The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Patent Watch: IBM Figures Out How To Limit Device Access By Geolocation
- Spigit Brings Enterprise Collaboration Tool To SMB’s
- Truphone Is First To Provide VoIP App For Nexus One
- Facebook Snatches User’s Vanity URL And Sells It To Harman International
- Google Voice Extension For Chrome Adds Click To Call And Other Killer Features
- All Your Twitter Bot Needs Is Love
- Adding A Social Layer To Gmail Just Became A SocialWok In The Park
- Google Co-Founders Plan To Sell Up To 10 Million Shares Over Next Five Years
- Twitter Looks To Help Bring Hope To Haiti With Hope140.org
- Mobile Tech Developer Motricity Files For $250 Million IPO
- The Apple Tablet Rumors The Other Blogs Are Afraid To Publish
- Twitter Starts Rolling Out Local Trends (Pictures)
- Twitter’s Revamped SUL Has Greatly Crippled The SUL Advantage
- Dave Morin Leaves Facebook, To Launch New Startup With Napster Creator Shawn Fanning
- Google Extending Google Voice To Veterans. Why Not Throw In Some Android Phones Too?
- Seed’s Goal Is To “Redefine Journalism For The Internet Age,” Its Reality Is Untangling Cat Hair
- Bing, Google, And The Enigmatic T2: The Race For A Complete Semantic Search Engine
- Google Reigns Supreme In 2009 Worldwide Searches But Microsoft Sees Faster Growth
| Patent Watch: IBM Figures Out How To Limit Device Access By Geolocation Posted: 23 Jan 2010 07:57 AM PST Could IBM be prepping more of its own location-aware technology and devices? According to a recent patent filing, it looks like it. On Thursday, Big Blue filed for a patent for a “method and system for location-aware authorization.” The inventors appear to be IBM engineers based in Rome, Italy. According to the filing, the technology would provide a method and technology to control access to a device based on the location of that device. IBM gave the example of a company that only wanted employees to use a particular device in the office or their home and believe that their technology would allow the employer to control where the particular device can be accessed. Here’s an excerpt from the filing:
Talk about GPS-lockdown. In an age of mobile workers and telecommuters, such a product might be more of a hindrance than a help for most organizations. But I could see putting something like that on servers or machines with super-sensitive data that are not supposed to leave the premises. The big question looms: what will Big Blue, which reported strong earnings for 2009 this past week, do with this technology? Thanks for the tip Anand S.
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| Spigit Brings Enterprise Collaboration Tool To SMB’s Posted: 23 Jan 2010 07:30 AM PST
Often times when an enterprise software company moves downstream, they simply strip down many core functions of their enterprise product in order to make it affordable for SMB’s. WE by Spigit has additional features in their enterprise model, such as prediction and idea trading markets, but the main functions at the heart of their service remain unchanged. When a company purchases WE by Spigit, they are able to create an “innovation community” where their employees (up to 500), are able to contribute and collaborate on projects immediately. Spigit employs constantly evolving algorithms in their system, which, when added to a thumbs up/down feedback system, creates a reputation value for a user. These values are useful because administrators will see topics and ideas which have the highest reputation rise to the top. Each community is hosted on Spigit’s servers. Another feature is the inclusion of incentives and rewards in order to increase contribution from the communities. Users gain both points and virtual currency for the parts they play in the community; which can then be redeemed for real goods. Spigit hopes that by providing rewards, users will collaborate more, and thus more ideas from within companies can come to fruition. BrightIdea offers services which are similar to those of Spigit, but they, like most other collaboration platforms, cater to larger enterprises. WE by Spigit is pay-as-you-go. The product starts at $500 per month for 50 users, and reaches $2500 a month for 500 users. Spigit received $10M in funding from Warburg Pincus in October of 2009, bringing their total funding amount to $14M since their launch in 2007. They have been cash-flow positive for the past 10 months.
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| Truphone Is First To Provide VoIP App For Nexus One Posted: 23 Jan 2010 06:12 AM PST
The update for Android device (version 3.0.2) also makes Truphone compatible with the T-Mobile Pulse, taking it to five Android devices now. Truphone worked closely with Google on the app.
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| Facebook Snatches User’s Vanity URL And Sells It To Harman International Posted: 23 Jan 2010 01:22 AM PST
Facebook then apparently did a sales deal around the vanity URL with Harman International. The notice from Facebook (also in image at bottom of post):
There’s just one problem. “Harman” as a vanity URL is perfectly appropriate as a username for someone named Harman Bajwa. Facebook’s VP Global Sales Mike Murphy has /mike, for example, much to my personal annoyance. And while we’re on the topic of Mike Murphy, he may actually be the guy behind all of this. It turns out that the reason Facebook wants to take back that /Harman vanity URL may be more about money and less (much less) about policy violations. That’s because Harman also received an email yesterday from a representative of Harman International, which is apparently “working with Facebook” to take the /Harman username for a initiative they’re doing around the Grammy Awards. They’re offering “promotional items” to Harman to hand the name over willingly:
We’ve reached out to Facebook PR for comment, although the evidence, unless fake, sort of speaks for itself. This is actually one of those times that I’m hoping that we’re being duped somehow, because telling users they’ve done something wrong when really all you’re doing is pursuing a sales quota is really, really distasteful. We’ll update with any comment. Harman, to his credit, isn’t all that angry. “It would be great if I get my User name back,” he said in an email to me, adding that he’s working on a startup that will launch next summer. Rest assured, Harman, we’ll be covering it.
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| Google Voice Extension For Chrome Adds Click To Call And Other Killer Features Posted: 23 Jan 2010 12:38 AM PST
The extension adds click to call functionality to web pages. So if there is a phone number on a web page, like a Yelp page or your online address book, it will now have a hyperlink. Click it and Google will throw you a pop up window asking which phone you want to use (home, mobile, work, etc.). It then calls that phone, and puts you through to the number. I’m always cutting and pasting phone numbers from websites into Google Voice to make calls. And I’ve asked for web based click to call from the Google Voice team for months. Now we have it, all you have to do is use Chrome. The extension also adds a small box in the upper right of the browser. You can type in a name or phone number and call or sms it from the browser, and read recent text messages and transcribed voicemails (Google automatically transcribes voicemails, usually horribly, but it’s fun). The extension is buggy on Macs, and you need to use the most recent Chromium build, not the launched Chrome for Mac to use it. Download one of the recent builds here (most recent at the bottom). The extension should work fine for Windows Chrome users. Google Voice doesn’t have an API, so third party applications need to harvest your user credentials to do anything useful with it. This Firefox add-on, for example, has nice click to call functionality but it requires that you give it your username and password. No thanks. One last thing – it likely won’t be too long before Google is adding soft phone functionality to the browser directly via their Gizmo5 acquisition. At that point you won’t even need a phone any more. You’ll just be able to initiate and receive calls directly to your computer as you can with Skype and other services today. Thanks to Amin Lakhani for the tip.
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| All Your Twitter Bot Needs Is Love Posted: 22 Jan 2010 07:48 PM PST
Thorton is the creation of developer Ryan Merket, who built him as a side project in around three hours. Merket has just posted the code that powers him, and has also divulged how he made Thorton seem somewhat realistic: the bot looks for tweets with the word “love” in them and tweets them as its own. From Merket’s blog:
Merket then goes on to detail why the ease with which he could build the bot should be cause for concern:
Can social networks really vet every single user that joins? That would likely be incredibly difficult to scale, but there’s certainly room for the algorithms to improve. In any case, here are some of Jason’s most recent tweets: And here are some of the people who fell for them: 
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| Adding A Social Layer To Gmail Just Became A SocialWok In The Park Posted: 22 Jan 2010 04:23 PM PST  At last year’s TechCrunch50 conference, Socialwok made a big splash, winning the award for best demopit startup and launching its enterprise-friendly, FriendFeed-like layer for Google Apps. The web-based application was praised for launching a social network that wrapped around the very unsocial Google Apps. Today, the startup is launching a gadget to allow users access all the features of Socialwok without leaving Gmail. Previously, you could access Gmail, YouTube, Google Calendar and even conversations in Wave from Socialwok’s Friendfeed-like interface. You can even sign in with your Google Docs credentials. But with the new gadget, Socialwok’s interface will appear within Gmail’s main canvas. Users can view, post and comment on updates; access feeds, files and Google Docs and search for posts, people, feeds, and files. Socialwok, which employs a freemium model, has steadily been adding features and improvements to its application, including releasing a new version of its HTML 5 mobile version for Android and iPhone browsers. And the startup has managed caught Google’s eye. Socialwok was chosen as one of the showcase companies for AppEngine technology at this year’s Google IO Developer Sandbox (Socialwok is powered by Google App Engine). And the startup wrote a blog post on Google’s Enterprise Blog about Socialwok. Over 4,000 domains and thousands of users are using Socialwok. As we wrote on our initial review of Socialwok, if Google doesn't buy the startup, they should at least heavily promoting what they're doing. And it appears that Google has taken the latter route. For now. There’s no doubt that Socialwok could face the same fate as Google Docs killer and collaboration platform Etherpad, which was acquired by Google last year.
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| Google Co-Founders Plan To Sell Up To 10 Million Shares Over Next Five Years Posted: 22 Jan 2010 03:27 PM PST Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin plan to steadily sell off up to 10 million shares of stock over the next five years, according to an SEC filing. At today’s closing price of $550, those shares would be worth $5.5 billion if sold immediately. Although the two co-founders hold Class B shares with super-voting rights, if they sell all 5 million shares, their voting control will drop from 59 percent today to 48 percent. From the filing:
They would continue to be the largest shareholders, but would not be able to control the outcome of any shareholder vote as they do today. They, of course, could decide to stop selling just short of losing control. They also could probably find the other 2 percent of votes if they ever need it from CEO Eric Schmidt or a collection of other Google employees and loyal investors. The two have not yet started selling shares under the plan, but it is common for tech founders to diversify their holdings in this manner. Bill Gates and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, for instance, sold stock of the companies they founded under similar plans. By selling at regular intervals, they get to cash out and diversify their holdings without spooking investors with sudden sales.
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| Twitter Looks To Help Bring Hope To Haiti With Hope140.org Posted: 22 Jan 2010 03:18 PM PST
The site features a collection of recommended tweeters and Lists, including charities and people who are actually reporting from the field. A stream of recent tweets about the crisis is scrolling by in real time. And a large part of the page is dedicated to helping non-profits connect with the Twitter community, as a sort of best practices guide. It also calls out tonight’s Hope For Haiti Now Telethon, which begins at 8 PM EST and is being hosted by George Clooney, Wyclef Jean, and Anderson Cooper. Twitter’s Biz Stone has also written a blog post about the efforts being made to help alleviate the crisis. Here's a list of different ways to text to help Haiti. You can also do it through the iTunes Store.
Finally, you can donate to International Fund For Animal Welfare Haiti Emergency Relief Response here. 
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| Mobile Tech Developer Motricity Files For $250 Million IPO Posted: 22 Jan 2010 02:26 PM PST
Motricity’s core product is the ‘mCore Platform’, which offers a mobile search engine, storefront, and channels that allow carriers to deliver content to their customers. The company often acts as “the brand behind the brand” as it builds mobile software. Motricity’s carrier clients include AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Virgin Mobile. Enterprise clients include TBS, Showtime, Vogue, and Yahoo. The company generated $88M in revenue in the first 9 months of 2009, but has not reached profitability. On its S-1 filed today, the company says its growth strategies include:
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| The Apple Tablet Rumors The Other Blogs Are Afraid To Publish Posted: 22 Jan 2010 02:12 PM PST  CrunchGear is, as you know, the internet's primary nexus for trade secrets, corporation-breaking revelations, and the latest salacious home videos of tech CEOs (yes, Jen-Hsun Hwang, we have that one). Our power to elevate or crush giants in the industry is kept in check only by our unerring discretion — and by a set of laws, carved into amber slabs and venerated constantly in a hidden shrine deep beneath Mountain View. But now and then our vast intelligence network brings in news of such inestimable importance that we must share it with our readers regardless what empires it may topple. Apple's event on the 27th is whipping the internet into a foaming frenzy, but I think you'll agree that the rumors so far have been pretty tame. 3G? Front-facing camera? Aluminum casing? You people underestimate Apple's dedication to bucking expectations. We've heard things that will curl your toes, and now, after much deliberation (and fortification of the shrine against the agents of Apple) we've decided to share some — not all — of these mind-blowing rumor-nuggets. For instance, did you know that the Apple Tablet will not be constructed from aluminum, but from ostrich ivory?
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| Twitter Starts Rolling Out Local Trends (Pictures) Posted: 22 Jan 2010 01:40 PM PST As you can see in the picture, Twitter has started to roll out its new Local Trends feature which takes the standard Trending Topics data and uses Twitter’s geolocation functionality to make it based on location. Twitter team members Ryan Sarver and Raffi Krikorian have confirmed it is starting to roll out. We noted this feature back in November when Twitter said there would be an API for it, but unlike actual geolocation, they’re clearly going to be featuring on the main website as well. This is a big part of Twitter’s effort to clean up the Trending Topics area which has become overrun with spam. While only a limited number of users can see it right now, user LisaBarone was able to capture it in action. As you can see, she only captured the ability to switch your city or country to find trends based on the location. Look for more screenshots soon. Update: And here’s another from Barone. Update 2: Twitter Platform Director Ryan Sarver has tweeted us a bit more information about the feature. Apparently, “Coachella” is a term only trending in LA and San Francisco, which makes sense since it’s a concert based in California. As you can see in the screenshot below, “LAFD” is also trending in LA.
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| Twitter’s Revamped SUL Has Greatly Crippled The SUL Advantage Posted: 22 Jan 2010 01:35 PM PST
While the numbers coming in are still very early (only based on one day), it appears that across the board, those who were on the SUL before and after the change are seeing dramatic drops in the numbers of users following them each day. In some cases, SUL users are even losing Twitter followers now following the change. While plenty were quick to note that the new SUL is more or less the same as the old SUL, just broken into categories, there is one vital difference: there is no way to add all the users on the lists with one click. This means that you now have to go through each user on the list one-by-one to add them, which most people apparently don’t feel the need to do. I pulled these interesting new numbers are pulled from the site TwitterCounter. For example, the TechCrunch account (which again was on the SUL before and also is currently) went from gaining 2,979 followers a day on average, all the way down to gaining just 286 yesterday (and it’s actually a bigger drop because the 286 number pulled down the 3,112 average that stood yesterday when I checked expecting there to be a huge drop). Another SUL mainstay, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, went from gaining 2,184 followers a day to losing 162 yesterday. Same with Twitter angel investor Chris Sacca who went from gaining 2,892 a day to losing 68 yesterday. The main Google Twitter account went from gaining 4,908 followers a day on average to 893 yesterday. I could go on, but you get the point. To be clear, the new SUL is still helping those that weren’t on it previously gain more followers. For example, Scott Beale’s LaughingSquid account wasn’t on the old SUL but is on the new one, and went from gaining about 51 users a day to gaining 151 users a day. But that’s a far cry from gaining 2,000 – 3,000 new followers every day. Everyone will probably agree this new method is a much more fair and balanced way to help users find interesting people on Twitter. That said, those who were on the SUL before are now likely out of reach of anyone not on it previously. Well, unless you’re @billgates, who apparently doesn’t need the SUL to attract the masses. Update: Twitter’s Doug Bowman has responded to this post in a tweet saying, “Exactly, and it was completely intentional.” [photo: flickr/hape gera]
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| Dave Morin Leaves Facebook, To Launch New Startup With Napster Creator Shawn Fanning Posted: 22 Jan 2010 12:33 PM PST
What we don’t know is what that startup will do, and it isn’t likely Morin or Fanning will be saying anytime soon. In a phone call this morning, all Morin would say is that they’ll be building Facebook Connect into the product. Morin was previously at Apple, where he met and partnered with Facebook. He eventually left Apple to join Facebook in 2006. At the time Facebook had just 10 million users. Today, it has over 350 million users. Morin’s personal blog is at davemorin.tumblr.com. I’d expect him to announce this shortly. A Facebook spokesperson tells us that Morin is leaving on good terms and that “we’re excited to be working with him on the other side as a member of the developer community.” Update: Here’s Dave’s personal announcement.
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| Google Extending Google Voice To Veterans. Why Not Throw In Some Android Phones Too? Posted: 22 Jan 2010 12:33 PM PST
Again, this is actually a very nice thing they’re doing, but it’s also an ingenious way to promote what Google clearly considers to be one of its killer products: Google Voice. This time, they’re giving out Google Voice accounts to U.S. veterans in Washington D.C. as an extension of their Project CARE program. This Saturday, Google is joining a dozen or so other Washington D.C. organizations at an event at the D.C. Veterans Affairs Medical Center to hand out Project CARE cards that will give veterans a unique Google Voice phone number and voicemail account. As Google notes:
Of course, giving away these phone numbers (which again, are free) doesn’t really mean much without an actual phone line or mobile device to attach it to. And Google doesn’t really explain how they’re going to serve these veterans who don’t have any access to a phone. But they do say that they will be helping them to set up the accounts, so presumably they’ll ask them if there is some other phone number of someone they know that they can attach the new Google Voice number to. The grander gesture would be for Google to give out a bunch of Android phones along with the Google Voice accounts. They don’t have to be the next high-priced Nexus Ones, but I’m sure Google has plenty of G1s laying around, which as yesterday’s latest and greatest Android toy, Android fans are setting aside to jump to the new phones. That would be a nice little extension of bringing back the “don’t be evil” slogan. Update: A Google spokesperson has reached out with the following additional information about the program:
That’s good, though I could see getting access to a computer still being a bit of a challenge for some. To be clear, Google also verified there is no VoIP element to this different version of Google Voice, so you can’t make outbound calls using this system — the Android phone would be good for that. [photo: flickr/pirateyjoe]
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| Seed’s Goal Is To “Redefine Journalism For The Internet Age,” Its Reality Is Untangling Cat Hair Posted: 22 Jan 2010 12:20 PM PST Last December, Saul Hansell left his job as a veteran reporter and blogger at the New York Times to become the programming director for Aol’s Seed, which is the new online assignment desk for Aol’s 80 different Websites. In his first blog post since he took on the new job, Hansell admits that his new career path was met by “a lot of blank stares” from friends and family. Seed is still a bit of a mystery to many, but its essentially a way for Aol to assign articles to anyone on the Web beyond the 3,500 journalists and professional freelancers it employs directly. Why is this important? As Hansell explains:
Seed is supposed to help by assigning the stories that “satisfy the world’s curiosity” (the Seed Creed). Hansell does his best to make writing articles for Aol at $30 to $300 a pop sound enticing:
That may be where Hansell wants to take Seed, which is still in beta and being kluged together on the back-end, but it’s definitely not where it is today. Seed, at least right now, looks more like Aol’s answer to Demand Media or Helium, where the going rate for an SEO-friendly how-to article seems to be in the $25 to $50 range. What are some of the current assignments on Seed ready to redefine journalism? I signed up for Seed to take a look around. The first thing I saw is that Aol seems to want someone to write a lot of gift guides (for weddings, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, kids, grandparents, teachers, and groomsmen). Then I went to the science and tech assignments. Seed is offering $25 for articles on the “Best Twitter Backgrounds,” “How Humans Will Colonize The Oceans” ($25), “10 Concepts We Think Were Real,” and “How To Make Free Calls.” (See screenshots below). The closest assignments I could find that might require some actual reporting are “What it’s like working at Target” ($25) and “How to Untangle Matted Hair on a Cat” ($80), which asks for an interview with a pet groomer. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that none of these are going to win a Pulitzer. But maybe that’s not what Aol means by redefining journalism. Hansell admits that what he writes in the post is highly aspirational, but he also cautions against judging Seed too early. ”If journalism has to evolve at the pace of technology companies, we have to experiment in public,” he tells me. ”We will do a lot of experiments. The potential of Seed is to tap into human intelligence at scale.” It is clear that Aol wants to use Seed to extend its reporting beyond the how-to variety.. Not that there’s anything wrong with teaching people how to untangle cat hair.
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| Bing, Google, And The Enigmatic T2: The Race For A Complete Semantic Search Engine Posted: 22 Jan 2010 09:17 AM PST Yesterday, Bing released a surprisingly useful new feature around recipe search. If you search for “Chicken,” you can narrow the results down by “chicken recipes” and then a whole bunch of new filtering options appear down the left-hand column. You can further narrow results by recipe rating, cuisine (vegetarian, Spanish, Southwestern), convenience (quick/easy, family, entertaining), occasion (wedding, Valentine’s Day), main ingredient, course, or cooking method. Bing is big on guided search (showing relevant search categories to help narrow results), but this goes one step further towards semantic search (the ability to index and search the Web by different facets). Recipes are just the beginning, and it’s not just Bing. Google and a handful of startups, including Evri, Hakia, and Radar Networks, are hard at work on making semantic search a reality. The race is on to bring this type of semantic filtering for nearly every category of search across the Web. In fact, Bing’s recipe search looks a hell of a lot like T2, the semantic search engine being developed in private by Radar Networks. The startup currently offers a semantic bookmarking application called Twine which is on autopilot, but T2 is much more ambitious. Not many people have seen T2, but CEO Nova Spivack once gave me a demo and I took a bunch of screenshots like the one above (there are also slides on the Web). When you search for “chicken” on T2, you can also narrow by difficulty level, meal, main ingredient, dietary option, cuisine, course, and so on. Recipes happens to be one of T2’s strong suits. It has perhaps the largest semantic indexes of recipes in the world with 300,000 recipes. But it is also building out its semantic search index for video games, movies, music, travel, health, sports, and other category verticals. Now here is where the plot thickens. T2 was supposed to launch by the end of last year. Part of the delay might be because semantic search is just a really hard problem. But there could be another reason as well. Rumors are swirling that Radar Networks is deep in M&A discussions with the “usual suspects.” In search, the usual suspects are Google and Bing. Spivack won’t comment on any rumors, but says that T2 is on track and that no other search engine is currently licensing it. Earlier this week, for what it’s worth, he did Tweet about how he was running around to “insane” meetings, right after he Tweeted that “Google still has a great cafeteria.” And after Bing launched its new recipe feature, he sent out this enigmatic Tweet:
It’s easy to read too much into these idle Tweets. Spivack is the CEO of a search startup. It stands to reason that he would have meetings with Google and and other big search engines about lots of things, ranging from licensing his semantic search technology to an outright sale. The one thing it is pretty safe to conclude is that both Google and Bing are very interested in semantic search. Bing seems to be further along than Google, as the launch of recipe search indicates. But both are facing a buy-or-build decision when it comes to semantic search. Bing’s recipe search is only based on partner feeds and tags, not a proper semantic index. Radar Networks is a serious player here, with a total of $24 million in capital raised since 2006. It owns four patents on the technology, with 20 more pending. Radar is essentially building a huge structured database for every page on the Web, which breaks down the information contained on those pages into well-defined facets. For recipes, it is ingredients, cooking times, and difficulty levels. For video games, it can search by title, developer, character, and so on. And since it is a structured database, it can jump from “Star Wars” video games to “Star Wars” recipes. It is all linked together in the semantic index. Radar is building that index across many different categories. each category requires its own ontology, or collection of facets which describe the things in that category. Radar is building out its own ontologies and also wants to create a SourceForge for ontologies where Webmasters can contribute as well. Some of the Webmaster tools Radar has developed will allow anyone who owns a Website to tell Radar about its Web pages. For instance, on a site about movies, the Webmaster would use a browser plug-in to mark the title, actors, director, reviews, and so on. Then Radar will take that template and apply it to the entire site. If Google or Bing adopted a similar approach, Webmasters would have a big incentive to train their semantic indexes because it would create deep links and improve their SEO. Like I said, the race is on.
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| Google Reigns Supreme In 2009 Worldwide Searches But Microsoft Sees Faster Growth Posted: 22 Jan 2010 09:00 AM PST The December 2009 global search stats are out from comScore and unsurprisingly Google took the top spot for total worldwide searches last month, with 87.8 billion searches over Google sites. Google’s searches rose 58 percent from December 2008’s searches, which totaled 55.6 billion searches. Yahoo and Baidu followed Google, with 9.4 billion and 8.5 billion searches, respectively. Google accounted for two-thirds of overall searches in December, which are estimated at 131 billion. But Microsoft saw the greatest jump in number of queries worldwide for the year, with searches rising 70 percent, from 2.4 billion in December 2008 to 4.1 billion in December 2009. This can be attributed to the launch of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, which is seeing traction. Russian search engine Yandex also grew year over the year, which volume of search queries rising 91 percent to 1.9 billion searches. Overall search queries in December rose nearly 50 percent from the previous year to 131 billion searches, or 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute. The U.S. led the pack 22.7 billion searches, representing 17 percent of all searches worldwide. China ranked second with 13.3 billion searches, followed by Japan with 9.2 billion and the U.K. with 6.2 billion. Russia showed the highest increase in number of search queries in 2009, growing 92 percent to 3.3 billion searches. Of course, for 2010, the numbers should be interesting considering the whole Google-China brouhaha. Google said in a blog post that it had been subjected to cyber attacks originating from China along with 20 other companies (reportedly including Yahoo), prompting the company to reevaluate the way it conducts business in the country. Google stated it would end self-censorship of its Chinese search engine in China, and that it may end up closing the site and shutting down its China offices. The fact is Google already lost the search engine battle in China to Baidu sometime ago.
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As companies mature from fledgling startups into small and medium-sized businesses, it becomes harder to capture and analyze ideas coming from within an organization. Email and spreadsheets are the usual tools used to deal with internal collaboration, but these modes have no way of bringing the best ideas to the top: many times they are lost in the shuffle. 
Voice app provider 
This looks really, really bad. An avid Facebook user named Harman Bajwa says that his 
I’ve just changed my default browser from Safari to Chrome. The reason – the official Chrome 
Anyone who has been on Twitter for more than a few days knows that it’s rife with bots — accounts that are run by a computer, rather than a human. But while bots may be pretty easy to come by, it isn’t often that you get the chance to read through the code that makes one tick. Tonight, you’ve got your chance. The bot’s name? 
As you probably heard, yesterday, 
Long time Facebook employee 
Just about two years ago, we wrote about 
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