads and build their databases, all the while looking for incremental ROI and arbitrage opportunities. But a new marketing game has come to town—social commerce. And at its core is an entirely different bit of DNA: the DNA of Facebook. This new variety of social commerce is about conversations. It's about relationships. It's about re-humanizing online commerce. And for marketers to succeed with social commerce, they are going to have to rethink their game plan. Facebook has given us a brand new color palette. Now it's up to us to figure out how to use it. I like to call this learning process "de-ecommercification."
Ze Frank's Star.me Is Like Being In Kindergarten All Over Again
Feb 05, 6:43AM
Every once in awhile you come across people who are entirely original, and Ze Frank is one of those people. While many people as eccentric as Frank end up with a not so amazing lot in life, Frank, who originally studied Neuroscience at Brown, most recently received $500K from Andreesen Horowitz, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, Gary Vaynerchuk and Ron Conway to focus on creating novel social games. Now the world gets to see the fruits of his labor. 
Search Underdog Blekko Sees Over 30M Searches In January, More Than 110K Slashtags Created Since Launch
Feb 05, 3:00AM
Nowhere has the need for a more diverse search market been more apparent than this week's revelation that Bing was cribbing Google's notes. While Microsoft VP Harry Shum and Google's Matt Cutts squabbled on a panel together at the Farsight 2011 conference, Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta looked on, more a human symbol of the call for greater market diversity than anything else. Earlier in the week Blekko made the decision that it would block content farms like Demand Media's eHow and AnswerBag and now is announcing another milestone, over 30 million search queries in January and over 110K slashtags created since its launch in November. This breaks down to about 10-15 search queries a second and over 1 million searches a day, which is at levels over its original traffic spike at launch. In contrast, Google was serving over 88 billion searches a month at last count (the 2010 Comscore numbers have yet to come out as far as I can see).
The Verizon Vs. AT&T Ads Prove One Thing: The iPhone Is Helen Of Troy
Feb 05, 2:33AM
The most recent Verizon and AT&T commercials are awesome because everyone loves a good slap fight — especially one that is played out in public (for more evidence, see Google vs. Bing earlier this week). But they're actually even more interesting under the surface. Because it's a fight that has only one real winner. But it's not who you might think. It's neither Verizon nor AT&T. It's Apple. Think about it. Both AT&T and Verizon are spending millions of dollars to bash each other in these high-profile commercials. But the overall impact of these commercials is likely to be that they completely cancel each other out. If AT&T feels Verizon is winning, they'll just order more ads, and vice versa. And so again, the only winner in these ads is the one common element: the iPhone.
Android Honeycomb's Mesmerizing Bootup Screen
Feb 05, 1:36AM
Earlier this week we posted an extensive preview of Android Honeycomb, the tablet version of Google's mobile OS that will start shipping on devices later this month. But we saved one more tasty bit of Honeycomb for the weekend: the OS's bootup screen. It looks like something out of Tron, and it's a nice departure from the boot animation seen on the Nexus One and Nexus S, which features swirling strands of color coming together to form the Nexus 'X' symbol (you can watch it below).
Groupon's "Rejected" Super Bowl Ad Is A (Subtle) Jab At LivingSocial
Feb 04, 11:57PM
The battle of the social media Super Bowl ads continues, with daily deals Groupon just posting on its own blog about how it rejected an ad where someone goes through a "deal a day" addiction, a concept conspicuously similar to what people are reporting competitor LivingSocial has up its sleeve for its 30 second ad before this Sunday's Steelers vs. Packer's game. Internet Retailer describes LivingSocial's ad, "The pre-game spot tells the story of how one man's life changes as a result of his "deal addiction" with LivingSocial. The campaign was created by Martin Agency."The details of what Groupon has up its sleeve for Sunday are still unknown.
They're Commercial Fighting! AT&T Shows How Talk And Surf Is Useful
Feb 04, 11:53PM
Yesterday, Verizon launched a commercial campaign to highlight that they now have the iPhone 4 with one important feature: the ability to make calls. While they never mention their competitor (or humorously, even the iPhone itself), it's clear who this was aimed squarely at: AT&T. But AT&T is not about to take the punches sitting down. Today, they have their own ad. "Answers" shows a man in his office working when he receives a call on his iPhone. It's his wife, wishing him a happy anniversary. Naturally, the man forgot. He quickly heads to Google on his iPhone and starts searching for a restaurant to make a reservation at. This is something that would not be possible with the Verizon version of the device.
Facebook Turns Seven: From Colleges To Cairo, You've Come A Long Way Baby
Feb 04, 10:47PM
From founder Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room at Harvard to movie theaters across the US to the cover of TIME magazine to the fingertips of protestors in Cairo, Facebook has probably had more influence over our day to day lives than any other startup this decade. To celebrate its seven years of incredible growth, the company has put up a custom candle graphic up on its Facebook wall, with the message, "To the 1.5 million of you who share our birthday today - Happy Birthday!" The image has received over 8,000 comments and 48,558 "Likes" thus far. 
Tango Takes Face-To-Face Video Calling Beyond The iPhone With 8 Million Downloads
Feb 04, 10:26PM
One of the best built-in features of the iPhone 4 is FaceTime, the video calling feature that lets you see who you are talking to by using the cameras on both phones. But it only works over WiFi and if both callers own an iPhone 4. Perhaps those limitations are why an app called Tango is the seventh most popular social networking app right now (iTunes link). Tango lets you make video calls not just on iPhones but also on Android phones, and it works over 3G data networks as well. It works on both the iPhone 4 and the 3GS, and even iPod Touches. It's been growing like crazy on both iOS and Android devices, adding one million downloads every two weeks. In the past three months, it's grown from about 1 million downloads to 8 million (see chart. Of those, 7.2 million became registered users, and 42 percent (or about 3 million) have made a video call in the last 30 days.
Help Make This Wild Braille Watch A Reality
Feb 04, 10:02PM
David Chavez has a dream. He wants to build this wild-looking Braille watch that shows the time by moving little rotating dots along the face to spell out the numbers in Braille. Even if you're not visually impaired, you have to appreciate the ingenuity and usability this watch, called the Haptica, has to offer. The project is up on Kickstarter now, so pop over and pre-order if you're so inclined. Considering most watches for the blind haven't changed since the early 1900s - take this Seiko "Braille" watch for example - this is an interesting step forward. 
Buy Your Valentine's Gift Through Causes, And They'll Donate $10 To Charity
Feb 04, 9:08PM
It's only ten days til Valentine's Day (ugh — err, yay!), which means many of you are vaguely aware that you should do something special for your significant other. And this year there's a way to give your sweetheart a nice gift while also giving back to charity. Causes has just launched a special promotion available at Causes.com/valentines. The concept is simple: buy a gift through the site, and you get to donate $10 to a nonprofit, like Campaign for Cancer Prevention or Invisible Children. You can also choose to donate the money to any of the Causes you're part of on the site. Pretty cool. Causes is essentially donating the affiliate fees they'd typically receive from their retail partners. The promotion is using different retailers for twenty countries around the world: in the U.S. it's Proflowers, Spain has Aquraelle and Serenata Flowers, and so on.
Discovering The Distance-to-Discount Ratio
Feb 04, 9:01PM
When it comes to deals, the bigger the discount, the further people will travel. While this may sound obvious, mobile advertising company JiWire has some numbers to back it up. JiWire is releasing a new study today that evaluates consumers; behavior when it comes to location-based deals and discounts. In a survey of more than 3,000 respondents, JiWire's results show that the greater the discount, the further people will travel to redeem a coupon or promotion. For example, for a $100 item, 55 percent of consumers are willing to travel 15 minutes for a 10 percent discount. But 40 percent of respondents will travel an hour for a 50 percent discount, and 28 percent will travel two hours for a 75 percent discount. Essentially, higher discounts motivate consumers to travel farther. But there are limits to how far people will go. Even if you give away a product worth $100 for free, only 31 percent of people would travel more than two hours to get it.
Multinational Startups: The Future Or A Doomed Idea? (TCTV)
Feb 04, 8:36PM
In our second segment with Ankur Jain of the Kairos Society, we talk about the idea of multinational startups. A lot of startups like to say they are "global from day one," but typically that's just marketing. Most of the startups I know who have tried to be truly global from day one-- focusing explicitly on several big markets at once with co-founders spread around the globe-- have said later they didn't recommend it. Many entrepreneurs would argue there is just something about facetime, coding in the same room, and building a project physically together that is core to how a startup works and a culture is built. After all, it's hard to be nimble when you're navigating cultural, language and time-zone chasms. Nevertheless, Jain thinks it's the future. He explains why in the video below. 
Rainbird: The Way Twitter Counts Tweets In Realtime (Which Will Be Open Sourced)
Feb 04, 7:40PM
Yesterday, Twitter analytics lead, Kevin Weil, gave a talk at O'Reilly's Strata 2011, a conference dedicated to big data. The main topic of the talk was Rainbird, Twitter's realtime counting system that's built on top of Cassandra. Notably, it powers a number of things Twitter uses internally, such as Promoted Products analytics, operational monitoring, and even Tweet Button counting. Today, Twitter has posted the entire presentation to SlideShare, which means we can now embed it above. It's fairly technical, but also pretty easy to follow along with. If you're at all interested in how Twitter acquires, stores, and uses the massive amount of data they deal with, you should check it out. It also gives a glimpse into their Promoted Tweet analytics package (which looks quite nice).
How The iPad Time Shifts Online Reading
Feb 04, 7:18PM
One of the reasons bookmarking apps like Read It Later and Instapaper are becoming so popular is because we are inundated with news and interesting links all day long, but have no time to read them. But just as DVRs helps us shift our TV viewing to better fit our own schedules, these apps helps us time shift our online reading. And according to some data put out earlier this month by Read It Later, it looks like the iPad is becoming the time-shifting reading device of choice. Read It Later offers bookmarking apps for computers, mobile phones and iPads. It looked at 100 million articles saved by its users. The chart above shows the amount of saving activity by time of day. It is pretty consistent throughout waking hours, as you's expect from people who are constantly bombarded with new information. It just never stops. Below is a chart showing when iPad users actually end up reading what they saved. As you can see, the time reserved for reading is shifted all the way to the right, with the sweet spot being between 7 PM and 11 PM at night. This suggests that iPad usage is competing with primetime TV for people's attention (or that they watching TV with iPad in hand, or shifting their TV viewing to other times). 
Demotix Makes Hay While The Middle Eastern Revolutions Shine, Thanks To Twitter (TCTV)
Feb 04, 6:25PM
Demotix is a London-based startup which has attracted a new wave of attention since the wave of civil unrest has swept the Middle East, particularly in Egypt. The idea is not new: upload photos and videos to a platform to create an alternative news wire / agency. What is new is that as the mainstream media's coverage of international events has been shrinking - it is no longer cost efficient to have a guy in some far-flung bureau filing the one annual story a year - so has Demotix' coverage expanded with professional and semi-professional contributors. In each case Demotix checks out the credentials of contributors, who can then earn news agency fees from their output. It splits the revenue with photographers 50/50 each time the photo or video is sold (major photo agencies take a much larger cut and only pay photographers once). Photos sourced from Demotix have appeared on the front pages of New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Time, and The Guardian. In August last year it signed a deal with the Publish2 news exchange giving it access to US distribution. 
HoneyApps Raises $1 Million For Security Management Software
Feb 04, 6:15PM
Chicago-based startup HoneyApps has raised $1 million in funding led by Tugboat Ventures with Hyde Park Angels participating in the round. Co-founded by Orbitz's former Chief Information Security Officer Ed Bellis and Jeff Heuer, HoneyApps offers businesses and government agencies a comprehensive security management software. Called Conduit, the software will consolidate all of a businesses' security vulnerability information, reporting and management into a single place. The startup will then analyze and track a company's vulnerability across applications, networks, servers, and databases. 
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