BluRay News

Online map mashups are about to get a whole lot more sophisticated. A startup in Arlington, Virginia called FortiusOne (based on technology out of George Mason University) is developing a service called Maker! that will let anyone easily find geo-tagged data available on the Web and map it. One piece of the service is already available: a search engine for geo-data called Finder! It lets you find sets of geographical data already on the Web, store it, and organize it, or upload your own. Both are being built around its GeoCommons brand.

Finder! will be combined with Maker! so that all of that geo-data can be easily placed on a digital map. The company is still putting the finishing touches on Maker!, but we’ve obtained some screen shots of the types of maps it will be able to create. For instance, in the screen shot above, carbon emissions data from Chinese power plants (the orange circles) is laid over population density (the darker the shading, the more people per square mile). When you mouse over any bubble, the underlying data pops up.

The maps below show Facebook users in the U.S. by city and a comparison of Hispanic concentration versus population density in San Francisco.

FortiusOne raised $5.4 million last year from investors that included Chart Venture Partners and In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s investing arm). Earlier this month, the company acquired geo-feed aggregator Mapufacture, which will form the basis for Maker!

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Can’t find a hotel for TechCrunch50 or the next conference you are going to? If you don’t mind roughing it, try AirBed and Breakfast. Anyone with an airbed (or couch) can “post a room” and how much it costs. Thrifty travelers can make reservations on the site and pay for the stay.

The site is spare but it does the job (it was pulled together for less than $20,000 in seed capital from friends and family of the founders—San Francisco designers Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, and software engineer Nathan Blecharczyk).

AirBed and Breakfast will definitely appeal to younger travelers, and conventioneers who can’t find a regular hotel room. In overbooked Denver, where 20,000 people will be descending for the Democratic National Convention, hotels are already sold out. More than 600 people have found alternative accommodations through AirBed and Breakfast, and 50 to 100 new listings appear every day. Prices range from $20 a night for an airbed to $3,000 for an entire house.

In general, the prices are usually much cheaper (rates in San Francisco, for instance, range from $10 to $175 a night, with the median being $85). And you get to stay with a friendly local who can steer you to restaurants and stores you probably would never find otherwise.

Typically, each person offering a room puts up a picture of themselves and the apartment or house, along with some very basic information. For instance, for $99 a night, you can crash in this 24-year-old’s room in San Francisco:

The combination of the AeroBed and the Internet has now made everybody into an innkeeper.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Twitter isn’t for everyone, and you may have dismissed the service a long time ago. But regardless of your own use, it’s hard to dismiss the phenomenon itself and the passion of so many that has built up around it.

No matter how long the outage du jour, Twitter users continue to stay attached to the service despite an ever-changing backdrop of alternatives.

Blogging isn’t for everyone either. But unlike blogging, Twitter enjoys a far a greater variety of users — they include people, many people, who would never think of starting a blog and people who would never touch an RSS reader. The 140 character limit is a plus for Twitter, but it isn’t all.

What explains the Twitter phenomenon then? What produces the positive feeling and the strong attachment among those who tweet? And moreover: How can other systems learn from this?

The answer lies in understanding Audience.
Twitter has a simple premise: You tweet & the message is pushed to your friends. The actual mechanics are slightly different (messages go to everyone who follows you, whether they’re your “friends” or not, assuming your stream is public) — but from a user’s perspective, the circle of receivers consists only of the people they know. Everyone else is part of a faceless crowd that’s hidden behind the follower count.

This simple premise holds the key to Twitter’s success: messages go to a well-defined audience. In the moment you release a tweet, you know who’s on the line and you have an idea of who can catch a glimpse of your message. @replies are the best illustration for this sense of audience: Even though Twitter is not a point-to-point message delivery system (let alone a reliable one), @replies are sent with the understanding that they will be read by the intended people because they are known to be in the audience. (Imagine a newspaper article that suddenly greeted a specific reader.)

Blogging on the other hand has no such clearly defined audience. An aspiring blogger who hasn’t crossed the chasm speaks into the void. Direct feedback can only come in the form of written comments (a relatively high barrier of effort) and it’s diminished by spam and vocal trolls these days.

FeedBurner’s subscriber count only provides the equivalent of Twitter’s opaque follower count and MyBlogLog didn’t solve this problem either.

So it’s not surprising that the majority of blogs are abandoned — the most-cited reason being “No one was reading it.” No one might be following your Twitter stream either, but Twitter is designed for network effects to take hold and given the natural reciprocity among groups of friends, it’s likely that most people have at least a handful of followers they know.

Back to Twitter: Why Audience works
Twitter works and enjoys such strong attachment because it provides real-time access to a well-defined audience. The backlog of all previous tweets is a guarantee of permanence (you can even search it) and you can catch up on it anytime. As a result, people use Twitter because they have an idea of who will see their lightweight messages and this sense of audience is reinforced by @replies, re-tweets and references in future conversations (online and offline).

Designing for the sense of Audience is a powerful tool to create cohesion and a sense of utility among users of a service. This lesson from Twitter can apply to many other services too. But before leaving the current discussion, it’s helpful to look at a service that has missed the full power of Audience so far.

Facebook: Designed for Audience? Not so much.
Facebook isn’t about Audience? That’s ridiculous, you’ll say — so let me clarify. I fully agree that social network profiles are all about self-expression and being seen, but a platform for self-expression isn’t necessarily designed for the audience that does “the seeing.”

Profile Pages on Facebook can have audiences of course, but this requires that users continually roam Facebook to look for news in their network. Facebook realized this limitation and introduced the News Feed. Its intent was to move a user’s “acts and performances” from the stage of the profile page to a single and central stage, a single place for Audience.

Sharing with the News Feed: Did it ever reach my friends?
Facebook was the first major social network to introduce the News Feed concept, which has since become a standard sauce for stickiness in many places (although not StudiVZ surprisingly). But Facebook’s implementation of the News Feed doesn’t capture the full power of designing for Audience: While Twitter distributes every message consistently, Facebook decides algorithmically which update is shown to whom. Algorithmic filtering is nice in theory, but such black-box behavior is simply unpredictable for the user.

“When I post new things, will my friends actually see them?”, one might wonder. And conversely: “Have my friends posted something that I’m not seeing? The news feed is cluttered right now with people I don’t care about.” Anything that’s unpredictable produces a feeling of uncertainty — and that’s never a comfortable feeling.

Even with Facebook’s recent attempts to introduce smarter filters, users only have relative means to customize their feed (more of this, less of that). Furthermore, there is mostly just one kind of feedback that users can give on the News Feed: comments. Imagine a concert, in which you could only leave written notes as you left — no clapping, no booing.

Because users don’t really know who’s listening on Facebook and who isn’t, the platform hasn’t been embraced as a place to publish proactively. Publishing events or photos is mostly push-driven (and generates an email — “you are invited to an event” or “tagged in a photo”). But for everything else you share, do you know if it ever reached your friends?

Who capitalized on this gap? FriendFeed.
It’s the same setup as Twitter, but with more content: You know who’s listening and you choose the people you listen to. A useful premise but it also has a catch: the word “more”. Too much content, too many people — which is exactly the problem that Facebook is trying to address with its algorithmic feed. But what’s a solution then? It’s not the “middle ground” and it has nothing to do with smarter filters.

The answer is feedback loops. But that opens up another discussion. If you’d like to read more, I have a separate post on my website, in which I elaborate on how to design for Audience.

Gregor Hochmuth is the founder of zoo-m.com Interactive, where he created Mento, LaterLoop and other services. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany, where he worked as an analyst for Hasso Plattner Ventures and has written about German startups on TechCrunch.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

It’s been just a little over a month since CBS completed its acquisition of Cnet and some of the first outward signs of the deal can be seen in a forthcoming logo for CBS Interactive that we obtained and a new design for Cnet’s Websites that it is testing in random batches. Judging purely by the design shifts, it appears that the cultures of the acquirer and the acquiree are moving towards each other. CBS Interactive is ditching its corporate black-and-blue logo for a friendlier orange and white one. (Assuming the version shown here is the one it ends up going with).

At the same time, Cnet is testing a new design in beta that is much sleeker, and replaces the familiar hippy-school-bus-yellow backdrop with a more serious CBS black. (I was randomly selected to see the sneak peek, which is how I found out about it). The new design is an improvement. The site is less cluttered, and on News.com blogs are featured prominently throughout.

The blog-centric approach is a direction News.com has been going in ever since it named blogging journo Dan Farber editor in chief last February. But now the navigational tabs on top all link directly to blogs such as Crave and Webware.

How do you like the new look? Check out the screen shots below. Here’s the old nav bar:

Update: And of course, CBSNews.com is already republishing stories from Cnet’s News.com. (Kind of makes you wonder whether those two brands will just merge at some point).

Here is the beta design:

And here is a Cnet story on CBSnews.com:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Wow. I’m completely speechless right now. Our very own Editor-in-chief John Biggs has himself a real book deal. That’s not to say his previous foray with “Black Hat: Misfits, Criminals, and Scammers in the Internet Age” was anything to scoff at, but Biggityboo’s (that’s what I like to call him) ” book was the object of an intense two-day auction involving six houses, including Collins and The Penguin Press.” Dial Press came out on top with an offer that’s said to be over $300,000. Watch out, folks, someone’s big time now.

So what’s Biggs going to be writing about? Read all about it at CrunchGear.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Twitterfone launched in May to let Twitter users post new messages by calling in to a phone number and speaking out what they want to say. The service then converts the message to text and posts it to your Twitter account along with a link to the audio file. Here’s a test message I created at the launch. The service is a great way to leave a quick Twitter message when you’re away from your computer and only have access to a phone - the service offers local number in 19 countries and is expanding regularly. The company says 20,000 people have signed up for the service since launch.

Today Twitterfone will start converting your Twitter messages to audio, too, giving users a full audio interface to the service. As of today, when you call Twitterfone the service offers to let you record a new message, listen to messages from your friends, and reply to messages publicly or privately. Users can listen to the first ten messages.

For now, only English is supported, but Japanese is next up. The service is free and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

If you are a Twitterer, you’re gonna love this. Below is a quick demo video I did via Qik that shows the functionality.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

As part of the ongoing integration of its DoubleClick acquisition (yesterday it sold off Performics), Google will be placing an additional DoubleClick cookie on the browsers of everyone who visits a site that is part of Google’s current AdSense network. This will allow Google to more easily serve up display ads from DoubleClick across that network of sites. It will also allow it to introduce some basic improvements such as frequency capping (letting advertisers limit how many times the same person sees the same ad), and better reporting and conversion data.

All of that is great for advertisers and great for Google, which will be able to leverage its vast, existing Adsense network to push more display ads as well. This is what scares the hell out of Microsoft and Yahoo, and was the prime impetus for Microsoft seriously getting into the online ad business in the first place with its acquisition of aQuantive last year and its attempts to buy Yahoo this year.

For consumers, it means even more cookies on their browsers and more attempts to target ads to them. From the Google Blog:

We are enabling this functionality by implementing a DoubleClick ad-serving cookie across the Google content network. Using the DoubleClick cookie means that DoubleClick advertisers and publishers don’t have to make any changes on their websites as we continue our integration efforts and offer additional enhancements.

On the bright side, for those who of you who have enough cookies on your browser, Google is letting you opt out of cookies for both AdSense and DoubleClick ads with one click.

Clarification: If you already have a DoubleClick cookie on your browser, and you probably do, then you won’t get a new one. That one will just work with Google’s ad network. And Google’s ad network has been able to serve display ads from DoubleClick and others since May, but this strengthens that capability with respect to DoubleClick ads in particular.

(Flickr photo by scubadive67).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Here are a few audio snippets from a Q and A session with the president of Google’s Enterprise division, Dave Girouard. The session took place on August 5th at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum in Vail, Colorado.

Girouard talks about Cloud Computing, Google’s new App Engine, the Google Apps productivity suite, competition versus partnerships, and how Google faces the challenges of protecting its users’ privacy and security.

Read more…

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

After about four months in private beta, social travel site TripSay is now open to all travelers. TripSay combines travel search with user-generated travel guides and ratings. When you enter a city or place, it comes up on a map, along with recommendations from other TripSay users that can be sorted by restaurants, hotels, bars, beaches, transportation, sights, and other categories. I described the service in my initial review:

TripSay combines social recommendations with a travel search engine that auto-suggests cities, pubs, hotels, and the like as you type them in. They appear as icons on a map, with a photo (pulled from Flickr) and description on the side, a tag cloud below, and minifeed of all the places you and your friends have rated or recommended. The detail page for each city shows other TripSay members who have visited, tips from members, the most interesting Flickr photos tagged with the name of the city, links elsewhere on the Web, and a list of the top-rated places shown on a map.

Since then, the site has added a few more features, including better editing tools, ways to collect and save your favorite tips, group message boards, and the ability to filter recommendations by groups. And, of course, it’s kept its signature rating system, which goes from smiley face to a full moon. TripSay competes with Dopplr, Driftr, and many other social travel sites, but it is worth a look.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Yahoo’s retally of its shareholder votes shows the deep-seated anger among shareholders and how close CEO Jerry Yang and chairman Roy Bostock were to being ousted from the board of directors. The votes had to be recounted after one of Yahoo’s largest shareholders, Capital Research and Management, questioned the initial results. (The miscount was the fault of Broadridge Financial Solutions, the proxy processor—their credibility is shot now). Half of the “No” votes for Yang and Bostok were initially never counted. Instead of the initially reported 15 percent and 21 percent of votes withheld for Yang and Bostock, respectively, the true “No” votes were double that: 34 percent for Yang and a whopping 40 percent for Bostock.

Those numbers are dangerously close to what would have been needed to kick them off the board. And it raises the question of what would have happened if Carl Icahn had decided not to back down from a full proxy battle. While it is doubtful that Icahn would have been able to overturn the entire board, he might have been successful removing Yahoo’s chairman and CEO. Between himself and other allies such as John Paulson and T. Boone Pickens (who ended up selling his shares at a loss), the Icahn contingent controlled at least 10 percent of the votes. That could have been enough to get rid of Bostock (depending on how Paulson voted his 4 percent stake). And keeping up the public pressure could have won over enough votes to kick Yang off his own board as well.

That’s too close for Yang & Co. to feel too secure about their standing with shareholders, in case they had any doubt before about what investors really think. Based on the recount, other board members that shareholders want to fire include Ronald Burkle (38 percent “No” votes), Arthur Kern (32 percent “No” votes), and Gary Wilson (28 percent “No” votes).

All together, that’s half the board within striking distance of being replaced. Did Icahn miscalculate when he backed down? Or are the three board seats he now has in hand better than the five in the bush he could have had a shot at?

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.